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The two gamblers looked like a Mutt and Jeff team. One was big, lantern-jawed, stolid, with coarse skin and knuckles the size of quarters, whereas his friend was sawed-off, porcine, with a stomach that hung down like a curtain of wet cement, his voice loud, his Jersey accent like a sliver of glass in the ear.
“That’s the man who t’rew my shotgun in the water,” Sookie said, and pointed at me. “Honest to God, t’rew it in the water. Like a drunk person.”
I rested my magazine across my knee and stared back at the three of them.
“Word of caution about Sookie,” I said. “About ten years ago he had to be pried out of a car wreck with the jaws of life. Three surgeons at Iberia General worked on him all night and saved his life. When he got the bill, he refused to pay it. A lawyer called him up and tried to appeal to his conscience. Sookie told him, ‘I ain’t worth ten thousand dollars and I ain’t paying it.’ It was the only time anyone around here remembered Sookie telling the truth about anything.”
“You’re a police officer?” the shorter gambler said.
“Sookie told you that?” I said, and laughed, then raised my magazine and began reading it again.
But as I watched the three of them walk outside, all of them gazing with the innocuous interest of tourists at the trees and antebellum homes along the street, I knew that being clever with the emissaries of greed and profit was a poor form of Valium for the political reality of the state where I was born, namely, that absolutely everything around us was for sale.
I went up the stairs to Perry’s office.
“You trying to bring casinos into Iberia Parish?” I said.
“No, people here have voted it down,” Perry answered from behind his desk.
“Then why are those two characters in town?”
“If it’s any of your business, there are people in Lafayette who believe gaming revenues shouldn’t go only to the parishes on the Texas border,” he replied.
“Gaming? That’s a great word. You don’t have any bottom, Perry. I was out to Ladice Hulin’s place this morning. The same day Amanda Boudreau was murdered, you told Tee Bobby that Legion Guidry was his grandfather. He came home in a rage, put his sister in the car, then went to find Jimmy Dean Styles. But you knew all this from the jump. You’re going to let Tee Bobby take the needle rather than see your family’s dirty bedsheets hung on the wash line.”
He sat very still in the deep softness of his black leather chair. He wore a cream-colored suit and a sky-blue shirt, opened casually at the collar. His mouth was puckered, as though he had sucked the moisture out of it, the folds of flesh in his throat pronounced, his hands cupped slightly on his desk blotter, the heated intensity of his eyes focused no more than six inches in front of him.
When he spoke, his vocal cords were a phlegmy knot.
“For one reason or another, you seem to have a need to demean me whenever we meet,” he said. “Obviously I can’t discuss the case of a client with you, but since you’ve chosen to attack me personally on this gambling stuff, maybe I can offer you an explanation that will allow you to think better of me. Most of the hot-sauce companies use foreign imports now. We don’t. We’ve never laid off an employee or evicted a tenant. That’s our choice. But it’s an expensive one.”
He looked up at me, his hands folded now, his posture and demeanor suggestive of the cleric he had once studied to be.
“I don’t have it all figured out yet, Perry. But I think the story is a lot dirtier than you’re letting on,” I said.
He clicked the edges of a pad of Post-its across his thumb. Then he pitched the pad in the air and let it bounce on his desk. “You’d better go take care of your own and not worry so much about me,” he said.
“You want to take the corn bread out of your mouth?”
“Your friend, the Elephant Man, Purcel, is it? He pulled Legion Guidry off a counter stool in Franklin this morning and threw him through a glass window. A seventy-four-year-old man. You two make quite a pair, Dave,” he said.
I went back to the office and called the jail in St. Mary Parish and was told by a sheriff’s deputy that Clete Purcel was in custody for disturbing the peace and destroying private property and would appear in court that afternoon. “No assault charges?” I asked.
“The guy he tossed through a window didn’t want to press charges,” the deputy replied.
“Did the guy give an explanation?”
“He said it was a private argument. It wasn’t no big deal,” said the deputy.
No big deal. Right.
After work I drove to Clete’s apartment. From the parking lot I saw him up on his balcony, above the swimming pool, in a Hawaiian shirt and faded jeans that bagged in the seat, grilling a steak, a can of beer balanced on the railing.
“How’s it hangin’, noble mon?” he called, grinning through the smoke.
I didn’t reply. I went up the stairs two at a time and through his front door and across his living room toward the sliding glass doors that gave onto the balcony. He drank from his beer, his green eyes looking at me over the top of the can.
“There’s a problem?” he said.
