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"The electrical contractor is too scared to file charges. But Clete's not going to use Iberia Parish as his safe house while he goes around kicking people's asses."
I nodded.
The heat went out of her face. "What's the score on this electrical contractor?" she said.
"He's the guy who installed bad wiring in my house. He works for Will Guillot."
"I'm fed up with the stuff, Dave. Clean it up or you and Clete can start making your own plans," she said.
I took the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette and hit a rainstorm just outside of town. By the time I got to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital the streets were flooding. I ran past a row of blooming camellia bushes into the side entrance of the hospital and asked at the nurse's station on the second floor for directions to Herbert Vidrine's room.
"Three rooms past the elevator, on your left," the nur
se said.
I thanked her and started down the hall. Then I stopped and went back to the station. I opened my badge holder. "How's Mr. Vidrine doing?" I asked.
"A concussion and a broken arm. But he's doing all right," the nurse replied. She was young and had clean features and brown hair that was clipped on her neck.
"Has anyone else been in to see him?"
"Not since I've been here. I came on at eight A.M.," she said.
"Could I use your typewriter?" I said.
I had taken a fiction-writing course when I was an English education major at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. I hoped my old prof, Lyle Williams, would be proud of the letter I was now composing. I typed rather than signed a name at the bottom, folded and put the letter in an envelope the nurse gave me, then printed Herbert Vidrine's name on the outside.
"Would you wait ten minutes, then deliver this to Mr. Vidrine's room?" I said.
"I don't know if I should get involved in this," she replied.
I placed the envelope on her desk. "You'd be helping out the good guys," I said.
Vidrine was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, one arm in a cast, easing a teaspoon of Jell-O past a severely swollen bottom lip.
"How are you, Herbert?" I said.
He put his spoon back in a bowl that rested on his bed tray. "You're Iberia Parish. What are you doing here?" he said.
"We're looking for the guy who hurt you but on different charges," I said, laying my raincoat and hat on a chair.
"Maybe you're here to rub salt in a wound, too," he said.
"You burned my house down, partner. But I'm like you, I'm a drunk. I can't carry resentments. Did you ever go back to meetings?"
His eyes left mine. Even though he was a hard-bodied man, he looked small in the bed, his spoon clutched in a childlike fashion. "I never had that big a drinking problem. It was just when I was married," he said.
"The man who attacked you didn't have the right to do what he did," I said.
He frowned and ran his tongue over the swelling in his bottom lip. "Just leave me alone," he said.
"One day you're going to have to do a Fifth Step on the injury you caused me and my family. My father built that house in the Depression with his own hands. My second wife was murdered in it. Her blood was in the wood," I said.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Maybe you are," I said. I put my business card on his nightstand. "I think you have a lot of information about the dealings of some bad people, Herbert. Why take their bounce?"
"I haven't done anything wrong," he replied.
