The man held his hands to the lower portion of his face, his brass knuckles shiny with the blood and saliva that drained through his fingers. Clete lifted the pipe like a baseball bat and swung it into the other Hispanic man's jaw, then across his back and rib cage. Both Hispanic men tried to shield their heads with their forearms and escape the blows raining down on them, but Clete followed them into the backyard, hitting them again and again, the pipe ringing in his palms.
"They're done! Jesus Christ! We're done!" Lou Coyne said. "You're gonna kill them guys! Hey, are you hearing me?"
Clete stumbled out of the backyard, dropping the pipe on the front sidewalk. The air smelled of smoke, perhaps from outdoor barbecue pits, and mist was blowing off an elevated highway in the distance. He staggered down the street toward a clapboard bar that glowed with the hazy iridescence of a pistol flare burning inside fog. Again, he thought he heard the downdraft of helicopter blades and the labored breath of people running, clutching at his arms, speaking words to him that made no sense.
Totally stoned, zoned, and shit-blown up the Mekong. I'm not going to make it, he thought.
Then, while a Miami P.D. helicopter with a searchlight roared by overhead, the loving hands of women who made him think of black angels guided him into the backseat of a car. Their lips were arterial-red, their perfume like that of an enclosed garden inside the car, their hands cool and gentle as they wiped his face and hair and the cuts in his scalp.
"What's the haps, ladies?" Clete said, and passed out.
chapter TWENTY
Clete arrived back in New Iberia the following evening on the Sunset Limited, ensconced in a Pullman bedroom with his flight bag and golf clubs, although he had little memory of being put aboard the train.
"These were black hookers?" I asked as I drove him to his cottage at the motor court.
"Except the woman driving. She was white. A beanpole with a corn bread accent, but definitely in charge," he replied. "She got on the cell phone and gave hell to this guy Lou Whatever."
"The pimp asked you if you were hooked up politically?"
"Yeah, that brings up another subject. Remember I told you Raphael Chalons had this televangelical character fronting points for his casino interests and you blew me off?"
"Vaguely."
"The dial-a-prayer number Babette gave me belongs to a TV huckster named Colin Alridge. He's the same guy who's working for Chalons. Babette said she and Lou Whatever and some other whores visited the casino in Lake Charles and met him. He looks like a college kid out of the 1940s. I think Babette creamed her pants when she shook his hand."
"Why should people be beating you up with chains because of Raphael Chalons's connection to a lobbyist?"
"I don't know," he replied. He was quiet a long time, lost in thought, his back and neck marbled with bruises. "There's one other thing I didn't tell you."
I looked at him.
"The white woman, the beanpole with corn fritters in her mouth? Before she and the black girls poured me into the Pullman, I'm pretty sure she said, 'Tell Dave and Jimmie Robicheaux I said hello.' What do you think of that, noble mon?"
Was the white woman Ida Durbin? There was no way to know. When Clete told me of his experience in Miami, he was still half-swacked on the drugs that the prostitute named Babette had probably dropped in his glass before she poured the rum punch into it.
I also wondered if the story about Raphael Chalons's connection with an evangelical political huckster had any relevance. If a political operative wired into the White House was on his payroll, Chalons's breeding would probably restrain him from revealing that fact at a formal dinner, but he would not care if someone else did. He was jaded, corrupt, sexually profligate, politically pragmatic, but not a hypocrite, a gentleman in the same way the Prince of Darkness is.
Friday morning Jimmie got back to town from New Orleans and I met him for lunch at Victor's Cafeteria.
"The white woman who saved Clete's butt said to tell you and me hello?" he said.
"That's what he says. But he was still half-loaded when he got off the train."
"She was a beanpole with a peckerwood accent?"
"Something like that." I was beginning to regret I had brought up the possibility that Ida Durbin was indeed alive and in Miami and hooked up with Lou Kale. "Jim, if this woman is Ida, she's better forgotten. Let the past slide."
"That from you? I've had her death on my conscience since 1958." He had stopped eating. His eyes glistened, and he coughed slightly into his napkin to hide his emotion.
"I've got a couple of calls in to Miami P.D. to check out the house where Clete got knocked around. Give me some time before you do something rash," I said.
"I need to go back over there," Jimmie said, picking up the check, his lunch unfinished.
The technical processes involving DNA identification are complicated and time-consuming. There is often a long waiting list at both federal and state laboratories, particularly in an era when large numbers of homicide and rape cases are appealed based on evidence that was gathered and stored years ago, before DNA identification was possible. But Mack Bertrand at our crime lab had pushed through the work on Honoria Chalons in less than four days. He called me at the office just before five on Friday.
"No match with the Baton Rouge serial killer, no match with anything in the national database," he said.
"I never thought the Baton Rouge guy did this," I said.
"What did you think?"
"Did the semen come from a relative?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"It speaks for itself," I replied.
"If you're talking about incest, this lab has no evidence of that." He paused a moment. "Dave, can I offer some advice?"
"What?"
"I'm not a fan of either Raphael or Valentine Chalons. But I think you're barking at the moon on this one."
"Thanks for your time."
"My wife and I are taking the kids to the Little League game tonight. Care to join us?"
"Tied up. But you're the best, Mack," I said.
I had learned long ago you can have all the friends you want when you're in tall cotton. But your real friends are the ones you meet during hard times, when you've blown out your doors and every sunrise comes to you like a testimony to personal failure. Mack Bertrand was a real friend.
It was Friday night and Molly was at a meeting of Pax Christi at Grand Coteau. I had deliberately stayed away from her since Doogie Dugas had arrested me on camera at my home and Val Chalons had used footage on his various news channels of Molly standing half-undressed in the bedroom doorway. She herself was undaunted by the experience and I suspect had long ago become inured to the wickedness that the socially respectable were capable of. But I did not want to see her hurt more than she already had been, and at the same time I wanted to see her terribly.
At sunset I took a long walk down Main, through the business district and out to the west side, where there is a neatly mowed green lot that is the only reminder of a smithy and wagonworks that was there when I was a child during World War II.
The wagonworks was a very old structure even then, its red paint cracked and faded by the elements, the wood planks shrunken and warped by the heat in the forge. The owner was Mr. Antoine, a small, wizened man who spoke beautiful French but little English. At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered the Emancipation, what they came to call "Juneteenth," and there were white people who had seen General Banks's Federal soldiers, twenty thousand of them, march through town in pursuit of the chivalric Confederate general, Alfred Mouton. But our only surviving Confederate veteran was Mr. Antoine.
He loved to regale us with tales of what he always referred to as " La Guerre. " He had served in Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign and had been with Jubal Early when Early had thrown twenty-five thousand men against the Union line just before Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Mr. Antoine's regiment was caught in a cornfield and blown into piles of gray and butternut rags by canister and grapeshot. But the point of Mr. Antoine's tale about the last days of the war was not the carnage, or the crows that pecked out the eyes of southern dead, or the snuffing sounds of feral hogs that would come at dusk. Instead, Mr. Antoine's story was about a fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama who found his regimental colors in the dust, tied them to a musket barrel, and mounted a terrified stray horse.