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I took a vacation day Friday and drove back to New Orleans and parked my truck on the edge of the Quarter and walked through Jackson Square and Pirates Alley, past the deep green, shaded garden behind St. Louis Cathedral, and down St. Ann to Clete Purcel’s office.
The building was tan stucco and contained an arched foyer and flagstone courtyard planted with banana trees. An “Out to Lunch” sign hung in the downstairs window. I went through the foyer and up the stairs to the second floor, where Clete lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony that gave onto the street. The ironwork on the balcony was overgrown with bougainvillea, and in the evening Clete put on a pair of blue, baggy, knee-length boxing trunks and pumped barbells out there under a potted palm like a friendly elephant.
“You re
ally want to ‘front this vice cop over Little Face Dautrieve?” he asked. He had unwrapped two fried-oyster po’ boy sandwiches, and he set them on the table with two cardboard containers of dirty rice.
“No, I want to find out why she has this personal involvement with Letty Labiche.”
He sat down at the table and hung a napkin like a bib from his shirt collar. He studied my face.
“Will you stop looking at me like that?” I said.
“I can hear your wheels turning, big mon. When you can’t get it to go your way, you find the worst guy on the block and put your finger in his eye.”
“I’m the one who does that?”
“Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.” He chewed a mouthful of oysters and bread and sliced tomatoes and lettuce, a suppressed smile at the corner of his mouth.
I started to speak, but Clete put down his sandwich and wiped his mouth and his eyes went flat. “Dave, this vice cop is a real prick. Besides, a lot of guys at NOPD still think we’re the shit that wouldn’t flush.”
“So who cares if we rumple their threads?” I said.
He blew out his breath and slipped his seersucker coat over his shoulder holster and put on his porkpie hat and waited for me by the door.
We went down to First District Headquarters on North Rampart, not far from the Iberville Welfare Project, but the detective we were looking for, a man named Ritter, had gone to Mississippi to pick up a prisoner. Clete’s face was dark, his neck red, when we came back outside.
“I thought you’d be relieved,” I said.
He bit a hangnail off his thumb.
“You see the way those guys were looking at me in there? I don’t get used to that,” he replied.
“Blow ’em off.”
“They were down on you because you were honest. They were down on me because they thought I was dirty. What a bunch.”
We got in my truck. A drop of perspiration ran out of the lining of his hat into his eye. His skin looked hot and flushed, and I could smell his odor from inside his coat.
“You said Little Face was supposed to come across for both Ritter and a liaison guy. Who’s the liaison guy?” I said.
“A political fuck named Jim Gable. He’s an insider at City Hall. He was in uniform at NOPD before we came along.”
“A City Hall insider is extorting sexual favors from a street hooker?”
“This guy’s had his Johnson out for thirty years. You want to brace him?”
“You up for it?” I asked.
Clete thought about it. “He’s on vacation, over at his home in Lafourche Parish.” Clete pressed his palms together and twisted them back and forth, the calluses scraping audibly. “Yeah, I’m up for it,” he said.
We drove out of the city, south, to Bayou Lafourche, then followed the state highway almost to Timbalier Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. We turned down a dirt road through farmland and clusters of paintless cabins and clearings in the sugarcane that were filled with tin-roofed sheds and farm equipment. It was late afternoon now, and the wind had kicked up and the cane was blowing in the fields. Clouds moved across the sun and I could smell rain and salt in the air and the odor of dead animals in the ditches. Off in the distance, silhouetted against the dull shimmer of the bay, was a three-story coffee-colored, purple-tiled house surrounded by palm trees.
“How’s a cop own a house like that?” I asked.
“It’s easy if you marry an alcoholic with heart disease in her family,” Clete said. “Stop up at that grocery. I’m going to have a beer and shot. This guy turns my stomach.”
“How about easing up, Clete?”
