“You see a gun?” I said.
“No,” Top said.
“Casings?”
“Nope. You think he shot himself four times?”
“I was hoping our shooter dropped his weapon.”
The truth was, I hadn’t precluded the possibility of suicide. I’ve seen victims who had to take a run at it several times before they pulled it off, particularly when they were filled with rage at others and couldn’t let go of this world.
I looked under the bed and the nightstand. The recoil in a suicide can put a firearm in strange places. But there was no gun. I opened the drawer on the nightstand. There was a five-shot holstered titanium .38 Special inside, the Velcro strap in place. Then I realized the enormity of the presumption I had been operating on. Labiche’s left hand twitched, as though a tiny electric current had touched it. I knelt again and peeled the pillowcase off his head. The clotted hair in one nostril moved almost imperceptibly.
“Get the medics up here, Top.”
I stayed in the emergency room with Labiche until sunrise, then walked along beside the gurney to the ICU. The neurologist said the bullet in the cheek had been fired at a downward angle and had tunneled through the temporal lobe and cerebellum, destroying Labiche’s hearing and sensory transmitters and muscular control. There was a chance that other areas of his brain were impaired as well. His face was sunken, his breathing little more than a rasp, the rectal catheter leaking. I rested my hand on the rail of the gurney and pushed a door open to help one of nurses. I felt Labiche touch my hand.
“Stop,” I said. “He’s trying to tell me something.”
The nurse smiled kindly and shook her head and made the word “no” with her lips.
“What is it, Spade?” I said.
One eye had eight-balled. It stared into my face. His other eye was caved, the lid black.
“Wait out here, Detective,” the nurse said.
“Sure,” I said.
I looked through the glass in the door as three nurses wheeled him into a room. I wondered what images lay in his head. Was the touch of his finger the result of a muscular spasm, a bump of the gurney, or a signal that the only man who knew the fate of T. J. Dartez was taking flight forever?
I drove back home and slept for three hours. When I woke, Sherry Picard’s cruiser was parked in my driveway.
I opened the screen door and stepped into the yard. She got out of the cruiser and looked at me across the roof, her hair blowing, leaves drifting on her clothes. “Your daughter said you were asleep. I told her I’d wait.”
“Where’d she go?” I said, half asleep.
“To the movie set.”
“They’re union,” I said. “They’re not supposed to work Sundays.”
“Tony Nine Ball keeps the Sabbath, does he?”
“What’s up, Detective?” I said.
She walked toward me. Her jeans were high up on her hips. She was wearing her gun and badge, her eyes locked on mine. There was an aggressiveness in her body language that was hard to deal with.
“You got a beef, don’t you?” she said.
“Me?”
“You don’t think I’m good for Clete.”
“It’s his life.”
“His image of himself has a lot to do with your opinion of him.”
“Young women feel safe in his company. Then they start feeling better about their situation and dump him.”
“I look like a dependent woman? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Clete’s my friend. I worry about him. Sometimes unnecessarily.”
“What’s the status on Labiche?” she asked.
“One step this side of a vegetable.”
“The cleaner did it?”
“We don’t know. Four rounds fired, one into the mattress. Large-caliber. It could be a .357.”
“Same caliber used on the deputy in St. Mary?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You think he did Penny?”
“Spade is a mean motor scooter, but torturing a man to death with an electric drill is on another level.”
“What kind of level?”
“Sexual vengeance comes to mind.”
“Levon Broussard for the rape of his wife?”
“That’s a hard fit.” I looked at my watch. “I was going to church at St. Edward’s.”
She looked down the street. Leaves were scudding along the sidewalk. “There’s something you’re not saying.”
“When you figure out what it is, tell me.”
“I hear Labiche is paranoid and fanatical about security systems,” she said.
“That’s Spade.”
“How’d the shooter get in?”
“He spray-painted the cameras, jumped the wiring, and probably turned a dead bolt with fishing line. He may have used a microcontroller to steal the pad code. Our guy is a total pro.”
“But you’re in doubt about who he is?”
“My money is on Smiley,” I said.
“But there’s something wrong, isn’t there? Cleaners don’t fire four rounds and leave their victims alive.”
“Want to come inside?”
“No. You think Labiche got to the shooter? Sent him off in a rage?”
“Psychotic people are psychotic for a reason,” I said. “They don’t deal well with confrontation.”
“Clete isn’t answering his cell. You know where he is?”
“He probably took Homer fishing.”
I saw the light fade in her eyes.
“What is it?” I said.
“Some guys in the department have a hard-on about Clete meddling in the Jeff Davis Eight case. They’re going to go through Homer to fuck him up.”
I knew where to find him. It was an emblematic postage stamp out of the past on the southwestern side of the Atchafalaya Swamp, a reminder that our connection to the Caribbean and our neocolonial origins was only one hour away.
On the edge of the bay was a flooded woods strung with moss and dotted with hollow tupelos that reverberated like conga drums when you knocked on them, the lichen on the water undulating like a milky-green blanket in the wake of a passing boat. In a hummock that had been part of a plantation built in the late eighteenth century were former slave quarters made of cypress and roofed with corrugated tin that had been eaten into orange lace. There were palm trees in the hummock and depressions back in the trees where people born in Africa were buried, their names and histories lost. Supposedly, Jean Lafitte moored his boats here when he and James Bowie were transporting slaves from the West Indies to the United States in violation of the 1808 embargo. The story of the Mid-Atlantic Passage was here, as well as the story of the auction houses in New York, Jamestown, Charleston, and New Orleans, all of it now bleached by sun and rain and washed clean of memories that steal into your sleep, the scattered planks and logs as weightless and innocuous as balsa wood and the whitish-brown cylindrical stain in the soil that supposedly was the remnant of a whipping post.
I cut my outboard and drifted onto the bank. Fifty yards away, Clete and Homer were anchored in a channel that flowed out of a bay between two narrow islands thick with gum and willow trees. They were casting their lures at the edges of the lily pads on the shady side of the islands. The time of day was equally wrong for big-mouth bass and sacalait and goggle-eye perch and bream, but catching fish wasn’t the issue for Clete. He had become Homer’s father, and I didn’t want to think about the travail and injury that awaited both of them.
The sun was white in the sky, the surface of the bay gold and brown and wobbling with light, the breeze out of the south, smelling of salt and distant rain. I went into the shade and propped an air cushion under my head and went to sleep. I dreamed of a scene out of T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, though I don’t know why. Bedouins on camels and in open-air motorcars were charging down a sand dune, the early-morning sun at their backs. Down below was a hospital train that had been dynamited and jacked off the tracks. The motorcars were equipped with Vickers machine guns, the muzzles flashing, sand rilling from the balloon tires. The train cars were filled with typhoid victims. The cries and moans of the dying were louder than the Vickers.