A Negro man in a white jacket and black pants walked out the side door of the house and stood on the edge of the drive while we got out of the truck.
"Mr. Cardo want y'all come out by the pool," he said. "He be with y'all in a minute." He couldn't keep his eyes from glancing sideways at the truck.
"You like it? Dave might part with it for the right price," Clete said.
"Mr. Cardo ax you gentlemens if you want a drink," the Negro said.
"Give me a double Black Jack on ice," Clete said. "What do you want, Dave?"
"Nothing."
"You got a bathroom?" Clete said to the Negro.
"Yes suh, follow me inside."
I sat in a beach chair under the colonnade by the side of the pool. The bottom of the pool was inset with a mosaic mermaid that glittered with chips of light. The suntanned man on the court was hitting the ball with his back to me, but I felt that he was aware I was watching him through the myrtle trees that grew along the screens. He stayed on the balls of his feet, the muscles in his brown calves and thighs taut and glazed with perspiration, his forehand shot a white blur across the net.
Clete came out of the side of the house with a highball glass in his hand and sat down heavily in a beach chair next to me.
"You ought to see the can," he said. "It looks like a pink whorehouse. Erotic art all over the wallpaper, a toilet seat inlaid with silver dollars. The colored guy went in after me and started cleaning the toilet with a brush. Should I take that personally?"
"Probably."
"Thanks."
The man on the tennis court turned off the ball machine and walked across the close-clipped lawn toward us, zipping up the case on his racket. He was truly a strange-looking man. His head was long and narrow, his ears tiny and pressed tightly against the scalp as though part of them had been surgically pared away. His hair grew in gray and black ringlets that were tapered on the back of his neck like the flange of a helmet. His smile exposed his long white teeth, and his chest hair was black and slick with perspiration.
"Tony Cardo," he said, his hand outstretched like a greeter's in a restaurant.
"It's nice to see you, Tony," I said. "This is a friend of mine, Clete Purcel."
"What's happening, Tony?" Clete said, rising up enough from the beach chair to shake hands.
"I remember you from somewhere," Cardo said to him.
"You drink vodka Collins," Clete said.
Cardo pursed his lips together in the shape of a tiny butterfly.
"You're a bartender in the Quarter," he said.
"I own the bar."
"You were in the corps."
"That's right."
"We had some words or something."
"No, I don't have words with people."
"Yeah, we did. Something about the corps. No, something about 'the crotch,' right?"
"You got me. I don't argue with people."
"Who's arguing? But you said something, almost like getting in a guy's face. Then you walked away. I was buying a drink for the gunny."
Clete shrugged his shoulders.
"It must be somebody else. I just remember you drink vodka Collins, that's all," he said.
"Hey, don't sweat it. You're a diplomat. That's good. It means you're a good businessman."
"I got no beef with anybody, Tony."
"I like that," Cardo said.
"Clete was my Homicide partner a few years ago," I said. I watched Cardo's face.
"What made you change careers?" His eyes smiled as though he were looking at a private conclusion inside himself. The black houseman brought out a tray with a Collins and a bowl of chilled shrimp on it and set it on a circular redwood table next to Cardo's chair.
"A little trouble in the department, nothing big," Clete said. "I went down to the tropics for a while to get my priorities straight. Then I got into casino security out in Vegas and Tahoe for Sally Dio."
"Yeah, Sally Dee out of Galveston," Cardo said. "His plane smacked into a mountain out in Montana or somewhere."
"Yeah, it was too bad. He was a great guy to work for," Clete said.
"I always heard he was a prick," Cardo said.
"Well, some people had that opinion, too," Clete said.
"You're not drinking anything, Dave?"
"No thanks. Can we talk some business, Tony?"
"Put on some swimsuits. Let's take a dip," he said.
"It's a little cool, isn't it?" I said.
"I keep the water at eighty-two degrees. You'll love it. There're some suits over there in the cottage," he insisted.
He went into his own house to change, and Clete and I walked across the lawn to a small white stucco cottage that was surrounded with palm and banana trees.
"He's one slick motherfucker. You won't get a wire into this place, partner," Clete said.
Inside the cottage we found a cardboard box full of men's and women's bathing suits on top of the bar. Clete started rooting through them and found only one pair that wasn't too small for him, an enormous pair of red boxer trunks with a white elastic band.
"I bet these belong to that blimp who runs the T-shirt shop," he said. He looked at my face. "It's not funny, Dave. These guys pass around VD like a family heirloom." He went into the bedroom, found a safety pin in a drawer, and began undressing by the bar.
"He really put you under the microscope," I said.
"They're all the same, mon. They love to peel back your skin."
"What do you think all that Marine Corps stuff is about?"
"Who cares? Figuring out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet."
I laid my clothes across the back of a couch and slipped on a pair of trunks. Clete poured a glass of Jack Daniel's at the bar and looked at my chest.
"That's where Boggs popped you, huh?" he said. "Does it give you much trouble?"
"I'm still weak on the left side. Sometimes it throbs a little in the morning."
"What else?"
"What do you mean 'what else'?"
"Don't try to put on your old partner. You remember when that kid planted a couple of.22 rounds in me? I had the nightly sweats for a long time, mon."
"It comes and goes."
"Like hell it does." Then he took a drink and smiled at me. His face looked as big and hard-ribbed as a grinning pumpkin under his porkpie hat. "But don't worry. Before this is over, we're going to cook Jimmie Lee Boggs's hash, I mean sling some serious shit on the walls. You wait and see, ole Streak."
He winked at me and walked duck-footed to the door, with his drink in his hand, his red trunks askew on his hips, lighting a cigarette.
"You think he's got any broads around?" he said.
I took the copy of the Atlantic out of my coat pocket and followed him to the pool.
Tony Cardo hit the water in a long, flat dive and swam with deep strokes to the diving board, blowing water out his nose, then made an underwater turn and pushed off the tiled side and swam into the shallow end. He raked the water out of his eyes and curly hair and spit into the trough that surrounded the pool.
"That's a nasty scar on your chest, Dave," he said.
"A nasty guy put it there."
"Yeah, I heard about that."
"He works for you."
"That's not exactly true, Dave. He used to work for some people I do business with. He doesn't now. I don't know where he is. I heard Florida."
"I wouldn't want a guy like that to blindside me, Tony."
"You're an up-front guy. But you got no worries on that. Not in this town."
"The people I represent like the quality of your product, they like the way you do business. They've given me a half million to work with. I want the same quality goods, same price on the key. Can we do some business today?"
"You cut right to it, don't you?"
"You're a serious man, you have a serious reputation."
"You're talking a big score."
"That's why I'm dealing with you. The word is that the Houston people are undependable."
"The problem I got sometimes is access, Dave. Or what you might call transportation. The product's out there, but there're a lot of nautical factors involved here, you know what I mean? Something happens to the product out on the salt, a lot of people lose money, a lot of people get real mad."