I put an oyster in my mouth and tried to keep my face empty. But it was no use. Even his worst detractors admitted that Clete Purcel was one of the best investigative cops NOPD ever had, until his career went sour with pills and booze and he had to flee to Central America on a homicide warrant.
"So now she's trying to work your crank?" he said.
"Do you have to put it that way? . . . Yeah, okay, maybe she is."
"What for? . . . Did you know your hair's sweating?"
"It's the Tabasco. Clete, would you ease up, please?"
"Look, Dave, this is the basic lesson here—don't get mixed up with rich people. One way or another, they'll hurt you. The same goes for this civil rights stuff. It's a dead issue, leave it alone."
"Do you want to go out and talk to Jimmy Ray Dixon or not?" I said.
"You've never met him?"
"No."
"Jimmy Ray is a special kind of guy. You meet him once and you never quite forget the experience."
I waited for him to finish but he didn't.
"What do I know?" he said, flipped his breadstick into the straw basket, and began putting on his raincoat. "There's nothing wrong with the guy a tube of roach paste couldn't cure."
We drove through the Garden District, past Tulane and Loyola universities and Audubon Park and rows of columned antebellum homes whose yards were filled with trees and flowers. The mist swirled out of the canopy of oak limbs above St. Charles, and the neon tubing scrolled on corner restaurants and the empty outdoor cafes looked like colored smoke in the rain.
"Was he in Vietnam?" I asked.
"Yeah. So were you and I. You ever see his sheet?" Clete said.
I shook my head.
"He was a pimp in Chicago. He went down for assault and battery and carrying a concealed weapon. He even brags on it. Now you hear him talking on the radio about how he got reborn. The guy's a shit-head, Dave."
Jimmy Ray Dixon owned a shopping center, named for his assassinated brother, out by Chalmette. He also owned apartment buildings, a nightclub in the Quarter, and a five-bedroom suburban home. But he did business in a small unpainted 1890s cottage hung with flower baskets in the Carrollton district, down by the Mississippi levee, at the end of St. Charles where the streetcar turned around. It was a neighborhood of palm trees and green neutral grounds, small restaurants, university students, art galleries and bookstores. It was a part of New Orleans unmarked by spray cans and broken glass in the gutters. In five minutes you had the sense Jimmy Ray had chosen the role of the thumb in your eye.
"You're here to ask me about the cracker that killed my brother?
You're kidding, right?"
He chewed and snapped his gum. He wore a long-sleeve blue-striped shirt, which hid the apparatus that attached the metal hook to the stump of his left wrist. His teeth were gold-filled, his head mahogany-colored, round and light-reflective as a waxed bowling ball. He never invited us to sit down, and seemed to make a point of swiveling his chair around to talk to his employees, all of whom were black, in the middle of a question.
"Some people think he might be an innocent man," I said.
"You one of them?" He grinned.
"Your humor's lost on me, sir."
"It took almost thirty years to put him in Angola. He should have got the needle. Now the white folks is worried about injustice."
"A kid in my platoon waited two days at a stream crossing to take out a VC who killed his friend. He used a blooker to do it. Splattered him all over the trees," I said.
"Something I ain't picking up on?"
"You have to dedicate yourself to hating somebody before you can lay in wait for him. I just never made Aaron Crown for that kind of
guy," I said.
"Let me tell you what I think of Vietnam and memory lane, Jack.