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“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 butt-wipes 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 three 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 ag
ain,” he said.
I went over all the details of Garrett’s murder, the shoot-out, the description of the 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 he 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.”
