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“What’s with you two? I could hear you all the way out in the driveway,” Molly said, coming through the back door, both arms loaded with groceries.
“Ask Dave, if you can get him to pull his head out of his ass,” Alafair said.
“That’s the second time someone has said that to me today. The other person was a meltdown o
n a road gang in Mississippi.”
Molly tried to make it to the counter with the grocery bags. But it was too late. One of them caved, and most of our delicatessen supper splattered on the linoleum.
That’s when Clete Purcel tapped on the back screen. “Am I interrupting anything?” he said.
CHAPTER
2
IT WAS THROUGH Clete Purcel that I had been over in Jeff Davis Parish asking about the seven girls and young women whose bodies had been found in ditches and swamp areas since 2005. Two weeks ago the remains of one of his bail skips were found in the bottom of a recently drained canal, her decomposed features webbed with dried algae, as though she had been wrapped in a sheet of dirty plastic. The pathologist said she had died of massive physical trauma. Perhaps she had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. Perhaps not.
Clete operated a private investigative service out of two offices, one on St. Ann in the French Quarter and the other on Main Street, here in New Iberia. His daily routine was one of ennui coupled with an almost visceral disdain for the people he routinely hooked up and delivered to two bondsmen in New Orleans by the names of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, both of whom had been bankrupted after Katrina when FEMA transported their bonded-out clientele to faraway cities all over the United States. At one time Clete had been the best cop I ever knew, both as a patrolman and as a detective-grade investigator with the NOPD. But booze and pills and his predilection for damaged women had been his undoing, and he’d been forced to blow the country on a murder beef and hide out in El Salvador and Guatemala, where, as a mercenary, he got to see the murder of civilians on a scale that was greater than he had seen in Vietnam.
Insatiability seemed to have been wired into his metabolism. He fought his hangovers with uppers and vodka and tomato juice and a celery stick in a tumbler of crushed ice, convinced himself that four fingers of Scotch sheathed in a glass of milk would not harm his liver, and clanked iron daily to compensate for the deep-fried soft-shell crabs and oyster po’boy sandwiches and gallons of gumbo he consumed on a weekly basis. His courage and his patriotism and his sense of personal honor and his loyalty to his friends had no peer. I never knew a better and braver man. But threaded through all of his virtues was his abiding conviction that he was not worthy of a good woman’s love and that somehow his father, the milkman who had made his son kneel on grains of rice, always stood somewhere close by, his face knotted with disapproval.
Clete was the libidinous trickster of folklore, the elephantine buffoon, the bane of the Mob and all misogynists and child molesters, the brain-scorched jarhead who talked with a dead mamasan on his fire escape, the nemesis of authority figures and anyone who sought power over others, a one-man demolition derby who had driven an earth-grader through the walls of a mobster’s palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain and systematically ground the entire building into rubble. Or at least that was the persona he created for the world to see. But in reality Clete Purcel was a tragedy. His enemies were many: gangsters, vindictive cops, and insurance companies who wanted him off the board. Klansmen and neo-Nazis had tried to kill him. A stripper he had befriended dosed him with the clap. He had been shanked, shot, garroted, and tortured. A United States congressman tried to have him sent to Angola. But all of the aforementioned were amateurs when it came to hurting Clete Purcel. Clete’s most dangerous adversary lived in his own breast.
I walked outside with him, into the coolness of the evening and the wind blowing through the bamboo that grew along the driveway. His skin was inflamed with fresh sunburn, and he was wearing a tropical shirt and mirrored shades that reflected the trees and clouds and his restored maroon Caddy with the starch-white top. He put his arm inside the driver’s window and lifted an open can of beer off the dashboard, then stuck a filter-tip cigarette into the corner of his mouth and prepared to light it with his Zippo. I removed the cigarette and stuck it in his shirt pocket.
“Can’t you stop doing that?” he said.
“No.”
“What was going on in your kitchen?”
“I had some words with a convict writer who hangs out with Alafair’s new boyfriend.”
“This guy Weingart?”
“You know him?”
“Not personally. He knocked up a black girl who waits tables at Ruby Tuesday.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. He’s a famous guy. She was impressed. I think he hunts on the game reserve. When they’re nineteen and haven’t been farther away than Lake Charles, it doesn’t take a lot to get them to kick off their panties.” He drank from his beer. The top of the can was covered with condensation from the coldness inside, and his mouth left a bright smear on it. “I’ve got a Dr Pepper in the cooler,” he said.
“I just had one. Why’d you come by?”
I couldn’t see his eyes behind his shades, but when he turned his head toward me, I knew he had caught the sharpness in my voice. “The feds are working those homicides in Jeff Davis Parish. Or at least they say they are. They’re talking about a serial killer. But I don’t buy it.”
“Let it go, Clete.”
“My bail skip was twenty-one years old. She’d had tracks on her arms since she was thirteen. She deserved something more out of life than being left in a rain ditch with all her bones broken.”
When I didn’t reply, he took off his shades and stared at me. The skin around his eyes looked unnaturally white. “Say it.”
“I’ve got nothing to say,” I replied.
“Rumdum PI’s don’t get involved in official investigations?”
“I went over to Mississippi and interviewed a brother of one of the victims. I also talked to Herman Stanga.”
