'It's what happened, though, isn't it?'
'Maybe I had them killed. It's what they deserved. I'm glad they're dead.'
'I think it's all right to feel that way,' I said.
'What are you going to do with what I've told you?'
'Take you home or to a treatment center in Lafayette.'
'I don't want to go into treatment again. If I can't do it with meetings and working the program, I can't do it at all.'
'Why don't we go to a meeting after work? Then you go every day for ninety days.'
'I feel like everything inside me is coming to an end. I can't describe it.'
'It's called 'a world destruction fantasy.' It's bad stuff. Your heart races, you can't breathe, you feel like a piano wire is wrapped around your forehead. Psychologists say we remember the birth experience.'
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, then cracked the window as though my words had drawn the oxygen out of the air.
'Lila, I've got to ask you something else. Why were you talking about a Hanged Man?'
'I don't remember that. Not at all. That's in the Tarot, isn't it? I don't know anything about that.'
'I see.'
Her skin had gone white under her caked makeup, her eyelashes stiff and black and wide around her milky green eyes.
I WALKED THROUGH THE rain into the hospital and rode up in the elevator with Lila's tissue-wrapped spray of carnations in my hand. Helen Soileau was in the waiting room.
'You get anything?' I asked.
'Not much. She says she thinks there were three guys. They sounded like hicks. One guy was running things,' she replied.
'That's got to be Harpo Scruggs.'
'I think we're going about this the wrong way. Cut off the head and the body dies.'
'Where's the head?'
'Beats me,' she said.
'Where's Purcel?'
'He's still in there.'
I walked to the open door, then turned away. Clete was sitting on the side of Megan's bed, leaning down toward her face, his big arms and shoulders forming a tent over her. Her right hand rested on the back of his neck. Her fingers stroked his uncut hair.
THE SKY CLEARED THAT night, and Alafair and Bootsie and I cooked out in the back yard. I had told the sheriff about my conversation with Lila Terrebonne, but his response was predictable. We had established possible motivation for the execution of the two brothers. But that was all we had done. There was no evidence to link Archer Terrebonne, Lila's father, to the homicide. Second, the murders still remained outside our jurisdiction and our only vested interest in solving them was the fact that one of the shooters wore an Iberia Parish deputy sheriffs uniform.
I went with Lila to an AA meeting that night, then returned home.
'Clete called. He's in New Orleans. He said for you not to worry. What'd he mean?' Bootsie said.
EIGHTEEN
RICKY SCARLOTTI ATE BREAKFAST THE next morning with two of his men in his restaurant by St. Charles and Carrollton. It was a fine morning, smelling of the wet sidewalks and the breeze off the river. The fronds of the palm trees on the neutral ground were pale green and lifting in the wind against a ceramic-blue sky; the streetcar was loading with passengers by the levee, the conductor's bell clanging. No one seemed to take notice of a chartreuse Cadillac convertible that turned off St. Charles and parked in front of the flower shop, nor of the man in the powder-blue porkpie hat and seersucker pants and Hawaiian shirt who sat behind the steering wheel with a huge plastic seal-top coffee mug in his hand.
The man in the porkpie hat inserted a dime in the parking meter and looked with interest at the display of flowers an elderly woman was setting out on the sidewalk under a canvas awning. He talked a moment with the woman, then entered the restaurant and stopped by the hot bar and wrapped a cold cloth around the handle of a heavy cast-iron skillet filled with chipped beef. He made his way unobtrusively between the checker-cloth-covered tables toward the rear of the restaurant, where Ricky Scarlotti had just patted his mouth with a napkin and had touched the wrist of one of the men at his side and nodded in the direction of the approaching figure in the porkpie hat.
The man at Ricky Scarlotti's side had platinum hair and a chemical tan. He put down his fork and got to his feet and stood flat-footed like a sentinel in front of Ricky Scarlotti's table. His name was Benny Grogan and he had been a professional wrestler before he had become a male escort for a notorious and rich Garden District homosexual. NOPD believed he had also been the backup shooter on at least two hits for the Calucci brothers.
'I hope you're here for the brunch, Purcel,' he said.
'Not your gig, Benny. Get off the clock,' Clete said.
'Come on, make an appointment. Don't do this. Hey, you deaf?' Then Benny Grogan reached out and hooked his fingers on the back of Clete's shirt collar as Clete brushed past him.
Clete flung the chipped beef into Benny Grogan's face. It was scalding hot and it matted his skin like a papier-mache mask with slits for the eyes. Benny's mouth was wide with shock and pain and an unintelligible sound that rose out of his chest like fingernails grating on a blackboard. Then Clete whipped the bottom of the skillet with both hands across the side of Benny's head, and backswung it into the face of the man who was trying to rise from his chair on the other side of Ricky Scarlotti, the cast-iron cusp ringing against bone, bursting the nose, knocking him backward on the floor.
Ricky Scarlotti was on his feet now, his mouth twisted, his finger raised at Clete. But he never got the chance to speak.
'I brought you some of your own, Ricky,' Clete said.
He jammed a pair of vise grips into Ricky Scarlotti's scrotum and locked down the handles. Ricky Scarlotti's hands grabbed impotently at Clete's wrists while his head reared toward the ceiling.
Clete began backing toward the front door, pulling Ricky Scarlotti with him.
'Work with me on this. You can do it, Mouse. That a boy. Step lively now. Coming through here, gangway for the Mouse!' Clete said, pushing chairs and tables out of the way with his buttocks.
Out on the street he unhooked Scarlotti from the vise grips and bounced him off the side of a parked car, then slapped his face with his open hand, once, twice, then a third time, so hard the inside of Scarlotti's mouth bled.
'I'm not carrying, Mouse. Free shot,' Clete said, his hands palm up at his sides now.
But Scarlotti was paralyzed, his mouth hanging open, his lips like red Jell-O. Clete grabbed him by his collar and the back of his belt and flung him to the sidewalk, then picked him up, pushed him forward, and flung him down again, over and over, working his way down the sidewalk, clattering garbage cans along the cement. People stared from automobiles, the streetcar, and door fronts but no one intervened. Then, like a man who knows his rage can never be satiated, Clete lost it. He drove Scarlotti's head into a parking meter, smashing it repeatedly against the metal and glass. A woman across the street screamed hysterically and people began blowing car horns. Clete spun Scarlotti around by his bloodied shirtfront and threw him across a laddered display of flowers under the canvas awning.
'Tell these people why this is happening, Ricky. Tell them how you had a guy's teeth torn out, how you had a woman blindfolded and beaten and held underwater,' Clete said, advancing toward him, his shoes crunching through the scattered potting soil.
