He scratched the back of his neck, then put on a pair of sunglasses that were tinted almost black. “No, I’ve met no maidens recently, iron or otherwise.”
“How about a kid named Blue Melton?”
“Sorry.”
“She was abducted on your boat.”
“The boat you’re describing is not mine, and I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“How about that amphibian you were on? I’ve always wanted to take a ride on one of those.”
“This conversation is over,” he replied.
The Vietnamese girl set Broussard’s steak by his elbow, the meat so hot it was sizzling in its gravy. “The cook say he sorry and hope you like it,” she said.
“Later, I want you to take me in the kitchen so I can meet him,” Broussard said. “We don’t want him to leave here with hurt feelings.”
“That’s white of you,” Clete said.
“Your mockery is not appreciated, sir,” Broussard said. “I was trying to indicate to this little girl that I was only teasing when I told her to fuss at the cook.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We need to do a lot more good deeds like that, particularly for the Vietnamese,” Clete said, crunching his ice, lifting his index finger for emphasis. “I saw some stuff in Vietnam that takes the cake. Throwing prisoners out of the slick, going into a ville at night and cutting a guy’s throat and painting his face yellow, you know, the kind of heavy shit the home folks don’t want to hear about. I knew this one door gunner who couldn’t wait to get back to a free-fire zone. Someone asked him how he killed all those women and children, and he said, ‘It’s easy. You just don’t lead them as much.’ You ever think about that kind of stuff while you’re tanking up at the pump?”
The conversation at the table went into slow motion and then died. Amidee raised his hand and gestured at the security personnel as though cupping air with his fingers.
“Eighty-sixing us, are you?” Clete said. “Tell you what, Rev, I’m going to check up on that Vietnamese girl, and if I find your fingerprints on her, you’re going to get large amounts of publicity that you don’t need.”
“There’s some misunderstanding. I think we need to talk this out,” Bobby Joe Guidry said.
“Don’t interfere,” Woolsey said.
“I thought we were all members of the church here. What’s going on?” Bobby Joe said, trying to smile.
“Get these two men out of here,” Woolsey said to the three security men who had arrived at the table.
I stood up and heard Clete getting out of his chair beside me, knocking against the table, shaking the glasses on it. I did not have to look at him to know what he was thinking or planning. The three security men had concentrated their attention entirely on Clete and were not looking at me at all. “We’re leaving,” I said to Woolsey and Broussard. “But you guys are going to see a lot more of us. Both of you have shit on your noses. I saw Blue Melton’s body after it was defrosted and taken apart by the coroner. How do you do something like that to a seventeen-year-old girl and live with yourself?”
It was an odd moment, one that I didn’t expect. Neither man looked at me, and neither spoke. They seemed to have folded into themselves like accordion cutouts made of cardboard. Clete and I walked toward the Caddy, the wind rustling the tree limbs. I heard feet crunching on the leaves behind me and assumed the security men had decided to score some points with either Broussard or us by escorting us to our vehicle. When I turned around, I was looking into the face of Bobby Joe Guidry. “I don’t like what happened back there,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” Clete said.
“Y’all seem like good guys. They shouldn’t have treated y’all like that. I was a radio operator in Desert Storm. I know what happened out there on the highway when all that traffic got caught by our planes. You know, what the media called the ‘Highway of Death.’ Some of those people were probably civilians. Whole families. I saw it. It’s something you don’t want to remember.”
“You ever go to A.A., Bobby Joe?” I asked.
“I didn’t figure I needed it after I met Amidee.”
“I attend the Solomon House meeting in New Iberia. Why don’t you drive down and see us sometime?”
“My main issue right now is finding a job.”
“I tell you what,” I said. I removed a business card from my billfold and wrote on the back of it. “We have an opening for a 911 dispatcher. You might give it a shot.”
“Why you doing this?”
“You look like a stand-up guy,” I said.
“You’re talking to the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said.