“Got indigestion troubles? Try Tums,” Clete said.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said to him.
“Nothing now,” he said, and pushed back the iron gate so we could drive through. The Latin man held on to the fence with one hand and labored to get his breath back. We drove up the driveway toward the stucco house. I continued to look at Clete.
“You never worked vice. You don’t know what kind of scum these bastards are,” he said. “When a greaseball like that gets in your face, you step all over him. It defines the equations for him.”
“Did you get drunk last night?”
“Yeah, but I don’t need an excuse to bash one of these fuckers.”
“No more of it, Clete.”
“We’re in, aren’t we? We’re the surprise in Julio’s afternoon box of Cracker Jacks. Look at that bunch by the pool. I bet we could run them and connect them with every dope deal in Orleans and Jefferson parishes.”
About a dozen people were in or around the clover-shaped pool. They floated on rubber rafts in the turquoise water, played cards on a mosaic stone table and benches that were anchored in the shallow end, or sat in lawn chairs by the slender gray trunks of the palms while a family of dwarf servants brought them tall tropical drinks filled with fruit and ice.
Clete walked directly across the clipped grass to an umbrella-shaded table where a middle-aged man in cream-colored slacks and a yellow shirt covered with blue parrots sat with two other men who were as dark as Indians and built like fire hydrants. The man in the print shirt was one of the most peculiar-looking human beings I had ever seen. His face was triangular-shaped, with a small mouth and very small ears, and his eyes were absolutely black. Three deep creases ran across his forehead, and inside the creases you could see tiny balls of skin. On his wrist was a gold watch with a black digital dial, and he smoked a Bisonte with a cigarette holder. The two dark men started to get up protectively as we approached the table, but the man in the yellow and blue shirt gestured for them to remain seated. His eyes kept narrowing as though Clete’s face were floating toward him out of a memory.
“What’s happening, Julio?” Clete said. “There’s a guy out front puking his lunch all over the grass. It really looks nasty for the neighborhood. You ought to hire a higher-class gate man.”
“Purcel, right?” Segura said, the recognition clicking into his eyes.
“That’s good,” Clete said. “Now connect the dots and figure out who this guy with me is.”
One of the dark men said something to Segura in Spanish.
“Shut up, greaseball,” Clete said.
“What do you think you’re doing, Purcel?” Segura asked.
“That all depends on you, Julio. We hear you’re putting out a very serious shuck about my partner,” Clete said.
“Is this him?” Segura asked.
I didn’t answer. I stared straight into his eyes. He puffed on his cigarette holder and looked back at me without blinking, as though he were looking at an object rather than a man.
“I heard you been knocking the furniture around,” he said finally. “But I don’t know you. I never heard of you, either.”
“I think you’re a liar,” I said.
“That’s your right. What else you want to tell me today?”
“Your people killed a nineteen-year-old girl named Lovelace Deshotels.”
“Let me tell you something, what’s-your-name,” he said. “I’m an American citizen. I’m a citizen because a United States senator introduced a bill to bring me here. I got a son in West Point. I don’t kill people. I don’t mind Purcel and his people bothering me sometimes. You got
la mordida
here just like in Nicaragua. But you don’t come out here and tell me I kill somebody.” He nodded to one of the dark men, who got up and walked to the house. “I tell you something else, too. You know why Purcel is out here? It’s because he’s got a guilty conscience and he blames other people for it. He took a girl out of a massage parlor in the French Quarter and seduced her in the back of his car. That’s the kind of people you got telling me what morality is.”
“How’d you like your teeth kicked down your throat?” Clete asked.
“I got my attorneys coming out right now. You want to make threats, you want to hit people, you’ll make them rich. They love you.”
“You’re a pretty slick guy, Julio,” I said.
“Yeah? Maybe you’re a cute guy, like your partner,” he answered.
“Slick as Vaseline, not a bump or a handle on you,” I said. “But let me tell you a story of my own. My daddy was a trapper on Marsh Island. He used to tell me, ‘If it’s not moving, don’t poke it. But when it starts snapping at your kneecaps, wait till it opens up real wide, then spit in its mouth.’ What do you think of that story?”
