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'Expidee Chatlin.'
I pressed my fingers into my temples.
'I didn't have anybody else available,' the sheriff said. 'I don't think it would have come out any different, anyway, Dave. Your gal's mighty slick.'
'I'd really appreciate your not calling her my gal or girlfriend.'
'Any way you cut it, she's one smart broad and she took us over the hurdles. That's just the way it plays out sometimes.'
'Too often.'
'Sir?'
I tried to concentrate on my legal pad.
'You and Bootsie have had a bad time. I don't think you should blame others for it, though,' he said.
'That wasn't my intention, Sheriff.' I could hear his leather gunbelt creak. I wrote the words William B. Schwert on the pad. He started to walk out of the room, then stopped.
'What've you got there, exactly?' he said.
'A Toronto cop wrote something on a napkin before he was found hanging by his ankles with a nine-millimeter round through his eye.' I glanced back at my notes. '"I know he's out there now, flying in the howling storm."'
'So?'
'It's from a poem by William Blake. It's about evil. As I remember it, it goes "O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm.
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy."'
'No, you misunderstood me, Dave. I was looking at the name you just wrote down there… Schwert. You never took any German at school?'
'No.'
'It means "sword," podna.'
He drank from his coffee cup and tapped me lightly on the shoulder with the flat of his fist.
But before I would get anything back from the FBI or the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., Clete Purcel would write history of the New Orleans mob Purcel.
a new chapter in the and outdo even Clete Purcel.
* * *
chapter twenty-five
Clete had been eating breakfast in Igor's on St. Charles, his porkpie hat tipped down over one eye, when two of Max Calucci's bodyguards came in and sat at the table next to him. They were in a good mood, expansive, joking with the waitress, relaxed in Clete's presence. One of them accidentally knocked his chair into Clete's.
