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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 afire 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 participant, you wore your scars like crimson beads at Mardi Gras.
    Clete lived on Main, too, farther down the bayou, in a stucco, 1940s motor court, set back from the street in deep shade. Because it was Sunday, I found him at home, reading in a deck chair, his glasses perched on his nose, his leviathan body glistening with suntan oil. An iced tomato drink with a stick of celery floating in it rested on the gravel by his chair. “What’s the haps, noble mon?” he said.
    I told him about my visit to Troy’s bedside and how Jimmie and I met Ida Durbin in Galveston on the Fourth of July in 1958. I told him about the beating Jimmie gave the pimp, Lou Kale, and how Ida disappeared as though she had been sucked through a hole in the dimension.
    Clete was a good investigator because he was a good listener. While others spoke, his face seldom showed expression. His eyes, which were smoky green, always remained respectful, neutral, occasionally shifting sideways in a reflective way. After I had finished, he ticked a fingernail at a scar that ran diagonally through his left eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose. “This guy Troy was working with pimps?” he said.
    “The uncle was a cop on a pad. Troy was evidently a tagalong,” I said.
    “But he believed they killed the girl?”
    “He didn’t say that,” I replied.
    “House girls are full-time cash on the hoof. Their pimps usually don’t kill them.”
    But Clete