A Stained White Radiance dr-5 Page 7

"No, I don't remember, Clete."

  "Come on, Dave. It was all full-tilt boogie rock 'n' roll back then. You loved it, mon. Admit it." He kept grinning, and his teeth clicked while he chewed his gum.

  "Why the piece?"

  "It gets interesting once in a while. I run down bail jumpers for a couple of bondsmen. Pimps, street dealers, bullshit like that. What a bunch. I think the Orkin Company ought to get serious in this town. I'm not kidding you, New Orleans is turning to shit. The fucking lowlifes have crawled out of the cracks."

  I looked at my watch.

  "You're worried about your parking meter or something?" he said.

  "Sorry. I just need to be back in New Iberia this afternoon."

  "How's everything at home?"

  "It's okay. Good."

  The smile went out of his eyes. I looked away from him.

  He spread his fingers on the desk blotter. His hands looked as big as skillets.

  "Bootsie's having trouble again?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "How bad?"

  "You never know. One day's fine and full of bluebirds. The next day the gargoyles come out of the closet."

  He took the gum out of his mouth and dropped it in the wastebasket. I heard him take a deep breath through his nose.

  "Let's walk on over to the Pearl and have some oysters," he said. "Then we'll talk about these three buttwipes you're looking for."

  "I'm a little tapped out right now."

  "I've got a tab there. I never pay it, but that's what tabs are for. Let's get out into this beautiful day."

  We walked down Bourbon, which was becoming more crowded with tourists now, past the T-shirt shops, jazz clubs and strip joints that advertised nude dancers and French orgies, to the corner of St. Charles and Canal, where we went inside the Pearl and sat at the long counter that ran the length of the restaurant. The tables were covered with checkercloth, wood-bladed fans turned overhead, and the e re black men in aprons were shucking open raw oysters over the ice bins behind the bar. We ordered two dozen on the half-shell, a glass of iced tea for me and a small pitcher of draft for Clete.

  "Run it by me again," he said.

  I went over all the details of Garrett's murder, the shootout, the description of three intruders, the names I had heard them call each other while my ears had roared like the sea with the sound of my own blood.

  Clete was silent, his green eyes thoughtful under his porkpie hat while he squeezed a lemon on his oysters and dotted them with Tabasco sauce.

  "I don't know about the guy named Eddy or the guy with the scrap metal in his mouth," he said. "But this sawed-off character named Jewel sounds like a local I used to know. I haven't seen him around in a while, but I think we might be talking about Jewel Fluck."

  "What?"

  "You heard me. That's his name. His family came from Germany and he grew up in the Channel. He tried to make it as a jockey out at Jefferson Downs, but he was too heavy and so worked as a hot-walker till they caught him doping a horse. He's a mean little bastard, Dave."

  "Fluck? "

  "You got it. Maybe his name screwed him up. When you think of Jewel Fluck, think of a hornet somebody just poured hot water on."

  "Why doesn't he have a record?"

  "He does. In Mississippi. I think he did four or five years in Parchman."

  "What for?"

  "Cutting up a colored guy who was scabbing on a job. Or something like that. Look, the only reason I know about this guy is he hid out a bail jumper I was looking for. The jumper was in the AB. I heard Fluck is, too."

  "The Aryan Brotherhood?"

  "Integrated jails breed them like fungus. I used to think it was the Black Muslims we had to worry about. But this is your genuine psychopathic white trash with a political cause up their butts. Hitler would have loved them."

  He signaled the bartender for another pitcher of beer.

  "Something wrong with your oysters?" he said.

  "I'm just trying to figure this guy's tie-in with Weldon Sonnier," I said.

  "Maybe it was just a robbery gone bad, Dave. Maybe it's not that complicated a deal."

  "You didn't see the inside of the house. They really did a number on it. They were after something specific."

  "Maybe this Sonnier guy is holding some dope. We live in greedy times. The coke money's a big temptation. A lot of straights have nosed up to the trough."

  "It could be. When's the last time you saw Fluck?"

