his bunkie. He was also in the Flat Top in Raiford. That’s where they keep the guys they couldn’t legally lobotomize. In Alabama he cut up the face of a female convenience-store clerk with a string knife. He was also arrested for the rape of a five-year-old girl. If that man comes close to my daughter, your grandfather won’t be able to protect you, Kermit.”
“Say that stuff about a ‘bunkie’ again?”
“That’s prison parlance for ‘regular punch.’”
The veins in his forearms were pumped with blood, his hands opening and closing at his sides, his cheeks flaming. “You’re old and you’re a guest in our home. Otherwise, I’d knock your teeth down your throat.”
“At my age, I don’t have a lot to lose, kid. You’re a good judge of character. Look at my face. Tell me I’m lying.”
CLETE PURCEL HAD parked his Caddy a hundred yards down the two-lane from the motel in St. Martin Parish where Carolyn Blanchet, Layton Blanchet’s wife, had rented a room. It had not been a productive day for Clete. After Herman Stanga’s little cousin Buford, also known as Kiss-My-Ass-Fat-Man, had visited Clete’s office to tell him of his fears that Robert Weingart was planning to drug and seduce a Vietnamese waitress at Bojangles, Clete had gone to the girl’s house and tried to warn her. He had tried to warn her in language that would not alarm or offend her. The mother, who spoke little English, thought he was a bill collector and told him to get out. The girl followed him outside, and Clete tried again.
“You know what Rohypnol is? It’s a very powerful tranquilizer,” he said. “It’s called the date-rape drug. It takes only twenty or thirty minutes to turn a person into Play-Doh. The effects can last several hours.”
“Robbie wants to do this to me?”
“‘Robbie’ is a douchebag and a bum. He has spent most of his life in prison for serious crimes. He made a black girl at Ruby Tuesday pregnant, then told her to get an abortion if she didn’t want the kid. Here’s my business card. If he bothers you, call me.”
“You make me scared, Mr. Purcel.”
“I’m not the one to be afraid of. Don’t cry. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re a good person, you hear me? That’s why I’m here. Robert Weingart should have been ground into fish chum a long time ago. I’m sorry for upsetting you. Come on, don’t do that. I apologize for the way I say things. My best friend tells me I have the sophistication of a junkyard falling down a staircase.”
His attempt at humor did not work. “I think you’re a nice man, but you must go back to your work now,” she said.
“You’re going out with this loser?”
“It isn’t right to condemn people without giving them a chance to defend themselves.”
She turned and went back into her house.
I tried, Kiss-My-Ass, Clete said to himself. But his words seemed self-mocking and were of poor consolation to him.
Now, in the twilight and the throbbing of birds in the trees, he was looking through his binoculars at a lounge with a blue-white neon champagne glass glowing over its entrance. He saw no one he recognized going in and out of the lounge. The motel was set behind the lounge and had a stucco arch over its driveway. At 7:13 P.M. Carolyn Blanchet emerged from her room in a swimsuit and dove into the pool, swimming cleanly through the water, taking long, powerful strokes, her platinum hair dark at the roots. She climbed up the steps in the shallow end, spread her feet slightly, and began cross-touching the tips of her toes, the backs of her thighs flexing, her bottom tightening against her swimsuit. Close by, two men playing cards at a table suddenly developed problems in their concentration.
Since being retained by Carolyn’s husband, Clete had pieced off the job to a private investigator who operated out of Morgan City. The Morgan City PI had followed Carolyn in a rainstorm to a houseboat in the Atchafalaya Basin, where she had gotten into a shouting argument with someone who had been waiting for her. The other person had left in an outboard, wearing a raincoat that had a hood on it. The PI could not make out the person’s face through his binoculars. The houseboat was owned by Carolyn’s husband.
