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LATER THAT AFTERN
OON Clete Purcel pulled into my driveway in the restored 1956 Cadillac he had bought the previous week. With its sleek lines and hand-waxed maroon paint job and chrome-spoked whitewall tires and leather interior, it made our contemporary designs look like shoe boxes with wheels. The top was down; two fishing rods were propped on the back seat. He stepped out on the gravel and removed a leaf from the hood and dropped it on the lawn as he might an injured moth. “Want to entertain the fish?”
“I’m meeting with the coroner at Iberia General,” I said.
“About that body y’all pulled out of the salt?”
“It’s in the paper?”
“Yeah,” he replied. He looked down the street at the Shadows—
a plantation home built in 1834—his hair freshly barbered, his face pink in the sun’s glow through the live oaks. “I need to tell you something.”
I knew the pattern. When Clete did something wrong, he headed for my house or office. I was his confessor, his cure-all, his bottle of aspirin and vitamin B, his hit of vodka Collins to sweep the spiders back into their nest. He was wearing pressed gray slacks and a fresh Hawaiian shirt and shined oxblood loafers. He had not come to fish.
“Anything going on?” I asked.
“Ten days ago I put a boat in by the train trestle over the Mermentau. Right at sunset. Nobody around. No wind. The water just right. The goggle-eye were starting to rise in the lily pads. Then I heard the train coming. A freight going about twenty-five miles an hour.”
Clete was not given to brevity. “Got it,” I said.
“It was a perfect evening, see. It’s kind of my private spot. So I was daydreaming and not thinking real sharp.”
“What are we talking about, Cletus?”
“I’m talking about the freight. It was wobbling and rattling, and the moon was rising, and about eight or nine cars went by, and then I saw a guy in white pants and a white shirt standing on the spine of an empty boxcar. There was blue trim on his collar and shirt pockets. Then the guy flew off the boxcar into the river. He must have hit in the middle or he would have broken his legs.”
“He was wearing a uniform?”
“Yeah.” Clete waited.
“What kind?” I said.
“The kind you see in a lot of Texas jails. He popped up from the water and looked right at me. Then he started swimming downstream.”
“You had your cell phone?”
“It was in the Caddy,” he said. There was a pause. “I wasn’t going to call it in, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t sure about anything. I couldn’t think. You know what those for-profit joints are like.”
“Let’s keep the lines straight, Clete. We can’t be sure he escaped from a for-profit jail. Or any kind of jail.”
“This is the way I saw it. Why dime a guy you don’t know the whole story on? I hate a snitch. I should have been born a criminal.”
“That’s what I’m saying. So what happened to the guy?”
“He waded through a canebrake and disappeared. So I wrote it off. Live and let live.”
“So why are you bothered now?”
“I did some googling and found out a guy who committed two homicides got loose from a joint outside Austin. That was eleven days ago. The guy is supposed to be a religious fanatic. Then there was the story in the Daily Iberian today about the woman you pulled out of the drink. There was nothing in the story about the cross. I got that from the reporter. Now I got this guy on my conscience.”
“What’s the name of the escaped inmate?”
