"Why's he want to help us?"
"He's into Wee Willie Bimstine for four large. I got him a one-month extension with no vig."
"It sounds good, Cletus," I said.
He smiled and put a breath mint on his tongue.
We drove south to Morgan City as the evening cooled and the clouds over the Gulf turned a deeper red in the sunset. The man named Steve Andropolis was waiting for us in the back of a diner set on pilings by the water's edge. A half-empty green beer bottle and a white plate filled with fried shrimp tails sat in front of him.
The hard, rounded surfaces of his face reminded me of an old baseball. He wore a new golf cap and a bright yellow golf shirt and gray slacks and tan loafers, as though affecting the appearance of a Florida retiree, but he had big-knuckled hands, a faded blue tattoo of a nude girl on his forearm, and close-set, pig's eyes that took the inventory of everyone in the diner.
When Clete introduced me, I didn't take his hand. He let his hand remain in the air a moment, then parted his lips slightly and wiped at something on the corner of his mouth.
"I know you?" he said.
"From a long time ago. You had a DWI and the court sent you to a twelve-step program in the Quarter. You stole two-hundred dollars from the group's treasury."
Andropolis turned to Clete. "What's the deal?" he asked.
"There's no problem here, Steve. We just want to know what you've heard about this guy who did Zipper Clum," Clete said.
"His name's Johnny Remeta. He's out of Michigan. They say he's got a lot of talent," Andropolis said.
"A lot of talent?" Isaid.
"Is there an echo in here?" Andropolis said.
"This doesn't fit, Steve. The guy we're looking for is a hillbilly," Clete said.
"You wanted to know who was the new kid in town, I told you. He's done hits for the greaseballs out on the coast, maybe a couple of pops in Houston. He don't have a sheet, either," Andropolis said.
"Where is he?" Clete asked.
"A guy who blows heads? He ain't like other people. He does the whack, gets his ashes hauled, and visits Disneyland."
Andropolis' eyes kept returning to my face as he spoke.
"Why's he looking at me like that?" he asked Clete.
"Streaks just being attentive. Right, Dave?" Clete said, and gave me a deliberate look.
"Right," I said.
"Y'all want to know anything else?" Andropolis asked.
"I think I remember some other things about you, Steve. Weren't you in the Witness Protection Program? What happened on that deal?" I said.
"What do you mean 'what happened'?"
"You were one of the guys who gave up Didi Gee. But you're obviously not a federally protected witness anymore."
"Because that tub of guts had his insides eaten out by the Big C. I heard the mortuary had to stuff his fat ass into a piano crate," he replied.
"You go way back with the Giacano family?" I asked.
"Yeah, I knew Didi when he used to carry a bloodstained baseball bat in the backseat of his convertible."
"Ever hear about a couple of cops on a pad snuffing a woman in Lafourche Parish back in the sixties?" I asked.
His eyes cut sideways out the window. He seemed to study the swirls of color in the sky. The sun was almost down now, and small waves from a passing tugboat rippled back over the mudflat under the diner's pilings.
"Yeah, I remember that. A whore?" he said.
"Yeah, Zipper said the same thing. They killed a whore," I said, my face expressionless, the skin tight against the bone, my hands folded one on top of the other.
"She had something on them. That's all I remember," he said.
"No names?" I said.
"No, I don't know anything else about it."
"But you're sure she was a whore? That's what you called her, right?" I said.
"You got some trouble with that word?" he asked.
"No, not really," I said, and took my eyes off his and scratched a place on my forehead.
He raised a finger to the counterman to order a beer for himself, then said, "I got to take a drain."
Clete leaned forward in the booth.
"Quit baiting the guy," he said.
"He knows more," I said.
"He's a gumball. You get what you see. Be thankful. We got the name of the shooter."
"Excuse me," I said, and followed Steve Andropolis into the men's room and shot the dead bolt behind me. The room was small, the air fetid and warm, with a wood enclosure around the toilet. I reached under my seersucker coat and slipped my.45 from its clip-on holster. I pulled back the slide and released it, chambering the top round on the magazine.
I stood back from the door on the toilet enclosure and kicked it open. Andropolis had been tucking his shirt into his trousers when the door hit him in the back and knocked him off balance against the wall. He tried to push the door back into my face, but I stomped it again, harder this time, ripping the top hinge and screws loose, pinning him in a half-crumpled position against the toilet bowl. I held on to the side of the stall with my left hand and drove my shoe through the door, again and again, splintering plywood into his face.
Then I flung the door off him and pointed the.45 at his mouth. A twelve-inch strip of desiccated wood was affixed to his cheek with three rusty nails.
"I wanted to apologize to you, Steve. I lied out there. I was bothered by the word 'whore.' When a subhuman sack of shit calls my dead mother a whore, that bothers me. Does that make sense to you, Steve?"
He closed his eyes painfully and pulled loose the splintered board that was nailed to his cheek.
"I've heard about you, you crazy sonofabitch. What do I know about your mother? I'm a spotter. I never capped anybody in my life."
"You tell me who killed her, Steve, or your brainpan is going to be emptied into that toilet bowl in ten seconds."
He began getting to his feet, blood draining in a long streak from his cheek.
"Fuck you, Zeke," he said, and drove his fist into my scrotum.
My knees buckled, and a wave of pain rose like a gray, red-veined balloon out of my loins, took all the air from my lungs, and spread into my hands. I fell against the wall, the backs of my legs quivering, the.45 on the floor by my foot, the hammer on full cock.
Andropolis kicked the screen out of the window, placed one foot on the jamb, and leaped outside.
He stared back at me, the clouds etched with purple fire behind his head.
"When your mother died? I hope it didn't go like I think it probably did. I hope they hurt her," he said.
He ran through the shallow water across the mudflat toward a distant clump of willow trees. The water splashing from under the impact of his feet had the same amber brilliance in the sunlight as whiskey splashed in a thick beer glass. I sighted the.45 on the middle of his back and felt my finger begin to tighten inside the trigger guard.
Clete Purcel exploded the dead bolt off the men's room door frame with one thrust of his massive shoulder.
"What are you doing, Dave?" he said incredulously.
I lay my forehead down on my arms and closed my eyes, my heart thundering in my ears, a vinegar-like odor rising from my armpits.
The next afternoon I drove out to the Labiche house on the bayou and was told by a black kid watering down the azaleas in front that Passion was at the cafe and nightclub she owned outside St. Martinville. I drove to the club, a flat-roofed, green building with rusty screens and a fan-ventilated, hardwood dance floor. The sun's glare ofFthe shale parking lot was blinding. I went in the side door and walked across the dance floor to the bar, where Passion was breaking rolls of quarters and dumping them into her cash drawer.
In the far corner stood the ancient piano that Letty used to play nightly. The keys were yellow, the walnut edges of the casement burned by cigarettes. Letty was one of the best rhythm-and-blues and boogie-woogie piano players I had ever seen perform. You could hear Albert Ammons, Moon Mulligan, and Jerry Lee Lewis in her music, and whenever she did "Pine Top's Boogie," the dance floor erupted into levels of erotic behavior that would have received applause at the baths of Caracalla.