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"There he goes! Hit it!" I said.
Julio Segura's lavender Cadillac had just bounced out through his front gate onto the street. A dwarf was driving, and a blond woman sat in the front passenger's seat. Segura and another man were in back. Cletus floored the accelerator until we were abreast of them. The dwarf's face was frightened behind the glass, and he kept driving.
I held my badge out at him. He put his foot on the brake, both of his hands on the steering wheel, his chin pointed upward under his purple chauffeur's cap, and scraped the front tire in a long black line against the curb.
"How do you want to play it?" Clete asked before we got out of the car.
"We run up the black flag," I said.
Clete had stopped our own car in front of the Cadillac, and we walked back on opposite sides of it. I tapped on the passenger's window and on Segura's back window for them to roll down the glass. Later I was to go over this scene again and again in my mind, as well as the careless remark I'd made to Clete about the black flag, and wonder at how differently that afternoon might have turned out if I had approached the driver's side of the Cadillac or if I had kept my own counsel.
Clete reached down into the ignition, pulled the keys, and threw them into a hedge. The dwarf was petrified with fear. His little hands gripped the wheel and his jug head swiveled back and forth between Clete and the back seat.
"You don't have a blowgun hidden in your shorts, do you?" Clete said to him, then sniffed the air inside the Cadillac. "My, my, what is that aroma I smell? Colombian coffee? Or maybe we've been toking on a little muta on our way to the golf course?"
The air was heavy with the smell of marijuana. The blond woman's face looked sick. I saw the cigarette lighter from the dash lying on the floor, and I suspected she'd been snorting the roach off the lighter and had eaten it when we'd pulled them over. She had a nice figure and was dressed in white shorts and heels and a low blouse, but her hair was lacquered with so much hair spray that it looked like wire, and her face was layered with cosmetics to cover the deep pockmarks in her complexion.
I opened the door for her. "Walk on back home," I said.
"They lock the gate," she said.
"Then do the best thing you've done in years and keep on walking," I said.
"I don't know what to do, Julio," she said to the backseat.
"Do what I tell you, hon. Your Latino gumball is going to take a big fall today," I said.
Her eyes shifted nervously and she bit her lips, then she picked up her purse, eased past me, and clicked hurriedly down the sidewalk.
I leaned down in Segura's window. He and the gatekeeper whom Clete had hit in the stomach the other day sat behind a fold-out bar with vodka drinks in their hands. Rubber bands held the napkins around the drink glasses. Segura wore yellow golf slacks, polished brown loafers, and a flowered white shirt unbuttoned to his stomach. His peculiar triangular face, with the tiny balls of purple skin in the furrows of his forehead, looked up at me in the slanting sunlight.
"What the fuck you think you're doing now, Robicheaux?" he asked.
"Teaching you what a real bad day can be," I said.
"What do you want? Some kind of action? A piece of something downtown?"
"You're going to give me Philip Murphy, Bobby Joe Starkweather, and the little Israeli."
"I don't know none of these people. You keep coming around my house talking about things I don't know nothing about."
"Ole Streak's in a bad mood today, Julio," Clete said. "Your friends messed it up the other night and did some real bad things. They're not around now, but you are. You and Paco the barfer here." He blew his cigarette smoke into the gatekeeper's face.
"You trying to squeeze me? Okay, I'm a realist. I got business arrangements with policemen," Segura said.
"You don't fly this time, Julio," I said. "All the doors are closed. It's just me and you."
"Call Wineburger," he said to the gatekeeper.
The other man reached for the telephone that was in a mahogany box inset in the back of the front seat.
"You touch that telephone and I'll stuff it crossways down your throat," Clete said.
The man sat back in the deep leather of the seat, his face tight, his hands flat on his knees.
"You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants," Segura said.
"Try this, my friend," I said. "Lovelace Deshotels was a little black girl from the country who had big aspirations for herself and her family. She thought she'd made the big score, but you don't like broads that slop down your booze and throw up in your pool, so you eighty-sixed her back to the geek circuit. Except you had a badass black girl on your hands that wouldn't eighty-six. On top of it, she developed this fixation about elephants." I watched his face. It twitched like a rubber band. "So what does a macho guy like you do when one of his whores gets in his face? He has a couple of his lowlifes take her out on a boat and launch her into the next world with the same stuff she'd already sold her soul for.
