"I'd like to get his autograph. Hey, I'm serious," he said.
He got out of the truck, trying to suppress his grin, and followed me onto the porch. A white-jacketed black houseman answered door, a broom and dustpan in his hands.
"Is Mr. Lejeune home?" I said.
"Took his guests to the country club a half hour ago. I'm still cleaning up," the houseman said.
I opened my badge. "Did you receive a phone call in the last ten minutes?" I said.
"Yes, suh, I sure did," he answered.
"From whom?"
"My wife. She tole me to bring home a loaf of bread."
On the way to the country club Clete was still grinning.
"Why is all this funny?" I said.
"I miss the Mob. Shaking up a bunch of Kiwanians just doesn't cut it."
"You're too much, Cletus."
In that mood we pulled into the tree-bowered entrance of a small tennis and golf club outside the city limits. It wasn't hard to find Castille Lejeune. He and his friends were having drinks under a pavilion and driving golf balls on a lighted practice range dotted in the distance with moss-hung live oaks that smoked in the mist. The range looked hand clipped, immaculate, with neither a leaf nor windblown scrap of paper on it.
The pavilion seemed as isolated and disconnected from the outside world as the golf range was from the trash-strewn roads beyond the hedges that bordered the club. Deferential black waiters brought Lejeune and his friends their buttered rum drinks on silver trays; a Wurlitzer jukebox next to the bar played Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey recordings; a rotund, cherry-cheeked man was speaking affectionately about "an old nigger" who had worked for his family, as though the waiters would take no offense at his language.
We locked the truck, with the twelve-gauge inside, and walked past the clay tennis courts, all of them deserted, the wind screens rattling in the breeze, just as Castille Lejeune whacked a ball off a tee and sent it downrange in a high, beautiful arc. The people at theta bles or teeing up from wire buckets filled with golf balls showed no recognition of our presence. Lejeune positioned himself, swung his driver back, and once again lifted the ball surgically off the tee, high into the darkness, a testimony to his health, the power in his wrists and shoulders, and the maturity and skill he brought to his game.
Clete used a toothpick to spear a peeled shrimp from a large bowl of crushed ice on the bar, dipping it in hot sauce, inserting it in his mouth. His badge holder was stuck in his belt, mine in the breast pocket of my sports coat. But still no one looked at us.
"Give me a Jack straight up with a beer back," he said to the bartender.
"Right away, suh," the bartender replied.
"That's a joke," Clete said.
Lejeune's friends were not people who had to contend with the world. They may not have owned it, nor would they take any part of it through the grave, but while they were alive they could lay rental claims on a very large portion of it.
"Mr. Lejeune, we'd like for you to come with us to the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said.
"Why should I do that, Mr. Robicheaux?" he replied, addressing the ball on his tee, his feet spread, his thighs flexed tightly.
"We need you to answer some questions about the murder of Dr. Samuel Bernstine and the fact Will Guillot has been blackmailing you about your molestation of your daughter when she was a child," I said.
In the silence I could hear leaves scraping across the surface of the tennis court. Lejeune seemed to gaze at an isolated thought in the center of his mind, then he sighted downrange and smacked the ball in a straight line, like a rifle shot, so that it did not strike earth again until it was almost to the oak trees smoking in the electric lights.
"You need to talk to my attorney, Mr. Robicheaux, not to me," he said.
"Did you hear what I said? We're investigating a homicide, the second one that happens to be connected with your name. We don't call attorneys to make appointments," I said.
He turned and dropped his driver in an upended leather golf bag.
He wore a silk scarf around his neck, as an aviator might, the ends tucked inside a sweater with small brown buttons on it. In the corner of my eye I saw two security guards walking from the club's main building and a man at the bar punching in numbers on a cell phone.
Lejeune began chatting with a woman seated at a table as though I were not there. Then I started to lose it.
"You had Junior Crudup beaten to death," I said. "You turned your daughter's childhood into a sexual nightmare. You sell liquor to drunk drivers and probably dope and porn in New Orleans. You think you're going to walk away from all this?"
"Mr. Robicheaux, I don't know if you're a vindictive man, or simply well-meaning and incompetent. The truth is probably somewhere in between. But you need to leave, sir, to let this thing go and give yourself some peace," he replied.
His detachment and his pose as a chivalric and charitable patriarch were magnificent. As Clete had always said, some people have no handles on them. Castille Lejeune was obviously one of them, and I felt like a fool.
Then Clete, who all night had been the advocate of reason and restraint, stepped forward, his thick arm and shoulder knocking against mine. "You were a fighter pilot in the Crotch?" he said.
"In the what?'" Lejeune said.
"I was in the Corps, too. Sunny "Nam, class of '69, smokin' grass and stompin' ass with Mother Green's Mean Machine. See?" He removed his utility cap and pointed to the globe and anchor emblem inked on the cloth. "We used to have a Bed Check Charley, but he was a guy who'd start lobbing blooker rounds in on us at about oh-two-hundred so nobody could get any sleep. Do you have any autographed photos? No shit, it'd mean a lot."
"Sir, I don't ask this for myself, but there're ladies present. Let's don't have this kind of scene here," Lejeune said.
"I can dig it," Clete said, putting his cap back on, his eyes cocked up in his head as though he were meditating upon a metaphysical consideration. "The problem is some grease balls kidnapped and tortured a police officer and pissed all over his face while he was blind folded. So how about taking the corn bread out of your mouth? It's getting to be a real drag."
"I apologize for any offense I may have given you," Lejeune said. "Tell me something, that badge you have hanging from your belt? I have the feeling you're not a police officer."
I could see the heat climbing into Clete's face. "Dave, hook up this prick. Work out the legal stuff later," he said.
The situation was deteriorating rapidly now. Two security guards had just walked into the pavilion and were standing behind us, awkward, unsure what they should do next. I turned so they could see my badge. "It's all right. Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said.
They tried to be polite, their eyes avoiding mine. I felt sorry for them. They made little more than minimum wage, paid for their own uniforms, and possessed no legal powers. They waited for Castille Lejeune to tell them what to do.
But I raised my finger before he could speak. "We're leaving," I said.
"Screw that," Clete said.
Two cruisers from the St. Mary Parish Sheriff's office had pulled into the parking lot and three uniformed deputies, one black, two white, were walking toward us, their faces filled with purpose. I slipped my hand around the thickness of Clete's arm and tightened my grip. "We're done here," I said.
But it was too late. The three deputies went straight for Clete, with the collective instinct of pack hounds who had just gotten a sniff of a feral hog. At first he didn't resist. When they walked him toward a cruiser, he was seemingly in control of himself again, grinning, full of fun, back in his familiar role of irreverent trickster, ready to let it all play out.
Maybe I should have stayed out of it. But I didn't.
"Let's slow it down a little bit," I said to the black deputy, a towering man with lieutenant's bars on his collar.