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  “Step over here, please,” I said.

  “Sure,” he replied, blowing out his breath, slipping his hands into his pockets.

  “Your inability to help us is causing us all kinds of problems, Roland. You tell us two black guys in ski masks murdered Amanda, but that’s as far as we get,” I said.

  “Sir?” he said.

  “You’ve got no idea who they were. You can’t tell us what their voices sounded like. You can’t even tell us how tall they were. I’ve got the feeling maybe you don’t want us to catch them,” I said.

  “Look at us, not at the ground,” Helen said.

  “Your hands were tied with nothing but your shirt. You could have gotten loose if you’d wanted to, couldn’t you? But you were too scared. Maybe you even begged. Maybe you told these guys their identity was safe. When people fear for their lives, they do all kinds of things they’re ashamed of later, Roland. But it was pretty hard to just lie there and listen to them rape your girl, wasn’t it?” I said.

  “Maybe it’s time to get it off your chest, kid,” Helen said.

  “Have you ever seen Tee Bobby Hulin play in a local club?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. I mean, I don’t remember.”

  He had dark hair and light skin, arms without muscular definition, narrow hips, and a feminine mouth. Involuntarily he felt for a religious medal through the cloth of his shirt.

  “Out at the crime scene you called them niggers. You don’t care for black people, Roland?” I said.

  “I was mad when I said that.”

  “I don’t blame you. Which guy shot her?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think they were gonna—”

  “They weren’t gonna what?” I said.

  “Nothing. You got me mixed up. That’s why you’re here. My daddy says I don’t have to talk to y’all anymore.”

  Then his face darkened, as though the politeness toward adults that was mandatory in his world had been replaced by other instincts.

  “They shove people around at school. They take the little kids’ lunch money. They carry guns in their cars. Why don’t you go after them ?” he said vaguely, sweeping his hand at the air.

  “Hear this, Roland,” Helen said. “If you know who these guys are and you’re lying to us, I’m going to find the shotgun that killed Amanda and jam it up your ass and pull the trigger myself. Tell that to your old man.”

  Two nights later the air was cool and dry, and the cypress trees in the swamp bloomed with heat lightning. Clete came into the bait shop as I was closing up. I smelled him before I saw him. He helped himself to a water glass off a wall shelf and sat down heavily at the counter and unscrewed the cap from a pint bottle of bourbon wrapped in a brown-paper sack. A noxious fog, an odor of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and beer sweat, begin to fill the shop like a living presence. Clete poured four fingers of whiskey in his glass and drank it slowly, watching me turn the electric fan on an overhead shelf in his direction. The lid of his left eye was swollen, a bruise like a small blue mouse in the crow’s-feet at the corner.

  “You got a reason for trying to blow me out the door?” he asked.

  “Nope. How you doin’, Cletus?”

  “Joe Zeroski is back in town. At my motor court with Zerelda Calucci and half the greaseballs in New Orleans. Last night I’m trying to take a nap and this collection of shitbags are cooking sausages on a hibachi ten feet from my window and playing a Tony Bennett tape loud enough to be heard in Palermo. So I make the mistake of talking to them like they’re human beings, asking them politely to dial it down a few notches so I can get some sleep.

  “What do I get? Nothing, like I’m not there. I go, ‘Look, just face your stereo the other way, okay?’ One guy says, ‘Hey, Purcel, I got your ten-inch frank right here. You want it with mustard?’ and grabs his flopper while the other greaseballs laugh.

  “So I go back inside, take a shower, put on fresh clothes, comb my hair, give these assholes every chance to go somewhere else. When I go outside, they’re still there, except now Zerelda Calucci is sitting at the picnic table with them, the tops of her ta-tas sticking out like beach balls, her shorts rolled up so tight they almost split when she crosses her legs.

  “So I walk over and ask her out for a late dinner, figuring that ought to put the lasagna through the fan if nothing else won’t. She sits there, scraping the label off a beer bottle with her thumbnail, rolling it into little balls, then goes, ‘I don’t mind.’

  “I try to use the wet dream of the Mafia to provoke these guys, and instead she agrees to have dinner with me. The greaseballs know better than to say dick about it, either. I put on my sports coat and back my convertible around to pick her up. Except here comes Perry LaSalle in his Gazelle. Zerelda gets this look on her face like she’s creaming in her pants and I’m back in my room, watching TV, dinner date canceled, LaSalle and Zerelda over in her room, blinds drawn.”

  He finished his glass of whiskey and opened a can of beer and broke a raw egg in the glass and poured the beer on top of it. He took a drink and stared out the window into the darkness, an unfocused light in his eyes.

