"Who was that?" I asked.
"The Lafayette sheriff. An electrical contractor by the name of Herbert Vidrine was pulled out of his house at around six-thirty this morning and worked over in his backyard," she said.
She looked down at the yellow legal pad on her desk, widening her eyes, as though she could not quite assimilate what she had just heard and written down. "By 'pulled out," I mean just that. His attacker was wearing work gloves of some kind and grabbed Vidrine by the mouth like he was picking up a bowling ball," she said. "He swung him around in a circle and threw him into the side of a garbage truck. Vidrine is in Our Lady of Lourdes now. A neighbor got the tag number of the attacker's car. A lavender Cadillac convertible. Guess who it belongs to?"
"I just talked to Clete on the phone. He's not coming in," I said.
"The electrical contractor is too scared to file charges. But Clete's not going to use Iberia Parish as his safe house while he goes around kicking people's asses."
I nodded.
The heat went out of her face. "What's the score on this electrical contractor?" she said.
"He's the guy who installed bad wiring in my house. He works for Will Guillot."
"I'm fed up with the stuff, Dave. Clean it up or you and Clete can start making your own plans," she said.
I took the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette and hit a rainstorm just outside of town. By the time I got to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital the streets were flooding. I ran past a row of blooming camellia bushes into the side entrance of the hospital and asked at the nurse's station on the second floor for directions to Herbert Vidrine's room.
"Three rooms past the elevator, on your left," the nurse said.
I thanked her and started down the hall. Then I stopped and went back to the station. I opened my badge holder. "How's Mr. Vidrine doing?" I asked.
"A concussion and a broken arm. But he's doing all right," the nurse replied. She was young and had clean features and brown hair that was clipped on her neck.
"Has anyone else been in to see him?"
"Not since I've been here. I came on at eight A.M.," she said.
"Could I use your typewriter?" I said.
I had taken a fiction-writing course when I was an English education major at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. I hoped my old prof, Lyle Williams, would be proud of the letter I was now composing. I typed rather than signed a name at the bottom, folded and put the letter in an envelope the nurse gave me, then printed Herbert Vidrine's name on the outside.
"Would you wait ten minutes, then deliver this to Mr. Vidrine's room?" I said.
"I don't know if I should get involved in this," she replied.
I placed the envelope on her desk. "You'd be helping out the good guys," I said.
Vidrine was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, one arm in a cast, easing a teaspoon of Jell-O past a severely swollen bottom lip.
"How are you, Herbert?" I said.
He put his spoon back in a bowl that rested on his bed tray. "You're Iberia Parish. What are you doing here?" he said.
"We're looking for the guy who hurt you but on different charges," I said, laying my raincoat and hat on a chair.
"Maybe you're here to rub salt in a wound, too," he said.
"You burned my house down, partner. But I'm like you, I'm a drunk. I can't carry resentments. Did you ever go back to meetings?"
His eyes left mine. Even though he was a hard-bodied man, he looked small in the bed, his spoon clutched in a childlike fashion. "I never had that big a drinking problem. It was just when I was married," he said.
"The man who attacked you didn't have the right to do what he did," I said.
He frowned and ran his tongue over the swelling in his bottom lip. "Just leave me alone," he said.
"One day you're going to have to do a Fifth Step on the injury you caused me and my family. My father built that house in the Depression with his own hands. My second wife was murdered in it. Her blood was in the wood," I said.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Maybe you are," I said. I put my business card on his nightstand. "I think you have a lot of information about the dealings of some bad people, Herbert. Why take their bounce?"
"I haven't done anything wrong," he replied.
I drummed my fingers on top of the chair where my raincoat rested and looked out the window at an oak tree whipping in the wind, its leaves shredding high in the air. Then I picked up my raincoat and left, just as the nurse entered with the letter I had typed at the nurse's station.
"This was left for you, Mr. Vidrine," I heard her say behind me.
I waited five minutes, then reentered Vidrine's room. "I forgot my hat," I said, picking it up from the chair.
The letter I had written lay unfolded on top of his bed tray. He was staring into space, his expression disjointed, like a man at a bus stop who has watched the bus's doors close in his face and the bus drive away without him.
The letter I had typed at the nurse's station read as follows:
Herbert,
Sorry you got your ass stomped by that queer bait we had trouble with at the cafe in Jeanerette. But if you can't deal with a fat shit like that, I don't need you on the job. Take this as your official notice of termination. Also be advised you are forfeiting all fees due on uncompleted work.
Will Guillot
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"Yeah, there is. You want to know about Sunbelt Construction?"
"Yeah, what's up with these guys?"
"They got connections with gangsters in New Orleans."
"That's not real specific."
"Maybe they're selling dope. I'm not sure. But Will Guillot is going to take over the company. He's got something on the old man."
"CastilleLeJeune?"
"Yeah, him. The war hero."
"What does Guillot have on him?"
"I don't know. I asked him once and all he said was, "I finally got the goods on both him and that cunt." I asked him which cunt he meant. He told me it wasn't my business."
"Ever hear the name of Junior Crudup?"
"No," he said.
It had stopped raining outside. The sky was gray, the sun buried in a cloud like a wet flame, the hospital lawn blown with camellia petals. "That's all you got for me, Herbert? It's not too much," I said.
"I'm an electrician. People don't confess their sins to me."
"See you around," I said.
"One time I told Will Fox Run was a beautiful place. He said, "Don't let it fool you. All these places got a nigger in the woodpile." I wasn't sure what he meant, though." He tilted his head inquisitively, waiting for me to speak, as if somehow we were old friends.
So Vidrine repeated a racist remark that confirms what you already knew," Helen said in her office an hour later. "Maybe a convict was killed on the Lejeune plantation fifty years ago. Or maybe not. We didn't find a body, bwana."
"That's the point," I said. "How could Will Guillot be blackmailing Castille Lejeune about the death of Junior Crudup? Guillot has something else on him."
"I'm glad we cleared that up. Now get out of here," she replied.
I couldn't blame Helen for her feelings. The real issues were the murders of the daiquiri-store operator and Fat Sammy Figorelli, and in both instances we had no viable suspects. In the meantime I had gotten myself abducted, gotten deeply involved in a murder case from a half century ago, and had helped bring Max Coll to our community.
As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, the axiom "keep it simple" was supposed to guide my daily life.
What a joke.
But Helen herself had said the real problem lay in the fact we were dealing with Dagwood and Blondie. Amateurs hide in plain sight. They also do not feel guilty about the misdeeds they commit. They attend church, Kiwanis meetings, belong to the Better Business Bureau, support every self-righteous moral cause imaginable, and float like helium balloons right over whole armies of cops looking for miscreants in off-track betting parlors, triple-X motels, and crack houses.