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“Tony Nine Ball. Maybe some meth guys in East Texas. Maybe some greaseballs in Tampa or Miami. Take your choice. We’re everybody’s punch.”
“You know who Maximo Soza and JuJu Ladrine are?”
“One’s a psychopath, the other has a triple-A battery for a brain. They both work for Tony.”
“You think they’re capable of crucifying a man and drilling his elbows and knees?”
“Maximo would do it in a blink. It’s not like JuJu.”
“What would be the motivation?”
“What motivates these guys to do anything? Half the things they believe don’t exist. They’re the dumbest shits on earth. That’s why they’re criminals.”
“How about this? Kevin Penny was a federal informant. Maybe Soza and Ladrine were sent to find out if Penny dimed them or Tony Nemo.”
“Too extreme, in my opinion.”
“So where does that leave us?” she said, looking straight at him as though she knew the answer to her question.
“You got me. I run down bail skips and do other kinds of scut work for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”
“How about the fact that they were following you around? They even parked their vehicle by the house of your lady friend while you were doing a sleepover.”
“How about leaving third parties out of this?” he said.
“Then you had a confrontation with them in downtown Jennings. Then your lady friend got beaten to a pulp. The word is you have some bad markers out. You also gave Kevin Penny a bad time about his kid. Maybe you figured all three of them for the beating of the Ardoin woman, and you started with Penny.”
Clete halved the loaf of French bread into two long buns and began layering them with lettuce and sliced tomatoes and chopped onions and deep-fried crawfish and oysters he had taken from the icebox. “Short answer, Detective: I never put a hand on Penny.”
“We lifted a lot of prints from the trailer. Most of them were in the computer at the NCIC. Some were not. That bothers me.”
“Because people like Penny don’t have normal friends?”
“But yours were all over the place. I’ve seen your sheet. I’ve known recidivists who would be in awe of your record.”
He released the handle of the knife and stared straight ahead. “I’ll try again. I was in the Crotch. I did two tours in Vietnam. I saw guys who were skinned alive and hung in trees. I don’t torture people.” He picked up a small clean brush and began painting mayonnaise and shrimp dip on his sandwich.
“My husband was killed in Iraq,” she said.
He turned around. Her face was calm, her eyes clear. She seemed to be looking at a thought or memory inside her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You have to get on the square about the missing boy, Mr. Purcel.”
“I am on the square. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to that little boy again.”
“You committed a felony by deliberately violating a crime scene and taking items from it. You know that, don’t you?”
He put the sandwich together and cut it in half. “I’ll split this with you.”
She got up and walked to the chair where the raincoat was. She tugged it slightly so it covered the bottom of the bat. “No, thanks.”
He wiped his hands on a dish towel and watched her. She wore her gun and badge and cuffs on her
belt, perhaps as a statement of her own identity and in defiance of male authority. She wasn’t aggressive, but she wasn’t passive, either. She seemed to live inside a place beyond the fray. She straightened her shoulders and looked out the window at the live oaks arching over the driveway. She turned around, as though asking him Why the silence?
“There’s a snitch in Lafayette named Pookie Domingue,” Clete said. “Sometimes people call him Pookie the Possum. He says the word is out you’d better get your head on straight.”
