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He looked at me from under his brow. “Like how?”
“I’m not sure yet. When Helen and I rousted him at his house, he seemed to suggest he could be a friend to the department, like he knew about the inner workings of an operation that was larger in importance than he and Robert Weingart were.”
“You
ever know a meltdown who was different? They bypassed toilet training and shoe tying, but they’re experts on everything from brain surgery to running the White House. Why would Perkins want to help y’all? He’s not on parole, and he doesn’t have any charges hanging over his head. This guy wouldn’t lift a toilet seat unless there was something in it for him.”
“Money.”
“From who?”
I let the thread die. I still had not broached the question about the gold pen, primarily because I was in the position of investigating a friend I wanted to protect against the consequences of the investigation I was conducting. I tried to convince myself I was “excluding” Clete as a suspect in the death of Herman Stanga. But Clete’s history of violence, even though most of it was on the side of justice, indicated a level of rage that had little connection to the miscreants he visited it upon and everything to do with a young boy who was not allowed to eat supper and was forced to kneel for hours on rice grains and, with regularity, feel his father’s razor strop whipped savagely across his buttocks. The thought of Clete Purcel in a blackout, in proximity to a sneering misogynistic pimp like Herman Stanga, made me shudder. The fact that Stanga had publicly gloated over the prospect of sending Clete to Angola made me wonder if indeed the most logical suspect on the planet for the Stanga homicide wasn’t sitting three feet from me.
I went back to the entrance of the barbell room and shut the door. I saw the expression change in Clete’s face. “What’s the deal?” he asked.
“Where’s the gold pen Alicia Rosecrans gave you?”
His T-shirt was gray with sweat. He pulled it loose from his neck and shook the fabric to cool himself, his green eyes empty. “I don’t know. Maybe at my office. Or in my dresser,” he said. “I don’t like to think about Alicia a lot. I thought maybe she and I would be together for a while. Like always, that didn’t happen. What’s so important about the pen?”
“When is the last time you saw it?”
“I don’t remember. What is this crap?”
“It showed up in an unlikely place. Stop avoiding the question, Clete.”
“I don’t remember where I put it. I didn’t want to see it again. I wish I had thrown it away. Every time I looked at it, it made me feel bad.”
“Who had access to it?”
“How do I know when I don’t remember where I put it?” Then, illogically, he said, “My secretary comes in my office. The skells come in my office. People visit my cottage. The cleaning woman. Look, I remember Wee Willie Bimstine borrowing it once. Maybe he didn’t give it back. Or maybe it was Nig who borrowed it.”
“It was found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool.”
He widened his eyes and squeezed his mouth with one hand and wiped his hand on his pants. “Who found it?”
“The pool cleaner. He’s a straight-up guy.”
We were both silent. Somebody opened the door and started to come in. “We’re tied up in here right now,” I said.
The door closed and the person went away. “Helen says you told her you were never on Stanga’s property,” I said.
“That’s right, I was never there.”
“Who might have taken the pen out of your office or your cottage?”
“Layton Blanchet came to my office when he hired me to follow his wife around. I’ve had a couple of female guests at the cottage. I’m not necessarily talking about the boom-boom express, maybe just for drinks or something to eat before we went to the casino.”
“Emma Poche was one of them?”
“Definitely.”
“But what?”
“That was the boom-boom express—in the sack, on the furniture, in the shower, maybe on the ceiling. I crashed into the wall with her and cracked the plaster. She deserves her own zip code down there. It was like swimming in the Caribbean. I told her she was part mermaid.”
“Will you stop that?”
“I’m trying to tell you we were occupied. She wasn’t rifling my dresser or closet or whenever I lost that damn pen.”
