Penny kicked open the door, letting in the rain. “Youse both get out.”
“Clete told me you had a son,” I said.
I saw the alarm in Clete’s face.
“What about him?” Penny said.
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing. He went to a home.”
“For irreparably damaged children?” I said.
He pared his thumbnail with the tine of a fork, then raised his eyes to mine. His lips curled as though he were preparing to speak, but he didn’t utter a word. Somehow I felt I was gazing into the face of an old enemy.
Clete and I went down the wood steps into the rain. Clete looked back over his shoulder. He took a breath. “He’s got a hard-on for you, Dave. If you come out here again, carry a drop.”
“He’ll cap a cop he’s met one time?”
“He’s got a brain like flypaper. He doesn’t let go.”
“I feel like going back in there.”
“Let’s have a burger and some coffee. Don’t argue.”
“What’d he do to his son?”
“The kid is too scared to talk. Penny is supposed to get him back in two weeks.”
He started the Caddy. We drove slowly past the trailer and the pond blanketed with floating trash.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, my first visitor in the office was Spade Labiche. He looked energized, glowing with his new assignment, a notepad in his hand. “Got a second, Dave?”
“What’s up?”
He sat down without being asked and peeled back his notebook. “I want you to know everything I’m doing. Maybe you can explain a couple of things as we go along.”
“Okay.”
“We pulled the phone records for calls made to the Dartez number night before last. None were made from your cell or your landline. Except one came in from a pay phone at a filling station in St. Martinville. At just about the time Ms. Dartez says her husband talked to you and said he’d meet you out by Bayou Benoit.”
I didn’t reply.
“You had a snootful?” he said.
“Who told you that?”
“Helen
has to do her job, Robo.”
“Yeah, I was loaded.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, writing in his notebook. “So you were going to iron some things out with Dartez? About your wife’s death?”
“I don’t remember.”