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He shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms up.
“Who am I to judge?” he said. “But go out to the welfare projects and see who’s running the action. They’re all colored kids. They scrape out crack pipes, they call it bazooka or something, and sell it for a buck a hit. Nobody who could think his way out of a wet paper bag is gonna try to compete with that.”
“Maybe my information isn’t very good. Or maybe I’m a little bit out of touch. But it’s my understanding that you’ve got connections with Bobby Earl, that Jack Gates is a button man for you.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. He took the matchstick out of his mouth and dropped it in the waste can.
“I’ve tried to be polite,” he said. “You’re from out of town, you had some questions, I tried to answer them. You think maybe you’re abusing the situation here?”
“I came here to pass on a couple of observations, Joey. When you try to get a cop on a pad and you don’t know anything about him, get somebody to lend him money, don’t leave it in his mailbox.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The two thousand is in the Iberia Parish sheriff’s desk drawer. At the end of the year it’ll probably be donated to the city park program.”
He was grinning again.
“You’re saying I tried to bribe you? You drove all the way over here to tell me somebody’s two thou is wasted on you? That’s the big message?”
“Read it like you want.”
“It’s been a lot of fun talking to you. Hey, I didn’t tell you I own a couple of goony golf courses. You like goony golf? It’s catching on here in New Orleans. Hey, Louis, give him a couple of tickets.”
The man with the cigar and green visor was grinning broadly, nodding his head up and down. He took a thick pack of tickets from his shirt pocket, popped two out from under the rubber band, and placed them on the desk in front of me.
Joey Gouza made a pyramid out of his hands and tapped the ends of his fingers together.
“I heard you were an intelligent man, Joey. But it’s my opinion you’re a stupid shit,” I said.
His eyes went flat, and his face glazed over.
“You fucked with Cletus Purcel. That’s probably the worst mistake you ever made in your insignificant life,” I said. “If you don’t believe me, check out what happened to Julio Garcia and his bodyguard a few years back. I think they wished they had stayed in Managua and taken their chances with the Sandinistas.”
“That’s supposed to make me rattle? You come in here like you fell out of a dirty-clothes bag, making noise like you got gas or something, and I’m supposed to rattle?” He pointed into his breastbone with four stiff fingers. “You think I give a fuck about what some pissant PI’s gonna do? Tell me serious, I’m supposed to get on the rag because he whacked out a spick nobody in New Orleans would spit on?”
“Clete didn’t kill Garcia. His partner did.”
I saw the recognition grow in his eyes.
“Tell those three clowns they’re going down for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy,” I said. “Stay out of Iberia Parish. Stay away from Purcel. If you fall again, Joey, I’m going to make sure you go down for the bitch. Four-time loser, mandatory life.”
I flipped the goony golf passes on his shirt front. The man in the green v
isor sat absolutely still with his cigar dead in his mouth.
CHAPTER 7
WHEN I GOT BACK to New Iberia I showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes and ate lunch with Bootsie in the backyard. I should have felt good about the day; it wasn’t hot, like yesterday, the trees were loud with birds, the wind smelled of watermelons, the roses in my garden were as big as fists. But my eye registered all the wrong things: a fire burning in the middle of the marsh, where there should have been none; buzzards humped over a dead rabbit in the field, their beaks hooked and yellow and busy with their work; a little boy with an air rifle on the bank of the bayou, taking careful aim at a robin in an oak tree.
Why? Because we were on our way back to the specialist in Lafayette. The treatment of lupus, in our case, had not been a matter of finding the right medication but the right balance. Bootsie needed dosages of corticosteroid to control the disease that fed at her connective tissue, but the wrong dosage resulted in what is called steroid psychosis. For us her treatment had been like trying to spell a word correctly by repeatedly dipping a spoon into alphabet soup.
There were times I felt angry at her, too. She was supposed to avoid the sun, but I often came home from work and found her weeding the flower beds in shorts and a halter. When we went out on the salt to seine for shrimp, she would break her promise and not only leave the cabin but strip nude, dive off the gunnel, and swim toward a distant sandbar, until she was a small speck and I would have to go after her.
We got back from Lafayette at 4 P.M. with a half-dozen new prescriptions in her purse. I sat listlessly on the front porch and stared at the smoke still rising into the sky from the cypress trees burning in the marsh. Why had no one put it out, I thought.
“What’s wrong, Dave?” Alafair said.
“Nothing, little guy. How you doing?” I put my arm around her small waist and pulled her against me. She had been riding her horse, and I could smell the sun in her hair and horse sweat in her clothes.
