The next afternoon the PI tailed Carolyn to the motel outside St. Martinville. He called Clete and asked him what he wanted to do.
“You’re doing a good job. Stay on it,” Clete said.
“I think she’s made me. If you ask me, she’s had a lot of experience at this.”
“I’ll relieve you. Fax me your notes and hours, okay?”
“You got it. When you find out who the guy is, let me know.”
“What for?” Clete asked.
“Maybe I can get on as his bodyguard. You ever hear the story about the football coach over in Texas that made a pass at her?”
“No.”
“They took it outside and fought in the street. Blanchet blinded him. It cost him millions.”
Clete looked through the binoculars again. Carolyn was reclining in a beach chair, a towel spread from her thighs to her breasts, her eyes closed. She seemed to doze off, then turned on her side, her hands pressed together and inserted under her cheek as though she were at prayer. Her mouth was soft-looking, her eyelashes long, the tops of her breasts white below her tan line.
But where was the lover? Clete resolved that this would be the last time he would do scut work for jealous cuckolds or wives who wanted their husbands photographed in flagrante delicto. Why anyone romanticized the life of a PI was beyond him. Jobs like this one made him feel he was one cut above a voyeur. Second, the information he was paid to deliver ruined lives. Maybe the involved parties brought it on themselves, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was he who loaded the gun.
He also felt his work made him a hypocrite. His own marriage had been a nightmare of pills and booze and weed and infidelity. He tried to blame his problems on his wife, who had fallen under the influence of an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Colorado. Then he tried to blame his problems on the fact that he worked Vice and lived in an amoral netherworld that was not of his making. He blamed the basket of snakes he brought back from Vietnam and even blamed the mamasan he accidentally killed in a hooch in the Central Highlands and whose forgiveness he still sought in his sleep. He blamed the corrupt cops who pressured a young patrolman into going along with them when they planted a throwdown on an unarmed black man they had shot and killed. He blamed the bookies and Shylocks he owed, the tab he didn’t have to pay at a couple of skin joints owned by the Giacanos, the script doctor who gave him unlimited amounts of downers, the watch supervisor who told him he either went on a pad for the greaseballs or he got assigned a beat at the Desire. And more than any of these, he blamed the easy female access that yawned open on Bourbon Street when his wife locked the bedroom door and said she could no longer live with a man who slept with a .357 Magnum and threatened to use it on himself because he believed the downdraft of helicopter gunships was shaking the plaster out of their apartment walls.
The light was tea-colored on the sugarcane fields and the oak trees along the Teche. A truck had parked next to the lounge, obscuring Clete’s view of the swimming pool and the reclining figure of Carolyn Blanchet. He started up his Caddy and drove on the berm the hundred yards down the road to the lounge and parked by the side of the building so he could see both the entrance to the motel and the row of rooms that gave onto the pool.
He hadn’t eaten since lunch, nor had he brought along his cooler that he usually kept stocked with po’boy sandwiches, Gatorade, a Ziploc bag of hard-boiled eggs, a jar of fresh orange juice, a pint of vodka, and a mixed dozen of longnecks and sixteen-ounce cans of Bud. This Layton Blanchet gig was a nuisance growing into a migraine that he didn’t need. What was even worse, he told himself, he had taken the job out of pride rather than financial need because he didn’t want to feel he couldn’t handle a self-inflated manipulator like Blanchet. It was like mashing down the sole of your shoe on bubble gum to prove you weren’t afraid of it.
What a fool he had been. Not only with Blanchet but with almost everything he touched. He’d lost it with Herman Stanga and had set himself up for a civil suit and criminal prosecution. Now he was running on dumb luck, a liver that he tried to revitalize with handfuls of vitamin B, and what he called the hypertension buzz, which produced a sound in his head like a fallen power line lying in a pool of water.
He was over the hill and lived alone and had no pension plan except a small SEP-IRA. The last woman he had loved and slept with had been an Amerasian FBI agent he had met in Montana. She had come to New Orleans with him, but as always happened with a younger woman, the discrepancy between youth and age finally had its way, and in this instance, the languid, subtropical heat and pagan excesses of southern Louisiana were no match for the techno-predictability of southern California, where she had grown up.
A woman in her mid-thirties came out the back door of the lounge and began walking toward the motel. She had gold hair that was cut short and wore jeans and suede half-topped boots and a canary-yellow cowboy shirt with purple roses sewn on it. She was looking straight ahead; then she saw the Caddy and Clete behind the wheel and smiled hesitantly, as though uncertain whether to approach the car or to continue on toward the motel. Finally, she walked to the driver’s window and propped her hand on the roof. “Remember me?” she asked.
“It’s Emma, right?” he said.
“Yeah, Emma Poche. I’m the deputy who called Dave Robicheaux the night you got brought in for that deal involving Herman Stanga at the Gate Mouth club. Looks like you got your car fixed.”
“Yeah, look, Emma—”
“You on the job?”
“Something like that.”
“My uncle is visiting from California. I’m supposed to meet him at the lounge, but he must have got lost. A guy has the phone tied up inside. I was gonna use the phone in the motel. Can I borrow your cell?”
