to his cell phone. I stopped in the bar at Clementine’s and at an outdoor place on Bayou Teche where he sometimes drank, but no one had seen him.
Perhaps I had been rude to Betsy Mossbacher. But few people understood the complexity of Clete Purcel. He didn’t show pain or injury; he absorbed it in the way I imagine an elephant absorbs a rock splinter in its foot. While the wound heals and scars over on the surface, the splinter works its way deeper into the tissue, until infection forms and the inflammation swells upward through the joints into the chest and shoulders and spine, until the elephant’s entire connective system throbs with the lightest of burdens placed on its back. Perhaps the latter was not true of an elephant. But it was of Clete.
I stood on the drawbridge overlooking the bayou at Burke Street and thought about the account Betsy had given me of Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle’s ordeal. I suppose a person could say Rochon had invited his fate, but certainly Ms. Degravelle had not. I thought about the kind of men who would bind and torture their fellow human beings for money or for any other reason. Over the years I had known a few. Some hid in a uniform, some did not. But all of them sought causes and all of them needed banners over their heads. None of them, except those who were obviously psychopathic, ever acted alone or without sanction.
In the twilight Bayou Teche was swollen and wide between its tree-shrouded banks, the backs of garfish roiling the surface next to the lily pads. The sun had burned into a tiny red cinder. The air was suddenly cool, the lawns along the bayou lit by gas-fed lanterns and sometimes by chains of white lights in the oak trees. William Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night. I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees, the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, its slat-tern breath and the quickness of its step only seconds away from the place where children played and our loved ones dwelled.
I walked home and began baking an apple pie in the kitchen oven, insisting that Molly and Alafair sit with me and talk while I did.
Chapter 20
BY SUNDAY MORNING Clete had still not shown up. I heard the pet flap on the door swing back and forth, then saw Snuggs walk into the kitchen, jump up on the windowsill, and look back outside. I walked out on the porch. Bo Diddley Wiggins was in my backyard, admiring the bayou, wearing a pair of slacks and a short-sleeved print shirt unbuttoned at the top, the lapels ironed out on his shoulders.
“Didn’t know if y’all were still sleeping,” he said. “How old is that coon?”
“He’s old. Like me,” I said.
“He took a wet dump all over his papers. That’s what I fear most in life. Sitting in a wheelchair, my pecker shriveled up, downloading in adult Pampers while a nigra woman sticks gruel in my mouth.”
I heard Molly close the kitchen window. Bo looked at the trees overhead, the sunlight breaking through the branches, a squirrel swinging on a bird feeder. He waited for me to invite him in.
“We’re about to head out to Lafayette, Bo. Otherwise I’d offer you coffee,” I said.
“I don’t have time, anyway. Look, I don’t like to meddle. But we go back and I couldn’t just blow off your friend’s situation. What’s his-name, the rhino who’s always getting into trouble around here?”
“Clete Purcel?”
“A couple of my employees are taking care of him right now. They don’t want to see him hurt. But the guy went ape-shit out by an old oil platform on my lease and shot at somebody. If it hadn’t been for my superintendent, your friend would be in the Lafourche Parish Jail.”
“Where is he now?”
“Shit-faced in a bar, with a thirty-eight in a holster strapped on his chest. Why you looking at me like that?”
“Why are your employees going out of their way for Clete Purcel?”
“Because he fishes down there and they know him. Because one of my employees was in Vietnam, just like your friend. Excuse me, Dave, but did I do something wrong in coming here, because I’m definitely getting that feeling.”
“No, you didn’t, Bo. I appreciate it. If you’ll give me directions, I’ll go get him.”
“I’ll take you. Get in my truck. Wait till you see what this baby can do in four-wheel drive on a board road.”
Bo drove his vehicle just like he did everything else-full-throttle, not taking prisoners, as though the rest of the world had become his enemy simply because it was on the other side of his windshield. We passed through miles of sawgrass, all of it yellowed by submersion, water and mud splashing above the hood, Bo driving with one hand on a road that was hardly a road, the frame bouncing on the springs.
The bar was at a rural intersection where the stoplight and the cable it hung on had been wrapped by storm winds around a telephone pole. Most of the bar’s metal roof was gone and had been replaced with plywood and canvas and blue felt. The rain ditches along the two intersecting roads were compacted with dead trees and detritus from a tidal surge that had wiped the coastal end of the parish off the map.
The inside of the club was dark, creaking with heat, the only power from a gas-operated generator chugging in back. Clete sat at a round table in the corner, his shoulder-holstered.38 strapped in plain sight across a Hawaiian shirt that stuck to his skin like wet Kleenex. A bottle of tequila, a salt shaker, a shot glass, and a saucer of sliced limes were on the table. So was a sweating can of Bud, which he picked up and sipped from without expression when he saw me and Bo Diddley enter the club.
Two sun-browned men in khaki clothes were drinking coffee at the bar. They nodded at Bo, then returned to their conversation.
“Trying to stoke up the locals?” I said to Clete.
“Who’s he?” he said, indicating Bo.
“Bo Wiggins,” Bo said, extending his hand.
“Those guys at the bar work for you?” Clete replied, either ignoring or not seeing Bo’s hand.
“They said you had some trouble at an old drill location on my lease. They said they heard a couple of pops in the wind and saw a guy roaring down the canal in a boat. They thought maybe this guy tried to rob you. So I called Dave and we drove out.”
Clete’s face was oily and dilated, his eyes bleary with fatigue and early-morning booze. “See, that’s not what happened. The guy in the boat is a guy I’ve been chasing through three parishes. See, he’s a guy who maybe tortured a lady friend of mine to death. They tortured her for a long time, and they put a plastic bag over her head and dumped her over the gunnels down by the salt. They did this because that’s the kind of guys they are, guys who get off working out their fantasies on a woman who can’t fight back.
“But right now the problem I got is your friends moved my Caddy somewhere and they don’t want to tell me where it is. So it would be really good if you would ask them to bring my Caddy around and to put the keys in my hand. Because if they don’t, it’s really going to mess up my day.” Clete held up the face of his watch for Bo to look at. “See, I’m already late for church.”
Bo listened with a half-smile on his face, his forearm on the table, his buzz haircut and jug ears silhouetted against a window. The back of his neck was red and pocked with acne scars and greasy with sweat. “No problem, Mr. Purcel. Your car will be here in five minutes,” he said.
Bo went to the bar and spoke to his employees, who kept their attention on him and did not look again in Clete’s direction.
“You don’t know those two guys?” I said.
“No, why?”
“You didn’t know one of them served in Vietnam?”
“No, I never saw either one of them. Who’s that guy with you?”
“Forget about him. You actually shot at somebody?”
“It’s a long story, but three separate people told me they saw that boat in the bay where Courtney’s body was found. I hired an airboat and chased the guy all along the coastline. I gave up, then a guy at a dock told me he’d seen the boat down by an oil platform. I drove my car down the levee and almost had him. When he took off, I