The next day the PI followed Carolyn to a hotel on the Vermilion River in Lafayette, except he didn’t get into the lobby fast enough to see which floor her elevator had stopped on. On the odd chance he might get lucky, he prowled the hallways but saw no sign of her. The desk clerk said no one using her name was registered at the hotel. The Morgan City PI waited in his automobile for three hours. When Carolyn came out of the hotel, a beach bag swinging from her arm, she was by herself. His surveillance had been a waste. Plus, she had stared straight at him, boldly, through his windshield, giving him a triumphant look.
The next afternoon the PI tailed Carolyn to the motel outside St. Martinville. He called Clete and asked him what he wanted to do.
“You’re doing a good job. Stay on it,” Clete said.
“I think she’s made me. If you ask me, she’s had a lot of experience at this.”
“I’ll relieve you. Fax me your notes and hours, okay?”
“You got it. When you find out who the guy is, let me know.”
“What for?” Clete asked.
“Maybe I can get on as his bodyguard. You ever hear the story about the football coach over in Texas that made a pass at her?”
“No.”
“They took it outside and fought in the street. Blanchet blinded him. It cost him millions.”
Clete looked through the binoculars again. Carolyn was reclining in a beach chair, a towel spread from her thighs to her breasts, her eyes closed. She seemed to doze off, then turned on her side, her hands pressed together and inserted under her cheek as though she were at prayer. Her mouth was soft-looking, her eyelashes long, the tops of her breasts white below her tan line.
But where was the lover? Clete resolved that this would be the last time he would do scut work for jealous cuckolds or wives who wanted their husbands photographed in flagrante delicto. Why anyone romanticized the life of a PI was beyond him. Jobs like this one made him feel he was one cut above a voyeur. Second, the information he was paid to deliver ruined lives. Maybe the involved parties brought it on themselves, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was he who loaded the gun.
He also felt his work made him a hypocrite. His own marriage had been a nightmare of pills and booze and weed and infidelity. He tried to blame his problems on his wife, who had fallen under the influence of an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Colorado. Then he tried to blame his problems on the fact that he worked Vice and lived in an amoral netherworld that was not of his making. He blamed the basket of snakes he brought back from Vietnam and even blamed the mamasan he accidentally killed in a hooch in the Central Highlands and whose forgiveness he still sought in his sleep. He blamed the corrupt cops who pressured a young patrolman into going along with them when they planted a throwdown on an unarmed black man they had shot and killed. He blamed the bookies and Shylocks he owed, the tab he didn’t have to pay at a couple of skin joints owned by the Giacanos, the script doctor who gave him unlimited amounts of downers, the watch supervisor who told him he either went on a pad for the greaseballs or he got assigned a beat at the Desire. And more than any of these, he blamed the easy female access that yawned open on Bourbon Street when his wife locked the bedroom door and said she could no longer live with a man who slept with a.357 Magnum and threatened to use it on himself because he believed the downdraft of helicopter gunships was shaking the plaster out of their apartment walls.
The light was tea-colored on the sugarcane fields and the oak trees along the Teche. A truck had parked next to the lounge, obscuring Clete’s view of the swimming pool and the reclining figure of Carolyn Blanchet. He started up his Caddy and drove on the berm the hundred yards down the road to the lounge and parked by the side of the building so he could see both the entrance to the motel and the row of rooms that gave onto the pool.
He hadn’t eaten since lunch, nor had he brought along his cooler that he usually kept stocked with po’boy sandwiches, Gatorade, a Ziploc bag of hard-boiled eggs, a jar of fresh orange juice, a pint of vodka, and a mixed dozen of longnecks and sixteen-ounce cans of Bud. This Layton Blanchet gig was a nuisance growing into a migraine that he didn’t need. What was even worse, he told himself, he had taken the job out of pride rather than financial need because he didn’t want to feel he couldn’t handle a self-inflated manipulator like Blanchet. It was like mashing down the sole of your shoe on bubble gum to prove you weren’t afraid of it.
What a fool he had been. Not only with Blanchet but with almost everything he touched. He’d lost it with
