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.”
“Won’t change nothing. You’ll still be a big fat man calling other people names.”
“I’m looking for Herman Stanga. I owe him some money.”
The boy’s expression showed no recognition of the lie. He stepped back from the Cadillac, nodding in approval, touching the chrome back of the outside mirror with his fingertips. His head was too small for his body, and his body too small for his baggy pants and bright orange and white polyester T-shirt.
“You just cruising around, handing out money? Leave it wit’ me. I’ll get it to the right person.”
“What’s your name?”
“Buford.”
“Tell your parents to use a better form of birth control, Buford.”
Then Clete saw a strange transformation take place in the boy’s face, a flicker of injury, the kind that went deep and couldn’t be feigned, like the pain of a stone bruise traveling upward from the foot into the viscera. Clete dropped his transmission into drive, then stuck it back in park. “What’s your last name?” he said.
“I ain’t got one. No, I take that back. My last name is Kiss-My-Ass-Fat-Man.”
“Get in the car, Kiss-My-Ass.”
The boy started to walk off. Four or five teenage boys were watching him from a side yard.
“Or go to jail,” Clete said, opening his PI badge holder. “They have a new pygmy unit there. You can test-drive it and see if you’d like to stay around for a while. Forget your partners over there. After you’re busted, they won’t take time to piss in your mouth.”
The boy hesitated, then got in the car, the big leather seat almost swallowing him up. He touched the polished wood of the dashboard and looked at the green glow of the dials. “Where we going?”
“Burger King. I eat five times a day. Right now my tank is empty. Can you handle a hamburger?”
“I ain’t against it.”
“If I catch you slinging dope again, I’ll personally put you in juvie.”
“If you
was a cop, you’d know where Cousin Herman is at.”
“Herman Stanga is your cousin?”
“I’ve seen you in front of your office downtown. You’re a private detective.”
“You’re pretty smart for a midget. Where’s your cousin, Kiss-My-Ass?”
“Where he is every night, at the club in St. Martinville. You a child molester?”
“What if I stop the car and use you for a tent peg and hammer you down into one of these dirt yards?”
“I was just axing. You look kind of weird. You need an elephant trunk on your face to make it complete.” The boy put a mint in his jaw and sucked on it loudly. He glanced backward at the assembly of teenage boys disappearing into the dusk.
“What’s the name of your cousin’s club?” Clete said.
“Your stomach and your butt must weigh t’ree hundred pounds by themselves. How you chase after people wit’ all that weight? You must put cracks in the sidewalk. You be T. rex. Jurassic Park comes to New Iberia.”
“The name of the club?”
“The Gate Mout’.”
“Those guys back there were holding your stash?”
“Ax them.”
“They’ll chew you up and spit you out, Kiss-My-Ass. So will your cousin. You talk like an intelligent kid. Why not act like it?”
They were stopped at a traffic light now, the sky as purple as a cloak, cars streaming up and down a street lined with strip malls and discount outlets and fast-food restaurants. The boy whose first name was Buford opened the car door and stepped out and closed the door behind him. “T’anks for the ride, Mr. Fat Man,” he said.
Then he was gone.
THE CLUB WAS located on a long two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche into St. Martinville’s black district, all the way to a town square that opened onto lovely vistas of oak trees and flowers and elephant ears planted along the bayou’s edge, a historic Acadian church, and nineteenth-century frame buildings with balconies and wood colonnades whose soft decay only added to the aesthetic ambience of the square. But the black district was another world and not one that lent itself to postcard representation. The gutters were banked with beer cans and wine bottles and paper litter, the noise from the juke joints throbbing and incessant, each bar on the strip somehow connected to a larger culture of welfare and bail bond offices, a pawnshop that sold pistols that could have been made out of melted scrap metal, and a prison system that cycled miscreants in and out with the curative effectiveness of a broken turnstile.
The ceiling inside the Gate Mouth club seemed to crush down on the patrons’ heads. The walls were lacquered with red paint that gave off the soiled brightness of a burning coal. The booths were vinyl, the cushions split, the tables scorched with cigarette burns that in the gloom could have been mistaken for the bodies of calcified slugs. The atmosphere was not unlike a box, one whose doors and windows were perhaps painted on the walls and were never intended to be functional. When Clete entered the room, he felt a sense of enclosure that was like a vacuum sucking the air out of his lungs.
He stood at the bar, his hat on, his powder-blue sport coat covering the handcuffs that were drawn through the back of his belt and the blue-black .38 he carried in a nylon shoulder holster. He was the only white person at the bar, but no one looked directly at him. Finally the bartender approached him, a damp rag knotted in one hand, his eyes averted, lights gleaming on his bald head. He did not speak.
“Two fingers of Jack and a beer back,” Clete said.
A woman on the next stool got up and went into the restroom. The bartender shifted a toothpick in his mouth with his tongue and poured the whiskey in a glass and drew a mug of draft beer. He set both of them on napkins in front of Clete. Clete removed a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and set it on the bar.
