Part 3 — Clement Alive And Well
The name on that release form was Roy Landry, the evidence clerk at the parish sheriffs office. Deputy Thibodeaux read it out loud twice, slow, and then he took his hat off and rubbed his head. He said, Mr. Guidry, I have known Roy twenty years. I am going to ask you to stay right here while I make some calls.
It came out over the next week, a little at a time. Roy had been quietly selling off seized boats, trailers and motors for cash, with no tow slip and no intake record, and pocketing the money. Our boat was one of eleven. He thought nobody would notice a sixteen-foot flat missing from a lot full of wrecks, so he slipped it onto the auction list himself.
The dry bag explained the rest. Clement Arceneaux, a fisherman from Dularge, had worked part-time cleaning the impound lot. Two summers ago, he saw Roy loading a boat onto a private trailer at night. He wrote down the dates, copied pages out of the logbook, and put it all in a dry bag under that false deck, where he planned to keep it safe until he could tell somebody he trusted.
Then he got scared. He knew Roy had friends in the department and a way of making trouble for people. Clement left a note for his sister, took his truck to her place in Beaumont, Texas, and stayed there quietly, working on a shrimp boat out of Port Arthur. The missing posters kept hanging in the grocery stores, and nobody told him.
Sometimes a man disappears not because something took him, but because he knew too much and had nobody to tell.
Deputy Thibodeaux drove to Beaumont himself that Friday. He found Clement on the dock, mending a net, healthy as a horse. When the deputy held up the license and the crawfish keychain, Clement sat down on a crate and said, I figured somebody would find that boat someday. I just did not think it would be this soon.
The parish brought in the state police to look at the books. Roy Landry was charged with theft, malfeasance in office, and falsifying public records. He pleaded guilty and agreed to repay what he took. The pages Clement had copied matched every entry, and the district attorney said it was the cleanest paper trail he had ever seen in a case this size.
As for me, the parish treasurer called with an apology and a check. They refunded my six hundred fifty dollars with interest, and the sheriff signed a clear title for the boat over my objections, saying it was the least they could do. I said I would have taken a handshake. He said the handshake was included.
Clement came to the house on Sunday, with his sister. Nadine fed the whole bunch crawfish etouffee, and Remy asked a hundred questions. Clement ran his hand along the new patch by the transom and said I did a decent job. From a man who had spent forty years on the water, that was a medal.
We launched her at Bayou Dularge the first week of May, with Clement at the tiller and me in the bow. I had painted a name on the side in white letters: Clement. He saw it and could not speak for a while. Then he pointed at the sky and said, Mr. Guidry, there is a catfish out there with your name on it.