The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

“You’re a mess with women.”

“I’m a mess?”

“Yeah, without my guidance, you’d really be in trouble,” he said. “What’s the haps with Bailey?”

“I’ve got to have your sacred oath.”

At first he didn’t answer. He put on a bathrobe and fluffy blue slippers. Then he said, “Don’t be talking to me like that, big mon. You either trust me or you don’t.”

I told him about the men who raped Bailey, and the fire she set under the propane tank on their trailer, and how all three men died, and the trouble she had in Holy Cross when she was thirteen. Then I told him about my visit the previous night to Sean McClain’s place.

“McClain couldn’t recognize Smiley Wimple?” Clete said. “Wimple looks like an albino caterpillar that glows in the dark.”

“Yeah, I wondered the same thing.”

“Sean McClain bothers you for some reason?”

“He’s been around too many murder scenes,” I said. “That’s what I keep thinking. Same with Bailey. I don’t know who she is.”

Clete started a pot of coffee on his small gas stove. He opened his icebox and took out a box of glazed doughnuts and tossed it to me. “You know what you’re always telling me, right?”

“No.”

“People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.”

“That’s not reassuring. Bailey killed three people. That’s what she did. With fire.”

“These guys were running a meth lab. They deserved what they got. Besides, she told you about it. Would she get on the square like that if she were jacking you around?”

“Why is it that everything you say has something in it about genitalia?”

He removed the coffeepot from the stove and set it and two cups on the table. “Dave, there’s an explanation for what you’re experiencing. The guy we’re after is waging war against this entire community. He wants us at each other’s throats. Don’t fall into his trap.”

“How do you know this?”

“I don’t. It’s just a thought. But nothing else makes sense.”

We were both quiet. I took a bite out of a doughnut.

“I’ve got a worse scenario, one I can’t get out of my head sometimes,” Clete said. “I wake up with it in the middle of the night. Some mornings, too. That’s when it really gets bad.”

“What does?”

“The dream. I dream we’re all dead. We fucked up while we were alive and now we’re stacking time in a place where there’re no answers, only questions that drive you crazy. I went to a shrink about it.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t give him a chance. He was one of the people in the dream. Enjoy the day we get, Streak. Being dead is a pile of shit.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

THAT MORNING, I went to Mass at St. Edward

’s, and that evening I attended an AA meeting at the Solomon House, across the street from old New Iberia High. When I left the meeting, the stars were bright against a black sky, and a warm breeze was blowing through the live oaks in front of the old school building. It was a fine evening, the kind that assures you a better day is coming.

Sean McClain was leaning against my pickup in uniform, his head on his chest, the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes.

“What’s happenin’?” I said.