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“You were a guest in my home. Carolyn fixed supper for you. What kind of people are you?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“You. All of you.”
His face was dilated, his breath rank, an odor like testosterone or dried sweat wafting off his body. His fists looked like big rocks at his sides.
I said, “I think you need help, partner. Clete hasn’t harmed you, and neither have I. I’ll drive you home myself. Maybe your wife will be there when you get back. Everybody has marital problems, but they pass. How about we let go of all this backyard bebop?”
Molly opened the screen door and came out on the steps, her robe cinched around her hips, her red hair hanging in her eyes. Layton turned and stared at her as though he had forgotten who she was or why she had come outside. She stepped into the yard, pushing her hair back with her fingers. “Listen to my husband, Mr. Blanchet,” she said. “He’s a truthful man, and he has nothing but good intentions toward you. You can leave or you can stay and have coffee with us, but you’re not going to come here and threaten people. That ends right now.”
He looked at her a long time, a behemoth of a man in a stained three-thousand-dollar suit, the shame of the cuckold as visible on his face as antlers painted on canvas in medieval portraiture. “Thank you,” he said.
“Do you want to come in?”
“No,” he replied. “No, I’m sorry for coming here like this. I’m sorry for many things.” He bent over and picked up Clete’s business card from the apron of bare ground around Tripod’s hutch. He stared at it blankly, then inserted it in his shirt pocket and walked down our driveway to his vehicle, brushing against the side of my pickup, oblivious to the muddy smear it left on his clothes. Molly continued to gaze down the driveway as Layton drove away. “You once quoted a convict about the relativity of doing time,” she said.
“His name was Dock Railroad. He was an old-time Pete man who did scores for Didoni Giacano. Clete and I caught him burning a safe in the back of Nig Rosewater’s bail bond agency. Dock was already a four-time loser. Clete offered him a cigarette and said, ‘Sorry about this, Dock. You’re probably going away on the bitch.’ Dock said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Purcel. Everybody stacks time. Inside the fence or outside the fence, we all stack the same time.’”
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Let’s fix some breakfast, troop. Then we can both use a little more sack time. Are you up for that?”
CHAPTER
11
WHEN I FOUND Clete that afternoon, he was polishing his Caddy at the motor court, dressed in a freshly ironed sport shirt printed with tropical birds and an outrageous pair of scarlet nylon Everlast boxing trunks that extended to his knees. He was humming a tune, passing a clean cotton rag back and forth across the dried wax on the finish, pausing to blow a bug off the starched top so he would not have to smack it and stain the immaculate starchlike whiteness of the canvas. Behind him, under the trees, a pork roast was cooking on his rotisserie barbecue pit. “How’s it hanging, big mon?” he said.
Without all the deleterious influences of booze and weed and cigarettes in his system, Clete looked ten years younger, his eyes clear, his skin rosy. I hated to ruin his day. “Layton Blanchet was in my backyard this morning. He seemed a little unhinged.”
“Tell me about it. He’s left a half-dozen messages on my machine.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I tried that. If you ask me, the guy is a head case. He’s got some other problems as well. I did a little checking on him. His bank in Mississippi is under SEC investigation. The fed I talked to said Blanchet has been running a Ponzi scheme since back in the nineties. He gets retirees to roll over their pension plans and SEP-IRAs into his bank and promises them a minimum of ten percent on their investment. Most of them are going to lose every penny they gave him.”
“He says he found your business card in his wife’s dresser.”
Clete had been polishing a back fin on the Caddy. He hand slowed and then stopped. He popped the rag clean and seemed to study the smoke drifting off his barbecue pit into the trees and the way the sunlight glittered like yellow diamonds on the bayou. “What would she be doing with my business card?” he asked.
“Evidently he’s convinced himself that you and Carolyn Blanchet were getting it on while you were working for him.”
“Not that I wouldn’t like to, but he’s full of shit.”
“The number of the Monteleone Hotel was on the back of the card,” I said.
“Layton Blanchet thinks I hang out at the Monteleone on my income? What an idiot.”
“Where do you think she got the card?”
“From any one of half the lowlifes in South Louisiana.”
“He said a couple of other things, Clete. He says he has a source inside the department. He says you’re still getting looked at for the Stanga homicide, and maybe I am, too.”
“Because the shooter was using a forty-five?”
