Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“Make sense.”

“Maybe the guy who smoked that cop in St. Mary Parish. He’s out of Florida. Nobody knows what he looks like. He’s like a cleaner, except he doesn’t just clean. He wipes out everything in the environment. I saw JuJu. He said Maximo is missing, down by Morgan City.”

“You need to soak your brain in a bucket of Drano, Pookie. I can’t begin to follow the crap coming out of your mouth.”

“Somebody put the grab on Maximo. He takes his lady on a picnic, then she goes for a whiz, and when she comes back, Maximo has gone into thin air.”

“The lady is the haystack from outer space?”

“Show some sensitivity here.”

“Maximo is a sadist and a pervert. In case you haven’t heard, one of his kids disappeared. The mother thinks Maximo killed him. Did he and JuJu attack Carolyn Ardoin in her driveway?”

“You already said it, Purcel. If it was Maximo, she wouldn’t have a face.”

“Get out of here, Pookie.”

“Listen to me. This guy who was following me wears red tennis shoes and fruity shirts and queer-bait pants. He ain’t out to just cap me. He wants information. You know what that means. T’ink about what somebody done to Kevin Penny.”

“I can’t help you. Don’t come around here anymore.” Clete went up the stoop and opened the screen door.

“Don’t leave me like this, no,” Pookie said.

Clete shut the door and turned the bolt and clicked off the porch light. He looked through the window. Pookie’s arms were thrashing in rage and frustration, as though he were caught in a wind tunnel.

* * *

CLETE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Forty years ago he had accepted insomnia as a way of life. For a long time the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape. Sometimes he made a pot of tea for her, then put it and a demitasse and saucer and napkin and tiny spoon on the windowsill, regardless of the terror in his wife’s face. One day the mamasan moved on, and his wife joined a Buddhist cult in Boulder, one in which the members were made to remove their clothes and humiliate themselves, and Clete was left with a sense of desertion and emptiness no amount of booze or redwings or weed could kill.

At three in the morning he sat up in the bed and looked at the moon. Homer was asleep on the couch, his cap and ball glove by his feet. He had read Clete’s situation correctly: Carolyn Ardoin was moving in with her mother. But that was a small part of the problem. Clete and domesticity didn’t flush. He had tried it in all its forms. The result was always a disaster. He had even seen a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had told him to get a vasectomy and never get drunk in Reno or Vegas, where he might accidentally stumble into a marriage chapel.

Clete looked at Homer in the moon glow. His skin was pale and his breath so shallow, his nostrils hardly quivered. Clete thought of the bodies of the people buried alive by the Vietcong along the banks of the Perfume River, the dirt clutched in their hands, the waxy look in their faces.

The world hasn’t treated you right, kid. But I don’t know what either one of us can do about it. If there’s a way, God help me find it.

* * *

IN ANY GIVEN twenty-four-hour period, we received a steady flow of reports and complaints about house break-ins, car wrecks, noisy house parties, fights outside bars, domestic disputes, a backed-up septic tank, a water heater that wouldn’t light, the garbage that wasn’t picked up, a sofa dumped in the bayou, a Peeping Tom, an alligator in a swimming pool, another alligator taking a barbecued chicken off a grill, possums chewing through someone’s wiring, a live skunk that kids had put in the high school principal’s car, and sometimes the real deal—a homicide or a felonious assault or an armed robbery.

The theft of the ice cream truck was a new one. In the late hours, the driver had gassed up in St. Martinville and entered the convenience store for a cup of coffee. When he came back outside, his truck was gone. We added the theft to our list of bizarre occurrences in Acadiana.

* * *

IT WAS SATURDAY. The wind was balmy, out of the south, and smelling of salt and rain, when a man in a Jolly Jack ice cream suit and a white stiff-billed hat stopped the truck by a park in a poor black neighborhood near Bayou Lafourche. Happy tunes jingled from the loudspeakers. The driver stuck his head out the window and waved at the children. There were tiny plastic roses on his coat, like candied flowers on cake icing. “Hi, kids! Who wants some ice cream?”

“We ain’t got no money,” a little girl said.

“What if I told you the ice cream is free today?” the man said.

“Then you be lying,” a little boy said.

The children laughed.

“My name is Smiley,” the driver said. “I can make my face look like rubber.” He made his face go out of shape.

They laughed louder this time. “Do it again, Smiley!” someone yelled.

He hooked his fingers inside his mouth and stretched it until it was almost splitting. “I can speak Spanish. I bet you can’t.”