Chad Patin had tried to kill me with a shotgun blast fired from the freezer truck. But as I looked at the images on Helen’s computer screen, I could feel no enmity toward him. When he called me in the middle of the night from Des Allemands, begging for help, I discounted much of what he said, particularly his rant about a cabal of some kind that controlled events in the lives of those at the bottom of the food chain. Also, his mention of a mysterious figure called Angel or Angelle and his description of someone dying inside the
iron maiden seemed the stuff of drug-induced psychosis. But I had been selective in listening to Chad Patin. He’d said he transported narcotics and prostitutes from Mexico into the United States. He also indicated he had abandoned his charges in a locked truck and perhaps left them to die of suffocation. Those were statements I believed. He admitted he had tried to kill me and in the same breath asked for money so he could get out of the country. In his mind, the request was perfectly reasonable. I had acted incredulously, but in reality, his point of view was one that people in law enforcement deal with every day. The real problem was not Chad Patin. The real problem lay in my discounting his story about a mysterious island where modern-day people made use of a torture instrument out of medieval Europe.
Helen was tilted back in her swivel chair, chewing on a hangnail, staring at her computer and the frozen image of Chad Patin’s remains on the boat deck. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“Why nobody took the ring off him?” I said.
“
That
and the fact that he was dumped overboard. Didn’t they learn anything after they put Blue Melton over the side in a block of ice?”
“Maybe they didn’t put him in the water. Maybe he was running and somebody popped him with a couple of .223 rounds, maybe from an AR-15 or M16. He fell off the boat, and they couldn’t find him in the dark.”
“You buy that stuff about an island and a torture chamber on it?”
“Patin was reporting something he heard on a tape. Maybe the tape was bogus, something excerpted from a slasher film. Who knows? Somebody fried Patin’s apartment with a flamethrower. That’s a tough act to follow. The bigger problem for me is this person Angel or Angelle. The notion of a cabal is too much like the New World Order or the Trilateral Commission.”
“You don’t believe in conspiracies?”
“Not the kinds that have formal names.”
“Was that a porn film I heard when I called you?”
“Not exactly.”
“You and Clete were watching an old Doris Day movie?”
“Give it a break, Helen. Clete is going through a bad time.”
“So am I. It’s called doing my job. Does he have somebody new working in his office?”
“She’s a temp.”
“What’s her name?”
“You made a crack about a porn film. Varina Leboeuf is probably extorting her lovers. Clete got involved with her.”
“Don’t change the subject. What’s the name of the temp?”
I got up from my chair and opened the door to leave. “Cut Clete a little slack. He’ll deliver. He always does. He’s the best cop either one of us ever knew.”
“I want to meet her.”
“Why?”
“You know why, Pops. Believe it or not, we’re on the same side. But you two guys don’t get to write the rules,” she said.
C
LETE CALLED ME
an hour later. “I’m not on those memory cards. But a lot of other guys are,” he said. “A couple of them are insider contractors who got in on the big bucks rebuilding New Orleans. I recognize a couple of shysters and oil guys, and then there were a few guys I never saw before. Anyway, I don’t see any big revelations. Actually, I feel like going outside and puking. I’m not up to this stuff.”
“She’s blackmailing people. You don’t call that a revelation?”
“Maybe she’s just covering her ass.”
“Great choice of words. Listen to yourself.”
“Maybe she’s got a fetish. Who’s perfect? Anyway, she left me out of it.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“What?”
“You’re going back for seconds is what.”
“So she’s a little weird. That doesn’t make her the Lucrezia Borgia of South Louisiana.”
“What does it take? How bad do you have to get hurt before you see what you’re doing to yourself?”
“Maybe I still like her. The apartment manager in Lafayette must have told her I was in her place. But she didn’t dime me.”
“Most extortionists don’t call the cops to report the theft of their blackmail materials.”
“Dave, you’re crucifying me for something I haven’t done. I didn’t say I was going to get it on with Varina again. I was just saying nobody is all good or all bad. Look, I’m burning this stuff and forgetting about it. I wish I’d never seen it. I wish I hadn’t gotten in the sack with her. I wish I hadn’t accidentally killed a mamasan and her children in Vietnam. I wish I hadn’t flushed my career with NOPD. My whole life is based on the things I wish I hadn’t done. What else do you want me to say?”
