”The muff-diver? That's the one who had her animals killed?“
”Give her a break, Clete.“
”Excuse me. I mean the lady who thinks I'm spit on the sidewalk.
What's in the bag?“
”Don't worry about it.“
”I guess I asked for this.“ He spit his gum out with a thropping sound.
We went through the door. It was a cheerless place where you could stay on the downside of a drunk without making comparisons. The interior was dark, the floor covered with linoleum, the green walls lined with pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. People whose race would be hard to define were at the bar, in the booths, and at the pool table. They all looked expectantly at the glare of light from the opening front door, as though an interesting moment might be imminent in their lives.
”Man, that Sweet Pea can pick 'em, can't he? I wonder if they charge extra for the roaches in the mashed potatoes,“ Clete said.
In the light from the kitchen we could see Sweet Pea and another man sitting at a large table with four women. The other man was explaining something, his forearms propped on the edge of the table, his fingers moving in the air. The women looked bored, hungover, wrapped in their own skin.
”Do you make the dude with him?“ Clete said close to my ear.
”No.“
”That's Patsy Dapolito, they call him Patsy Dap, Patsy Bones, Patsy the Baker. He's a button guy for Johnny Carp.“
The man named Patsy Dapolito wore a tie and a starched collar buttoned tightly around his neck. His face was pinched-looking, the nose thin, sharp-edged, the mouth down-turned, the teeth showing as though he were breathing through them.
”Stay out of overdrive, Dave. Dapolito's a head case Clete said quietly.
“They all are.”
“He baked another hood's bones in a wedding cake and sent it to a Teamster birthday party.”
Sweet Pea sat at the head of the table, a bib tied around his neck. The table was covered with trays of boiled crawfish and beaded pitchers of draft beer. Sweet Pea snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, then peeled the shell off the tail. He dipped the meat into a red sauce, put it in his mouth, and never looked up.
“Y'all get yourself some plates, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He wore cream-colored slacks and a bolo tie and a gray silk shirt that rippled with a metallic sheen. His mouth glistened as though it were painted with lip gloss.
I took the dead coon out of the bag by its hind feet. The body was leathery and stiff, the fur wet from the ice in the cooler. I swung it across the table right into Sweet Pea's tray. Crawfish shells and juice, beer, and coleslaw exploded all over his shirt and slacks.
He stared down at his clothes, the twisted body of the coon in the middle of his tray, then at me. But Sweet Pea Chaisson didn't rattle easily. He wiped his cheek with the back of his wrist and started to speak.
“Shut up, Sweet Pea,” Clete said.
Sweet Pea smiled, his webbed eyes squeezing shut.
“What I done to deserve this?” he said. “You ruin my dinner, you trow dead animals at me, now I ain't even suppose to talk?”
I could hear the air-conditioning units humming in the windows, a solitary pool ball rolling across the linoleum floor.
“Your buddies tried to hurt a friend of mine, Sweet Pea,” I said.
He wrapped a napkin around the coon's tail, then held the coon out at arm's length and dropped it.
“You don't want nothing to eat?” he asked.
“Fuck it,” Clete said beside me, his voice low.
Then I saw the expression on the face of the man called Patsy Dap. It was a grin, as though he both appreciated and was bemused by the moment that was being created for all of us. I felt Clete's shoe nudge against mine, his fingers pull lightly on my arm.
But it was moving too fast now. “What d' we got here, the crazy person hour, flicking clowns abusing people at Sunday dinner?” Dapolito said.
“Nobody's got a beef with you, Patsy,” Clete said. “What d' you call this, creating a fucking scene, slopping food on people, who the fuck is this guy?”
“We got no problem with you, Patsy. Accept my word on that,” Clete said. “Why's he looking at me like that?” Dapolito said.
“Hey, I don't like that. Why you pinning me, man? .. . Hey .. .” My gaze drifted back to Sweet Pea. “Tell those two guys, you know who I'm talking about, not to bother my friend again. That's all I wanted to say,” I said. “Hey, I said why you fucking pinning me. You answer my ques-tidn,” Dapolito said Then his hand shot up from under the table and bit like a vise into my scrotum. I vaguely recall the screams of the women at the table and Clete locking his big arms around me and dragging me backward through a tangle of chairs. But I remember my palm curving around the handle of the pitcher, the heavy weight of it swinging in an arc, the glass exploding in strings of wet light; I remember it like red shards of memory that can rise from a drunken dream. Then Dapolito was on his knees, his face gathered in his hands, his scarlet fingers trembling as though he were weeping or hiding a shameful secret in the stunned silence of the room.
