“I’m in the Dome,” Sherry Picard said. “Have you found Clete?”
“I just saw him. He went into the concourse. I’m walking there now. Before you hang up, I have to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“How does a woman the size of Rowena Broussard take down a guy like Penny?”
“Succinylcholine.”
“Say again?”
“It paralyzes the muscles. Somebody shot a hypodermic load of it into his system. Rowena was a nurse in South America, wasn’t she? Those lefties are a howl.”
“Clete fought for the leftists in El Sal.”
“I gave him a dispensation.”
Stay away from this person, I thought.
Chapter 39
Clete left the concourse and worked his way to the other side of the Dome, hoping to come up on the backside of the stage. If he could make it that far, he was going to walk onto the stage. It was undignified, self-abasing, and maybe the act of a public fool. What did it matter? He thought of the graves he had dug with an e-tool, the bodies hung in trees after the VC got finished with them, the people who had sat on scalding rooftops in the Lower Ninth Ward, waiting for the helicopters. This was the kind of world Clete believed Jimmy Nightingale would preside over. The man used people as he would a suppository. Clete wanted to print him on a wall.
But this was a fantasy, and he knew it. As a boy, Clete had never been a bully, although older and bigger boys had bullied him. He even forgave the kid from the Iberville Project who bashed him with the pipe that left the scar through his eyebrow. The kid had grown up no differently than Clete and later died at Khe Sanh. For Clete, the myth of Wyatt Earp was not a myth. You smoked them when they dealt the play but not before, even if you had to eat a bullet. And for that reason alone, Clete would always be at a disadvantage in dealing with a cunning man like Nightingale, who, minutes earlier, had incorporated the racism of Bobby Earl into his campaign while acting as the bestower of forgiveness.
Clete passed a restroom and a locked office, then found a door that opened onto a storage area under the stands. He opened a second door onto an entryway from which he could see the backside of Nightingale as he introduced a famous country singer wearing a thick-felt tall-crowned white cowboy hat and a pale blue western-cut suit stitched with flowers.
Clete also saw a beer vendor whose pants and shirt looked dipped in starch, the trousers stuffed inside rubber boots, a Nightingale baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He was a short, pudgy man with lips like red licorice.
Clete stared at the vendor but didn’t move. What was he waiting for? He started again toward the aisle, his gaze riveted on the vendor’s neck. Let it play out, a voice said.
His stomach was churning. Maybe he’s just an ordinary guy, he thought. What if you start something and security gets the wrong idea and the guy gets hurt just so Nightingale is safe?
But he knew the real reason for his unwillingness to act. The weight on his heart was the size of an anvil.
“What are you doing here, asshole?” a voice said.
Clete turned around. Once again he was looking into the face that was one of many he could never rid himself of. The faces were out of a subculture that fed on need and dysfunction and systemic cruelty, in this case the face of an old-time gunbull whose measure of self-worth was the degree to which he could inspire terror in others. He wore tight gray slacks with high pockets and a shirt the color of tin and a bolo tie and a salt-and-pepper mustache as stiff as wire and a belt equipped with Mace, handcuffs, a slapjack, and a blue-black semi-auto with checkered grips.
“Birl Wooster is the full name, isn’t it?” Clete said.
“When I woke up, it was. Answer my question.”
“I just saw a beer vendor who might be the guy called Smiley.”
“You’re talking about this guy out of Florida?”
“He’s down there.”
“Where?”
Clete turned around and looked down the aisle. “I don’t see him now.”
“Because he was never there.”
“A guy who fits his description was there.”
“And you’re a goddamn liar.”
Clete’s eyes searched the crowd again. “I think we blew an opportunity. But maybe not.”
“You know why I don’t like you, Purcel? One guy like you taints a whole department. It’s like trying to launder the stink out of shit.”
“You screwed the pooch, dickhead. By the way, that black kid you killed on the levee? He was nineteen.”
“Until he stopped being nineteen,” Wooster said. “I lost a lot of sleep over that.”
“How’s it feel?” Clete said.
“How’s what feel?”
Clete shook his head. “Don’t pay attention to me.”
Wooster removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it into his mouth. “I’m going to dial you up one of these days, Purcel.”
The crowd began to drain from the Dome.
“I hear there’s a reception at the casino,” Clete said.
“Not for you, there isn’t.”
“See you around, Wooster. Don’t beat up on any handicapped people.”
Wooster elevated the toothpick with his teeth, his eyes veiled.
I found Sherry Picard in the concourse and called Clete again. This time he answered.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Behind the stage,” he said. “I just got braced by an ex-gunbull from Angola. He blew away a black inmate for sassing him and put a shank on his body. A guy named Wooster.”
“Who?”
“He does security for Nightingale.”
“What does Wooster have to do with anything?” I said.
“Nothing. I think I saw Smiley. He’s posing as a beer vendor. I was maybe forty feet from him when Wooster came down on me.”
“You let a hump for Nightingale stop you from taking down Smiley?”
“Not exactly.”
I couldn’t put together what he was saying. Then it hit me. “You were going to let Smiley get to Nightingale?”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“I’m with Sherry Picard. Wait for us.”
“You brought her here?”
“No, she came on her own.”
“Butt out on this, Dave. I got a handle on it.”
“The way you handled Smiley?”
“You want the truth?” he said. “I was going to make sure both of them went off the board. Wooster screwed things up.”
“Stay where you are.”
“I’m going to the casino. My car is parked six blocks away. It’ll take me a while to get there.”
“What’s at the casino?”
“A reception for Nightingale.”
“I’ll drop the dime on you, Cletus.”
“No, you won’t. Keep Sherry out of it. I’m copacetic and very cool and collected and totally in control of the situation. You’re the best, big mon.”
Clete had to walk to the other side of LaSalle to retrieve his Caddy. The sky was still dark, the rain blowing off the roofs of the few lighted buildings along the street. He cut through an alley lined with banana plants and garbage cans that had been knocked over by the wind. Twice he thought he heard footsteps behind him, but when he turned around, no one was there. The second time, he stepped between two buildings and waited. An elderly black man on a bicycle pedaled down the sidewalk at the end of the alley. Clete continued on.
He walked past a collapsed garage to the back of a deserted brick house where he had parked his vehicle. A tall man in a slicker and a wilted rain hat was standing by the driver’s door. His face was dark with shadow. His shoulders were rectangular, his coat open, his hands invisible. “Beat you to it.”