Or a child who survived a massacre in an El Salvadoran village and grew into an attorney and a novelist, only to be kidnapped by a fellow countryman and perhaps locked in a car trunk, hog-tied, eyes and mouth wrapped with tape. That image lived like a scream inside my head.
• • •
WE LANDED OFF Cypremort Point and taxied across the water to a dock where Clete Purcel was waiting for us. He was wearing a windbreaker and khakis and lace-up canvas-and-rubber hunting boots, his hair blowing in the wind. He looked at Bailey, then back at me. “I got a tip.”
I waited, the wind cupping in my ears.
“From the black gal who was chugging pole for Wexler when he popped Wimple in City Park,” he said.
“We don’t need the detail,” Bailey said.
“Do you want to hear me out or not?” he replied.
“What did she say?” Bailey asked.
“She turns tricks out of a couple of motels in Lafayette,” he said. “She does specialties for geeks. She says Wexler is a regular. She had dinner one time with Cormier.”
“Dinner?” I said.
“Yeah, she knows him pretty good. She says he’s weird.”
“What does she know about Alafair?” I said.
“I’m trying to get to that,” he said. “She says Wexler and Cormier brought her to a duck camp. Cormier went off on his own while she took care o
f Wexler. She says Wexler told her there were drowned Nazi sailors about half a mile from shore. She thought he was making fun of her.” He kept his eyes on me.
“You know a place like that?” Bailey said.
“I’m not sure,” Clete replied.
I knew exactly where the place was, and so did Clete. In the early days of World War II, German U-boats lay in wait for the oil tankers that sailed from the refineries in Baton Rouge. In New Iberia, we could see the glow of the tankers burning at night, just beyond the southern horizon. In the fall of ’42, a German sub had been depth-charged from the air and sunk in sixty feet of water. All these years it had been sailing, as far out as the edge of the continental shelf, but it always came back to the place where it had been sunk.
“Where’s the black woman now?” Bailey said.
“I talked to her on her cell,” Clete said. “She’s not going to come anywhere near us.”
Bailey had come to the dock in a police cruiser, and I had my truck. Clete’s Caddy was parked by a boat ramp.
“I’m going to head back to town,” I said to Bailey. “I’ll call you from my house.”
“We need the black woman,” she said. “What’s her name?”
“I can’t give it to you,” Clete said.
“You’re about to get yourself in some serious trouble,” she said.
“What’s new?” he replied.
She walked away, her back stiff with anger, the wind blowing hard enough to show her scalp. I didn’t like deceiving Bailey, but I no longer trusted her, or Sean McClain, or several other colleagues who had ties to Axel Devereaux.
“I brought my AR-15,” Clete said.
“You’re sure the hooker isn’t jacking us?”
“I’m like you,” he said. “Not sure of anything. Let’s rock.”
• • •