  "A year or so ago. I don't think he's around town. I'll ask around, though. Look, Dave, from what you've told me, this Sonnier character has invited a pile of shit into his life. He also sounds like one of these white-collar cocksuckers who think cops have about the same status as their yardmen. Maybe it's time he learned the facts of life."

  "Sir, could you watch your language, please?" the bartender said.

  "What?" Clete said.

  "Your language."

  "What about my language?"

  "We're okay here," I said to the bartender. He nodded and walked farther down the bar and started mixing a drink.

  Clete continued to stare after him.

  "Does Fluck still have relatives in New Orleans?" I asked.

  "I don't know," he answered, his eyes coming back into mine. "His mother probably wishes she'd thrown him away and raised the afterbirth. Forget about Fluck a minute. I've got a thought, a funny memory about somebody. The guy with the crowbar, the one named Eddy, tell me what he looked like again."

  "His head was real big, his face full of bone. The kind you break your fist on."

  "Did he have a tattoo?"

  "I don't remember."

  "A red and yellow tiger on his right arm?"

  I tried to see it in my mind's eye, but the only image that came back was the bone-heavy face and the ridges of muscle under the T-shirt.

  "Maybe I couldn't even pull him out of a lineup with any certainty," I said.

  "There's one guy around town, he has a head like a tree. His name's Raintree, from Baton Rouge. I don't know his first name, though."

  "Go on."

  "I get a security retainer out at the yacht club. Sometimes I check out backgrounds on potential members, keep out the riffraff supposedly, which means the south-of-the-border crowd. The tomato pickers are very big on clubs these days. But I also do security at dances, receptions, Republican geek shows, that kind of stuff. So one night Bobby Earl has a big gig out there. It's black-tie stuff, respectable, people from the Garden District, no Red Man spitters allowed, get the picture? You couldn't get the word 'nigger' out of this bunch at gunpoint.

  "Except a guy shows up who Bobby Earl wasn't planning on. Some character from the old States' Rights party, a real oil can, Vitalis running out of his hair, shiny suit, enough cologne to make your nose fall off. He was hooked up with those Klansmen who dynamited that colored church in Birmingham back in the sixties and killed those four children.

  Anyway, he's shaking hands with Bobby on the steps of the yacht club and this weird-looking kid from a radical newspaper takes their picture.

  "That's when this guy Raintree, the guy with the pumpkin head and a red and yellow tiger on his arm, comes down the steps and takes the kid by the arm and walks him through the parking lot down to the lake. When I got there he'd punched the kid in the stomach and thrown his camera in the lake."

  "What did you do?"

  "I told Raintree to leave the grounds. I told the kid he ought to go home and leave these guys alone."

  His eyes shifted away from me. He lit a cigarette. When I didn't speak, he turned on the stool and looked at me, a pinched light in his eyes.

  "So it's not noble stuff. If I'd had my choices, I'd have clicked off Raintree's switch with a slapjack. But I don't get a city paycheck anymore, Dave."

  "No, that's not what I was thinking about. You just tied the ribbon on the box, partner."

  "You mean the connection between Jewel Fluck, the AB maybe, and this racist politician? But what's Bobby Earl got to do with
your man in New Iberia?"

  "Weldon Sonnier is his brother-in-law."

  Five minutes later we were walking under a colonnade on our way back to Clete's office. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the air had become close with the smell of rain and the ripe fruit that was stacked in boxes on the sidewalk.

  "What are you going to do?" Clete said. His face was heated from our pace.

  "Head back to New Iberia and check out this guy Raintree."

  "You think that's the way we ought to do it?"

  I looked at him.

  "Leave that procedure dogshit to the paper shufflers," he said.

  "Clete, I don't think the word 'we' figures into the equation here."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  "You got a lot of help from the guys at the First, did you? You got a lot of backup when those three gumballs were trying to paint the furniture with your brains?"

  We turned up Toulouse toward Bourbon. He stopped in front of a cigar and news stand. A black man was shining the shoes of a man who sat in an elevated chair. Clete touched me on the jacket lapel with his finger.

  "I won't tell you what to do," he said. "But when they try to kill you, it gets personal. Then you play it only one way. You go into the lion's den and you spit in the lion's mouth."

