“You said something to me yesterday that won’t go out of my head.”
“What’s that?”
“You said the only thing Stanga understood was a bullet in the mouth.”
“What about it?”
“Most of Stanga’s jaw was blown off. Who saw you at Henderson Swamp last night, Pops? Don’t break my heart.”
“Nobody saw me. And I’m through with this conversation,” I said.
AT NOON I found Clete sitting at the bar in Clementine’s, a po’boy fried-oyster sandwich on a plate in front of him, a Bloody Mary in a big tumbler with a celery stalk stuck in it by his elbow. His loafers were shined and his slacks and Hawaiian shirt pressed, but the back of his neck looked oily and hot, and behind his shades, the skin at the corners of his eyes was white and threaded with lines. I rested my hand on his shoulder. It felt as hard as concrete.
“Helen Soileau wants you to come in,” I said.
“For what?” he said, studying my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
“She wants to know where you were last night.”
“When I find out, I’ll tell her.”
“Rough night?”
“Probably. I don’t remember. I woke up in the backseat of my rental, behind a filling station in Morgan City. My wallet was empty.”
“You know about Herman Stanga?”
“I saw it in the paper.”
“Helen just wants to exclude you.”
“Good. Let me know when she does that,” he said.
I tightened my hand around the back of his neck. “Come stay with us.”
“I look homeless?”
“Just for a while, until we get through this stuff.”
“I’m fine. I’m getting my Caddy out of the shop today. Everything is copacetic, Dave.”
The waiter brought him a bowl of gumbo. Clete dipped the end of his po’boy sandwich into the bowl and began eating, drinking from his Bloody Mary, filling his mouth with French bread, oysters, lettuce and tomatoes, red sauce, and mayonnaise, stopping only long enough to wipe his chin with a white napkin. He took off his shades and turned toward me. His face looked poached and twenty years older than his age. “Stop staring at me like that,” he said. “I’m not going to burn my own kite. You stop acting like I’m the walking wounded. Did you hear me, big mon? I can’t take it.”
Out of politeness, the bartender walked away from us. I went back outside, into the smell of wet trees and raindrops striking warm concrete, wondering at what point you have to honor the self-destructive request of the best friend you ever had.
At one P.M. Helen called me back into her office and told me that AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, had found a match for the girl we exhumed at the Delahoussaye farm. “She was a Canadian runaway, from a place called Trout Lake, British Columbia. She’d been picked up in North Dakota and returned to a foster home in B.C.” Helen opened a folder that was filled with printouts from both the National Crime Information Center and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Her name was Fern Michot. I talked with an inspector with the RCMP. She seemed to have been a good kid, until her parents were killed in a car wreck and she got placed with a family that probably abused her. The social worker assigned to her case thinks the father in the family might have raped her. Anyway, here’s a picture that was taken of her two years ago at age sixteen.”
In police work, you see many kinds of photos, some taken in booking rooms, others at crime scenes, some in morgues. But the kind you’re never prepared for is the picture of either the victim or the perpetrator when he or she was a child. The photo Helen handed me was of a beautiful blue-eyed, blond girl dressed in a Girl Scout uniform that had a maple leaf sewn on the sleeve. The girl was smiling and looked younger than her years, as though perhaps she hadn’t outgrown her baby fat. She looked like a girl who had been loved and who believed the world was a good place where the joy of young womanhood waited for her with each sunrise.
“How did she end up down here?” I said.
“She had run away from British Columbia twice before. She must have run away again and crossed the border and this time kept going.”
“But why here? How did she fall into the hands of the person who killed her?”
Helen put the photo back in the folder and placed the folder in my hand. “Find out,” she said.
I turned to go.