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Clete came out of the side of the house with a highball glass in his hand and sat down heavily in a beach chair next to me.
"You ought to see the can," he said. "It looks like a pink whorehouse. Erotic art all over the wallpaper, a toilet seat inlaid with silver dollars. The colored guy went in after me and started cleaning the toilet with a brush. Should I take that personally?"
"Probably."
"Thanks."
The man on the tennis court turned off the ball machine and walked across the close-clipped lawn toward us, zipping up the case on his racket. He was truly a strange-looking man. His head was long and narrow, his ears tiny and pressed tightly against the scalp as though part of them had been surgically pared away. His hair grew in gray and black ringlets that were tapered on the back of his neck like the flange of a helmet. His smile exposed his long white teeth, and his chest hair was black and slick with perspiration.
"Tony Cardo," he said, his hand outstretched like a greeter's in a restaurant.
"It's nice to see you, Tony," I said. "This is a friend of mine, Clete Purcel."
"What's happening, Tony?" Clete said, rising up enough from the beach chair to shake hands.
"I remember you from somewhere," Cardo said to him.
"You drink vodka Collins," Clete said.
Cardo pursed his lips together in the shape of a tiny butterfly.
"You're a bartender in the Quarter," he said.
"I own the bar."
"You were in the corps."
"That's right."
"We had some words or something."
"No, I don't have words with people."
"Yeah, we did. Something about the corps. No, something about 'the crotch,' right?"
"You got me. I don't argue with people."
"Who's arguing? But you said something, almost like getting in a guy's face. Then you walked away. I was buying a drink for the gunny."
Clete shrugged his shoulders.
"It must be somebody else. I just remember you drink vodka Collins, that's all," he said.
"Hey, don't sweat it. You're a diplomat. That's good. It means you're a good businessman."
"I got no beef with anybody, Tony."
"I like that," Cardo said.
"Clete was my Homicide partner a few years ago," I said. I watched Cardo's face.
"What made you change careers?" His eyes smiled as though he were looking at a private conclusion inside himself. The black houseman brought out a tray with a Collins and a bowl of chilled shrimp on it and set it on a circular redwood table next to Cardo's chair.
"A little trouble in the department, nothing big," Clete said. "I went down to the tropics for a while to get my priorities straight. Then I got into casino security out in Vegas and Tahoe for Sally Dio."
"Yeah, Sally Dee out of Galveston," Cardo said. "His plane smacked into a mountain out in Montana or somewhere."
"Yeah, it was too bad. He was a great guy to work for," Clete said.
