who didn’t try to kill me first,” I said, now defending a history of violence that went all the way back to Vietnam.
“This man is evil and I wish you hadn’t gone after him on your own. But stop judging yourself so harshly. You were protecting a creature who can’t protect himself. You don’t think God can understand that?”
I’m not a theologian, but I believe absolution can be granted to us in many forms. Perhaps it can come in the ends of a woman’s fingers on your skin. Some people call it the redemptive power of love. Anyway, why argue with it when it comes your way?
THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday and Helen was home when I called her. I told her about my behavior of the previous night, every detail of it, including the fact Clete had backed my play with a twelve-gauge pump. When I finished my account, I could hear a whirring sound in the receiver and feel a steel band tightening across my sternum.
“You still there?” I said.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Nobody called in a nine-one-one?”
“That’s your main concern here?”
“Raguza dealt the play. Considering what he did to Tripod, I think he got off light.”
“There’s no point talking to you. You hear nothing I say.”
“I called to tell you I’ll take the heat. If it costs me my job, that’s the way it is. I don’t want you compromised.”
“I’m having a hard time with this show of magnanimity.”
“I did what I felt I had to. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you or the department,” I said. “I know Raguza, Helen. He’s the kind of guy you put out of action before he burns your house down.”
It was quiet a moment, then I heard a sound like dry bread being crunched and I realized she was eating toast. I thought our conversation was over, that my moment in the confessional box had come and gone. As was often the case in my dealings with the complexity of Helen Soileau, I was wrong.
“One day they’re going to kill you, Pops. When that happens, a big part of me is going to die with you,” she said.
I went outside and worked in the yard, flinging shovel-loads of compost into the flower beds, my eyes burning with sweat. Then I jogged two miles in the park, but Helen’s words stayed with me like an arrow in the chest. Just as I returned home, out of breath, aching for a shower, Betsy Mossbacher pulled a steel-gray Toyota into my drive.
“Hello,” I said.
She didn’t reply. She got out of her car and looked me flat in the face. Her jeans were belted high on her hips, her cowboy boots powdered with dust.
“What’s the trouble?” I said.
“You are.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me.”
“You went over to Lafayette and beat the crap out of Lefty Raguza.”
“What about it?” I said.
My cavalier attitude seemed to light a fire in her chest. Her eyes stayed fixed on my face, as though she was deciding how much information she should convey to a fool. “You listen,” she said. “We have knowledge about the inner workings of Whitey Bruxal’s circle that you don’t. You understand the connotations of what I’m saying?”
“You’ve got him tapped?”
She didn’t acknowledge my question. “Bruxal thinks Trish Klein and her merry pranksters are planning to take down one of his operations. He also thinks your fat friend Clete Purcel is involved. So what do you guys do? You remodel Raguza’s head and stuff a tube of Super Glue down his throat.”
“It was roach paste,” I said.
She blinked, I suspected from a level of anger that she could barely contain. “You think this is funny?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
“Good. Because we now have the sense Whitey believes you and Purcel may both be working with Trish Klein. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if you are.”
“Wrong. Look, you know anything about Whitey’s house getting creeped?”
“No,” she said, surprised.
“I think Trish Klein’s friends did it. They convinced Whitey’s wife they were from the gas company.”
I could see the consternation in her face. It was obvious the Lafayette P.D. was not sharing information with her, perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was a Fed, or perhaps both.
“What were they after?” she asked.
“You got me. But whatever it is, Purcel is not part of it.”
“That’s not the impression we have. Your friend’s anatomy seems turned around. I think his penis and main bowel are located where his brains should be,” she said.
“You don’t have the right to talk about him like that,” I said.
“You still don’t get it, do you? I work with a few people who aren’t as charitable as I am. They wouldn’t be totally unhappy if Whitey decided to have your friend clipped. Of if Whitey decided to put up a kite on an Iberia Parish detective who’s known for his hostility toward the Bureau.”
“You’re a rough bunch.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said.
Then I saw a look in her face that every veteran police officer recognizes. It was the look of a cop out of sync with her peers, her supervisors, and the political and bureaucratic obligations that had been dropped on her. There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.
“I talked with Monarch Little last night,” I said. “He admitted he called Tony Lujan and tried to shake him down just before Tony was killed. They were supposed to meet out by the Boom Boom Room, but Monarch claims he decided not to go.”
“So?” she said.
“I believe him. I think Monarch is an innocent man.”
She bit off a piece of her thumbnail and looked down the street. “Who do you think did it?”
“Right now I’d bet money on Slim Bruxal.”
“Could be,” she said. “Tell Purcel to keep his wick dry and stay away from casinos. One other thing-”
“I don’t know if I can handle it.”
“I talked to the sheriff before I came over here. She seems to be very protective toward you. I’d thank my stars I had a boss like that.”
I decided not to comment on her ongoing inventory of my personal life. I wrote my cell number on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “Call me with anything you get on Trish Klein. I’ll do the same,” I said.
“I hope you’re telling me the truth.”
“I don’t want to offend you, but I think you should give some serious thought to the way you talk to other people, Agent Mossbacher.”
“No shit?” she replied.
After she stuck my number in her shirt pocket, she backed into my garbage can and mashed it between her bumper and an oak tree. “Oh jeez, I can’t believe I did this again,” she said, twisting the steering wheel, bouncing over the curb in a shuddering scrape of steel against concrete.
I was convinced they grew them special in Chugwater, Wyoming.
ON SUNDAY, Molly and I went to Mass at the university chapel in Lafayette, then ate deep-fried crawfish at Foti’s in St. Martinville and took an airboat ride on Lake Martin. It was a wonderful afternoon. The lake was wide, the water high from the storm, the shoreline bordered with flooded cypress and willow trees whose leaves riffled in the breeze. Strapped into the elevated seats on the airboat, roaring across the lily pads, ear protectors clamped down on our heads, we had an extraordinary view of the Edenic loveliness that at one time characterized all of Louisiana. Each time the airboat tilted into a turn or swerved across a slough that was little more than wet sand,
