“Which bozo?”
“With the state regulatory agency.” His eyes moved around on my face.
“It’s Bobby Earl, isn’t it?” I said.
“Maybe.”
“There’s no ‘maybe’ about it.”
“Anyway, they got these complaints and they’re talking about a hearing before their board.”
“What complaints?”
“Well, there was this button man, a real bag of shit out of Miami, a guy who whacked out two Cuban girls who were going to send this greaseball dealer up to Raiford. He jumped a two-hundred-thou bond, and word had it he was hiding out in Ascension or St. James Parish. So the bondsman in Miami calls me and tells me he’ll pay me a five-grand finder’s fee if I can bring in this guy before the bondsman has to come up with the two hundred thou. But the only lead he can give me on the shit bag is that he’s somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, he loves pink Cadillacs, smoking dope, and being a big man around lowlife broads.
“So I spend two weeks cruising these dumps along Airline Highway. Just when I’m about to give up, I see this beautiful, flamingo-pink Cadillac convertible, with Georgia plates, parked in front of this club that’s got both white and mulatto broads on stage. I go inside, and the place is filled with smoke and about two hundred geeks that look like somebody beat up on them with an ugly stick. But I don’t see my man. So I go back out to the parking lot and pop the door lock on the Caddy with a slim jim. The inside smells like somebody rubbed hash oil into the upholstery. In the glove compartment I find a box of rubbers, a match cover from a Fort Lauderdale bar, an ice pick, and a dozen loose .38 shells. What does that tell me? This has got to be the shit bag’s car.
“Except I look all over the bar and I can’t find the guy, which means he’s probably wearing a disguise. Then it’s three in the morning, still no shit bag, and I’m bone-tired. So I kind of hurried things along by setting fire to the pink Caddy.”
“You did what?”
“What was I supposed to do, spend the rest of the week there? I was working on spec. Anyway, the Caddy was burning beautifully in the parking lot, and the geeks came pouring out of the building to watch it, happy as pigs rolling in slop, except of course for the guy who owned the Caddy. Guess what?”
“He wasn’t your guy.”
“Right. He was a traveling sporting-goods salesman from Waycross. But guess what again? There, standing in the crowd, is my shit bag. In two minutes I had him in cuffs and locked to a D-ring in the back of my car. So it all worked out all right, except somebody saw me messing around the Caddy and told the cops and the firemen, and I had to come back the next day and answer some questions that made me a little bit uncomfortable. Then Nig got me into a scrape—”
“Nig?” I had finished eating and was glancing at my watch.
“Yeah, Nig Rosewater, the bondsman. I’m sorry to bore you with this stuff, Dave, but I don’t get a regular paycheck. I depend upon guys like Nig to keep me afloat.”
I took a breath and let him continue.
“Nig decides to go into the saloon business,” Clete said. “So he opens a bar on Magazine right next to a black neighborhood. What kind of sign does he put in his window? ‘HAPPY HOURS 5 TO 7—HAVE A SWIG WITH NIG.’ So the first night somebody flings a burning trash can through the plate glass. Then they did it two more nights, even after Nig got rid of the sign. Who did it, you ask. The fucking Crips, not because they’re big on civil rights but because it impresses the other punks in the neighborhood. Have you dealt with any of these guys? They knocked off a kid on Calliope, then, to make sure everybody got the message, they walked into the mortuary, in front of his family, and blew his coffin full of holes. They’re a real special bunch.
“So I found out the kid who had been remodeling Nig’s bar was named Ice Box. They call him that because he pushed a refrigerator on top of his grandmother. I’m not making this up. This kid could blow out your light like he was turning a page in a comic book. Anyway, I had a talk with Ice Box while I held him by his ankles off a fire escape, five stories up from the pavement. I think he’s back in California these days. But his grandmother, can you dig it, with dents still in her head, filed charges against me.
“Anyway, somebody in Baton Rouge wants to cut a piece out of my butt. Like I say, I brought it on myself. I learned in the corps you don’t mess with the pencil pushers. You stay invisible. You piss off some corporal in personnel and two weeks later you’re humping it with an ambush patrol outside Chu Lai.”
“Give me the name of the guy in Baton Rouge who’s after you.”
“Leave it alone. It’ll probably go away.”
“Bobby Earl won’t.”
“That’s the point, mon. Earl’s got no handles on him. We sent the shit bags up the road because they were born to take a fall. Earl’s part of the system. There’re people who love him. You think I’m giving you a shuck? Did you see him on The Geraldo Rivera Show? Some of those broads were ready to throw their panties at him. It’s me and you who’ve got the problem. We’re the geeks, Dave, not this guy. He’s a fucking hero.”
His breath was heavy with the smell of beer and cigarettes.
He crushed a beer can in his palm and dropped it on the table, then studied the tops of his big, coarse, red hands. He had tried to comb his sandy hair back over the divots where his stitches had been, but I could still see crusted lesions like thin black worms on his scalp.
“Oh, hell, what do I know?” he said, and looked down the street at the traffic in the hot sunlight, as though it somehow held the answer to his question.
BACK IN MY OFFICE, I got hold of Lyle Sonnier at his church.
“Hey, Loot, I’m glad you called,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about throwing a big dinner here at the church, actually more like a family reunion, and I wanted to ask you and Bootsie.”
“Thanks, Lyle, but right now I’m looking for Vic Benson, the fellow you think might be your father.”