Clete pitched the ball to Homer, but the boy let the bat stay on his shoulder and watched the ball drop into the dirt.
“Strike one,” Penny said.
Clete took off his fielder’s glove and walked to the porch. He curled the glove into a cone and tucked it between Penny’s thigh and the railing. “There’s Little League ball in Jennings.”
“Reach me those napkins in my pack, will you?” Penny said.
Clete didn’t answer. Penny said something with his mouth full of meat.
“What’s that you say?” Clete asked.
Penny cleared his throat and laughed. “I thought that perfumed cunt from the welfare office would be here. Instead I get you.”
“I’ll be running along now.”
“Want a thigh?” Penny raised the chicken and the grease-pooled foil to Clete’s face.
Clete walked to the Caddy, a sound in his ears like tank treads clanking or the mewing of barnyard animals caught inside an unbearable flame. He bent down to Homer. “I’ll be back to see you, pal. I’m on your side. So are Miss Carolyn and Mr. Smith.”
The boy was not listening. His eyes were wide, his bottom lip trembling, as he stared at his father.
Clete could remember little of driving back to New Iberia. Nor could he remember when he’d had a sadder day or a greater sense of foreboding.
That afternoon Helen caught me in the corridor. “In my office, Dave.”
I followed her inside and shut the door.
“The prosecutor is on my butt about the Dartez investigation,” she said.
“He doesn’t like how it’s going?”
“He thinks you should be on the desk.”
“Remind me of that, come the next election.”
Helen was silhouetted against the window, her face covered with shadow. I didn’t know if I had made her angry or not.
“I made a mistake assigning Labiche to the case,” she said. “He wants your job.”
Finally, I thought.
“I talked to a couple of people in Dade and Broward Counties. They said he took freebies in Liberty City, but that’s about all they knew of.”
“Any vice cop who’ll take freebies will take money.”
“In this instance there’s no evidence of that,” she said.
“Come on, Helen, if a cop is dirty, he can be blackmailed. He can also be killed.”
“All right,” she said, giving up.
She had gone to extraordinary lengths for me many times; I took no pleasure in her concession. “Helen, I think everything we’re talking about is much bigger than Labiche or me or T. J. Dartez or Jimmy Nightingale. I think it has to do with narcotics, with all the trafficking that starts in Florida and comes straight down I-10 into our midst.”
“The crack trade in Jefferson Davis Parish isn’t the big score, Dave.”
“We’re the Walmart of the drug culture. Kids deal dope while they line up to go to a movie.”
Her face was still in shadow. “I don’t think the Dartez homicide is prosecutable, at least not at this point. I’m telling that to the prosecutor and leaving it in his hands. Prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
“We’ll be accused of covering up. Look at me, Dave.”
I knew what was coming.
“Tell me you didn’t do it. Or at least tell me that deep in your heart, you believe you didn’t do it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Goddamn it,” she said.
“Don’t swear.”
She turned her back to me and stared out the window. The wind was blowing in City Park, the boughs of the oak trees swirling, a motorboat towing a water-skier, furrowing the bayou. I wanted to say something of a consoling nature, but I had nothing to offer.
Clete Purcel normally referred to cop shows on television as “the most recent shit Hollywood is foisting on really stupid people.” Clete’s intolerance aside, the facsimile has little to do with the reality. Probably one third of cops are dedicated to the job; one third eat too many doughnuts; and one third are people who should not be given power over others. Female detectives do not show off their cleavage. Many cops carry a drop or a throw-down. Cops plant evidence and lie on the stand. In our midst are sadists and racists who taint the rest of us. And the greatest contributor to solving crimes is not the lab but the informant, usually someone who skipped toilet training and couldn’t make a peanut butter sandwich with a diagram.
For Clete, at least in the Acadiana area, that man was Pookie the Possum Domingue. Pookie had the eyes and snout of his namesake and walked in the same unsteady, desultory fashion, his head wobbling on his spindle of a neck. Years ago he was a gofer for the Teamsters in Lafayette when they were cheating their own members out of their union books. He also racked balls in Antlers Pool Hall and did scut work for a bail bondsman, shilled for the card dealers in the old Lafayette Underpass area, and washed money with No Duh Dolowitz at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds. But his great talent lay in what he called “research.” Though the Internet had put most PIs out of work, Pookie was unfazed. His knowledge of the netherworld could be matched only by the caretakers of the La Brea Tar Pits.
He called Clete at his office on Tuesday morning. “Is that you, Purcel?”
“Who’s this?”
“You keeping your plunger under control?”
“All right, wise guy, if this is who I think it is—”
“Dial it down. I got some information for you. I was in Sticks this afternoon.”
“Where?”
“Sticks Billiards. In Lafayette. We got a bad connection here?”
“I know where you live, Pookie. Smart off one more time, and I’m going to stuff you into a hamster cage.”
“I’m only axing for a little respect here.”
“I apologize. But I don’t need termites in my building or in my head. Now, what do you want?”
“I was shooting some eight ball, taking down this blimp with an ass on him like a washtub, when guess which two clowns come through the door and blow my action. To be more specific, guess which two guys announce to everybody in the place, ‘Hey, Pookie, glad to see you’re not eighty-sixed no more. Leave us the bones.’ ”
“Sorry I missed this world-shaking event,” Clete said.
“Put the cork in it, Purcel. It was JuJu and Maximo. Both of them look like somebody tried to screw their heads into a fire hydrant.”
“That breaks me up.”
“Maybe it should. Because the first thing they ax is if I’ve seen you around. I told them you got an office in New Iberia. So Maximo says, ‘No, that ain’t what we axed. We don’t need nobody to tell us how to use the phone book. We’re axing where that fat shit hangs out. Where’s he get his knob polished, that kind of thing.’ ”
“Somebody put you up to this?”
“I’m trying to do a favor here.”
“The last favor you did was to talk your mother out of committing suicide because she defecated you into the world.”
There was a pause. “I’ll say this once. JuJu ain’t a bad guy. The tomato picker with him has done eight or nine contract hits. The word is Tony the Nose bought your markers. If that’s true, pay him or find an igloo on the North Pole.”
“There’re no Eskimos on the North Pole.”
“You can be the first.”
The line went dead.
Clete took his .38 snub from its holster and flipped out the cylinder, rotating it idly with his thumb. What to do? Nothing. Let them come to him. There was nothing like a bullet in the center of the forehead to get your point across.
His thoughts were self-serving, and he knew it. The guy who blew out your wick was always a nasty little hornet like Maximo, a disposable psychopath who watched Saturday-morning cartoons and had a three-hundred-pound mistress whose lap he sat in for a photograph and then put the photo on the Internet.