“Chad Patin’s remains just showed up in the belly of a hammerhead shark a guy caught south of Grand Isle. Lose the charade with Varina. She knows you’re a kindhearted guy, and she used you.”
“Why don’t you show some fucking respect?”
“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I’m supposed to stand around with my hands in my pockets while other people mess up your head?”
“Say that about Patin again?”
“There were two rifle slugs in the remains. He was probably trying to escape from his abductors when they popped him. He told me about an island run by people who made a tape of a guy being squeezed to death inside an iron maiden. I think he was probably telling me the truth. Wake up, Cletus. Compared to what we’re dealing with, Bix Golightly is the Dalai Lama.”
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“You know all that stuff you hear about getting it on with a young woman so you can feel young again?”
“What about it?”
“It works fine. Until you come out of the shower the next morning and look in the mirror and see a mummy looking back at you.”
CLETE HUNG UP his desk phone and gazed out the back window at the bayou. A black man seated on an inverted bucket was fishing with a cane pole in the shade of the drawbridge. Water hyacinths grew thickly along the banks, and on the far side was the old gray hospital and convent that had been converted into business offices, all of it shadowed by giant live oaks. The wind was up and the moss was straightening in the trees and the oak leaves were tumbling on the manicured lawn. Clete rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye and felt a great weariness that seemed to have no origin. He lit his Zippo lighter and placed it in the center of an ashtray and, with a pair of tweezers, held the memory cards he had retrieved from Varina Leboeuf’s property over the flame.
He had left his office door open. He failed to notice that Gretchen Horowitz had returned from the errands he had sent her on. She tapped on the doorjamb before entering his office. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, but I heard your conversation,” she said.
He watched the second memory card curl and blacken in the flame of his Zippo. He dropped it into the ashtray. “What about it?” he asked.
“I wish you would trust me more.”
“About what?”
“Everything. If you trusted me, maybe I could help.”
“You’re a kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about, no matter how much you’ve been around.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a kid. That’s what we all want to be. That’s why we screw up our lives, always trying to be something we’re not.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that. I don’t like what this woman is doing to you.”
“Did you get the mail?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to FedEx in Lafayette?”
“Yes.”
“Then you did your job. We’re done on this subject.”
“Can I have the rest of the afternoon off?”
“To do what?”
She leaned down on his desk. Her shoulders were too big for her shirt, her upper arms taut with muscle. The violet tint of her eyes seemed to deepen as she looked into his face. “Personal business.”
“I think you should hang around.”
“I want to buy a vehicle for myself. Maybe a secondhand pickup.”