When he was a patrolman in the Garden District, he busted a choleric, obnoxious United States congressman for D.W.I, and hit-and-run and had the congressman's car towed to the pound. When the congressman and his girlfriend tried to walk off to a bar on the corner of St. Charles and Napoleon, Clete handcuffed him to a fireplug.
Charges against the congressman were dropped, and one week later Clete found himself reassigned to a program called Neighborhood Outreach. He spent the next year ducking bullets and bricks or garbage cans weighted with water and thrown from roofs at the Desire, Iberville, and St. Thomas projects.
Even though Clete made constant derogatory allusions to the population of petty miscreants and melt-downs that cycles itself daily through the bail bond offices, courts, and jails of every city in America, in reality he viewed most of them as defective rather than evil and treated them with a kind of sardonic respect.
Drug dealers, pimps, sexual predators, jackrollers, and armed robbers were another matter. So were slumlords and politicians on the pad and cops who did scut work for the Mob. But Clete's real disdain was directed at a state of mind rather than at individuals. He looked upon public displays of charity and morality as the stuff of sideshows. He never trusted people in groups and was convinced that inside every reformer there was a glandular, lascivious, and sweaty creature aching for release.
After Clete made plainclothes, he worked a case involving a Garden District doyenne whose philandering husband went missing on a fishing trip down in Barataria. The husband's outboard was found floating upside down in the swamp immediately after a storm, the rods, tackle boxes, ice chest, and life preservers washed into the trees. His disappearance was written off as an accidental drowning.
But Clete learned the husband hated to drive an automobile and regularly hired taxicabs to take him around New Orleans. Clete searched through hundreds of taxi logs until he found an entry for a pickup at the husband's residence on the day he went fishing. The destination was the husband's new downtown office building. Clete also questioned a security guard at the office building and was told the wife had been installing new shelves in the basement very early on the Saturday morning her husband had disappeared.
Clete obtained a blueprint of the building and got a search warrant and discovered that behind the shelves a brick wall had been recently mortared across an alcove that was meant to serve as a storage space.
He and three uniformed patrolmen sledgehammered a hole in the bricks and were suddenly struck by an odor that caused one of them to vomit in his hands. The doyenne had not only walled up her husband in his own office building, she had hosted a dance, with a hired orchestra, right above the alcove that evening. The coroner said the husband was alive for the whole show.
Clete busted an infamous gay millionaire on Bayou St. John who fed his abusive mother to a pet alligator, helped wiretap a Louisiana insurance commissioner who went to prison for bribery, and eventually caught up with the United States congressman who had been instrumental in shipping Clete off to Neighborhood Outreach.
During Mardi Gras someone had flung a beer bottle from a French Quarter hotel window into the passing parade and had seriously hurt one of New Orleans's most famous trumpet players. Clete went down a third-floor corridor, knocking on doors, trying to approximate the probable location of the room from which the bottle had been thrown.
Then he reached the door of a large suite, marched off the distance to the end of the corridor, comparing it with the distance he had measured between the suspect window and the edge of the building outside. When he and the hotel detective were refused entrance to the suite, Clete kicked the doors open and saw the congressman amid a group of naked revelers, their Mardi Gras masks pushed up on their heads, spitting whiskey and soda on one another.
This time Clete made a call to a police reporter at the Times-Picayune right after busting the whole room.
"You think Perry LaSalle may be a sex predator?" Bootsie said that afternoon.
"I didn't say that. But Perry always gives you the feeling he's Prometheus on the bayou. Jesuit seminarian, friend of the migrants, professional good guy at a Catholic Worker mission. Except he represents Legion Guidry and has a way of involving himself with working-class girls who all think they're going to be his main squeeze."
We were in our bedroom and Bootsie was putting on eyeliner in the dresser mirror. She had just had her bath and was wearing a pink slip. Through the window I could see Alafair pouring fresh water in Tripod's bowl on top of his hutch.
"Dave?" Bootsie said.
"Yes?"
"You need to get your grits off the stove."
"I need to talk to Perry."
"About what?" she said, no longer able to suppress her irritation.
"I think he's being blackmailed by Legion Guidry. How's that for starters?"
"Are we going out to dinner?"
"Yeah, sure," I replied.
"Thanks for confirming that," she said, her eyes out of focus in the mirror.
A few minutes later we walked out on the gallery. The yard was already in shadow, and on the wind I could smell an odor like cornsilk in a field at the end of the day. It should have been a fine evening, but I knew the white worm eating inside of me was about to ruin it.
"I've got to go to a meeting," I said.
"This isn't Wednesday night," she replied.
"I'll drive to Lafayette," I said.
She turned and walked back into the bedroom and began changing out of her dress into a pair of blue jeans and a work shirt.
When I came home late that night, she had made a bed on the couch and was asleep with her face turned toward the wall.
The next morning I drove to Perry LaSalle's office on Main Street.
"He's not in right now. He went out to Mr. Sookie's camp," Perry's secretary said.
"Sookie? Sookie Motrie?" I said.
"Why, yes, sir," she replied, then saw the look on my face and dropped her eyes.
I drove deep down into Vermilion Parish, where the wetlands of southern Louisiana bleed into the Gulf of Mexico, passing through rice and cattle acreage, then crossing canals and bayous into long stretches of green marshland, where cranes and blue herons stood in the rain ditches, as motionless as lawn ornaments. I turned onto a winding road that led back through gum trees and a brackish swamp, past a paintless, wood-frame church house whose roof had been crushed by a fallen persimmon tree.
But it wasn't the ruined building that caught my eye. A glass-covered sign in the yard, unblemished except for road dust and a single crack down the center, read, "Twelve Disciples Assembly-Services at 7 p.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m. Sunday. Welcome."
I stopped the cruiser and backed up, then turned onto the church property. A dirt lane led back to an empty house, now packed to the eaves with bales of hay. A sawhorse with an old Detour sign on it lay sideways in the middle of the lane. Road maintenance equipment and a tree shredder used by parish work crews were parked in a three-sided tin shed, surrounded by water oaks and slash pine. Just past the shed was a railed hog lot that gave onto a thick woods and a dead lake. The hogs in the lot were indescribably filthy, their bristles matted with feces, their snouts glazed with what looked like chicken guts.
I tried to remember the lyrics of the song Marvin Oates was always quoting from but they escaped me. Maybe Bootsie was right, I told myself. Maybe I was so deep in my own head that I saw a dark portent in virtually everyone who had been vaguely connected with the lives of Amanda Boudreau and Linda Zeroski, even to the extent that I had actually begun to think Perry LaSalle, who had represented Linda in court, might bear examination.