“Listen to me, Sean—”
“He didn’t say a word. He just stared at me with his eyes misting over. I never had anybody look at me like that.”
“You’re an honorable man. That’s why you went to the funeral home. Nobody has the right to condemn you. That man wasn’t there when Tillinger pointed a Luger at us.”
“I wanted to explain it to him.”
“There’re situations for which no words are adequate. This was one of them. I’m sure that fellow respects you for coming to the funeral home.”
I heard him take a breath. “I didn’t mean to pester you,” he said.
Through the window I could see lightning flickering on the oak trees in the yard, the door on Tripod’s empty hutch swinging in the wind. “I’d better go now,” I said.
“What I just told you ain’t the only reason I called. I could have dropped a guy tonight. I called you because I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not.”
“Could have dropped whom?”
“Somebody out by my barn. I called him out and he took off running.”
“Clear this up for me, Sean, and get it right. You say you could have dropped him. You drew down on him, you had him in your sights, what?”
“Lightning flashed and I saw somebody inside the barn. His skin looked real white. I think he had a rifle. I cain’t be sure. I had my piece out, but I didn’t raise it. He run out the back of the barn into the pecan trees.”
“Did you call it in?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want people to think I’m losing it.”
“Will you be there for the next fifteen minutes?”
Sean rented a paintless termite-eaten farmhouse with a wide gallery and a peaked tin roof down by Avery Island. All the lights were on in the house when I pulled into his dirt yard and went up the steps with a raincoat over my head. He opened the door.
“Hate to be an inconvenience and general pain in the butt,” he said. “Want some coffee? It’s already made.”
“No, thanks.”
He was wearing a white T-shirt and starched jeans and flip-flops. Leaning by the door was a scoped rifle with a sling. A holstered revolver and gun belt hung on the back of a chair in the dining room.
“Miss Bailey get aholt of you?” he said.
“No, I’ve been looking for her.”
“That’s funny. She was just here.”
“What for?”
“She thought this Smiley guy might want to do me in ’cause of Tillinger being his friend or something.”
“That’s a possibility. You think you saw Smiley Wimple?”
“I ain’t sure.”
“You weren’t in the service, were you?”
“No, sir.” He waited. “How come you ask me that?”
“You’ve got your whole environment lit up. You’d make a great silhouette on a window shade.”
“I don’t study on things like that.”
“On what things?”
“Dying. I figure everybody has a time. Till it comes, I say don’t study on it.”
“Let’s take a look at your barn.”
He put on a raincoat with a hood, and we went out into the rain and walked under an oak tree and crossed a clear spot and entered the dry barn. He closed the door behind us and pulled the chain on a solitary lightbulb. Fresh shoe marks were stenciled in the dirt, though not to the extent that I could tell their size.
“Were you in here?”
“No, sir.”
“You stood outside?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the guy ran from here to that pecan grove?”
“Like I said.”
“Your clothes didn’t get wet?”
“They was sopping. That’s why I put on dry ones.”
“I was just wondering. I thought you might have secret powers.”
“You did, huh?”
It was too late to take back the wisecrack. “What else did Bailey have to say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Sean—”
“To heck with you, Dave. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
He pulled the chain on the light and walked back to his house, the rain glistening on his raincoat, his profile as sharp as snipped tin.
I didn’t sleep that night. Early Sunday morning I drove to Clete’s motor court and banged on his door. The rain was still falling, a thick white fog rolling on the bayou, the air cold, like snow on your skin. Clete answered the door in his pajamas. “Have you gone nuts?”
“Thanks for the kind words,” I said, brushing past him.
He shut the door. “You had trouble with Bailey Ribbons?”
“Why do you think that?”
“You’re a mess with women.”
“I’m a mess?”
“Yeah, without my guidance, you’d really be in trouble,” he said. “What’s the haps with Bailey?”
“I’ve got to have your sacred oath.”
At first he didn’t answer. He put on a bathrobe and fluffy blue slippers. Then he said, “Don’t be talking to me like that, big mon. You either trust me or you don’t.”
I told him about the men who raped Bailey, and the fire she set under the propane tank on their trailer, and how all three men died, and the trouble she had in Holy Cross when she was thirteen. Then I told him about my visit the previous night to Sean McClain’s place.
“McClain couldn’t recognize Smiley Wimple?” Clete said. “Wimple looks like an albino caterpillar that glows in the dark.”
“Yeah, I wondered the same thing.”
“Sean McClain bothers you for some reason?”
“He’s been around too many murder scenes,” I said. “That’s what I keep thinking. Same with Bailey. I don’t know who she is.”
Clete started a pot of coffee on his small gas stove. He opened his icebox and took out a box of glazed doughnuts and tossed it to me. “You know what you’re always telling me, right?”
“No.”
“People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.”
“That’s not reassuring. Bailey killed three people. That’s what she did. With fire.”
“These guys were running a meth lab. They deserved what they got. Besides, she told you about it. Would she get on the square like that if she were jacking you around?”
“Why is it that everything you say has something in it about genitalia?”
He removed the coffeepot from the stove and set it and two cups on the table. “Dave, there’s an explanation for what you’re experiencing. The guy we’re after is waging war against this entire community. He wants us at each other’s throats. Don’t fall into his trap.”
“How do you know this?”
“I don’t. It’s just a thought. But nothing else makes sense.”
We were both quiet. I took a bite out of a doughnut.
“I’ve got a worse scenario, one I can’t get out of my head sometimes,” Clete said. “I wake up with it in the middle of the night. Some mornings, too. That’s when it really gets bad.”
“What does?”
“The dream. I dream we’re all dead. We fucked up while we were alive and now we’re stacking time in a place where there’re no answers, only questions that drive you crazy. I went to a shrink about it.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. I didn’t give him a chance. He was one of the people in the dream. Enjoy the day we get, Streak. Being dead is a pile of shit.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
That morning, I went to Mass at St. Edward’s, and that evening I attended an AA meeting at the Solomon House, across the street from old New Iberia High. When I left the meeting, the stars were bright against a black sky, and a warm breeze was blowing through the live oaks in front of the old school building. It was a fine evening, the kind that assures you a better day is coming.