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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 funny 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 pumpkin. 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.”
