It was bright and cool outside, and I lowered the blinds to take the glare out of the office. When I closed my eyes, red rings seemed to recede into my brain and for just a second I thought I could see muzzle flashes from a semi-automatic rifle. I could feel Clete’s eyes following me around the room.
“Stop it,” I said.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“ Sidney wants his goods. He probably thinks Bertrand Melancon is still in New Iberia or he thinks Bledsoe can lead him to Melancon.”
“You don’t think Bledsoe is working for him?”
“If he was, he isn’t now.”
“What do you figure is the deal on Bo Diddley Wiggins?”
“I think he’s mixed up in it. But here’s the rub. Bo Diddley is a businessman. Sidney fancies himself one. Ronald Bledsoe and Bobby Mack Rydel are cut out of different cloth. If I had to take a guess, I think Bo and Sidney probably stepped off a cliff and didn’t know how to get back on it.”
I could see Clete’s irritation growing. “Guys like Bledsoe and Rydel don’t operate in a vacuum. They do the jobs that guys like Kovick and Wiggins don’t want to dirty their hands on. Like kidnapping and suffocating Courtney Degravelle to death. I got two regrets in all this, Streak. One, that I drug Courtney into it. Two, that it wasn’t me who parked a couple of big ones in Rydel’s brisket.”
Fortunately my desk phone rang. It was Mack Bertrand, at the Acadiana Crime Lab. “We picked up the letter at Otis Baylor’s place. It was in the trash can, like he said. The biggest problem is the note was printed on low-grade paper that’s been sitting in water. It was almost mush when we lifted it out. Anyway, I’ve done a computer reconstruction of it. What are you looking for in particular?”
“Directions to some stolen property. How legible is it?”
“You ever eat alphabet soup when you were a kid?”
After I hung up, I looked at Clete, my palm still resting on the receiver, unsure what I should do next. Clete was not a welcome presence at the sheriff’s department. At best he was tolerated because he and I were friends. At worst, he was still looked upon as a disgraced cop who hunted down street mutts for hire. “I need to go over to the Crime Lab,” I said.
He waited.
“Want to come?” I said.
The Crime Lab was outside the city limits, in a quasi-rural area. On the way there, a small deer ran across the road. It sprang across a rain ditch and ran through a sodden field of sugarcane that had been ruined by flooding and high wind. We were in my truck, and Clete turned in the passenger seat and strained to see out the back window as the deer bounced over a fence into a grove of water oaks. Then he stared straight ahead at the road.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“I was just thinking about something you said. The reason this case doesn’t hang together is because we’ve got a mixture of business types and greaseballs and sociopaths all in the same blender. It’s the amateurs who stay under the radar. They’re not predictable. They do business in Iran and get blow jobs in Nigeria, then take their families to First Baptist back in Big D. You think you’re hunting down Charlie Manson and instead you end up dealing with Beaver Cleaver.”
“What are you saying?”
“We don’t have the juice to take these guys down. I’m glad you capped Rydel when you had the chance.”
“He dealt it.”
“That’s not my point. The guy was protected. He was a killing machine for years and always had somebody with juice covering his butt.”
“You think that’s how Bledsoe has stayed off the computer?”
“No, that’s where it doesn’t make sense. Bledsoe is no mercenary. He’s a serial predator, a guy who doesn’t like to take orders. Maybe somebody brought him in for a short gig. That’s all I can figure. This whole bunch should have been in soap dispensers a long time ago.” he was quiet the rest of the way to the Crime Lab.
TECHNICALLY I WAS still on the desk, but technically again my desk extended to the Lab. The head forensic technician there was Mack Bertrand. He was a slender, nice-looking family man, always well groomed, who carried his pipe in a leather case on his belt. Wherever he went, he trailed a fragrance of apple-spiked pipe tobacco. I could tell he wasn’t entirely comfortable with Clete’s presence inside the Lab. Clete sensed it, too, and went outside.
“Did I say something?” Mack asked.
“It’s all right. What have you got?” I said.
Mack had created virtual images on a computer screen from the dissolved texture of the paper towel on which Bertrand Melancon had written his letter of amends. In our earlier conversation on the telephone, Mack had made use of a metaphor involving alphabet soup. The metaphor could not have been more appropriate.
I could make out several words in the body of the letter, but toward the bottom of the page, only a few letters, re-created from both the ink and the pressure of the ballpoint pen, were discernible:
Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an.
“Does that help you?” Mack asked.
“Not right offhand. But maybe it’ll make sense down the line.”
“Tell Purcel I’ve got nothing against him. But it’s supposed to be only authorized personnel. I always thought he was a pretty decent guy.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought him in,” I said.
“You okay from yesterday?”
“No problem.”
“That’s the way. When they deal it, we slam the door on it, case closed. Right? Don’t think about it,” he said, knowing a lie when he heard one, both mine and his.
THE NEXT DAY, in the Atchafalaya Basin, a black man was bobber-fishing with a cane pole inside a grove of flooded trees. It wasn’t the abandoned rental car on the levee that caught his eye. It was the gray cloud of gnats that hovered above the boxlike remains of a cabin at the foot of the levee. The cabin had been built of plywood and tarpaper and had been blown or floated there years ago by a hurricane. On several occasions, during an electrical storm, the black man had taken shelter inside the cabin, and he knew it to be a dry, empty place that was clean of any dead animals or discarded food.
He paddled his pirogue through the trees, dropping his baited hook and cork bobber into the dark pools that were unruffled by the wind out on the channel. Then he heard flies buzzing and saw shadows swooping across the grassy slope of the levee. When he looked up into the sky, he saw three turkey buzzards gliding in a circle.
He turned his back toward the levee and lifted his pole in the air, swinging the line back toward the channel, dropping the worm next to a cypress trunk. The wind changed direction, blowing down the slope of the levee. An odor that made him gag struck his nostrils.
He rolled his line up on his pole and paddled through the flooded trees onto the mudflat, sufficiently upwind now. He dragged the pirogue onto the grass and climbed the levee, then descended again so the wind was firmly at his back. The door to the cabin hung partially open. He picked up a stick to open it the rest of the way, then felt foolish at his fearful behavior. He put his hand on the edge of the door and dragged it open, scraping the bottom across the ground.
“Oh Lord,” he said under his breath.
WHEN HELEN SOILEAU and I arrived, the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department had already strung yellow crime scene tape from the flooded trees to the top of the levee, sealing off access to the cabin. The St. Mary sheriff was out of town and the investigation was being run by a lead detective named Lamar Fuselier. His blond hair was cut short and boxed on his neck, and he wore a blue windbreaker and starched khakis and spit-shined black shoes. I used to see him at Red’s Gym sometimes in Lafayette, dead-lifting three hundred pounds on the bar. That’s when he was taking courses in criminal justice at the university. That was where I also saw him pay a student in the locker room for an examination that had been stored in a fraternity file.
