Chapter 10
AFTER I HAD gone down to the office Sunday morning and made my report, a mail clerk at the post office called the dispatcher and said that during the night someone had dropped an army-issue .45 automatic through a post office mail slot. The .45 had been wrapped in a paper bag with my name written on the outside.
It was hot and bright at noon, with a breeze blowing out of the south, and Clete Purcel walked with me along the dirt road to the spot where Sonny and the man named Jack had entered the brush and run down the bayou’s bank toward the four corners. The blood on the leaves was coated with dust from the road.
“It looks like Sonny really cored a hole in the guy. He didn’t show up at a hospital?”
“Not yet.”
We walked through the brush and down to the bank. The deep imprints in the mud left by Sonny and the man named Jack were now crisscrossed with the shoe prints of the deputies who had followed Jack’s blood trail to a break in the cattails where the bow of a flat-bottomed boat had been dragged onto the sand.
Clete squatted down heavily, slipped a piece of cardboard under one knee, and looked back up the bank toward the dock. He wore a pair of baggy, elastic-wasted shorts with dancing zebras printed on them. He took off his porkpie hat and twirled it on his index finger.
“Did you ever see the sawed-down twelve?” he asked.
“No.”
“You think he was carrying one?”
“I don’t know, Clete.”
“But you know a guy like that was carrying a piece of some kind? Right?”
We looked at each other.
“So the question is, why didn’t he try to pop Sonny with it? He could have waited for him in the dark and parked one in his brisket,” he said.
“Because he dropped it,” I said. Then I said, “And why didn’t anyone find it last night?”
He was spinning his hat on his finger now. His eyes were green and full of light.
“Because it fell in the water,” he said, and lumbered to his feet.
It didn’t take long. Seventy feet back down the bank, where the water eddied around a sunken and rotted pirogue that was green and fuzzy with moss, we saw the barrel of the twelve-gauge glinting wetly among the reeds and the wake from a passing boat. The barrel was sawed off at the pump and impacted with sand. The stock had been shaved and shaped with a wood rasp and honed into a pistol grip. A two-foot length of bungee cord, the kind you use to strap down luggage, was looped and screwed into the butt.
Clete shook the sand out of the barrel and jacked open the breech. Yellow water gushed out of the mechanism with the unfired shell. Then he jacked four more rounds out on the ground. I picked them up and they felt heavy and wet and filmed with grit in my palm.
“Our man doesn’t use a sportsman’s plug,” Clete said. He looked at the shells in my hand. “Are those pumpkin balls?”
“Yeah, you don’t see them anymore.”
“He probably loads his own rounds. This guy’s got the smell of a mechanic, Streak.” He peeled a stick of gum with one hand and put it in his mouth, his eyes thoughtful. “I hate to say this, but maybe dick-brain saved your life.”
Down by the dock a teenage kid was holding up a stringer of perch for a friend to see. He wore a bright-chrome-plated watchband on his wrist.
“You don’t think this guy’s a button man, he’s mobbed-up?” Clete asked.
“I was thinking about Sonny ... the handcuffs ... the way he took me down.”
Clete blew into the open breech of the shotgun, closed it, and snapped the firing pin on the empty chamber. He studied my face.
“Listen, Sonny’s a walking hand-job. Stop thinking what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Then why are you thinking the same thing?”
“I’m not. A guy like Sonny isn’t born, he’s defecated into the world. I should have stuffed him down a toilet with a plumber’s helper a long time ago.”
“I’ve seen federal agents with the same kind of cuffs.”
“This guy’s no cop. You buy into his rebop and he’ll piss in your shoe,” he said, and put the shotgun hard into my hands.
Clete ate lunch with us, then I went down to the bait shop and picked up a Styrofoam cooler that I had filled with ice Friday afternoon. The corner of a black garbage bag protruded from under the lid. I walked back up the incline through the shade and set the cooler in the bed of my truck. Clete was picking up pecans from under the trees and cracking them in his hands.
