drove, for eight hundred dollars from a mortician who had bought it off the family of a mobbed-up suicide victim. The steel-jacketed.357 round had exited through the Cadillac's roof, and Clete had filed down the jagged metal and filled the hole with body solder and sanded it smooth and sprayed it with gray primer so the roof looked like it had been powdered from the explosion of a large firecracker.
'What are you doing here?' I asked.
'I had to get out of New Orleans for a while. This homicide guy Magelli was bugging me yesterday about Zipper Clum getting popped. Like I have knowledge about every crime committed in Orleans and Jefferson parishes,' Clete said. '
You usually do.'
'Thanks. Let's get something to go and eat in the park. I want to have a talk with you, big mon.'
'About what?'
'I'll tell you in the park.'
We ordered two Styrofoam containers of fried catfish and coleslaw and dirty rice and drove across the drawbridge that spanned Bayou Teche at Burke Street. The bayou was dented with rain rings. Clete parked the Cadillac by one of the picnic shelters under the oaks in City Park, and we sat under the tin roof in the rain and warm breeze and ate lunch. Inside all of Clete's outrageous behavior was the secular priest, always determined to bail his friend out of trouble, no matter how unwanted his help was. I waited for the sermon to begin.
'Will you either say it or stop looking at me like that?' I said finally.
'This homicide hotshot, Magelli? He's heard you've been moving the furniture around about your mother's death. He thinks you might just do a number on somebody.'
'Who cares what he thinks?'
'I think he's right on. You're going to coast along, not saying anything, stonewalling people, then when you think you've found out enough, you're going to blow up their shit.'
'Maybe you're right.'
'It's not your style, noble mon. That's why I'm going to be in town for a little while. I was out at Passion Labiche's place early this morning.'
'What for?'
'Because I'm not sure the hit on Zipper Clum is related to your mother's death. These political fucks in Baton Rouge want Letty Labiche executed, body in the ground, case closed, so they can get back full-time to the trough. You keep turning over rocks, starting with sticking a gun in Zipper Clum's mouth up on that roof.'
'Me?'
'So I helped a little bit. That Passion Labiche is one hot-ass-looking broad, isn't she? Is she involved with anybody?'
'Why don't you give some thought to the way you talk about women?'
'It was a compliment. Anyway, you're right, she's hiding something. Which makes no sense. What do she and her sister have to lose at this point?'
I shook my head.
'I think we should start with the hitter, the cracker on the tape,' I said.
'I got a question for you. Jack Abbott, this mainline con a writer got out of the Utah Pen some years back? Where'd he go after he knifed a waiter to death in New York?'
' Morgan City.'
'What can I say? Great minds think alike. I already put in a couple of calls,' Clete said, grinning while he wiped food off his mouth.
But I didn't have great faith in finding the killer of Zipper Clum in Morgan City, even though it was known as a place for a man on the run to disappear among the army of blue-collar laborers who worked out of there on fishing vessels and offshore drilling rigs. Clete had not heard the tape on which Zipper had said his killer had never done outside work and had skin like milk. I also believed Clete was more interested in monitoring me than the investigation into my mother's death. He came to the sheriff's department at quitting time, expecting to drive down together to Morgan City.
'I can't go today,' I said.
'Why not?' he asked.
'Commitments at home.'
'Yeah?' He was standing in the middle of my office, his porkpie hat slanted down on his head, his stomach hanging over his belt, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. He tossed the cigarette end over end into the wastebasket. 'I refuse to light one of these things ever again. Why are you giving me this bullshit, Streak?'
'Come have dinner with us.'
'No, I'm meeting this retired jigger an hour from now. You coming or not?'
'A bank jigger?'
'More serious. He was the lookout man for a couple of hit teams working out of Miami and New Orleans.'
'Not interested.'
'Where do you think we're supposed to get information from, the library?'
When I didn't reply, he said, 'Dave, if you want me out of town, just say so.'
'Let's talk about it tomorrow.'
After he closed the door behind him, his heat and anger remained like a visible presence in the room's silence.
That evening Alafair, Bootsie, and I were eating supper in the kitchen when we heard a heavy car on the gravel in the driveway. Alafair got up from the table and peered out the window. She was in high school now and seemed to have no memory anymore of the civil war in El Salvador that had brought her here as an illegal refugee, nor of the day I pulled her from the submerged wreckage of an airplane out on the salt. Her Indian-black hair was tied up on her head with a blue bandanna, and from the back, when she raised up on the balls of her feet to see better through the blinds, her body looked like that of a woman ten years her senior.
'It's somebody in a limousine, with a chauffeur. She's rolling down the window. It's an old woman, Dave,' she said.
I went out the back door and walked around the side of the house to the limousine. It was white, with charcoal-tinted windows, and the chauffeur wore a black suit and cap and tie and white shirt. Oddly, his face was turned away, as though he did not want me to see it. Through the limousine's open back window I saw Jim Gable's wife, in a white dress and gloves, drinking sparkling burgundy from a crystal glass with a long stem. The late sun's glow through the trees gave her skin a rosy tone it did not naturally possess, and her mouth was soft, full of wrinkles, when she smiled at me. What was her name? Corrine? Colinda?
'Micah, open the door so Mr. Robicheaux can get in,' she said to the chauffeur.
He stepped out of the driver's seat and opened the back, his face still averted. When I was inside, on the rolled leather seat, he walked down toward the dock just as a flight of snow egrets flew across the water, their wings pink in the sunset.
'How you do, Miss Cora?' I said.
'I couldn't stand staying another day alone while Jim's in the city. So I got Micah to drive me on a little tour of your lovely area. Join me in a glass of burgundy, Mr. Robicheaux,' she said.
I realized, listening to her voice, that her Deep South accent came and went arbitrarily, even though her eyes, which were violet, never seemed to vary in their level of warmth and sincerity.
'No, thanks. Would you like to come in and have a bite to eat?' I replied.
'I'm afraid I've intruded. I do that sometimes. Lack of an audience, that sort of thing.' She watched my face to see if I had inferred a second meaning. Obviously I had not.
'Audience?' I said, confused.
'It's a vanity of mine. I assume everyone on the planet spends time thinking about old movies.' She opened a
