The light was tea-colored on the sugarcane fields and the oak trees along the Teche. A truck had parked next to the lounge, obscuring Clete’s view of the swimming pool and the reclining figure of Carolyn Blanchet. He started up his Caddy and drove on the berm the hundred yards down the road to the lounge and parked by the side of the building so he could see both the entrance to the motel and the row of rooms that gave onto the pool.
He hadn’t eaten since lunch, nor had he brought along his cooler that he usually kept stocked with po’boy sandwiches, Gatorade, a Ziploc bag of hard-boiled eggs, a jar of fresh orange juice, a pint of vodka, and a mixed dozen of longnecks and sixteen-ounce cans of Bud. This Layton Blanchet gig was a nuisance growing into a migraine that he didn’t need. What was even worse, he told himself, he had taken the job out of pride rather than financial need because he didn’t want to feel he couldn’t handle a self-inflated manipulator like Blanchet. It was like mashing down the sole of your shoe on bubble gum to prove you weren’t afraid of it.
What a fool he had been. Not only with Blanchet but with almost everything he touched. He’d lost it with Herman Stanga and had set himself up for a civil suit and criminal prosecution. Now he was running on dumb luck, a liver that he tried to revitalize with handfuls of vitamin B, and what he called the hypertension buzz, which produced a sound in his head like a fallen power line lying in a pool of water.
He was over the hill and lived alone and had no pension plan except a small SEP-IRA. The last woman he had loved and slept with had been an Amerasian FBI agent he had met in Montana. She had come to New Orleans with him, but as always happened with a younger woman, the discrepancy between youth and age finally had its way, and in this instance, the languid, subtropical heat and pagan excesses of southern Louisiana were no match for the techno-predictability of southern California, where she had grown up.
A woman in her mid-thirties came out the back door of the lounge and began walking toward the motel. She had gold hair that was cut short and wore jeans and suede half-topped boots and a canary-yellow cowboy shirt with purple roses sewn on it. She was looking straight ahead; then she saw the Caddy and Clete behind the wheel and smiled hesitantly, as though uncertain whether to approach the car or to continue on toward the motel. Finally, she walked to the driver’s window and propped her hand on the roof. “Remember me?” she asked.
“It’s Emma, right?” he said.
“Yeah, Emma Poche. I’m the deputy who called Dave Robicheaux the night you got brought in for that deal involving Herman Stanga at the Gate Mouth club. Looks like you got your car fixed.”
“Yeah, look, Emma—”
“You on the job?”
“Something like that.”
“My uncle is visiting from California. I’m supposed to meet him at the lounge, but he must have got lost. A guy has the phone tied up inside. I was gonna use the phone in the motel. Can I borrow your cell?”
He handed it to her. She went around the corner of the building and then came back to the Caddy, this time leaning down inside the passenger’s window. She dropped his cell phone on the seat. “Thanks. You get loose, come have a drink. My uncle is a no-show. What a drag, huh?”
Clete sat for another forty-five minutes in the Caddy. The sunset turned into long strips of maroon clouds, backdropped by a moment of robin’s-egg blueness on the earth’s rim, then the light drained from the sky and he could hear frogs croaking in a field down by the bayou and the first mosquitoes of the evening droning inside his vehicle.
He started the engine and rolled up all his windows and turned on his air conditioner full blast. Carolyn Blanchet got up from the recliner and went back inside her room. No one joined her. Twenty minutes later, she reemerged fully dressed, a fabric tote bag hanging from her shoulder. She opened a compact and studied her reflection in the mirror. She closed the compact and dropped it back in her bag. Then she got in her Lexus and drove away, the taillights disappearing in the gloom.
Clete picked up his cell phone off the seat and speed-dialed the private number Layton Blanchet had given him. He hoped he would get Blanchet’s voice mail so he would not have to talk personally with the man again. No such luck.
“What do you want?” Blanchet said.
“Maybe I should call another time. Or just send you a fax. I can do that,” Clete said.
“Sorry to sound short. I’m a little jammed up these days. You got something for me?”
“No, I’ve found nothing that could be considered significant. There’s no charge for my time. I’ll send you a bill for expenses and for the hours another guy put in. So this call in effect terminates my situation with you.”
“Hold on there. What do you mean you’re terminating the situation? What do you mean when you say you didn’t find anything ‘significant’?”
“Nothing we’ve uncovered puts your wife with another man. You know what I suggest sometimes in situations like this? I tell the husband to take his wife out to dinner. Buy her flowers. Put some music on the stereo and dance with her on the patio. Pay more attention to her and forget all this other bullshit. It’s not worth it, Mr. Blanchet. Not financially, not emotionally. If our marriages ar
e flushed, they’re flushed. If they’re salvageable, we salvage them.”
“You said you were sending me a bill for another guy’s hours. You shared this information with other people?”
“Yeah, I pieced off the job. That’s how it works. I’m one guy, not the CIA.”
“Then I want the names of everybody involved.”
“We’re done on this.”
“Oh, no, we’re not.”
“My sympathies to your wife,” Clete said, and clicked off his cell phone. He rubbed the ennui and fatigue out of his face and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. The air-conditioning was cold on his skin, the air freshener that the repair people had hung from his mirror smelling of lilacs, of spring, of youth itself. He remembered the excitement and romance of being twenty-three and returning home in Marine Corps tropicals, a recipient of the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts, riding the Ferris wheel high above Pontchartrain Beach, the rifles in a shooting gallery popping far below him, the waves of the lake capping on the sand, a young woman clinging tightly to his arm.
But youth was a decaying memory, and no matter what a song lyricist might say, you couldn’t put time in a bottle.
He went inside the lounge. Emma Poche was sitting by herself at a table in the corner, her canary-yellow western shirt lit by the glow of the jukebox. She had put on fresh lipstick, and her eyes were warm with an alcoholic sheen. “Sit down, handsome, and tell me about your life,” she said.