“Remind me of that, come the next election.”
Helen was silhouetted against the window, her face covered with shadow. I didn’t know if I had made her angry or not.
“I made a mistake assigning Labiche to the case,” she said. “He wants your job.”
Finally, I thought.
“I talked to a couple of people in Dade and Broward Counties. They said he took freebies in Liberty City, but that’s about all they knew of.”
“Any vice cop who’ll take freebies will take money.”
“In this instance there’s no evidence of that,” she said.
“Come on, Helen, if a cop is dirty, he can be blackmailed. He can also be killed.”
“All right,” she said, giving up.
She had gone to extraordinary lengths for me many times; I took no pleasure in her concession. “Helen, I think everything we’re talking about is much bigger than Labiche or me or T. J. Dartez or Jimmy Nightingale. I think it has to do with narcotics, with all the trafficking that starts in Florida and comes straight down I-10 into our midst.”
“The crack trade in Jefferson Davis Parish isn’t the big score, Dave.”
“We’re the Walmart of the drug culture. Kids deal dope while they line up to go to a movie.”
Her face was still in shadow. “I don’t think the Dartez homicide is prosecutable, at least not at this point. I’m telling that to the prosecutor and leaving it in his hands. Prepare yourself.”
“For w
hat?”
“We’ll be accused of covering up. Look at me, Dave.”
I knew what was coming.
“Tell me you didn’t do it. Or at least tell me that deep in your heart, you believe you didn’t do it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Goddamn it,” she said.
“Don’t swear.”
She turned her back to me and stared out the window. The wind was blowing in City Park, the boughs of the oak trees swirling, a motorboat towing a water-skier, furrowing the bayou. I wanted to say something of a consoling nature, but I had nothing to offer.
* * *
CLETE PURCEL NORMALLY referred to cop shows on television as “the most recent shit Hollywood is foisting on really stupid people.” Clete’s intolerance aside, the facsimile has little to do with the reality. Probably one third of cops are dedicated to the job; one third eat too many doughnuts; and one third are people who should not be given power over others. Female detectives do not show off their cleavage. Many cops carry a drop or a throw-down. Cops plant evidence and lie on the stand. In our midst are sadists and racists who taint the rest of us. And the greatest contributor to solving crimes is not the lab but the informant, usually someone who skipped toilet training and couldn’t make a peanut butter sandwich with a diagram.
For Clete, at least in the Acadiana area, that man was Pookie the Possum Domingue. Pookie had the eyes and snout of his namesake and walked in the same unsteady, desultory fashion, his head wobbling on his spindle of a neck. Years ago he was a gofer for the Teamsters in Lafayette when they were cheating their own members out of their union books. He also racked balls in Antlers Pool Hall and did scut work for a bail bondsman, shilled for the card dealers in the old Lafayette Underpass area, and washed money with No Duh Dolowitz at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds. But his great talent lay in what he called “research.” Though the Internet had put most PIs out of work, Pookie was unfazed. His knowledge of the netherworld could be matched only by the caretakers of the La Brea Tar Pits.
He called Clete at his office on Tuesday morning. “Is that you, Purcel?”
“Who’s this?”
“You keeping your plunger under control?”
“All right, wise guy, if this is who I think it is—”
“Dial it down. I got some information for you. I was in Sticks this afternoon.”