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"Be my guest."
"A conversation with you is a head-numbing experience. I don't think any ordinary person is ready for it."
"Let me try to put it in simple words that you can understand," he said. "You may not know it, but I try to be a fair man. That means I don't like somebody else getting a board kicked up his ass on my account. I'm talking about you. Your own people are dumping on you because they think you're going to chase some big money out of town. I leave places or I stay in places because I want to. Somebody gets in my face, I deal with it, personal. You ask anybody in the industry. I don't rat-fuck people behind their back."
I set down my coffee cup, folded the newspaper on the step, and walked out into the trees toward his parked automobile. I waited for him to follow me.
"Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?" I said.
"No, of course not. I'm just out here to give you my personal profile. Listen to me, I'm going to finish this picture, then I'm never coming back to this state. In fact, I'm not even going to fly over it. But in the meantime no more of my people are going to the hospital."
"What?"
"Good, the flashbulb went off."
"What happened?" I said.
"Last night we'd wrapped it up and everybody had headed home. Except Elrod and this kid who does some stunt work got loaded and Elrod decides he's going to 'front Julie Balboni. He picks up a Coke bottle and starts banging on Julie's trailer with it. Julie opens the door in his jockey undershorts, and there's a twenty-year-old local broad trying to put on her clothes behind him. So Elrod calls him a coward and a dago bucket of shit and tells him he can fix him up in L.A. with Charlie Manson's chippies, like they got hair under their arms and none on their heads and they're more Julie's speed. Then El tells him that Julie had better not cause his buddy Robicheaux any more grief or El's going to punch his ticket for him, and if he finds out Julie murdered Kelly he's going to do it anyway, big time, with a shotgun right up Balboni's cheeks.
"I don't know what Balboni was doing with the broad, but he had some handcuffs. He walked outside, clamped one on El's wrist, the other on a light pole, and said, 'You're a lucky man, Elrod. You're a valuable piece of fruit. But your friend there, he don't have any luck at all.' Then he stomped the shit out of the stunt kid. 'Stomped' is the word, Mr. Robicheaux, I mean with his feet. He busted that kid's nose, stove in his ribs, and ripped his ear loose from his head."
"Why didn't you stop it?"
"I wasn't there. I got all this from the kid a
t the hospital. That's why I didn't get any sleep last night."
"Is the kid pressing charges?"
"Get real. He was on a flight back to Los Angeles this morning with enough dope in him to tranquilize a rhinoceros."
"What do you want with me?"
"I want you to take care of Elrod. I don't want him hurt."
"Tell me the truth. Do you have any concerns at all except making your pictures?"
"Yeah, human beings. If you don't accept that, I say fuck you."
His tense, protruding eyes reminded me of hard-boiled eggs. I looked away from him, felt my palm close and unclose against my trousers. The sunlight on the bayou was like a yellow flare burning under the water.
"I'm not in the baby-sitting business, Mr. Goldman," I said. "My advice is that you tell all this to the sheriff's department. Right now I'm still suspended. I'm going back and finish my coffee now. We'll see you around."
"It's Dogpatch. I'm in a cartoon. I talk, nobody hears me." He tapped himself on the cheek. "Maybe I'm dead and this is hell."
"What else do you want to say?" I heard the heat rising in my own voice.
"You accuse me of not having any humanity. Then I tell you Elrod's striking matches on Balboni's balls on your account and you blow me off. You want Balboni to put his foot through El's face?"
"He's your business partner. You brought him here. You didn't worry about the origins of his money till you—"
"That's all true. The question is what do we do now?"
"We?"
"Right. I'm getting through. Everybody around here doesn't have meatloaf for brains after all."
"There's no we in this. I'll talk to Elrod, I'll take him to AA meetings, but he's not my charge."
