man who sweats inside his clothes and never takes his coat off. “Who are you guys?” he asked.
“We’re cops. That means beat it, asshole,” Clete said.
I held Clete by his upper arm until the momentum of the crowd separated us from the man. His arm felt as hard as a pressurized fire hose and was humming with the same level of energy. “What’s the matter with you?” I said.
“Remember when we walked a beat in the First District? That was the happiest time of my life.”
“We’re in the bottom of the sixth. It’s not even the seventh-inning stretch yet,” I said.
“Right, keep telling yourself that,” he replied. “I need a drink.” He took a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and drank it half empty before we reached the Caddy.
The party was being held inside a magnificent grove of oak trees wrapped with strings of white lights, backdropped by a brightly lit mansion on the Vermilion River that was owned by an oilman from Mississippi. Though the house had a swimming pool in back and probably cost a fortune to build, the final result was a cross between an architectural nightmare and a deliberate celebration of vulgarity and bad taste. The pillars were made of concrete and swollen in the middle like Disney dwarfs; the brickwork had the shiny uniformity of laminated siding, the kind that is rolled and glued onto cinder block. The ceiling-high windows, the most outstanding feature of Louisiana houses, were bracketed with nonoperational shutters painted mint green and bolted flatly on the brick like postage stamps. The patio was a bare concrete pad that had settled and cracked through the center and was infested with fire ants. Through the windows, a visitor could look into a series of rooms carpeted in different colors and filled with furniture that could have been painted with shellac that morning.
The five acres of front lawn were filled with vehicles, row after row of them, extended-cab pickups and the biggest SUVs on the market. The guests were the glad of heart and the curious and the voyeuristic or those who had recently discovered that salvation and prosperity and the exploitation of the earth’s resources were all part of the same journey.
The serving tables groaned with bowls of white and dirty rice and etouffee and deep-fried crawfish and boiled shrimp. White-jacketed black waiters sliced pork off a hog on the spit and carved up turkeys and sirloin roasts and smoked hams swimming in pineapple rings and redeye gravy. There were beer kegs in tubs of ice and a three-table bar for those who wanted champagne or highballs. With the breeze off the river and the rustle of the moss in the trees and the smell of meat dripping into an open fire, the night could not have been more perfect. What imperfection could anyone see in the scene taking place before us? Even the Vietnamese serving girls seemed like a testimony to the richness of the New American Empire, one that indeed offered sanctuary to the huddled and downtrodden.
We found a place on a bench under a spreading oak, and Clete went straight to the drinks table and came back with a Jack on the rocks and a draft Budweiser foaming over the edges of a red plastic cup. “Guess who I just talked to in the line. The guy who was giving us trouble in the concourse. He said he didn’t know we were cops and he was sorry for getting in our face. Can you figure it?”
“Figure what?”
“As soon as these guys think you’re in the club, they want to kiss your ass.”
We were a few feet away from a plank table where people were eating off paper plates. They glanced at us from the corners of their eyes. “Sorry,” Clete said. “I’ve got a genetic case of logorrhea.”
A couple of them smiled good-naturedly and went on eating. Clete drank from his cup and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin. “I know you worry about me, big mon, but everything is copacetic,” he said.
“The only person who doesn’t worry about you is you.”
“Where’d all these Vietnamese girls come from?”
“A lot of them got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina.”
“You ever think about going back to ’Nam?”
“Almost every night.”
“John McCain went back. A lot of guys have. You know, to make peace with yourself and maybe some of the people we hurt or who were shooting at us? I hear they treat Americans pretty good today.”
I knew Clete was not thinking about making peace. He was thinking about the irrevocable nature of loss and about a Eurasian girl who had lived in a sampan on the edges of the South China Sea and whose hair floated off her shoulders like black ink when she walked into the water and reached back for him to take her hand.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” I said.
“Would you go with me?”
“If you want me to.”
“You believe spirits hang around for a while? They don’t take off right away to wherever they’re supposed to go?”
I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t sure he was talking to me any longer.
“The girl I had over there was named Maelee. I told you that already, huh?” he said.
“She must have been a great woman, Clete.”
“If I’d stayed away from her, she’d still be alive. Sometimes I want to find the guys who did it and blow up their shit. Sometimes I want to sit down and explain to them what they did, how they punished an innocent, sweet girl because of a guy from New Orleans who wasn’t much different from them. We thought we were fighting for our country just like they thought they were fighting for theirs. That’s what I’d tell them. I’d meet their families and tell them the same thing. I’d want them all to know we didn’t get over the war, either. We’re dragging the chain forty years down the road.”
He swirled the whiskey and ice in his cup, then drained it and crunched the ice between his molars. His cheeks had the red blush of ripe peaches, his eyes aglow with an alcoholic benevolence, one that always signaled an unpredictable metabolic change taking place in his system. “There’s Amidee Broussard. Check out the dude sitting with him,” he said.
I tried to see through the crowd, but my angle was wrong, and I couldn’t get a clear view of Broussard’s table.
“Gretchen said she saw Varina on board that Chris-Craft with an albino. I don’t know if I’d call this guy an albino or not,” Clete said. “His face looks like a piece of white rubber somebody sewed onto his skull. You think that’s the guy?”
I took a barbecue sandwich off a tray a waiter was passing around, then stood up so I could see Broussard’s table. I cradled the sandwich in a napkin and ate it and tried to hide my interest in Broussard while I watched him and his friend. As a police officer, I had learned many years ago that you learn more by seeing than listening. Why? All perps lie. That’s a given. All sociopaths lie all the time. That’s also a given. Any truth you learn from them comes in the form of either what they don’t say or what their eyes and hands tell you. A refusal to blink usually indicates deception. A drop in the register of the voice and a blink right after a denial means you tighten the screw. Evasion and begging the question and telling half a truth are indicators of a habitual liar whose methodology is to wear you down. It’s not unlike playing baseball. Have you ever gone up against a left-handed pitcher who hasn’t shaved in three days and looks like his wife just kicked him out of the house? You either read his sign language or you get your head torn off.
When you watch a man like Amidee Broussard, if he’s deprived by distance of his ability to deceive with words, what things do you look for? You ignore the ceramic smile, the work-worn, sun-freckled hands of the farm boy and the bobbed white hair of a frontier patriarch. You look at the eyes and where they go. He was being served dinner from the kitchen rather than from the buffet tables. The black waiter who put Broussard’s steak before him wore sanitary plastic mittens, although none of the other serving personnel did. After the waiter set the plate down, Broussard offered no word of appreciation, no show of recognition; he never paused in his conversation with the man who had the surreal face of someone you thought lived only in the imagination.
I dropped the rest of my sandwich in a trash barrel and began walking toward the Broussard table. A Vietnamese girl was refilling his water glass and picking up the dirty dishes from the tablecloth. There was no mistaking the direction of Broussard’s eyes. They darted to her cleavage when she bent over, and they followed her hips as she walked away. His dentures looked as stiff as bone. “You think our man might be having impure thoughts?” Clete said.
Before we reached the table, we were joined by the man who had given us trouble at the Cajundome. “Hey, y’all fixing to talk to Reverend Amidee?” he said.