Chapter 11
YOU DO it, mon?“ Clete said outside. We were standing between my truck and Sweet Pea's Cadillac convertible. ”He dealt it.“ I wiped the sweat off my face on my sleeve and tried to breathe evenly. My heart was beating against my rib cage. So far we had heard no sirens. Some of the restaurant's customers had come out the front door but none of them wanted to enter the parking lot. ”Okay.. . this is the way I see it,“ Clete said. ”You had provocation, so you'll probably skate with the locals. Patsy Dap's another matter. We'll have to do a sit-down with Johnny Carp.“
”Forget it.“
”You just left monkey shit all over the ceiling. We're doing this one my way, Streak.“
”It's not going to happen, Clete.“
”Trust me, big mon,“ he said, lighting a cigarette. ”What's keeping the locals?“
”It probably got called in as barroom bullshit in the black district,“ I said. There was a whirring sound in my ears like wind blowing in seashells. I couldn't stop sweating. Clete propped his arm against the cloth top of Sweet Pea's car and glanced down into the backseat. ”Dave, look at this,“ he said.
”What?“
”On the floor. Under those newspapers. There's something on the carpet.“ The exposed areas of the carpet, where people's feet had crumpled and bunched the newspaper, looked brushed and vacuumed, but there were stains like melted chocolate in the gray fabric that someone had not been able to remove. ”We took it this far. You got a slim-jim in your tool box?“ Clete said. ”No.“
”So he needs a new top anyway,“
he said, and snapped open a switchblade knife, plunged it into the cloth, and sawed a slit down the edge of the back window. He worked his arm deep inside the hole and popped open the door. ”Feel it,“ he said a moment later, stepping aside so I could place my hand on the back floor. The stain had become sticky in the enclosed heat of the automobile. Hovering like a fog just above the rug was a thick, sweet smell that reminded me in a vague way of an odor in a battalion aid station. ”Somebody did some major bleeding back there,“ Clete said.
”Lock it up again.“
”Wait a minute.“ He picked up a crumpled piece of paper that was stuck down in the crack of the leather seat and read the carbon writing on it. ”It looks like Sweet Pea's got lead in his foot as well as his twanger. Ninety in a forty-five.“
”Let's see it,“ I said. He handed it to me. Then he looked at my face again. ”It means something?“ he said. ”He got the ticket yesterday on a dirt road out by Cade. Why's he hanging around Cade?“ In the distance I could hear a siren on an emergency vehicle, as though it were trying to find a hole through traffic at an intersection.
”Wait here. Everything's going to be copacetic,“ Clete said. ”Don't go back in there.“ He walked fast across the lot, entered the side door of the restaurant, then came back out
with his hand in one pocket.
”Why is it these dumb bastards always use the John to score? The owner's even got sandpaper glued on top of the toilet tank to keep the rag-noses from chopping up lines on it,“ he Said. He stood between my truck and the Cadillac and began working open a small rectangular cellophane-sealed container with two silhouetted lovers on it. ”You're one in a million, Cletus,“ I said. He unrolled a condom, then removed a piece of broken talc from his pocket, crushed it into fragments and powder, poured it with his palm into the condom, and tied a knot in the latex at the top. ”There's nothing like keeping everybody's eye on the shit bags By the way, they wrapped one of those roller towels from the towel machine around Patsy's head. Think of a dirty Q-Tip sitting in a chair,“ he said. He dropped the condom on the floor of the Cadillac with two empty crack vials and locked the door, just before an Acadian ambulance, followed by a Lafayette city police car, turned into the parking lot. ”Party time,“ he said. He crinkled his eyes at me and brushed his palms softly. The sheriff had never been a police officer before his election to office, but he was a good administrator and his general decency and sense of fairness had gotten him through most of his early problems in handling both criminals and his own personnel. He had been a combat marine, an enlisted man, during the Korean War, which he would not discuss under any circumstances, and I always suspected his military experience was related to his sincere desire not to abuse the authority of his position. When I sat down in his office the sun was yellow and bright outside the window, and an array of potted plants on his windowsill stood out in dark silhouette against the light. His cheeks were red and grained and woven with tiny blue veins, and he had the small round chin of the French with a cleft in it.
