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“Where we going?” Marvin asked.
Her eyes roved over a barked area by his eye, a bruise on his chin. Her face became suffused with pity and anger.
“To straighten out somebody who thinks he’s a swinging dick because he can knock around someone half his size. Now get in the car, Marvin,” she replied.
“I dint want to cause no trouble, Miss Zerelda,” Marvin said.
She opened the car door and started to get out.
“I’m coming,” he said.
. . .
It was almost dusk when Zerelda crossed the Mississippi River and drove down Canal and into the French Quarter and parked around the corner from Clete’s office and upstairs apartment on St. Ann Street. The doors were locked, but a note addressed to an infamous nuisance in the New Orleans underworld was stuck in the corner of a window. It read: “Dear No Duh, I’m over at Nig and Willie’s—Clete.” The bail bond office of Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater was located just off Basin, just inside the ragged edges of the Quarter, not far from St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park. Zerelda pulled to the curb and parked next to a cluster of overflowing garbage cans. Down the street and across Basin she could see the old redbrick buildings and the green wood porches of the Iberville Project, a community whose crack addicts and gangbangers and teenage prostitutes would not only mug tourists and roll johns in the adjacent cemetery but occasionally execute them out of pure meanness. In fact, the city had poured cement barricades across some of the streets leading into the Iberville so that tourists would not drive into it by mistake.
But Marvin Oates’s attention was focused on the window of the bail bond office, where Clete was playing cards at a desk with a thin, nattily dressed, deeply tanned man who wore an oxblood fedora with a gray feather in the band and a mustache that looked like it had been grease-penciled on his upper lip.
Marvin’s face was wind-burned from the trip to the city, and now he was sweating heavily in the dusk, pinching his mouth dryly in his hand.
“I’ll wait out here,” he said.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Zerelda said, getting out of the car.
“That’s ’cause I’m staying out here.”
She walked around to his side of the convertible. “Comb your hair, sweetie. Then I’m going to take you out to dinner. Don’t you ever be afraid. Not when you’re with me,” she said, and smoothed his hair back up on his head.
His face looked like a fawn’s.
Then she went through the door of the bail bond office, her purse swinging heavily from a cloth strap wrapped around her wrist.
“Zerelda, what’s the haps? Great coincidence. I wanted No Duh here to check out our man Marvin the Voyeur, see if he wasn’t a guy No Duh ran across in central lockup,” Clete said.
“Where the fuck do you get off knocking around an innocent boy like that?”
“He has a way of showing up in places where he has no business,” Clete replied.
“Oh, yeah?” Zerelda said, and swung her purse with both hands at his head, the cloth bottom bulging with the weight of her .357 Magnum.
He caught the blow on his forearm, but she swung again, this time hitting him squarely across the back of the head.
“Come on, Zerelda, that hurts,” Clete said.
“You tub of whale sperm, you thought you could just dump me and get it on with some pisspot at the D.A.’s office?” she said.
“Remember strolling off to the ice cream parlor with dick brain out there? I took that as a signal to get lost. So I got lost,” Clete said.
“Well, lose this, you fat fuck,” she said, and hit him again.
“What’s going on?” No Duh Dolowitz said. “Hey, Nig, we got some people getting hurt out here!”
Nig Rosewater came out of the back office. His porcine neck was as wide as his head inside his starched collar, so his head looked like the crown of a white fireplug mounted on his shoulders. Nig took one look at Zerelda and went back inside his office and closed and bolted the door.
“All right, I’ll talk to him! Calm down!” Clete said, and rose from his chair.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Zerelda said.
/> “That guy is a bullshitter, Zee,” Clete said.
