"Listen-"
"No, you've got it wrong. You listen. We've worked on this case eight months. You guys come along and think you're going to wrap up Tony C. in a few weeks. In the meantime you don't inform us that you're working undercover, and then you've got the balls to grab my snitch."
"You coerced her into prostituting herself."
He turned his head and looked at me. The neon bar lights made the neatly trimmed edge of his beard glow with a reddish tinge.
"She was working at Tony C.'s club before she ever came to our attention," he said. "He probably had to tie a board across his ass to keep from falling inside."
I saw Clete walk out of his office in back and begin changing a light bulb over the bandstand. The back of the club was empty.
"You're a bad cop, Baxter. But worse, you don't have any feelings about people," I said. "There's a word for that-pathological."
"Take somebody else's inventory, Robicheaux. I'm not interested. Here's what it comes down to. You fuck up this investigation, you keep getting in my face, causing me problems, I wouldn't count on the department protecting your cover. Anyway, I've had my say. Just stay away from me."
He turned back to his drink and ran his tongue along his gums. I opened and closed my hands at my sides.
"You gonna have something, suh?" the black barman said.
"No, thank you," I said.
I continued to stare at the side of Baxter's face, the grained skin on the back of his neck. I could hear my breath in my nostrils. Then I turned and walked toward the open front door. My body felt wooden, my arms and legs disjointed. The sun reflecting off a windshield outside was like a sliver of glass in the eye. I stopped, looked back, and saw Baxter go into the rest room by the bandstand.
When I pushed open the rest room door he was combing his hair in front of the mirror.
"If you do anything to hurt that girl again, or if you compromise my situation here in New Orleans, I'm going down to your office, in front of people, and give you the worst day in your insignificant life," I said.
He turned from the mirror, slipped his leather comb case out of his shirt pocket, blew in it before he replaced the comb; his breath reflected into my face. He used the back of his left hand to push me aside.
I heard a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping behind my eyes and saw a rush of color in my mind, like amorphous red and black clouds turning in dark water, and as though it had a life of its own my right fist hooked into his face and caught him squarely in the eye socket. His head snapped sideways, and I saw the white imprints of my knuckles on his skin and the watery electric shock in his eye.
But I had stepped into it. His right hand came out of his coat pocket with a leather-covered blackjack, an old-fashioned one that was shaped like a darning egg, with a spring built into the braided grip. I tried to raise my forearm in front of me, but the blackjack whopped across the top of my left shoulder and I felt the blow sink deep into the bone. The muscles in my chest and side quivered and then seemed to collapse, as if someone had run a heated metal rod through the trajectory of Jimmie Lee Boggs's bullet.
I was bent forward, my palm pressed hard against the throbbing pain below my collarbone, my eyes watering uncontrollably, the lip of the washbasin a wet presence across my buttocks. The expression in Baxter's eyes was unmistakable.
"Just one more for the road," he said softly.
But Clete pushed the door back on its springs and stepped into the room like an elephant entering a phone booth. His unblinking eyes went from me to the blackjack; then his huge fist crashed against the side of Baxter's head. Baxter's face went out of round, his automatic flew from his shoulder holster, and he tripped sideways over the toilet bowl and fell on top of the trash can in a litter of crumpled paper towels.
Clete grimaced and shook his hand in the air, then rubbed his knuckles.
"Are you all right?" he said.
"I don't know."
"What happened?"
"He threatened to blow my cover."
Clete looked down at Baxter in the corner. Baxter's eyes were half-closed, his mouth hung open, and one hand twitched on his stomach.
"You hit him first?" Clete said.
"Yep."
Clete chewed his lip.
"He'll use it, then. That's not good, not good," he said, and began making clicking sounds with his tongue. He reached down and patted Baxter on the cheek. "Wake-up time, Nate."
Baxter widened his eyes, then started to sit up among the wet towels and fell back down again. Clete lifted him by the back of his herringbone jacket and folded him over the rim of the toilet bowl.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"Freshen up, Nate. That's it, my man. Splash a little on your face and it's a brand-new day," Clete said.
He flushed the toilet and pushed Baxter's head farther down into the bowl.
"That's enough, Clete," I said.
Someone tried to open the door.
"This toilet is occupied right now," Clete said. He lifted Baxter off the bowl and propped him against the wall, then squatted down and blotted his face with paper towels. "Hey, you're looking all right, Nate. How many fingers am I holding up? Three. Look, three fingers. That's it, take a deep breath. You're going to be fine. Look, I'm putting your piece back in your holster. Here's your sap. Come on, look up at me, now."
Clete patted Baxter's cheek again. The back of Clete's thick neck was red from the effort of squatting down. His stomach and love handles hung over his belt.
"Here's the way I see this deal," he said. "We write the whole thing off. It was just a bad day at Black Rock, not even worth talking about later. You had a beef, Dave had a beef, it's over now. Right?"
Baxter blinked his eyes and flexed his jaw as though he had a toothache. Water dripped out of his beard.
"Or you could go back to the First District and get into a lot of paperwork," Clete said. "Or you might want to cause Dave some grief with Tony C. But I don't think you're that kind of guy. Because if you were, it'd create some nasty problems for everybody. See, here's the serious part in all this. There's a hooker who comes into the bar. I usually don't let them in because they're bad for business. But I've known this broad since I was in Vice myself, and she's basically a nice girl and she respects my place and doesn't come on to the Johns while she's in here. Anyway, she tells a funny story. She says you're getting freebies in the Quarter, and you made her ex-room-o cop your joint. I don't know, maybe she made it up. But you know how those broads are, they carry a grudge a long time. I don't think it'd take a lot to get one of them to drop the dime on you, Nate."
Clete crimped his lips together and looked Baxter steadily in the eyes. Baxter's face looked as though he were experiencing the first stages of recognition after an earthquake. Clete closed the lid on the toilet and sat Baxter on top of it. His head hung forward. Clete touched him gently on the shoulder with two fingers.
"It ends here, Nate," he said quietly. "We're understood on that, aren't we?"
Baxter moved his lips but no sound came out.
"You don't have to say anything, as long as we have an understanding," Clete said. "Get yourself a couple of free doubles at the bar, if you want. I'm going to walk Dave outside now. It's a nice day. We're all going back outside into a nice day."
Clete looked over the top of Baxter's head at me and made a motion toward the door with his thumb. I walked back out through the bar onto the sidewalk under the colonnade. Clete followed me. The French Market and the tables in the du Monde were crowded with tourists now, and the street was heavy with afternoon traffic. Clete adjusted his tie, lit a cigarette with the lighter cupped in his big hands, and looked up the street as though he had nothing in his mind except a pleasant expectation of the next event in his life.
I rubbed my collarbone and the puckered scar over the.38 wound and straightened my back.