“You want to take a ride to Breaux Bridge?” I asked.
“I thought we were going fishing,” he said. “I hear Sweet Pea Chaisson has rented a place out by the old seminary.”
He smiled broadly.
We took the four-lane into Lafayette, then drove down the road toward Breaux Bridge, past Holy Rosary, the old Negro Catholic school, a graveyard with tombs above the ground, the Carmelite convent, and the seminary. Sweet Pea’s rented house was a flat-roofed yellow brick building shielded by a hedge of dying azalea bushes. The lot next door was filled with old building materials and pieces of iron that were threaded with weeds and crisscrossed with morning glory vines.
No one was home. An elderly black man was cleaning up dog feces in the yard with a shovel.
“He taken the ladies to the restaurant down on Cameron in Lafayette, down by the fo’ corners,” he said.
“Which restaurant?” I said.
“The one got smoke comin’ out the back.”
“It’s a barbecue place?” I said.
“The man own it always burning garbage out there. You’ll smell it befo’ you see it.”
We drove down Cameron through the black district in Lafayette. Up ahead was an area known as Four Corners, where no number of vice arrests ever seemed to get the hookers off of the sidewalks and out of the motels.
“There’s his Caddy,” Clete said, and pointed out the window. “Check this place, will you? His broads must have rubber stomach liners.”
I parked in a dirt lot next to a wood frame building with paint that had blistered and curled into shapes like blown chicken feathers and with a desiccated privy and smoking incinerator in back.
“We’re not only off your turf, big mon, we’re in the heart of black town. You feel comfortable with this?” Clete said when we were outside the truck.
“The locals don’t mind,” I said.
“You checked in with them?”
“Not really.” He looked at me.
“Sweet Pea’s a pro. It’s not a big deal,” I said.
I reached inside the Styrofoam cooler and pulled the vinyl garbage bag out. It swung heavily from my hand, dripping ice and water.
“What are you doing?” Clete said.
“I think Sweet Pea helped set up Helen Soileau.”
“The muff-diver? That’s the one who had her animals killed?”
“Give her a break, Clete.”
“Excuse me. I mean the lady who thinks I’m spit on the sidewalk. What’s in the bag?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I guess I asked for this.” He spit his gum out with a thropping sound.
We went through the door. It was a cheerless place where you could stay on the downside of a drunk without making comparisons. The interior was dark, the floor covered with linoleum, the green walls lined with pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. People whose race would be hard to define were at the bar, in the booths, and at the pool table. They all looked expectantly at the glare of light from the opening front door, as though an interesting moment might be imminent in their lives.
“Man, that Sweet Pea can pick ‘em, can’t he? I wonder if they charge extra for the roaches in the mashed potatoes,” Clete said.
In the light from the kitchen we could see Sweet Pea and another man sitting at a large table with four women. The other man was explaining something, his forearms propped on the edge of the table, his fingers moving in the air. The women looked bored, hungover, wrapped in their own skin
.
“Do you make the dude with him?” Clete said close to my ear.
“No.”
“That’s Patsy Dapolito, they call him Patsy Dap, Patsy Bones, Patsy the Baker. He’s a button guy for Johnny Carp.”
The man named Patsy Dapolito wore a tie and a starched collar buttoned tightly around his neck. His face was pinched-looking, the nose thin, sharp-edged, the mouth down-turned, the teeth showing as though he were breathing through them.
“Stay out of overdrive, Dave. Dapolito’s a head case.” Clete said quietly.
“They all are.”
“He baked another hood’s bones in a wedding cake and sent it to a Teamster birthday party.”
Sweet Pea sat at the head of the table, a bib tied around his neck. The table was covered with trays of boiled crawfish and beaded pitchers of draft beer. Sweet Pea snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, then peeled the shell off the tail. He dipped the meat into a red sauce, put it in his mouth, and never looked up.