He handed it to her. She went around the corner of the building and then came back to the Caddy, this time leaning down inside the passenger’s window. She dropped his cell phone on the seat. “Thanks. You get loose, come have a drink. My uncle is a no-show. What a drag, huh?”
Clete sat for another forty-five minutes in the Caddy. The sunset turned into long strips of maroon clouds, backdropped by a moment of robin’s-egg blueness on the earth’s rim, then the light drained from the sky and he could hear frogs croaking in a field down by the bayou and the first mosquitoes of the evening droning inside his vehicle.
He started the engine and rolled up all his windows and turned on his air conditioner full blast. Carolyn Blanchet got up from the recliner and went back inside her room. No one joined her. Twenty minutes later, she reemerged fully dressed, a fabric tote bag hanging from her shoulder. She opened a compact and studied her reflection in the mirror. She closed the compact and dropped it back in her bag. Then she got in her Lexus and drove away, the taillights disappearing in the gloom.
Clete picked up his cell phone off the seat and speed-dialed the private number Layton Blanchet had given him. He hoped he would get Blanchet’s voice mail so he would not have to talk personally with the man again. No such luck.
“What do you want?” Blanchet said.
“Maybe I should call another time. Or just send you a fax. I can do that,” Clete said.
“Sorry to sound short. I’m a little jammed up these days. You got something for me?”
“No, I’ve found nothing that could be considered significant. There’s no charge for my time. I’ll send you a bill for expenses and for the hours another guy put in. So this call in effect terminates my situation with you.”
“Hold on there. What do you mean you’re terminating the situation? What do you mean when you say you didn’t find anything ‘significant’?”
“Nothing we’ve uncovered puts your wife with another man. You know what I suggest sometimes in situations like this? I tell the husband to take his wife out to dinner. Buy her flowers. Put some music on the stereo and dance with her on the patio. Pay more attention to her and forget all this other bullshit. It’s not worth it, Mr. Blanchet. Not financially, not emotionally. If our marriages ar
e flushed, they’re flushed. If they’re salvageable, we salvage them.”
“You said you were sending me a bill for another guy’s hours. You shared this information with other people?”
“Yeah, I pieced off the job. That’s how it works. I’m one guy, not the CIA.”
“Then I want the names of everybody involved.”
“We’re done on this.”
“Oh, no, we’re not.”
“My sympathies to your wife,” Clete said, and clicked off his cell phone. He rubbed the ennui and fatigue out of his face and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. The air-conditioning was cold on his skin, the air freshener that the repair people had hung from his mirror smelling of lilacs, of spring, of youth itself. He remembered the excitement and romance of being twenty-three and returning home in Marine Corps tropicals, a recipient of the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts, riding the Ferris wheel high above Pontchartrain Beach, the rifles in a shooting gallery popping far below him, the waves of the lake capping on the sand, a young woman clinging tightly to his arm.
But youth was a decaying memory, and no matter what a song lyricist might say, you couldn’t put time in a bottle.
He went inside the lounge. Emma Poche was sitting by herself at a table in the corner, her canary-yellow western shirt lit by the glow of the jukebox. She had put on fresh lipstick, and her eyes were warm with an alcoholic sheen. “Sit down, handsome, and tell me about your life,” she said.
He pulled out a chair and signaled the waitress. Emma was drinking out of a tall Collins glass, one packed with crushed ice and cherries and an orange slice. “I thought you knew Dave through the program,” he said.
“Not really. Our ties go back to NOPD.”
“You’re not in the program?”
“I’ve tried it on and off. I got tired of listening to the same stories over and over. Were you ever in A.A.?”
“Not me.”
“Yeah, stop drinking today and gone tomorrow. Why not party a little bit while you have the opportunity?”
“That’s the way you feel about it?”
“I’m gonna die no matter how I feel about any of it, so I say ‘bombs away.’ If you ask me, sobriety sucks.”
He tried to reason through what she had just said, but the jukebox was playing and the long day had landed on him like an anvil. The waitress came to the table and Emma ordered a vodka Collins and Clete a schooner of draft and a shot of Jack. He poured the whiskey into his beer and watched it rise in a mysterious cloud and flatten inside the foam. He tilted the schooner to his mouth and drank until it was almost half empty. He let out his breath, his eyes coming back into focus, like those of a man who had just gotten off a roller coaster. “Wow,” he said.
“You don’t fool around,” she said.
“I spent most of the day firing in the well, then having a conversation with a world-class asshole. Plus I have complications with a dude by the name of Robert Weingart. Know anything about him?”
“I read his book. Weingart is the asshole?”
“Weingart is an asshole, all right, but I was talking about a client. Have you heard anything in St. Martin Parish about girls getting doped with roofies before they’re raped?”
“I’ve heard about it in Lafayette but not around here. Weingart is doing that?”
“I’m not sure.” Clete finished his boilermaker and ordered a refill. When it came, he sipped the whiskey from the shot glass and chased it with the beer.
“Your stomach lining must look like Swiss cheese,” she said.
