The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

I was sure at that moment that Desmond Cormier lived in a place few of us would have the courage—or perhaps the temerity—to enter.

• • •

AFTER WORK THE next

day, Sean McClain pulled his pickup into my driveway, a pirogue in the bed. Two cane poles were propped on the tailgate. He didn’t get out. “Take a ride with me to Fausse Point.”

He had never asked me to go fishing before. “Anything going on?” I asked.

“Thought we’d entertain the bream. Last time out, I hooked myself in the neck with a Mepps spinner. Thought I’d keep it simpler, cane pole–style.”

I had no idea what was on his mind, but I knew it wasn’t fish. “Why not?” I said.

We drove up the Loreauville Road through fields of green cane channeled with wind, the sky marbled with purple and scarlet rain clouds. We put the pirogue in at Lake Fausse Point. I sat in the bow and he sat in the stern, and we paddled along the edge of dead tupelos that resonated like conga drums when you knocked on them. I unhooked the line at the base of my cane pole and threaded a worm on the hook, and swung the line and bobber and small lead weight next to the lily pads. The wind had dropped, and the water was as flat and still as a painting.

“There’s something maybe I should tell you,” Sean said.

“I thought you might.”

“You did?”

“You shot one of your colleagues?” I said.

“Maybe I was working up to it.”

I turned around and looked at him. “I was kidding.”

“No, I ain’t shot nobody,” he said. “Although maybe I was thinking about it. There’s some what needs it.”

“Can you please tell me what we’re talking about?”

“I was having coffee at the doughnut place, and some guys was shooting off their mouths about Miss Bailey. One guy in particular. He said she got her job on her back.”

“Which guy?”

“The one who got off on that charge at the parish prison.”

“Axel Devereaux?” I said.

“I told him a couple of things maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“That he put me in mind of a shit-hog ear-deep in a slop bucket. That he’d better shut his face before I went upside his head.”

“Devereaux isn’t a man to provoke,” I said.

“I done it.”

“You did what?”

“Went upside his head with the paper-napkin dispenser. It knocked him out of the chair.”

“You hit Axel Devereaux with a napkin dispenser?”

“I also stepped on his face and told him he’d better stay where he was at before I mashed his ear into a grape.”

“You’re not putting me on?”