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“I don’t know where she is. He meets her in different bars, then they go to a motel.”
“We’ll give it a little while. Maybe he’ll head over to Algiers later.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. His eyes moved over the rolling fairways and oak trees, the parking lot in front of the main building, the sailboats rising and falling in their slips. “There’s two or three exits to this place. We’d better park inside. I’m going to have a talk with Nig later about credibility. That’s the problem with this PI stuff, you’ve got about the same clout as the lowlifes. I always feel like I’m picking up table scraps.”
We drove through the gate and parked at the back of the lot, where we could see the Chrysler two rows away, under a sodium lamp. Clete reached into the back seat for his Styrofoam cooler, pulled out two fried-oyster poor-boy sandwiches, a can of Jax for himself, and a Dr Pepper for me. He kept brushing crumbs off his shirtfront while he ate. When he finished a beer he crushed the can in his huge hand, threw it out onto the parking lot, and snapped open another one. He squinted one eye at me.
“Dave, have you got something else on the agenda?” he said.
“Not really.”
“You’re not going to see Joey Meatballs again and forget to invite your old partner to the party, are you?”
“Gouza doesn’t rattle. We’re going to have to take down somebody around him.”
“It’s been tried before. They’re usually a lot more afraid of Joey than they are of us. I heard he busted out a snitch’s teeth in Angola with a ballpeen hammer. Every punk and addict and pervert in New Orleans knows that story, too.”
“How heavy do you figure he’s into the crack trade?”
“He’s not. It’s pieced off too many times before it gets to the projects. Gouza’s on the other end. Big shipments, pure stuff, out of Florida or South America. I hear his people distribute to maybe four or five guys in Orleans Parish, they make their profit on quantity, then they’re out of the chain with minimum risk. Even the greaseballs won’t go into the welfare projects. I had to go after a jumper for Nig at the St. Thomas. Two kids on the roof filled up a thirty-gallon garbage can with water and dropped it on me, bottom end down. It missed me by a foot and flattened a kid’s tricycle like a half-dollar. . . . But you didn’t really answer my question, noble mon. I think you’ve got something else on the dance card and you’re not cutting ole Cletus in on it.”
“This case has been all dead ends, Clete. When I learn something, I’ll tell you. My big problem is the Sonniers. I feel like locking them all up as material witnesses.”
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea. Taking showers with child molesters and mainline bone smokers helps get your perspective clear sometimes.”
“I couldn’t make it stick. They weren’t actually witness to anything.”
“Then let them live with their own shit.”
“I’m still left with a dead cop.”
We sat for a long time in the rain. The band of cobalt light on the horizon gradually faded under the rim of storm clouds, and the lake grew dark and then glazed with the yellow reflection of ballroom lights in the club. I could taste salt in the wind. I pulled my rainhat down over my eyes and fell asleep.
I see Bootsie when she’s nineteen, her hair as bright as copper on the pillow, her nude body as pink and soft as a newly opened rose. I put my head between her young breasts.
When I awoke the rain had stopped completely, the moon had broken through a rip in the clouds over the lake, and Clete was not in the car. I could hear orchestra music from the ballroom. Then I saw him, in silhouette, his wide back framed in the opened driver’s door of Bobby Earl’s Chrysler, his elbows cocked, both his arms pointed down toward his loins. He rotated his head on his neck as though he were standing indifferently at a public urinal. Even at that distance I could see the spray splashing on the dashboard, the steering wheel, the leather seats. Clete shook himself, flexed his knees, and zipped his fly. He cupped his Zippo in his hands, lit a cigarette, and puffed it in the corner of his mouth as he walked back toward the car and squinted up approvingly at the clearing sky overhead.
“I don’t believe it.”
“You got to let a guy like Bobby know you’re around,” he said, slamming the door behind him. “Ah, lookie there, our man scored after all. I think he’s one of these guys who plans on marrying up and screwing down.”
Bobby Earl walked across the parking lot in a white suit, charcoal shirt, and white-and-black striped tie. A red-headed woman in a sequined evening gown held on to his arm and tried to step across the puddles in her high heels. Both she and Bobby Earl balanced champagne glasses gingerly in their hands. The woman was laughing uncontrollably at something Bobby Earl was telling her.
Earl opened the passenger door for her, then got behind the wheel. The light from the sodium lamp shone through his front window, and I saw his silhouette freeze, then his shoulders stiffen, as though he had just become aware that a geological fissure had opened up below his automobile. Then he got out of the car, staring incredulously at his upturned palms, the wet streaks in his suit, the damp imprints of his shoes.
Clete started the engine, and the rusted-out muffler thundered off the asphalt and reverberated between the rows of cars. He turned out into the aisle and drove slowly past the Chrysler, the engine and frame clanking like broken glass.
“What’s happenin’, Bob?” he asked, then flipped his cigarette in a high, sparking arc, punched in a rock tape, and gave Bobby Earl the thumbs-up sign.
Bobby Earl’s face slipped by the window like an outraged balloon. The woman in the sequined evening gown walked hurriedly back toward the clubhouse, her spiked heels clicking across the puddles.
ALL MEN HAVE a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident. Eddy Raintree’s votive attempt at metaphysics was just a little more eccentric than most. Both the gunbull in Angola and the biker girl in Algiers had said that Raintree was wired into astronomy and weirdness. In New Orleans, if your interest ran to UFOs (called “ufology” by enthusiasts), Island voodoo, witchcraft, teleportation through the third eye in your forehead, palm reading, the study of ectoplasm, the theory that Atlanteans are living among us in another dimension, and herbal cures for everything from brain cancer to impacted wisdom teeth, you eventually went to Tante Majorie’s occult bookstore on Royal Street in the Quarter.
Tante Majorie was big all over and so black that her skin had a purple sheen to it. She streaked her high cheekbones with rouge and wore gold granny glasses, and her hair, which was pulled back tightly in a bun, had grayed so that it looked like dull gunmetal. She lived over her shop with another lesbian, an elderly white woman, and fifteen cats who sat on the furniture, the bookshelves, and the ancient radiator, and tracked soiled cat litter throughout the apartment.
She served tea on a silver service, then studied the photo of Eddy Raintree. Her French doors were open on the balcony, and I could hear the night noise from the street. I had known her almost twenty years and had never been able to teach her my correct name.
“You say he got a tiger on his arm?” she asked.
