on, “Vidor Perkins put his hand on my daughter’s face this morning. At the fruit stand by the bayou.”
“Tell Alafair to file battery charges.”
“Maybe we should bust Perkins for littering as well.”
She picked up the Ziploc bag with the gold pen inside it and dropped it again. It hit the blotter with a sound like a rock falling. “You want to make clever and cynical statements? That’s fine. But this pen won’t go away. How do you think I feel about investigating an old friend like Clete? You think you’re the only person in the department with feelings?”
“What’s the name of the pool cleaner?” I asked.
I FOUND HIM three hours later in St. Martinville, dragging an underwater vacuum on a telescopic pole along the bottom of a swimming pool behind a house owned by a black city councilman. I had known him for years. His name was Felton Leger, and he used to coach Little League baseball in New Iberia. He had a deformed foot and had to wear a special boot for it, but he had always been a man of good cheer and goodwill who was known for his decency and his loyalty to his family and friends. Why do I mention these things? Because I wanted the pool man to be someone else, someone whose word was suspect and who would be willing, if the price was right, to set up Clete Purcel.
But no such luck. Felton Leger was an honest man. “There was a lot of slash-pine needles on the bottom, big globs of them,” he said. “I almost didn’t see the pen. Then the vacuum sucked up a bunch of needles and I seen the pen lying there like a big gold bug. So I fished it out wit’ the seine and dumped it in a paper bag and called the sheriff’s department, ’cause I figured y’all would be wanting to look at it. I didn’t like the man who lived there. But it was the law’s job to get rid of him, not some killer.”
“Did you touch it or dry it off?”
“I knew better than to do that. I dropped it right in the bag.”
“You did the right thing, Felton. When was the last time you cleaned the pool?”
“One month ago.”
“Could the pen have been in there then?”
“No, sir. When I clean the pool, I clean the pool.”
“How many people know your schedule?”
“Just me. Sometimes I might tell my wife where I’m gonna be on a particular day.”
“How many people know you serviced Herman Stanga’s pool?”
“Maybe I said something to my wife. Maybe not. I don’t remember. The bank owns the house now. Stanga had borrowed a bunch of money on it and wasn’t making his payments.”
“Didn’t he always pay you in advance?”
“’Cause I made him. I knew he was a deadbeat. If you ax me, I think he was fixing to leave town. That’s why he let the lawn burn up and the dogs dump all over the place. He kept up the pool to entertain his chippies.”
“I see. Where’s your wife work?”
“At the sheriff’s department. She’s a night dispatcher.”
I tried to place her but couldn’t. “In New Iberia?”
“No, here in St. Martinville. This is where we live now,” he said.
IT WAS AFTER three P.M. when I got back to town. I called Clete’s office and was told by Hulga, his secretary, that he was at Baron’s health club. I found him in a back room alone, dressed in sweatpants, his T-shirt splitting on his back while he squatted and hoisted a two-hundred-pound bar above his head, his neck bulging, his face almost purple.
“Have you lost your mind? You’re going to slip a disk,” I said.
He dropped the bar on the floor, his breath escaping like air from a collapsed balloon. “Dave,” he gasped, unable to finish the statement.
“What?” I said.
“
It was not a time to be completely honest. I told him what had happened to Alafair at the fruit stand and made no mention of the gold pen that had been found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s pool, one inscribed to him by the FBI agent Alicia Rosecrans. He listened quietly, wiping his throat and the back of his neck with the towel. “Say that last part again. He put his hand on her cheek and licked his fingers?”
“Something like that,” I replied.
“Let me shower and get dressed and we’ll pay him a visit.”
“I’ll handle it.”
He looked at me from under his brow. “Like how?”
“I’m not sure yet. When Helen and I rousted him at his house, he seemed to suggest he could be a friend to the department, like he knew about the inner workings of an operation that was larger in importance than he and Robert Weingart were.”
“You ever know a meltdown who was different? They bypassed toilet training and shoe tying, but they’re experts on everything from brain surgery to running the White House. Why would Perkins want to help y’all? He’s not on parole, and he doesn’t have any charges hanging over his head. This guy wouldn’t lift a toilet seat unless there was something in it for him.”
“Money.”
“From who?”
I let the thread die. I still had not broached the question about the gold pen, primarily because I was in the position of investigating a friend I wanted to protect against the consequences of the investigation I was conducting. I tried to convince myself I was “excluding” Clete as a suspect in the death of Herman Stanga. But Clete’s history of violence, even though most of it was on the side of justice, indicated a level of rage that had little connection to the miscreants he visited it upon and everything to do with a young boy who was not allowed to eat supper and was forced to kneel for hours on rice grains and, with regularity, feel his father’s razor strop whipped savagely across his buttocks. The thought of Clete Purcel in a blackout, in proximity to a sneering misogynistic pimp like Herman Stanga, made me shudder. The fact that Stanga had publicly gloated over the prospect of sending Clete to Angola made me wonder if indeed the most logical suspect on the planet for the Stanga homicide wasn’t sitting three feet from me.
I went back to the entrance of the barbell room and shut the door. I saw the expression change in Clete’s face. “What’s the deal?” he asked.
“Where’s the gold pen Alicia Rosecrans gave you?”
His T-shirt was gray with sweat. He pulled it loose from his neck and shook the fabric to cool himself, his green eyes empty. “I don’t know. Maybe at my office. Or in my dresser,” he said. “I don’t like to think about Alicia a lot. I thought maybe she and I would be together for a while. Like always, that didn’t happen. What’s so important about the pen?”
“When is the last time you saw it?”
“I don’t remember. What is this crap?”
“It showed up in an unlikely place. Stop avoiding the question, Clete.”
“I don’t remember where I put it. I didn’t want to see it again. I wish I had thrown it away. Every time I looked at it, it made me feel bad.”
“Who had access to it?”
“How do I know when I don’t remember where I put it?” Then, illogically, he said, “My secretary comes in my office. The skells come in my office. People visit my cottage. The cleaning woman. Look, I remember Wee Willie Bimstine borrowing it once. Maybe he didn’t give it back. Or maybe it was Nig who borrowed it.”
“It was found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool.”
He widened his eyes and squeezed his mouth with one hand and wiped his hand on his pants. “Who found it?”
“The pool cleaner. He’s a straight-up guy.”