“My stomach is fine. My liver is the size of a football.”
“Maybe you ought to ease up.”
He could feel the alcohol taking hold in his system, restoring coherence to his thoughts, driving the gargoyles back to an unlighted place in his mind, releasing the cord of tension that often bound his chest and pressed the air out of his lungs. “I appreciated you calling Dave when I was in that holding cell. Some of those guys in St. Martin Parish carry resentments. That was a stand-up thing to do.”
“You had the same kind of trouble at NOPD as me and Dave. The unholy trinity, huh?” she said, watching him lift the shot glass to his mouth again.
“I brought most of my trouble on myself.”
“Save it for Oprah. I worked with those shitheads. What was the deal outside there?”
“What deal?”
“In your Cadillac. You were on a stakeout?”
“I wouldn’t give it that kind of depth. Anyway, I pulled the plug on it.”
“You like being a PI?”
“I don’t think about it a lot.”
“That’s a good way to be. My job is okay, but I miss life in the Big Sleazy.” She put her hand on his wrist when he started to lift his schooner again. “Better eat something.”
“Yeah, maybe.” His eyes moved sleepily over her face. She pretended to be looking at the bar, but he knew she was aware he was staring at her with more than curiosity. His gaze drifted to her ring finger. “You ever been married?”
“I woke up once with a rock-and-roll drummer who said we’d gotten hitched in Juárez, but I never saw a certificate. The guy got hit by a train, anyway. I was seventeen. I always call that part of my life the downside of that old-time rock and roll.”
She looked back at the bar, straightening her shoulders slightly, her breasts stiffening against her shirt. Clete studied the clearness of her complexion and her pug nose and the pools of color in her cheeks and the redness of her mouth and the cuteness of her profile. She removed a strand of hair from her eyebrow and looked him in the face. “Something wrong?” she said.
“Did you have dinner yet?”
“No, I was supposed to eat with my uncle.”
“Let’s have another round and I’ll buy you supper at Possum’s.”
“Dutch treat,” she said.
“No, it’s going on my expense tab, and I’m sending it to the world-class asshole.”
“Who is he?”
He upended his shot glass and winked at her. When she sipped from her vodka Collins, her mouth looked cold and hard and lovely. She fished a cherry out of the ice and held it by the stem and placed it behind her teeth. When she bit into it, the juice ran over her lip. She caught it on one knuckle, smiling. She wiped her hand on a paper napkin. “I’m a mess,” she said.
“You look good to me.”
“Ready to rock, big guy?” she said. She bit down on the corner of her lip, her eyes fixed on his.
CHAPTER
9
I WOKE BEFORE SUNUP the following day and fed Tripod and Snuggs on the back steps, then fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and sat down on the steps and ate breakfast with them. The dawn was a grayish-blue, the fog so thick on the bayou that I couldn’t see the oaks on the far bank, the house and yard quiet except for the ticking of moisture out of the trees. It was one of those moments in the twenty-four-hour cycle of the day when you know that the past is still with you, if you’ll only take the time to listen to the voices inside the mist or watch the shapes that are sometimes printed on a patch of green-black shade between the live oaks.
I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream inside the mind of God. Perhaps it’s only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent? Buried in the mudflat down Bayou Teche from me were the remains of a Confederate gunboat. I knew this to be a fact because in the year 1942 my father pulled a huge rusted spike from one of its beams and gave it to me, along with sixteen balls of grapeshot he found inside the cavity of a rotted oak not thirty yards away. On the street in front of my present home, twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched down the Old Spanish Trail in pursuit of General Alfred Mouton and his boys in butternut, their haversacks stuffed with loot, their wounds from a dozen firefights still green, their lust for reven
ge unsated. As I sat on the steps with Snuggs and Tripod, I wondered if those soldiers of long ago were still out there, beckoning to us, daring us to witness their mortality, daring us to acknowledge that it would soon be ours.
I have had visions of them that I do not try to explain to others. Sometimes I thought I heard cries and shouts and the sounds of musket fire in the mist, because the Union soldiers who marched through Acadiana were turned loose upon the civilian populace as a lesson in terror. The rape of Negro women became commonplace. Northerners have never understood the nature of the crimes that were committed in their names, no more than neocolonials can understand the enmity their government creates in theirs. The pastoral solemnity of a Civil War graveyard doesn’t come close to suggesting the reality of war or the crucible of pain in which a soldier lives and dies.
But in spite of the bloody ground on which our town was built, and out of which oak trees and bamboo and banks of flowers along the bayou grew, it remained for me a magical place in the predawn hours, touched only cosmetically by the Industrial Age, the drawbridge clanking erect in the fog, its great cogged wheels bleeding rust, a two-story quarter boat that resembled a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler being pushed down to the Gulf, the fog billowing whitely around it, the air sprinkled with the smell of Confederate jasmine.
I heard the screen door open behind me. I turned and looked up into Alafair’s face. She was still wearing her nightgown, but she had washed her face and combed her hair. I had not spoken to her since my confrontation the previous day with Kermit Abelard on the lawn of his house. “Got a minute?” she said.