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He considered his own behavior perfectly reasonable and did many of the above deeds and others that were worse with a lopsided grin on his face, thinking them hardly worthy of mention.
His best friends were drunks, grifters, and brain-fried street people, his girlfriends strippers and junkies. Gangbangers, pushers, strong-arm robbers, and dirty cops crossed the street when they saw him coming. He swallowed his blood and ate his pain and never flinched in a fight, no matter what his adversaries did to him. He was the bravest and most loyal man I ever knew, and also the most irreverent, reckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.
I tried not to think of how Janet Gish could be a player in Clete's plan to jam up Fat Sammy Figorelli. Friday evening I found out.
He told me to meet him in Metairie, in front of a rented hall on the edge of a middle-class neighborhood. Metairie had become a white-flight refuge during the mass exodus from New Orleans in the 1970s, known for its strict law-and-order attitudes and the distinction of having given David Duke his start in the state legislature.
I waited for Clete in the parking lot, the sky ribbed with strips of pink cloud, the trees ruffling in the yards of the modest homes beyond a shopping mall, the rental hall filling with families dressed as though they were going to church. The scene made me think of Levittown but not in a bad way. The rental hall, with its gravel roof and artificial brick shell, seemed to transcend its own cheapness, like an excursion back into an earlier era when American neighborhoods had sidewalks and were defined by their sense of community and generational continuity.
I looked again at my watch. Where was Clete? The light was fading, the air growing cold. From inside the hall I could hear someone adjusting the volume on a microphone. Then I saw Clete's lavender Cadillac coming hard down the street, the front and back seats packed with people, slowing down for a stop sign just before he bounced into the parking lot, dust and exhaust fumes rising like a dirty halo from the car frame. When he cut the engine the entire car body seemed to gasp and shrivel like an animal that had been mortally wounded. The windows were open and I could smell a heady, thick odor, like burning leaves, drifting out on the wind, then someone flicked a marijuana roach sparking onto the pavement.
Clete got out of the car and closed the door behind him, then leaned down to the window. "Crack open another six-pack and go easy on the stash. I'll be right back," he said.
"Where's the fucking opera? You said we were gonna see an opera," a woman in back said.
"I've got reserved seats. Trust me. Just be cool. Everything's copacetic he replied.
He walked past me, so I would have to follow him, out of earshot of the people in the car. He lifted his shirt off his chest and sniffed at it. "Do I smell like a whorehouse?" he asked.
"What's going on?" I said.
"Fat Sammy belongs to this group of amateur opera singers. They perform once a month at the hall. It's Ozzie and Harriet night by way of Palermo. The archbishop is a big fan and sits up on the front row. Starting to get the picture?"
"No."
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"You want to squeeze Fat Sammy, forget conventional methods. Sammy's a geek and closet pervert who always wanted people to like him. So he comes out here and pretends he's a normal member of the human race. That's about to end."
"Who's in the car?"
"Janet Gish and Big Tit Judy Lavelle and four others who got bonds with Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. Either Sammy gives up the guy who put the whack on you or I'm marching all of them right up the front aisle and turning them loose."
"This doesn't sound too good, Clete."
"Oh, Sammy Fig as victim, I forgot. Every one of those broads has worked in either his porn films or his massage parlor. Ask them how they like giving twenty-dollar blow jobs to conventioneers from Birmingham."
I walked back to the Cadillac and looked inside. "How y'all doin'?" I said.
"Hey, Robicheaux, Clete say you taking us to supper at Gala-to ire a black woman in shades said. She called herself Cody Wyoming, although she had grown up on Prytania Street in New Orleans, not far from where Lillian Hellman was born.
"He hasn't filled me in on that yet," I replied.
"You might be getting old, Streak, but I bet you still got the thrust under the hood," she said. Everybody in the car roared.
I walked back to Clete. "Galatoire's?" I said.
"Nig and Willie owe me a thousand for running down a skip in Mobile. Except they say they don't owe me anything because I told Willie to write the bond on this guy when I knew he was mainlining six balloons a day. So I told them they pay for the dinner at Galatoire's, I tell the girls it's on Willie and Nig, which means they'll tell all the other hookers in New Orleans Willie and Nig are great guys, and we call it even."
"I don't think this is going to work."
"It'll work. Ever hear that story about Sammy taking a girl to the Prytania and a bunch of kids in the balcony hitting them with water bombs made from condoms? I was one of the kids in the balcony. I guess I'm sorry for what we did, but that's the way it was back then. Come on, Streak, this is the life we chose."
On that note I walked through the double doors of the hall into the heart of middle America, cloistered, far from the inner city, passenger jets decelerating overhead as they approached the airport, a bustling shopping mall close by, and a freeway streaming with headlights to reassure everyone God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.
Clete had not lied to Janet Gish and her friends about reserved seating. Eight folding metal chairs in the front row remained empty,
a program resting on the seat of each one. Otherwise the house was packed. Sammy Figorelli stood resplendent on the stage with his fellow singers, beaming, stuffed inside a summer tux, the footlights surrounded by bouquets of plastic flowers. Clete took out his cell phone and pushed a button on the speed dial.
