Jolie Blon's Bounce (Dave Robicheaux 12)

“I’m supposed to know that? No wonder you people got a crime wave. Get out of here,” he said.

“Joe, I think Marvin may have murdered your daughter,” I said.

“Say that again.”

“Marvin Oates may have molested a woman in St. Mary Parish. He keeps showing up in places he has no business at.”

“When’d you start looking at this guy?” Joe said.

“He’s been an unofficial suspect for some time.”

“Unofficial? You got a way with words.”

“I’m here now, Joe, because I’m concerned about both Clete and Zerelda. If you can help me in any way, I’ll be in your debt.”

An angry thought went out of his eyes.

“I don’t know where they’re at. But I’ll make some calls,” he said.

“No cowboy stuff. Oates is a suspect. That’s all,” I said.

“You figure him for the hit on Frankie?” he said.

“Maybe.”

“How could a watermelon picker like that take out Frankie Dogs? A guy who wears boots that look like they come off a Puerto Rican faggot. You ever seen anybody besides an elf or a fruit wear red and green boots?”

“When did you see him in these boots?”

“Tonight. Why?”

I went back home. I tried to imagine where Clete might have gone, but I was at a loss. I called his apartment again and got the answering machine, but this time I just hung up. “Clete always lands on his feet,” Bootsie said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” I replied.

“You can’t live his life, Dave,” she said.

I went out on the gallery and sat in a chair, with the light off, and watched the rain fall on the swamp. I thought about the biblical passage describing how God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the good and the wicked. A few miles away Jimmy Dean Styles and Tee Bobby Hulin were both housed in the parish prison, held without bond, in twenty-three-hour lockdown. I wondered if Tee Bobby had finally accepted his fate, if he looked out at the drenched sugarcane fields surrounding the stockade and saw his future there, either as a lifetime convict laborer on Angola Farm or as a hump of sod in the prison cemetery at Lookout Point, with no identification on his grave marker except a number.

I even wondered if Jimmy Dean Styles still doubted his fate. I could not imagine a worse death than being confined in a cage, knowing the exact date, hour, minute, and second you will die at the hands of others. To me it was always miraculous that the condemned did not go insane before the day of their execution.

But an old-time warden at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi confided to me an observation of his own that I’ve never forgotten. He said that no matter how pathological or evil the condemned might be, they do not believe the state will carry out its sentence. An army of correctional officers, prison psychologists, physicians, hospital attendants, prison administrators, and chaplains is assigned to the care and well-being of those on death row. They’re fed, given every form of medical care, nursed back to health if they try to kill themselves, and sometimes punished, as children would be, for possessing a stinger or a jar of prune-o.

Would these same representatives of the state strap down a defenseless individual and fill his veins with lethal chemicals or create an electrical arc from his skull to the soles of his feet? My friend the warden believed the contradictions were such that no sane person could quite assimilate them.

On the far side of the swamp a bolt of lightning leaped from the earth and quivered whitely in a pool of clouds at the top of the sky. I felt the day’s events wash through me in a wave of fatigue. Then the phone rang in the living room and I went inside to answer it.

It was Mr. Lemand, the manager of Clete’s apartment complex.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” he said.

“It’s all right. Can I help you?” I said.

“A lady named Mrs. LeBlanc lives next door to Mr. Purcel. After you left, her toilet became clogged and I had to go up and fix it. Since I knew you were concerned about Mr. Purcel, I asked if she had seen him. She said he’d told her he had rented a camp at Bayou Benoit.”

“Do you know where exactly?”

“No, I asked her that.”