When he had finished speaking, Megan looked at me sadly, her eyes prescient with the knowledge that a man's best explanation for his life can be one that will never satisfy him or anybody else.
'Y'all ain't gonna say nothing?' he asked.
'Let go of it, partner,' I said.
'The Man always got the answer,' he replied.
'Your daddy is an honest and decent person. If you're still ashamed of him because he shined shoes, yeah, I think that's a problem, Breeze,' I said.
'
'Give it a break, Megan,' I said.
'No… Behind us. The G sent us an escort,' she said.
I turned and looked back through the hatch at our wake. Coming hard right up the trough was a large powerboat, its enamel-white bow painted with the blue-and-red insignia of the United States Coast Guard. A helicopter dipped out of the sky behind the Coast Guard boat, yawing, its downdraft hammering the water.
I entered a channel that led to the boat ramp where my truck and boat trailer were parked. The helicopter swept past us and landed in the shell parking area below the levee. The right-hand door opened and the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier stepped out and walked toward us while the helicopter's blades were still spinning.
I waded through the shallows onto the concrete ramp.
'You're out of your jurisdiction, so I'm going to save you a lot of paperwork,' she said.
'Oh?'
'We're taking Mr. William Broussard into our custody. Interstate transportation of stolen property. You want to argue about it, we can talk about interference with a federal law officer in the performance of her duty.'
Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder on Megan, who stood on the bow of my boat, her hair blowing under her straw hat.
'You take one picture out here and I'll have you in handcuffs,' Adrien Glazier said.
'Broussard's been snakebit. He needs to be in a hospital,' I said.
But she wasn't listening. She and Megan stared at each other with the bright and intimate recognition of old adversaries who might have come aborning from another time.
FIVE
THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCHTIME Clete Purcel picked me up at the office in the chartreuse Cadillac convertible that he had bought from a member of the Giacano crime family in New Orleans, a third-generation miscreant by the name of Stevie Gee who decided to spot-weld a leak in the gas tank but got drunk first and forgot to fill the tank with water before he fired up the welding machine. The scorch marks had faded now and looked like smoky gray tentacles on the back fenders.
The back seat was loaded with fishing rods, a tackle box that was three feet long, an ice chest, air cushions, crushed beer cans, life preservers, crab traps, a hoop net that had been ground up in a boat propeller, and a tangled trot line whose hooks were ringed with dried smelt.
Clete wore baggy white pants without a shirt and a powder-blue porkpie hat, and his skin looked bronzed and oily in the sun. He had been the best cop I ever knew until his career went south, literally, all the way to Central America, because of marriage trouble, pills, booze, hookers, indebtedness to shylocks, and finally a murder warrant that his fellow officers barely missed serving on him at the New Orleans airport.
I went inside Victor's on Main Street for a take-out order, then we crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove past the live oaks on the lawn of the gray and boarded-up buildings that used to be Mount Carmel Academy, then through the residential section into City Park. We sat at a picnic table under a tree, not far from the swimming pool, where children were cannonballing off the diving board. The sun had gone behind the clouds and rain rings appeared soundlessly on the bayou's surface, like bream rising to feed.
'That execution in St. Mary Parish… the two brothers who got clipped after they raped the black girl? How bad you want the perps?' he said.
'What do you think?'
'I see it as another parish's grief. As a couple of guys who got what they had coming.'
'The shooters had one of our uniforms.'
He set down the pork-chop sandwich he was eating and scratched the scar that ran through his left eyebrow.
'I'm still running down skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. Nig went bail for a couple of chippies who work a regular Murphy game in the Quarter. They're both junkies, runny noses, scabs on their thighs, mainlining six and seven balloons a day, sound familiar, scared shitless of detoxing in City Prison, except they're even more scared of their pimp, who's the guy they have to give up if they're going to beat the Murphy beef.
'So they ask Nig if they should go to the prosecutor's office with this story they got off a couple of Johns who acted like over-the-hill cops. These guys were talking to each other about capping some brothers out in the Basin. One of the chippies asks if they're talking about black guys. One duffer laughs and says, 'No, just some boys who should have kept practicing on colored girls and left white bread alone.''
'Where are these guys out of?'
'They said San Antone. But Johns usually lie.'
'What else do the girls know?'
'They're airheads, Dave. The intellectual one reads the shopping guide on the toilet. Besides, they're not interested in dealing anymore. Their pimp decided to plea out, so they're off the hook.'
'Write down their names, will you?'
He took a piece of folded paper from his pants pocket, with the names of the two women and their addresses already written on it, and set it on the plank table. He started eating again, his green eyes smiling at nothing.
'Old lesson from the First District, big mon. When somebody wastes a couple of shit bags…' He realized I wasn't listening, that my gaze was focused over his shoulder on the swimming pool. He turned and stared through the tree trunks, his gaze roving across the swimmers in the pool, the parents who were walking their children by the hand to an instruction class a female lifeguard was putting together in the shallow end. Then his eyes focused on a man who stood between the wire enclosure and the bathhouse.
The man had a peroxided flattop, a large cranium, like a person with water on the brain, cheekbones that tapered in an inverted triangle to his chin, a small mouth full of teeth. He wore white shoes and pale orange slacks and a beige shirt with the short sleeves rolled in neat cuffs and the collar turned up on the neck. He pumped a blue rubber ball in his right palm.
'You know that dude?' Clete said.
'His name's Swede Boxleiter.'
'A graduate?'
'Canon City, Colorado. The FBI showed me some photos of a yard job he did on a guy.'
'What's he doing around here?'
Boxleiter wore shades instead of the granny glasses I had seen in the photos. But there was no doubt about the object of his attention. The children taking swim lessons were lined up along the edge of the pool, their swimsuits clinging wetly to their bodies. Boxleiter snapped the rubber ball off the pavement, ricocheting it against the bathhouse wall, retrieving it back into his palm as though it were attached to a magic string.
'Excuse me a minute,' I said to Clete.
I walked through the oaks to the pool. The air smelled of leaves and chlorine and the rain that was sprinkling on the heated cement. I stood two feet behind Boxleiter, who hung on to the wire mesh of the fence with one hand while the other kneaded the rubber ball. The green veins in his forearm were pumped with blood. He chewed gum, and a lump of cartilage expanded and contracted against the bright slickness of his jaw.
He felt my eyes on the back of his neck.
'You want something?' he asked.
'We thought we'd welcome you to town. Have you drop by the department. Maybe meet the sheriff.'
He grinned at the corner of his mouth.
