"What happened to Bottles?" another man asked.
"You got me. I was on the Freedom Bird the next week… Oh, he probably did all right," Ritter said, wiping his eyes, lifting his glass to his mouth.
Clete ordered a chili dog and a draft and went to the men's room. Ritter's eyes followed him, then the eyes of the other men turned and followed him, too.
When Clete came back out, the jukebox was playing and someone was racking pool balls. At first he wasn't sure about the references he was now hearing in the story Ritter was telling his friends.
"His wife was a muff-diver. That's not exaggeration. My wife knew her. She dumped him for another dyke and went off to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. Can you dig it? The guy comes home and thinks he's finally nailed her in the sack with the milkman and she's getting it on with another broad?" Ritter said.
They're shitheads. Walk away from it, Clete thought.
But the bartender had just set Clete's foot-long chili dog, smothered with melted cheese and chopped onions, in front of him and was now drawing a schooner of beer for him. So Clete hunched over his plate and ate with a spoon, his porkpie hat tilted over his forehead, and tried to ignore Ritter and his friends, whose conversation had already moved on to another subject.
When he had finished eating and had drained the last of his beer, he started to get up from the stool and leave. But he paused, like a man who can't make up his mind to get on the bus, then sat back down, his skin crawling with dried salt under his shirt. What was it he had to set straight? The lie that still hung in the air about his ex-wife? That was part of it. But the real problem was that Ritter could ridicule and sneer with impunity because he knew Clete was chained by denial to his past and would always be an object of contempt in the eyes of other cops.
"My ex left me because I was a drunk and I took juice and I popped a bucket of shit in Witness Protection," Clete said. "She wasn't a dyke, either. She just had the poor judgment to hang with your wife. The one who gave head to a couple of rookies at that party behind Mambo Joe's."
They caught him in the parking lot, as he was opening his car door, Ritter and one of the trappers and an unshaved man who wore canvas pants and rubber boots and firehouse suspenders on his bare torso.
The man in suspenders hit Clete in the back of the head with brass knuckles, then hooked him above the eye. As Clete bounced off the side of the Cadillac and crashed onto the shells, he saw the man in suspenders step away and Ritter take a long cylindrical object from him and pull a leather loop around his wrist.
"You think you're still a cop because you throw pimps off a roof? In Camden guys who look like you drive Frito trucks. Here's payback for that crack about my wife. How you like it, skell?" Ritter said.
16
"HE USED A BATON on you?" I said.
"Mostly on the shins," Clete said. He lay propped up in the hospital bed. There was a neat row of black stitches above his right eye and another one inside a shaved place in the back of his head.
"How'd you get out of it?"
"Some other cops stopped it." He took a sip from a glass of ice water. His green eyes roved around the room and avoided mine and showed no emotion. He pulled one knee up under the sheet and his face flinched.
"This happened on Saturday. Where have you been since then?" I said.
"Laid up. A lot of Valium, too much booze. I ran off the road tonight. The state trooper let me slide."
"You weren't laid up. You were hunting those guys, weren't you?"
"The one in canvas pants and suspenders, the dude who gave Ritter the baton? He was buds with that plainclothes, Burgoyne. I bet they were the two guys who beat the shit out of Cora Gable's chauffeur. By the way, I called the chauffeur and shared my thoughts."
"Don't do this, Clete."
"It's only rock 'n' roll."
"They're going to put you in a box one day."
"Ritter called me a skell."
Tuesday morning the sheriff came into my office.
"I need you to help me with some PR.," he said.
"On what?"
"It's a favor to the mayor. We can't have an ongoing war with the city of New Orleans. She and I are having lunch with some people to try and establish a little goodwill. You want to meet us at Lerosier?"
"Bootsie's meeting me in the park."
"Bring her along."
"Who are these people we're having lunch with?"
"P.R. types, who else? Come on, Dave, give me a hand here."
Bootsie picked me UP at noon and we drove down East Main and parked up from the Shadows and crossed the street and walked under the canopy of oaks toward the restaurant, which had been created out of a rambling nineteenth-century home with a wide gallery and ventilated green shutters.
I saw the sheriff's cruiser parked in front of the restaurant, and, farther down, a white limousine with charcoal-tinted windows. I put my hand on Bootsie's arm.
"That's Cora Gable's limo," I said.
She slowed her walk for just a moment, glancing at the flowers in the beds along the edge of the cement.
"I just wish I could get my hydrangeas to bloom like that," she said.
We walked up the steps and into a foyer that served as a waiting area. I could see our newly elected woman mayor and the sheriff and three men in business suits and Cora Gable at a table in a banquet room. At the head of the table, his face obscured by the angle of the door, sat a man in a blue blazer, with French cuffs and a heavy gold watch on his wrist.
"I have to go into the ladies' room a minute," Bootsie said.
A moment later I looked through the glass in the front door and saw Micah, the chauffeur, come up the walk and sit in a wicker chair at the far end of the gallery and light a cigarette.
I went back outside and stood by the arm of his chair. He smoked with his face averted and showed no recognition of my presence. Even though his forehead was freckled with perspiration, he did not remove his black coat or loosen his tie or unbutton his starched collar.
"Miss Cora said you won't press charges against the two NOPD cops who worked you over," I said.
"I'm not sure who they were. Waste of time, anyway," he replied, and tipped his ashes into his cupped palm.
"Why?"
He moved his neck slightly, so that the skin brushed like sandpaper against the stiff edges of his collar.
"I got a sheet," he said.
"People with records sue the system all the time. It's a way of life around here."
" New Orleans cops have murdered their own snitches. They've committed robberies and murdered the witnesses to the robberies. Go work your joint somewhere else," he said, and leaned over the railing and raked the ashes off his palm.
"You afraid of Gable?" I asked.
He brushed at the ashes that had blown back on his black clothes. Sweat leaked out of his hair; the right side of his face glistened like a broken strawberry cake.
I went back inside just as Bootsie was emerging from the ladies' room. We walked through the tables in the main dining area to the banquet room in back where Jim Gable stood at the head of the table, pouring white wine into his wife's glass.
"Jim says y'all know each other," the sheriff said to me.
"We sure do," I said.
"Bootsie's an old acquaintance, too. From when she lived in New Orleans," Gable said, the corners of his eyes threading with lines.
"You look overheated, Dave. Take off your coat. We're not formal here," the mayor said. She was an attractive and gentle and intelligent woman, and her manners were sincere and not political. But the way she smiled pleasantly at Jim Gable while he poured wine into her glass made me wonder in awe at the willingness of good people to suspend all their self-protective instincts and accept the worst members of the human race into their midst.
There was something obscene about his manner that I couldn't translate into words. His mouth constricted to a slight pucker when he lifted the neck of the wine bottle from the mayor's glass. He removed a rose that was floating in a silver center bowl and shook the water from it and placed it by her plate, his feigned boyishness an insult to a mature woman's intelligence. During the luncheon conversation his tongue often lolled on his teeth, as though he were about to speak; then his eyes would smile with an unspoken, mischievous thought and he would remain silent while his listener tried to guess at what had been left unsaid.