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"What?"
"It's a terrible vice. It'll lead you to ruin."
"You bastard, you're not going to get away with this," he said.
I hung up the phone, knocked back the jigger of Jim Beam, and sipped from the glass of beer. The sun looked like a yellow balloon trapped under the lake's surface. The wind was warm, and sweat ran down my bare chest in the hot shade of the umbrella. My eyes burned with the humidity of the afternoon. I dialed Clete down at the First District.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"At home."
"There's a bunch of people asking about you. You sure spit in the soup, Dave."
"I'm not hard to find. Who's curious about me?"
"Who else? Feds. Did you really call up the CIA? Man, that's unbelievable."
"I have a lot of time on my hands. A guy has to do something for kicks."
"I don't know as I'd want to fire up these babies. A nasty bunch. They're not our crowd."
"You think I ought to get lost for a while?"
"Who knows? I just wouldn't pull on their tallywackers anymore."
"Actually, I called you for a point of information, Clete. In all the shootings you've investigated, how many times have you known the shooter to recover his brass?"
"I don't understand."
"Sure you do."
"I don't guess I ever gave it much thought."
"I've never seen it once," I said. "Except when a cop was the shooter."
"What's the point?"
"It's funny how that can be trained into a guy, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Imagine that."
"If I was the shooter, I'd rather leave the shell casing than my signature."
"Maybe some things aren't worth speculating about, Dave."
"Like I said, I'm idle now. It fills the time. I spent two hours this morning over at the St. Charles sheriff's department answering questions about Bobby Joe Starkweather. Did they contact you all yet?"
"We heard about it." His voice was becoming irritated.
"A truly big mess out there. Another hour or so and I don't think there would have been anything left of Bobby Joe except his belt buckle and his boot nails."
"He's better off as sausage links. A guy finds his proper level after a while. I got to split, partner."
"Do me a favor. How about punching on the computer and seeing if you can turn up a retired two-star general named Abshire?"
"Stay idle, Dave. Adjust. We'll get out of this bullshit eventually. You'll see. Adios."
The phone went dead in my hand, and I looked at the smoky green surface of the water in the summer haze and poured another jigger of Jim Beam. What did they have on him? I wondered. Whores? Juice from narcotics? It seemed sometimes that the best of us became most like the people whom we loathed. And whenever a good cop took a big fall, he could never look back and find that exact moment when he made a hard left turn down a oneway street. I remembered sitting in a courtroom when an ex-major-league baseball pitcher from New Orleans was sentenced to ten years in Angola for extortion and trafficking in cocaine. Seventeen years earlier he had won twenty-five games, had thrown fastballs that could destroy barn doors, and now he weighed three hundred pounds and walked as though a bowling ball were slung between his thighs. When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, he stared up at the judge, the rings of fat on his neck trembling, and replied, "Your Honor, I have no idea how I got from there to here."