“You’re a mature man. Why you want to be a fool? I didn’t do nothing to you. For some reason you’re finding this trouble for yourself.”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen happen to somebody, Julio?” I asked.
“What’re you talking about?” he said. His brow was furrowed, and the tiny balls of skin in the creases looked like strings of purple BBs.
“I hear you have some cruel guys working for you. Probably some of Somoza’s old national guardsmen, experts in garroting journalists and murdering Catholic priests.”
“You don’t make no sense.”
“Sure I do,” I said. “You probably got to visit the basement in some of Somoza’s police stations. You saw them hung up by their arms, with a cloth bag soaked in insecticide tied over their heads. They screamed and went blind and suffocated to death, and even a piece of shit like yourself had a few nightmares about it. You also knew about that volcano where the army used to drop the Sandinistas from a helicopter into the burning crater. It’s pretty awful stuff to think about, Julio.”
“They really sent us a pair today. A vice cop with
puta
in his head and another one that talks like a Marxist,” he said. Some of the people around the pool laughed.
“You’re not following my drift,” I said. “You see, to you a bad fate is what you’ve seen your own kind do to other people. But once you got away from the horror show down there in Managua, you figured you were safe. So did Somoza. He got out of Dodge with all his millions, then one day his chauffeur was driving him across Asuncion in his limo, with a motorcycle escort in front and back, and somebody parked a three-point-five bazooka rocket in his lap. It blew him into instant lasagna. Are you following me, Julio?”
“You going to come after me, big man?” he asked.
“You still don’t get it. Look, it’s almost biblical. Eventually somebody eats your lunch, and it always comes from a place you didn’t expect it. Maybe a redneck cop puts a thumbbuster forty-five behind your ear and lets off a hollow-point that unfastens your whole face. Or maybe they strap you down in the Red Hat House at Angola and turn your brains into fried grits.”
“You ought to get a job writing comic books,” he said.
“Then maybe you’re sitting by your pool, secure, with your prostitutes and these trained monkeys around you, and something happens out of sequence,” I said, and picked up his tropical drink full of ice and fruit and poured it into his lap.
He roared back from the table, raking ice off his cream-colored slacks, his face full of outrage and disbelief. The squat, dark man seated across from him started from his chair. Clete slammed him back down.
“Start it and we finish it, Paco,” he said.
The dark man remained seated and gripped the wrought-iron arms of his chair, staring at Clete with a face that was as flat and latently brutal as a frying pan.
“There, that’s a good fellow,” Clete said.
“You get out of here!” Segura said.
“This is just for openers. The homicide people are a creative bunch,” I said.
“You’re spit on the sidewalk,” he said.
“We’ve got a whole grab bag of door prizes for you, Julio. But in the end I’m going to send you back to the tomato patch,” I said.
“I got guys that can cut a piece out of you every day of your life,” Segura said.
“That sounds like a threat against a police officer,” Clete said.
“I don’t play your game,
maricón
,” Segura said. “You’re amateurs, losers. Look behind you. You want to shove people around now?”
Two men had parked their canary-yellow Continental at the end of the drive and were walking across the grass toward us. Both of them looked like upgraded bail bondsmen.
“Whiplash Wineburger, up from the depths,” Clete said.
“I thought he’d been disbarred for fixing a juror,” I said.
“That was his brother. Whiplash is too slick for that,” Clete said. “His specialty is insurance fraud and ripping off his own clients.”
“Who’s the oilcan with him?”
“Some dago legislator that’s been peddling his ass around here for years.”
“I heard you were wired into some heavy connections. These guys need lead in their shoes on a windy day,” I said to Segura.
”
Me cago en la puta de tu madre, “
he replied.
“You hotdogs got two minutes to get out of here,” the lawyer said. He was lean and tan, like an aging professional tennis player, and he wore a beige sports jacket, a yellow open-necked shirt, and brown-tinted glasses.
“We were just on our way. It looks like the neighborhood is going to hell in a hurry,” Clete said.
“By the way, Wineburger,” I said, “bone up on your tax law. I hear the IRS is about to toss Segura’s tax records.”
