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out of my head. I tried to convince myself that the past was the past, that
Ida had involved herself with violent and predatory people and that her fate
was neither my doing nor Jimmie's.
But over the years I had seen the file drawer slammed on too many unsolved
disappearances. These cases almost always involved people who had no voice and
whose families had no power. Sometimes a determined cop would try to keep the
investigation alive, revisiting his files and chasing leads on his own time,
but ultimately he, too, would make his separate peace and try not to think, as
I was now, about voices that can cry out for help in our sleep.
I had no demonstrable evidence that a crime had actually been committed,
nothing except the statement of a guilt-driven man who said he had seen blood
on a chair decades ago. Even if I wanted to initiate an investigation, where
would I start? In a Texas coastal town where most of the players were probably
dead?
I had another problem, too. For a recovering alcoholic, introspection and
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solitude are the perfect combination for a dry drunk, a condition that for me
was like putting a nail gun in the center of my forehead and pulling the
trigger.
I mowed the grass in the front yard and began raking up layers of blackened
leaves on the shady side of the house, burning them in a rusty oil barrel
under the oak trees down by the bayou. A speedboat went by with water-skiers
in tow, churning a frothy yellow trough down the center of the bayou. On the
far bank, in City Park, the camellias were in bloom, kids were playing
baseball, and families were fixing lunch in the picnic shelters. But I
couldn't shake the gloom that had clung to me like cobwebs since I had
listened to Troy Bordelon's deathbed statement.
I went back in the house and read the newspaper. The lead story was not a
happy one. Thirty miles from New Iberia, the body of a young black woman,
bound at the wrists and ankles, had been found in a cane field, not far from
the convent in Grand Coteau. Her car was discovered only two miles away, at a
rural cemetery where she had been visiting her brother's grave site, the
driver's door ajar, the engine still idling.
In the last six months two women had been abducted in Baton Rouge and their
bodies dumped in wetlands areas. The murder of the black woman in Grand Coteau
bore similarities to the homicides
in Baton Rouge, except this was the first time the killer, if indeed the same
perpetrator murdered all three women, had struck in the area we call Acadiana.
A one-paragraph addendum to the wire-service story mentioned that over thirty
women in the Baton Rouge area had been murdered by unknown perpetrators in the
last decade.
Clete Purcel, my old friend from NOPD, had opened a branch of his P.I.
business in New Iberia, and was now dividing his time between here and his
office on St. Ann in New Orleans. He claimed he was simply expanding his
business parameters, but in truth Clete's shaky legal status and his penchant
for creating chaos and mayhem wherever he went made instant mobility an
imperative in his day-to-day existence.
How many cops have longer rap sheets than most of the criminals they put in
the can? Over the years, some of Clete's antics have included the following:
forcing an entire dispenser of liquid hand soap down a button man's mouth in
the men's room of the Greyhound bus depot; leaving a drunk U.S. congressman
handcuffed to a fire hydrant on St. Charles Avenue; filling a gangster's
convertible with cement; dangling a gang-banger by his ankles off a fire
escape five stories above the street; driving an earthmover back and forth
through Max Calveci's palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain; stuffing a billiard
ball inside the mouth of a child molester; parking a nine-Mike round in the
brainpan of a federal snitch; and, top this, possibly pouring sand in the fuel
tank of an airplane, causing the deaths of a Galveston mobster by the name of
Sally Dio and a few of his hired gumballs.
More unbelievably, Clete did all these things, and many others, in a blithe,
carefree spirit, like a unicorn on purple acid crashing good-naturedly through
a clock shop. He was out of sync with the world, filled with self-destructive
energies, addicted to every vice, still ridden with dreams from Vietnam,
incredibly brave, generous, and decent, the most loyal man I ever knew, and
ultimately the most tragic.
What Victor Charles and the NVA couldn't do to him, or the Mob or his enemies
inside NOPD, Clete had done to himself with fried food, booze, weed, whites on
the half shell, and calamitous affairs with strippers, junkies, and women who
seemed to glow with both rut and neurosis. Sometimes I believed his dreams
were not about Vietnam but about his father, a milkman in the Garden District
who thought parental love and discipline, the latter administrated with a
whistling razor strop, were one and the same. But no amount of pain, either
inflicted by himself or others, ever stole his grin or robbed him of his
spirit. For Clete, life was an ongoing party, and if you wanted to be a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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