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'Your buddy, bubble butt… Bimstine, Dave. He belongs to the Jewish Defense Organization. They don't like somebody, they rat-fuck him where he works.'
'I wouldn't know. I don't like the way you talk about him, though.'
'Excuse me?'
'You take cheap shots, Tommy.'
'Like maybe I'm un-American, an anti-Semite or something?'
'Read it like you want.'
'I was sixteen years old at Heartbreak Ridge. I love this country. You saying I don't—' He stopped and smiled. 'You and me might have to forget we're mature people.'
'You don't know anybody named Will Buchalter?'
'This the guy hurt your wife?'
I didn't answer and stared straight into his face. He set his sandwich on his plate, removed a wisp of lettuce from his lip, then took a sip of beer from his schooner and brought his eyes back to mine.
'What can I say? I'm fighting with cancer of the prostate,' he said. 'You want to know what's on my mind? Dying. You know what else is on my mind? Dying broke. I don't know any guy named Buchalter.'
'I'm sorry to hear about your health problem, Tommy.'
'Save it. That sweaty pile of gorilla shit you call a friend is trying to break me. We get casino gambling in New Orleans, he's gonna own it all. I got to take a piss. Which I do with my eyes closed because half the time there's blood in the bowl. You want a beer, they're in the cooler.'
He opened a small closet that had a toilet inside and, without closing the door, began urinating loudly into the water while he flexed his knees and passed gas like it was a visceral art form.
How do you read a man like Tommy Lonighan?
Heartbreak Ridge, Irish bigotry, right-wing patriotism, morbidity that he used like a weapon, speech and mood patterns that had the volatility of tinfoil baking in a microwave.
The day a person like Lonighan makes sense to you is probably the day you should seriously reexamine your relationship to the rest of the human gene pool.
And on that note I waved good-bye and left before he had finished shaking himself and thumbing his gray sweat trunks back over his genitalia.
I stopped by Clete's office on St. Ann to see if he had found out anything about the man who called himself Will Buchalter.
'If the guy's local, he's low-profile,' Clete said. 'Like below street level. I think I talked to every dirtbag and right-wing crazoid in town. Have you ever been to any of these survivalist shops? I think we ought to round up some of their clientele while there's still time.'
He started to take a cigarette out of a pack on his desk; instead, he put a mint on his tongue and smiled at me with his eyes.
'How about hookers?' I said. ,
'The ones I know say he doesn't sound like any of their Johns. I don't think he's from around here, Streak. A guy like this earns people's attention.'
'Thanks for trying, Clete.'
'Hang on. You've got two messages,' he said, taking his feet off his desk and looking at two memo slips by his telephone. 'That black sergeant, Ben Motley, you remember him, he always had his fly unzipped when he was in Vice, he wants you to call him about some dude who electrocuted himself in custody last night—'
'What?'
'Hang on, mon. I got a similar message from this character Reverend Oswald Flat. Isn't that the guy who was out at your bait shop? He's got a voice like somebody twanging on a bobby pin.'
'That's the guy.'
'Well, he called Bootsie and she told him to call here. NOPD picked up some wild man in the Garden District, can you dig this, a forty-year-old guy with tattoos on his head, wearing black leather in August. The autopsy showed he'd been shooting up with speed and paint thinner. How about that for a new combo?'
'What's the connection?'
