“I guess it depends on how you read it. Varina Leboeuf has a photo of her husband with Tee Jolie Melton. It was taken in a club, maybe one of those zydeco joints up by Bayou Bijoux. I told her to give it to you.”
“I’m glad you did,” I replied, waiting for him to get to the real reason he had come to the house.
“Think it’s enough to get him in the box?”
“It’s not proof of a crime, but it’s a start.”
“Varina came across it by accident. She wanted to do the right thing with it.” He kept his attention fixed on the water and the bream starting to feed among the lily pads. “I agreed to take her on as a client.”
“She wants you to get the gen on her husband?”
“She came into the office yesterday with a minister. She thinks she’s in danger. What should I have done? Kicked her out?”
“That’s all that’s bothering you?”
“More or less.”
“It’s just another gig. If it doesn’t work out, let it go.”
“That’s the way I figured it.”
“I’ve got some coffee on. How about some Grape-Nuts and milk and blackberries?”
“That’d be nice. I didn’t want to wake you up, that’s all. So that’s why I thought I’d sit on the bank awhile and watch the sun come up.”
“What happened last night, Clete?”
He turned and looked at me sideways. He grimaced. “I went out to her old man’s place on Cypremort Point. The old man is in Iberia General.”
I nodded, trying to show no expression.
“We played badminton,” he said. “Then I knocked back a few shots of tequila, and she showed me the photograph. She collects Indian artifacts, all kinds of junk from Santa Fe and around Mesa Verde and other places out west. She goes on archaeological digs. She found some ancient pottery in a cave, bowls that go back to the thirteenth century. That’s when there was a big drought in the Southwest. She knows all about that kind of stuff.”
“People who go on archaeological digs don’t get to keep their artifacts, Clete.”
“Yeah, I brought that up a little later.”
“Later than when?”
“After we got it on.”
“You were in the sack with Varina Leboeuf?”
“In the sack, on a chair, standing up, against the wall, you name it. I think we might have broken some of her old man’s furniture. She’s like a portable volcano. About four A.M. she was ready to rock again. We fell on top of her teddy bear.”
“Her what?”
“She has this teddy bear on a couch under all her Indian artifacts.”
“Varina Leboeuf keeps teddy bears in the room where she gets it on with guys our age?”
“Come on, Streak, I already feel like somebody ran over me with a garbage truck. I don’t mean about her. I’m talking about me. I’m old and fat, and all I think about is getting my ashes hauled. It’s the way I am, but having somebody else tell me that about myself doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Go over it again.”
“What for?”
“Just do it. Don’t leave out one detail.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, his hands splayed on his knees, and repeated everything. I cupped my hand on the back of his neck. It felt as hard as iron, the pockmarks in his skin oily and hot and as coarse as pig hide on the edges. He looked at the water, his face wan, his coat almost splitting on his back. “I feel awful,” he said.
“The teddy bear, did it look like an old one?”
“Now that you mention it, no.”
“Think about it, Cletus. What doesn’t fit in the story you just told me?”
“I can’t follow you,” he said. “I feel like the Tijuana Brass is doing a Mexican hat dance inside my head.”
“Varina has a long history with men. She never asks for quarter and never gives it. She’s not a sentimentalist. If Wyatt Earp ever had a female counterpart, it’s Varina Leboeuf.”
“The teddy bear?” he said.
“It doesn’t belong in the picture, does it?”
“Why would she want to trap me with a nanny-cam? Who cares if a guy like me can’t keep his stiff red-eye under control?”
“The better question is how many guys around here are in stag films they don’t know about?” I said.
A half hour later, Gretchen Horowitz could barely contain her anger as she began dissecting Clete inside the cottage they were sharing at the motor court down the Teche. “You stay out all night and don’t bother to call or leave a message?”
“I’m sorry, Gretchen. I was in the bag. I was doing tequila shots and mixing it with beer, then somebody ripped the hands off the clock.”
“That’s not all you were doing.” She fanned at her face with a magazine.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Get in the shower. I’m going to open up some windows. Why don’t you show some discretion? Who was the broad?”
Clete was taking off his shoes on the edge of the bed. “These things are none of your business,” he said.
“It was Varina Leboeuf, wasn’t it?”
He dropped a shoe on the floor and stood up and took off his shirt. Lipstick was smeared on the collar, and the underarms were dark with sweat. He threw the shirt in the corner. “She had a photo of Pierre Dupree with Tee Jolie Melton. That’s why I went to her place. It was supposed to be business.”
“They’re playing you, Clete.”
“Who’s they?”
“She and her husband.”
“Varina hates his guts.”
“Use your head. From a legal perspective, that photo doesn’t mean squat. Dupree knows you and Dave Robicheaux will eventually find out he knew Tee Jolie. So she provides you with a photo that he can claim he doesn’t remember, and then both of them are off the hook. In the meantime, she gets you on a leash and gains access to everything you and Dave Robicheaux are doing. You’d see that if your brains weren’t in your putz. Get undressed and give me your clothes. I’m going to take them to the Laundromat.”
“Say that again about the two of them working together?”
“Not until you get in the shower,” she said, throwing open a window, flooding the inside of the cottage with sunlight and fresh air.
After she heard the water beating on the sides of the tin stall, she went into the bathroom and picked up his underwear and stuffed it in a dirty-clothes bag. Then she went through his slacks and the top shelf of his closet and his dresser drawers. She opened the bathroom door and leaned inside, steam billowing around her head. “I took your car keys, your sap, and your Beretta,” she said. “Take a nap. While I’m gone, I’ll do your laundry. In the meantime, you keep your harpoon in your tackle box. I’ll be back this evening.”
She got in the Caddy and drove to the McDonald’s on East Main and used the pay phone so there would be no personal record of her calls. Then she bought a fish sandwich and a milk shake to go and rolled down the top on the Caddy. The trip to New Orleans on the four-lane, going through Morgan City, would take only two hours. The sky was a hard blue, the sun so bright she couldn’t look directly at it, but there was a dark border of clouds low on the southern horizon, and the trees were starting to swell with wind. She burned rubber going down East Main, the unchecked power of the engine throbbing through the steering wheel into her hands.
She parked the Caddy on a side street off St. Charles, not far from a restaurant that recently was redone in
