beside her, the water darkening his khakis up to the knees. “This is the place where the body of Blue Melton floated up,” he said. “If you look to the southeast, you’ll see a channel that flows through the bay and into the Gulf. It’s like an underground river that flows in and out with the tides. I think the guys who dumped her overboard didn’t know much about tidal currents. I believe they intended for her body to sink and be eaten by sharks or crabs. If the body was found, it would look like she fell off a boat and drowned. Because the ice hadn’t melted, I think they were in pretty close to shore. What I’m saying is I think these guys were on a big boat, one with a freezer unit, but they’re not seafarers, and they’re probably not from around here.”
“Why are rich guys hanging around with a poor Cajun girl from St. Martinville?” Gretchen said.
“Try sex.”
“She had a balloon in her mouth?”
“It probably held the same skag she was injected with. There was a message in it that said her sister was still alive. After she was abducted, somebody decided she knew more than she was supposed to and had her killed. Somebody gave her a hotshot and let her die in a freezer.”
“Why are we talking about this now?”
“My buddy Dave keeps insisting that we’re up against some big players. I told him we were dealing with the same collection of lamebrains we’ve been locking up for thirty years. I was wrong.” Clete looked at the giant trunk of an uprooted cypress that had washed up onto the beach in a storm, now lying sun-bleached and worm-scrolled and polished by wind and salt next to a stand of gum and persimmon trees. “Sit down a minute, Gretchen.”
“What for?”
“Because I asked you to. I don’t know how to say this. Three New Orleans lowlifes who tried to scam me out of my office building and apartment got whacked. The mechanic who did the job was probably an out-of-towner, maybe somebody who’s been mobbed up for a while. These three guys were criminals and knew the rules of the game. They made their bet and lost. The girl who floated up here wasn’t a player. She was an innocent girl that a bunch of real cocksuckers got their hands on and murdered. Her sister, Tee Jolie Melton, may be in the hands of those same guys. You smell that?”
Gretchen turned her face into the breeze. They were sitting in the shade on the cypress trunk, the metallic reflection of the bay as bright and eye-watering as the arc from an electric welding torch. “It smells like a filling station,” she said.
“You can’t see it yet, but it’s oil. Nobody knows how much of it is out there. The drilling company sank it with dispersants so there would be no way to accurately calculate how many barrels they’d be held responsible for spilling. Tee Jolie Melton said something to Dave about her boyfriend being mixed up with some guys who were talking about centralizers. Dave thinks the boyfriend is Pierre Dupree. Maybe the blowout was caused because there weren’t enough centralizers in the casing. But everybody already knows that, so that’s not the issue.”
“Yeah, I think I got all that. Go back to what you said about the three guys who messed with you and got shot.”
“They’re dead. End of story. Maybe the person who smoked them did the world a favor, know what I’m saying?”
“No, I don’t. Not at all.”
“The hitter was somebody who goes by the name Caruso.”
“Like the singer?” she said.
“Yeah, when Caruso sings, everyone else becomes silent. Permanently.”
“Sounds like urban-legend Mafia bullshit to me. You ever go to Miami in the winter? The whole beach is littered with greaseballs. They have physiques like tadpoles. Before they leave New York, they get chemical tans. Their skin looks like orange sherbet with black hair. My mother used to turn tricks in a couple of big hotels on the beach. She said some of these guys wore prosthetic penises inside their Speedos. Most of these pitiful fucks have day jobs on sanitation trucks. If they weren’t in the union, they’d be on welfare.”
Clete hung his head, his hands folded between his knees, his eyes unfocused. The wind was cool inside the shade, the leaves of the gum trees rustling overhead. His boat was rocking in the small waves sliding back off the beach.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked.
“No,” he replied.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I love Louisiana.”
She rested her hand on the back of his neck, her fingernails touching his hairline and the pockmarks in his skin. He felt her nails move back and forth inside his hair, as though she were stroking a cat. “Under it all, you’re a tender man,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody like you.”
A S I SAT in Helen’s office on Thursday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the shooting death of Ronnie Earl Patin, I wondered how things might have worked out if I had gotten Patin into custody at Lafayette PD. But if my perceptions were correct, a black hooker at the bar had notified someone that Patin was hooked to my bumper in cuffs and about to be housed in the city jail. Which meant the people behind his death and behind the attempt on my life and probably behind the deaths of Blue Melton and Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly and Frankie Giacano had influence and power and control that went far beyond the crime families that once operated out of Galveston and New Orleans. In other words, Ronnie Patin had been DOA no matter what I did or didn’t do.
Or was I falling into that category of people who saw conspiracies at work in every level of society?
“Let’s see if I’ve got this right, Dave,” Helen said. “You think Patin’s brother was the shooter in the freezer truck?”
“I’m not sure. I think Ronnie Earl boosted the truck. I think the shooter in it looked like Ronnie after he’d lost a hundred pounds. Ronnie said his brother was dead or living in Kansas.”
“Patin didn’t know which?”
“I wouldn’t call him a family-values kind of guy.”
“I just talked to the chief of police in Lafayette. He said no one heard the shot or saw who killed Patin. There were no shell casings and no outside surveillance cameras at any building on the street. The chief wonders why you didn’t coordinate with him before you went to the club.”
“I wasn’t sure the guy there was Ronnie Earl.”
“You should have let Lafayette handle it.”
Maybe she was right. When I didn’t reply, she said, “Second-guessing others is a bad habit of mine. Maybe Lafayette PD would have sent a couple of uniforms and spooked the guy out the back door. What a crock, huh, bwana?”
I was standing by her window, with a fine view of Bayou Teche and the lawn that sloped down to the water and the camellia bushes growing on the far bank and the shady grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. I saw a black Saab convertible turn off East Main and come up the long curved driveway past the grotto and park below our building, its waxed surfaces glittering like razor blades. A woman got out and walked across the grass through the side entrance. I could not see her face, only the top of her head and her figure and the martial fashion in which she walked. “Are you expecting Varina Leboeuf?” I asked.
“She’s here?” Helen said.
“Her vehicle is parked in the yellow zone. She just came through the restricted entrance.”
“That girl needs her butt kicked.”
“I think I’d better get back to my office.”
“I think you should stay right where you are. Let’s see what our hypocritical little cutie-pie is up to.”
“Maybe she’s a bit hot-tempered, but I wouldn’t call her a hypocrite.”
“You know why I love you, Dave? When it comes to women, you’re hopeless.” She waited for me to speak, but I wasn’t going to. “You think she’s the rebel, the reckless and passionate woman who’ll always risk her heart if the right man comes into her life?”
“How about we drop it?”
But I had stepped into it. Like many people who are made different, either in the womb or because they grew up in a dysfunctional home, Helen had spent a lifetime puzzling through all the reasons she had been arbitrarily rejected by others. Therapists often identify this particular behavioral syndrome with individuals who are weak and obsessed with concerns that are of no consequence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason most of these individuals become survivors and not suicides or serial killers is because they finally figure out that the