“Anything else?” the bartender said.
“I like the happy, neighborhood-type mood in here. I bet it’s Mardi Gras here every day.”
The bartender propped his arms on the bar, his eye sockets cavernous, his impatience barely constrained. “Somebody did you something?” he said.
“Is this place named for Gatemouth Brown, the musician?” Clete asked.
“What are you doing in here, man?”
“Waiting on my change.”
“It’s on the house.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Then you got no bidness in here.”
“The twenty is for you. I need to talk to Herman Stanga.”
The muscles on the backs of the bartender’s arms were knotted and tubular, one-color tats scrolled on his forearms.
“I’m out of New Orleans and New Iberia,” Clete said. “I chase bail skips and other kinds of deadbeats. But that’s not why I’m here. How about losing the ofay routine?”
The bartender removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked toward the back door. “Some nights we cook up some links and chops. They ain’t half bad,” he said. “But don’t give me no shit out there.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Clete said.
Clete poured his Jack Daniel’s into his beer mug and drank it. He walked through a back hallway stacked with boxes, and out the back door into a rural scene that seemed totally disconnected from the barroom. The back lot was spacious and dotted with live oaks and pecan trees, the limbs and trunks wound with strings of white lights. A barbecue pit fashioned from a split oil drum leaked smoke into the canopy and drifted out over Bayou Teche. People were drinking out of red plastic cups at picnic tables, some of the tables lit by candles set inside blue or red vessels that looked like they had been taken from a church.
Clete had never seen Herman Stanga but had heard him described and had no difficulty singling him out. Stanga was sitting with a woman in the shadows, at a table under a live oak that was not wrapped with lights. Both ends of the tabletop were covered with burning candles, guttering deep inside their votive containers. The woman was over thirty, heavy in the shoulders and arms, her blouse and dress those of a countrywoman rather than a regular at a juke.
Stanga tapped a small amount of white powder from a vial on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, then held it up to the woman’s nose. She bent forward, closing one nostril, and sniffed it up as quickly as an anteater, her face lighting with the rush.
Clete walked closer, the tree trunk between him and Stanga and Stanga’s female friend. A puff of wind off the bayou swelled the tree’s canopy, rustling the Spanish moss, spinning leaves down on the tabletop and the shoulders of the two figures sitting there. Clete could hear Stanga talking with the kind of hypnotic staccato one would associate with a 1940s scat singer:
“See, baby, you ain’t no cleaning girl I brung up from the quarters in Loreauville. You’re a mature woman done been around and know how the world work. Ain’t nobody, ain’t no man, gonna make you do anyt’ing you don’t want to. That’s what I need. A strong woman that’s a people person, somebody who know how to keep the cash flow going wit’out no hitches, midlevel management out there on the ground, keep these young girls in line. You be Superwoman. You ain’t gonna be driving that shitbox of yours no more, either. Gonna put you in nice threads, gonna give you your own expense account, gonna dress you up, baby. I’ll tell you something else. You a temptation, but bidness is bidness. Ax any nigger in this town. I respect a woman’s boundaries. I’m here as your friend and your bidness partner, but the operational word in our relationship is ‘respect.’ You want some more blow, baby?”
The woman’s eyes, which had seemed sleepy and amused by Stanga’s monologue, wandered off his face to a presence that was now standing behind him. Stanga twisted his head around, the light from the candles flickering on his face, his tiny black mustache flattening under his nostrils. He laughed. “The American Legion hall is down the road,” he said.
“A couple of your girls stiffed Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine for their bail,” Clete said. “I thought you might want to do a righteous deed and direct me to their whereabouts.”
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“Number one, I ain’t got no ‘girls.’ Number two, I ain’t no human Google service. Number t’ree—”
“Yeah, I got it.” Clete removed his cell phone from his trouser pocket and opened it with his thumb. He looked at the screen as though waiting for it to come into focus. “A state narc friend of mine is sitting out front in my Caddy. He’s off the clock right now, but for you he might make an exception. You want to take a walk down to the bayou with me or run your mouth some more?”
“Look, I ain’t give you no trouble. I was talking to my lady friend here and—”
Clete pushed the send button on his phone.
“All right, man, I ain’t in this world to argue. I’ll be right back, baby. Order up something nice for us both,” Stanga said.
Clete walked down the slope, ahead of Stanga, seemingly unconcerned with the matter at hand, glancing up at the stars and across the bayou at the lighted houses on the opposite slope. The drawbridge was open upstream, and a tugboat, its deck and cabin lights blazing, was pushing a huge barge past the bridge’s pilings. Clete stared at the shallows and at the bream night-feeding among the lily pads. He watched the gyrations of a needle-nosed garfish that was maneuvering itself on the perimeter of the bream that had schooled up underneath the lilies. He did all these things with the detachment of a resigned, world-weary man who offered little threat to anyone.
“So what this is, man, them two Jews in New Orleans cain’t run their bidness wit’out siccing you on me?” Stanga said to Clete’s back.