“They don’t clang any bells for me.”
I had given him my business card. His cup had already made a half-moon coffee print on it.
“But you’ll rack your memory, won’t you?” I said.
“What?”
“If I wanted to have somebody whacked out in New Orleans, who would I have to see?”
His face began to grow attentive with the suggestion of the insult.
“What are you getting at?” he asked.
“There are at least four guys in the Quarter who can arrange a contract hit for five hundred dollars. Do you know who they are?”
“I don’t care for your tone.”
“Maybe it’s just one of those off days. Thanks for the use of your mug books. I’d appreciate your keeping my card in your desk in case you need to call me.”
I drove on over to Decatur by the river and parked my truck down the street from Jackson Square and walked into the French Quarter. The narrow streets were still cool with morning shadow, and I could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the cafés, strawberries and plums from the crates set out on the sidewalks in front of small grocery stores, the dank, cool odor of old brick in the courtyards. It had rained just before dawn, and water leaked out of the green window shutters on the pastel sides of the buildings and dripped from the rows of potted plants on the balconies or hanging from the ironwork.
I walked down St. Ann in the shadow of the cathedral to a one-story stucco building with a piked gate and a domed brick walkway that led to an office just off a flagstone courtyard. The courtyard was bordered with tight clumps of untrimmed banana trees. Painted on the frosted glass office window were the words CLETUS PURCEL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES.
He had been my partner in the First District and one of the best cops I ever knew. Among the lowlifes, the wiseguys, the psychopaths, even the contract hit men out of Houston and Miami, he’d had a reputation that was notorious even by the standards of the New Orleans Police Department. Hard-nosed, mainline recidivists who laughed at the threat of ten-year jolts in Angola would swallow with apprehension and reconsider their point of view when they were told that Clete had taken an interest in their situations. Once a recently discharged convict from Parchman, a man who had shot out his wife’s eye with a BB gun and whom I busted in a hot-pillow joint on Airline Highway, said he was coming back to New Orleans to cool out the cop who was responsible for his grief. Clete met him at the Greyhound depot, walked him into the restroom, and poured a container of liquid soap down his mouth. We never heard from him again.
But his marriage went bad, and eventually he got into trouble with whiskey, prostitutes, and shylocks, and a teaspoon at a time he began to serve the forces and people he had hated all his life. Finally he took ten thousand dollars to get rid of a witness in a federal investigation and barely made the flight to Guatemala, three minutes before his fellow detectives were racing down the concourse behind him with a murder warrant. Later the murder charge was dropped and he became head of security at two casinos in Las Vegas and Reno and the bodyguard of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio. I had marked Clete off as a turncoat, a pitiful facsimile of the friend I’d once had, but I came to learn that his loyalty and courage went far deeper into his character than his personal problems. His resignation from the mob came in the form of Sally Dio’s private plane exploding all over a mountaintop in western Montana. Sally Dio and his entourage had to be combed out of the ponderosa trees with garden rakes. The National Transportation Safety Board said they suspected that someone had put sand in the fuel tanks.
“How’s it hanging, noble mon?” he said from behind his desk when I opened his office door.
He wore a candy-striped shirt that looked like it was about to burst on his huge shoulders, a tie pulled loose at the throat, a blue-black .38 revolver in a nylon shoulder holster, and a powder-blue porkpie hat pushed down low on his forehead. His eyes were green and intelligent, his hair sandy, and his face always had a flush to it because of his weight and high blood pressure. A scar the texture and color of a bicycle patch ran down through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he’d been bashed with a length of pipe when he was a kid.
I had already called him and told him about my problems with the Sonnier investigation.
“How’d you make out down at the First?” he said.
“I didn’t recognize anyone in the mug books. I didn’t get any help from anyone, either. I got the feeling I was a tourist from the provinces.”
“Let’s face it, mon. They didn’t hold a going-away party when either one of us hung it up.”
“How do you like the PI business?” I sat down across from him in a straw and deer-hide swayback chair. The walls of his office were decorated with bullfight posters, wine bags, and festooned banderillas. Through the back window I could see the courtyard and Clete’s barbells and weight bench next to a stone well that leaked water at the top.
“It’s good,” he said. “Well, maybe the word’s easy. You don’t get rich at it, but the competition isn’t exactly the first team. You know, ex-cops who majored in stupid, redneck jocks from Mississippi who think the big score is working security at Walmart. I’m clearing around five hundred a week after the overhead. It beats running a nightclub for greaseballs, I guess.”
“Sounds all right.”
He took a cigarette out of his package of Camels and held it for a moment in his big hand, then he set it down on the desk blotter and put a stick of gum in his mouth. His eyes smiled at me while he chewed.
“The problem is that a lot of it’s a drag,” he said. “Discovery investigations for lawyers, stuff like that. It’s not like the old days in Homicide when we used to really make them wince. You remember when we—”
“No, I don’t remember, Clete.”
“Come on, Dave. It was all full-tilt boogie rock ’n’ roll back then. You loved it, mon. Admit it.” He kept grinning, and his teeth clicked while he chewed his gum.
“Why the piece?”
