“It’s all right,” I said.
“You’re stand-up, Robo.”
No, just dumb, I thought.
Carroll drove away. Clete and I walked along a partially destroyed levee. The sawgrass was flattening in the wind, the sky yellow, the air filled with salt spray. “LeBlanc’s dirty,” Clete said.
“His daughter is messed up. He’s going through a bad time.”
“Quit looking for good in people when it’s not there, Dave.”
Maybe he was right. Anyway, I knew better than to argue with Clete. We walked in silence until the levee made a bend and we could see a large house on stilts out in deep water. A tug and a pontoon plane were anchored by the pilings. Clete looked through his binoculars. “I can’t believe it.”
“What?” I said.
“Shondell is on the deck with Adonis and Penelope Balangie. They’ve been jerking us around from the jump.”
“Maybe they’re negotiating.”
“They’re scum, Dave, including Penelope Balangie. She’s taken you over the hurdles six ways from breakfast.”
“You shot at Shondell and the El Salvadoran, didn’t you?” I said.
“So what?”
“I didn’t get on your case, did I?”
“Of course you did. You’re always on my case.”
“Clete, no one is ever going to believe the events you and I have been privy to except Father Julian and Leslie Rosenberg. We can’t be fighting with each other.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No, you’re not hearing me. Maybe it’s all going to end here.”
His green eyes looked as hard as glass, unblinking even in the wind. “What do you mean ‘it’s all going to end’?”
“I think we’re outside of time now. I think the big secrets aren’t secrets at all. We turn them into secrets by denying their reality. Shondell is one of those guys who will destroy the earth. He’s the essence of evil. I wish you had smoked both him and the general.”
“This isn’t like you, noble mon.”
“Explain Gideon to me.”
“I think LSD is involved,” he said.
“You’re taking yourself over the hurdles, Clete.”
He put the binoculars in my hands. “You call the play. I say bust ’em or dust ’em.”
“There is no busting Mark Shondell.”
“Maybe you’re finally seeing the light.”
“No cowboy stuff. Got it?”
Clete began tapping the air. “I’m the one got hung upside down over a fire at Shondell’s orders. That guy is going to have dinner with the crabs.”
I looked through the binoculars. Penelope and Adonis and Shondell were talking on the deck. Penelope’s expression had the melancholy solemnity of the women in Botticelli’s paintings. I wanted to travel across the water and put my mouth on hers. I wanted to touch her breasts and hair and put myself inside her. Clete was right. Her presence in my life wasn’t nearly over.
I handed Clete the binoculars. “Carroll and I will knock on the door of the stilt house tonight.”
“Y’all will knock on the door?”
“We have to do it by the numbers, Clete. We don’t have a warrant or probable cause.”
“Why at night?”
“Some of his men will be high. They’ll also feel safe.”
“At night they feel safe?” he said.
“They go back to the womb.”
“No matter what you say, this is about Penelope Balangie,” Clete said. “You think you still have a chance with her.”
“Wrong,” I said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
He walked toward the motel, his coat blowing, one hand clamped on his porkpie hat. I had treated him in a moralistic fashion and had indicated that his lack of a policeman’s badge made him secondary to a deeply flawed lawman like Carroll LeBlanc. But Clete was wired and determined to have justice for the psychological damage done to him in the Keys; he was also extremely dangerous when he took revenge on misogynists and child abusers. Plus, we didn’t know where Johnny and Isolde were, and bullets don’t care about the targets they find.
Chapter Thirty-five
By mid-afternoon Clete was out of his funk and concentrated on our objective. He called the airboat pilot who had given him information about Shondell and asked him to meet us in a café ten miles up the road. I told Carroll to keep his eyes on Shondell’s stilt house. The airboat pilot was a Cajun from Houma who had lost a leg in the propeller of his father’s airboat when he was twelve. He had intense brown eyes and a narrow unshaved face that made me think of an unhusked coconut. His name was Dallas Landry. He said he had seen no sign of a young couple matching the description of Johnny and Isolde.
“How about the guys on the tug?” I said. “You talk to them at all?”
“They ain’t the kind of guys you talk to,” he said.
“How many guys are there?” Clete asked.
“Four or five. Lots of ink on both arms. They got women wit’ ’em, too.”
“Hookers?” Clete said.
“They ain’t from the convent.”
“You’ve been very helpful, Dallas,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“Mr. Mark had a guy there a couple of times. A lawyer, maybe. They was laughing about Adonis Balangie. They said they was gonna take everyt’ing he’s got. I pretended I didn’t hear nothing. He’s got a five-hundred-foot yacht about two miles out in the Gulf. He’s got sailboats on it.”
There was another question I wanted to ask him. He wasn’t the kind of man we euphemistically call a “confidential informant,” many of whom are motivated by aggrandizement or fear or a desire to be accepted or to feel important. He was taking considerable risk, the least of which was loss of his job.
“Why’d you come forward, Dallas?” I said.
He stared at his coffee cup. “Mr. Mark bothers me.”
“In what way?” I said.
“I ain’t got a way of putting it. It’s the way he looks at them young girls. I ain’t seen him put a hand on them. But I seen the way he looks. Somet’ing else, too.” He knotted his fingers.
“Go on,” I said.
“He got somet’ing dark in him, Mr. Robicheaux.”
Just then Carroll LeBlanc came through the café entrance. “What’s going on with you guys?” he said.
“You’re supposed to be watching the stilt house,” Clete said.
“I didn’t know where y’all were,” Carroll said. He glanced at Dallas Landry. “Who are you?”
“I run an airboat service,” Dallas said.
“Oh yeah, Clete told me.”
“Walk outside with me,” Clete said to Carroll.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Carroll said. “What the hell is going on?”
Clete went outside by himself and got in his Caddy.
“See you around, Mr. Robicheaux,” Dallas said.
“You, too,” I said.
Carroll sat down at the table. I wanted to take him apart.
“I saw Johnny Shondell, so cool your jets, Dave,” he said. “I couldn’t get cell service, so I motored on up the road.”
“You’re sure it was Johnny?”
“He was standing on Shondell’s deck, wearing shades and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked pretty relaxed.”
“You’ve got beer on your breath,” I said.
“You want me to bag ass, I’ll understand.”
“Get your act together, Carroll,” I said. “I’ll see you at the motel.”
“You trying to hurt me?” he said.
I went outside and got in the Caddy. The top was up, the hand-waxed pink paint job sprinkled with leaves from the oak tree overhead.
“You don’t look too hot,” Clete said.
“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known, Clete,” I replied.
He started the engine, an unlit Lucky Strike hanging from his mouth. “Sometimes you truly perplex me, noble mon.”