Then he went to one knee, fumbling his wallet from his back pocket, spilling the contents, digging out the photo of the Jewish woman and her three children on their way to the gas chamber, sticking it in the unrecognizable faces of the two mercenaries. “See that?” he said. “Look at it! That’s what you’re responsible for. I’d shove this down your mouths, but you’re not worthy to touch these people’s picture.”
He stood up, steadying himself on the bar, and wiped the picture on his shirt and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket. A rivulet of blood slid from the bandaged knife wound in his left arm. The people in the room had become statues, unable to speak, avoiding eye contact with us or each other. Isolde held her hands over her mouth. The only person who reacted was Johnny Shondell. He laid his Gibson on a couch and picked up a bar towel and knelt by the two men on the floor, then looked up at Clete and me. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’d these guys do? Mr. Clete, this isn’t you.” He paused. “Is it?”
I gathered up the contents of Clete’s wallet, and the two of us walked outside and left the door open behind us, the rain sweeping inside, the wind shredding the palm trees. In seconds our clothes were drenched, and Clete’s Panama hat was torn off his head and flying end over end down the beach, where it was sucked into the surf. Clete stared at it blankly, his swollen, blood-streaked fists hanging at his sides, seemingly bewildered by the storm taking place around him.
Chapter Eight
Cops from both Mississippi and New Iberia were at my house the next day. I denied any knowledge of Clete’s whereabouts. I didn’t have to lie, either. I had told Clete to get lost and not tell me where. A Mississippi plainclothes told me the man who took the worst hits looked like a volleyball wrapped with barbed wire.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “Does he have a sheet?”
“He was up on a rape charge in the army. The nurse was afraid to testify.”
“How about the other guy?”
“Pretty much a wannabe. A couple of domestic-abuse charges. He went to a phony merc school in the Everglades.”
We were standing in my front yard, the trees aglow with red and gold leaves. “Anything else?” I said.
“I grew up in Mississippi. My father was in the Klan. He was uneducated and poor and thought they could offer him a better life.”
I kept my face empty and gazed at some children riding their bicycles over the concrete sidewalk that was cracked and peaked by the huge oak roots in front of my house.
“My father was at the liberation of Dachau,” the plainclothes said. “When he came back home, he burned his robes in the backyard. You know where I’d like to be in weather like this?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Palm Beach. I hear the kingfish are running night and day. A couple of weeks in a place like that and a man could forget all his troubles.”
Four days later, Clete called me on my cell phone. “Where are you?” I said.
“Down by Cocodrie. Anybody been around?”
“What do you think?”
“How bad is it going to be?”
“Just stay off the radar awhile,” I said.
“I checked out the guy with the house in Bay St. Louis. His name is Eddy Firpo. He screws every musician he gets his hands on.”
“Forget about Eddy Firpo. Just stay out of town. Here as well as New Orleans.”
“What’s going on with the Balangie girl?” Clete asked.
“How should I know?”
“That’s where all this stuff started.”
“It started because you sent four people to the hospital,” I said, and immediately regretted my words.
“You’re right,” he said.
“No, I’m not. I should have stayed away from Marcel LaForchette. I should have forgotten my conversation on the pier with Isolde Balangie and never made contact with her family or Mark Shondell.”
“You’re a cop, Dave. Whether you’ve got your shield or not. What were we supposed to do? Leave a seventeen-year-old girl on the auction block? I feel like we’re in the Middle Ages.”
“There was a detective here from Bay St. Louis. He said the kingfish were running in Palm Beach and that’s where he’d be for a couple of weeks if he had his druthers. I think he was telling me to tell you to cool it and you’ll be all right.”
“They’re going to cold-case it?”
“That’s my guess.”
He was silent. I thought I had lost the connection. “You there?” I said.
“Don’t get mad at me, but I got to say this: You’re not having the wrong kind of thoughts, are you?”
“Thoughts about what?” I asked.
“I saw the look on your face when Penelope Balangie came out of the chapel with a rosary in her hand.”
“We’ve already been through this, Clete. Give it a rest.”
“You saw a woman with a rainbow around her. Get real, Streak. She’s Adonis’s wife. She knows Adonis has ordered people killed or done it himself, but she probably gets it on with him every other night anyway. Look at that image in your head and tell me you want to get mixed up with a broad like that.”
“You’re all wrong,” I said.
“Do you know why we drink? So we can do the things our conscience won’t let us do when we’re sober.”
If you’re a souse, try to refute a statement like that.
The following week, in the late afternoon, I saw a restored 1956 Bel Air parked under a live oak in front of Veazey’s ice-cream store on West Main. The trunk of the tree was painted white up to the fork, and in the fork was a loudspeaker blaring out a song by the Chordettes. I parked and went inside and saw Johnny Shondell seated on a stool, wearing gray drapes and a sky-blue cowboy shirt sewn with roses and tasseled loafers hooked on the rungs, his knees so elevated they were higher than his waist. The Wurlitzer against the wall was loaded with Swamp Pop and 1950s rock, the plastic casing swimming with liquid balls of color. Johnny’s mouth was bent to the straw in a chrome milk-shake container. His face lifted to mine. “Hey, Mr. Dave. What’s shaking?”
“No haps,” I said, and sat down next to him. “You doing all right?”
“Right as rain,” he said, his eyes drifting away, as though he were trying to wish himself out the door.
“Sorry we messed up your gig.”
“Yeah, I’d rather forget about that, Mr. Dave.”
“I know what you mean. But something was going on there that really bothers me. Stuff you and Isolde don’t need in your lives.”
“You’re thinking about some of the drugstore products that were floating around?”
“Blow and weed aren’t drugstore products.”
“Yeah, I dig what you’re saying, Mr. Dave,” he said, looking out the window where an orange sun glowed behind the trees. “Why’d your friend bust up those guys?”
“Those ‘guys’ are Nazis. A better question is why are you hanging with a fraud like Eddy Firpo?”
“Eddy’s not a bad guy.”
“So why would he have Nazis around?”
“Takes all kinds?”
“You’re a good kid, Johnny. Don’t degrade yourself.”
“That hurts my feelings, Mr. Dave.”
A shaft of sunlight shone on one side of his face; the other side was buried in shadow.
“How’s Isolde?” I asked.
“All right.” He set down the chrome container and looked at the marks his fingers had left on the coldness of its surface. “I mean I’m guessing she’s all right.”