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When he had finished eating and had drained the last of his beer, he started to get up from the stool and leave. But he paused, like a man who can’t make up his mind to get on the bus, then sat back down, his skin crawling with dried salt under his shirt. What was it he had to set straight? The lie that still hung in the air about his ex-wife? That was part of it. But the real problem was that Ritter could ridicule and sneer with impunity because he knew Clete was chained by denial to his past and would always be an object of contempt in the eyes of other cops.
“My ex left me because I was a drunk and I took juice and I popped a bucket of shit in Witness Protection,” Clete said. “She wasn’t a dyke, either. She just had the poor judgment to hang with your wife. The one who gave head to a couple of rookies at that party behind Mambo Joe’s.”
They caught him in the parking lot, as he was opening his car door, Ritter and one of the trappers and an unshaved man who wore canvas pants and rubber boots and firehouse suspenders on his bare torso.
The man in suspenders hit Clete in the back of the head with brass knuckles, then hooked him above the eye. As Clete bounced off the side of the Cadillac and crashed onto the shells, he saw the man in suspenders step away and Ritter take a long cylindrical object from him and pull a leather loop around his wrist.
“You think you’re still a cop because you throw pimps off a roof? In Camden guys who look like you drive Frito trucks. Here’s payback for that crack about my wife. How you like it, skell?” Ritter said.
16
“He used a baton on you?” I said.
“Mostly on the shins,” Clete said. He lay propped up in the hospital bed. There was a neat row of black stitches above his right eye and another one inside a shaved place in the back of his head.
“How’d you get out of it?”
“Some other cops stopped it.” He took a sip from a glass of ice water. His green eyes roved around the room and avoided mine and showed no emotion. He pulled one knee up under the sheet and his face flinched.
“This happened on Saturday. Where have you been since then?” I said.
“Laid up. A lot of Valium, too much booze. I ran off the road tonight. The state trooper let me slide.”
“You weren’t laid up. You were hunting those guys, weren’t you?”
“The one in canvas pants and suspenders, the dude who gave Ritter the baton? He was buds with that plainclothes, Burgoyne. I bet they were the two guys who beat the shit out of Cora Gable’s chauffeur. By the way, I called the chauffeur and shared my thoughts.”
“Don’t do this, Clete.”
“It’s only rock ‘n’ r
oll.”
“They’re going to put you in a box one day.”
“Ritter called me a skell.”
Tuesday morning the sheriff came into my office.
“I need you to help me with some P.R.,” he said.
“On what?”
“It’s a favor to the mayor. We can’t have an ongoing war with the city of New Orleans. She and I are having lunch with some people to try and establish a little goodwill. You want to meet us at Lerosier?”
“Bootsie’s meeting me in the park.”
“Bring her along.”
“Who are these people we’re having lunch with?”
“P.R. types, who else? Come on, Dave, give me a hand here.”
Bootsie picked me up at noon and we drove down East Main and parked up from the Shadows and crossed the street and walked under the canopy of oaks toward the restaurant, which had been created out of a rambling nineteenth-century home with a wide gallery and ventilated green shutters.
I saw the sheriff’s cruiser parked in front of the restaurant, and, farther down, a white limousine with charcoal-tinted windows. I put my hand on Bootsie’s arm.
“That’s Cora Gable’s limo,” I said.
