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“They don’t clang any bells for me.”
I had given him my business card. His cup had already made a half-moon coffee print on it.
“But you’ll rack your memory, won’t you?” I said.
“What?”
“If I wanted to have somebody whacked out in New Orleans, who would I have to see?”
His face began to grow attentive with the suggestion of the insult.
“What are you getting at?” he asked.
“There are at least four guys in the Quarter who can arrange a contract hit for five hundred dollars. Do you know who they are?”
“I don’t care for your tone.”
“Maybe it’s just one of those off days. Thanks for the use of your mug books. I’d appreciate your keeping my card in your desk in case you need to call me.”
I drove on over to Decatur by the river and parked my truck down the street from Jackson Square and walked into the French Quarter. The narrow streets were still cool with morning shadow, and I could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the cafés, strawberries and plums from the crates set out on the sidewalks in front of small grocery stores, the dank, cool odor of old brick in the courtyards. It had rained just before dawn, and water leaked out of the green window shutters on the pastel sides of the buildings and dripped from the rows of potted plants on the balconies or hanging from the ironwork.
I walked down St. Ann in the shadow of the cathedral to a one-story stucco building with a piked gate and a domed brick walkway that led to an office just off a flagstone courtyard. The courtyard was bordered with tight clumps of untrimmed banana trees. Painted on the frosted glass office window were the words CLETUS PURCEL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES.
He had been my partner in the First District and one of the best cops I ever knew. Among the lowlifes, the wiseguys, the psychopaths, even the contract hit men out of Houston and Miami, he’d had a reputation that was notorious even by the standards of the New Orleans Police Department. Hard-nosed, mainline recidivists who laughed at the threat of ten-year jolts in Angola would swallow with apprehension and reconsider their point of view when they were told that Clete had taken an interest in their situations. Once a recently discharged convict from Parchman, a man who had shot out his wife’s eye with a BB gun and whom I busted in a hot-pillow joint on Airline Highway, said he was coming back to New Orleans to cool out the cop who was responsible for his grief. Clete met him at the Greyhound depot, walked him into the restroom, and poured a container of liquid soap down his mouth. We never heard from him again.
But his marriage went bad, and eventually he got into trouble with whiskey, prostitutes, and shylocks, and a teaspoon at a time he began to serve the forces and people he had hated all his life. Finally he took ten thousand dollars to get rid of a witness in a federal investigation and barely made the flight to Guatemala, three minutes before his fellow detectives were racing down the concourse behind him with a murder warrant. Later the murder charge was dropped and he became head of security at two casinos in Las Vegas and Reno and the bodyguard of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio. I had marked Clete off as a turncoat, a pitiful facsimile of the friend I’d once had, but I came to learn that his loyalty and courage went far deeper into his character than his personal problems. His resignation from the mob came in the form of Sally Dio’s private plane exploding all over a mountaintop in western Montana. Sally Dio and his entourage had to be combed out of the ponderosa trees with garden rakes. The National Transportation Safety Board said they suspected that someone had put sand in the fuel tanks.
“How’s it hanging, noble mon?” he said from behind his desk when I opened his office door.
He wore a candy-striped shirt that looked like it was about to burst on his huge shoulders, a tie pulled loose at the throat, a blue-black .38 revolver in a nylon shoulder holster, and a powder-blue porkpie hat pushed down low on his forehead. His eyes were green and intelligent, his hair sandy, and his face always had a flush to it because of his weight and high blood pressure. A scar the texture and color of a bicycle patch ran down through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he’d been bashed with a length of pipe when he was a kid.
I had already called him and told him about my problems with the Sonnier investigation.
“How’d you make out down at the First?” he said.
“I didn’t recognize anyone in the mug books. I didn’t get any help from anyone, either. I got the feeling I was a tourist from the provinces.”
“Let’s face it, mon. They didn’t hold a going-away party when either one of us hung it up.”
“How do you like the PI business?” I sat down across from him in a straw and deer-hide swayback chair. The walls of his office were decorated with bullfight posters, wine bags, and festooned banderillas. Through the back window I could see the courtyard and Clete’s barbells and weight bench next to a stone well that leaked water at the top.
“It’s good,” he said. “Well, maybe the word’s easy. You don’t get rich at it, but the competition isn’t exactly the first team. You know, ex-cops who majored in stupid, redneck jocks from Mississippi who think the big score is working security at Walmart. I’m clearing around five hundred a week after the overhead. It beats running a nightclub for greaseballs, I guess.”
“Sounds all right.”
He took a cigarette out of his package of Camels and held it for a moment in his big hand, then he set it down on the desk blotter and put a stick of gum in his mouth. His eyes smiled at me while he chewed.
“The problem is that a lot of it’s a drag,” he said. “Discovery investigations for lawyers, stuff like that. It’s not like the old days in Homicide when we used to really make them wince. You remember when we—”
“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.
