At first I felt only anger. I felt it toward Gretchen and toward Clete and toward myself. Then I felt incurably stupid and used. I also felt a nameless and abiding fear, the kind that is hard to describe because it’s irrational and goes deep into the psyche. It’s the sort of fear you experience when someone unexpectedly turns off a light in a room, plunging it into darkness, or when the airplane you are riding on hits an air pocket and drops so fast that you cannot hear the sound of the engines. It’s the kind of fear you experience when an atavistic voice inside you whispers that evil is not only real but it has become omnipresent in your life, and nothing on God’s green earth can save you from it.
After he finished telling me things he probably never guessed he would say to his best friend, he got up from the breakfast table without looking at me and went to the cabinet and poured more milk in his glass and added more vanilla extract, shaking the last few drops out of the tiny bottle. “Have you got anything stronger?” he asked.
“No, and I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.”
“If you slugged me, I’d consider it a gift,” he said.
“You think Gretchen’s mother is being held in Miami?” I asked.
“I doubt it.” He tried to meet my stare, but his gaze broke. “You want to go to the FBI?”
I looked at him for a long time, and I didn’t do it to make him feel uncomfortable. I knew there had to be an answer to the problem, but I didn’t know what it was. The moment we brought in the FBI, they would pick up Gretchen Horowitz, and the contract for our death would go to someone else. In the meantime, there was a strong chance that Clete Purcel would go down for aiding and abetting. When all that was done, we would still be on our own. Sound like exaggeration? Ask any victim of a violent crime or any witness for the prosecution in a trial involving the Mob what his experience with the system was like. Ask him how safe he ever felt again or how often he slept soundly through the night. Ask him what it was like to be afraid twenty-four hours a day.
“I need to tell Molly and Alafair and see what they think,” I said.
I saw him trying to control his emotions. His throat was prickled with color, the whites of his eyes full of tiny pink vessels, the skin around his mouth as sickly-looking as a fish’s belly. My guess was he couldn’t begin to sort through the shame and embarrassment and guilt he was experiencing. Nor could he help wondering if he would ever stop paying dues for the mistakes he had made years ago.
“Whatever y’all want to do is jake with me,” he said.
“Gretchen has no idea where the contract came from?”
“You know how it works. They use people who are morally insane to carry out the job, then half the time they dispose of them.” He paused as though he couldn’t deal with the content of his own statement. “Gretchen didn’t choose the world she was born into. She was tortured with cigarettes when she was an infant, all because her father wasn’t there to protect her. On her sixth birthday, she had to perform oral sex on Bix Golightly. Does anyone in his right mind believe a kid like that will grow into a normal adult? I think it’s amazing she’s the decent person she is.”
His eyes were shiny, his voice so wired that some of his words were almost inaudible.
“Let’s take a walk,” I said.
“Where?”
“To get some ice cream.”
“Dave, I’m truly sorry for this. Gretchen is, too.”
“Don’t tell me about Gretchen’s problems, Clete. I’m not up to it.”
“I’m just telling you, that’s all. She’s human, too. Give her a break.”
“That might be hard to do,” I said.
He looked at me, surprised and hurt.
I could see the light failing in the trees and hear the frogs croaking on the bayou, and I wanted to walk into the yard and wrap myself and Molly and Alafair and Clete inside the gloaming of the day and forget everything taking place around us. Instead, I said, “We’ll get through it. We always do.”
“I forgot to tell you something. While I was getting dressed to come over, I had the television on. There was a clip about a British oil guy who’s giving a talk in Lafayette. There was a shot of him with Lamont Woolsey, that albino who hangs out with the televangelist.”
“What about the oil guy?”
“I’ve seen him before. He was on the Varina Leboeuf video,” he replied. “After he finished pumping her, he was combing his hair, still in the nude. He looked straight into the camera. The words ‘narcissist’ and ‘real bucket of shit’ come to mind. Think we should dial him up?”
I CALLED THE department and had a cruiser placed in front of my house. It would be manned and unmanned at different times of the day. It would be replaced by another cruiser parked in a different spot. Anyone watching our house could not avoid concluding that there was a police presence there twenty-four hours a day.
Then I drove to the Winn-Dixie and found Molly and Alafair and followed them back home. The three of us sat down in the kitchen, and I told them everything Clete had told me. Alafair started opening her mail, seemingly more concerned with it than the discussion. Molly opened a can of cat food and brought Snuggs and Tripod in and fed them on a piece of newspaper and then filled a bowl of water and set it beside the cat food. Snuggs’s tail flipped from side to side on the paper while he and Tripod ate.
“Clete’s sorry for this, and so am I,” I said.
“Clete’s a mess. He’ll never change. The question is what do we do about it,” Molly said. “Have you talked to Helen?”
“Not yet,” I replied.