“It gets interesting once in a while. I run down bail jumpers for a couple of bondsmen. Pimps, street dealers, bullshit like that. What a bunch. I think the Orkin Company ought to get serious in this town. I’m not kidding you, New Orleans is turning to shit. The fucking lowlifes have crawled out of the cracks.”
I looked at my watch.
“You’re worried about your parking meter or something?” he said.
“Sorry. I just need to be back in New Iberia this afternoon.”
“How’s everything at home?”
“It’s okay. Good.”
The smile went out of his eyes. I looked away from him.
He spread his fingers on the desk blotter. His hands looked as big as skillets.
“Bootsie’s having trouble again?” he said.
“Yes.”
“How bad?”
“You never know. One day’s fine and full of bluebirds. The next day the gargoyles come out of the closet.”
He took the gum out of his mouth and dropped it in the wastebasket. I heard him take a deep breath through his nose.
“Let’s walk on over to the Pearl and have some oysters,” he said. “Then we’ll talk about these three butt-wipes you’re looking for.”
“I’m a little tapped out right now.”
“I’ve got a tab there. I never pay it, but that’s what tabs are for. Let’s get out into this beautiful day.”
We walked down Bourbon, which was becoming more crowded with tourists now, past the T-shirt shops, jazz clubs and strip joints that advertised nude dancers and French orgies, to the corner of St. Charles and Canal, where we went inside the Pearl and sat at the long counter that ran the length of the restaurant. The tables were covered with checkercloth, wood-bladed fans turned overhead, and three black men in aprons were shucking open raw oysters over the ice bins behind the bar. We ordered two dozen on the half-shell, a glass of iced tea for me and a small pitcher of draft for Clete.
“Run it by me ag
ain,” he said.
I went over all the details of Garrett’s murder, the shoot-out, the description of the three intruders, the names I had heard them call each other while my ears had roared like the sea with the sound of my own blood.
Clete was silent, his green eyes thoughtful under his porkpie hat while he squeezed a lemon on his oysters and dotted them with Tabasco sauce.
“I don’t know about the guy named Eddy or the guy with the scrap metal in his mouth,” he said. “But this sawed-off character named Jewel sounds like a local I used to know. I haven’t seen him around in a while, but I think we might be talking about Jewel Fluck.”
“What?”
“You heard me. That’s his name. His family came from Germany and he grew up in the Channel. He tried to make it as a jockey out at Jefferson Downs, but he was too heavy and so he worked as a hot-walker till they caught him doping a horse. He’s a mean little bastard, Dave.”
“Fluck?”
“You got it. Maybe his name screwed him up. When you think of Jewel Fluck, think of a hornet somebody just poured hot water on.”
“Why doesn’t he have a record?”
“He does. In Mississippi. I think he did four or five years in Parchman.”
“What for?”
“Cutting up a colored guy who was scabbing on a job. Or something like that. Look, the only reason I know about this guy is he hid out a bail jumper I was looking for. The jumper was in the AB. I heard Fluck is, too.”
“The Aryan Brotherhood?”
“Integrated jails breed them like fungus. I used to think it was the Black Muslims we had to worry about. But this is your genuine psychopathic white trash with a political cause up their butts. Hitler would have loved them.”
He signaled the bartender for another pitcher of beer.
“Something wrong with your oysters?” he said.
“I’m just trying to figure this guy’s tie-in with Weldon Sonnier,” I said.
“Maybe it was just a robbery gone bad, Dave. Maybe it’s not that complicated a deal.”
“You didn’t see the inside of the house. They really did a number on it. They were after something specific.”
“Maybe this Sonnier guy is holding some dope. We live in funny times. The coke money’s a big temptation. A lot of straights have nosed up to the trough.”
“It could be. When’s the last time you saw Fluck?”
“A year or so ago. I don’t think he’s around town. I’ll ask around, though. Look, Dave, from what you’ve told me, this Sonnier character has invited a pile of shit into his life. He also sounds like one of these white-collar cocksuckers who think cops have about the same status as their yardmen. Maybe it’s time he learned the facts of life.”
“Sir, could you watch your language, please?” the bartender said.
“What?” Clete said.
“Your language.”
“What about my language?”
“We’re okay here,” I said to the bartender. He nodded and walked farther down the bar and started mixing a drink. Clete continued to stare after him.
“Does Fluck still have relatives in New Orleans?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered, his eyes coming back into mine. “His mother probably wishes she’d thrown him away and raised the afterbirth. Forget about Fluck a minute. I’ve got a thought, a funny memory about somebody. The guy with the crowbar, the one named Eddy, tell me what he looked like again.”
“His head was real big, his face full of bone. The kind you break your fist on.”
“Did he have a tattoo?”
“I don’t remember.”
“A red and yellow tiger on his right arm?”
I tried to see it in my mind’s eye, but the only image that came back was the bone-heavy face and the ridges of muscle under the T-shirt.
“Maybe I couldn’t even pull him out of a lineup with any certainty,” I said.
“There’s one guy around town, he has a head like a pumpkin. His name’s Raintree, from Baton Rouge. I don’t know his first name, though.”
“Go on.”
