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Out of nowhere, Alice Werenhaus pushed past him, her feet sinking to the ankles in the mixture of black dirt and coffee grinds and guano that Clete used in his gardens, dropping onto all fours and forming a protective arch over Grimes’s body, her homely face terrified. “Please don’t hit him anymore. Oh, Mr. Purcel, you frighten me so,” she said. “The world has hurt you so much.”
OUR HOME WAS located on a one-acre lot shaded by live oak and pecan trees and slash pines on East Main in New Iberia, right up the street from the Shadows, a famous antebellum home built in the year 1831. Even though our house was also constructed in the nineteenth century, it was of much more modest design, one that was called “shotgun” because of its oblong structure, like a boxcar’s, and the folk legend that one could fire a bird gun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back entrance without ever striking a wall.
Humble abode or not, it was a fine place to live. The windows reached all the way to the ceiling and had ventilated storm shutters, and in hurricane season, oak limbs bounced off
our roof without ever shattering glass. I had extended and screened the gallery across the front, and hung it with a glider, and sometimes on hot afternoons I would set up the ice-cream freezer on the gallery and we would mash up blackberries in the cream and sit on the glider and eat blackberry ice cream.
I lived in the house with my daughter, Alafair, who had finished law school at Stanford but was determined to be a novelist, and with my wife, Molly, a former nun and missionary in Central America who had come to Louisiana to organize the sugarcane workers in St. Mary Parish. In back, there was a hutch for our elderly raccoon, Tripod, and a big tree above the hutch where our warrior cat, Snuggs, kept guard over the house and the yard. I had been either a police officer in New Orleans or a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish since I returned from Vietnam. My history is one of alcoholism, depression, violence, and bloodshed. For much of it I have enormous regret. For some of it I have no regret at all, and given the chance, I would commit the same deeds again without pause, particularly when it comes to protection of my own.
Maybe that’s not a good way to be. But at some point in your life, you stop keeping score. It has been my experience that until that moment comes in your odyssey through the highways and byways and back alleys of your life, you will never have peace.
I had been home from the recovery unit nine days and was sitting on the front step, cleaning my spinning reel, when Clete Purcel’s restored Cadillac convertible with the starch-white top and freshly waxed maroon paint job pulled into our driveway, the tires clicking on the gravel, a solitary yellow-spotted leaf from a water oak drifting down on the hood. When he got out of the car, he removed the keys from the ignition and dropped them in the pocket of his slacks, something he never did when he parked his beloved Caddy on our property. He also looked back over his shoulder at the one-way traffic coming up East Main, fingering the pink scar that ran through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose.
“You run a red light?” I asked.
He sat down heavily next to me, a gray fog of weed and beer and testosterone puffing out of his clothes. The back of his neck was oily, his face dilated. “Remember a guy name of Waylon Grimes?”
“He did some button work for the Giacanos?”
“Button work, torture, extortion, you name it. He came to my place with Bix Golightly. Then he came back with a property appraiser. That’s after he was warned.”
“What happened?”
“He said some stuff about Vietnam and killing women and kids. I don’t remember, exactly. I lost it.”
“What did you do, Clete?”
“Tried to kill him. Alice Werenhaus saved his life.” He took a breath and lifted one arm and placed his hand on top of his shoulder, his face flinching. “I think I tore something loose inside me.”
“Have you been to a doctor?”
“What can a doctor do besides open me up again?”
“Has Grimes filed charges?”
“That’s the problem. He told the ambulance attendants that he fell from my balcony. I think he plans to square it on his own. I think Golightly has given him the addresses of my sister and niece.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Golightly told me he was going to do it unless I paid him for the marker. You know the word about Bix. He’s a nutjob, and he’d gut and stuff his own mother and use her for a doorstop, but he’s straight up when it comes to a debt, either collecting or paying it. What do you think I ought to do?”
“Talk to Dana Magelli at NOPD.”
“What should I tell him? I tried to beat a guy to death, but I’m the victim, and now I need a couple of cruisers to follow my family around?”
“Find something else to use against Grimes,” I said.
“Like what?”
“The death of the child he ran over.”
“The parents are scared shitless. They’re also both junkies. I think Grimes was delivering their skag when he killed their kid.”
“I don’t know what else to offer.”
“I can’t let my sister and niece take the fall for what I did. This is eating my lunch.”
“You stop having the thoughts you’re having.”
