Tee Jolie fixed a glass of ice and Dr Pepper with a lime slice and stuck a straw in it and held it up to my mouth. She was wearing a long-sleeve shirt printed with purple and green flowers. Her skirt was pale blue and fluffy and pleated, and her shoes looked tiny on her feet. You could say that Tee Jolie was made for the camera, her natural loveliness of a kind that begged to be worshipped on a stage or hung on a wall. Her face was thin, her eyes elongated, and
her hair full of waves, as though it had been recently unbraided, although that was the way it always looked.
“I feel selfish coming here, ’cause it wasn’t just to give you a Dr Pepper and the iPod,” she said. “I came here to ax you somet’ing, but I ain’t gonna do it now.”
“You can say anything you want, Tee Jolie, because I’m not even sure you’re here. I dream in both the day and the night about people who have been dead many years. In my dreams, they’re alive, right outside the window, Confederate soldiers and the like.”
“They had to come a long way, huh?”
“That’s safe to say,” I replied. “My wife and daughter were here earlier, and I know they were real. I’m not sure about you. No offense meant. That’s just the way it is these days.”
“I know something I ain’t suppose to know, and it makes me scared, Mr. Dave,” she said.
She was sitting in the chair, her ankles close together, her hands folded on her knees. I had always thought of her as a tall girl, particularly when she was onstage at the zydeco club where she sang, an arterial-red electric guitar hanging from her neck. Now she looked smaller than she had a few moments ago. She lifted her face up into mine. There was a mole by the corner of her mouth. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say.
“Did you get involved with some bad guys?” I said.
“I wouldn’t call them that. How come you to ax me that?”
“Because you’re a good person, and sometimes you trust people you shouldn’t. Good women tend to do that. That’s why a lot of us men don’t deserve them.”
“Your father was killed in a oil-well blowout, wasn’t he? Out on the Gulf when you was in Vietnam. That’s right, ain’t it?”
“Yes, he was a derrick man.”
As with many Creoles and Cajuns, there was a peculiarity at work in Tee Jolie’s speech. She was ungrammatical and her vocabulary was limited, but because of the cadence in her language and her regional accent, she was always pleasant to listen to, a voice from a gentler and more reserved time, even when what she spoke of was not pleasant to think about, in this case the death of my father, Big Aldous.
“I’m wit’ a man. He’s separated but not divorced. A lot of people know his name. Famous people come to the place where we live. I heard them talking about centralizers. You know what they are?”
“They’re used inside the casing on drilling wells.”
“A bunch of men was killed ’cause maybe not enough of those centralizers was there or somet’ing.”
“I’ve read about that, Tee Jolie. It’s public knowledge. You shouldn’t worry because you know about this.”
“The man I’m wit’ does bidness sometimes with dangerous people.”
“Maybe you should get away from him.”
“We’re gonna be married. I’m gonna have his baby.”
I fixed my gaze on the glass of Dr Pepper and ice that sat on the nightstand.
“You want some more?” she asked.
“Yes, but I can hold it by myself.”
“Except I see the pain in your face when you move,” she said. She lifted the glass and straw to my mouth. “They hurt you real bad, huh, Mr. Dave?”
“They shot me up proper,” I replied.
“They shot your friend Mr. Clete, too?”
“They smacked both of us around. But we left every one of them on the ground. They’re going to be dead for a long time.”
“I’m glad,” she said.
Outside the window, I could hear the rain and wind sweeping through the trees, scattering leaves from the oaks and needles from the slash pines across the roof.
“I always had my music and the piece of land my father left me and my sister and my mama,” she said. “I sang wit’ BonSoir, Catin. I was queen of the Crawfish Festival in Breaux Bridge. I t’ink back on that, and it’s like it was ten years ago instead of two. A lot can change in a short time, cain’t it? My mama died. Now it’s just me and my li’l sister, Blue, and my granddaddy back in St. Martinville.”
“You’re a great musician, and you have a wonderful voice. You’re a beautiful person, Tee Jolie.”
“When you talk like that, it don’t make me feel good, no. It makes me sad.”
“Why?”
“He says I can have an abortion if I want.”