“I think Pierre and Varina and Alexis Dupree are a tighter unit than they let on. They might hate one another, but they’re all in the same lifeboat.”
“Neither of us knows that,” he replied.
“Chad Patin’s remains just showed up in the belly of a hammerhead shark a guy caught south of Grand Isle. Lose the charade with Varina. She knows you’re a kindhearted guy, and she used you.”
“Why don’t you show some fucking respect?”
“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I’m supposed to stand around with my hands in my pockets while other people mess up your head?”
“Say that about Patin again?”
“There were two rifle slugs in the remains. He was probably trying to escape from his abductors when they popped him. He told me about an island run by people who made a tape of a guy being squeezed to death inside an iron maiden. I think he was probably telling me the truth. Wake up, Cletus. Compared to what we’re dealing with, Bix Golightly is the Dalai Lama.”
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“You know all that stuff you hear about getting it on with a young woman so you can feel young again?”
“What about it?”
“It works fine. Until you come out of the shower the next morning and look in the mirror and see a mummy looking back at you.”
C
LETE HUNG UP
his desk phone and gazed out the back window at the bayou. A black man seated on an inverted bucket was fishing with a cane pole in the shade of the drawbridge. Water hyacinths grew thickly along the banks, and on the far side was the old gray hospital and convent that had been converted into business offices, all of it shadowed by giant live oaks. The wind was up and the moss was straightening in the trees and the oak leaves were tumbling on the manicured lawn. Clete rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye and felt a great weariness that seemed to have no origin. He lit his Zippo lighter and placed it in the center of an ashtray and, with a pair of tweezers, held the memory cards he had retrieved from Varina Leboeuf’s property over the flame.
He had left his office door open. He failed to notice that Gretchen Horowitz had returned from the errands he had sent her on. She tapped on the doorjamb before entering his office. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, but I heard your conversation,” she said.
He watched the second memory card curl and blacken in the flame of his Zippo. He dropped it into the ashtray. “What about it?” he asked.
“I wish you would trust me more.”
“About what?”
“Everything. If you trusted me, maybe I could help.”
“You’re a kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about, no matter how much you’ve been around.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a kid. That’s what we all want to be. That’s why we screw up our lives, always trying to be something we’re not.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that. I don’t like what this woman is doing to you.”
“Did you get the mail?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to FedEx in Lafayette?”
“Yes.”
“Then you did your job. We’re done on this subject.”
“Can I have the rest of the afternoon off?”
“To do what?”
She leaned down on his desk. Her shoulders were too big for her shirt, her upper arms taut with muscle. The violet tint of her eyes seemed to deepen as she looked into his face. “Personal business.”
“I think you should hang around.”
“I want to buy a vehicle for myself. Maybe a secondhand pickup.”
“Stay away from Varina Leboeuf,” he said.
“How about taking your own advice? You’re unbelievable.”
He watched her walk out the front door into the brightness of the day, a cute olive-drab cap tilted on her head, her wide-ass jeans stretched tight on her bottom, her tote bag swinging from her shoulder.
T
HREE HOURS LATER
, Alafair’s cell phone rang. “Are you working on your novel right now?” Gretchen asked.
“I’ve finished the galleys on the first one. I’ve started a new one,” Alafair replied.
“What’s it about?”
“I’m not sure. I never am. I make it up each day. I never see more than two scenes ahead.”
“You don’t make an outline?”
“No, I think the story is written in the unconscious. You discover it a day at a time. At least that’s the way it seems to work for me.”
“I’ll buy you dinner if you drive me to a couple of car lots,” Gretchen said. “I took a cab to three but didn’t find anything interesting. I don’t want to waste the rest of the day waiting on more cabs.”
“Dave says you tore up Pierre Dupree and two other guys with a blackjack.”
“Shit like that happens sometimes.”
“Where are you?”
