His eyes would not leave mine. There were moments when I hated not just my job but the human race. I had no adequate words for him.
“You’re sure about this?” he asked.
“Let’s take care of the identification, sir.”
“Help me up, please. My knees aren’t much good anymore.”
He held on to my arm, weightless as a bird when we walked down the steps to the cruiser. Then he veered away from me as though he could undo our meeting and the message I had brought him. “Who would want to hurt her? She tried to get justice for people nobody cares about. Tell me what they did to her. Tell me right now.”
But any comfort I could have offered him would have been based on a lie.
He sat down sideways on the passenger seat of the cruiser, his feet outside, and wept in his hands. I could hear the bottle tree tinkling in the wind, the pecan leaves ruffling. I wanted to be on the other side of the moon.
Chapter Three
CLETE CALLED ME at the department late the same afternoon and asked me to come to his office. It was located on Main Street in a century-old brick building half a block from the Shadows. The receptionist was gone, and the folding metal chairs were empty except for one where a man with long hair as slick and shiny as black plastic was cleaning his nails with a penknife. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and gum wrappers and an apple core and a banana peel. Clete sat behind his desk in the back room, the door ajar. He waved me in. “Close the door,” he said.
There were printouts and two folders and a legal pad on his desk. Through the window I could see his spool table and umbrella on the concrete pad behind the building, and the drawbridge at Burke Street and the old convent across the bayou.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I made several calls about Hugo Tillinger. It’s a complex case. It also stinks.”
“I talked with Helen about him, Clete. Let us take it from here.”
“Is everything okay? I mean with me not reporting Tillinger right away?”
I avoided his eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Did you ID the body of the girl on the cross?”
“She’s the daughter of a Baptist minister in Cade. Her name is Lucinda Arceneaux. She was a volunteer for the Innocence Project.”
He flinched.
“That doesn’t mean she knew Hugo Tillinger,” I said.
“Stop it.”
He got up from his desk and opened the door. “Come in here, Travis.”
The man with black hair greased straight back folded his knife and dropped it in his slacks. He had the beginnings of a paunch and cheeks that looked like they had been rubbed with chimney soot. He wore his slacks below the belly button; hair protruded from the top of his belt.
“This is Travis Lebeau,” Clete said. “Tell Dave what you know about Hugo Tillinger.”
“While he was being held for trial, I’d bring ice to his cell,” Travis said.
“Ice?” I said.
“That’s what I did in this particular jail. I brought ice from the kitchen and got paid in smokes or whatever.”
Three teardrop tats dripped from his left eye. Two blue stars the size of cigar burns were tattooed on the back of his neck.
“Travis was in the AB,” Clete said. “Now he’s trying to do a few solids to make up for the past.”
“I thought the AB was for life,” I said.
“They sold me to the niggers. The BGF,” he replied. “They claimed I snitched on a guy. I never snitched on anybody in my life.”