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CHAPTER 19
Clete Purcel grew up in the Irish Channel in the days when white gangs fought with chains over the use of a street corner. His father was a drunken, superstitious, and sentimental man who delivered milk in the Garden District, made his children kneel on grains of rice for sassing a nun, and whipped Clete with a razor strop when he lost a fight. A gang of kids from the Iberville Project jumped Clete by St. Louis Cemetery and bashed his eye open with a steel pipe. Clete packed the wound with a cobweb, closed it with adhesive tape, and drove around all night in a stolen car until he caught the pipe wielder alone. After New Orleans the Marine Corps was a breeze. Even Vietnam wasn’t much of a challenge. Women were another matter.
His second wife, Lois, was driven by either her own neurosis or living with Clete to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. In the meantime Clete flowered as a vice cop. Unfortunately, he seemed to fit into the milieu too well. His girlfriends were addicts, strippers, compulsive gamblers, deep-fried cultists, or beautiful Italian girls with complexions and long hair like the bride of Dracula. The latter group usually turned out to be the sweethearts or relatives of criminals. When we were Homicide partners at NOPD, I often had to roll down all the windows in our car to blow out the odors Clete carried in his clothes from the previous night.
But one way or another he always got hurt. What neither his inept, uneducated father, sadistic brig chasers, nor even Victor Charles could do to him, Clete managed to do to himself.
He burned his kite at NOPD with pills and booze and by killing a government witness. He hired out as a mercenary in Central America and worked for the Mob in Reno and maybe engineered the crash of a gangster’s seaplane in the Cabinet Mountains of western Montana. His P.I. license and his job as a hunter of bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine were the only elements of stability in his life. The effect of his arrival in any environment was like a junkyard falling down a stairs. Chaos was his logo, honor and loyalty and a vulnerable heart his undoing.
Now Clete was swinging into high gear again, this time with Battering Ram Shanahan.
Just after Joe Zeroski had driven away from my dock, Clete pulled into the driveway. He was wearing a summer tux, his sandy hair wet and parted neatly on the side, his cheeks glowing, a corsage in a plastic box by his thigh.
“How do I look?” he asked.
“Beautiful,” I said.
He got out of the car and turned in a circle. A piece of toilet paper was stuck to a shaving cut on his chin. “The coat’s not too tight? I feel like I’m wrapped in a sausage skin.”
“You look fine.”
“We’re going to a dance at a country club. Barbara has to pay her dues with some political people. The last time I went dancing Big Tit Judy Lavelle and I did the dirty bop in Pat O’Brien’s and got thrown out.”
“Smile a lot. Leave early. Take it easy on the hooch,” I said.
He blotted his forehead with his wrist and looked down the dirt road under the row of oaks that paralleled the bayou.
“On another subject, I just passed Joe Zeroski. What was he doing here?” he said.
“Legion Guidry scrambled a couple of his guys. One by the name of Sonny Bilotti. You know him?”
“He was a hitter for the Calucci brothers. He shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. Guidry cleaned his clock?”
“He put him in the hospital.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Really?” I said.
He caught the look on my face. “Oh, like you’re a pushover? The difference is you have parameters, Dave. A guy like Bilotti parks one in the brain pan and then checks to see if he got the right guy. That’s the edge these guys have on us. I’ve got to work out a new strategy on Guidry.”
I pulled the piece of toilet paper off the shaving cut on his chin and let it blow away in the breeze.
“Enjoy the dance,” I said.
The dance at the country club in Lafayette was one of those insular events where the possession of power and money are celebrated in ways that never require the participants to acknowledge the secret chambers of the heart or perhaps, more accurately, the edges of the conscience. The buffet tables and ice sculptures and silver bowls brimming with champagne and sherbet punch, the 1950s orchestra music, the flagstone patio overhung by electrically lit oak trees, the white-jacketed, sycophantic waiters, were a testament to an idea, a fusion of the antebellum South with twenty-first-century prosperity, a systemic exclusion of everything in the larger culture that seemed coarse and intellectually invasive and contrary to the ethos of free enterprise.
The celebrants were politicians and judges and attorneys and shopping-mall developers and realtors and executives from petrochemical industries. They greeted one another with a level of warmth and gaiety that seemed born of lifelong friendships, although few of them had any personal contact outside of their business dealings. They gave the sense that they all shared the same love of country and the same patriotic commitment to its governance. There was almost an innocence in the narcissistic pleasure purchased by their success and in their shared presumption that a great, green, rolling continent had been presented to them by a divine hand for their own use.
Clete ate his steak and lobster and drank wine spritzers and said virtually nothing during the evening. In fact, two petroleum executives who had been fighter pilots in Vietnam kept hitting him on the shoulders and roaring at his jokes. But Barbara Shanahan became increasingly restless, her face ruddy with either alcohol or frustration, blowing her breath upward to clear her hair out of her eyes, crunching ice between her molars. Then a congressman who had changed his party affiliation the day after the balance of power shifted in the House of Representatives, receiving the chairmanship of a committee in the bargain, mounted the bandstand and told jokes about environmentalists.
He brought the house down.
“I can’t take these assholes,” Barbara said, and snapped her fingers at the waiter. “Clean these spritzers out of here and bring us a couple of depth charges.”
“Depth charges, madam?” the waiter said.
“A shot and draft. Put it on Fuckhead’s tab,” she said, gesturing with her thumb at the congressman.
