“Seymour knows me.”
“Who’s Seymour?”
“The night clerk. He would have given y’all my name and I’d be in worse trouble than I am. Where’s he at?”
“We’re interested in the two guys in the Buick,” I said. “Did they tell you their names?”
She shook her head.
“They used their first names to each other,” I said. “Don’t lie to us, Miss Dora.”
“They’re dagos out of Miami. You know what that means.”
“You’re not afraid of Smiley, but you’re afraid of the two dead guys?” I said.
“Their kind ain’t ever dead.”
“Others like them are coming?”
“Sure, what you t’ink? They work for the Mob. They said they was gonna pop a guy. They said they was gonna do it for the state of Texas. I tole them they was full of it.”
“Because you didn’t want to believe they would do that?” I said.
“I ain’t t’ought it t’rew.”
“You want something to eat?”
“No,” she replied. “I’m starting to get sick.”
“You saw Smiley’s face, Miss Dora,” I said.
“If he was gonna hurt me, he would have already done it.”
“He’s not a predictable man.”
“You lying, you. You know it, too.” She rubbed at her nose with the back of her wrist.
“Stay with Detective Ribbons,” I said.
I walked to the sheriff, then returned to the cruiser. The sun was above the trees now. I could see a dredge boat chugging down a canal surrounded by a sea of grass that had turned brown from saline intrusion. I leaned down to Dora’s window. “How much money do you have?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t make the john pay up front?”
“Not wit’ them kind.”
I put a five-dollar bill into her shirt pocket. “You’re free to go. Get something to eat.”
“Ain’t I lucky?” she said, squeezing past me. Her body smelled of nicotine and rut and booze. She looked back at me, then took the bill from her pocket and scrunched it in her palm and threw it in the wind.
At noon, I went to Clete Purcel’s office on Main Street. The waiting room was empty, littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and orange rinds and a splayed sandwich with a half-moon bite taken out of it. Clete was sitting at the spool table under the beach umbrella on the concrete pad behind the office, reading the Advocate and drinking a bottle of Mexican beer and sucking on a salted lime. His green eyes were dulled over, as if smoke from a dirty fire were trapped inside them.
“Leaving the dock early?” I said.
“I thought about it.”
“Something happen?”
He flattened the wrinkles on the front page of the newspaper with his hand. “That little creep is killing people again.”
“The two guys who got it were probably hit men.”
“Hit men are sane. This shit-for-brains starts gunfights in crowded casinos.”
That was how Clete’s former girlfriend had died, although the round had not come from Smiley’s weapon.
“He could have taken out a witness,” I said. “He didn’t. She’s a hooker named Dora Thibodaux. Know her?”
“Works out of a dump south of Morgan City?”
“She laid one of the hit men. His name was Jerry Gemoats.”
Clete scraped up the newspaper and stuffed it into a trash can under the table. “Who cares?”
“The hooker seemed to think well of Wimple.”
“I bet he loved his mother, too. What was the name of the hit man again?”
“Jerry Gemoats.”
Clete straightened his back. “He was the go-to mechanic for any hits out of Miami. Somebody with serious money sent him here. Who was the other hitter?”
“We don’t know. The car they died in was registered to Gemoats.”
Clete went into his office and came back with a file folder. He dropped it onto the glass table and opened it. He tilted the beer to his mouth and chugged half the bottle, the foam sliding down the inside of the neck. I swallowed and tried to hide the knot in my throat, the sense of longing I could not get rid of. “You got a soda?”
“In the icebox.”
I went inside and came back out with a can of orange-tasting carbonated water I could barely drink. The sun was like an acetylene torch on the bayou. “What’s in the folder?”
“I checked with some shylocks in Vegas and Tampa. Except they don’t call themselves shylocks anymore. They’re ‘lending institutions.’ I’m not making this up. This fat fuck in Tampa probably has ten million on the street and went to the fifth grade. The vig is four points a week.”
“Can you get to the point?”
He gave me a look. “Everybody I talked to said Desmond Cormier is up to his eyes in debt. Kind of like Francis Ford Coppola when he made Apocalypse Now, except he didn’t borrow from people who do collections with chain saws. Maybe Wimple and Gemoats and the other gash hound were here to protect Cormier. The Mob can bleed Cormier for the rest of his life; plus, they love being around actors.”
“Wimple was supposed to take out Tillinger and didn’t, so somebody sicced the two hitters on him?”
“That’d be my bet,” Clete said.
But I was not thinking about Miami button men or Smiley Wimple or the daily immersion into a sewer that constituted my livelihood. Clete followed my gaze to the sweating green bottle of Mexican beer on the table.
“Can I make an observation?” he said.
“No.”
“You’re falling in love with a young woman, and you think it’s wrong. Stop pretending you’re a monk. It’s going to get you drunk again.”
“Butt out, Cletus.”
“I know your thoughts before you have them. You think you have to marry every woman you sleep with. Except this time she’s too young. So instead of being human, you’re going to do a number on your own head and get back on the dirty boogie. In the meantime, you don’t let the young woman have a vote. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. Who died and made you God?” He drained the bottle, his throat working, and dropped it loudly into the trash can. “You’re peeling my face off.”
“I wonder why.”
“Search me. I think you’re too sensitive.”
I left the office early that afternoon and drove to Bella Delahoussaye’s house. Through the houses I could see Bayou Teche and the elephant ears that undulated in the current at high tide. I was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a music box with chocolates inside. Bella was wearing tight jeans and a pullover when she answered the door. She tilted her head. “Look at Santa Claus.”
I stepped inside and handed her the roses and set the music box on the couch. “ ‘Jolie Blon’ is on it.”
“You come to court me, baby?”
“You’re an extraordinary woman.”
“Come here.”
I stepped closer to her. She worked her sandals off by pushing one foot against the other. She stood on top of my shoes and put her arms around me and pressed the entirety of her body against mine, her face buried in my neck, her hair soft and freshly washed and air-blown and swelling against my cheek. I squeezed her in a way I had not squeezed a woman since the death of my wife.
She stepped back and touched my face. “But you ain’t here to win my heart away, are you?”
“I’d like to. But you’re right.”
“You got a comb?”
I removed it from my back pocket and handed it to her. As a beautician might, she stroked my hair back over my head, along the sides, and through the white patch I’d carried since childhood. “I knowed when I first met you, you had the blues. You ain’t got to explain anything. Sometime down the track, you need a place to park your hips, you know where I’m at.”
“That’s a line from Bessie Smith.”