“This is going to be a funny question.”
“You want to know if she was unconscious when the perpetrator tore her up?” he said.
I waited.
“Massive internal bleeding,” he said. “I think he probably stomped and kicked her after she went down.”
“How do you figure this guy?”
“I can’t.”
“We’ve got another player involved,” I said. “I think you should know.”
“Who?”
“Smiley. I saw him. I talked with him.”
His eyes hazed over. “I’ll have something on your desk by tonight. Have a good one, Dave.”
He got into his car and drove away.
Smiley had been raised in an orphanage in Mexico City. By all accounts, including his, he had been severely abused, both in the orphanage and on the streets of the city, where he was passed from hand to hand in alleys that specialized in child prostitution. Probably in his late teens, he found his way to southern Florida and discovered that he possessed an enormous talent — namely, an ability to float like a piece of ectoplasm among the criminal culture and be disregarded or dismissed up to the moment someone got it in the ear with a .22 auto or an ice pick in the brain.
His activities seemed to be a labor of love. His hits were contracted and paid for at drop boxes, his weapons provided by UPS. He bought children ice cream wherever he went, and on one occasion he hijacked a truckload of it and passed it out to black children in a park down by Bayou Lafourche while a bound and gagged man he planned to dispose of later struggled impotently inside the refrigerator.
He also tried to kill a local politician whose antecedents were Huey Long and George Wallace. Secretly, I always thought Smiley had his moments.
But Smiley was also responsible for the death of a female detective who paid her dues in Afghanistan. For a short time she was the lover of Clete Purcel. I really didn’t want to tell him about Smiley’s visit. Nor did I wish to contemplate the results if Clete got his hands on him. But at five that afternoon I drove to Clete’s motor court on East Main. He was sitting in a deck chair down by the bayou, a quart of stoppered beer in a bucket by his side. He was reading a novel by Michael Connelly.
“How you doing, Cletus?” I said.
He looked at me over his reading glasses. “Whenever I hear that tone of voice, I know I’d rather be somewhere else.”
“I’m back on the job. I also had a visit from Smiley.”
“Tell me you’ve been drinking.”
“He’s back and ready to rock.”
“Why is he back?”
“He says he wants to be our friend.”
Clete stood up slowly and set his book on the chair. He removed his glasses and put them away. The warmth of the sunlight on the side of his face contradicted the coldness in his eyes. He stared at the cattails bending in the breeze, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin. “Where do you think I might find him?”
“No idea.”
He put a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. The worst part of my visit had not begun. Obviously, he had been out of town during the day or he had not listened to the news or seen a local newspaper.
“Hilary Bienville is dead, Clete.”
He turned around and removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Say again?”
“Early this morning. She was beaten to death in her trailer. Her killer pressed a Christmas-tree star on her forehead.”
His face seemed poached, the color fading, his teeth showing behind his lips. His eyes were green marbles. “Same guy who did Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“What about her kid?”
“The kid is all right. Sean McClain took her to the grandmother’s place.”
“Witnesses?”
“None we could find.”
“How bad was it?”
“As bad as it gets.”
He folded his deck chair and picked up his book and cradled his ice bucket with one arm. “I want to see the crime scene.”
“You know the rules.”
“Forget I asked,” he said. “I’ll handle it by myself.”
When we arrived at the trailer park, the sun was low on the horizon, orange and dust-veiled. There were no children at play. I took down the crime scene tape on the small gallery and opened the door to Hilary Bienville’s trailer with a key Helen had given me. Clete and I stepped inside, both of us with latex on. Clete shone his flashlight on the broken glass, the smears and splatter on the walls, the broken table and chairs. “Who was the responder?”
“Sean McClain.”
“Wasn’t he the responder on the Devereaux homicide?”
“More or less.”
“No tie there?”
“No.”
“The door was key-locked?” he asked.
“Right.”
“So it wasn’t a barroom john? It was somebody she trusted?”
“That’d be my guess.”
“The baby must have been crying when he left, but he locked up the place anyway?”
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“The guy didn’t want Hilary found right away, but he didn’t care if the baby sweltered to death or choked on her vomit.”
“The guy who killed Hilary doesn’t care about anything or anyone,” I said.
Clete clicked off his flashlight. “I’ve seen enough.”
“What do you make of it?”
“He had some kind of working relationship with her. But something set him off. She was in pajamas?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he wanted to get it on and she told him to fuck off. Violence like this is almost always sexual. There was no sign of rape or biting or any of that crap?”
“Not according to the coroner.”
Clete stared at the sun and the Greek revival home in the trees across the bayou. “Why does this place make me think of a killing ground on the Cambodian border?”
“Because this was a slave cemetery,” I said. “They’re under your feet.”
“Christ,” he said, his face twitching.
Later that evening I sat down in the living room with Alafair. The windows were open, the streetlights on. I could see leaves smoldering like red coals in a rain gutter, and smell impending rain and the heavy odor of the bayou. I did not want to think any more about Hilary Bienville or the evil that humans do. I once had a friend who worked with the criminally insane in Norwalk, California. He was a Quaker and a humanist and seemed to be unscathed by his experience with patients who had committed crimes that were unthinkable. I asked him what his secret was.
“I conceded,” he answered.
“Conceded what?” I said.
“There are people who are at peace with malevolence. It’s in their eyes. It keeps them warm. That’s the way they come out of the womb.”
There was a reading lamp above Alafair’s head. She kept looking at me in a peculiar way. “Are you all right?”
“I’m a little tired. I brought a dessert home.”
I went into the kitchen and cut a wet slice of chocolate cake for each of us, then put them on plates and brought them back into the living room. She had been on location in Morgan City all day and had not heard about Hilary Bienville. So I told her, then I told her about Smiley. The room was quiet.
“You don’t believe me about Smiley?” I said.
“I’m not sure, you see things other people don’t. You haven’t said anything about the Bienville crime scene.”
“It’s better not to talk about it.”
“Who’s doing this, Dave?”
“I have no idea. There’s no single thread that runs through all the cases. We don’t know if we’re dealing with one killer or more than one.”
But her mind seemed somewhere else. “There’s something wrong with Desmond.”
“Like what?”
“Today somebody said something about the Lucinda Arceneaux homicide, like working the floating cross with the body on it into the movie. Desmond snapped the guy’s head off.”