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Bootsie at the sink, I kissed her on the back of the neck and touched her
rump. She turned and threw a wet dish towel at my head.
The next day was Friday. I walked to Victor's Cafeteria on Main and ate lunch
by myself. It was dark and cool under the high, stamped-tin ceiling, and I
drank coffee and watched the lunch crowd thin out at one o'clock. The front
door opened and inside the glare of white light from the street I saw the
slightly stooped, simian silhouette of Joe Zeroski. He headed for my table,
brushing past a customer and a waitress.
"I need to talk," he said.
"Go ahead."
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"Not here. In my car."
"Nope."
"What, I got bad breath?"
"Is that a piece under your coat?"
"I got a permit. You believe that?"
"Sure, it's a great country. Come to my office," I replied.
He thought for a moment, his fingers working at his sides, his facial
muscles like stone.
"So I'll find you another time," he said.
"Bad attitude, Joe," I said, but he was gone.
It was too fine a day to worry about Joe Zeroski. The air was sweet and
balmy from a morning sun-shower. Leaves floated on the bayou and the floral
bloom in the yards along East Main was absolutely beautiful. But Joe Zeroski
bothered me and I knew why. Clete Purcel had wound up his clock and broken off
the key, and even Clete now regretted it.
That evening I was counting receipts out of the cash register at the bait
shop when I heard someone behind me. I turned and looked into Joe Zeroski's
flat-plated face. He was dressed in dark blue jeans, a checkered sports shirt,
a yellow cap, and new tennis shoes. He held a cheap rod and reel in his hand,
the price tag still dangling from one of the eyelets.
"Your sign says guided fishing trips," he said.
Twenty minutes later I cut the gas feed on the outboard and we coasted
out of a channel into an alcove of moss-strung cypress trees that were lacy
with new leaf. The sun was a red cinder through the canopy, the wind down, the
water so still inside the shelter of the trees you could hear the bream and
goggle-eyed perch popping along the edges of the hyacinths. Joe cast his
lure across the clearing, right into a tree trunk, hanging the treble hook
deep in the bark.
"I'll row us over," I said.
"Forget it," he said, and broke off his line. "How many guys you heard I
popped?"
"Nine?"
"It's closer to three or four. I never done it on a contract, either.
They all come after me or a friend or the man I worked for first. Can you
relate to that?"
I cast a Rapala deep between the trees, reeled the slack out of the line,
and handed Joe the rod.
"Retrieve it in spurts, so the lure swims like a wounded minnow," I said.
"You were easier to talk with when you were a drunk. Are you hearing
anything I say? Listen, I went out and talked to Mr. Boudreau."
"Amanda Boudreau's father?"
"That's right. He's a nice gentleman. He don't need to be told what it
feels like to have your daughter killed by a degenerate. He says you belong to
the same club."
"What?"
"He said some fuckheads killed your mother and your wife. I didn't know
that."
"So now you do."
"Then you understand."
"It doesn't change anything, Joe."
"Yeah, it does. I don't know what's going on. I get a lead on some old
guy by the name of Legion Guidry, a guy maybe you're looking at for Linda's
murder. Now two of my best guys are in Iberia General. You looking at this guy
or not? What's going on?"
"You got to dial it down, Joe."
"Don't tell me that."
"I apologize for what's happened to you in New Iberia. I think you
deserve better."
Just then a largemouth bass struck Joe's lure, roiling the surface,
taking the treble hook down with it, its firm body straining against the
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monofilament, then rising, bursting through the water's surface, like green
and gold glassware breaking inside a shaft of sunlight, the lure rattling at
the corner of its mouth, sprinkling the air with crystal.
Joe jerked his rod and tried to retrieve the slack in the line, but his
fingers were like wood. The reel clanked once against the aluminum gunnel and
the rod tipped downward toward the water, the cork handle flipping upward and
out of Joe's fingers.
He watched the rod sink into the darkness, then stared uncomprehendingly
at his lure floating uselessly in the middle of the pool.
"What happened? I had it under control. Right here between my hands.
How'd it get away? I can't figure nothing out," he said.
His eyes searched mine, waiting for me to reply.
CHAPTER 19
Clete Purcel grew up in the Irish Channel in the days when white gangs fought
with chains over the use of a street corner. His father was a drunken,
superstitious, and sentimental man who delivered milk in the Garden District,
made his children kneel on grains of rice for sassing a nun, and whipped Clete
with a razor strop when he lost a fight. A gang of kids from the Iberville
Project jumped Clete by St. Louis Cemetery and bashed his eye open with a
steel pipe. Clete packed the wound with a cobweb, closed it with adhesive
tape, and drove around all night in a stolen car until he caught the pipe
wielder alone.
After New Orleans the Marine Corps was a breeze. Even Vietnam wasn't much
of a challenge. Women were another matter.
His second wife, Lois, was driven by either her own neurosis or living
with Clete to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. In the meantime Clete
flowered as a vice cop. Unfortunately, he seemed to fit into the milieu too
well. His girlfriends were addicts, strippers, compulsive gamblers, deep-fried
cultists, or beautiful Italian girls with complexions and long hair like the
bride of Dracula. The latter group usually turned out to be the sweethearts or
relatives of criminals. When we were Homicide partners at NOPD, I often had to
roll down all the windows in our car to blow out the odors Clete carried in
his clothes from the previous night.
But one way or another he always got hurt. What neither his inept,
uneducated father, sadistic brig chasers, nor even Victor Charles could do to
him, Clete managed to do to himself.
He burned his kite at NOPD with pills and booze and by killing a
government witness. He hired out as a mercenary in Central America and worked
for the Mob in Reno and maybe engineered the crash of a gangster's seaplane in
the Cabinet Mountains of western Montana. His P.I. license and his job as a
hunter of bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine were the only
elements of stability in his life. The effect of his arrival in any
environment was like a junkyard falling down a stairs. Chaos was his logo,
honor and loyalty and a vulnerable heart his undoing.
Now Clete was swinging into high gear again, this time with Battering Ram
Shanahan.
Just after Joe Zeroski had driven away from my dock, Clete pulled into
the driveway. He was wearing a summer tux, his sandy hair wet and parted
neatly on the side, his cheeks glowing, a corsage in a plastic box by his
thigh.
"How do I look?" he asked.
"Beautiful," I said.
He got out of the car and turned in a circle. A piece of toilet paper was
stuck to a shaving cut on his chin. "The coat's not too tight? I feel like I'm
wrapped in a sausage skin."
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"You look fine."
"We're going to a dance at a country club. Barbara has to pay her dues
with some political people. The last time I went dancing Big Tit Judy Lavelle
and I did the dirty bop in Pat O'Brien's and got thrown out."
"Smile a lot. Leave early. Take it easy on the hooch," I said.
He blotted his forehead with his wrist and looked down the dirt road
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