The girl looked up at me. “I don’t t’ink Smiley would hurt anyone. Would he, suh?”
I didn’t answer and instead said good night and drove back to the crime scene. The paramedics were trundling the bodies on gurneys to an ambulance. Inside the house, Helen was talking on her cell phone to Jimmy Nightingale. Her face looked old when she hung up.
“Bad?” I said.
“He cried. I can never read that guy.”
“The little girl told me a big guy wearing a small hat and driving a purple convertible passed Smiley on the road. Smiley was headed north, the convertible was headed south.”
“Clete?” she said.
“Sounds like it.”
“You get his butt in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”
* * *
I LEFT THREE messages for him that night and one the next morning. I went by his office. His secretary said she thought he was in New Orleans.
“When will he be back?” I said.
“It’s Friday, Mr. Dave. In New Orleans. He’ll be back when he gets back.”
The double murder was the headline story in The Daily Iberian. I felt caught in a situation that was endless and had no good ending. The rain was unrelenting. We had gone from drought that had left the swamplands strung with dead vegetation to flooded fields and ditches and front yards and cemeteries in which caskets floated from the crypts. Levon Broussard was transferred to the jail in Jennings, then granted bail a second time. From all accounts, Jimmy Nightingale was devastated. I feared for Clete, because I believed he was becoming not only obsessed but irrational. I went to a noon meeting and passed when it was my turn to speak, primarily because I genuinely believed, as Clete and Helen did, that a shapeless and malevolent entity was in our midst. It was not the kind of stuff that improved a recovering drunk’s day.
At one-thirty P.M. Saturday, Clete called me at home.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the Big Sleazy, where else? If you’re worried about Homer, he’s with the lady I hire.”
“You were seen at the Nightingales’ camp, Clete. Shortly after Smiley did a job on Swede Jensen and Emmeline Nightingale.”
“So what?”
“What were you doing there?”
“I wanted to have another run at Jimmy Nightingale. A St. Mary deputy told me he was probably at the camp.”
“You could end up a suspect.”
“I was trying to be courteous and return your calls, big mon. How about getting off my case?”
“Don’t shine me on.”
“I’m going to bring that lying cocksucker down,” he said. “Maybe I won’t bust a cap on him, but one way or another I’m going to put a freight train up his ass. I mean that literally—in the bridal suite in Angola.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Nail him as a coconspirator in the death of the Jeff Davis Eight. One way or another, I’m going to get him. I’ve had a good life.”
Then I remembered Jimmy Nightingale had a rally that night at the Superdome.
“I’ll put you in handcuffs if I have to,” I said.
He was already off the line.
* * *