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Nightingale laughed. “God, you’ve got the guts of a beer-glass brawl, Purcel. Come work for me.”
“I need my piece back.”
“Give it to him,” Nightingale said to the security man.
“Mr. Nightingale, I think you should let us handle this.”
“There will be none of that,” Nightingale said.
The security man handed Clete his snub-nose. Clete dropped it into his shoulder holster. A freshly waxed purple Lincoln with chrome-spoked whitewalls came out of the carriage house with Emmeline Nightingale in the back and Swede Jensen in livery behind the wheel.
“You’re behind that geek from Florida, Jimmy,” Clete said.
“Which geek is that?”
“Goes by the tag Smiley. You’re dirty. You know it and I know it, and I’m going to prove it.”
“The peace of the Lord be with you.”
“Stay indoors during lightning storms,” Clete said. He got into the Caddy.
Nightingale leaned down to the window. “I always liked you, Clete.”
“Watch your foot,” Clete said. He backed in a semicircle, breaking the flowers off the camellia bushes, and drove toward the highway, the sunlight splintering in the oak limbs above his head.
How do you get to a guy like Nightingale? he wondered. More important, who was he? A master of illusion or a guy with a genius IQ who was brain-dead when it came to morality?
Clete looked in the rearview mirror. The security men had gone back to their posts, but Nightingale still stood in the middle of the driveway, one hand lifted in farewell, as though he were saying good-bye to a friend from a previous life.
* * *
CLETE CALLED ME and told me to meet him at Clementine’s at seven.
“What for?” I said.
“I think Nightingale got inside my head.”
“Come by the house.”
“It might be bugged,” he said.
“You’ve been thinking too much.”
“Yeah, I imagined the mercury tilt switch I found by my automobile.”
After supper I walked down to the restaurant. Clete was at the bar. He knocked back the whiskey in his shot glass and pointed at a table by the brick wall in the back of the dining room.
“Where’s Homer?” I said.
“Playing softball in the park.” He caught the waiter. “What are you having, Dave?”
“Nothing.”
Clete ordered a plate of étouffée and half a dozen raw oysters and a bottle of Danish beer. “I’m so dry I’m a fire hazard. Don’t get on my case because I’ve got to have a hit of this or that.”
“Lose the Mouseketeer routine, will you?”
“I got the willies.” He told me what had happened in front of Jimmy Nightingale’s home. “You think he’s just an actor? Nothing rattles him. For a minute he made me feel like we were old friends.”
