“Nothing. I tried to appeal to his patriotism. You knew he was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade?”
“John Ehrlichman was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying cross. Who cares?”
“You haven’t talked to Purcel?”
“No.”
“He was handling it okay.”
“You don’t know Clete. He doesn’t handle anything okay.”
“Regardless, he needs to stay out of this investigation. Your friend has a serious problem about minding his own business.”
“His neighbor is Ronald Bledsoe. His girlfriend was tortured to death. His City drowned while the most powerful politicians in the country sat on their asses. If these things aren’t his business, what is?”
On her way out of the office, she trailed a finger across the back of my neck. “People use me for a dartboard only once, Dave.”
THAT EVENING I went to Clete’s cottage at the motor court, but he was not there and he didn’t return my calls to his cell phone. I stopped in the bar at Clementine’s and at an outdoor place on Bayou Teche where he sometimes drank, but no one had seen him.
Perhaps I had been rude to Betsy Mossbacher. But few people understood the complexity of Clete Purcel. He didn’t show pain or injury; he absorbed it in the way I imagine an elephant absorbs a rock splinter in its foot. While the wound heals and scars over on the surface, the splinter works its way deeper into the tissue, until infection forms and the inflammation swells upward through the joints into the chest and shoulders and spine, until the elephant’s entire connective system throbs with the lightest of burdens placed on its back. Perhaps the latter was not true of an elephant. But it was of Clete.
I stood on the drawbridge overlooking the bayou at Burke Street and thought about the account Betsy had given me of Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle’s ordeal. I suppose a person could say Rochon had invited his fate, but certainly Ms. Degravelle had not. I thought about the kind of men who would bind and torture their fellow human beings for money or for any other reason. Over the years I had known a few. Some hid in a uniform, some did not. But all of them sought causes and all of them needed banners over their heads. None of them, except those who were obviously psychopathic, ever acted alone or without sanction.
In the twilight Bayou Teche was swollen and wide between its tree-shrouded banks, the backs of garfish roiling the surface next to the lily pads. The sun had burned into a tiny red cinder. The air was suddenly cool, the lawns along the bayou lit by gas-fed lanterns and sometimes by chains of white lights in the oak trees. William Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night. I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees, the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, its slat-tern breath and the quickness of its step only seconds away from the place where children played and our loved ones dwelled.
I walked home and began baking an apple pie in the kitchen oven, insisting that Molly and Alafair sit with me and talk while I did. Chapter 20
B Y SUNDAY MORNING Clete had still not shown up. I heard the pet flap on the door swing back and forth, then saw Snuggs walk into the kitchen, jump up on the windowsill, and look back outside. I walked out on the porch. Bo Diddley Wiggins was in my backyard, admiring the bayou, wearing a pair of slacks and a short-sleeved print shirt unbuttoned at the top, the lapels ironed out on his shoulders.
“Didn’t know if y’all were still sleeping,” he said. “How old is that coo
n?”
“He’s old. Like me,” I said.
“He took a wet dump all over his papers. That’s what I fear most in life. Sitting in a wheelchair, my pecker shriveled up, downloading in adult Pampers while a nigra woman sticks gruel in my mouth.”
I heard Molly close the kitchen window. Bo looked at the trees overhead, the sunlight breaking through the branches, a squirrel swinging on a bird feeder. He waited for me to invite him in.
“We’re about to head out to Lafayette, Bo. Otherwise I’d offer you coffee,” I said.
“I don’t have time, anyway. Look, I don’t like to meddle. But we go back and I couldn’t just blow off your friend’s situation. What’s his-name, the rhino who’s always getting into trouble around here?”
“Clete Purcel?”
“A couple of my employees are taking care of him right now. They don’t want to see him hurt. But the guy went ape-shit out by an old oil platform on my lease and shot at somebody. If it hadn’t been for my superintendent, your friend would be in the Lafourche Parish Jail.”
“Where is he now?”
“Shit-faced in a bar, with a thirty-eight in a holster strapped on his chest. Why you looking at me like that?”
“Why are your employees going out of their way for Clete Purcel?”
“Because he fishes down there and they know him. Because one of my employees was in Vietnam, just like your friend. Excuse me, Dave, but did I do something wrong in coming here, because I’m definitely getting that feeling.”
“No, you didn’t, Bo. I appreciate it. If you’ll give me directions, I’ll go get him.”
“I’ll take you. Get in my truck. Wait till you see what this baby can do in four-wheel drive on a board road.”