“What about Clete Purcel?”
“Forget it.” He took a badge in a leather holder out of his desk drawer and dropped it on his blotter. “Tell me you don’t want it and we’re done.”
ONE MILE AWAY, Clete had just parked his Caddy under a cluster of maple trees behind the university library when he saw a familiar green Honda pass on the street. He had seen the Honda twice that morning, in traffic, once outside the Express Lube Friday morning, and once later, at the mall.
Clete watched the Honda disappear around a curve at the base of the mountain behind the university. He walked across a knoll, through a grove of trees, and sat on the steps of a classroom building with a view of his Caddy. He sat there for ten minutes, sipping from a silver flask, each hit of Scotch and milk going down like the old friend it used to be, the wind blowing cool through the trees, the damp smell of the steps reminiscent of the Quarter in the early-morning hours. But the green Honda did not reappear, and Clete walked to the library, where he began to research both the life of the woman he had slept with and the life of the husband he had cuckolded.
As he did these things, he felt wrapped in a web of deceit and desire that he could not scrub off his skin.
The reference librarian helped him find articles about the young Jamie Sue Stapleton on the Internet and in music magazines and biographical books dealing with country-and-western personalities. Most of it was fluff, written by hacks who created caricatures of blue-collar people who rose from humble origins to a world stage where their brocaded and sequined western costumes told their audiences that fame and wealth could be theirs, too, if only they believed. The manufactured accents, the nativism and cynical use of religion, the meretricious nature of the enterprise, the cheapness of the disguise were all forgivable sins. It was the poor whites’ answer to the minstrel show. Starshine allowed them to delight in the parody of themselves and to turn the poverty and rejection that characterized their lives into badges of honor.
Unfortunately for the hacks who wrote about her, Jamie Sue’s life and career did not lend themselves to predictability.
She had been born to a blind woman and an oil-field roustabout in Yoakum, Texas, the inception point of the old Chisholm Trail. She left high school at age sixteen and worked as a waitress at a truck stop in San Antonio and as a dancer at a topless club in Houston. According to one interview, she earned an associate of arts degree from a community college when she was nineteen. She also married her English professor and divorced him one year later, after charging him with assault and battery and spousal rape.
With the money from her divorce settlement, she formed her first band.
At a time when Nashville music was transforming itself into a middle-class and popular medium, Jamie Sue used Kitty Wells and Skeeter Davis as her models, and a mandolin and a banjo as her lead instruments, and a Dobro instead of an electric bass. A song that always brought down the house was one written by Larry Redmond titled “Garth Ain’t Playing Here Tonight.”
She hooked up with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, a rodeo drifter some people said had the best voice to hit the Texas hill country since Jimmie Rodgers had lived there. Others said a hymnal duet by Jamie Sue and Jimmy Dale could make the devil join the Baptist Church. But two weeks before they were scheduled to cut their first album in an Austin recording studio, Jimmy Dale put a knife into the nephew of the meanest county judge in Southwest Texas.
Why had she married an older man, one terribly mutilated by fire? Was it simply money? Clete found only a few news articles on Leslie Wellstone: He had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a double major in anthropology and comparative literature, but he had disappeared into the post-psychedelic culture of Haight-Ashbury. He had made underground films and a documentary on migrant farmworkers. He had joined a New Age commune high up in the mountains above Santa Fe. He had also enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and gotten his Spam fried in the Sudan.
Clete had the feeling Leslie Wellstone was a man who had dealt himself almost all the cards in the box and had liked none of them.
Clete left the library and headed toward his Caddy. In a parking lot by the Student Union, he saw the green Honda again. A man was sitting behind the steering wheel, his face obscured by the sun visor. Out on the lawn, in the shade of maples not far from the Caddy, a college-age boy and girl were eating sandwiches on a blanket, the door of their parked vehicle yawning open behind them, their car radio playing softly. Clete looked again at the green Honda. Show-time on the campus, he thought.
He walked over to the college boy and his girl. The air in the shade was cool and smelled of clover. The two young people looked up at Clete uncertainly. He squatted down on his haunches, eye level with them, and opened his badge holder on his knee.
“My name is Clete Purcel. I’m a private investigator from New Orleans,” he said. “See that guy parked in the green shitbox over there?”
They nodded but kept their eyes on his face and did not look directly at the parking lot.
“That dude has been following me, and I want to turn it around on him,” Clete said. “The problem is, he’s made my maroon Caddy over there. In the next couple of minutes, I’m going to flush him out of the parking lot. I’ve got about thirty-seven bucks in my wallet. It’s yours if you’ll follow him in your car and let me sit in the backseat.”
“He’ll know who we are,” the boy said.
“No, he can’t see your car from where he is. He’s not interested in y’all. He’ll be looking for me and my Caddy.”
“What’s he done besides follow you?” the girl asked.
“He’s a child molester,” Clete replied.
“What do you plan to do to him?” the boy asked.
Take a chance, Clete thought. “Maybe nothing. Maybe break all his wheels,” he said. “Anytime you want me out of the car, I’ll get out.”
The boy and girl looked at each other and shrugged.
Clete walked across the grass to Lyle Hobbs’s vehicle and propped one arm on the roof above the driver’s window. Hobbs had a box of Wheat Thins open on his lap and was feeding them one at a time into his mouth, chewing them on his back teeth. His recessed right eye, the one looped with stitch marks, glittered wetly, as though it had been irritated by the wind. Clete suppressed a yawn, his gaze wandering up the slope of the mountain behind the university. Then he watched a U.S. Forest Service plane, one filled with fire retardant, flying low across the sky, its engines laboring with its massive load. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.
Lyle Hobbs turned on his radio and tuned the station to a baseball game in progress. “You gonna let it get personal, Mr. Purcel?”
A nest of small blue veins was pulsing in Clete’s temple. “When I was with NOPD, I’d do just that, Lyle. Get personal, I mean. Know why that was? Because my pay was the same whether I was eating doughnuts or mopping up the sidewalk with a degenerate. Now I’m a PI. When it becomes personal, I get in trouble and lose my source of income.”
“I noticed that about you when you were working for Sally Dee. A real pro. I was impressed. You always seemed to fit right in,” Hobbs replied, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
“Does it ever get personal for you, Lyle? Ever know a guy with a short-eyes jacket who wasn’t afraid – I mean, deep down inside, scared shitless? It’s what makes them cruel, isn’t it? That’s why they always choose their victims carefully. You ever get a real bone-on and go apeshit on somebody, Lyle?”
“You’re a real philosopher, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said, suddenly looking up at Clete, just like the lead-weighted eyelids of a doll clicking open. He dropped his empty Wheat Thins box out the window. It bounced off the pavement, powdering Clete’s shoes with crumbs.