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“Not me. The agent who’ll probably be representing Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter will be staying there. Of course, you’re familiar with the William Morris Agency, aren’t you?”
“They sell insurance?”
“Oh, that’s very good. Would you like to join us for dinner? I understand you’re a wonderful raconteur. I’m sure everyone would be fascinated with the tales you could relate. Industrial espionage, CIA intrigue, that sort of thing.”
Clete folded his arms again and grinned and pushed his aviator shades up on the bridge of his nose with one finger. “I dig your wheels, Bob. You don’t mind if I call you Bob, do you?”
“It’s Robert. But call me whatever you wish.”
“No, you’re right. Bob is too commonplace. What about Roberto or Ro-bear, the way the French say it? No, that’s too foreign. How about the Bobster? Kind of like a name a welterweight might have. You duck, you weave, you bob, you’re slick as grease, you pop out their lights before they know
what hit them. You’re the Bobster.”
“To be honest, Mr. Purcel, I don’t think you have many arrows in your quiver.”
“Remember that nineteen-year-old waitress at Ruby Tuesday you knocked up? The one you told to get an abortion? Did that Mustang fire up her hormones? I wish I could have a car like that and get my ashes hauled by teenage girls with ninth-grade educations. You couldn’t bum the price of a box of rubbers off her?”
“Just stay on your Jenny Craig diet and keep saying your morning prayers, and you can drive a car like mine. But that might produce conflict for you. I suspect you’re a nice soft hump for Mr. Robicheaux. I imagine in a time of AIDS, a few extra pounds can give comfort on a couple of levels.”
Clete stuck a cigarette in his mouth but did not light it. He scratched at a mosquito bite high up on his arm, examining the flesh around the bite while he did it. “Good try, bub, but I checked you out. Over in Huntsville, you were lots of things, but straight wasn’t one of them. The warden said you chugged pug for every swinging dick on the yard. That brings up a question I’ve always had. Is it true the Midnight Special originally meant a late-night freight train up the ass, maybe with a three-hundred-pound black guy driving the locomotive?”
“Funny man,” Weingart said. “But answer me this, Mr. Purcel. Alafair’s breakthrough in New York will probably come about because of her friendship with me and Kermit. How does it feel to be stuck in a place like this? Why is it she’s with us and not you?”
Clete watched silently as Weingart started his car and drove away. Then Clete got into his Caddy and followed him around the block and all the way down to the old brick post office and the plantation house known as The Shadows and finally back onto Main Street, where Weingart parked his vehicle and went into Lagniappe Too and sat down behind the picture-glass window and ordered breakfast.
I GOT THE call from Hulga Volkmann two minutes after I had picked up my mail and sat down behind my desk. “He told me not to call you, Mr. Robicheaux, but I’m doing it anyway, whether you or he like it or not,” she said. “He’s under great stress, and I think he’s not entirely rational. He’s also drinking too much. Now this Mr. Blanchet is calling. He’s not a nice man and Mr. Purcel does not need to put up with that kind of abusive behavior at a time like this.”
“Sorry, I’m not tracking the message here.”
“I think Mr. Purcel is having a nervous breakdown. Mr. Layton Blanchet just called and accused Mr. Purcel of violating his confidence and hurting his family. He also said some very unpleasant things of a personal nature to me. He told me to write all this down and to read it back to him and then give it to Mr. Purcel, as though voice mail had not been invented.”
“How does this relate to your concerns about Clete this morning?”
“I just told you, Mr. Robicheaux. Mr. Purcel left the office in his automobile and then parked down the street from where this convict author had parked his little white convertible.”
“No, you did not tell me about Robert Weingart. You were talking about Layton Blanchet.”
“I already dealt with Mr. Blanchet. If I quote what I said to him, I would be taking license with you and acting disrespectfully. My concern is Mr. Purcel.”
“What did you tell Blanchet, Miss Hulga?”
“I told him I would not be writing down any of his ugly remarks or allow them to be recorded on Mr. Purcel’s phone. I also told him we do not welcome his kind of clientele in our office. I told him he was ill-mannered and ill-bred and unappreciative of Mr. Purcel, who works hard on behalf of his clients.” She paused, as if energizing herself to cross the finish line. “I told him he was a self-important idiot and he could kiss my bottom.”
“I see. And where is Clete now?”
“That’s what I have been trying to tell you. He followed that criminal author down the street to Lagniappe Too and went inside. He doesn’t like this man and considers him a degenerate who preys on uneducated young women. I don’t think this is a matter of oil and water. It’s more like one of gasoline and matches. Mr. Robicheaux, will you please stop this good-hearted man from doing more injury to himself?”
You could do worse than have a person like Hulga Volkmann on your side, I told myself.
CLETE SAT DOWN at one of the checker-cloth-covered tables in the corner of the restaurant, with a view of the intersection and the dark structural mass of The Shadows looming inside acres of live oaks bordered by a piked fence and walls of bamboo. Thirty feet away, Robert Weingart was buttering a roll and sipping his coffee. When Weingart’s phone rang, he examined the caller ID, then closed the phone without taking the call. He turned in his chair and glanced at Clete and seemed to laugh under his breath before sipping from his coffee again. He gazed lazily out the window at the flow of traffic on Main Street.
Clete gave his order to the waitress. “Coffee, orange juice, a breakfast steak, two fried eggs on top, grits, no butter, please, hash browns, and biscuits, with a bowl of milk gravy on the side.”
“No butter,” she said, making a special note.
“Yeah, I got hypertension and have to watch it.”
“Anything else, Mr. Clete?”
