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But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth.
The biscuit-colored stucco walls inside Clete's office were decorated with bullfight posters, leather wine bags, banderillas that he had brought back from his vacation in Mexico City. Through the back window I could see the small flagstone patio where he kept his dumbbells and the exercise bench that he used unsuccessfully every day to keep his weight and blood pressure down. Next to it was a dry stone well impacted with dirt and untrimmed banana trees.
He sat behind his desk in his Budweiser shorts, a yellow tank top, and porkpie hat. His blue-black .38 police special hung in a nylon holster from a coatrack in the corner. He pried the cap off a bottle of Dixie beer with his pocketknife, let the foam boil over the neck onto the rug, kicked off his flip-flops, and put his bare feet on top of the desk.
'You trying to leave the dock early today?' I said.
'Hey, I was in the tank all night. You ought to check that scene out, mon. Two-thirds of the people in there are honest-to-God crazoids. I'm talking about guys eating their grits with their hands. It's fucking pitiful.'
He pushed at a scrap of memo paper by his telephone.
'I was a little bothered by something Nate Baxter said last night,' I said.
'Oh yeah?'
'This vigilante stuff. He thinks you might be the man.'
He drank out of his beer and smiled at me, his eyes filled with a merry light.
'You think I might actually have that kind of potential?' he said.
'People have said worse things about both of us.'
'The Lone Ranger was a radio show, mon. I don't believe there's any vigilante. I think we're talking about massive wishful thinking. These hits are ju
st business as usual in the city. We've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.' s now.'
'Five or six of them have been blacks in the projects.'
'They were all dealers.'
'That's the point,' I said.
'Dave, I've run down bond jumpers in both the Iberville and Desire projects. Life in there is about as important as water breaking out the bottom of a paper bag. The city's going to hell, mon. That's the way it is. If somebody's out there taking names in a serious way, I say more power to them. But I don't think that's the case, and anyway it's not me.'
He took a long drink from the beer. The inside of the bottle was filled with amber light. Moisture slid down the neck over the green-and-gold label.
'I'm sorry. You want me to send out for a Dr Pepper or some coffee?' he asked.
'No, I've got to be going. I had to bring my boat up from New Iberia for some work. It'll be ready about noon.'
He picked up the slip of memo paper by his phone and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.
'I ought to save you a headache and throw this away,' he said. But he flipped it across the desk blotter at me.
'What is it?'
'That black broad, the sergeant who was in front of Calucci's, called this morning. She didn't know how else to get ahold of you. My advice is that you pitch that telephone number in the trash and go back to New Iberia. Forget New Orleans. The whole place is just waiting for a hydrogen bomb.'
'What's the deal?'
'She's a hard-nosed black broad named Lucinda Bergeron from the projects who doesn't take dog shit from white male cops. That's the deal.'
'So?'
'Last night she evidently got in Nate Baxter's face. So today he's trying to kick a two-by-four up her ass. He wrote her up for insubordination. He says she cussed him out. She says she's innocent and you can back her up.'
'She didn't cuss him out while I was there. In fact, she really kept her Kool-Aid.'