Alafair picked up Gretchen at a car lot out by the four-lane. She was standing on the corner, wearing dull red cowboy boots, her jeans stuffed into the tops, cars whizzing by her. She pulled open the passenger door and got inside. “Do the drivers around here drop acid before they get in their automobiles?” she said.
“What kind of car are you looking for?” Alafair asked.
“Something that’s cheap with a hot engine.” Gretchen gave directions to a car lot on the edge of town.
“You know a lot about cars?” Alafair said.
“A little. But forget about that. Clete told me you were number one in your class at Stanford Law.”
“There’s no official rating of graduates at Stanford, but I had a four-point GPA. My adviser said if I was ranked, I’d probably be first in my class.”
“You were born in a grass hut? You make me feel like a basket case. I’m sending in my application forms to the University of Texas. I think you have to be interviewed to get into the film program. I’m a little nervous about that.”
“Why should you be nervous?”
“Because I’ve always had a tendency of sending certain kinds of signals to men when I wanted something from them. Like maybe they could get into my pants if things went right for me. I pretended to myself that wasn’t what I was doing, but it was. I’d find a middle-aged guy who couldn’t control where his eyes went and home in on him.”
“Stop talking about yourself like that. If you have to go to Austin for an interview, I’ll go with you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Gretchen, talent doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s background or education. Did you ever see
Amadeus
? It’s the story of Mozart and his rivalry with Antonio Salieri. Salieri hated Mozart because he thought God had given this great talent to an undeserving idiot. Talent isn’t earned, it’s given. It’s like getting hit by lightning in the middle of a wet pasture. People don’t sign up for it.”
“If I could talk like you.”
“I told you to quit demeaning yourself. You’re the kind of person writers steal lines from. What kind of people do you think make movies? Most of them belong in detox or electroshock. The rest are narcissists and nonpathological schizophrenics. That’s why Los Angeles has more twelve-step meetings than any other county in the United States. Can you see your local Kiwanis Club making
Pulp Fiction
?”
“I’ve got to write that down.”
“No, you don’t. You have better lines in your own head.”
“I’m one of the people you just mentioned?”
“Anybody can be normal. Count your blessings,” Alafair said.
She turned in to a used-car lot that, only two weeks earlier, had been a cow pasture. The car seller was a notorious local character by the name of T. Coon Bassireau. His business enterprises had ranged from burial insurance to car-title loans to storefront counseling centers that billed Medicaid to treat street people who had to be taught the names of their illnesses. He also patented a vitamin tonic that contained 20 percent alcohol and was guaranteed to make the consumer feel better. He swindled pensioners out of their savings in a Mexican biotech scam and once dumped a bargeload of construction debris in a pristine swamp. But the big score for T. Coon came in the form of deteriorating train tracks across southern Louisiana. Whenever there was a freight derailment, particularly one involving tanker cars, he and his brother, a liability lawyer, distributed T-shirts to people in the neighborhoods along the tracks. The message printed on the back read:
HAVE TOXIC SMELLS IN YOUR HOUSE FROM THE TRAIN WRECK? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A LARGE CASH SETTLEMENT. CALL T. COON BASSIREAU. T. COON IS YOUR FRIEND
. The 800 number was emblazoned in red on the front and back.
He stood proudly under the vinyl banner that stretched across his new car lot. Half a dozen American flags, their staffs speared into the ground, popped in the breeze. A battery-lit portable sign that read
WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS
glittered by the entranceway. T. Coon wore sideburns that flared like grease pencil on his cheeks, and a Stetson and a shiny magenta shirt with pearl snap buttons and a Stars and Bars belt buckle as big as the bronze plate on a heliograph. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots, a man at peace with both Caesar and God.
Gretchen walked past him without speaking and examined the two rows of junker cars and trucks T. Coon had assembled in the pasture. “You ladies want to go for a test drive?” he said. “You can do anyt’ing you want here. Just ax. For ladies like y’all, I’ll lower my price any day of the week and twice on Sunday and t’ree times on
Monday.” He crossed his heart. “If I’m lying, dig me up and spit in my mout’.”