"All right, for God's sake," Clete said.
"I'll take you up there. But do me a favor. That's my meal ticket up there. Don't look at these people like they're zoo creatures. Particularly Sal's father. He's a bloated old degenerate, but he's also a vicious sonofabitch who never liked me to begin with. I mean it, Dave. Your face doesn't hide your feelings too well. It gets that glaze on it like an elephant broke wind in the room. Okay? We got a deal, right, partner?"
"Sure," I said.
"Oh boy."
Sally Dio had brought Galveston, Texas, with him. His glassed-in sun porch, which gave onto the lake, was filled with potted banana, umbrella, orange, and Hong Kong orchid trees, and in the center of the house was a heavily chlorinated, lime-green swimming pool with steam rising off the water. A half-dozen tanned people sat on the edge of the tiles or drifted about lazily on inflated rubber rafts. The living room was paneled with white pine, the carpet was a deep red, and the waxed black piano, with the top propped open, gleamed in the indirect lighting. Dixie Lee, dressed only in a pair of Hawaiian beach shorts and an open bathrobe, sat at the piano bench and ran his fingers back and forth over the keys, his shoulders hunched, then suddenly his arms outspread, his florid face confident with his own sound. He sang, "I was standing on the corner Corner of Beale and Main, When a big policeman said, "Big boy, you'll have to tell me your name."
I said, "You'll find my name On the tail of my shirt. I'm a Tennessee hustler And I don't have to work." Sally Dio sat behind a set of drums and cymbals in a pair of pleated gray slacks, bare-chested, his red suspenders hooked over his shoulders. He was a lean, hard-bodied man, his face filled with flat and sharp surfaces like a person whose bone is too close to the skin so that the eyes look overly large for the face. Under his right eye was a looped scar that made his stare even more pronounced, and when he turned his head toward Dixie Lee and fluttered the wire brushes across the snare drum, the ridge of his duck tails glistened against the refracted sunlight off the lake.
Out on the redwood veranda I could see the back of a wheelchair and a man sitting in it. Sally Dio and Dixie finished their song. No one asked me to sit down.
" Dixie says you used to be a police officer. In New Orleans," Sally Dio said. His voice was flat, his eyes casually interested in my face.
"That's right."
"What do you do now?"
"I'm a small-business man."
"Probably pays better, doesn't it?"
"Sometimes."
He made a circular pattern on the drumhead with the wire brushes.
"You like Louisiana?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Why are you up here, then?"
Clete walked to the wet bar by the pool's edge and started fixing a drink., "I have some things to take care of. I wanted a few words with Dixie," I said.
"He says you're in a lot of trouble down there. What's he got to do with your trouble?"
"A lot."
He looked me evenly in the eyes. Then he fluttered and ticked the brushes lightly on the drum skin.
" Dixie never hurt anybody. Not intentionally, anyway," he said.
"I mean him no harm, Mr. Dio."
"I'm glad of that."
A dripping blond girl in a silver swimsuit that was as tight as tin on her body, with a terry cloth robe over her shoulder, walked toward us, drying her hair with a towel.
"You want me to take Papa Frank in, Sal?" she said.
"Ask Papa Frank."
"He gets cold if he stays out there too long."
"Then go ask him, hon."
She walked to the glass doors, then stopped and hooked up the strap on her sandal, pausing motionlessly against the light as though she were caught in a photographer's lens. Sally Dio winked at her.
I looked at Dixie Lee. I had to talk to him alone, outside. He refused to see any meaning in my face. A moment later the blond girl pushed the man in the wheelchair into the living room.
He wore a checkered golf cap, a knitted sweater over his protruding stomach, a muffler that almost hid the purple goiter that was the size of an egg in his neck. His skin was gray, his eyes black and fierce, his face unevenly shaved. Even from several feet away his clothes smelled of cigar smoke and Vick's VapoRub. With his wasted legs and swollen stomach, he reminded me of a distended frog strapped to a chair.
But there was nothing comical about him. His name had been an infamous one back in the forties and fifties. He had run all the gambling on Galveston Island and all the prostitution and white slavery on Post Office and Church streets. And I remembered another story, too, about a snitch on Sugarland Farm who tried to cut a deal by dropping the dime on Frank Dio. Somebody caught him alone in the shower and poured a can of liquid Drano down his mouth.
He fixed one watery black eye on me.
"Who's he?" he said to his son.
"Somebody Clete used to know," Sally Dio said.
"What's he want?"
"He thinks Dixie Lee can get him out of some trouble," Sally Dio said.
"Yeah? What kind of trouble you in?" the father said to me.
"He's up on a murder charge, Pop. Mr. Robicheaux used to be a police officer," Sally Dio said. He smiled.
"Yeah?" His voice raised a level.
"Why you bring this to our house?"
"I didn't bring anything to your house," I said.
"I was invited here. By Clete over there. Because the man I wanted to talk with couldn't simply walk down the hill and spend five minutes with me."
"I invite. Sal invites. You don't get invited by somebody that works for me," the father said.
"Where you used to be a cop?"
" New Orleans."
"You know-?" He used the name of an old-time Mafia don in Jefferson Parish.
"Yes, I helped give him a six-year jolt in Angola. I heard he complained a lot about the room service."
"You a wise guy huh?"
"You want me to fix you a drink, Mr. Frank?" Clete said.
The old man flipped his hand at Clete, his eyes still fixed on me, as though he were brushing away bad air.
"That's my cousin you're talking about," he said.
I didn't reply. I looked again at Dixie Lee, who sat hunched forward on the piano bench, his hands in his lap, his gaze averted from us.
"Tell him to get the fuck out of here," the father said.
"Tell that other one he don't bring smartass guys up to our house, either." Again, he didn't bother to look in Clete's direction.
Then he motioned with his hand again, and the girl in the silver bathing suit wheeled him through a far door into a bedroom. The bed was piled with pink pillows that had purple ruffles around them. I watched the girl close the door.
"Got to do what Pop says. See you around, Mr. Robicheaux," Sally Dio said. He tapped one wire brush across the drumhead.
" Dixie, I want you to walk down to my car with me," I said.
"Conversation time's over, Mr. Robicheaux."
"The man can speak for himself, can't he?" I said.
But before all my words were out, Sally Dio did a rat-a-tat-tat on the drum with the brushes.
"Are you coming, Dixie?"
Again he slapped the brushes rapidly on the drum, looking me steadily in the eyes with a grin at the corner of his mouth.
"A footnote about your relative in Angola," I said.
"I not only helped put him away, I maced him in the face after he spit on a bailiff."
"Clete, help our man find his car," he said.
Clete took his drink away from his mouth. His face reddened. Behind him, the people in the pool were in various attitudes of embrace among the rubber cushions and wisps of steam.
"Sal, he's a good guy. We got off to a bad start this morning," he said.
"Mr. Robicheaux's late for somewhere else, Clete."
Clete looked as though he had swallowed a thumbtack.
"No problem. I'm on my way. Take it easy, Clete," I said.
"Sal, no kidding, he's a solid guy. Sometimes things just go wrong. It's nobody's fault," Clete said.
"Hey, Robicheaux something to take with you," Sally Dio said.
"You came in here on somebody's shirttail. Then you talked rude to an old man. But you're in my house and you get to leave on a free pass. You been treated generous. Don't have any confusion about that."