“That’s why you sent that other man?”
“Excuse me?”
“The one with the red hair and the skin look like milk. He was standing outside in the rain. I axed him what he was doing in this neighborhood at night. He said he was your friend and you were worried about me. He’s your friend, isn’t he?”
“Yes, I think he probably is.”
“Think?”
I started to explain, but I didn’t. Then I simply said, “I’d better be going now.”
Her turquoise eyes, gold skin, the mole by her mouth, her thick black hair that curved on her cheek were framed as though in a lens by the curtains that puffed and danced behind her head. Her eyes moved up to meet mine.
“You’re a very good man,” she said.
“Good-bye, Ruthie Jean,” I said, and took her hand in mine. It was small and dry and I wanted to hold it a long time. I knew in a way that words could not explain that this was much more than a casual farewell.
We pulled into the circle drive of the yacht club and parked not far from the practice green. The yacht club was sparkling white in the sunlight, with flagstone terraces and tinted, glassed-in dining areas and fairways that looked like corridors of velvet between the oak trees. When we got out of the truck, Clete pulled his shirt down over the front of his slacks, smoothed it with his fingers, adjusted his belt with his thumb, looked down at his shirt again.
“How does a prick like Johnny Carp get in a joint like this?” he said.
“They recognize a closet Republican when they see one.”
“How do I look?” he said.
“Lean and mean, not a bump on you.”
“You sure you want to do this?”
“You got to do something for kicks,” I said.
“I’m starting to worry about you, big mon.”
We walked in the shade of the building toward the entrance. Sailboats were rocking in their slips out on Lake Pontchartrain. The maître d’ stopped us at the door to the dining room.
“Do you gentlemen have reservations?” he said. His face and accent were European, his closed-shaved cheeks ruddy with color.
I opened my badge holder. “We’re here to see Polly Gee,” I said. He looked at me blankly. “That’s Johnny Carp... John Giacano. His secretary said he’s having lunch here.”
His facial skin tightened against the bone. His eyes involuntarily glanced at a glass-domed annex to the main dining room. He cleared his throat softly.
“Is there going to be a problem, gentlemen?” he asked.
“We’ll let you know if there is. Bring me a double Jack, with a Dixie on the side, and put it on Johnny’s tab. He told me to tell you that,” Clete said.
The domed annex was empty, except for Johnny Carp and his crew, who were eating from gumbo appetizer bowls at a long linen-covered table set with flowers and pitchers of sangria. Johnny lowered his spoon from his mouth, his face dead. A scar, like a piece of black string, was crimped into his lip where I had hit him. One of Johnny’s crew, a one-thousand-dollar-a-hit mechanic named Mingo Bloomberg, started to rise from his chair. He was a handsome, copper-haired man with ice blue eyes that were totally devoid of moral light.
“The man with the badge has a pass. You don’t, Purcel,” he said.
“Don’t get up on my account,” Clete said.
“A guy’s got to try. It’s nothing personal.”
“Put your hand on me and you’re going to wear a metal hook, Mingo.”
“So we see how it shakes out,” Mingo said, and began to stand up.
Clete fitted his hand on Mingo’s face and shoved him back down in his chair. Then he hit him twice with the flat of his hand, like a man swinging a fielder’s glove filled with cement.
“You want another one?” he said. “Tell me now, Mingo. Go ahead, open your mouth again.”
I cupped my palm around Clete’s bicep. It felt like a grapefruit.
“I’m fed up with this shit. Somebody get security in here,” Johnny said.
“You’re looking good, John,” I said.
“You’re a lucky man, Dave.” He pointed his fork at me. “You ought to burn a few candles at your church.”
“That’s not quite how I see it, John,” I said. “You don’t want to queer your people’s action in Iberia Parish by killing a police officer, but then again you’re not always predictable. That means I need to do something about you, like maybe squeeze Patsy Dapolito until he gives you up. You think Patsy will give you up, John?”
“What’s to give? He don’t work for me no more. He never really did.”
“Oh?” I said.
“That’s right, he’s a malignant geek, a short-eyes, a freak. You gonna nail me with the testimony of a child molester? You know what my lawyer would do with a guy like that on the stand? When he gets excited he drools. Hey, you guys, picture star witness Patsy Bones drooling on the stand.” Johnny stretched his face out of shape and let his tongue roll wetly in his mouth while all his crew laughed. “You two twerps get out of here.”
“It’s always a pleasure, John,” I said.
Clete picked up a bread stick, dipped it in a Sangria pitcher, and snapped it off in his jaw, winking at me while he grinned outrageously.
Outside in the parking lot, he pulled up his shirt and removed the tape recorder from under his belt, popped out the cassette, and flipped it in his palm.
“Isn’t life grand?” he said.
Chapter 34
I was filling out my time sheet the next day when Helen Soileau knocked on my office door, then sat on the corner of the desk and looked me in the face, her eyes seeming to focus on words or sentences in her head that would never become the right ones to use.
“Say it,” I said.
“I just got off the phone with Fart, Barf, and Itch in New Orleans. Marsallus is dead. They’ve got his body.”
I returned her stare and didn’t answer.
“Dave?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. I don’t believe it.”
“The body never washed up because it was wedged in the pilings of that collapsed pier.”
I looked out the window. The sky was thick with lead-colored clouds, the trees filmed with dust, motionless in the trapped heat. The traffic on the street seemed to make no sound.
“How’d they ID the body?” I said.
“Dental records.”
“What dental records?” I said, the irritation rising in my voice. “Sonny grew up in a welfare project. He probably went to a dentist as often as he went to a gynecologist.”
“The agent says they’re a hundred percent sure it’s Sonny.”
“He worked for the Feds. He was an embarrassment to them. They want his file closed.”
“Do you know what denial is?”
“Yeah. With me it has to do with booze, not dead people.”
“You want to go to lunch?”
“No. Where’s the body?”
“On its way to a mortuary in New Orleans. Leave it alone, Dave.” She watched my face. “Water and fish and crabs do bad things.”
I rose from my desk and looked silently out the window until she was gone. Outside, a trusty from the parish lopped a dead banana stalk in half with a machete, revealing a swarm of fire ants that fed off the rotten pulp inside.
“You sure you want to see it?” the mortician, a middle-aged black man, said. It was late and he was tired. He wore a T-shirt and rumpled slacks without a belt, and there was stubble on his chin. “Okay, if that’s what you want. You say he was a friend?”
“Yes.”
He raised his eyebrows and opened the door to a back room where the temperature was twenty degrees lower than the front of the funeral home. It smelled of chemicals, stainless steel, the cool odor of scrubbed concrete.