Dana Magelli at NOPD. The following day, Saturday, I found Marcel LaForchette in the same dump on the edge of St. Martinville’s black district where I’d found him before. He was at the end of the bar, eating fried crawfish and dirty rice with a spoon from a paper plate. A fat woman with gold hair and skin the color of paste was sitting next to him. I remembered her from somewhere. Maybe a motel raid, a drug bust, a domestic shooting, the kind of events that happen most often on the first weekend of the month. The red paint lacquered on the walls looked smoked, darker, as though it were being consumed by its own garishness.
“Lose your way to your A.A. meet again?” Marcel said.
“Your PO told me to check you out,” I replied.
“Funny man.”
“You don’t have a parole officer anymore?”
“Mr. Mark got me cut loose,” he said. “So if you’re here about him, I say beat feet, my man.”
The woman kept her face turned away from me. She was drinking from a soda can. Lipstick was smeared on the top. She stank of cigarette smoke.
“I need to talk to you,” I said to Marcel.
“Talk.”
I looked at the back of the woman’s head. She wore a frilly white blouse and a bra with black straps that showed through the fabric. Marcel stuck a tightly folded ten-dollar bill between her fingers. “Cloteel, can you get us somet’ing cold?”
“No,” she said.
“Somet’ing wrong?” Marcel said.
“If you wit’ him, you ain’t wit’ me,” she said.
She dropped the folded bill on the bar and walked to the women’s room. Her buttocks were massive, the backs of her thighs printed with the bar stool. Then I remembered her.
“She don’t mean anyt’ing by it,” Marcel said.
“Right,” I said. I leaned in close to him. “The whack you drove on? Was the hit a guy named Gerald Levine, middle name Shondell?”
“Maybe.”
“He was Mark Shondell’s cousin.”
Marcel stared at his food. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Father Julian. I’m staying off the juice and the spike and weed and everyt’ing else. The way I was before I got turned out.”
His Cajun accent had deepened, as though he wanted to regress into childhood. I wanted to be sympathetic to him. But I knew Marcel’s history, and I could only guess at the number of people he had killed.
“Is your lady friend part of your new life?”
“I don’t judge.”
“She sold her infant child for a few bags of brown skag. She cut the skag with insect poison and sold it to some teenagers.”
“She’s clean now, so you can shut down the sermon.”
He was right. My remarks about the woman were a cheap shot. It’s easy to be righteous about people at the bottom of the food chain until you spend one day in their shoes.
“Come outside,” I said.
“I ain’t lost nothing out there.”
“Come outside or I’ll bust you right here.”
“For what?”
“Public stupidity.” I removed a pair of cuffs from my coat pocket and held them below the level of the bar where he could see them. I let my voice climb. “I’ll bust your friend, too.”