"I think in this case we're talking about a wet towel held down on the face. Maybe she fell, then somebody finished the job. But I'm in a speculative area now."
The image he had called up out of memory was not one I wanted to think about. I looked at the fractured light on the bayou, a garden blooming with blue and pink hydrangeas on the far bank. But he wasn't finished.
"She was pregnant. Maybe two months. Does that mean anything?" he said.
"Yeah, it sure does."
"You don't look too good."
"It's a bad story, Doc."
"They all are."
* * *
TWENTY-TWO
THAT EVENING CLETE PARKED HIS convertible by the dock and hefted an ice chest up on his shoulder and carried it to a fish-cleaning table by one of the water faucets I had mounted at intervals on a water line that ran the length of the dock's handrail. He poured the ice and at least two dozen sac-a-lait out on the table, put on a pair of cloth gardener's gloves, and started scaling the sac-a-lait with a spoon and splitting open their stomachs and half-mooning the heads at the gills.
"You catch fish somewhere else and clean them at my dock?" I said.
"I hate to tell you this, the fishing's a lot better at Henderson. How about I take y'all to the Patio for dinner tonight?"
"Things aren't real cool at the house right now."
He kept his eyes flat, his face neutral. He washed the spooned fish scales off the board plank. I told him about the autopsy on Ida Broussard.
When I finished he said, "You like graveyard stories? How about this? I caught Swede Boxleiter going out of the Terrebonne cemetery last night. He'd used a trowel to take the bricks out of the crypt and pry open the casket. He took the rings from the corpse's fingers, and a pair of riding spurs and a silver picture frame that Archer Terrebonne says held a photo of some little girls a slave poisoned.
"I cuffed Boxleiter to a car bumper and went up to the house and told Terrebonne a ghoul had been in his family crypt. That guy must have Freon in his veins. He didn't say a word. He went down there with a light and lifted the bricks back out and dragged the casket out on the ground and straightened the bones and rags inside and put the stolen stuff back on the corpse, didn't blink an eye. He didn't even look at Boxleiter, like Boxleiter was an insect sitting under a glass jar."
"What'd you do with Boxleiter?"
"Fired him this morning."
"You fired him?"
"Billy Holtzner tends to delegate authority in some situations. He promised me a two-hundred-buck bonus, then hid in his trailer while I walked Boxleiter off the set. Have you told this Broussard guy his wife was murdered?"
"He's not home."
"Dave, I'll say it again. Don't let him come around the set to square a beef, okay?"
"He's not a bad guy, Clete."
"Yeah, they've got a lot of that kind on Camp J."
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sat with Cool Breeze on the gallery of his father's house and told him, in detail, of the pathologist's findings. He had been pushing the swing at an angle with one foot, then he stopped and scratched his hand and looked out at the street.
"The blow on the back of her head and the marks on her shoulders, could you have done that?" I said.
"I pushed her down on the steps. But her head didn't hit nothing but the screen."
"Was the baby yours?"
"Two months? No, we wasn't… It couldn't be my baby."
"You know where she went after she left your house, don't you?" I said.