AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Walking home after work, I saw Alafair and the screenwriter-producer Lou Wexl
er backing out of my driveway in his Lamborghini, the top down. Wexler braked and raised one hand high in the air. “Join us, sir.”
“For what?” I said.
“Dinner at the Yellow Bowl in Jeanerette,” he said.
“I left you a note,” Alafair said.
“Another time,” I said. “I may have to go back to the office tonight.”
“Roger that,” he said. He gave me a thumbs-up and drove away, his exhaust pipes throbbing on the asphalt. I saw Alafair try to turn around, her hair blowing. I didn’t have to go back to the office, and I felt guilty for having lied. I felt even worse for trying to make Alafair feel guilty.
I ate a cold supper on the back steps and watched the gloaming of the day, angry at myself for my inability to accept the times and the fact that Alafair had her own life to live and at some point I would have to let go of her and turn her over to the care of a man whom I might not like. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were sitting on our spool table, flipping their tails, checking out the breeze. The air was dense with the smell of the bayou, the way it smells after a heavy rain, and the light had become an inverted golden bowl in the sky, the cicadas droning in the trees. I heard someone walking through the leaves by the porte cochere.
“How’s it hanging, big mon?” Clete said.
There was no more welcome person in my life than Clete Purcel. He was the only violent, addicted, totally irresponsible human being I ever knew who carried his own brand of sunshine. “How you doin’, Cletus?”
“Is Alafair around?”
“She’s with some character named Lou Wexler.”
“I get the sense you don’t approve.”
“I don’t have a vote. What’s up?”
“I was researching these Hollywood guys. I don’t want to believe Tillinger is behind these killings.”
“These killings have nothing to do with you. Now give it a rest.”
“I should have called 911 when he bailed off that freight.”
“Enough.”
“All right,” he said. He sat down beside me and folded his hands. He looked at Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. “Something on your mind?”
“On my mind?”
“Yeah, something I can help with.”
How do you respond to a statement like that? “I spent the last two days talking to people who knew Joe Molinari.”
“The guy in the tree?”
“He probably weighed a hundred and twenty pounds and never hurt a soul in his life. Somebody drove a sharpened walking cane through his heart.”
“You’re getting the blue meanies.”
That was a term from the old days when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the French Quarter, and later, when we were partners in Homicide. “Blue meanies” was our term for depression, or living daily with human behavior at its worst. The blue meanies not only ate your lunch, they chewed you up and spat you out and ground you into the sidewalk.
“How do you read this stuff?” I said.
Clete thought for a moment. “The guy is posing his victims. He might be a photographer. He knows a lot about history and religion and symbolism. He’s full of rage, but he lets it out only in controlled situations. He’s the kind of white-collar schnook who lives alone and works eight to five in an office, then goes home and plays with a power saw in a basement that has blacked-out windows.”
Clete’s description made me shudder, not because of his detail but because he was seldom wrong when it came to a homicide investigation.
“That’s why Tillinger bothers me,” he said. “I found out he was in a drama club in high school. He was also an amateur photographer and dug David Koresh.”
