Clete drained his Collins. The waiter began putting our food on the table. “Hit me again on this, will you?” Clete said, pointing to his glass. He looked at Earl. “You walk the walk, Bobby. Fucking A.”
People at other tables turned in their chairs.
“Are you mocking me?” Earl said.
“Are you kidding? I always thought Jimmy Nightingale was a fraud and a four-flusher. Look how he treated Tony. He takes the Civil War sword Tony bought to give to Levon Broussard and gives it to Broussard himself. Now he’s got a rape beef coming down on his head, and he’ll probably give up anybody he can to save his own sorry ass.”
“What rape beef?” Tony said.
“A well-known lady has brought charges. You can check out the particulars yourself. This guy Penny says Nightingale has got a cut of the action in Jeff Davis Parish. Maybe elsewhere as well. Now that he’s in trouble, maybe he’ll give up some names. The guy’s NCAA, no class at all.”
Tony made a wet sucking sound in his throat. “You think you’re smart?”
“I was keeping you up-to-date on your boy Nightingale, Tony,” Clete said. “I got to hit the head. Don’t choke on that oyster.”
“Take this thought with you, smart guy. I bought a bunch of your markers, twenty cents on the dollar. Now you owe me, not the shylock.”
Clete stared at him in disbelief.
“Yeah, you heard right,” Tony said. “Now go piss.”
My cell phone rang. It was Helen, but the connection was bad. I went outside on the sidewalk. The air was cool and dank in the shade, and had a winey smell like old Europe. A garbage truck clattered past. “Helen?” I said.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“In the Quarter, eating lunch with Fat Tony and Bobby Earl.”
“What’s Earl doing there?”
“Cadging favors.”
“You need to get back here.”
“What happened?” I said. My head was still pounding with the revelation that a man like Tony the Nose had bought part of Clete’s debt.
“Rowena Broussard cut her wrists. She’s at Iberia General. She says nobody believes her account of the assault. She’s putting it on you and me. Levon is yelling his head off.”
“About what?”
“He thinks Iberia General isn’t up to his standards. He wants his wife transferred to Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge.”
“I’ll wrap things up here and head back.”
“What’s going on with Tony Nemo?”
“Trouble.” I looked through the restaurant window. Clete was gone from the table. So were JuJu and Maximo. “I’ll call you back,” I said.
Clete was standing at the urinal when he heard Maximo and JuJu come through the door. A man wearing a suit was urinating next to him. The man zipped his pants and began combing his hair in the mirror.
“Go outside, man,” Maximo said.
“Why?” the man said.
“We got to unstop a pipe. You need to be somewhere else.”
The man took one look at the expression on Maximo’s face and went out the door.
Clete turned on the faucet and watched Maximo and JuJu in the mirror. “Don’t do this.”
“You got to come out in the alley,” JuJu said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Tony says we gotta talk,” Maximo said.
“Tell him to boogie, Max,” Clete said. “In six months the state of Louisiana will be installing a pay toilet on Tony’s grave.”
“What happens later don’t change nozzing now,” Maximo said. “What you got in your coat pocket?”
Clete squeaked off the faucet and jerked two brown paper towels from the dispenser and dried his hands. “Talk to him, JuJu.”
JuJu looked like someone had fitted a garrote around his neck. “I got my job to do, Purcel.”
“Bad choice of words,” Clete said.
“No, bad choice of everything for you, man,” Maximo said.
Clete put a hand into his coat pocket for his blackjack, one that was shaped like a darning sock and weighted with lead and attached to a spring and a wood grip. But Maximo had already clicked on the stun gun he held behind his back. He touched it to Clete’s spine, and more than fifteen thousand volts flowed into Clete’s body.
Clete felt a pain like a bucket of nails tearing their way through his insides, dropping into his genitals, buckling his knees, and making him speak in a voice he didn’t recognize. He pulled himself half erect and tried to swing the blackjack at Maximo’s head. It flew from his fingers into the toilet stall. Clete stumbled along the wall, knocking over the trash can, his eyes bloodshot and stinging.
“We ain’t finished, man,” Maximo said. “It don’t do no good to run.”
Clete felt the sharp edges of a condom machine. He fitted his fingers around it and tore it loose in a cloud of plaster and smashed it on Maximo’s head. JuJu was reaching inside his coat for a small five-shot titanium Colt .38 special he carried in a nylon holster under his coat. Clete drove the condom machine like a cinder block straight into his face.
Maximo lay half upright against the wall. JuJu was bent over the sink, teeth and blood and saliva stringing into his cupped hand. Clete wet a handful of paper towels and pressed them to JuJu’s mouth. “Jesus Christ, JuJu! Why’d you guys do this? What’s the matter with y’all?”
JuJu spat a tooth into the sink, unable to answer. The door swung back on its hinges. Fat Tony stood in the hallway, one hand propped on his cylinder cart, his lungs wheezing. Two uniformed cops stood behind him. “I got your balls in a vise, Purcel. Your new home is Shitsville. How’s it feel, Blimpo?”
Chapter 13
Maximo and Juju went to the hospital, and Clete went to the can. I called Helen and told her I’d be late getting back to New Iberia.
“What happened?” she asked.
I told her. In detail.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”
“New Orleans does that to you.”
She hung up.
In the morning I went to Iberia General to visit Rowena Broussard, less out of concern for her than the fact that she had blamed her attempted suicide on Helen and me.
She was out of intensive care and propped up on the bed in a sunny room that gave onto Bayou Teche and live oaks strung with Spanish moss. Her lips were gray, her face pale, her wrists heavily bandaged. A glass of ice water sat on the table next to her. Water had been spilled on the table.
“Levon just left,” she said.
“I came to see you,” I said.
“I forgot. It’s a felony to commit suicide in Louisiana.”
“How about losing the victim routine?”
“You’re a hard-nosed wanker, aren’t you.”
I sat in a chair next to her bed and picked up her water glass. I held the straw to her mouth. She drank from it and laid her head back on the pillow.
“What’s a wanker?” I said.
“A fucking Seppo who doesn’t know where to plant his bishop.”
I thought it better not to pursue any more Australian definitions.
“I heard you put your suicide attempt on Sheriff Soileau and me,” I said.
“You’re right. That’s probably not fair. There was nothing good on the telly, so I thought I’d shuffle off to the crematorium.”