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“You’re saying you don’t like him?”
“Talk to Big Tit Judy. She used the term ‘inexhaustible needs.’ Gee, I wonder what she means by that.”
“I’d better get to work. How are things going with you and Barbara?”
He crumpled up a paper napkin and dropped it on his plate. He started to speak, then shrugged his shoulders, his face chagrined.
“My feelings seem a little naked?” he said.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You’re sure a bum liar.”
I walked with him to his car, then watched him drive down the dirt road, his convertible top down, a Smiley Lewis tape blaring from his loudspeakers, determined not to let mortality and the exigencies of his own battered soul hold sway in his life.
I went to the office, but I couldn’t quite shake a thought Clete had planted in my head. His thinking and behavior were eccentric, his physical appetites legendary, his periodic excursions into mayhem of epic proportions, but under it all Clete was still the most intelligent and perceptive police officer I had ever known. He not only understood criminals, he understood the society that produced them. When he was a patrolman in the Garden D
istrict, he busted a choleric, obnoxious United States congressman for D.W.I. and hit-and-run and had the congressman’s car towed to the pound. When the congressman and his girlfriend tried to walk off to a bar on the corner of St. Charles and Napoleon, Clete handcuffed him to a fireplug.
Charges against the congressman were dropped, and one week later Clete found himself reassigned to a program called Neighborhood Outreach. He spent the next year ducking bullets and bricks or garbage cans weighted with water and thrown from roofs at the Desire, Iberville, and St. Thomas projects.
Even though Clete made constant derogatory allusions to the population of petty miscreants and meltdowns that cycles itself daily through the bail bond offices, courts, and jails of every city in America, in reality he viewed most of them as defective rather than evil and treated them with a kind of sardonic respect.
Drug dealers, pimps, sexual predators, jackrollers, and armed robbers were another matter. So were slumlords and politicians on the pad and cops who did scut work for the Mob. But Clete’s real disdain was directed at a state of mind rather than at individuals. He looked upon public displays of charity and morality as the stuff of sideshows. He never trusted people in groups and was convinced that inside every reformer there was a glandular, lascivious, and sweaty creature aching for release.
After Clete made plainclothes, he worked a case involving a Garden District doyenne whose philandering husband went missing on a fishing trip down in Barataria. The husband’s outboard was found floating upside down in the swamp immediately after a storm, the rods, tackle boxes, ice chest, and life preservers washed into the trees. His disappearance was written off as an accidental drowning.
But Clete learned the husband hated to drive an automobile and regularly hired taxicabs to take him around New Orleans. Clete searched through hundreds of taxi logs until he found an entry for a pickup at the husband’s residence on the day he went fishing. The destination was the husband’s new downtown office building. Clete also questioned a security guard at the office building and was told the wife had been installing new shelves in the basement very early on the Saturday morning her husband had disappeared.
Clete obtained a blueprint of the building and got a search warrant and discovered that behind the shelves a brick wall had been recently mortared across an alcove that was meant to serve as a storage space.
He and three uniformed patrolmen sledgehammered a hole in the bricks and were suddenly struck by an odor that caused one of them to vomit in his hands. The doyenne had not only walled up her husband in his own office building, she had hosted a dance, with a hired orchestra, right above the alcove that evening. The coroner said the husband was alive for the whole show.
Clete busted an infamous gay millionaire on Bayou St. John who fed his abusive mother to a pet alligator, helped wiretap a Louisiana insurance commissioner who went to prison for bribery, and eventually caught up with the United States congressman who had been instrumental in shipping Clete off to Neighborhood Outreach.
During Mardi Gras someone had flung a beer bottle from a French Quarter hotel window into the passing parade and had seriously hurt one of New Orleans’s most famous trumpet players. Clete went down a third-floor corridor, knocking on doors, trying to approximate the probable location of the room from which the bottle had been thrown.
Then he reached the door of a large suite, marched off the distance to the end of the corridor, comparing it with the distance he had measured between the suspect window and the edge of the building outside. When he and the hotel detective were refused entrance to the suite, Clete kicked the doors open and saw the congressman amid a group of naked revelers, their Mardi Gras masks pushed up on their heads, spitting whiskey and soda on one another.
This time Clete made a call to a police reporter at the Times-Picayune right after busting the whole room.
“You think Perry LaSalle may be a sex predator?” Bootsie said that afternoon.
“I didn’t say that. But Perry always gives you the feeling he’s Prometheus on the bayou. Jesuit seminarian, friend of the migrants, professional good guy at a Catholic Worker mission. Except he represents Legion Guidry and has a way of involving himself with working-class girls who all think they’re going to be his main squeeze.”
We were in our bedroom and Bootsie was putting on eyeliner in the dresser mirror. She had just had her bath and was wearing a pink slip. Through the window I could see Alafair pouring fresh water in Tripod’s bowl on top of his hutch.
“Dave?” Bootsie said.
“Yes?”
“You need to get your grits off the stove.”
“I need to talk to Perry.”
“About what?” she said, no longer able to suppress her irritation.
“I think he’s being blackmailed by Legion Guidry. How’s that for starters?”
