“Somebody was in Emma’s house when Alafair was at the front door. Emma was delivering a litany of grief about her mistreatment at this person’s hands. But whoever it was left through the back without Alafair seeing him or her. Alafair said a copy of Kermit Abelard’s last novel was on the coffee table. It was inscribed to someone named Carolyn.”
“That doesn’t make it Carolyn Blanchet’s.”
“The inscription indicated this particular Carolyn was a champion tennis player and a longtime supporter of Kermit’s work. Carolyn once told me she was a big fan of Kermit’s books. I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think we’ve been looking in the wrong place.”
I had lost her attention. “That slut,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You and I need to take a ride.”
“I can handle it, Helen.”
“What you can do is get on the phone and tell Ms. Blanchet we’re on our way to her house and her prissy twat had better be there when we arrive.”
WHEN CLETE PURCEL was a patrolman in New Orleans and, later, a detective-grade plainclothes, he had been feared by the Mob as well as the hapless army of miscreants who dwelled like slugs on the underside of the city. But their fear of Clete had less to do with his potential for violence than the fact that he did not obey rules or recognize traditional protocol. More important, he seemed indifferent to his own fate. He was not simply the elephant in the clock shop. He was the trickster of folk legend, the psychedelic merry prankster, Sancho Panza stumbling out of the pages of Cervantes, willing to create scenes and situations in public that were so outrageous, pimps and porn actors and street dips who robbed church boxes were embarrassed by them. Whenever I hesitated, his admonition was always the same: “You got to take it to them with tongs, big mon. You got to spit in the lion’s mouth. Two thirds of these guys never completed toilet training. Come on, this is fun.”
Maybe because of his visceral hatred of Robert Weingart, or his conviction that Timothy Abelard trailed the vapors of the crypt from his wheelchair, Clete decided to take a ride down to the Abelard compound on the southern rim of St. Mary Parish. It was a fine day for it, he told himself. The rain had quit; the clouds were soft and white against a blue sky; the oaks along Bayou Teche looked washed and thick with new leaves. What was there to lose? His gold pen had been stolen from him and used to set him up for the killing of Herman Stanga. He still had resisting-arrest charges against him because of his flight from the St. Martin cops the night he busted up Herman Stanga behind the Gate Mouth club. His best friend had almost been clipped in that gig down by the river in Jeff Davis Parish, then had been dissed by the local cops. In the meantime, Clete had watched a pattern that seemed to characterize his experience in law enforcement for over three decades: The puppeteers got blow jobs while their throwaway minions stacked time or got their wicks snuffed.
He put down the top on his Caddy, made a stop at a convenience store for a six-pack of Bud and a grease-stained bag of white boudin still warm from the microwave, and motored on down the road, Jerry Lee Lewis blaring “Me and Bobby McGee” from the stereo.
Outside Franklin, he drove south on the two-lane through a corridor of gum and hackberry trees and slash pines that grew along the edge of flooded sawgrass and expanses of saltwater intrusion where the grass had turned the color of urine. As he neared the Abelard compound, he saw a pickup truck backed into a cleared area that contained a cast-iron Dumpster. The top of the Dumpster was open, and a large black woman wearing rubber boots was standing in the truck bed, hefting a series of plastic garbage bags and flinging them into the Dumpster.
Abelard’s nurse, he thought. What was her name? Had Dave said she was Abelard’s out-of-wedlock daughter? A white man was sitting in the cab of the truck reading a sports magazine, his door open to catch the breeze.
Clete turned in to the clearing, cut the engine, and set his can of Bud on the floor. “Need a hand with that?” he said.
The black woman paused in her work, studying Clete, trying to place him. “No, suh, we got it,” she said. She flung a heavy sack with both hands into the Dumpster.
Clete got out of the Caddy and removed his shades and stuck them in his shirt pocket. His shoes were shined, his golf slacks ironed with sharp creases, his flowery sport shirt still crisp from the box. “It’s Miss Jewel, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, suh. You came out for lunch one day with Mr. Robicheaux.”
Clete glanced at the white man behind the wheel. His hair was peroxided and clipped short, the sideburns long and as exact as a ruler’s edge, his jaw square. He never lifted his eyes from the magazine. Clete picked up two large vinyl bags and walked them to the Dumpster and tossed them inside.
“I got the rest of them, suh. It’s not any trouble,” Jewel said.
Clete nodded and put an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth and gazed across the road at the wood bridge that led to the Abelard compound. A blue heron was rising from the lily pads that grew in the water by the bridge, the edges of its wings rippling in the wind. “Got a match?” he said to the man behind the steering wheel.
“Don’t smoke,” the man said, not looking up.
“Got a lighter in there?”
“It doesn’t work.”
Clete nodded again. “Have I seen you somewhere?”
This time the man held Clete’s gaze. “I couldn’t say.” He sucked on a mint. His eyes were of a kind that Clete had seen bef
ore, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes in memory. They didn’t blink; they didn’t probe; they contained no curiosity about the external world. They made Clete think of cinders that had been consumed by their own heat.
“You a military man?” Clete asked.
“No.”
“But you were in, right?”
“Ruptured disk.”