The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

I went back outside. Most of the children who lived in the trailer park had left on the school bus. No adults came out of their trailers. A few looked through the windows. Cormac Watts, the coroner, was standing by his car, his foot on the bumper. He watched me walk toward him, his face empty.

“Glad to see you back,” he said.

“This is going to be a funny question.”

“You want to know if she was unconscious when the perpetrator tore her up?” he said.

I waited.

“Massive internal bleeding,” he said. “I think he probably stomped and kicked her after she went down.”

“How do you figure this guy?”

“I can’t.”

“We’ve got another player involved,” I said. “I think you should know.”

“Who?”

“Smiley. I saw him. I talked with him.”

His eyes hazed over. “I’ll have something on your desk by tonight. Have a good one, Dave.”

He got into his car and drove away.

• • •

SMILEY HAD BEEN raised in an orphanage in Mexico City. By all accounts, including his, he had been severely abused, both in the orphanage and on the streets of the city, where he was passed from hand to hand in alleys that specialized in child prostitution. Probably in his late teens, he found his way to southern Florida and discovered that he possessed an enormous talent—namely, an ability to float like a piece of ectoplasm among the criminal culture and be disregarded or dismissed up to the moment someone got it in the ear with a .22 auto or an ice pick in the brain.

His activities seemed to be a labor of love. His hits were contracted and paid for at drop boxes, his weapons provided by UPS. He bought children ice cream wherever he went, and on one occasion he hijacked a truckload of it and passed it out to black children in a park down by Bayou Lafourche while a bound and gagged man he planned to dispose of later struggled impotently inside the refrigerator.

He also tried to kill a local politician whose antecedents were Huey Long and George Wallace. Secretly, I always thought Smiley had his moments.

But Smiley was also responsible for the death of a female detective who paid her dues in Afghanistan. For a short time she was the lover of Clete Purcel. I really didn’t want to tell him about Smiley’s visit. Nor did I wish to contemplate the results if Clete got his hands on him. But at five that afternoon I drove to Clete’s motor court on East Main. He was sitting in a deck chair down by the bayou, a quart of stoppered beer in a bucket by his side. He was reading a novel by Michael Connelly.

“How you doing, Cletus?” I said.

He looked at me over his reading glasses. “Whenever I hear that tone of voice, I know I’d rather be somewhere else.”

“I’m back on the job. I also had a visit from Smiley.”

“Tell me you’ve been drinking.”

“He’s back and ready to rock.”

“Why is he back?”

“He says he wants to be our friend.”

Clete stood up slowly and set his book on the chair. He removed his glasses and put them away. The warmth of the sunlight on the side of his face contradicted the coldness in his eyes. He stared at the cattails bending in the breeze, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin. “Where do you think I might find him?”

“No idea.”

He put a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. The worst part of my visit had not begun. Obviously, he had been out of town during the day or he had not listened to the news or seen a local newspaper.

“Hilary Bienville is dead, Clete.”

He turned around and removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Say again?”