could hear Clete clenching and rubbing his hands together between his thighs, the calluses on his palms as rough as horn, his face bloodless and poached-looking.
When I went outside into the coolness of the morning, I sat on a stone bench by the city library, in front of the grotto that had been built as a shrine to the mother of Jesus. The wind was blowing through the bamboo and the oak trees and the Spanish moss, and rose petals from a nearby flower bed were scattered across the St. Augustine grass. Clete sat down beside me and lit a cigarette, not speaking, the cigarette tiny inside his hand. The smoke drifted in my face, but I didn’t mind.
“When are you going to stop smoking those?” I asked.
“Never. I’m tucking away a pack of Luckies in the casket. With no filters.”
“Don’t drink today.”
“Who said I am?”
“Some days aren’t any good for drinking. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m going to get the guys who did this, Dave. They’re going out in pieces, too.”
“You’ll get them. But not like you say.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“You’re not like them. Neither am I. And neither is Helen. You’re not capable of being like them.”
We sat there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, Clete puffing on his Lucky Strike, flicking his ashes so they didn’t hit my clothes, the mother of Jesus looking silently at the bayou.
COMPUTERS WORK WONDERS. By late that afternoon we got a hit on a home invasion in which silverware, the entire contents of a liquor cabinet, a flat-screen television, a frozen ham, a case of beer, an Armani suit, and a DVD player had been reported stolen. The home invasion had taken place in an upscale subdivision on the bayou, just outside the New Iberia city limits. The owner of the house was a local black attorney. His name was Monroe Stanga, the cousin of Herman Stanga.
We found him in his office, a two-story white stucco building down by the courthouse square, a building with faux balconies that had Spanish grillework overlooking the Southern Pacific railway tracks.
“Y’all found the stuff somebody stole from my house? That’s what y’all saying?” Monroe asked, his eyes going from me to Helen. It was obvious he did not comprehend why the sheriff was personally involving herself in the investigation of a comparatively minor crime.
“You listed a DVD player as one of the items stolen from your house, correct?” I said.
“Yeah, right, plus all my silverware and my flat-screen and my Armani-”
“We think somebody might have sold your DVD player at a pawnshop in New Orleans,” I said. “What was the brand?”
He told me, then waited.
“I think we’ve found your property,” I said.
Monroe was in his thirties but had his head shaved at a barbershop every two days, as an older man might. He had gotten his law degree from Southern University and specialized in liability suits that involved chemical spills along railroad tracks, pipeline ruptures, oil-well blowouts, or any kind of industrial accident that could provide large numbers of claimants. He wore a pleated white shirt with a rolled collar and a lavender tie and a gray vest. His coat hung on the back of his chair, and when he hunched forward on his elbows, his eyes darting back and forth, his arms and shoulders poking like sticks against his shirt, he made me think of a ferret being worked into a corner with a broom.
“So how about my silverware and the other stuff that was stole?” he asked.
“Do you have a receipt for the DVD player, something that would have a serial number on it or help identify it?”
“No, I don’t have anything like that.”
“That’s too bad. Did you file an insurance claim?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“You didn’t have to provide a bill of sale or an item number of some kind?”
“They stole my Armani suit and all my silverware and my flat-screen. Stealing a DVD player isn’t like hauling off Fort Knox. I’m starting to get a li’l lost here.”
“Where’d you buy the player?” Helen asked.
“I didn’t exactly buy it.”
“Then how did you acquire it, Mr. Stanga?” she asked.
“My cousin Herman told me he wanted me to have it. And his flat-screen. So after he died, see, I brought them over to my house. ’Cause of what Herman told me.”
“You ever use the player?” I said.
He seemed to search his memory. “I don’t think I plugged it in. But I’m not sure. What’s on y’all’s mind? I want to he’p, but I don’t know what we’re ruminating about here.”
“I want you to come down to the department and watch about forty seconds of video, Mr. Stanga,” Helen said. “Then we’ll have a chat.”
Outside, the Sunset Limited clattered down the railway tracks, the pictures and framed degrees rattling on the office walls.
“Herman have some porn on there or something?” Monroe said.
Helen exhaled, then looked at me. Monroe may have been a venal man, but he could not be called an evil one. Our knowledge about his cousin’s activities was probably greater than his own. After he watched the video, he was visibly shocked and frightened and sat with his arms folded tightly across his chest, his round mahogany-colored waxed head bright with pinpoints of perspiration. He wiped his forehead with a folded handkerchief, then rubbed at his nose with the back of his wrist.
“How come there’s no sound?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” I said.
He huffed air out of his nostrils, blinking like a man who couldn’t deal with the brightness of the day. “Think y’all gonna find Herman’s flat-screen?”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“If you do, give it to the Goodwill. I don’t want to ever see it again,” he said.
THAT EVENING I asked Molly to take a walk with me. The sky was piled with clouds that looked like golden and purple fruit turning red around the edges. From the bridge at Burke Street, we could see the flooded bamboo behind The Shadows and the flowers growing along the bayou and the deep shade on the water under the overhang of the trees.
“I’d like for you and Alafair to leave town for a week or so. Maybe go to Key West,” I said.
“When did we start running away from things?” she replied.
“This one is different. I’m not even sure who the players are.”
“What others do or don’t do isn’t a factor. We don’t stop being who we are,” she said.
The air was cool puffing up from under the bridge, the surface of the water crinkling in the sunset with the incoming tide. “We’re dealing with people who have no lines,” I said. “Their motivations are only partially known to us. Part of their agenda is financial. The other part of it is fiendish. It’s the last part I’m worried about.”
Then I told her about the video we had watched in Helen’s office. While I spoke, Molly continued to lean on the bridge rail, staring at the sunlight’s reflection on the bayou’s surface, like hundreds of glinting razors, her face never changing expression.
“Who would do this?” she said.
“That’s it. We don’t know. Monsters like Gacy and Bundy and Gary Ridgway and this guy Rader in Kansas torture and murder people for years and live undetected in our midst while they do it.”
“We’re not going anywhere, Dave.”
I watched a garfish roll among the water hyacinths along the bank, its dark green armored back sliding as supplely as a snake’s beneath the flowers, down into the depths, while tiny bream skittered out of its way.
I ATE LUNCH the next day at Victor’s cafeteria on Main. It was hot and bright when I came back out on the street, the air dense, a smell like salt and warm seaweed on the wind, more like hurricane season than the end of
