Clete stopped. “We didn’t take the sandwiches she fixed,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“It’ll hurt her feelings. What’s the harm? I’ll see you at the plane.”
I waded out into the water and climbed into the cabin of the Cessna. I could think of only a few instances in my life when I had felt as depressed as I did then.
“What’s in that house?” Julie said.
“Pure evil.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing anyone will believe.”
“What’s your podjo doing?”
“He was worried we hurt a young woman’s feelings.”
“That’s why he went back?”
“Clete is a cross between Saint Francis of Assisi and Captain Bly. But you never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box.”
I saw her watching him through the windshield as though seeing him for the first time, her thoughts hidden.
“I’m going to tell you something that maybe I have no right to say, but I’ll say it anyway,” I said. “When people kill themselves, particularly when they bail off buildings or leave blood splatter on the ceiling, it’s usually because of a chemical assault on the brain. They can free themselves of their rage only by creating a legacy of guilt and shame and depression that is equal to their own suffering and that other people will buy into. In their fantasy, they survive their death and witness the discovery of their remains by the people they want to injure. Don’t let that be your fate, Julie. The world belongs to the living. Let the dead stay under their headstones.”
“Boy, you know how to say it, don’t you?”
“I think you’re a nice lady, too good to carry the weight of a guy who decided to mess you up as bad as he could,” I said.
“You’re the only person who ever had the guts to talk to me like that.” She looked in Clete’s direction again. “Something happen between you and your friend?”
“I let him down. Or at least he thinks I did.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s my friend. You don’t let your pals down. Right or wrong, you brass it out. Right?”
“You’re a funny guy, Dave. Here he comes now. He’s smiling. I bet he’s forgotten all about it.”
Clete climbed into the cabin and sat down heavily in the backseat, a smear of mustard on his cheek. His face was flat, his eyes empty when he looked at me. “Let’s blow this dump,” he said.
23
I called in sick Monday and spent the early-morning hours raking leaves in the backyard. I piled them in stacks by the water’s edge and soaked them with kerosene and set them ablaze and watched the curds of smoke rise through the trees and break apart in the wind. I felt like a man coming off a bender, wanting to invest the rest of his life in garden chores and fixing his roof and oiling his fishing tackle and sanding the barnacles off a boat he left half filled with rainwater for the last year. I wanted to take every misadventure and wrong choice in my life and set it on fire with the leaves and watch it burn into a pile of harmless ash.
I wanted to be rid forever of martial thoughts and the faces of the men I had killed and the images of dead children and animals in third-world villages. I wanted to slip through the dimension into a place where moth and rust did not have their way, where thieves did not break in and steal. I felt sickened by my own life and the evil that seemed to pervade the earth. I wanted to find a gray-green tree-dotted tropical stretch of land on the watery rim of creation that had not been stained by war and the poisons of the Industrial Age. I was convinced that Eden was not a metaphor or a legend and that somehow it still lay within our grasp if only we could find the path that led back into it. If it had existed once, it could exist again, I told myself. I wondered if the dead who seemed to wander the earth were not seeking it, too, over and over, feeling their way through the darkness, searching for the place that lay somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
I guess these were strange thoughts to have on the cusp of winter, inside the smoke of a leaf fire that contained both the fecund smell of the earth and a petrochemical accelerant, but could there be a more appropriate season and moment?
I did not hear the footsteps of the person standing behind me while I heaped layer upon layer of blackened leaves onto the flames, my face hot, my eyes stinging with humidity.
“I hear you’re looking for me,” Gretchen said.
I stepped back from the fire and turned around and propped the bottom of the rake on the ground. “That’s one way to put it.”
“I’m not staying with Clete. I’ve got my own place. What do you want?”
“Did you have to pop somebody when you rescued your mother?”
“I scared a couple of guys, but no, I didn’t hurt them. You can check out my mother. She’s holed up in Key Largo, coked to the eyes. Something else you want to know?”
“Yeah, after you put two rounds into Jesse Leboeuf, he said something to you in French. Remember what it was?”
“I’m here about Clete, Mr. Robicheaux. He has to choose between me and you, and it’s tearing him up. I don’t want him taking my weight.”
“Then tell me what Leboeuf said before he died.”
Her eyes followed a speedboat that had just roared past us, splitting the bayou with a frothy yellow trough, the wake sliding through the cypress roots.
“They’re going to send people after you,” she said.
“Answer the question. Why not get your old man off the hook? The Leboeuf shooting was probably justified. You stopped a rape in progress. Leboeuf was armed and a threat to both you and Catin Segura. You can skate.”
She was breathing through her nose, her nostrils white around the edges. “You want me to confess to snuffing a cop in a place like this?”
“You probably saved Catin’s life. If you’d wanted to summarily execute Leboeuf, you would have parked a third round in him while he was lying in the bathtub. That means you have a conscience.”
“Roust me if you want. Tell my landlord I have AIDS. Do all the dog shit you guys do when you can’t make your case, but lay off Clete.”
“You’ve got it turned around, Miss Gretchen. Clete saw you put three rounds in Bix Golightly’s face. You made him a witness to a homicide and an accessory after the fact. You’ve done a major clusterfuck on your father. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”
Her breathing had grown louder, the blood draining from around her mouth. “The guys who kidnapped my mother are pretty dumb, but they were smart enough to know the difference between cooperation and going over a gunwale with cinder blocks wired around their necks. The contract came down from a guy who talks like he has a speech defect, like he can’t pronounce an R. Did you see Lawrence of Arabia? Remember how Peter O’Toole dressed? The guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd wraps himself up like Peter O’Toole because he’s afraid of the sunlight. Know anybody like that?”
“The albino, Lamont Woolsey?”
“God, you’re smart,” she said.
Clete Purcel was not a fan of complexities. Or rules. Or concerns about moral restraint when it came to dealing with child molesters, misogynists, rapists, and strong-arm robbers who jackrolled old people. Clete wasn’t sure which category Lamont Woolsey fit into, but he didn’t care. The chains and hooks and manacles and piranha tank and dried blood in the room we found on the island southeast of the Chandeleurs gave Lamont Woolsey the