  “So good riddance,” I said.

  “I did some checking on that dude. You know why he didn’t finish at the Jesuit seminary? He couldn’t keep it in his pants.”

  “What are you talking about, Clete?”

  “He belongs to Sexaholics Anonymous. The guy’s a gash hound. Why is it everybody in this town has some kind of problem? I don’t know why I keep coming over here.”

  I turned off the outside floodlamps, and the bayou went dark and the tops of the cypresses were green and ruffling in the moonlight.

  “Where’d you get the mouse?” I asked.

  “I got up at four in the morning and walked into a door,” he replied.

  At the office the next morning I glanced at the state news section of the Times Picayune and saw an Associated Press article describing the homicide of a waitress outside Franklin, Louisiana. Her name was Ruby Gravano, a member of that group of marginal miscreants I had known for years in New Orleans, what I called the walking wounded, whose criminal deeds became a kind of incremental suicide, as though they were doing penance for sins committed in a previous incarnation. The body had been found by a roadside, not far from the banks of Bayou Teche, the clothes torn off her back. The article described her injuries as massive, which usually meant the details could not be published in a family newspaper. I started out my door toward Helen’s office and almost collided into Clete Purcel. He was dressed in a tan suit and a powder-blue shirt with a rolled collar and a tie with a horse painted on it and shined cordovan loafers. His cheeks were shiny with aftershave lotion.

  “Have a cup of coffee with me. I’m a little wired right now,” he said.

  “Got a lot of work to do, Cletus,” I said.

  “Fill me in on this Shanahan broad.”

  “What?”

  “I asked her out to lunch. I told her I had some helpful information on an armed robber she’s prosecuting.”

  “Can’t you let one day go by without stirring something up?”

  He snuffed down in his nose and nodded to a uniformed deputy passing in the corridor. The deputy did not acknowledge him.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll catch you another time,” Clete said.

  “Come inside,” I said.

  I closed the office door behind us. Before he could speak, I said, “Remember Ruby Gravano?”

  “A hooker, used to live in a flophouse by Lee Circle?”

  “She was killed last night. Maybe beaten to death.”

  “I heard she was out of the life. You talk to her pimp?” he said.

  “Beeler something?”

  “Beeler Grissum. I think she married him,” Clete said.

  “Thanks, Cletus.”

  He opened the office door. “I’ll let you know how my lunch came out. This is a class broad, Dave.” He blew his breath on his palm and sniffed it. “Oh, man, I smell like puke. I got
to brush my teeth.”

  The sheriff’s wife, who was a mild and genteel woman, happened to be passing in the corridor. She shut and opened her eyes, as though she were riding in an airplane that had just hit an air pocket.

  Helen Soileau and I checked out a cruiser and drove the thirty miles down to Franklin, then stopped by the sheriff’s department and got directions to Ruby Gravano’s, which turned out to be a one-story, weathered, late-Victorian frame house, with ventilated window shutters and high windows and a wide gallery hung with flower baskets. An oak tree that must have been two hundred years old grew in the side yard, a broken rope swing dangling in the dust. Ruby’s husband, Beeler Grissum, who was from north Georgia or South Carolina, sat on the steps, cracking peanuts and flicking them to a turkey in the yard. Two or three years ago, in a Murphy scam gone bad, a john had delivered a martial-arts kick into Beeler’s face that had broken his neck. Today his body had the contours of a sack of potatoes, his chin held erect by a leather and steel neck brace, so that his head looked like a separate part of his anatomy positioned inside a cage. His hair was dyed platinum, like a professional wrestler’s, combed straight back on his scalp. He rotated his upper torso as we approached the steps, a vague recognition swimming into his face.

  “Sorry about your wife, Beeler,” I said.

  He removed a peanut from the sack in his hand, then offered the sack to us.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “The sheriff thinks maybe Ruby was thrown from a car.”

  “He wasn’t there. But if that’s what he says,” Beeler said.

  As I remembered him, he had been a carnival man before he was a pimp and had lived most of his life off the computer. His speech was flat, adenoidal, laconic, so lacking in joy or passion or remorse or emotion of any kind that the listener felt Beeler did not care enough about others or the world or even his own fate to lie.

  “Two women have been murdered recently in Iberia Parish. Maybe Ruby’s death is connected to them,” I said.

  He looked into space and seemed to think about my words. He scratched a place under his eye with one fingernail.

  “It ain’t her death brought you here then. It’s the cases you ain’t been able to solve?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said.

  “Don’t matter. It’s my fault,” he said.

  “I don’t follow you,” I said.

