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But Helen herself had said the real problem lay in the fact we were dealing with Dagwood and Blondie. Amateurs hide in plain sight. They also do not feel guilty about the misdeeds they commit. They attend church, Kiwanis meetings, belong to the Better Business Bureau, support every self-righteous moral cause imaginable, and float like helium balloons right over whole armies of cops looking for miscreants in off-track betting parlors, triple-X motels, and crack houses.
The word criminal is more an emotional than legal term. Go to any U.S. post office and view the faces on the wanted posters. Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photographs often taken in late-night booking rooms unshaved, pig snouted, rodent eyed, hare lipped, reassuring us that human evil is always recognizable and that consequently we will never be its victim.
But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of.
Five or six years ago Helen and I had to fly to Deer Lodge, Montana, and question a kid whose execution was scheduled in three days. We were not prepared for what we saw when he was brought into the interview room in a short-sleeve, orange jumpsuit and leg and waist chains. His first name was Kerry, and the softness in his name was like both his features and his North Carolinian accent. He had no cigarette odor, no tattoos, no needle tracks. His auburn hair was shampooed, clipped on the ends, and kept falling across his glasses, so that he constantly twitched his head to shake a loose strand out of his vision.
While we questioned him about a murder in Iberia Parish, his large glasses wobbled with reflected light and a strange, almost self-effacing smile never left his mouth. If he bore anger or resentment toward anyone, I could not detect it.
He had been sentenced to death for tying a rancher and his wife to chairs in their kitchen and butchering them alive. While on Death Row he helped organize a riot that resulted in the convict takeover of the entire maximum-security area. Kerry also was a chief participant in the fate of five sn
itches who were pulled out of protection cells, tortured, and lynched with wire loops from the second tier of a lock-down section.
He said he knew nothing of the homicide in Iberia Parish.
"Your fingerprints at the murder scene indicate otherwise. Maybe the victim had it coming. Why not get your interpretation of events on the books?" I said.
He nipped his head to clear a strand of hair from his glasses and smiled at a joke that only he seemed to understand.
We gave it up. But before we left the interview room I had to ask him another question. "What do you think lies on the other side, Kerry?" I said.
He had a slight cold and couldn't wipe his nose because his hands were manacled at the waist, so he huffed air out of his nostrils before he answered. "You just move on to another plane of existence," he said.
The afternoon of his injection he had to be awakened from a sound sleep. Minutes later the death warrant was read and he was videotaped by a member of the medical examiner's office on the way to the execution chamber. He grinned at the camera and said, "Hi, Mom," and jiggled all over with laughter.
Chapter 22.
I went to bed early that night and listened to the rain hitting the tin roof of my rented house. The fog was white in the trees, a lighted tugboat out on the Teche, its gunnels hung with rubber tires, glistening inside the rain. I slept the sleep of the dead.
The time on my alarm clock was 4:16 A.M. when I heard the unmistakable sound of Clete's automobile engine dying in my driveway. A moment later he tapped softly on the front door. He was wearing gloves and a beat-up leather bomber jacket. The jacket was unzipped, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and his blue-black, pearl-handled .38 revolver inside it.
"Where have you been?" I said.
"At a fish camp on Lake Fausse Pointe. Get dressed. I know where Max Coll is," he said.
"No more cowboy stuff, Clete."
"Me?" he said.
"Where is he?" I said.
Clete stepped inside the living room and started to explain, looking back over his shoulder at the street, then got vexed at being conciliatory. "You want in on this or not?" he said.
I left a note on the kitchen counter for Father Jimmie, then Clete and I headed out in the predawn wetness for New Orleans, a thermos of coffee and a box of beignets on the seat between us. The old homes along East Main were still dark, the live oaks dripping on the sidewalks. I was still not quite awake.
"Run it by me again," I said.
"Janet Gish is trying to get off the nose candy without a program, so she spends most of the night at Harrah's. She says a guy with a Mick accent was in the casino until early Saturday morning, then he left just before seven. He came back at eight-thirty, ate a plate of steak and eggs, played some more blackjack, and drove off in a Honda."
"Why was she paying so much attention to a guy with an accent?" I asked.
"One, I'd already described Coll to her, and, two, she still hooks a little on the side and thought he'd be an easy trick. Here's the rest of it. He had on black dress pants, like a priest might wear."
It was raining and still dark when we crossed the high bridge over the Atchafalaya at Morgan City. Down below I could see shrimp boats in their berths, the red-tiled roofs of the town, and the great, cypress-dotted expanse of the wetlands in the south, all of which were being eaten away by saltwater intrusion at a rate of hundreds of square miles a year.
"Doesn't your heater work?" I said.
"It's full blast, mon."
