“I don’t think you’re looking for exculpatory evidence about Dave,” she said. “I don’t think you’re a friend. I think you have a lean and hungry look.”
“If there’s something I haven’t done to help your stepfather, tell me what it is, little lady, and I’ll get on it.”
“He’s not my stepfather, he’s my father. Call me ‘little lady’ again and see what happens.”
He sucked in his breath, smiling wetly, as though acknowledging his indiscretion. “I don’t choose my words very well. That’s probably why I’ve remained a single man.”
“I’d better finish my work. I’ll give Dave your message.”
He snapped his fingers. “Sorry, I forgot to ask you something.”
She waited.
“Call it deep background,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the case itself. How many times did Dave have to bust a cap on a guy or break his spokes, particularly in a close-quarter situation? Like when he was arresting a guy or the guy got in his face and he lost it? I never met an old-school cop yet who took shit off mutts and pervs. Can you give me a ballpark number?”
Chapter 10
In the life, Clete was known as con-wise, even though he had never been a convict. The term in the criminal subculture is laudatory and indicates a level of knowledge and experience that cannot be acquired in a library. You also have to pay dues. A “solid” or stand-up con stacks his own time, does it straight up without early release, work furloughs, conjugal privileges, or snitching off fellow inmates for favorable treatment. It’s not easy. Ask anyone who’s stood on the oil barrel in Huntsville or chopped cotton inside the system in Arkansas or been thrown into a lockdown unit full of wolves.
Clete went his own way, didn’t impose it on others, and asked the same respect. He would not only lay down his life for a friend; he would paint the walls with his friend’s enemies. He grew up in the old Irish Channel and palled around with guys like Tony Cardo, who was probably the most intelligent and dangerous and successful old-school gangster New Orleans ever produced. When they were kids, Clete and Tony found a box of human arms outside the incinerator by the Tulane medical school, and hung them from the straps of the St. Claude streetcar just as all the employees from the cigar factory were boarding; one passenger leaped from the window and crashed on top of a sno’ball cart. Except for Tony, Clete’s old-time buds went to the can or the chair, and Clete went to Vietnam and came back with the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Hearts, and cruised right back into the Big Sleazy without giving any of it a second thought.
I drove to his cottage at the motor court Thursday afternoon. He was standing amid the trees grilling a two-inch-thick steak, flipping it with a fork. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and a porkpie hat tilted on his brow and a pair of dark blue rayon workout pants that covered his shoelaces. “Big mon. I was just fixing to ask you and Alafair over.”
“How you doin’?” I said.
“Not bad.”
When Clete was equivocal, you tended to glance at the sky for thunderclouds, dust rising out of the fields, a splinter of lightning on the horizon.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Have a seat.”
I sat down at a picnic table made of green planks and covered with bird droppings and needles from a slash pine.
“I’m worried about Kevin Penny,” he said. “I think he’s got you on the brain.”
“He’s not coming after me, Clete. If he does, we’ll punch his ticket. He knows that.”
“You don’t get it. He’s an obvious habitual, but he’s not on parole, he has no outstanding warrants, and he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender, even though he was up on sexual assault charges a couple of times. I don’t know how he got out of Raiford, either. They should have welded the door on him and poured concrete on top of it.”
“What was he in for?”
“Distribution of cocaine and assault with a deadly weapon. But they couldn’t get him for the bigger charge: He and two other guys tortured a dealer in Little Havana for his stash. They hung him from a hoist on a wrecker and put a propane torch on him.”
“You’re saying Penny is protected?”
“He has to be. Pukes in the projects do life for three street busts involving amounts of money you could steal from bubble-gum machines.”
“Who’s his protector?”
“I know you don’t like this, but I think Jimmy Nightingale is a player in this.”
“A player in what?”
“Setting you up.”
“Maybe I wasn’t set up. Maybe I killed T. J. Dartez.”
“This is what Penny just told me—”
“Wait a minute. You just saw Penny?”
“This morning. I saw the social worker who’ll be looking after his kid, too. I told Penny I’d be visiting him, kind of like an old friend. Penny says Nightingale is a geek. He says he’s AC/DC and humps his sister or half sister or whatever she is.”
“This guy has no credibility, Clete.”
“Penny says Nightingale is eaten up with guilt. Maybe he killed somebody.”
I didn’t reply.
“You don’t buy it?”
“I don’t know. Rowena Broussard says he raped her. He claims he never touched her. When I interviewed him, he almost had me convinced.”
“Go on.”
“I felt like he wanted to confess. But not to rape. Something else. Maybe Penny is right.”
He forked the steak off the flames and laid it on a plate. “Is that what you came by to tell me?”
“No, I got the loan on my house. You’re a quarter of a mil richer than you were this morning.”
“You actually did that?”
“Why not?”
His eyes were shiny. He wiped them on his forearm. “I’ve got to get out of this smoke.”
“Pay off those bums and get them out of your life.”
“You’re truly a noble mon, noble mon. I’ll brown us some bread.”
That evening, pushing a basket at Winn-Dixie, I saw a young woman with a small red mouth and amber-colored hair and a flush on her cheeks.
“There you are again,” she said. “ ’Member me?”
I had to think. “You’re Babette. From the bar-and-grill.”
“You ordered two doubles and a Heineken. You was waiting for your friend, but you drank it all.”
“I wish I hadn’t.”
“Your friend come in afterward. You’re a friend of Mr. Spade, ain’t you?”
We were in the middle of the aisle, but no one else was around. “Spade Labiche came in the bar after I left?”
“Yes, suh. He left his gold lighter. I run out after him. He was talking to another man, but he drove off befo’ I could catch him.”
“What’d you do with the lighter?”
“I put it in the drawer for a couple of days. When he didn’t come in, I dropped it t’rew the mail slot in the big building wit’ a note.”
“Did Mr. Spade tell you he was looking for me?”
“He was in the corner. He come over and axed if you’d gone in the bat’room. I tole him you was gone.”
“Do you know who Mr. Spade was with?”
Her eyes lingered on mine, as though she were standing on the edge of a cliff. “I seen him once befo’. I don’t know his name or nothing about him.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He’s got bad skin. It’s thick, like leather. Like his eyes are looking out of holes. I ain’t caused no trouble, no?”