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ONE HOUR LATER, Clete looked out the back window of his office and saw Swede Jensen on his patio, where Clete kept a reclining chair and a spool table outfitted with a beach umbrella. Swede was tossing his chauffeur’s cap into the air and catching it. Clete opened the French doors and stepped out into the heat. “You trying to creep my office?”
“Ms. Nightingale is picking up her Lexus at the dealership. I got a question. Are you on the inside with the Robicheaux girl?”
“Time to use your words carefully, Swede.”
“You got me wrong. You said something about me working in a porn studio. Maybe there was some porn made there, but I wasn’t part of it.”
“I’ll contact the Vatican so they can get started with your early canonization.”
“I was in two independent films; they made it into a few legitimate theaters.”
“Yeah?” Clete said.
“I’ll tell you something else. The porn guy on Airline? He almost nailed the hijackers before 9/11. He tried to get ahold of somebody at the FBI. He said the ragheads buying dirty films from him weren’t religious fanatics, they were degenerates and rod floggers, like most of his clientele. The messa
ge got lost or delayed or something. A few days later the Towers and the Pentagon got hit. True story. So how about it?”
“How about what?”
“Will you put in a word for me with Robicheaux’s daughter? She’s the screenwriter for this Civil War film. I’m a pretty good actor. I just want a shot.”
“I’ll ask her.”
“No kidding?”
“I’ll tell her you’re available.”
“You’re okay, Purcel. Not like what I’m always hearing.”
“Do me a favor?”
“Anything,” Swede said.
“Keep the Nightingales away from me. And don’t give Alafair any trouble. Think of me as her uncle.”
“I owe you a solid, man.”
Clete watched him walk away whistling, flipping his hat into the air and catching it on his head. He turned around and gave Clete a thumbs-up.
FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD Clete. As simple-minded people are wont to do, they put him into categories. He was a compulsive gambler, a disgraced cop who’d flushed his career with weed and booze, a mercenary who should be considered a traitor, a lover of women who belonged in straitjackets, a human wrecking ball, a child in a man’s body, a rum-dum living on yesterday’s box score, a former leg-breaker for the Mob, and most realistically, a dangerous, war-damaged man whose unpredictable moods could lay waste to half a city.
But as with all simple-minded and dismissive people, they were wrong. And not only were his detractors wrong, none of them could shine his shoes. Clete was one of the most intelligent people I ever knew, and one of the most humble, less out of virtue than his inability to understand his own goodness. He was so brave that he didn’t know how to be afraid. In the same fashion, he was generous because he cared little about money or social status or ownership, except for his Caddy convertibles. His physical appetites were enormous. So was his capacity for self-destruction. His father the milkman had taught Clete to hate himself, and Clete had spent a lifetime trying to unlearn the lesson.
The people who understood him best were usually in the life. Grifters, hookers, money washers at the track, street dips, Murphy artists, and shylocks respected him. So did uptown house creeps and old-time petemen. Button men avoided him. So did strong-arm robbers and child molesters; men who abused women or animals were terrified of him. When Clete’s anger was unleashed, he transformed into someone larger than himself. His fists seemed as big as cantaloupes, his pocked neck as hard as a fire hydrant; his arms and shoulders would split his clothes. He dropped a New Jersey hit man off a roof through the top of a greenhouse. He hooked his hand into a Teamster official’s mouth and slung him from a balcony into a dry swimming pool. He almost drowned a NOPD vice cop in a toilet bowl. He burned down a plantation home on Bayou Teche, fire-hosed a gangster across the restroom floor in a casino, pushed a sadist off the rim of a canyon in Montana, filled a mobbed-up politician’s antique convertible with concrete, went berserk in a St. Martinville pool hall and piled five unconscious outlaw bikers in a corner and would have doubled the number with a baseball bat if Helen Soileau hadn’t talked him into cuffing himself.
He was the trickster from folk mythology who flung scat at respectability. But he was a far more complicated man, in essence a Greek tragedy, a Promethean figure no one recognized as such, a member of the just men in Jewish legend who suffered for the rest of us. If there are angels among us, as St. Paul suggests, I believed Clete was one of them, his wings auraed with smoke, his cloak rolled in blood, his sword broken in battle but unsurrendered and unsheathed, a protector whose genus went back to Thermopylae and Masada.
He pulled to the curb as I was walking home from work. He was eating a spearmint sno’ball, the top of the Caddy down. “I had a talk with Emmeline Nightingale in the park today.”
“Not interested,” I said.
“Is Alafair home?”
“Probably.”
“Ms. Nightingale’s chauffeur would like a part in her picture.”