  “We had a fight. She took off in my truck. Sometimes she’d go to a colored blues joint, sometimes to the casino on the reservation. She kept all her tips in a fruit jar. She had a thing for poker machines.”

  “Was she involved with another man?” Helen asked.

  “She was out of the life. She been a one-man woman since. Most ex-whores are. Don’t be talking about her like that,” he replied.

  “Can you let us have a picture of your wife?” Helen asked.

  “I reckon.”

  He went into the house and returned with a photograph of Ruby and himself that was tucked with several others inside a gold-embossed Bible. He handed it to Helen. Ruby’s hair was full and black, but the gauntness of her face made her hair look like a wig on a mannequin.

  “Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain’t gonna catch him,” he said.

  “You want to explain that?” Helen said.

  “I just did,” Beeler replied.

  He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying goodbye.

  That night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house. A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road.

  “You looking for somebody?” I asked.

  “You,” he said. “The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor.”

  He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear.

  “Mistake to come around my house, Legion,” I said.

  “That’s what you t’ink,” he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull.

  I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather-sheathed darning sock.

  “I’m a police officer,” I heard myself say.

  “Don’t matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain’t gonna want to tell nobody about it,” he replied.

  He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist’s drill hollowing into marrow.

  He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand.

  I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wet newspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn’t have raised my arms to ward off the blow.

  He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me.

  “How you feel?” he asked.

  He waited in the silence for my reply.

  “I’ll ax you again,” he said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I whispered.

  He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his tongue inside. I could taste tobacco and decayed food and bile in his saliva and smell the road dust and body heat and dried sweat in his shirt.

  “Go tell them all what I done to you. How I whipped you like a dog and used you for my bitch. How it feel, boy? How it feel?” he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  The sunrise in the morning was pink and misty, like the colors and textures inside a morphine dream, and through the window at Iberia General I could see palm trees and oaks hung with moss along the Old Spanish Trail and a white crane lifting on extended wings off the surface of the bayou. The sheriff sat hunched in a chair at the foot of my bed, staring at the steam rising from his paper coffee cup, his face angry, conflicted with thought.

  Clete stood silently against one wall, rolling a matchstick from side to side in his mouth, his massive arms folded on his chest. Through the open door I saw Bootsie in the hall, talking to a physician in green scrubs.

  “The guy comes out of nowhere, beats the shit out of you with a sap, gives no explanation, and drives off?” the sheriff said.

  “That’s about it,” I said.

  “You didn’t get a license number?” he asked.

  “The lights were off on the dock. There was mud on the tag.”

  The sheriff started to look at Clete, then forced his eyes back on me, not wanting to recognize Clete as a legitimate presence in the room.

  “So I’m to conclude maybe one of our clientele got discharged from Angola and decided to square an old beef? Except the cop he clocked, one with thirty years’ experience, didn’t recognize him. That makes sense to you?” he said.

  “It happens,” I said.

&
nbsp; “No, it doesn’t,” he replied.

  I kept my eyes flat, my expression empty. My face felt out of round, my forehead as large as a muskmelon. When I moved any part of my body, the pain telegraphed all the way through my system and a wave of nausea rose into my mouth.

  “You mind if we have a minute alone?” the sheriff said to Clete.

  Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and flipped it into the wastebasket.

  “No, I don’t mind. You might check the walls for bugs, though. You can never tell in a place like this,” he said.

  The sheriff stared at Clete’s back as he went out the door, then turned back toward me. “What’s with that guy?” he asked.

  “Everybody wants respect, Sheriff. There’re times Clete doesn’t get it. He was a good cop. Why not give credit where it’s due?”

  The sheriff leaned forward in his chair.

  “I learned in the Corps a good officer takes care of his people first. Everything else is second. But you don’t allow that to happen, Dave. You think you operate in your own time zone and zip code. And every time you get in trouble, your friend out there seems to be belly-deep in it with you.”

  “Sorry to hear you feel that way.”

  The sheriff stood up from his chair and pulled at his coat sleeves until they were even on his wrists. “You know why the world’s run by clerks? It’s because our best people flame out across the sky and never leave anything behind but a good light show. Is that what you want to be, Dave? A light show? Damn, if you don’t piss me off.”

  After he was gone, Clete put ice in a water glass and inserted a straw in the ice and held the glass for me to drink.

  “What happened out there?” he asked.

  I told him of the systematic beating from head to foot, the contempt shown my person, the sense that I no longer possessed control over my life, that my confidence in myself, my ability to deal with the world, had always been the stuff of vanity.

  Then I told him about the kiss, a male tongue rife with nicotine pushed inside my mouth, over the teeth, into the throat, his saliva like an obscene burn on my chin.