“That’s his offer to you?”
“He ain’t got his divorce yet. He ain’t a bad man. You know him.”
“Don’t tell me his name,” I said.
“How come?”
Because I might want to put a bullet between his eyes
, I thought. “It’s not my business,” I said. “Did you really give me this iPod?”
“You just saw me.”
“I can’t trust what I see and hear these days. I truly want to believe you’re real. The iPod is too expensive a gift.”
“Not for me. He gives me plenty of money.”
“My wallet is in the nightstand drawer.”
“I got to go, Mr. Dave.”
“Take the money.”
“No. I hope you like the songs. I put t’ree of mine in there. I put one in there by Taj Mahal ’cause I know you like him, too.”
“Are you really here?” I asked.
She cupped her hand on my brow. “You’re burning up, you,” she said.
Then she was gone.
N
INE DAYS LATER
, a big man wearing a seersucker suit and a bow tie and spit-shined shoes and a fresh haircut and carrying a canvas bag on a shoulder strap came into the room and pulled up a chair by the bed and stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
“You’re not going to smoke that in here, are you?” I asked.
He didn’t bother to answer. His blond hair was cut like a little boy’s. His eyes were bright green, more energetic than they should have been, one step below wired. He set his bag on the floor and began pulling magazines and two city library books and a box of pralines and a carton of orange juice and a
Times-Picayune
from it. When he bent over, his coat swung open, exposing a nylon shoulder holster and the blue-black .38 with white handles that it carried. He removed a pint bottle of vodka from the bag and unscrewed
the cap and poured at least three inches into the carton of orange juice.
“Early in the day,” I said.
He tossed his unlit cigarette end over end into the wastebasket and drank out of the carton, staring out the window at the robins fluttering in the oak trees and the Spanish moss stirring in the breeze. “Tell me if you want me to leave, big mon.”
“You know better than that,” I said.
“I saw Alafair and Molly getting in their car. When are you going home?”
“Maybe in a week. I feel a lot stronger. Where have you been?”
“Running down a couple of bail skips. I still have to pay the bills. I’m not sleeping too good. I think the doc left some lead in me. I think it’s moving around.”
His eyes were bright with a manic energy that I didn’t think was related to the alcohol. He kept swallowing and clearing his throat, as though a piece of rust were caught in it. “The speckled trout are running. We need to get out on the salt. The White House is saying the oil has gone away.”
He waited for me to speak. But I didn’t.
“You don’t believe it?” he said.
“The oil company says the same thing. Do you believe
them
?”
He fiddled with his fingers and looked into space, and I knew he had something on his mind besides the oil-well blowout on the Gulf. “Something happen?” I said.
“I had a run-in two nights ago with Frankie Giacano. Remember him? He used to burn safes with his cousin Stevie Gee. He was knocking back shots with a couple of hookers in this joint on Decatur, and I accidentally stepped on his foot, and he says, ‘Hey, Clete, glad to see you, even though you probably just broke two of my toes. At least it saves me the trouble of coming to your office. You owe me two large, plus the vig for over twenty years. I don’t know what that might come to. Something like the national debt of Pakistan. You got a calculator on you?’”
Clete drank again from the carton, staring at the birds jittering in the trees, his throat working, his cheeks pooling with color as they
always did when alcohol went directly into his bloodstream. He set the carton down on the nightstand and widened his eyes. “So I told him, ‘I’m having a quiet beer here, Frankie, and I apologize for stepping on your needle-nose stomps that nobody but greaseballs wears these days, so I’m going to sit down over there in the corner and order a po’boy sandwich and read the paper and drink my beer, and you’re not going to bother me again. Understood?’
“Then, in front of his skanks, he tells me he peeled an old safe owned by his uncle Didi Gee, and he found a marker I signed for two grand, and all these years the vig was accruing and now I owe the principal and the interest to him. So I go, ‘I think a certain kind of social disease has climbed from your nether regions into your brain, Frankie. Secondly, you don’t have permission to call me by my first name. Thirdly, your uncle Didi Gee, who was a three-hundred-pound tub of whale shit, died owing me money, not the other way around.’
