“How about this? Kevin Penny was a federal informant. Maybe Soza and Ladrine were sent to find out if Penny dimed them or Tony Nemo.”
“Too extreme, in my opinion.”
“So where does that leave us?” she said, looking straight at him as though she knew the answer to her question.
“You got me. I run down bail skips and do other kinds of scut work for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”
“How about the fact that they were following you around? They even parked their vehicle by the house of your lady friend while you were doing a sleepover.”
“How about leaving third parties out of this?” he said.
“Then you had a confrontation with them in downtown Jennings. Then your lady friend got beaten to a pulp. The word is you have some bad markers out. You also gave Kevin Penny a bad time about his kid. Maybe you figured all three of them for the beating of the Ardoin woman, and you started with Penny.”
Clete halved the loaf of French bread into two long buns and began layering them with lettuce and sliced tomatoes and chopped onions and deep-fried crawfish and oysters he had taken from the icebox. “Short answer, Detective: I never put a hand on Penny.”
“We lifted a lot of prints from the trailer. Most of them were in the computer at the NCIC. Some were not. That bothers me.”
“Because people like Penny don’t have normal friends?”
“But yours were all over the place. I’ve seen your sheet. I’ve known recidivists who would be in awe of your record.”
He released the handle of the knife and stared straight ahead. “I’ll try again. I was in the Crotch. I did two tours in Vietnam. I saw guys who were skinned alive and hung in trees. I don’t torture people.” He picked up a small clean brush and began painting mayonnaise and shrimp dip on his sandwich.
“My husband was killed in Iraq,” she said.
He turned around. Her face was calm, her eyes clear. She seemed to be looking at a thought or memory inside her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You have to get on the square about the missing boy, Mr. Purcel.”
“I am on the square. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to that little boy again.”
“You committed a felony by deliberately violating a crime scene and taking items from it. You know that, don’t you?”
He put the sandwich together and cut it in half. “I’ll split this with you.”
She got up and walked to the chair where the raincoat was. She tugged it slightly so it covered the bottom of the bat. “No, thanks.”
He wiped his hands on a dish towel and watched her. She wore her gun and badge and cuffs on her belt, perhaps as a statement of her own identity and in defiance of male authority. She wasn’t aggressive, but she wasn’t passive, either. She seemed to live inside a place beyond the fray. She straightened her shoulders and looked out the window at the live oaks arching over the driveway. She turned around, as though asking him Why the silence?
“There’s a snitch in Lafayette named Pookie Domingue,” Clete said. “Sometimes people call him Pookie the Possum. He says the word is out you’d better get your head on straight.”
“Or?”
“There’re eight dead women who want justice. Somebody out there doesn’t want that to happen, Miss Sherry.”
“Detective Picard,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Forget I said anything. I think I really screwed up in a previous incarnation.”
Clete sat down at the table and bit into his sandwich.
Then she was standing behind him. “I’m going to cover your ass as best I can. Take care of Homer and Ms. Ardoin. If you shot me a line on any of this, I’ll be back.”
She dragged a fingernail across the back of his neck as she went out the door. He set down his food and went out on the stoop. He was going to tell her something. He was sure of that. He just didn’t know what it was.
That afternoon Helen and I met with the prosecutor, Lala Segretti. He was tall and in his mid-fifties and had freckles and thinning light red hair and wore suspenders and always looked wired. When he was a long-distance runner at LSU and a pretty girl would walk by he would say “Ooh-la-la” to hide that he was afraid of girls because he’d grown up in a fundamentalist church Ayatollah Khomeini could have invented. He was a family man and a straight shooter, but he obsessed over things of no consequence and sometimes translated the Old Testament into a political mind-set that precluded compassion, particularly when it came to capital punishment.
We were in the conference room at a long oak table with him at the head of it, pages from my report spaced out in front of him. He was blinking, his jaw tight. He was obviously agitated, but I didn’t know about what. He was one of those men who could eat any kind of food without gaining weight, as though a flame in his stomach burned off the intake the second it came down the pipe.
“Everything all right, sir?” I said.
“We’ve got a shit storm coming down on us because of the Nightingale indictment,” he said. “Plus a lot of criticism about an in-house matter.”
He looked at me to make sure I got the point.
“I’m the in-house matter?” I said.
“We’ll talk about that later,” he replied.
I felt a constriction behind my left eye that caused my eye to water and sent a signal to my brain that has always scared me and that I have never understood.
“Nightingale’s constituency thinks we’re political,” Lala said. “The problem is, to some degree, they’re right. He’s a demagogue and a liar, and I want to put him out of business before he turns the state into a sewer. We can’t let them get away with it.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Helen said. “Get away with what?”
“His hacks and hucksters. He has an army of them. He’s got backers in Vegas. I think they’re grooming him for bigger things.”
“I don’t think this conversation is taking a good turn,” I said.
Lala looked at me again. “Rephrase that so I don’t get the wrong inference.”
“Nightingale is guilty of sexual assault and battery or he isn’t,” I said.
“Dave is right,” Helen said. “We do our job and stay out of the consequences.”
“I don’t think I’ve expressed myself very well,” he said. “Nightingale and his family are associated with criminals. They’ve gotten a free pass for years. Iberia Parish voted down casino gambling. That will always be to our credit. We’re not going to allow this son of a bitch to besmirch us.”
“You’re not alone in your feelings,” Helen said.
Lala wasn’t listening. His attention was fixed on me. “In your report I get a sense of hesitancy,” he said.
“There’s some elements in the case that aren’t clear,” I said. “Why would Rowena delay reporting the rape? Why did she destroy evidence? She’s educated and intelligent. So is her husband.”
“Traumatized people don’t behave rationally,” he said.
“The family physician indicates she may have been a neglected wife,” I said.
“Neglected wives have drinks with another man, or even affairs, but that doesn’t mean they invite rape into their lives,” he said.
“I’m with you on that.”
The room was silent. Helen cleared her throat. A tree limb brushed against the window.
“What are you holding back?” he asked me.
“The last time I talked to Levon, he didn’t mention Nightingale not being in jail; that was the kind of thing I expected him to say. It was almost like he didn’t care.”
“That’s perception, not evidence,” he said.
“How many sexual assault cases are not about perception?” I said.