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"What?" he said. He was bare chested and barefoot, and wore only a pair of pajama bottoms string-tied under his navel. The breeze blew from the back of the cottage through the open door. "What?" he repeated.
"Toking up kind of early today?"
"So call the DEA."
"Father Jimmie Dolan was your basketball coach. Why did you say you didn't know him?"
'"Cause I can't remember every guy I knew in high school with a whistle hanging out of his mouth."
"Father Jimmie says it wasn't you who attacked him, Gunner. But I think somebody told you to bust him up, and you pieced off the job to somebody else. Probably because you still have qualms."
"Is this because I filed on your friend?"
"No, it's because you're a shit bag and you're going to drop those charges or I'll be back here tonight and jam a chainsaw up your ass."
"Look, man " he began.
"No, you look," I said, rising to my feet, shoving him backward through the door into the living room. "Fat Sammy is behind the job on Father Jimmie ?"
"No," he said.
I shoved him again. He tripped over a footstool and fell backward on the floor. I pulled back my sports coat and removed my .45 from its clip-on holster and squatted next to him. I pulled back the slide and chambered a round, then pointed the muzzle at his face.
"Look at my eyes and tell me I won't do it," I said.
I saw the breath seize in his throat and the blood go out of his cheeks. He stretched his head back, turning his face sideways, away from the .45.
"Don't do this," he said. "Please."
I waited a long time, then touched his forehead with the gun's muzzle and winked at him.
"I won't. I'd think about my request on those charges, though," I said.
Just as I eased the hammer back down, his bladder gave way and he shut his eyes in shame and embarrassment. When I looked up I saw a little girl, no older than six or seven, staring at us, horrified, from the kitchen doorway.
"That's my daughter. I get her one day a week. I've known some cruel guys with a badge, but you take the cake," Gunner said.
The charges against Clete were dropped by three that afternoon. I drove him from Central Lock-Up to his apartment on St. Ann, where he fell asleep on the couch in front of a televised football game. Fat Sammy Figorelli's home was only three blocks away, over on Ursulines. The temptation was too much.
Fat Sammy had grown up in the French Quarter, and although he owned homes in Florida and on Lake Pontchartrain, he spent most of his time inside the half city block where the Figorelli family had lived since the 1890s. It seemed Sammy had been elephantine all his life. As a child the balloon tires of his bicycle burst under his weight. His rump wouldn't fit in the desk at the school run by the Ursuline nuns. In high school he got stuck inside his tuba while performing with the marching band at an LSU football game. The paramedics had to scissor off his jacket, smear him with Vaseline, and pry him loose in front of ninety thousand people. In his senior year he mustered up the courage to invite a girl to the Prytania Theater. A gang of Irish kids in the balcony rained down a barrage of water-filled condoms on their heads.
As an adult he filled his body with laxatives, tried every diet program imaginable, trained at fat farms, sweated to the oldies with Richard Simmons, attended a fire-walker's school run by a celebrity con man in California, almost died from liposuction, and finally had a gastric bypass. The consequence of the latter was a weight loss of 170 pounds in a year's time.
All of the wrong kind.
He lost the blubber, but under the blubber was a support system of sinew that hung on his frame like curtains of partially hardened cement. If this was not enough of a problem, Fat Sammy had another one that was equally egregious and beyond the scope of medicine. His head was shaped like a football, his few strands of gold hair brushed like oily wire into his scalp.
I twisted an iron bell on the grilled door that gave onto a domed archway leading into Fat Sammy's courtyard.
"Who is it?" a voice said from a speaker inside the gate.
"It's Dave Robicheaux. I've got a problem," I said.
"Not with me, you don't."
"It's about Gunner Ardoin. Open the door."
"Never heard of him. Come back another time. I'm taking a nap."
