“Not me.”
“Adonis Balangie came to my apartment in the Quarter last night. He had two of his gumballs with him. He said either you get your head on straight or you get disappeared, and disappeared will be the least of it.”
“Straight about what?”
“Getting into the wrong bread box. I’m not talking about Penelope Balangie, either.”
“So who are you talking about?” I said, trying not to clear my throat before speaking.
He took a piece of notepaper from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Leslie Rosenberg, who evidently is his regular punch. He says you not only got it on with her, but you told her to quit the job he gave her. You know this broad?”
“She’s not a broad.”
“Excuse me. Did you pork this lady who probably graduated from Sophie Newcomb?”
“I’m not going to talk to you on this level.”
“Answer my question, Dave.”
“I don’t know. I was at her house. It was raining. I had some kind of blackout.”
“That’s convenient. I got to try that the next time I get caught milking through the fence.”
“Maybe I did.”
“Got it on?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember the rain and a voice that said, ‘I’ve waited for you a long time. I was born to be with you.’ ”
“Don’t do this to me, Dave. One of us has got to stay sane.”
“Then the voice said, ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ ”
He looked at me, an alcoholic shine in his eyes. “You mean like—”
“Yeah, a climax.”
“I hope she took snapshots. You can send them to Adonis. You know how to do it, big mon.”
“I don’t care about any of this, Clete. I may have shot a child in Henderson Swamp.”
I told him everything. His face drained. His voice sounded like a bucket of rust. His eyes were damp. “That guy Richetti is real, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he is,” I said.
“I’m going to bring this shit to an end.”
“It’s not that easy. You know it, too,” I said.
“What if I just take Mark Shondell off at the neck? What if I put his head on a spike?”
“You’re serious?”
“You weren’t hung upside down from a wrecker hook,” he said. “I can’t get that out of my head.”
“We don’t know that Richetti is working for Shondell.”
“Mark Shondell is putting the blocks to a teenage girl everybody has deserted, including her mother and stepfather. I say we cap him. I also say we cap anybody who gets in our way, starting with Adonis Balangie. In the meantime, you stay away from his punch, what’s-her-name?”
“You shouldn’t drink for the rest of the day. Let’s hammer down some bacon and eggs.”
He threw me his cell phone. “Call Victor’s. They’ll deliver. I need something from the car.” He went to his Caddy and came back with another beer. He twisted off the cap and sat down. “You’re not going to say anything?” he said.
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Dave, something political is going on with Shondell and Bobby Earl. Like Father Julian said. Maybe it’s like Hitler going into the Rhineland in 1936. Nobody stood up to him, so he decided to take Czechoslovakia and then Poland.”
“This is New Iberia.”
“Tell Huey Long that. Do you realize you just told me that maybe you shot a little girl? That we’re sitting here talking about it? We should have already shoved a twelve-gauge up Shondell’s ass.”
“I’m with you in whatever you want to do,” I said.
“Talk to the Jewish broad. Find out what’s going on. And keep your flopper on lockdown.”
“You’re talking about Leslie Rosenberg?”
His eyes went out of focus. Or maybe he deliberately crossed them. “Duh! What did you tell her that made her quit her job with Adonis?”
“I told her she deserved a better life.”
“Then you got it on?”
“I don’t remember.”
“No clue, huh?” he said. “What was the status of your pole when you got home?”
“Will you—”
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
I waited for him to start taking me apart again. Instead he poured his beer on the grass and set the bottle on the picnic table and stared at it. “Dave, we’ve got to get to the bottom of the business at Henderson Swamp. This isn’t us. There’s got to be an explanation. I’m about to have an aneurism here.”
I walked away and got in my truck and drove home, the steel grid on the drawbridge rattling under my tires.
Monday afternoon Carroll Leblanc came into my office without knocking, a clipboard in one hand. “Reptile blood,” he said.
I stood up, a fishhook in my windpipe. “You got the lab report?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The tech wasn’t real happy. Something about giving lab priority to the death of a snake.”
I sat back down and lowered my head into my hands, breathing slowly through my mouth. “Thanks, Carroll.”
“No problem. You all right?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t look like it.”
I sat up straight, dizzy, spots before my eyes. “Tell the lab I owe them one.”
“The less said about this stuff, the better.”
“I saw what I saw out there.”
“No, you didn’t. Nothing happened.”
I opened my desk drawer and took out the three slave marbles I’d found behind the shack. I rolled them on my blotter. “I don’t think finding these was a coincidence.”
“Don’t get back in your spaceship, Robo.”
“Can you call me Dave, please?”
“I’ll call you crazy if I hear any more of this.”
I looked through the glass in my door. A patrolman had hooked up a man with thick salt-and-pepper hair and was walking him down the hall. LeBlanc followed my eyes. “What?”
“That’s Marcel LaForchette.”
“Yeah, he pulled a knife on a guy in Clementine’s.”
“What’s Marcel doing at Clementine’s?” I said.
“Upgrading his lifestyle. How would I know? Stay out of it.”
“Nobody was hurt?”
“Ask the chamber of commerce guy he threatened. He dumped in his pants — literally, on his shoes.” LeBlanc’s eyes lingered on my face. “Why the look?”
“I don’t buy it.”
“What’s with you and LaForchette?”
“I could have been him.”
“I know where this is going,” LeBlanc said.
“Then you know more than I do.”
“You’re a laugh a minute, Robo. I mean Dave.”
I found Marcel Laforchette and the patrolman and a detective in an interview room at the end of the hallway. I talked with the detective outside, then asked if I could have a few minutes with Marcel. After the patrolman and detective were gone, I sat down across from Marcel at a steel table that was bolted to the floor. He was wearing a navy blue sport coat and pressed gray slacks and a red silk shirt and polished needle-nosed Tony Lama boots. His wrists were cuffed behind him, the ratchets hooked too tight, biting into the veins.
“You could be charged with aggravated battery, Marcel,” I said.
“Yeah, I deserve it. I don’t know what made me do that.”
“Neither does anyone else. The detective said you asked for segregation.”
“Yeah, I don’t like being around amateurs. I need to relax a bit, too, get some shut-eye, watch a little TV.”
“I got good news for you,” I said.
“Yeah?” He shifted in his chair, a flicker of pain in his face.
“The guy you threatened is a good guy. He figures you were just drunk, which you and I know was not the case.”
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“The guy says no harm, no foul.”
Marcel’s eyes searched in space, then came back to mine. “You getting off on this?”