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“You’re dealing?”
“No,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and removed a small plastic bag rolled around three joints. “I smoke one or two a day, that’s all. I know if I’m arrested at the jail, I’ll be searched and then charged for holding.”
I took the bag from him, shook the joints out, and ground them under my heel. “So you’re not holding now,” I said, and stuffed the bag back in his pocket.
I started walking toward the cruiser, with Tony perhaps ten feet behind me. I heard him quicken his step to catch up with me.
“That was a pretty decent thing to do, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.
“Don’t deceive yourself, kid. What I told you back there in the trees wasn’t a ruse. You had your chance and you blew it. The people I work with are going to twist your head off and spit in it,” I replied.
I HAD NOT SEEN Clete Purcel since Saturday evening, when he had driven away from the boat landing at Henderson Swamp with Trish Klein, his face and hers glowing like those of youthful lovers in the sunset. I left three messages on his cell phone, and also went by his office, only to find it closed. Friday I went by his office again, and this time his part-time secretary, Hulga Volkmann, was behind the desk. She was a big, rosy-complected, cheerful, and scatterbrained woman who wore flower-print dresses and perfume that would numb the olfactory senses of an elephant.
“He went to New Orleans for a day or so, then called from Cancún. He’ll be back tonight,” she said.
“Clete’s in Mexico?” I said.
“Or was it Bimini?” she said.
Clete Purcel’s romantic problems did not occur as a result of his having love affairs with biker girls and neurotic artists and strippers. Instead, they usually began when he got involved with any woman who was halfway normal, in other words, the type of person he didn’t believe he deserved. Any attempt to convince him that he was attractive to women other than pipeheads and narcissistic meltdowns was futile. In Clete’s mind, he was still the son of a milkman in the Irish Channel, with skinned knuckles from fights on the school ground and welts across his butt from his father’s razor strop. Nice girls didn’t hang with a guy who had a scar like a pink inner-tube patch through one eyebrow, put there by a black warlord from the Gird Town Deuces. Nice girls didn’t hang with a former jarhead who still heard the downdraft of helicopter blades in his sleep.
“Is Clete with a lady by the name of Trish Klein?” I asked the secretary.
“He was with someone. I heard a lot of noise in the background. I think he was in a casino,” Hulga said.
Clete lived down the bayou in a Depression-era motor court, one that still did not have telephones in the cottages and was covered by the shade of oaks hundreds of years old. At ten Saturday morning, I knocked on his door. He answered it in his skivvies and an undershirt, smiling sleepily. “How you doin’, big mon?” he said. A square bandage was taped high up on his left shoulder.
“Why don’t you tell your friends where you are once in a while?”
“Oh, Trish and I drove over to the Big Sleazy for the day, then one thing led to another. You know how it goes. You want coffee?”
“I don’t want to hear Darwin’s history of the planet. Did you let her hustle you?”
“Lighten up on the terminology,” he replied, filling a metal coffeepot at the sink.
“What happened to your shoulder?”
“Nothing. A scratch. I had to get a tetanus shot.”
“I think Trish Klein is playing you, Cletus,” I said, instantly regretting my words.
“Hell, yes. Why would a great-looking broad be interested in an over-the-hill P.I. who’s got a worse jacket than most perps?”
“I didn’t say that. Your weakness is your good heart. People take advantage of it.”
“Good try. Get the milk out of the icebox, will you? God!”
“God what?”
“I woke up feeling great. I haven’t had any booze in two days. Trish and I are going to a street dance in Lafayette tonight. Then you come in here and walk around on my libido with golf shoes. Plus you insult Trish.”
“I worry about you. You were gone four days without telling me where you were.”
He tossed a loaf of bread into my hands. “Make some toast.”
“What happened in New Orleans?”
“Ever hear of a guy named Lefty Raguza?”
