A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“Y’all will knock on the door?”

“We have to do it by the numbers, Clete. We don’t have a warrant or probable cause.”

“Why at night?”

“Some of his men will be high. They’ll also feel safe.”

“At night they feel safe?” he said.

“They go back to the womb.”

“No matter what you say, this is about Penelope Balangie,” Clete said. “You think you still have a chance with her.”

“Wrong,” I said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

He walked toward the motel, his coat blowing, one hand clamped on his porkpie hat. I had treated him in a moralistic fashion and had indicated that his lack of a policeman’s badge made him secondary to a deeply flawed lawman like Carroll LeBlanc. But Clete was wired and determined to have justice for the psychological damage done to him in the Keys; he was also extremely dangerous when he took revenge on misogynists and child abusers. Plus, we didn’t know where Johnny and Isolde were, and bullets don’t care about the targets they find.

Chapter Thirty-five

BY MID-AFTERNOON CLETE was out of his funk and concentrated on our objective. He called the airboat pilot who had given him information about Shondell and asked him to meet us in a café ten miles up the road. I told Carroll to keep his eyes on Shondell’s stilt house. The airboat pilot was a Cajun from Houma who had lost a leg in the propeller of his father’s airboat when he was twelve. He had intense brown eyes and a narrow unshaved face that made me think of an unhusked coconut. His name was Dallas Landry. He said he had seen no sign of a young couple matching the description of Johnny and Isolde.

“How about the guys on the tug?” I said. “You talk to them at all?”

“They ain’t the kind of guys you talk to,” he said.

“How many guys are there?” Clete asked.

“Four or five. Lots of ink on both arms. They got women wit’ ’em, too.”

“Hookers?” Clete said.

“They ain’t from the convent.”

“You’ve been very helpful, Dallas,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

“Mr. Mark had a guy there a couple of times. A lawyer, maybe. They was laughing about Adonis Balangie. They said they was gonna take everyt’ing he’s got. I pretended I didn’t hear nothing. He’s got a five-hundred-foot yacht about two miles out in the Gulf. He’s got sailboats on it.”

There was another question I wanted to ask him. He wasn’t the kind of man we euphemistically call a “confidential informant,” many of whom are motivated by aggrandizement or fear or a desire to be accepted or to feel important. He was taking considerable risk, the least of which was loss of his job.

“Why’d you come forward, Dallas?” I said.

He stared at his coffee cup. “Mr. Mark bothers me.”

“In what way?” I said.

“I ain’t got a way of putting it. It’s the way he looks at them young girls. I ain’t seen him put a hand on them. But I seen the way he looks. Somet’ing else, too.” He knotted his fingers.

“Go on,” I said.

“He got somet’ing dark in him, Mr. Robicheaux.”

Just then Carroll LeBlanc came through the café entrance. “What’s going on with you guys?” he said.

“You’re supposed to be watching the stilt house,” Clete said.

“I didn’t know where y’all were,” Carroll said. He glanced at Dallas Landry. “Who are you?”

“I run an airboat service,” Dallas said.