“Y’all get yourself some plates, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He wore cream-colored slacks and a bolo tie and a gray silk shirt that rippled with a metallic sheen. His mouth glistened as though it were painted with lip gloss.
I took the dead coon out of the bag by its hind feet. The body was leathery and stiff, the fur wet from the ice in the cooler. I swung it across the table right into Sweet Pea’s tray. Crawfish shells and juice, beer, and coleslaw exploded all over his shirt and slacks.
He stared down at his clothes, the twisted body of the coon in the middle of his tray, then at me. But Sweet Pea Chaisson didn’t rattle easily. He wiped his cheek with the back of his wrist and started to speak.
“Shut up, Sweet Pea,” Clete said.
Sweet Pea smiled, his webbed eyes squeezing shut.
“What I done to deserve this?” he said. “You ruin my dinner, you trow dead animals at me, now I ain’t even suppose to talk?”
I could hear the air-conditioning units humming in the windows, a solitary pool ball rolling across the linoleum floor.
“Your buddies tried to hurt a friend of mine, Sweet Pea,” I said.
He wrapped a napkin around the coon’s tail, then held the coon out at arm’s length and dropped it.
“You don’t want nothing to eat?” he asked.
“Fuck it,” Clete said beside me, his voice low.
Then I saw the expression on the face of the man called Patsy Dap. It was a grin, as though he both appreciated and was bemused by the moment that was being created for all of us. I felt Clete’s shoe nudge against mine, his fingers pull lightly on my arm.
But it was moving too fast now.
“What d’ we got here, the crazy person hour, fucking clowns abusing people at Sunday dinner?” Dapolito said.
“Nobody’s got a beef with you, Patsy,” Clete said.
“What d’ you call this, creating a fucking scene, slopping food on people, who the fuck is this guy?”
“We got no problem with you, Patsy. Accept my word on that,” Clete said.
“Why’s he looking at me like that?” Dapolito said.
“Hey, I don’t like that. Why you pinning me, man? ... Hey ...”
My gaze drifted back to Sweet Pea.
“Tell those two guys, you know who I’m talking about, not to bother my friend again. That’s all I wanted to say,” I said.
“Hey, I said why you fucking pinning me. You answer my question,” Dapolito said
Then his hand shot up from under the table and bit like a vise into my scrotum.
I vaguely recall the screams of the women at the table and Clete locking his big arms around me and dragging me backward through a tangle of chairs. But I remember my palm curving around the handle of the pitcher, the heavy weight of it swinging in an arc, the glass exploding in strings of wet light; I remember it like red shards of memory that can rise from a drunken dream. Then Dapolito was on his knees, his face gathered in his hands, his scarlet fingers trembling as though he were weeping or hiding a shameful secret in the stunned silence of the room.
Chapter 11
“WHY’D YOU DO it, mon?” Clete said outside. We were standing between my truck and Sweet Pea’s Cadillac convertible.
“He dealt it.” I wiped the sweat off my face on my sleeve and tried to breathe evenly. My heart was beating against my rib cage. So far we had heard no sirens. Some of the restaurant’s customers had come out the front door but none of them wanted to enter the parking lot.
“Okay... this is the way I see it,” Clete said. “You had provocation, so you’ll probably skate with the locals. Patsy Dap’s another matter. We’ll have to do a sit-down with Johnny Carp.”
“Forget it.”
“You just left monkey shit all over the ceiling. We’re doing this one my way, Streak.”
“It’s not going to happen, Clete.”
“Trust me, big mon,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “What’s keeping the locals?”
“It probably got called in as barroom bullshit in the black district,” I said.
There was a whirring sound in my ears like wind blowing in seashells. I couldn’t stop sweating. Clete propped his arm against the cloth top of Sweet Pea’s car and glanced down into the backseat.
“Dave, look at this,” he said.
“What?”
“On the floor. Under those newspapers. There’s something on the carpet.”
