“You’re Swede Jensen. You parked cars at the casino.”
“You got a good memory,” the chauffeur said. “I work for Ms. Nightingale now.”
“I’m closed till one.”
“She gave me orders. I told her you probably didn’t want to be bothered. She pissed in the swimming pool about it. How about cutting me a break?”
Clete tried to process what he’d just heard. It was impossible. “Come in and make it fast.” He went back into the office and closed the blinds. His secretary had already gone to lunch; the waiting area was empty. He sat behind his desk and opened a drawer and took out a roll of mints and put one into his mouth. He left the drawer open. A .25-caliber semi-auto lay under a notepad. Swede took a chair.
“She wants to hire you,” he said.
“So why doesn’t she come in?”
“She’s shy.”
“I’ll believe that in a minute.”
“I told her we go back.”
“We don’t go back, Swede. I remember you. That’s a long way from ‘we go back.’ ”
“This is my meal ticket, Purcel.”
“Before Tony Nine Ball got you a job parking cars, you were a porn actor in that studio out on Airline Highway.”
Swede took off his shades and pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes were blue, one of them defective, as if there were an ice chip in the lens. “I took a pinch for a lewd act with a minor. I had to wait eight months in jail to go to court. The charges got dropped. You want me to leave, that’s fine with me.”
“What’s on Ms. Nightingale’s mind?”
“She thinks Levon Broussard’s lawyers are going to put the Kevin Penny torture/murder on her brother.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Clete asked.
“What do you think? To break his sticks.”
“So he can’t get elected to the U.S. Senate?”
“The Senate is just the rosin box,” Swede said. “Jimmy Nightingale is the man for our times.”
“I knew a mobbed-up guy from Jersey who knew Nightingale in the casino business. He’s doing life for tying a guy to a tree and shooting him in the balls. He said Nightingale was a Murphy artist without the virtues.”
“Go to one of his rallies. All those people are wrong?”
Clete looked at Swede again. His eyebrows were irregular in shape, like earthworms that had been stepped on. “You were in the ring?”
“Ham-and-egg stuff. Nothing to write Ring magazine about.”
“Where’d you learn to fight?”
“Inside. When I was eighteen. The Nightingales gave me a break, like they have a lot of people. Here’s the gig. Two thousand a month retainer, probably for a year.”
“Retainer to do what?”
“To swat flies. This place is Bum Fuck on acid. You know the kind of dirt that people are trying to dig up on Mr. Nightingale?”
“Tell Ms. Nightingale to call me.”
“She’s waiting for you now.”
“Where?”
“You got a problem with food from Popeyes?”
“No.”
“She’s in the park.”
Don’t do it, a voice said.
“I’ll follow you,” Clete said.
He drove his Caddy onto the grass by a concrete boat ramp and a row of camellia bushes on the water’s edge. Emmeline was sitting under the roof of a picnic shelter, wearing a sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat with silk flowers sewn on it, like one from the plantation era. She and Swede had spread a checked cloth on the table and placed there a bucket of fried chicken and one of fried crawfish and a box of buttermilk biscuits with a container of milk gravy. Clete removed his porkpie hat and sat down. “How do you do, ma’am?” he said.
“You’re as big as they say,” she said.
“My stomach?”
“A big guy is a big guy,” she said.
“Swede says you want some help.”
“I don’t want Jimmy stabbed in the back.”
“Who wants to do that?”
“Levon Broussard, the savior of humanity,” she said. She pushed the bucket of fried crawfish toward him.
“Got a soft drink?” he asked.
“You don’t want a long-neck?” Swede asked.
Emmeline’s eyes drilled a hole in Swede.
“Coca-Cola coming up,” he said.
“So you want Levon Broussard off your case?” Clete asked Emmeline.
“Or tied to an anchor and thrown in the Gulf,” she said. “That’s a joke.”
“I don’t think the guy’s got a lot of arrows in his quiver.”
“What do you call an abomination like Tony Nemo?” she asked.
“I don’t like to say this, but Fat Tony poured most of your brother’s concrete.”
“Nemo poured half the concrete in New Orleans,” she replied.
Clete took a long sip from his Coke, his eyes veiled. What was she after? Now she was talking about oil companies, their mistreatment of Jimmy, the unfair role they’d placed him in in South America, the stupidity of the media, the hypocrisy of Levon, the vile nature of his wife.
“How’s Broussard a hypocrite?” Clete asked. “He did a lot of good down in Latin America, didn’t he? With Amnesty International and that kind of stuff.”
“He can’t write or talk enough about his glorious ancestors, who happened to be slave owners; then he bleeds all over the television screen about the suffering people in Guatemala. In the meantime, his Aborigine wife tells everybody who’ll listen that Jimmy raped her.”
“She’s an Aborigine?” Clete said.
“She looks like one.”
“You’re not going to go jogging with her?” he said.
“Did I misjudge you?”
“Do you mean am I dumb instead of smart? Yeah, probably.”
“That’s not clever, Mr. Purcel. You have a good reputation as a private investigator. But I don’t think you understand how vicious Jimmy’s enemies are. You also don’t know how good a man he is.”
Right, Clete thought. He took another sip from his Coke. How far should he take it?
“Swede mentioned a retainer of two grand a month,” he said. “That’s a lot of money for what sounds like doing nothing.”
“There would be a few duties,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Security, maybe.”
He picked up a biscuit and dipped it in the gravy and put it into his mouth, his cheek pouching. His eyes remained empty, as though he were detached from the conversation. “Has Dave Robicheaux got anything to do with this?”
“No. Why would he be involved in anything regarding Jimmy? Actually, I don’t care for Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Don’t take this personal, Ms. Nightingale. When a guy like Tony the Squid can’t get a cop on a pad, he goes to a friend of the cop. Maybe he wines and dines the cop, then lends him money. The issue is information. Any place there’s vice, extortion, blackmail, union corruption, insider trading, jury-rigging, highway contracting, the issue is always information. The rest of it doesn’t mean diddly-squat on a rock. Outside of the scut work I do for bail bondsmen, I make my living off information. I’m not proud of it.”
“Your perception is correct,” she said.
“About what?”
“I want to retain you to keep me informed about people who want to hurt my brother,” she said. “Got it?”
“I don’t do wiretaps, I don’t do videos through windows, and I don’t deliberately mess people up, not even the lowlifes.”
“I don’t expect you to,” she said.
“Let me think on it.”
“You’ve taken up this much of my time, and you’ll think on it?”
Clete looked at the glare of the sun on the water. It resembled a yellow flame, dancing under the chop from a passing boat. “I’ve got a big enemy. My own head. So I got to think through things before I make choices. Then I usually make the wrong choice anyway. Then I got to think my way back through it a second time, and it’s not only a drag, I get a bad headache.”