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I went into the kitchen and called Donna Parks at her home. There was no answer. I left a message on her machine and drove to Franklin to visit Clete Purcel in jail.
A turnkey walked me down a corridor to an isolation cell, one with horizon al bars, flat cross-plates, and an iron food slit in the door, but with nothing inside except a stainless steel toilet and a metal bench bolted to the floor. Clete was sitting on the bench, still in his street clothes, his wrists locked to his hips with a waist chain, another chain locked between his ankles. His right eye was swollen into a puffed knot, his forehead and chin scraped raw. The cement floor outside the cell door was splattered with red beans, rice, two pieces of white bread, and coffee from a broken Styrofoam cup.
"Who did that to his face?" I said.
"He come in like that," the turnkey said.
"That's a lie," I said.
"He wouldn't put on his jumpsuit. He threw his tray at a deputy. You got issues with it, talk to the boss. I just clean up the mess," the turnkey said, and walked away.
I hung my hands through the bars. "How you doin', Cletus?" I said.
He stood up from the bench and shuffled toward me, his chains clinking on the cement. "I'm going to look up a couple of these guys when I get out of here," he said.
"Why do you have to provoke them?"
"It's fun."
"I'm suspended. I don't have any clout to help you."
"What'dyoudo?"
"Fired up Max Coll and pointed him at Lejeune and Guillot. I figured my line was tapped and I might get the Feds in here."
"I keep telling you, it's the broad."
"Maybe it is."
Then his eyes went away from mine and looked into space. "Nig and Wee Willie won't go bail," he said.
"Why not?"
"They're pissed because of that dinner I charged on their card at Galatoire's. Plus two of the girls skipped their court appearances and Nig's putting it on me."
"What kind of bail are we talking about?" I asked.
"A screw tried to do an anal search on me. He's going to need some dental work. So I've got two separate A&B's on a law officer."
I touched my forehead against the bars and closed my eyes. Clete kicked the door with the point of his shoe, rattling it in the jamb. "Listen up, Dave. We're the good guys. The problem is nobody else knows it. But that's their problem, not ours," he said.
I left the jail and parked my truck on an oyster-shell road down by Bayou Teche, just outside the Franklin city limits. Rain was falling on the trees around my truck, and across the bayou were a cow pasture, a collapsed red barn, and a solitary black man in a straw hat, sitting on an inverted bucket, cane-pole fishing under a live oak. I got out of the truck, tossed a pine cone into the current, and watched it float southward toward the Gulf.
Clete had made a point, one which I don't think was either vituperative or vain. Legal definitions had little to do with morality. It was legal to systemically poison the earth and sell arms to Third World lunatics. Politicians who themselves had avoided active service and never had listened to the sounds a flame thrower extracted from its victims, or zipped up body bags on the faces of their best friends, clamored for war and stood proudly in front of the flag while they sent others off to fight it.
The polluters and the war advocates are always legal men, as the Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman.
The John Gottis of the world make good entertainment. The polluters and the war advocates can be seen at prayer, on camera, in the National Cathedral. Unlike John Gotti, they're not very interesting, but they cause infinitely more damage.
The chances were I would never take down Castille Lejeune for the murder of Junior Crudup. Nor did it look like I would solve the shooting of the drive-by daiquiri store operator or Fat Sammy Fig-orelli. The people who had committed these crimes did not have patterns and to one degree or another operated with public sanction. They might go down for an ancillary offense, but at worst they would do minimum time, if not get probation.
But regardless of what occurred in the lives of others, I was going to clear my conscience of a problem I had created because of my desire to control a situation in which I had failed.
I drove through the wet streets of Franklin, out to Fox Run, and lifted the false knocker on the front door that activated the chimes deep inside the house. A moment later Castille Lejeune answered the door, dressed in sweat clothes, a towel twisted around his throat, surprisingly pleasant, his face ruddy from riding an exercise bike by the sun room that gave onto the back patio, the same patio where Junior Crudup had entertained him and his wife fifty years ago.
"Come in, sir," he
said, opening the door wider.