The exposed areas of the carpet, where people’s feet had crumpled and bunched the newspaper, looked brushed and vacuumed, but there were stains like melted chocolate in the gray fabric that someone had not been able to remove.
“We took it this far. You got a slim-jim in your tool box?” Clete said.
“No.”
“So he needs a new top anyway,” he said, and snapped open a switchblade knife, plunged it into the cloth, and sawed a slit down the edge of the back window. He worked his arm deep inside the hole and popped open the door.
“Feel it,” he said a moment later, stepping aside so I could place my hand on the back floor.
The stain had become sticky in the enclosed heat of the automobile. Hovering like a fog just above the rug was a thick, sweet smell that reminded me in a vague way of an odor in a battalion aid station.
“Somebody did some major bleeding back there,” Clete said.
“Lock it up again.”
“Wait a minute.” He picked up a crumpled piece of paper that was stuck down in the crack of the leather seat and read the carbon writing on it. “It looks like Sweet Pea’s got lead in his foot as well as his twanger. Ninety in a forty-five.”
“Let’s see it,” I said.
He handed it to me. Then he looked at my face again.
“It means something?” he said.
“He got the ticket yesterday on a dirt road out by Cade. Why’s he hanging around Cade?” In the distance I could hear a siren on an emergency vehicle, as though it were trying to find a hole through traffic at an intersection.
“Wait here. Everything’s going to be copacetic,” Clete said.
“Don’t go back in there.”
He walked fast across the lot, entered the side door of the restaurant, then came back out with his hand in one pocket.
“Why is it these dumb bastards always use the John to score? The owner’s even got sandpaper glued on top of the toilet tank to keep the rag-noses from chopping up lines on it,” he said.
He stood between my truck and the Cadillac and began working open a small rectangular cellophane-sealed container with two silhouetted lovers on it.
“You’re one in a million, Cletus,” I said.
He unrolled a condom, then removed a piece of broken talc from his pocket, crushed it into fragments and powder, poured it with his palm into the condom, and tied a knot in the latex at the top.
“There’s nothing like keeping everybody’s eye on the shit bags By the way, they wrapped one of those roller towels from the towel machine around Patsy’s head. Thi
nk of a dirty Q-Tip sitting in a chair,” he said. He dropped the condom on the floor of the Cadillac with two empty crack vials and locked the door, just before an Acadian ambulance, followed by a Lafayette city police car, turned into the parking lot.
“Party time,” he said. He crinkled his eyes at me and brushed his palms softly.
The sheriff had never been a police officer before his election to office, but he was a good administrator and his general decency and sense of fairness had gotten him through most of his early problems in handling both criminals and his own personnel. He had been a combat marine, an enlisted man, during the Korean War, which he would not discuss under any circumstances, and I always suspected his military experience was related to his sincere desire not to abuse the authority of his position.
When I sat down in his office the sun was yellow and bright outside the window, and an array of potted plants on his windowsill stood out in dark silhouette against the light. His cheeks were red and grained and woven with tiny blue veins, and he had the small round chin of the French with a cleft in it.
He reread my report with his elbows on the desk blotter and his knuckles propped against his brow.
“I don’t need this on Monday morning,” he said.
“It got out of hand.”
“Out of hand? Let me make an observation, my friend. Clete Purcel has no business here. He causes trouble everywhere he goes.”
“He tried to stop it, Sheriff. Besides, he knows Sonny Marsallus better than anyone in New Orleans.”
“That’s not an acceptable trade-off. What’s this stuff about a dead coon?”
I cleared a tic out of my throat. “That’s not in my report,” I said.
“Last night I got a call at home from the Lafayette chief of police. Let’s see, how did he put it? “Would you tell your traveling clown to keep his circus act in his own parish?” You want to hear the rest of it?”
“Not really.” Because I knew my straying into another jurisdiction, or even the beer pitcher smashed into Patsy Dapolito’s face, was not what was on the sheriff’s mind.