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"Oh, your ass," he said, and caught up with me on the sidewalk, pulling on his sports coat, a powdered beignet in his mouth.
The pool room was six blocks from the Desire welfare project. The windows were barred, the walls built of cinder blocks and scrolled with spray-painted graffiti. I parked by the curb and stepped up on the sidewalk, unconsciously looked up and down the street.
"We're way up the Mekong, Dave. Hang your buzzer out," Clete said.
I took out my badge holder and hooked it through the front
of my belt, listened to somebody shatter a tight rack and slam the cue stick down on the table's edge, then walked through the entrance into the darkness inside.
The low ceiling seemed to crush down on the pool shooters like a fist. The bar and the pool tables ran the length of the building, a tin-hooded lamp creating a pyramid of smoky light over each felt rectangle. No one looked directly at us; instead, our presence was noted almost by osmosis, the way schooled fish register and adjust to the proximity of a predator, except for one man, who came out of the rest room raking at his hair with a steel comb, glanced toward the front, then slammed out of a firedoor.
Jimmy Ray Dixon was at a card table in back, by himself, a ledger book, calculator, a filter-tipped cigar inside an ashtray, and a stack of receipts in front of him. He wore a blue suit and starched pink shirt with a high collar, a brown knit tie and gold tie pin with a red stone in it.
"I seen you on TV, still frontin' points for the man killed my brother," he said, without looking up from his work. He picked up a receipt with his steel hook and set it down again.
"I need your help," I said. I waited but he went on with his work. "Sir?" I said.
"What?"
"Can we sit down?"
"Do what you want, man."
Clete went to the bar and got a shot and a beer, then twisted a chair around and sat down next to me.
"Somebody put a hit on Mingo Bloomberg," I said.
"I heard he hung himself from a water pipe in y'all's jail," Jimmy Ray said.
"Word gets around fast."
"A dude like that catch the bus, people have parades."
"He told me a black guy out of Miami had a contract on him. He said a guy who looks like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit."
Clete scraped a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the next table, his eyes drifting down the bar.
"Maybe you ought to give some thought to where you're at," Jimmy Ray said.
"You heard about a mechanic out of Miami?" I said.
"I tell you how I read this sit'ation. You put a snitch jacket on a guy and jammed him up so he didn't have no place to run. So maybe somebody's conscience bothering him, know what I mean?" he said.
"I think the same hitter popped Lonnie Felton's scriptwriter."
"Could be. But ain't my bidness."
"What is your business?"
"Look, man, this is what it is. A smart man got his finger in lots of pies. Don't mean none of them bad. 'Cause this guy's a brother, you ax me if I know him. I don't like to give you a short answer, but you got a problem with the way you think. It ain't much different than that cracker up at Angola."
Clete leaned forward in his chair, cracked the shell off a peanut, and threw the peanut in his mouth.
"You still pimp, Jimmy Ray?" he asked, his eyes looking at nothing.
"You starting to burn your ticket, Chuck."
"I count eight bail skips in here. I count three who aren't paying the vig to the Shylock who lent them the bail. The guy who went out the door with his hair on fire snuffed one of Dock Green's hookers in Algiers," Clete said.
