“Grimes tortured my secretary. I shouldn’t go into his apartment?”
“You didn’t call the shooting in?”
“I called in a shots-fired from a pay phone.”
“You did that later?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s something not coming together here, Clete. You had your piece out when you were in the alley?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But you didn’t try to stop the shooter?”
“Would you eat a round for Bix Golightly?”
Clete was staring into the fog, his big hands cupped on his knees, his porkpie hat low on his forehead, his stomach hanging over his belt. He picked up Snuggs and started wiping the mud off the cat’s paws with his handkerchief, smearing mud and fur on his slacks and sport coat.
“You’re leaving something out,” I said.
“Like what?”
“You’re telling me you froze?”
“I didn’t say that. I just left Golightly to his fate, that’s all. He was born a bad guy, and he went out the same way. The world is better off without him.”
“You’re a witness to a homicide, Clete.”
“What else do you want me to say? I told you what happened. You don’t like what I’ve told you, so you put the problem on me. You got anything to eat?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess?” he said, putting Snuggs down.
“Come inside. I’ll get some eggs and bacon started.”
He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead as though he could smooth the wrinkles out of it. “Just coffee,” he said. “I don’t feel too hot.”
“You pull something loose inside?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“How can I help you if you won’t be square with me?”
“I thought this fall we’d be fishing again. Like the old days, when we caught green trout north of Barataria Bay. New Orleans is the only place in the world where people call bass ‘green trout.’ That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?”
“Who was the shooter, Clete?”
A T 7:45 A.M. I went to the office, and Clete went to the cottage he rented at a motor court down the bayou. At eleven A.M. I called Dana Magelli at the NOPD. I asked him what he had on a double shooting in Algiers. “How do you know we have anything?” he replied.
“Word gets around,” I replied.
“Bix Golightly got it. So did a kid by the name of Waylon Grimes. So far no brass, no prints. It looks like a contract hit. Somebody called in an anonymous shots-fired from a public phone.”
“Why do you think it was a contract job?”
“Aside from the fact that the shooter recovered his brass, he probably used a twenty-two or a twenty-five with a suppressor. The pros like small-caliber guns because the round bounces around inside the skull. Who told you about the shooting, Dave?”
“I got a tip.”
“From who?”
“Maybe from the same guy who called in the shots-fired. He said the shooter was wearing a red windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and jeans stuffed in suede boots. He said Golightly called the shooter Caruso.”
“We’ve already been to Golightly’s condo. A neighbor says a guy who sounds a whole lot like Clete Purcel was hanging around the condo last night. What are you guys up to?”
“Nothing of consequence. Life is pretty boring on the Teche.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“You’re a good man, but don’t ever talk to me like that again,” I said.
“You’re holding back information in a homicide investigation,” he said.
“You ever hear of a hitter named Caruso?”
“No. And if I haven’t, nobody else around here has, either.”
“Maybe there’s a new player in town.”
“Sometimes when people have a near-death experience, they think they don’t have to obey the same rules as the rest of us. You tell Purcel what I said.”
“He’s the best cop NOPD ever had.”
“Yeah, until he killed a federal informant and fled the country rather than face the music.”
I hung up the phone. At noon my half-day shift was over. I walked home under the canopy of live oaks that arched over East Main, the sunlight golden through the leaves, the Spanish moss lifting in the wind, the autumnal Louisiana sky so hard and perfectly blue that it looked like an inverted ceramic bowl. Molly was at her office down the bayou, where she worked for a relief agency that helped fisher-people and small farmers build their own homes and businesses. Alafair was proofreading the galleys of her first novel at our redwood picnic table in the backyard, Tripod and Snuggs sitting like bookends on either side of the table. I fixed ham-and-onion sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea and carried them outside and sat down next to her.
“Did Pierre Dupree find you?” she said.
“He called?”
“No, he was here about an hour ago.”
“What did he want?” I asked.
“He didn’t say. He seemed in a hurry.”
“Dupree owns a building in New Orleans that used to be the headquarters of Didoni Giacano. There was a safe in the building that contained an old IOU from a card game Clete was in. Clete had paid the debt, but a couple of wiseacres got their hands on the marker and tried to take his office and apartment away from him. What do you know about Dupree?”
“I’ve met him at a couple of parties. He seems nice enough,” she said. She took a bite of her sandwich and avoided my eyes.
“Go on,” I said.
“He’s had a lot of commercial success as an artist. I think he’s a marketing man more than a painter. There’s nothing wrong in that.”
“There isn’t?”
“He owns an ad agency, Dave. That’s what the man does for a living. Not everybody is Vincent van Gogh.”
“When was the first time you wrote a dishonest line in your fiction?”
She drank from her iced tea, her expression neutral, her galley pages fluttering when the wind gusted.
“The answer is you never wrote a dishonest line,” I said.
Her skin was unblemished and dark in the shade, her hair as black as an Indian’s, her features and the luster in her eyes absolutely beautiful. Men had trouble not looking at her, even when they were with their wives. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged airplane that crashed off Southwest Pass. “There’s Pierre Dupree,” she said.
A canary-yellow Humvee with a big chrome grille had just pulled into the driveway. Through the tinted windshield, I could see the driver talking on a cell phone and fooling with something on the dashboard. I walked through the porte cochere until I was abreast of the driver’s window. Pierre Dupree had thick black hair that was as shiny as a raven’s wing. He also had intense green eyes with a black fleck in them. He was at least six feet seven and had a face that would have been handsome except for the size of his teeth. They were too big for his mouth and, coupled with his size, they gave others the sense that in spite of his tailored suits and good manners, his body contained physical appetites and energies and suppressed urges that he could barely restrain.