He reread my report with his elbows on the desk blotter and his knuckles propped against his brow.
”I don't need this on Monday morning,“ he said.
”It got out of hand.“
”Out of hand? Let me make an observation, my friend. Clete Purcel has no business here. He causes trouble everywhere he goes.“
”He tried to stop it, Sheriff. Besides, he knows Sonny Marsallus better than anyone in New Orleans.“
”That's not an acceptable trade-off. What's this stuff about a dead coon?“
I cleared a tic out of my throat. ”That's not in my report,“ I said.
”Last night I got a call at home from the Lafayette chief of police.
Let's see, how did he put it? “Would you tell your traveling clown to keep his circus act in his own parish?” You want to hear the rest of it?“
”Not really.“ Because I knew my straying into another jurisdiction, or even the beer pitcher smashed into Patsy Dapolito's face, was not what was on the sheriff's mind.
”What have you held back from me?“ he said.
I looked at him blankly and didn't answer.
”You're not the only one who chooses what to file a report on and what not to, are you?“ he asked.
”Excuse me?“
”Saturday I ran into a friend of mine with the humane society. He's a friend of Helen Soileau's. He mentioned a certain event he thought I already knew about.“
The sheriff waited.
”I don't believe in using the truth to injure good people,“ I said.
”What gives you the right to make that kind of decision?“
My palms felt damp on the arms of the chair. I could feel a balloon of heat rising from my stomach into my throat.
”I never enjoyed the role of pin cushion,“ I said.
”You're being treated unfairly?“
I wiped my palms on my thighs and folded them in my lap. I looked out the window at the fronds on a palm tree lifting in the breeze.
”Somebody killed all her animals. You knew about it but you didn't report it and you went after Sweet Pea Chaisson on your own,“ he said.
”Yes, sir, that's correct.“
”Why?“
”Because some shitheads set her up for blackmail purposes.“
He brushed at the corner of his eye with his fingertip.
”I have a feeling they didn't catch her in the sack with a boyfriend,“
he said.
”The subject's closed for me, Sheriff.“
”Closed? Interesting. No, amazing.“ He swiveled his chair sideways, rocked back in it, pushing against his paunch with his stiffened fingers. ”Maybe you ought to have a little more faith in the people you work for.“
”She sent some inquiries through the federal computer. Somebody doesn't want her to pursue it,“ I said.
His eyes rested on the flowered teapot he used to water his plants, then they seemed to refocus on another concern. ”I've got the FBI bugging me about Sonny Marsallus. What's their interest in a Canal Street gum ball
“I don't know.”
“They know a lot about him and I don't think it's off a rap sheet.
Maybe he got loose from the witness protection program.”
“Sonny's not a snitch,” I said.
“Great character reference, Dave. I bet he took his grandmother to Mass, too.”
I rose from the chair. “Are you going to tell Helen about our conversation?”
“I don't know. Probably not. Just don't try to take me over the hurdles again. Were you ever mixed up in army intelligence?”
“No, why?”
“This whole thing stinks of the federal government. Can you tell me why they have to track their shit into a town that's so small it used to be between two Burma-Shave signs?”
I sat back down. “I want to get a warrant to search Sweet Pea Chaisson's car.”
“What for?”
“There's dried blood on the back floor.”
“How do you know?”
“Clete and I were inside it … Clete salted the shaft but the Lafayette cops didn't find what they were supposed to.”
“I don't believe what you're telling me.”
“You said you wanted it straight.”
“This is the last time we're going to have this kind of conversation, sir.”
I picked up my mail and walked down to my office. Five minutes later the sheriff opened my door just far enough to lean his head in.
“You didn't skate after all,” he said. “Sweet Pea's lawyer, what's his name, that grease bag from Lafayette, Jason Darbonne, just filed a harassment complaint against you and the department. Another thing, too, Dave, just so we're clear on everything, I want this shit cleaned up and it'd better be damn soon.”
