James Burke: The Glass Rainbow

Clete operated a private investigative service out of two offices, one on St. Ann in the French Quarter and the other on Main Street, here in New Iberia. His daily routine was one of ennui coupled with an almost visceral disdain for the people he routinely hooked up and delivered to two bondsmen in New Orleans by the names of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, both of whom had been bankrupted after Katrina when FEMA transported their bonded-out clientele to faraway cities all over the United States. At one time Clete had been the best cop I ever knew, both as a patrolman and as a detective-grade investigator with the NOPD. But booze and pills and his predilection for damaged women had been his undoing, and he’d been forced to blow the country on a murder beef and hide out in El Salvador and Guatemala, where, as a mercenary, he got to see the murder of civilians on a scale that was greater than he had seen in Vietnam.

Insatiability seemed to have been wired into his metabolism. He fought his hangovers with uppers and vodka and tomato juice and a celery stick in a tumbler of crushed ice, convinced himself that four fingers of Scotch sheathed in a glass of milk would not harm his liver, and clanked iron daily to compensate for the deep-fried soft-shell crabs and oyster po’boy sandwiches and gallons of gumbo he consumed on a weekly basis. His courage and his patriotism and his sense of personal honor and his loyalty to his friends had no peer. I never knew a better and braver man. But threaded through all of his virtues was his abiding conviction that he was not worthy of a good woman’s love and that somehow his father, the milkman who had made his son kneel on grains of rice, always stood somewhere close by, his face knotted with disapproval.

Clete was the libidinous trickster of folklore, the elephantine buffoon, the bane of the Mob and all misogynists and child molesters, the brain-scorched jarhead who talked with a dead mamasan on his fire escape, the nemesis of authority figures and anyone who sought power over others, a one-man demolition derby who had driven an earth-grader through the walls of a mobster’s palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain and systematically ground the entire building into rubble. Or at least that was the persona he created for the world to see. But in reality Clete Purcel was a tragedy. His enemies were many: gangsters, vindictive cops, and insurance companies who wanted him off the board. Klansmen and neo-Nazis had tried to kill him. A stripper he had befriended dosed him with the clap. He had been shanked, shot, garroted, and tortured. A United States congressman tried to have him sent to Angola. But all of the aforementioned were amateurs when it came to hurting Clete Purcel. Clete’s most dangerous adversary lived in his own breast.

I walked outside with him, into the coolness of the evening and the wind blowing through the bamboo that grew along the driveway. His skin was inflamed with fresh sunburn, and he was wearing a tropical shirt and mirrored shades that reflected the trees and clouds and his restored maroon Caddy with the starch-white top. He put his arm inside the driver’s window and lifted an open can of beer off the dashboard, then stuck a filter-tip cigarette into the corner of his mouth and prepared to light it with his Zippo. I removed the cigarette and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

“Can’t you stop doing that?” he said.

“No.”

“What was going on in your kitchen?”

“I had some words with a convict writer who hangs out with Alafair’s new boyfriend.”

“This guy Weingart?”

“You know him?”

“Not personally. He knocked up a black girl who waits tables at Ruby Tuesday.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me. He’s a famous guy. She was impressed. I think he hunts on the game reserve. When they’re nineteen and haven’t been farther away than Lake Charles, it doesn’t take a lot to get them to kick off their panties.” He drank from his beer. The top of the can was covered with condensation from the coldness inside, and his mouth left a bright smear on it. “I’ve got a Dr Pepper in the cooler,” he said.

“I just had one. Why’d you come by?”

I couldn’t see his eyes behind his shades, but when he turned his head toward me, I knew he had caught the sharpness in my voice. “The feds are working those homicides in Jeff Davis Parish. Or at least they say they are. They’re talking about a serial killer. But I don’t buy it.”

“Let it go, Clete.”

“My bail skip was twenty-one years old. She’d had tracks on her arms since she was thirteen. She deserved something more out of life than being left in a rain ditch with all her bones broken.”

When I didn’t reply, he took off his shades and stared at me. The skin around his eyes looked unnaturally white. “Say it.”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” I replied.

“Rumdum PI’s don’t get involved in official investigations?”

“I went over to Mississippi and interviewed a brother of one of the victims. I also talked to Herman Stanga.”

“And?”

“I came up with nothing that could be called helpful.”

“So you’re dropping it?”

“It’s out of my jurisdiction.”

“Meaning it’s automatically out of mine?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you thought it.”

“Only three of the seven dead girls and women are certifiable homicides, Clete. There’s no telling how the others died. Drug overdoses, hit-and-run accidents, suicide, God only knows.”

“Only three, huh?”

“You know what I meant.”

“Right,” he said. He put his shades back on and got in his Caddy, twisting the key hard in the ignition.

“Don’t leave like this.”

“Go back inside and fight with your family, Streak. Sometimes you really put me in the dumps.”

He backed into the street, lighting a cigarette with his Zippo simultaneously, an oncoming vehicle swerving around him, blowing its horn.

CLETE STARTED HIS search for Herman Stanga in New Iberia’s old red-light district, down Railroad Avenue, where the white girls used to go for five dollars and the black girls on Hopkins went for three. He cruised past the corner hangouts and the old cribs, their windows nailed over with plywood, a drive-by daiquiri store, and rows of unoccupied houses in front of which bagged garbage and junked furniture and split mattresses were stacked three feet high. He passed a stucco bungalow that had been blackened by fire and was now used as a shooting gallery. He saw the peculiar mix of addiction and prostitution and normal blue-collar life that had become characteristic of inner-city America. Then he drove down Ann Street, where black teenage drug vendors stood one kid to each dirt yard, their faces vacant, their bodies motionless, like clothespins arranged on a wash line, their customers flicking on a turn signal to indicate they were ready for curb service.

The sky had the color and texture of green gas, the trees throbbing with birds. In the west, the sun was a tiny red spark inside rain clouds. Clete parked on a corner in front of a paint-peeling shotgun house and waited. His top was down, his porkpie hat tilted on his brow, his fingers knitted on his chest, his eyes closed in repose. Three minutes went by before he felt a presence inches from his face. He opened one eye and looked into the face of a boy who was not more than twelve, a baseball cap riding on his ears.

“What you want, man?” the boy asked.

“Affirmative action is forcing Herman Stanga to hire midgets?”

“I ain’t no midget. You parked in front of my friend’s house, so I axed you what you want. If you’re looking for Weight Watchers, you’re in the wrong neighborhood,” the boy said.

“You’re about to get yourself wadded up and stuffed in my tailpipe.”