“I get a security retainer out at the yacht club. Sometimes I check out backgrounds on potential members, keep out the riffraff supposedly, which means the south-of-the-border crowd. The tomato pickers are very big on clubs these days. But I also do security at dances, receptions, Republican geek shows, that kind of stuff. So one night Bobby Earl has a big gig out there. It’s black-tie stuff, respectable, people from the Garden District, no Red Man spitters allowed, get the picture? You couldn’t get the word ‘nigger’ out of this bunch at gunpoint.
“Except a guy shows up who Bobby Earl wasn’t planning on. Some character from the old States’ Rights party, a real oil can, Vitalis running out of his hair, shiny suit, enough cologne to make your nose fall off. He was hooked up with those Klansmen who dynamited that colored church in Birmingham back in the sixties and killed those four children. Anyway, he’s shaking hands with Bobby on the steps of the yacht club and this weird-looking kid from a radical newspaper takes their picture.
“That’s when this guy Raintree, the guy with the pumpkin head and a red and yellow tiger on his arm, comes down the steps and takes the kid by the arm and walks him through the parking lot down to the lake. When I got there he’d punched the kid in the stomach and thrown his camera in the lake.”
“What did you do?”
“I told Raintree to leave the grounds. I told the kid he ought to go home and leave these guys alone.”
His eyes shifted away from me. He lit a cigarette. When I didn’t speak, he turned on the stool and looked at me, a pinched light in his eyes.
“So it’s not noble stuff. If I’d had my choices, I’d have clicked off Raintree’s switch with a slapjack. But I don’t get a city paycheck anymore, Dave.”
“No, that’s not what I was thinking about. You just tied the ribbon on the box, partner.”
“You mean the connection between Jewel Fluck, the AB maybe, and this racist politician? But what’s Bobby Earl got to do with your man in New Iberia?”
“Weldon Sonnier is his brother-in-law.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER we were walking under a colonnade on our way back to Clete’s office. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the air had become close with the smell of rain and the ripe fruit that was stacked in boxes on the sidewalk.
“What are you going to do?” Clete said. His face was heated from our pace.
“Head back to New Iberia and check out this guy Raintree.”
“You think that’s the way we ought to do it?”
I looked at him.
“Leave that procedure dogshit to the paper shufflers,” he said.
“Clete, I don’t think the word ‘we’ figures into the equation here.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You got a lot of help from the guys at the First, did you? You got a lot of backup when those three gumballs were trying to paint the furniture with your brains?”
We turned up Toulouse toward Bourbon. He stopped in front of a cigar and news stand. A black man was shining the shoes of a man who sat in an elevated chair. Clete touched me on the jacket lapel with his finger.
“I won’t tell you what to do,” he said. “But when they try to kill you, it gets personal. Then you play it only one way. You go into the lion’s den and you spit in the lion’s mouth.”
“I don’t have any authority here.”
“That’s right. So they won’t be expecting us. Fuck, mon, let’s give them a daytime nightmare.” He stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and grinned. “Come on, think about it. Is there anything so fine as making the lowlifes wish they were still a dirty thought in their parents’ mind?”
He snapped his fingers and rhythmically clicked his fists and palms together. His green eyes were dancing with light and expectation.
IF YOU GREW UP in the Deep South you’re probably fond, as I am, of recalling the summertime barbecues and
fish fries, the smoke drifting in the oak trees, the high school dances under a pavilion that was strung with Japanese lanterns, the innocent lust we discovered in convertibles by shadowed lakes groaning with bullfrogs, and the sense that the season was eternal, that the world was a quiet and gentle place, that life was a party to be enjoyed with the same pleasure and certainty as the evening breeze that always carried with it the smell of lilac and magnolia and watermelons in a distant field.
But there is another memory, too: the boys who went nigger-knocking in the little black community of Sunset, who shot people of color with BB guns and marbles fired from slingshots, who threw M-80s onto the galleries of their pitiful homes. Usually these boys had burr haircuts, jug ears, half-moons of dirt under their fingernails. They lived in an area of town with unpaved streets, garbage in the backyards, ditches full of mosquitoes and water moccasins from the coulee. Each morning they got up with their loss, their knowledge of who they were, and went to war with the rest of the world.
When we meet the adult bigot, the Klansman, the anti-Semite, we assume that he was bred in that same wretched place. Sometimes that’s a correct conclusion. Oftentimes it’s not.
“Did this guy grow up in a shithole or something?” Clete said.
We were parked in my truck across from Bobby Earl’s home out by Lake Pontchartrain.
“I heard his father owned a candy company in Baton Rouge,” I said.
“Maybe he was an abused fetus.” He blew cigarette smoke out the window and looked at the piked fence, the blue-green lawn and twirling sprinklers, the live oaks that formed a canopy over the long white driveway. “There must be big bucks in sticking it to the coloreds these days. I bet you could park six cars on his porch.” He looked at his watch. The sky was gray over the lake, and the waves were capping in the wind. “Let’s give it another half hour, then I’ll treat you to some rice and red beans at Fat Albert’s.”
“I’d better head back pretty soon, Clete.”
He formed a pocket of air in one jaw.