I couldn't blame him for his anger. The case drawers in our building were filled with enough grief, mayhem, perversity, and institutional failure to match the quality of life in the worst Third World nations on earth. Like case histories at a welfare agency, a police file, once opened, never seemed to close. Instead, it grew gene rationally the same family names appearing again and again, the charges and investigations marking the passage of one individual from birth to adolescence to adulthood to death, crime scene photo upon mug shot, yellowing page upon yellowing page, like layers of sedimentary accretion formed by sewage as it flows through a pipe.
Children aborted with coat hangers, born addicted to crack, scalded under hot faucets; teenage mothers with pipe cleaner legs living between detox, the welfare agency, and hooking on the street; high school kids who can let off a .44 Magnum point-blank into their classmates at a dance and seriously maintain they acted in self-defense because they heard firecrackers popping in the parking lot; armed robbers who upgrade their agenda to kicking ballpoint pens into the eardrums of their victims before they execute them in the back of a fast-food restaurant; and the strangest and most baffling phenomenon of all, the recidivist pedophiles who are repeatedly paroled until they not only sodomize but murder a small child.
At one time local AA meetings were made up largely of aging drunks like myself. Now kids who should be in middle school are brought to the meetings in vans from halfway houses. They're usually white, wear burr haircuts, floppy tennis shoes, an
d oversize baseball caps sideways on their heads and look like refugees from an Our Gang comedy, except, when it's their turn to talk, they speak in coon ass blue-collar accents about jone sing for crack and getting UA-ed by probation officers. You have the feeling their odyssey is just beginning.
Our best efforts with any of it seem to do no good. In dark moments I sometimes believed we should simply export the whole criminal population to uninhabited areas of the earth and start over again.
But any honest cop will tell you that no form of vice exists without societal sanction of some kind. Also, the big players would still be with us-the mob and the gambling interests who feed on economic recession and greed in politicians and local businessmen, the oil industry, which fouls the oyster beds and trenches saltwater channels into a freshwater marsh, the chemical and waste management companies that treat Louisiana as an enormous outdoor toilet and transform lakes and even the aquifer into toxic soup.
They all came here by consent, using the word jobs as though it were part of a votive vocabulary. But the deception wasn't even necessary.
There was always somebody for sale, waiting to take it on his knees, right down the throat and into the viscera, as long as the money was right.
The speeding ticket Clete had found in Sweet Pea's car had been written on the dirt road that led from the highway back to the juke joint operated by Luke and Ruthie Jean Fontenot. Before I left the office, I pulled the ten-year package we had on Luke. He had been extricated from the death house while a convict barber was in the act of lathering and shaving his head, the state's final preparation for the moment when Luke would sit in an oak chair while men he didn't know screwed a metal cap down on his sweating pate and strapped his arms and shinbones so tightly into the wood that his own rigid configuration would seem part of the chair itself. The call had come from the governor's office after Moleen Bertrand had hand-delivered depositions from two witnesses who swore the victim, a white sharecropper, had brought a pistol out from under the bouree table. According to the witnesses, a wet-brain in the crowd had stolen the gun before the sheriff's deputies arrived.
Luke received not only a stay but eventually a new trial, and finally a hung jury and a prosecutorial decision to cut him loose. His debt to Moleen was a large one. The morning was warm and humid and the breeze blew a fine dust out of the shell parking lot and powdered the leaves of the oak and hackberry trees that were clustered next to the juke joint. I drove through the empty lot and parked in the shady lee of the building. A trash fire was smoldering in a rusted oil barrel by one of the trailers. On the ground next to it, like a flattened snake with a broken back, was a long strip of crusted gauze. A black woman in purple shorts and an olive green V-neck sweater looked out the back screen and disappeared again. I kicked over the trash barrel, rolled it across the shells, and used a stick to pry apart a smoldering stack of newspaper and food-streaked paper plates, scorched boudin casings and pork rinds, until, at the bottom of the pile, I saw the glowing and blackened remains of bandages that dissolved into thread when I touched them with the stick. I went through the screen door and sat at the empty bar. Motes of dust spun in the glare of light through the windows.