“That wasn’t the case with Bella.”
“Because she was older and smarter and read him for the piece of shit he is.”
You didn’t slide one by Clete Purcel. “Why’d this kid have to give his ink back?” I said.
“Ask him.”
The biker bar was on the north side of Lafayette. Like most biker bars, it could have served as a laboratory dedicated to the study of misogyny, atavism, and contradiction. A Confederate battle flag was tacked by the corners to the ceiling, puffing in the breeze from an electric fan. The Reich service flag was nailed to one wall; on another wall was a black flag with two white lightning bolts. I always thought the greatest irony of the patrons was in their dress. They affected the roles of Visigoths and iconoclasts but simultaneously seemed to seek uniformity and anonymity. They dressed alike, looked alike, and spoke in the same guttural voice, as though all of them gargled with muriatic acid. The swagger and the way they hid their features inside their facial hair reminded me of actors who were terrified someone would catch on to who they really were.
This does not mean they weren’t dangerous. They were ferocious in groups and found in each other the strength they didn’t own themselves, and their leaders were not only intelligent but disarming and impressive when need be. No matter the occasion or the environment, messing with them was a mistake.
Spider Dupree was probably twenty-five at the outside, his shoulder-length red hair washed and blow-dried. He wore zoot pants high on his hips and an oversize white long-sleeve shirt with silver thread in it and pearl snap buttons on the pockets and cuffs. The skin below his left eye had been disfigured. A biker bar seemed a strange environment for a kid who obviously had been forced to give back his ink.
Clete introduced me. Spider Dupree’s handshake was as light as air, his eyes like misaligned black stones at the bottom of a fish bowl.
“You probably wonder why I’m doing this,” he said. “I joined a church and got clean. That also means I got to stay on the square.”
“Sure,” I said. Trying to return his gaze was impossible. His eyes seemed to watch separate screens at the same time. “Good to know you, Spider.”
He touched one of the scars that dripped from his eye. “My story is on my face. I got no secrets. These guys here treat me all right. Let’s go over in the booth. You want a beer or anything?”
Before I could reply, Clete said, “Give me a Miller and give Dave a Coca-Cola with some cherries and a lime slice. Right, Dave?”
I didn’t answer.
We waited for Spider to come to the booth with the drinks. “You told me you took a hit of Jack,” Clete said. “So I jumped the gun.”
“Forget it. What’d Spider go down for?”
“Rolling gays in the Castro District.”
“Three years?” I said.
“He beat the hell out of them with a blackjack, mostly in the mouth. You could say he has a little bit of a denial problem. He was fresh meat as soon as he went into gen pop.”
Dupree sat down next to Clete. It was hard not to be distracted by the scars below his left eye. They resembled a pink, segmented worm someone had stepped on. He wiped at them with his wrist and grinned with half his mouth. “They make my eye water, although that don’t make sense.”
“Tell Dave why the AB wanted their ink back.”
“I took down four guys to earn my teardrops. Two in the shower, one in the yard, one in the block. Then they told me I had to come across for maybe half a dozen swinging dicks. They used a screwdriver. I would have been killed if I hadn’t gotten transferred to Atascadero.”
I let my eyes slip off his. I couldn’t imagine what his childhood must have been like. “Yesterday’s box score.”
“I lit up one guy in lockdown. That sound like somebody who should pull a train?”
I looked at Clete.
“You were stand-up, Spider,” Clete said. “Nobody is holding anything against you. Right, Dave?”
“Right,” I said.
There was a warm light in Spider’s eyes that reminded me of a nineteen-year-old door gunner I once knew, a mindless kid who had no idea how his rhetoric unnerved other people.
“About this guy who got suffocated in the Iberia Parish prison?” Clete said. “Two guards sat on him?”
Spider seemed to come out of a trance. “Yeah, he was AB. But deaf and a nutcase. He started fighting with the hacks and they sat on him. He was a hump for a cop named Devereaux.”
“ ‘Hump’ like a boyfriend?” I said.
“No, he worked for the cop.”
“Pimping?” I said.
“Cooze, coke, and crank. Now it’s cheese and oxy. I don’t like to talk about this too much.”
“Why not come clean?” I asked.
“That’s the point: I am clean. Trips down memory lane don’t do a lot for my serenity.”
“We totally dig what you’re saying,” Clete said. “You’re doing a solid for us, Spider. We won’t forget it.”
“The guy who got smothered cooked his head when he rode with a couple of motorcycle clubs on the West Coast.”
“Tell Dave about the tats,” Clete said.
“Around one ankle. A chain of crosses.”
“Like big fat ones?” Clete said.
“Yeah,” Spider said.
“The Maltese cross?” I said.
“The what?”
“I remember the man who died in the jail,” I said. “His name was Frank Dubois. That’s who you’re talking about?”
“Yeah, he had a coat of arms tattooed on his back. He could speak Latin or ancient Greek or some shit. He knew sign language, too.”
“Did he know Lucinda Arceneaux?” I asked.
“I don’t know who that is,” he answered.
“Are any Hollywood guys involved in this?” I asked.
“One, for sure.”
“Who?” I said.
“A guy who likes to hang girls up on coat hooks,” he said. “Least that’s what I heard. He’s got a funny name.”
“Antoine Butterworth?” I said.
“Rings a bell,” he replied. “I got to get back to work. That’s eight-fifty on the drinks. The tip is on me. If you’re gonna hang around, don’t get too intimate with the clientele. There’s a lot of abnormal people around these days.”
We went outside to Clete’s Caddy. It was parked behind the club by a stand of trees strung with dead vines. The wind had turned cold; yellow and black leaves were tumbling through the parking lot and floating in pools of rainwater greasy with oil. The bikers’ motorcycles were parked in straight lines, the wheels at the same angle, the bodies wiped down and shining in the moonlight.
Clete put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. His porkpie hat was slanted on his forehead. I removed the cigarette from his mouth and flipped it into the water. He watched it floating in the pool. “You think Butterworth is our guy?” he asked.
“We’ve run him six ways from breakfast,” I said. “He likes playing the bad boy. I get the feeling he wants to be knocked around.”
“How’s he different from those guys inside?” he said, looking at the club. “Just because they’re imitation Hells Angels doesn’t mean they don’t kill people.”
“Let’s get out of here. It’s depressing.”
“Why do they bother you?”
“Who?”
“Bikers,” he said.
“It’s not bikers. It’s these kinds of bikers. If they had their way, we’d be living in the American Reich.”
But he was no longer listening. “There’s a guy you’re not thinking about, Dave.”
“Oh yeah?”
Clete put another cigarette into his mouth. This time he lit it. The smoke came out of his mouth like a piece of cotton. “A guy you keep pretending isn’t dirty.”
I zipped up my windbreaker and buttoned the collar. I took the second cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into the water. “Stop playing games with me, Clete.”