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“Yes, he did.”
He didn’t reply and I thought the line had gone dead.
“Perry?”
“I apologize for saying what I did about Purcel. Is Barbara all right? I can’t believe Legion did that. That rotten son of a bitch,” he said.
On Saturday morning I called Clete’s apartment, but there was no answer and his machine was turned off. I tried again Sunday morning, with the same result. That afternoon I hitched my outboard and trailer to the pickup and headed toward Bayou Benoit and stopped at Clete’s apartment on the way. He was lying in a recliner by the pool like a beached whale, his body glowing with lotion and sunburn, a bottle of vodka and a tall glass filled with crushed ice and cherries by his elbow. “Where have you been?” I asked.
“Me? Just messing around. You know how it is,” he said.
“You look very content. Relaxed. Free of tension.”
“Must be the weather,” he said, smiling behind his sunglasses.
“How’s Zerelda?”
“She said to tell you hello,” he said.
“I think you’re about to run over a land mine.”
“I had a feeling you might say that.” He slipped his sunglasses up on his head and gazed at my truck and boat in the parking lot. “We going fishing?”
A half hour later I cut the engine on the outboard and we floated into a quiet stretch of cypress-dotted water on Bayou Benoit, our wake sliding through the tree trunks into the shore. There were stormheads in the south, but the sky was brassy overhead, the wind hot and smelling of salt and dead vegetation inside the trees. I clipped a rubber worm on my line and made a long, looping cast into a cove that was rimmed with floating algae.
On the ride out to the landing Clete had tried to sustain his insouciant facade, refusing to be serious, his eyes crinkling whenever I showed concern about his reckless and self-destructive behavior. But now, in the dappled light of the trees, the thunder banging in the south, I could see shadows steal across his eyes when he thought I wasn’t looking.
“I’m right, you and Zerelda are an item again?” I said.
“Yeah, you could call it that.”
“But you don’t feel too good about it?”
“Everything’s copacetic there. That kid, Marvin Oates, was around yesterday, but Zerelda told him to take a hike.”
“What?” I said.
“She finally got tired of wet-nursing him. She spent a whole day looking for him in the Iberville Project, then he showed up at the motor court drunk. So yesterday she told him he should spend more time on his criminal justice studies or find some friends more his age.”
“You’ve got something on your mind, Cletus.”
“This character Legion Guidry,” he said. Unconsciously he wiped his palms on his pants when he said the name. “When I dragged him off that counter stool, I could smell an odor on him. It was awful. It was like shit and burnt matches. I had to wash it off my hands.”
I reeled in my artificial worm and cast it against a hollow cypress trunk and let it sink through the algae to the bottom of the cove. He waited for me to say something, but I didn’t.
“What, I sound like I’ve finally become a wetbrain?” he said.
I started to tell him about my experience breaking into Legion’s house, but instead I opened the ice chest and took out two fried-oyster po’-boy sandwiches and handed one to him.
“This is guaranteed to help you lose weight and make you younger at the same time,” I said.
“I smelled it, Dave. I swear. I wasn’t drunk or hungover. This guy really bothers me,” he said, his face conflicted with thoughts he couldn’t resolve.
CHAPTER 26
Monday morning the sky was black, veined with lightning over the Gulf. Right after I checked into the department I went to see Barbara Shanahan in the prosecutor’s office. She was dressed in a gray suit and white blouse, her face defensive and vaguely angry. “If you’re here to talk about something of a personal nature, I’d rather we do that after business hours,” she said.
“I’m here about Amanda Boudreau.”
