'Your sign says guided fishing trips,' he said.
Twenty minutes later I cut the gas feed on the outboard and we coasted out of a channel into an alcove of moss-strung cypress trees that were lacy with new leaf. The sun was a red cinder through the canopy, the wind down, the water so still inside the shelter of the trees you could hear the bream and goggle-eyed perch popping along the edges of the hyacinths. Joe cast his lure across the clearing, right into a tree trunk, hanging the treble hook deep in the bark.
'I'll row us over,' I said.
'Forget it,' he said, and broke off his line. 'How many guys you heard I popped?'
'Nine?'
'It's closer to three or four. I never done it on a contract, either. They all come after me or a friend or the man I worked for first. Can you relate to that?'
I cast a Rapala deep between the trees, reeled the slack out of the line, and handed Joe the rod.
'Retrieve it in spurts, so the lure swims like a wounded minnow,' I said.
'You were easier to talk with when you were a drunk. Are you hearing anything I say? Listen, I went out and talked to Mr. Boudreau.'
'Amanda Boudreau's father?'
'That's right. He's a nice gentleman. He don't need to be told what it feels like to have your daughter killed by a degenerate. He says you belong to the same club.'
'What?'
'He said some fuckheads killed your mother and your wife. I didn't know that.'
'So now you do.'
'Then you understand.'
'It doesn't change anything, Joe.'
'Yeah, it does. I don't know what's going on. I get a lead on some old guy by the name of Legion Guidry, a guy maybe you're looking at for Linda's murder. Now two of my best guys are in Iberia General. You looking at this guy or not? What's going on?'
'You got to dial it down, Joe.'
'Don't tell me that.'
'I apologize for what's happened to you in New Iberia. I think you deserve better.'
Just then a largemouth bass struck Joe's lure, roiling the surface, taking the treble hook down with it, its firm body straining against the monofilament, then rising, bursting through the water's surface, like green and gold glassware breaking inside a shaft of sunlight, the lure rattling at the corner of its mouth, sprinkling the air with crystal.
Joe jerked his rod and tried to retrieve the slack in the line, but his fingers were like wood. The reel clanked once against the aluminum gunnel and the rod tipped downward toward the water, the cork handle flipping upward and out of Joe's fingers.
He watched the rod sink into the darkness, then stared uncomprehendingly at his lure floating uselessly in the middle of the pool.
'What happened? I had it under control. Right here between my hands. How'd it get away? I can't figure nothing out,' he said.
His eyes searched mine, waiting for me to reply.
CHAPTER 19
Clete Purcel grew up in the Irish Channel in the days when white gangs fought with chains over the use of a street corner. His father was a drunken, superstitious, and sentimental man who delivered milk in the Garden District, made his children kneel on grains of rice for sassing a nun, and whipped Clete with a razor strop when he lost a fight. A gang of kids from the Iberville Project jumped Clete by St. Louis Cemetery and bashed his eye open with a steel pipe. Clete packed the wound with a cobweb, closed it with adhesive tape, and drove around all night in a stolen car until he caught the pipe wielder alone.
After New Orleans the Marine Corps was a breeze. Even Vietnam wasn't much of a challenge. Women were another matter.
His second wife, Lois, was driven by either her own neurosis or living with Clete to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. In the meantime Clete flowered as a vice cop. Unfortunately, he seemed to fit into the milieu too well. His girlfriends were addicts, strippers, compulsive gamblers, deep-fried cultists, or beautiful Italian girls with complexions and long hair like the bride of Dracula. The latter group usually turned out to be the sweethearts or relatives of criminals. When we were Homicide partners at NOPD, I often had to roll down all the windows in our car to blow out the odors Clete carried in his clothes from the previous night.
But one way or another he always got hurt. What neither his inept, uneducated father, sadistic brig chasers, nor even Victor Charles could do to him, Clete managed to do to himself.
He burned his kite at NOPD with pills and booze and by killing a government witness. He hired out as a mercenary in Central America and worked for the Mob in Reno and maybe engineered the crash of a gangster's seaplane in the Cabinet Mountains of western Montana. His P.I. license and his job as a hunter of bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine were the only elements of stability in his life. The effect of his arrival in any environment was like a junkyard falling down a stairs. Chaos was his logo, honor and loyalty and a vulnerable heart his undoing.
Now Clete was swinging into high gear again, this time with Battering Ram Shanahan.
Just after Joe Zeroski had driven away from my dock, Clete pulled into the driveway. He was wearing a summer tux, his sandy hair wet and parted neatly on the side, his cheeks glowing, a corsage in a plastic box by his thigh.
'How do I look?' he asked.
'Beautiful,' I said.
He got out of the car and turned in a circle. A piece of toilet paper was stuck to a shaving cut on his chin. 'The coat's not too tight? I feel like I'm wrapped in a sausage skin.'
'You look fine.'
'We're going to a dance at a country club. Barbara has to pay her dues with some political people. The last time I went dancing Big Tit Judy Lavelle and I did the dirty bop in Pat O'Brien's and got thrown out.'
'Smile a lot. Leave early. Take it easy on the hooch,' I said.
He blotted his forehead with his wrist and looked down the dirt road under the row of oaks that paralleled the bayou.
'On another subject, I just passed Joe Zeroski. What was he doing here?' he said.
'Legion Guidry scrambled a couple of his guys. One by the name of Sonny Bilotti. You know him?'
'He was a hitter for the Calucci brothers. He shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. Guidry cleaned his clock?'
'He put him in the hospital.'
'That's hard to believe.'
'Really?' I said.
He caught the look on my face. 'Oh, like you're a pushover? The difference is you have parameters, Dave. A guy like Bilotti parks one in the brain pan and then checks to see if he got the right guy. That's the edge these guys have on us. I've got to work out a new strategy on Guidry.'
I pulled the piece of toilet paper off the shaving cut on his chin and let it blow away in the breeze. 'Enjoy the dance,' I said.
The dance at the country club in Lafayette was one of those insular events where the possession of power and money are celebrated in ways that never require the participants to acknowledge the secret chambers of the heart or perhaps, more accurately, the edges of the conscience.
The buffet tables and ice sculptures and silver bowls brimming with champagne and sherbet punch, the 1950s
