'Do y'all specialize in being public fools, Mr. Robicheaux?' he asked. He touched at the corner of his mouth, his three-fingered hand like that of an impaired amphibian.
THE SHERIFF PACED IN his office. He pulled up the blinds, then lowered them again. He kept clearing his throat, as though there were an infection in it.
'This isn't a sheriff's department. I'm the supervisor of a mental institution,' he said.
He took the top off his teakettle, looked inside it, and set the top down again.
'You know how many faxes I've gotten already on this? The St. Mary sheriff told me not to put my foot in his parish again. That sonofabitch actually threatened me,' he said.
'Maybe we should have played it differently, but Boxleiter didn't give us a lot of selection,' I said.
'Outside our jurisdiction.'
'We told him he wasn't under arrest. There was no misunderstanding about that,' I said.
'I should have used their people to take him down,' Helen said.
'Ah, a breakthrough in thought. But I'm suspending you just the same, at least until I get an IA finding,' the sheriff said.
'He threw sweat on her. He hit her in the chest with his elbow. He got off light,' I said.
'A guy with twenty-eight stitches in his head?'
'You told us to pick him up, skipper. That guy would be a loaded gun anyplace we tried to take him down. You know it, too,' I said.
He crimped his lips together and breathed through his nose.
'I'm madder than hell about this,' he said.
The room was silent, the air-conditioning almost frigid. The sunlight through the slatted blinds was eye- watering.
'All right, forget the suspension and IA stuff. See me before you go into St. Mary Parish again. In the meantime, you find out why Cisco Flynn thinks he can bring his pet sewer rats into Iberia Parish… Helen, you depersonalize your attitude toward the perps, if that's possible.'
'The sewer rats?' I said.
He filled his pipe bowl from a leather pouch and didn't bother to look up until we were out of the room.
THAT EVENING CLETE PURCEL parked his Cadillac convertible under the shade trees in front of my house and walked down to the bait shop. He wore a summer suit and a lavender shirt with a white tie. He went to the cooler and opened a bottle of strawberry soda.
'What, I look funny or something?' he said.
'You look sharp.'
He drank out of the pop bottle and watched a boat out on the bayou.
'I'll treat y'all to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville,' he said.
'I'd better work.'
He nodded, then looked at the newscast on the television set that sat above the counter.
'Thought I'd ask,' he said.
'Who you going to dinner with?'
'Megan Flynn.'
'Another time.'
He sat down at the counter and drank from his soda. He drew a finger through a wet ring on the wood.
'I'm only supposed to go out with strippers and junkies?' he said.
'Did I say anything?'
'You hide your feelings like a cat in a spin dryer.'
'So she's stand-up. But why's she back in New Iberia? We're Paris on the Teche?'
'She was born here. Her brother has a house here.'
'Yeah, he's carrying weight for a psychopath, too. Why you think that is, Clete? Because Cisco likes to rehabilitate shank artists?'
'I hear Helen beat the shit out of Boxleiter with a slapjack. Maybe he's got the message and he'll get out of town.'
I mopped down the counter and tossed the rag on top of a case of empty beer bottles.
'You won't change your mind?' he said.
'Come back tomorrow. We'll entertain the bass.'
He made a clicking sound with his mouth and walked out the door and into the twilight.
AFTER SUPPER I DROVE over to Mout' Broussard's house on the west side of town. Cool Breeze came out on the gallery and sat down on the swing. He had removed the bandage from his cheek, and the wound he had gotten at the jail looked like a long piece of pink string inset in his skin.
'Doctor said I ain't gonna have no scar.'
'You going to hang around town?' I asked.
'Ain't got no pressing bidness nowheres else.'
'They used you, Breeze.'
'I got Alex Guidry fired, ain't I?'
'Does it make you feel better?'
He looked at bis hands. They were wide, big-boned, lustrous with callus.
'What you want here?' he asked.
'The old man who made your wife cook for him, Harpo Delahoussey? Did he have a son?'
'What people done tole you over in St. Mary Parish?'
'They say he didn't.'
He shook his head noncommittally.
'You don't remember?' I said.
'I don't care. It ain't my bidness.'
'A guy named Harpo may have executed a couple of kids out in the Basin,' I said.
'Those dagos in New Orleans? You know what they do to a black man snitch them off? I'm suppose to worry about some guy blowing away some po'-white trash raped a black girl?'
'When those men took away your wife twenty years ago, you couldn't do anything about it. Same kind of guys are still out there, Breeze. They function only because we allow them to.'
'I promised Mout' to go crabbing with him in the morning. I best be getting my sleep,' he said.
But when I got into my truck and looked back at him, he was still in the swing, staring at his hands, his massive shoulders slumped like a bag of crushed rock.
IT WAS HOT AND dry Friday night, with a threat of rain that never came. Out over the Gulf, the clouds would vein and pulse with lightning, then the thunder would ripple across the wetlands with a sound like damp cardboard tearing. In the middle of the night I put my hands inside Bootsie's nightgown and felt her body's heat against my palms, like the warmth in a lampshade. Her eyes opened and looked into mine, then she touched my hardness with her fingertips, her hand gradually rounding itself, her mouth on my cheek, then on my lips. She rolled on her back, her hand never leaving me, and waited for me to enter her.
She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and moist in my ear.
She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on her skin.
'What's worrying you?' she asked.
'Nothing.'
She kicked me in the calf.
'Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt,' I said.
