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“But they skated in Wichita,” I said.
“So that’s on the DA’s office in Wichita. Fuck them.”
“Good attitude. But my experience is that survivors of violent crimes tend to become gun enthusiasts.”
He winked. “I throw baseballs.”
“Jimmy hits golf balls into the bayou.”
“May I visit Alafair at your house?”
“Anytime,” I replied.
I walked back to my pickup. Rowena was sitting in a rocking chair on the gallery. “Mr. Robicheaux?”
I tried to keep my face pleasant, but I didn’t speak.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“All of it. I got drunk with another man when I should have been home with my husband. I gave you people the wrong information. I caused Levon to go to Kevin Penny’s trailer. These things are all my doing.”
“Forget it,” I said. “You’re a nice lady, Miss Rowena.”
There was a smile in her eyes. It’s strange how much a kind word can do.
* * *
CLETE PURCEL WAS the most thorough and insightful and successful investigative lawman I ever knew. If he hadn’t wiped out his career with hooch and pills and weed and strippers and other women who glowed with neurosis, he could have had a job in the Department of Justice. Instead, he ended up working with the Mob in Vegas and Reno. I’ll take it a step further. He ended up working for a degenerate killer named Sally Dio, also known as Sally Ducks, who had his boys slam Clete’s hand in a car door. Later, Sally was on his private plane with his boys when the engines failed and the plane crashed into the side of a mountain near Flathead Lake. The coroner had to comb Sally’s remains from a tree with a rake. The National Transportation Safety Board said the fuel lines were clogged with sand. For unexplained reasons, Clete immediately grabbed a flight to Mexico City with only his toothbrush and a shaving kit.
Clete drove his Caddy down East Plaquemine Street in Jennings to the sheriff’s office. The sky was lidded with steel-gray clouds, the air muggy and superheated by the asphalt, the live oaks and palm trees motionless. The building was located in a strange piece of green landscape that had a few small frame houses on it, none of them with fences, like a semirural neighborhood from a simpler time.
He left his .38 snub and holster in the glove box, put on his porkpie hat, locked his car, and went up the walk, touching his face with a folded handkerchief, his collar and his own odor bothering him. The problem did not lie in the weather. Clete could have overcome his reputation for vigilantism and chaotic behavior, but his brief association with the Mob and his accidental shooting of a federal witness followed him wherever he went, in part because he was a better man and a better and more honorable cop than his detractors could ever be. But that was poor consolation. Among those who should have been his colleagues and friends, he was a pariah and a turncoat.
“I’d like to see Detective Picard,” he said to the desk sergeant.
“Name?”
“Purcel.”
“Ohhh, yeah,” the sergeant said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s been that kind of day.”
“How about it, top? Is she here or not?”
“Down the hall.”
“Would you mind telling her I’m here? I don’t have an appointment.”
“She’ll be glad for the company.”
He removed his porkpie hat and ran a comb through his hair and put the comb away. He yawned, his eyes empty. “You got any openings? I’d really dig working in a place like this. It reminds me of El Sal when it was run by the death squads.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” the sergeant said.