“Yeah? You got a line to the White House?” he said.
“It’s all over the Federal Building. You haven’t been doing your homework,” I said.
We walked back to our car and left Segura and his lawyer staring at each other.
We headed back down the lake road toward the Pontchartrain Expressway. The palm trees were beating along the shore, and small waves were whitecapping out on the lake. Several sailboats were tacking hard in the wind.
“You think we stuck a couple of thumbtacks in his head?” Cletus asked. He drove without looking at me.
“We’ll see.”
“That touch about the IRS was beautiful.”
“You want to tell me something, Clete?”
“Am I supposed to go to confession or something?”
“I don’t like to see a guy like Segura trying to jerk my partner around.”
“It was three years ago. My wife and I had broke up, and I’d been on the shelf for six weeks.”
“You let the girl walk?”
“She never got busted. She was a snitch. I liked her.”
“That’s why you put your fist through that guy’s stomach?”
“All right, so I don’t feel good about it. But I swear to you, Dave, I never got any free action because of my badge, and I never went on the pad.” He looked across at me with his poached, scarred face.
“So I believe you.”
“So buy me a
beignet
and a coffee at the Café du Monde.”
An afternoon thundershower was building out over Lake Pontchartrain. The sky on the distant horizon had turned green, and waves were scudding all across the lake now. The few sailboats still out were drenched with spray and foam as they pounded into the wind and headed for their docks. It started to rain in large, flat drops when we turned onto the Expressway, then suddenly it poured down on Clete’s car in a roar of tackhammers.
The city was soaked and dripping when I went to pick up the social worker, whose name was Annie Ballard, by Audubon Park. The streetlamps lighted the misty trees along the esplanade on St. Charles; the burnished streetcar tracks and the old green streetcar glistened dully in the wet light, and the smoky neon signs, the bright, rain-streaked windows of the restaurants and the drugstore on the corner were like part of a nocturnal painting out of the 1940s. This part of New Orleans never seemed to change, and somehow its confirmation of yesterday on a rainy summer night always dissipated my own fears about time and mortality. And it was this reverie that made me careless, let me ignore the car that parked behind me, and let me walk up her sidewalk with the vain presumption that only people like Julio Segura had things happen to them out of sequence.
THREE
She lived in an old brick rowhouse that was connected to several others by a common porch and a shrub-filled front yard. I heard footsteps behind me, turned and glanced at three men who were joking about something and carrying a wine bottle wrapped in a paper sack, but I paid no attention to them after they turned toward a lighted house where a party was going on.
She smiled when she opened the door. She wore a blue dress with transparent shoulders, and her blond curls stuck out from under a wide straw hat. She was very pretty with the light behind her, and I didn’t care whether we made it to the track or not. Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder, saw her expression break apart, heard the feet on the porch behind me, this time fast and running. Just as I turned, one of the three men shoved me hard into Annie Ballard’s living room and aimed a Browning automatic pistol straight into my face.
“Don’t try to pull it, biscuit-eater, unless you want your brains running out your nose,” he said, and reached inside my sports coat and pulled my .38 from my waist holster.
He was tall and angular, his hair mowed into his scalp like a peeled onion, his stomach as flat as a shingle under the big metal buckle on his blue jeans. The accent was Deep South, genuine peckerwood, and on his right arm was a tattoo of a grinning skull in a green beret with crossed bayonets under the jaw and the inscription KILL THEM ALL… LET GOD SORT THEM OUT.
The second man was short and olive-skinned, with elongated Semitic eyes and a hawk nose. He went quickly from room to room, like a ferret. But it was the third man who was obviously in charge. His hands rested comfortably in his raincoat pockets; his face looked impassively around the room as though he were standing at a bus stop. He was in his early fifties, with a paunch, a round Irish chin, a small mouth with down-turned corners, and cheeks that were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. The vaguely dissolute edges of his face, with his tangled eyebrows and untrimmed gray hair, gave you the impression of a jaded Kiwanian.
“There’s nobody else,” the olive-skinned man said. He spoke with a Middle Eastern accent.