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“He’s not a predictable man.”
“You lying, you. You know it, too.” She rubbed at her nose with the back of her wrist.
“Stay with Detective Ribbons,” I said.
I walked to the sheriff, then returned to the cruiser. The sun was above the trees now. I could see a dredge boat chugging down a canal surrounded by a sea of grass that had turned brown from saline intrusion. I leaned down to Dora’s window. “How much money do you have?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t make the john pay up front?”
“Not wit’ them kind.”
I put a five-dollar bill into her shirt pocket. “You’re free to go. Get something to eat.”
“Ain’t I lucky?” she said, squeezing past me. Her body smelled of nicotine and rut and booze. She looked back at me, then took the bill from her pocket and scrunched it in her palm and threw it in the wind.
• • •
AT NOON, I went to Clete Purcel’s office on Main Street. The waiting room was empty, littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and orange rinds and a splayed sandwich with a half-moon bite taken out of it. Clete was sitting at the spool table under the beach umbrella on the concrete pad behind the office, reading the Advocate and drinking a bottle of Mexican beer and sucking on a salted lime. His green eyes were dulled over, as if smoke from a dirty fire were trapped inside them.
“Leaving the dock early?” I said.
“I thought about it.”
“Something happen?”
He flattened the wrinkles on the front page of the newspaper with his hand. “That little creep is killing people again.”
“The two guys who got it were probably hit men.”
“Hit men are sane. This shit-for-brains starts gunfights in crowded casinos.”
That was how Clete’s former girlfriend had died, although the round had not come from Smiley’s weapon.
“He could have taken out a witness,” I said. “He didn’t. She’s a hooker named Dora Thibodaux. Know her?”
“Works out of a dump south of Morgan City?”
“She laid one of the hit men. His name was Jerry Gemoats.”
Clete scraped up the newspaper and stuffed it into a trash can under the table. “Who cares?”
“The hooker seemed to think well of Wimple.”
“I bet he loved his mother, too. What was the name of the hit man again?”
“Jerry Gemoats.”
Clete straightened his back. “He was the go-to mechanic for any hits out of Miami. Somebody with serious money sent him here. Who was the other hitter?”
“We don’t know. The car they died in was registered to Gemoats.”
Clete went into his office and came back with a file folder. He dropped it onto the glass table and opened it. He tilted the beer to his mouth and chugged half the bottle, the foam sliding down the inside of the neck. I swallowed and tried to hide the knot in my throat, the sense of longing I could not get rid of. “You got a soda?”
“In the icebox.”
I went inside and came back out with a can of orange-tasting carbonated water I could barely drink. The sun was like an acetylene torch on the bayou. “What’s in the folder?”
