"What's happening, Dave?" he said. "I'm glad you caught me when you did. I got to go down to New Orleans this afternoon. Come on out on the patio and have a drink. What do you think of my place?"
"It's impressive."
"It's more place than I need. I got a small house on Lake Pontchartrain and a winter house in Bimini. That's more my style. But the wife likes it here, and you're right, it impresses the hell out of people. You remember when you and me and your brother used to set pins in the bowling alley and the colored kids tried to run us off because we were taking their jobs?"
"My brother and I got fired. But I don't think they could have run you off with a shotgun, Bubba."
"Hey, those were hard times, podna. Come out here, I got to show you something."
He led me through some French doors onto a flagstone patio by a screen-enclosed pool. Overhead the sun shone through the spreading branches of an oak and glinted on the turquoise water. On the far side of the pool was a screened breezeway, with a peaked, shingled roof, that contained a universal gym, dumbbells, and a body and timing bag.
He grinned, went into a prizefighter's crouch, and feinted at me.
"You want to slip on the sixteen-ounce pillows and waltz around a little bit?" he said.
"You almost put out my lights the last time I went up against you."
"The hell I did. I got you in the corner and was knocking the sweat out of your hair all over the timekeeper and I still couldn't put you down. You want a highball? Clarence, bring us some shrimp and boudin. Sit down."
"I've got a problem you might be able to help me with."
"Sure. What are you drinking?" He took a pitcher of martinis out of a small icebox behind the wet bar.
"Nothing."
"That's right, I heard you were fighting the hooch for a while. Here, I got some tea. Clarence, bring those goddamn shrimp." He shook his head and poured himself a drink in a chilled martini glass. "He's half senile. Believe it or not, he used to work on the oyster boat with my old man. You remember my old man? He got killed two years ago on the SP tracks. I ain't kidding you. They say he took a nap right on the tracks with a wine bottle on his chest. Well, he always told me he wanted to be a travelling man, poor old bastard."
"A Haitian named Toot and maybe a guy by the name of Eddie Keats came to see me. They left a few stitches in my mouth and head. A bartender in Smiling Jack's on Bourbon told me he sicked them on me by calling one of your clubs."
Bubba sat down across the glass-topped table from me with his drink in his hand. His eyes were looking directly into mine.
"You better explain to me what you're saying."
"I think these guys job out for you. They also hurt a friend of mine," I said. "I'm going to square it, Bubba."
"Is that why you think you're sitting in my house?"
"You tell me."
"No, I'll tell you something else instead. I know Eddie Keats. He's from some toilet up North. He doesn't work for me. From what I hear, he doesn't put stitches in people's heads, he smokes them. The Haitian I never heard of. I'm telling you this because we went to school together. Now we eat some shrimps and boudin and we don't talk about this kind of stuff."
He ate a cold shrimp off a toothpick from the tray the Negro had placed on the table, then sipped from his martini and looked directly into my face while he chewed.
"A federal cop told me Eddie Keats jobs out for you," I said.
"Then he ought to do something about it."
"The feds are funny guys. I never figured them out. One day they're bored to death with a guy, the next day run him through a sausage grinder."
"You're talking about Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, right? You know what his problem is? He's a coonass just like you and me, except he went to college and learned to talk like he didn't grown up down here. I don't like that. I don't like these things you're saying to me, either, Dave."
"You dealt the play, Bubba, when those two guys came out to my house."
He looked away at a sound in the front of the house, then tapped his fingertips on the glass tabletop. His nails were chewed back to the quick, and the fingertips were flat and grained.
"I'm going to explain it to you once because we're friends," he said. "I own a lot of business. I got a dozen oyster boats, I got a fish-packing house in New Iberia and one in Morgan City. I own seafood restaurants in Lafayette and Lake Charles, I own three clubs and an escort agency in New Orleans. I don't need guys like Eddie Keats. But I got to deal with all kinds of people in my business-Jews, dagos, broads with their brains between their legs, you name it. There's a labor lawyer in New Orleans I wouldn't spit on, but I pay him a five-thousand-dollar-a-year retainer so I don't get a picket in front of my clubs. So maybe I don't like everybody on my payroll, and maybe I don't always know what they do. That's business. But if you want me to, I'll make some calls and find out if somebody sent Keats and this colored guy after you. What's the name of this motormouth at Smiling Jack's?"
"Forget him. I already had a serious talk with him."
"Yeah?" He looked at me curiously. "Sounds mean."
"He thought so."
"Who's the friend that got hurt?"
"The friend is out of it."
"I think we got a problem with trust here."
"I don't read it that way. We're just establishing an understanding."
"No. I don't have to establish anything. You're my guest. I look at you and it's like yesterday I was watching you leaning over the spit bucket, your back trembling, blood all over your mouth, and all the time I was hoping you wouldn't come out for the third round. You didn't know it, but in the second you hit me so hard in the kidney I thought I was going to wet my jock."
"Did you know I found Johnny Dartez's body in that plane crash out at Southwest Pass, except his body disappeared?"
He laughed, cut a piece of boudin, and handed it to me on a cracker.
"I just ate," I said.
"Take it."
"I'm not hungry."
"Take it or you'll offend me. Christ, have you got a one-track mind. Listen, forget all these clowns you seem to be dragging around the countryside. I told you I have a lot of businesses and I hire people to run them I don't even like. You're educated, you're smart, you know how to make money. Manage one of my clubs in New Orleans, and I'll give you sixty thou a year, plus a percentage that can kick it up to seventy-five. You get a car, you cater trips to the Islands, you got your pick of broads."
"Did Immigration ever talk to you?"
"What?"
"After they busted Dartez and Victor Romero. They tried to smuggle in some high-roller Colombians. You must know that. I heard it in the street."
"You're talking about wetbacks or something now?"
"Oh, come on, Bubba."
"You want to talk about the spicks, find somebody else. I can't take them. New Orleans is crawling with them now. The government ought to send massive shipments of rubbers down to wherever they come from."
"The weird thing about this bust is that both these guys were mules. But they didn't go up the road, and they didn't have to finger anybody in front of a grand jury. What's that lead you to believe?"
"Nothing, because I don't care about these guys."
"I believe they went to work for the feds. If they'd been muling for me, I'd be nervous."
"You think I give a fuck about some greasers say they got something on me? You think I got this house, all these businesses because I run scared, because the DEA or Immigration or Minos Dautrieve with his thumb up his pink ass say a lot of bullshit they never prove, that they make up, that they tell to the newspapers or people that's dumb enough to listen to it?"