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"And you never heard of Troy Bordelon?" I said.
"I just told you."
"You're a knowledgeable man, so I thought I'd ask," I said.
He inserted a piece of gum into his mouth and chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "You kill me, Dave. Come out to the plantation. We've got a cook from France now. I want him to fix a dinner especially for you."
"I'm off butter and cream," I said.
He laughed to himself and shook his head. "It was worth every minute of the drive out here. Have a good one." He
patted me on the shoulder and walked away, a self-amused grin on his face.
Let it go, I told myself. But I couldn't take his imperious, fraternity-boy manner. I caught up with him at the passenger window of his van. "Ida Durbin worked in a hot pillow joint on Post Office Street in Galveston in 1958. Would your old man know anything about those places?" I said.
"You're asking this about my father?" he said.
"Want me to repeat the question?" I said.
He touched at his nose and snapped his gum in his jaws. For a moment I thought he might step outside the vehicle. But he didn't. "Dave, I'd love to get you your own show. The ratings would go through the roof. Let me make a couple of calls to New York. I'm not putting you on. I could swing it," he said.
Then the van pulled away, bouncing through the dips in the road, the high beams spearing through the underbrush and trees.
You just blew it, bubba, I said under my breath.
I couldn't find Clete for three days. The owner of the motor court where he lived said Clete had thrown a suitcase in his Cadillac early Friday morning, driven away with a wave of the hand, and had not returned.
But at dawn the following Monday, Clete called the house on his cell phone.
"Where are you?" I said.
"Across the bayou. In City Park. I can see your backyard from here."
"Why the mystery?"
"My situation is a little warm right now. Anybody been around?"
"What have you done, Clete?"
"It's under control. Haul your butt over here, Streak. Over-and-out."
I drove down Main and across the drawbridge into the park. The sky was gray, the trees shrouded with mist, the surface of the bayou chained with rain rings. Clete was sitting on a table under a picnic shelter, his restored Cadillac parked back in the trees. But if he was trying to hide his Caddy from notice, he had taken on an impossible task. It was a beautiful automobile, with big fins, Frenched headlights, wire wheels and whitewalls, an immaculate cream-colored top, and a waxed finish that was the shade of a flamingo's wing — all of it the gift of a pornographic actor and drug mule by the name of Gunner Ardoin, who credited Clete with turning his life around.
I sat beside him under the shelter and unscrewed the cap on a thermos of coffee and hot milk I had brought from home.
"You went after Billy Joe Pitts, didn't you?" I said.
"I found out he hangs around the casino in Lake Charles on the weekends. But that's not all he does over there. He's part owner of a motel that operates as a cat-house for high rollers."
Clete sipped his coffee, the steam rising into his face. He wore a rumpled suit with a white shirt and no tie, and a yellow straw cowboy hat that was bright with dew. The back of his neck was thick and red and pocked with scars below his hairline. I waited for him to go on, but he didn't.
"What happened?" I said.
"He made me at the casino and got me busted. I spent Saturday night in the Calcasieu Parish Jail. I'd still be in there if Nig and Willie hadn't called in some IOUs for me. I was in a cell with a meth freak who tried to talk to his wife in the women's section by yelling into the toilet bowl."
Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater were two New Orleans bondsmen Clete worked for, but I didn't want to hear about them or Clete's night in the can. When Clete's stories digressed, he was usually trying to hide a disaster of some kind inside an incessant stream of minutiae. "What did you do when you got out, Clete?"
"Hung around town, bought some books at Barnes and Noble, went swimming out at the lake. You ever been to Shell Beach?"