  "I don't have any authority here."

  "That's right. So they won't be expecting us. Fuck, mon, let's give them a daytime nightmare." He stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and grinned. "Come on, think about it. Is there anything so fine as making the lowlifes wish they were still a dirty thought in their parents' mind?"

  He snapped his fingers and rhythmically clicked his fists and palms together. His green eyes were dancing with light and expectation.

  If you grew up in the Deep South, you're probably fond, as I am, of recalling the summertime barbecues and fish fries, the smoke drifting in the oak trees, the high school dances under a pavilion that was strung with Japanese lanterns, the innocent lust we discovered in convertibles by shadowed lakes groaning with bullfrogs, and the sense that the season was eternal, that the world was a quiet and gentle place, that life was a party to be enjoyed with the same pleasure and certainty as the evening breeze that always carried with it the smell of lilac and magnolia and watermelons in a distant field.

  But there is another memory, too: the boys who went nigger-knocking in the little black community of Sunset, who shot people of color with BB guns and marbles fired from slingshots, who threw M-80s onto the galleries of their pitiful homes. Usually these boys had burr haircuts, ugly ears, half-moons of dirt under their fingernails. They lived in an area of town with unpaved streets, garbage in the backyards, ditches full of mosquitoes and water moccasins from the coulee. Each morning they got up with their loss, their knowledge of who they were, and went to war with the rest of the world.

  When we meet the adult bigot, the Klansman, the antiSemite, we assume that he was bred in that same wretched place. Sometimes that's a correct conclusion. Oftentimes it's not.

  "Did this guy grow up in a shithole or something?" Clete said.

  We were parked in my truck across from Bobby Earl's home out by Lake Pontchartrain.

  "I heard his father owned a candy company in Baton Rouge," I said.

  "Maybe he was an abused fetus." He blew cigarette smoke out the window and looked at the piked fence, the blue-green lawn and twirling sprinklers, the live oaks that made a canopy over the long white driveway. "There must be big bucks in sticking it to the coloreds these days. I bet you could park six cars on his porch." He looked at his watch. The sky was gray over the lake, and the waves were capping in the wind. "Let's give it another half hour, then I'll treat you to some rice and red beans at Fat Albert's."

  "I'd better head back pretty soon, Clete."

  He formed a pocket of air in one jaw.

  "You always believed in prayer, Streak," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "Don't you AA guys call it 'turning it over'? Maybe it's time to do that. Worrying about Bootsie and what you can't change is putting boards in your head."

  "It sure is."

  "So?"

  "What?"

  "Why set yourself up for a lot of grief?" He was looking straight ahead now, his porkpie hat resting on his brow. "I know you, noble mon. I know the thoughts you're going to have before you have them. Turn the dials on yourself long enough, tamp them down till you got all the gears shearing off against each other, and pretty soon the old life looks pretty good again."

  "That's not the way it is this time."

  "Yeah, probably not. I shouldn't be handing out advice, anyway. When I started drinking my breakfast there for a while, I got sent by the captain to this shrink who was on lend-lease from the psychology department at Tulane. So I told him a few stories, stuff that I thought was pretty ordinary-race beefs when I was growing up in the Irish Channel, a hooker who dosed me while I was married, the time you and I smoked that greaseball dope dealer and his bodyguard in the back of their Cadillac-and I thought the guy was going to throw up in his wastebasket. I always heard these guys could take it. I felt like a freak. I ain't kidding you, the guy was trembling. I offered to buy him a drink and he got mad."

  I couldn't help laughing.

  "That's it, mon. Lighten up," he said. "Nothing rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. And my, my, what do we have here?" He adjusted the outside mirror with his hand.

  "Yes indeedy, it's the All-American peckerwood. You know this guy's got broads all over New Orleans? That's right, they really dig his rebop. I've got to learn his technique. Come on, fire it up, Streak."

  I turned the ignition and followed the white, chauffeurdriven Chrysler toward the entrance.

  "I'm out of my jurisdiction, Clete," I said. "No Wyatt Earp stuff. We don't bruise the fruit. Right? Agreed?"