“Frankie says, ‘If you’d be a little more respectful, I would have worked something out. But I knew that was what you were gonna say. For that reason, I already sold the marker to Bix Golightly. By the way, take a look at the crossword puzzle in your newspaper. I was working on it this morning and couldn’t think of a thirteen-letter word for a disease of the glands. Then you walked in and it hit me. The word is “elephantiasis.” I’m not pulling your crank. Check it out.’”
“You think he was lying about selling the marker to Golightly?” I asked.
“Who cares?”
“Bix Golightly is psychotic,” I said.
“They all are.”
“Put away the booze, Clete, at least until afternoon.”
“When you were on the hooch, did you ever stop drinking because somebody told you to?”
It was Indian summer outside, and the sunlight looked like gold smoke in the live oaks. At the base of the tree trunks, the petals of the four-o’clocks were open in the shade, and a cluster of fat-breasted robins were pecking in the grass. It was a fine morning, not one to compromise and surrender to the meretricious world in which Clete Purcel and I had spent most of our adult lives. “Let it go,” I said.
“Let what go?” he asked.
“The sewer that people like Frankie Giacano and Bix Golightly thrive in.”
“Only dead people get to think like that. The rest of us have to deal with it.”
When I didn’t answer, he picked up the iPod and clicked it on. He held one side of the headset close to his ear and listened, then smiled in recognition. “That’s Will Bradley and Freddie Slack. Where’d you get this?”
“From Tee Jolie Melton.”
“I heard she disappeared or went off someplace. She was here?”
“It was about two in the morning, and I turned on the pillow and she was sitting right there, in the same chair you’re sitting in.”
“She works here?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“After ten
P.M
. this place is locked up like a convent.”
“Help me into the bathroom, will you?” I said.
He set the iPod back on the nightstand and stared at it, the driving rhythms of “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” still rising from the foam-rubber pads on the earphones. “Don’t be telling me stuff like this, Streak,” he said. “I’m not up to it. I won’t listen anymore to that kind of talk.”
He lifted the orange juice carton and drank from it, fixing one eye on me like a cyclops who was half in the bag.
C
LETE MAINTAINED TWO
private investigative offices, one on Main Street in New Iberia, over in the bayou country, and one in New Orleans, on St. Ann in the French Quarter. After Katrina, he bought and restored the building on St. Ann that he had formerly rented. With great pride, he lived on the second floor, above his office, with a fine view from the balcony of St. Louis Cathedral and the oak trees and dark green pike-fenced garden behind it. As a PI, he did scut work for bondsmen and liability lawyers, wives who wanted their unfaithful husbands bankrupted in divorce court, and cuckolds who wanted their wives and their lovers crucified. On the upside of the
situation, Clete hired out at nearly pro bono rates to bereaved parents whose missing children had been written off as runaways, or to people whose family members may have been railroaded into prison and even placed on death row.
He was despised by many of his old colleagues at NOPD and the remnants of the Mob. He was also the bane of the insurance companies because of the massive amounts of property damage he had done from Mobile to Beaumont. He had skipped New Orleans on a murder beef after shooting and killing a federal witness, and he had fought on the side of the leftists in El Salvador. He had also been a recipient of the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts. When a private plane loaded with mobsters crashed into the side of a mountain in western Montana, the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation determined that someone had poured sand in the fuel tanks. Clete threw a suitcase in the back of his rusted-out Caddy convertible and blew Polson, Montana, like it was burning down. He dropped a corrupt Teamster official upside down from a hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool. He poured a dispenser of liquid soap down the throat of a button man in the men’s room of the New Orleans airport. He handcuffed a drunk congressman to a fireplug on St. Charles Avenue. He opened up a fire hose on a hit man in the casino at the bottom of Canal Street and blew him into a toilet stall like a human hockey puck. He destroyed a gangster’s house on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth-grader, knocking down the walls, troweling up the floors, and crushing the furniture into kindling, even uprooting the shrubbery and flowers and trees and grading them and the lawn furniture into the swimming pool.
An average day in the life of Clete Purcel was akin to an asteroid bouncing through Levittown.