She looked out of the corner of her eye toward the house. “I got to get these radishes hoed out. Then I’m fixing a big salad for Mr. Timothy. People have their problems and their grief, then it passes. Mess with it and it gets all over you.”
Clete heard a screen door open and swing back on a spring. The black woman’s hands tightened on the hoe handle, her triceps knotting as she scratched and clicked the blade frenetically between the vegetable rows.
“If you have business on the property, you need to call first and make an appointment,” the man with the peroxided hair said to Clete.
“Give me a number and I’ll get right on that.”
“It’s unlisted.”
“That kind of makes it hard to call.”
“Take it up with Mr. Abelard or his grandson. I’m just the hired help.”
“You’re doing a heck of a job, too.”
“Anything else?”
“Can I park out on the road?”
“Do whatever you want, long as it’s not on this side of the bridge.”
“I didn’t get your name.”
“I didn’t give it. Go start dinner, Jewel. I’ll be along in a bit.”
“Yes, suh.”
The man from Florida watched her walk into the shade of the house and lean her hoe against the back steps and go inside. Then he fixed his gaze on Clete. His face had the youthful tautness of an athlete’s, but there were three parallel lines across his brow with tiny nodules of skin in them, like beads on a string, that gave his face a dirty, aged look. “You a PI?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Leave me a business card. I got my job to do, but I try to give a guy a break if I can.”
“I think your job is to keep Miss Jewel from talking to outsiders.”
“Then you thought wrong.”
“I think you already know my name. I think you didn’t answer the door because you were busy running my tag.”
The man from Florida glanced at his wristwatch. “In five minutes, I’m gonna look out the front window. Leave or stay. But if you stay, you’re gonna be on your way to the parish jail.”
“No problem,” Clete said. “By the way, Miss Jewel doesn’t give up family secrets, whatever they might be. So don’t be acting like she did after I’m gone. You got my drift on that?”
The man from Florida stepped closer to Clete, into his shadow, his face turned up into Clete’s. His right foot was pulled behind his left and set at a slight angle, the instinctive posture of someone who was trained in at least one of the martial arts. An odor like male musk or stale antiperspirant rose from his armpits. “It’s no coincidence you got beer on your breath this early in the morning. You’re a retread, pal, way beyond your limits. Eat a big dinner and get drunk or get yourself laid. Do something you can handle. But don’t mouth off to the wrong people again. Juicer or not, a guy your age ought to know that.”
The man walked back to the house, stooping to pick up the hoe from the steps and hang it on a garden-shed hook, as though Clete were not there.
Clete went back out to his Caddy and sat behind the wheel, biting a hangnail. He drained the open can of beer that rested on the floor, but it was flat and hot and tasted sour in his mouth. He stared at the front of the house, the scaling paint on its stone columns, the dormers upstairs that seemed piled with junk, the nests of mud daubers and yellow jackets under the eaves, the loops of cobweb on the fans that hung over the upstairs veranda.
Clete thought of his childhood in the old Irish Channel and the predawn milk deliveries he made with his father in the Garden District. He remembered a splendid antebellum home off St. Charles Avenue and the kindly woman who lived there and asked him to come back on Saturday afternoon for ice cream. When he had shown up, dressed in his best clothes, the backyard was crowded with street urchins and raggedy black children from across Magazine. He returned later with a bag full of rocks and broke out all the glass in her greenhouse. Now, as he stared at the Abelard home, he tried to think of a term that described it and the history it represented: a cheap fraud, a house of cards, a place where Whitey could boss around his darkies and live off somebody else’s sweat.
But he knew those weren’t the appropriate words. The house meant nothing, and the people in it, such as the Abelards, were, like the rest of us, eventually dust in the wind. The real story was one that people seldom figured out. It was that the Abelards and their kind had taught others to disrespect themselves, and in large numbers they had done exactly that. Clete poured his beer out on the gravel, crunched the can in his palm, and tossed the can in the flower bed.
As he was driving across the wood bridge, his cell phone rang. He checked the caller ID, then placed the phone to his ear. “Talk to me, big mon,” he said.
He turned off the bridge and pulled the Caddy to the side of the road and listened. While he listened, he gazed at the blue Dumpster set back in the cleared space across the road, a bib of flattened trash scattered around its perimeter, a thick green stand of brush and persimmon trees behind it. “Andy Swan, huh?” he said. “Okay, I’m going to do some archaeological research while I’m here, and we’ll ROA for dinner when I get back to New Iberia. No, everything is copacetic. I’m extremely cool and serene and mellow and thinking only cool thoughts. Do not worry, noble mon. No, there is no problem here in St. Mary Parish that is not totally under control. Out.”
He parked in front of the Dumpster, retrieved a pair of bolt cutters and polyethylene gloves from the trunk, and cut the cable that was locked down in a V-shaped configuration on the Dumpster’s steel lid.
He began his search by splitting open the piled vinyl bags and shaking out their contents. Among the persimmons, he found a broken tree branch on the ground and used it to rake among the plastic bottles and tin cans and shrimp shells and Perrier and wine bottles and decayed food that the Abelards and their guest Robert Weingart had amassed in a week’s time. He was about to give it up when he spied, on the Dumpster’s floor, a strip of white plastic that was tongued on one end and notched with a hole on the other, the sides serrated like tiny teeth.
He dropped the plastic strip into a Ziploc bag. Behind him, the pickup truck driven by the man from Florida rattled over the plank bridge and angled across the asphalt and pulled to a stop lengthwise behind Clete’s Caddy. The man got out and slammed the door behind him. “I don’t believe you,” he said.
“I’m about to leave. I’d appreciate you moving your truck,” Clete said.
“What you’re gonna do is clean up this mess. What you’re also gonna do is put anything you found back where you got it.”
Clete scratched the back of his neck as though an insect had just bitten him. “No, I don’t think that’s on the table today.”
“Did you come out here to get beat up or drug off in handcuffs? You just like to walk into buzz saws? You get off on pissing in the punch bowl? Which is it?”
“See, I just found what looks to be a ligature. Or maybe it’s just a strip of plastic used to hang pipe. What’s your opinion, Mr. Swan?”
“I’m supposed to be impressed because you got somebody to run my tag?”
“No, there’s nothing interesting about me. But you, that’s a different deal. You were a member of the execution team at Raiford back when they were still using the chair. You were one of the guys who shaved their head and put a diaper on them so they wouldn’t mess themselves in front of the witnesses.
“I usually try to stay objective about my job and not get personalities mixed up in it. But for you, I think I’m gonna make an exception,” Andy Swan said.
Clete lifted his arms away from his sides. “No piece, no slapjack, no cuffs, no shank, no weapons of any kind. I’m no threat to you, Mr. Swan.”
“I know. You’re just a jolly fat man, probably a guy who got kicked off the force somewhere for taking freebies from crack whores or going on a pad for greaseballs. Now you carry a badge anybody can buy in a pawnshop and stick your dick in Bourbon Street skanks and pretend you’re still a player. Maybe I didn’t get it all exactly right, but I’m close, aren’t I?”