  "Sure. We're just out here to visit. Talk some trash, maybe drink some mash. Get some political tips. Step on it, mon." His arm was pressed flat against the side of the truck door, his face bright, like a man anticipating a carnival ride.

  The Chrysler drove through the gate and on up the drive toward the white stucco, blue-tiled home with the sweeping porch and an adjacent swimming pool that was bordered with banana and lime trees and flaring gas torches. A man in pressed black pants and shined shoes, white shirt and black tie, with oiled red hair combed straight back on his head, swung the gate closed and walked away as though we were not there.

  Clete got out of the truck and walked to the gate.

  "Hey, bubba, does it look like we're from Fuller Brush?" he said.

  "What?" the man said.

  "We're here to see Bobby Earl. Open up."

  "He's got dinner guests. Who are you?"

  "Who am I?" Clete said, smiling, pointing at his chest with his thumb. "Good question, good question. You see this badge? Dave, do you know who we're talking to here?"

  He folded his private investigator's badge and replaced it in his coat pocket when the man reached for it.

  "I bet you didn't think I recognized you, did you?" Clete said. "Gomez, right? You were a middleweight. Lefty Felix Gomez. I saw you fight Irish Jerry Wallace over in Gretna. You knocked his mouthpiece into the third row."

  The gateman nodded, his face unimpressed. "Mr. Earl don't want to be bothered by anybody tonight," he said.

  "That badge you got. Pawnshop windows are full of them."

  "Sharp eye," Clete said, his mouth still grinning. "I remember another story about you. You beat up a kid in a filling station. A high school kid. You fractured his skull."

  "I told you what Mr. Earl said. You can come back tomorrow, or you can write him care of the state legislature. That's where he works."

  "Nice tie," Clete said, reached through the gate, knotted the man's necktie in his fist, and jerked his face tightly against the bars. "You've got a serious problem, Lefty. You're hard of hearing. Now, you get on that box and tell Mr. Earl that Cletus Purcel and Detective Dave Robicheaux are here to
see him. Is my signal getting through to you? Are we big-picture clear on this?"

  "Let him go, Clete," I said.

  A tall, good-looking man with angular shoulders in a striped, gray double-breasted suit, his silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest, walked down the drive toward us.

  "Sure," Clete said, and released the gateman, whose face had gone livid with anger except for the two diagonal lines where the flesh had been pressed into the iron bars of the gate.

  "What's the trouble, Felix?" the man in the suit said.

  "No trouble, Mr. Earl. We want a few minutes of your time. I don't think your man here was passing on the information very well," Clete said.

  "I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish sheriff's office," I said, and opened my badge in my palm.

  "I'm sorry for the late hour, but I'm in town only for today. I'd like to talk with you about Mr. Raintree."

  "Mr. Raintree? Yes. Well, I'm having someone for dinner, but-" His thick brown hair was styled and grew slightly over his collar, giving him a rugged and casual look. His skin was fine-grained, his jaws cleanly shaved, and his smile was easy and good-natured. The only strange characteristic about him was his right eye, whose pupil was larger than the one in his left eye, which gave it a monocular look.

  "Well, we can take a minute or two, can't we? Would you like to sit down by the pool? I'm not sure that I can help you, but I'll try."

  "I appreciate your time, sir," I said, and followed him up the drive.

  "Hey, Lefty, I forgot to tell you," Clete said, winking at the gateman. "When you were in the ring, I always heard they tried to match you up with cerebral-palsy victims."

  We sat on canvas deck chairs by a swimming pool that was shaped in the form of a cross. The underwater lights were on, and the turquoise surface glistened with a thin sheen of suntan oil. On the flagstone patio a linen-covered table was set with candelabra and service for two. Bobby Earl walked to the side door of his house and spoke to his chauffeur, who had changed into a white butler's jacket.

  Then a young blonde woman in a pink bathing suit, terrycloth robe, and high heels came out the door and began arguing with Bobby Earl. His back was to us, but I could see him raise his long, slender hands in a placating gesture.