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“Who tole you I did that?”
“It’s written all over you.”
The heavy, oblong steel head of the Stilson rested on the rim of the aluminum tank, his hand grasped tightly around the shank. The back of his hand was brown, mottled with liver spots and lined with veins that looked like knotted package twine. I could hear a horse blowing inside the stable.
I supposed it was not a time to say anything. But there are moments when caution and restraint just don’t cut it. “Why’d you do it, partner? She was just a kid.”
“Maybe there’re reasons everybody don’t know about. Maybe t’ings just happen,” he replied.
“Run that crap on somebody else.”
“What do you know? You got everyt’ing. They killed my boy. You know what it’s like to have your kid killed?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The niggers. Monarch Little and all them niggers with black scarfs on their head, selling their dope, pimping their women, corrupting the town.”
It was hopeless. I think there are those who are psychologically incapable of honesty and I think Bello was one of them. I got back in the truck and left him to himself. In all candor, I doubt if a worse punishment in the world could have been visited upon him.
BUT I STILL HAD MILES TO GO before I slept. I called Molly on my cell phone and asked if we could have a late dinner.
“You have to work?” she said.
“Clete’s in some trouble.”
“What kind?”
I searched my mind for an honest answer. “There’s no adequate scale. The rules of reason and logic have no application in his life,” I said.
“Sound like anybody else you know?” she replied.
“Put my supper in the icebox.”
“It already is,” she replied.
The owner of the motor court where Clete lived told me Clete and a young woman had gone to a street dance in St. Martinville.
They weren’t hard to find. In fact, as I drove up the two-lane through the dusk, through the corridor of live oaks that led out of town and the miles of waving sugarcane on each side of the road, I saw Clete’s Caddy parked in front of a supper club left over from the 1940s. It was a happy place, where people ate thick steaks and drank Manhattans and old-fashioneds and sometimes had trysts involving a degree of romance in the palm-shrouded motel set behind the club. Above the entrance way was a pink neon outline of a martini glass with the long-legged reclining figure of a nude woman inside.
The refrigerated air in the dining room was so cold it made me shiver. Each table was covered with white linen and set with a candle burning inside a glass chimney. A man in a summer tux was playing a piano that was so black it had purple lights in it. Clete was at a table by himself, a collins drink in his hand, his face flushed and cheerful, his eyes shiny with alcohol.
“Where’s Trish?” I said.
“On the phone.”
I sat down without being asked. “Helen says Orleans Parish is cutting a warrant for your arrest.”
“So I’ll get out of town for a little while. You want a steak?”
“The Orleans sheriff told Helen he knows you’re mixed up with bank robbers. What’s the matter with you, Clete? You know how many people in South Louisiana want an excuse to blow you away?”
“That’s their problem.”
I was so angry I could hardly speak.
“There used to be a slop chute in San Diego that had a sign over the door like the one out there. You ever go to San Diego?” he said.
“No. Listen, Clete—”
