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“Legion Guidry was at the bait shop today. He wanted to know if Clete had been around.”
Her book fell off her knee. Her reading glasses were full of light when she looked at me.
I drove to his apartment on the Loreauville Road. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and the apartment manager, an elderly Jewish man who had been a teenager in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was stacking the poolside furniture under a sheltered walkway. “Have you seen Clete Purcel, Mr. Lemand?” I asked.
“Early this morning. He was putting his fishing things in the back of his car. A young woman was with him,” he replied.
“Did he say when he might be back?”
“No, he didn’t. I’m sorry,” Mr. Lemand said. He was a bald, wizened man, with brown eyes and delicate hands. He always wore a tie and a starched shirt and was never seen at a dinner table without his coat on. “You’re the second person who asked me about Mr. Purcel today.”
“Oh?”
“A man in a red truck was here. He sat for a long time in the parking lot, under the trees, smoking cigarettes. Maybe because of your line of work you know this man,” Mr. Lemand said.
“How do you mean?”
He inverted a plastic chair and placed it on a table.
“In my childhood I saw eyes like his. That was in Germany, in times quite different from our own. He wanted to know if Mr. Purcel was with Ms. Shanahan. You know, Ms. Shanahan, who works in the district attorney’s office? I didn’t tell him.”
“Good for you.”
“Do you think he’ll come back, this man in the truck?”
“Call me if he does. Here, I’ll put my home number on the back of my business card,” I said, and handed it to him.
“This man had an odor. At first I thought I was imagining it. But I wasn’t. It was vile,” he said.
His eyes searched my face for an explanation. But I had none to give him. The pool was a brilliant, clear green against the glow of the underwater lights, the surface chained with rain rings. I walked out into the darkness, into the parking lot, and started my truck.
Who else would go fishing in an electric storm or ignore the danger represented by a man like Legion Guidry? I asked myself. But that was Clete’s nature, defiant of all authority and rules, uneducable, grinning his way through the cannon smoke, convinced he could live through anything. Evidently, James Jones and Ernest Hemingway bore each other a high degree of enmity. Ironically, they both described the evolution of the combat soldier in a similar fashion. Each author said the most dangerous stage in a soldier’s life is the second one, immediately after he has survived his initial experience in combat, because he feels anointed by a divine hand and convinces himself he would not have been spared in one battle only to die in another.
Clete had never evolved out of that second stage in a combat soldier’s career. His great strength lay in his courage and his uncanny knowledge of his enemy. But his weakness was in direct proportion to his strength, and it lay in his inability to foresee or appreciate the consequence of his actions, or, more simply said, the fact that a cable-strung wrecking ball is designed to swing both ways.
I drove back up the Loreauville Road and crossed the drawbridge in the center of town and turned onto Burke Street, then walked up the steps to Barbara Shanahan’s apartment overlooking the Teche. A lamp was on in the living room, but no one answered the bell. I hammered on the door, but there was no movement inside. I stuck a note in the doorjamb, asking her to call the house when she returned.
I drove to the motor court where Joe Zeroski and Zerelda Calucci were staying. Zerelda was not in her cottage, but Joe was, dressed in pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, and slippers, holding the door open for me, the rain blowing in his face.
“Just the guy I wanted to see,” he said.
“Me?” I said.
“Yeah, this whole town ought to be napalmed. I called the sheriff at his house. He told me to talk to him during business hours. Hey, crazoids don’t keep business hours. That includes Blimpo.”
“Blimpo is Clete?”
“No, Nancy Reagan. Who do you think I mean?”
“You’re going too fast for me, Joe.” I closed the door behind me. His television set was on, a glass of milk and a sandwich on a table by an overstuffed chair.
“Purcel took my niece fishing. He didn’t say where, either, which means he wants to boink her without me being around. In the meantime Marvin Dipshit is knocking on her door, with roses in his hand and this puke-pot look on his face,” he said.
“When?” I asked.
“Two hours ago.”
“Where is Oates now?” I asked.
