The dog seemed to shrink itself into the grass. Alexis Dupree was smiling at her, the fishing rod trembling slightly with the palsy that affected his hand. His gaze moved back to Gretchen and the lights in her hair and the thin gold chain. “Please accept my apologies for the behavior of my grandson’s wife,” he said. “Did your family emigrate from Prussia? Few people know that Yiddish is a German dialect. I suspect you’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
Gretchen looked at Clete. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said.
“Did I say something wrong?” Dupree asked, his eyes dropping to Gretchen’s hips and thighs as she walked away.
“Don’t let that old guy get to you,” Clete said to her in the Caddy.
“I felt like he wanted to peel off my skin.”
“Yeah, he’s a little strange.”
“ He’s a little strange? How about the broad?”
“She seemed pretty normal to me.”
“She has a broom up her ass.”
“So?”
“You couldn’t keep your eyes off her. That’s the kind of woman you’re attracted to?”
“You work for me, Gretchen. You’re not my spiritual adviser.”
“Then act your fucking age.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to this,” Clete said.
She stared at the rusted trailers in the slum by the drawbridge and the children in the dirt yards and the wash flapping on the clotheslines. The Caddy rumbled across the steel grid on the drawbridge. “I don’t know why I said that. I feel confused when I’m with you. I don’t understand my feelings. You really aren’t trying to put moves on me, are you?”
“I already told you.”
“You don’t think I’m attractive?”
“I know my limitations. I’m old and overweight and have hypertension and a few drinking and weed issues. If I was thirty years younger, you’d have to hide.” He accelerated the Caddy toward New Iberia, lowering his window, filling the inside of the car with the sound of wind. “We’re going to get you a badge,” he said.
“A badge for what?”
“A private investigator’s badge. At a pawnshop and police-supply store in Lafayette,” he said. “Anybody can buy a PI badge. They’re bigger and shinier and better-looking than an authentic cop’s badge. The trick to being a PI is gaining the client’s confidence. Our big enemy is not the skells but the Internet. With Google, you can look down people’s chimneys without ever leaving your house. Most reference librarians are better at finding people and information than I am.”
“Yeah, but you don’t just ‘find’ people.”
“Here’s the reality of the situation. I’ve got certain powers not because I’m a PI but because I run down bail skips for two bondsmen. I’m not a bondsman, but legally, I’m the agent and representative of people who are, so the powers given them by the state extend to me, which allows me to pursue fugitives across state lines and kick down doors without a warrant. I have legal powers an FBI agent doesn’t have. For example, if a husband and wife are both out on bond and the husband skips, Wee Willie and Nig can have the wife’s bond revoked in order to turn dials on the husband. I don’t do stuff like that, but Wee Willie and Nig do. You starting to get the picture?”
“You don’t like what you do?”
“I want to wear a full-body condom when I go to work. Pimps and pedophiles and dope dealers use my restroom and put their feet on my office furniture. They think I’m their friend. I try not to shake hands with them. Sometimes I have to. Sometimes I want to scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush.”
“It’s a job. Why beat up on yourself?”
“No, it’s what you do after you’ve flushed your legitimate career. The only time you actually help out your clients is in a civil suit. The justice system doesn’t work most of the time, but civil court does. This guy Morris Dees broke the Klan and a bunch of Aryan Nation groups by bankrupting them in civil court. I don’t catch many civil cases. If you work for me, you deal with the skells. That means we’ve got two rules: We’re honest with each other, and we never hurt anybody unless they deal the play. Can you live with that?”
“This is the big test I’m supposed to pass?”
He pulled to the side of the road under a shade tree, next to a pasture where black Angus were grazing in the sunlight.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I like you a lot, and I think the world has done a number on you that no kid deserves. I want to be your friend, but I don’t have much to offer. I’m a drunk, and almost everything I touch turns to shit. I don’t care what you did before we met. I just want you to be straight with me now. You want to tell me some things down the track, that’s copacetic. If you don’t want to tell me anything down the track, that’s copacetic, too. You hearing me on all this? I back your play, you back mine. The past is past; now is now.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eye.
“I don’t get you,” she said.
“What’s to get? I love movies and New Orleans and horse tracks and Caddy convertibles with fins and eating large amounts of food. My viscera alone probably weighs two hundred pounds. When I go into a restaurant, I get seated at a trough.”
“You really like movies?”
“I go to twelve-step meetings for movie addiction.”
“You have cable?”
“Sure. I’ve got insomnia. I watch movies in the middle of the night.”
“James Dean’s movies are showing all this week. I think he was the greatest actor who ever lived.”
He restarted the Caddy and turned back onto the road, his brow furrowed, remembering the red windbreaker worn by the person he watched murder Bix Golightly. “What do you know about guns?”
“Enough so I don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”
“We’ll stop at Henderson Swamp. I want to show you a few things about firearms.”
“I found your Beretta and disarmed it on your premises. I don’t need a gun lesson, at least not now. I’m a little tired, okay? The numbers tattooed on that old man’s forearm, they’re from the death camp?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“He made me feel dirty all over. Like when I was a little girl. I don’t know why,” she replied. “I’m not feeling too good. Can we go back to the motor court? I need to take a nap and start the day over.”
The only lead I had on the men who had tried to kill me outside Bengal Gardens was the name of Ronnie Earl Patin, a strong-arm robber I had helped put away a decade ago. Though there are instances when a felon goes down for some serious time and nurses a grudge over the years and eventually gets out and does some payback, it’s very rare that he goes after a cop or judge or prosecutor. Payback is usually done on a fall partner or a family member who snitched him off. Ronnie Earl was a sweaty glutton and a porn addict and a violent alcoholic who knocked around old people for their Social Security checks, but he had been jailing all of his adult life, and most of his crimes grew out of his addictions and were not part of vendettas. That said, would he do a contract job on a cop if the money was right? It was possible.
The driver of the freezer truck was too short to have been Ronnie Earl, and the shooter who had almost taken my head off with the cut-down had an ascetic face similar in design to a collection of saw blades. Could ten years in Angola, most of it on Camp J, have melted down the gelatinous pile that I helped send up there?
I called an old-time gunbull at Angola who had shepherded Ronnie Earl through the system for years. “Yeah, he was one of our Jenny Craig success stories,” the gunbull said. “He stayed out of segregation his last two years and worked in the bean field.”
“He went out max time?”
“He earned two months good time before his discharge. This was on a ten-bit. He could have been out in thirty-seven months.”
“What kept him in segregation?”
“Making pruno and raping fish and being a general shithead. What are you looking at him for?”
