A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“The exact spot, Marcel.”

“T’ink I’m gonna tell you that?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just tell Mark Shondell you helped kill his cousin.”

“You’re a bum, Dave.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Two minutes later, I walked down the alley in the mist, alongside a rivulet of black rainwater, past the two people who had finished their coupling and were now sharing a bottle of synthetic wine. “What’s happenin’?” I said.

They looked at me fearfully.

We’re supposed to protect and serve. But sometimes we exploit and screw the most helpless of the helpless; in this instance I had used Marcel LaForchette. With no other place to put my anger, I picked up a rock and flung it against a Dumpster. I saw the couple flinch and instinctively grab each other.

* * *

I BANGED ON CLETE’S door early the next morning, the air cold and the rain dripping audibly out of the trees where the Teche had overrun its banks. He answered the door in his skivvies. “Why not wake up the whole motor court?” he said.

I stepped inside without being asked. “Get dressed.”

“For what?”

“We’re going to New Orleans. You need some rubber boots.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Remember those stories about a place where Pietro Balangie buried his bodies?”

He sighed. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”

I told him everything Marcel had said. When I finished, Clete was sitting on the side of the bed, still undressed, a coffee mug imprinted with the marine globe and anchor balanced on his thigh. “Have you told Dana Magelli about this?”

“No.”

“You’re protecting LaForchette?”

“He cooperated. He’s trying to go straight. Why jam the guy?”

“I think something else is going on here, Dave. You keep putting your necktie in the garbage grinder, starting with the Balangie woman. Now we’re about to dig up Adonis’s childhood. I think you’re on a dry drunk.”

“Not true, Cletus.”

“You’ve lost two wives. Either go to more meetings or buy a bottle of Jack. But stop messing with the Balangies.”

“Are you in or out?”

He set down his coffee cup on the nightstand and cupped his hands on his knees. “I had a dream last night.”

“Forget dreams. That’s all they are.”

“We were sliding off the edge of the earth, you and me,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re into. I’ve never felt like this in my life.”

* * *

CLETE AND I got in my truck and, four hours later, found the spot Marcel had described. The lake was to the south, capping in the wind, the willows bending in the inlets. To the north were warehouses, rusted oil tanks, and an obsolete sewage plant. The sky was gray, the smell of burning garbage in the wind. We stood in a sump that was like a mixture of glue and quicksand and wet cement, and began shoveling and raking and probing for a bottom with a long iron bar that once was part of a school flagpole. We did this for two hours. Our lack of procedure and legality probably seems strange. But anyone who buys in to the average television portrayal of law enforcement deserves any misfortune that happens to him. Most of us give it our best, but a lot don’t. So how do we sometimes put away the worst members of the human race? Answer: We salt the mine shaft, lie on the witness stand, conceal exculpatory evidence, and cut deals with jailhouse snitches. We also dig big holes and find nothing and bury something for our colleagues to find two days after we’re gone.

We found part of a shoe and pieces of bone that could have belonged to seagulls or small four-footed animals. Maybe some of the bone fragments could have belonged to people, but I doubted it, and the shoe could have washed ashore and been buried by a storm. In effect, the sump seemed bottomless; it would require a large forensic team and many days of labor and a huge amount of tax money to produce anything of evidentiary value.