The man with the concave face and recessed eyes got inside with him and shut the door. Eddy’s weight shifted on the gurney as the ambulance pulled out onto the street and drove away at high speed.
“Scared?” the man said.
“Ain’t scared of nothing,” Eddy replied. “Not of no peckerwoods, not of nothing.”
“You ought to be,” the man said, inserting a chocolate bar into his mouth. He smiled as he chewed on the chocolate.
CLETE PURCEL worked out of his secondary office on main and stayed at our house, but he returned to New Orleans three times in his pursuit of the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon. He used a city map to re-create the possible routes Bertrand Melancon could have used in his escape from Otis Baylor’s neighborhood immediately following the shooting. He walked through backyards and alleys and at a residential intersection found a woman throwing the remnants of her kitchen onto her terrace, smashing dishes and glass-ware on the flagstones.
“Can I help you?” she said when she saw him watching her. Sweat was leaking out of her hair band.
He showed her his PI badge and told her about the shooting down the street. He gave her the date and the approximate time the shooting took place.
“I know all about it. I think they got what they deserved,” she said. She wore a halter and shorts and flip-flops, and she had chestnut hair that hung in strands on her brow. Her skin was unnaturally white and dotted with moles. Clete doubted if she was the type who would be seen in halter and shorts were it not for the intense heat inside her house.
“Two of those guys are still on the loose. I’d like to find them. They were in a green aluminum boat, with an outboard motor on it.”
“What, you think they’re parked somewhere on the street waiting for you?”
“No, I think they dumped some stolen property around here. I’d like to recover it for my client.”
She walked out on the edge of her lawn. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the intersection. There were blue veins in the tops of her breasts. “I saw an outboard like that almost hit an airboat full of cops. A black man was in the stern. It looked like another guy was slumped down in the bilge. They swung around behind my house and went up the alley. Were they the ones you’re after?”
“It sounds like them. Did they stop?”
“I wish they had.”
“Pardon?”
“If looters broke into my house, I was going to serve them ham sandwiches I’d filled with rat poison. I mixed the poison with mustard so they couldn’t taste it. I made a dozen of them.”
Clete finished jotting down her words about the boat in his notebook. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“What is it?” she said, her left eye wrinkling at the corner.
“Why are you smashing your dishware?”
“Because the goddamn insurance company just told me my policy doesn’t cover water damage. Because I thought I’d give their worthless asses breakage they could understand. Because they just fucked me out of every cent I got from my divorce.”
Clete looked down the street, suppressing a smile. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name. Like to take a break, get something to eat?” he said.
IT WAS NOON, Wednesday, and I was in Clete’s New Iberia office, located in a refurbished brick building on Main Street, listening to his account of his most recent trip to New Orleans. The nineteenth-century tin ceiling was stamped with a fleur-de-lis design and the walls were decorated with antique firearms. Outside the rear window was a brick-paved patio, shaded by potted palm and banana trees, where Clete often ate his lunch. But today he couldn’t stop talking about the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon and the new woman he had met down the street from Otis Baylor’s house.
I believed Clete was still wired from Katrina and was now giving himself over to an obsession, one that allowed him to believe if he nailed the guys who had run over him with their automobile, he could somehow revise all the events that had turned a gingerbread Caribbean city into food for every kind of jackal in the book.
“I got it figured, big mon,” he said. “Bertrand Melancon almost collided into an airboat full of NOPD guys, so he swerved down this alley behind Courtney’s house-”
“Whose house?”
“The gal I told you about, the one breaking dishes all over her terrace. Bertrand bagged it down the alley and hid Sidney Kovick’s goods somewhere along the way. The hospital is only three blocks from Courtney’s. I think I even found his boat. It was wedged under a pile of trees. The motor was gone, but it’s a green, aluminum job. Ducks Unlimited is painted on the hull. I bet they boosted it from a rescue operation.”
“I think you’re spending more time on these guys than you should,” I said.
“How’d you arrive at that brilliant idea?”
“Twisting these guys won’t bring back New Orleans, Clete. It’s gone. Just like our youth. The place we knew will be a place we look at in books that feature historical photography.”
He got up from behind his desk and stared out the window. He was wearing a short-sleeved green shirt with bluebirds and flowers printed on it. The back of his neck was pitted, his hair lightly oiled and clipped. I could see the color rising in his neck. “Don’t say that about New Orleans.”
“All right, I won’t. The guys who let people drown for two days are going to pour billions into rebuilding poor neighborhoods.”
He turned and faced me. The flattened scar that ran through one eyebrow and across his nose was the dull color and shape of an elongated tire patch. “The shield I carry could have come out of a cereal box. The only credibility I have is the degree of respect I instill in scum like the Melancons. I wish it was different. I wish I was still with NOPD. But I flushed my legitimate career a long time ago. Don’t be lecturing at me, Streak.”
The room was silent a long time.
“I got a call this morning on my cell from Bertrand Melancon,” he said.
“The Melancons have your number?” I replied, glad to have something else to talk about.
“Nig gave it to Bertrand. He says his brother was kidnapped out of our Lady of the Lake. He wants me to get him back. That’s what I was trying to tell you, but you kept interrupting me.”
“Who kidnapped him?”
“Bertrand thinks it was Sidney Kovick’s people.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I don’t work for street pukes, particularly ones I think are rapists.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“I made a mistake. I should have figured out a way to bring him in. Bertrand must have found something in that house he can’t fence. In fact, I got the impression he’s not sure what he’s holding.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“That’s what I told Bertrand. He wants to cut a deal with Sidney to get his brother back, but he thinks whatever it is he’s holding is so hot Sidney is going to kill him and Eddy and Andre Rochon once he gets it back.”
“Don’t get any deeper in this.”
“You haven’t heard the half of it. Bertrand started talking about bodies under the water in the Lower Nine. He said they glowed under his boat. He said he’s going to Hell for something he did. I told him to take his bullshit to a priest and to lose my cell number. You know what he said?”
I didn’t want to hear more of it. Clete’s face was spotted with color, the way it got when his liver was aching for a drink.
“Bertrand said the last person he wanted to see was a priest. He said it was a priest who caused the bodies in the water to glow.”
“I’m gone,” I said.
“See what happens when I’m straight up with you?” he yelled at my back.
I WENT BACK to the department, my head pounding. The enormous loss of life in New Orleans kept the media
