James Burke - Light of the World

“Have any idea who these cocksuckers are?”

I thought he would give me a facile answer, but Clete was the most prescient cop regarding human behavior whom I ever knew. “I think we’re dealing with multiple players, maybe guys with different objectives. The best place to start is with the money. Always. Come inside. I want to show you some information I dug up.”

For years he had chased down bail skips for two bondsmen named Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. The conventional portrayal of a PI’s life is a romantic and noir excursion into a world of intrigue, with wealthy female clients swathed in veils and overweight villains sweating under a fan in a saloon on the Pacific Rim. The real world of a PI, and the clientele of Willie and Nig, could be compared to the effluent running through an open sewer. Anyone who thinks otherwise knows nothing about it. Criminality and narcissism are not interchangeable terms, but they are closely related. The checkbook of a narcissist or a recidivist is always balanced, but at someone else’s expense. With rare exceptions, anyone working on his second or third jolt is looking for an institutional womb. Most of them have no feeling about the pain they cause other human beings, either inside or outside the system. The culture of cruelty inside a prison makes you wonder if there is not a genetic flaw in all of us, like an embryonic lizard waiting to crack free from its shell.

Clete hated his job. The NOPD pulled his shield in 1986, and ever since, he had tried to pretend that the loss of his career was of no consequence. Occasionally, I would see him bending over the lavatory in his office, his sleeves rolled up, his wristwatch on the edge of the basin, scrubbing Ajax into his pores, and there would be a level of regret and loss in his eyes that had nothing to do with the face Clete Purcel showed the world.

Working for Wee Willie and Nig had one advantage only: They were anachronisms, but they knew everything about everyone in the city of New Orleans, at least everyone who went against the grain or was a half-bubble off or was part of a sybaritic culture that celebrated its own profligacy.

“I told you Love Younger’s daughter-in-law, Felicity Louviere, was from New Orleans, didn’t I?” Clete said. “She grew up by the old Prytania Theatre. Not far from where I did. Did you know Lillian Hellmann grew up on Prytania?”

“Yeah, I did,” I said, waiting for him to get to the point.

“It’s the accent. That’s how I knew.”

“Yeah, I got that. What I don’t get is why you’re homing in on her and not her husband or father-in-law.”

“Give me some credit, Streak. The woman’s in grief. You think I’d try to put moves on her?”

I let my eyes go empty. “No,” I said. But you’re a sucker for a woman who’s in trouble.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I said no, you wouldn’t take advantage of a woman who just lost a child, for God’s sake.”

He gave me a look and picked up a handful of printouts sent to him through Albert’s computer by a reference librarian who worked for Willie and Nig. “Felicity Louviere’s old man was Rene Louviere. Remember him?”

I remembered the name in the way you remember high school friends who never had a category, people who floated hazily on the edge of your vision and whose deeds, for good or bad, never seemed memorable. You may think of them with fondness, as compatriots with whom you shared a journey. You’re sure they were good at something, but never sure exactly what. “He was in the department for a while?” I said.

“Yeah, for about three years. In community outreach, over by the Desire Project. He got canned for cutting too much slack to the local pukes. He was a nice guy. He just wasn’t a cop.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw an indistinct image of a man who was too thin for his clothes and went a long time between haircuts and was uncomfortable with the coarseness common during morning roll call. “What became of him?”

“He was a social worker in Holy Cross and got fired for giving welfare money to illegals. He ended up roughnecking in a rain forest in South America. Get this. The local Indians burned the bones of their dead relatives and mixed the ashes in the food to keep the family line going. They also shot blowguns at the Americans on the drilling rigs. Some geologists decided to do some payback and flew over the village in a single-engine plane and dropped a couple of satchel charges on them. They killed and wounded a bunch of people, including children.”

He set the printouts on the breakfast table and pinched his eyes, a look of weariness if not soul sickness stealing into his face. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

“What is it, Clete?” I said.

“You know the drill. The motherfuckers who start wars have never heard a shot fired in anger, but they wave the flag and make speeches at Arlington and run up the body count as high as they can. I hate them, every one of them.”

I knew Clete was no longer talking about events in the rain forests of Brazil or Venezuela. He was back in the Central Highlands, on the edge of a ville that stank of duck shit and stagnant water, the flame from the cannon of a Zippo track arching onto the roofs of the hooches, a mamasan pleading hysterically in a language he couldn’t understand.

“Finish the story, Clete,” I said.

His eyes came back on mine. “Rene Louviere quit his job with the oil company in protest. He went back to the States and joined a relief agency and returned to the ville the geologists had bombed. Guess what?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“A couple of Indians got wasted on mushrooms and chopped him into pieces.”

“How did Felicity Louviere meet her husband?”

“At a Mardi Gras ball. He probably didn’t tell her he got expelled from college for cheating. He’s also a degenerate gambler and had a hundred-grand credit line in Vegas and Atlantic City, until his father forced him into Gamblers Anonymous. Here’s the weird part: The guy supposedly has an incredible mind for figures. The reason he got comped in the casinos was because no matter how much he won, the house took it all back, plus the fillings in his teeth.”

“You think Younger’s people put the bug above Gretchen’s door?”

“They probably know she’s doing a documentary on Love Younger’s shale-oil projects in Canada. But...”

“But what?”

“Nobody cares about the damage these guys are doing, including the Canadians. Why spend money eavesdropping on us?”

“Maybe they’re hiding something that has little or nothing to do with the environment.”

“I don’t know what it is, and neither does Gretchen.”

“There’s another possibility, Clete. I just don’t like to think about it.”

“The guy up at the cave?”

“Asa Surrette is the name.”

“Dave, guys like this have a way of staying alive in our imagination long after they’re dead. Sometimes I still see Bed-check Charlie in the middle of the afternoon. He’s up on a rooftop, locking down on me through a scoped sight on a Russian rifle, just about to squeeze off a round. I feel like somebody is taking off my skin with a pair of pliers. What are the chances of Asa Surrette being the only survivor in a collision between a prison van and a gasoline truck?”

“What are the chances this guy could torture and kill people in his hometown and go undetected for two decades?”

Clete rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you know about him except he was active in his church?”

“He was an electrician and sometimes installed burglar alarms in people’s homes,” I replied.

He stared at me in the silence, his eyes lidless.

So far only two people gave any credence to the possibility that Asa Surrette had escaped from a gasoline-tanker explosion in West Kansas or that someone like him had stenciled the message on the cave wall. One was Alafair and the other was Wyatt Dixon, a man who proved so uncontrollable in custody that the state had tried to short-circuit his brain. I had told the sheriff not to listen to Dixon’s quasi-psychotic ravings. But I was wrong. Dixon was con-wise. He had information and levels of experience that other people couldn’t guess at. He was also the kind of guy you enlist in your cause if you want to win a revolution.