screens in six parishes.
He almost eluded the army of state police and sheriff's deputies that was crisscrossing Highway 90, virtually colliding into one another. He swung onto a side road in St. Mary Parish, floored the souped-up stock-car racer he had stolen out of a mechanic's shed, scoured a balloon of dust out of a dirt road for two miles through sugarcane fields that shielded the car from view, then swung back onto 90, a half mile beyond a police barricade, and looked down the long corridor of oaks and pines that led into New Iberia.
He shifted down, turned across a stone bridge over the bayou, arching a crick out of his neck, knotting his T- shirt in his hand, wiping the sweat off his face with it.
He'd outrun them all. He filled his lungs with air. The smoke from meat fires drifted through the oaks on people's lawns; the evening sky glowed like a purple rose. Now, to dump this car and find a rooming house where he could watch a lot of television for a few days. Man, it was good to be alive.
That's when the First Assembly of God church bus hit him broadside, springing his doors, and propelled him through the air like a stone, right through a canebrake into Bayou Teche.
He sat on a steel bunk in the holding cell, barefoot, his khakis and T-shirt splattered with mud, a bandage wrapped around his head. He pulled a thin strand of bamboo leaf from his hair and watched it tumble in a shaft of light to the cement floor.
The sheriff and I looked at him through the bars. 'Why didn't you get out of New Orleans when you had the chance?' I asked.
'It's a free country,' he replied.
'Not when you kill people,' I said.
'I'll ask you a better question. Why didn't you stay where you were?' the sheriff said.
Johnny Remeta's eyes lifted into the sheriff's face, then they emptied of any perception or thought. He looked at the wall, stifling a yawn.
'Get him processed. I want those detectives from New Orleans to have him out of here by noon tomorrow,' the sheriff said, and walked down the corridor and banged the heavy door behind him.
'What's his problem?' Remeta said.
'Our space is full up with local wise guys. We don't need imports. Why'd you come to New Iberia?'
'A guy looks for friends where he can.'
'I'm not your friend. You were hanging around New Orleans to pop the guys who took a shot at you, weren't you?'
'You blame me?'
'You know who they are?'
'No. That's why I hung around.' I looked at him a long time. He dropped his eyes to the floor.
'You told the cop at the museum you were an artist,' I said.
'I paint ceramics. I've done a mess of them.'
'Good luck, kid. I think you're going to need it,' I said, and started to go.
He rose from the bunk and stood at the bars. His face was no more than three inches from mine.
'I've got money put away for a lawyer. I can beat the beef on Zipper Clum,' he said.
'So?'
'I have a feeling my kite's going down before I ever see that lawyer.'
His breath was like the stale odor of dead flowers.
His grief was his own, I told myself as I went home later that evening.
But I couldn't rest. Zipper Clum's dying statement, taped on the boom box in the lawn-mower shop off Magazine, said Johnny Remeta was the trail back to my mother's death.
I ate a late supper with Bootsie on the picnic table in the backyard and told her about Johnny Remeta's fears. I expected her to take issue with my concerns, which I seemed to bring home as a matter of course from my job. After I stopped talking, she was pensive, one tooth biting into her bottom lip.
'I think Remeta's right. Zipper Clum was killed because of what he knew about your mother's death. Now Connie Deshotel has taken a special interest in you. She called again, by the way.'
'What about?'
'She said she wanted to tell you Clete Purcel's license problems have been straightened out. How nice of her to call us rather than him.'
'Forget her.'
'I'd like to. Dave, I didn't tell you everything about my relationship with Jim Gable. He's perverse. Oh, not with me. Just in things he said, in his manner, the way he'd stand in his undershorts in front of the mirror and comb his hair, the cruelty that was threaded through his remarks.'
The blood had risen in her face, and her eyes were shiny with embarrassment.
'You didn't know what he was like, Boots.'
'It doesn't help. I think about him and want to wash my body with peroxide.'
'I'm going to help Batist close up, then we'll go for some ice cream,' I said.
I walked down to the bait shop and called Dana Magelli, my NOPD friend, at his home and got the unlisted number for Jim Gable's condo in New Orleans.
'Why are you messing with Gable?' Magelli asked. 'Cleaning up some paperwork, interdepartmental cooperation, that sort of thing.'
'Gable leaves shit prints on everything he touches. Stay away from him. It's a matter of time till somebody scrambles his eggs.'
'It's not soon enough.'
I punched in Jim Gable's number. I could hear opera music playing in the background -when he answered the phone.
'Y'all are picking up Johnny Remeta tomorrow,' I said.
'Who is this?' he asked.
'Dave Robicheaux. Remeta thinks somebody might want to blow up his shit.'
'Hey, we owe you a big thanks on this one. You made the ID through that home invasion in Loreauville, didn't you?'
'He'd better arrive in New Orleans without any scratches on the freight.'
'You're talking to the wrong man, my friend. Don Ritter's in charge of that case.'
'Let me raise another subject. I understand you've made 'some remarks about my wife.'
I could hear ice cubes rattle in a glass, as though he had just sipped from it and replaced it on a table.
'I don't know where you heard that, but it's not true. I have the greatest respect for your wife,' he said.
I stared out the bait shop window. The flood lamps were on and the bayou was yellow and netted with torn strands of hyacinths, the air luminescent with insects. My temples were pounding. I felt like a jealous high school boy who had just challenged a rival in a locker room, only to learn that his own words were his worst enemy.
'Maybe we can take up the subject another time. On a more physical level,' I said.
I thought I heard the voice of a young woman giggling in the background, then the tinkle of ice in the glass again.
'I've got to run. Get a good night's sleep. I don't think you mean what you say. Anyway, I don't hold grudges,' Gable said.
The woman laughed again just before he hung up.
But the two New Orleans detectives who were assigned to take Johnny Remeta back to their jurisdiction,
Don Ritter and a man named Burgoyne, didn't show up in the morning. In fact, they didn't arrive at the department until almost 5 p.m.
I stayed late until the last of the paperwork was done. Ritter bent over my desk and signed his name on a custody form attached to a clipboard, then bounced the ballpoint pen on my desk blotter.
'Thanks for your help, Robicheaux. We won't forget it,' he said.
'You taking the four-lane through Morgan City?' I said.
'No, 1-10 through Baton Rouge,' Burgoyne, the other detective, said.
