Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

ELEVEN

THE NEXT MORNING I CALLED Clete Purcel in New Orleans, signed out of the office for the day, and drove across the elevated highway that spanned the chain of bays in the Atchafalaya Basin, across the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge, then down through pasture country and the long green corridor through impassable woods that tapered into palmettos and flooded cypress on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. Then I was at the French Quarter exit, with the sudden and real urban concern of having to park anywhere near the Iberville Welfare Project.

I left my truck off Decatur, two blocks from the Cafe du Monde, and crossed Jackson Square into the shade of Pirates Alley between the lichen-stained garden of the Cathedral and the tiny bookstore that had once been the home of William Faulkner. Then I walked on down St. Ann, in sunlight again, to a tan stucco building with an arched entrance and a courtyard and a grilled balcony upstairs that dripped bougainvillea, where Clete Purcel kept his private investigative agency and sometimes lived.

"You want to take down Jimmy Fig? How hard?" he said.

"We don't have to bounce him off the furniture, if that's what you mean."

Clete wore a pressed seersucker suit with a tie, and his hair had just been barbered and parted on the side and combed straight down on his head so that it looked like a little boy's.

"Jimmy Figorelli is a low-rent sleaze. Why waste time on a shit bag?" he said.

"It's been a slow week."

He looked at me with the flat, clear-eyed pause that always indicated his unbelief in what I was saying. Through the heavy bubbled yellow glass in his doors, I saw Megan Flynn walk down the stairs in blue jeans and a T-shirt and carry a box through the breezeway to a U-Haul trailer on the street.

"She's helping me move," Clete said.

"Move where?"

"A little cottage between New Iberia and Jeanerette. I'm going to head security at that movie set."

"Are you crazy? That director or producer or whatever he is, Billy Holtzner, is the residue you pour out of spittoons."

"I ran security for Sally Dio at Lake Tahoe. I think I can handle it."

"Wait till you meet Holtzner's daughter and boyfriend. They're hypes, or at least she is. Come on, Clete. You were the best cop I ever knew."

Clete turned his ring on his finger. It was made of gold and silver and embossed with the globe and anchor of the U.S. Marine Corps.

"Yeah, 'was' the best cop. I got to change and help Megan. Then we'll check out Jimmy Fig. I think we're firing in the well, though," he said.

After he had gone upstairs I looked out the back window at the courtyard, the dry wishing well that was cracked and never retained water, the clusters of untrimmed banana trees, Clete's rust-powdered barbells that he religiously pumped and curled, usually half full of booze, every afternoon. I didn't hear Megan open the door to the breezeway behind me.

"What'd you say to get him upset?" she asked. She was perspiring from her work and her T-shirt was damp and shaped against her breasts. She stood in front of the air-conditioning unit and lifted the hair off the back of her neck.

"I think you're sticking tacks in his head," I said.

"Where the hell you get off talking to me like that?"

"Your brother's friends are scum."

"Two-thirds of the world is. Grow up."

"Boxleiter and I had a talk. The death photo of the black guy in the drainpipe was a setup."

"You're full of shit, Dave."

We stared at each other in the refrigerated coolness of the room, almost slit-eyed with antagonism. Her eyes had a reddish-brown cast in them like fire inside amber glass.

"I think I'll wait outside," I said.

"You know what homoeroticism is? Guys who aren't quite gay but who've got a yen they never deal with?" she said.

"You'd better not hurt him."

"Oh, yeah?" she said, and stepped toward me, her hands shoved in her back pockets like a baseball manager getting in an umpire's face. Her neck was sweaty and ringed with dirt and her upper lip was beaded with moisture. "I'm not going to take your bullshit, Dave. You go fuck yourself." Then her face, which was heart-shaped and tender to look at and burning with anger at the same time, seemed to go out of focus. "Hurt him? My father was nailed alive to a board wall. You lecture me on hurting people? Don't you feel just a little bit embarrassed, you self-righteous sonofabitch?"