It was located in a parish to the north of us and was part of a larger complex that featured a clubhouse and horse track. But the horse races and the upscale dining areas were ultimately cosmetic. The real draw was the casino. The other bars in the parish were forced by law to close at 2 a.m. Not so with the casino. Regardless of the uproar raised by local saloon owners and law enforcement agencies and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the booze at the casino flowed from moonrise to dawn. How could anyone doubt this was a great country? They only had to ask Frogman.
Seated at the bar, a martini in his hand, dressed western in case an unsophisticated country girl or two was floating around, Frogman had a sense of security and well-being that tempted him to forgive the state of Louisiana for all the time it had dropped on his head over the years. Actually he could afford to be generous. He’d just hit a three-hundred-dollar jackpot on the slot and had treated himself to a steak dinner and a split of champagne. He’d outsmarted that fat cracker Purcel, too, even if he’d had to remodel his brother-in-law’s living room a little bit. Frogman tried to imagine his brother-in-law’s face when he pulled into his driveway and saw his broken television set and picture-glass window lying in the flower bed. Maybe he should drop a postcard and explain. Why not? It was the right thing to do. He’d take care of it first thing tomorrow.
But Frogman’s brother)in-law was not in a forgiving mood and had already dimed Frogman and his probable whereabouts to Clete Purcel. Saturday night Clete cruised the interior of the casino, not knowing that Frogman was taking a break from the machines and getting his ashes hauled by a Mexican prostitute in an Air Stream trailer out by the stables. So Clete set up shop at a blackjack table and quickly lost four hundred and seventy-three dollars.
“You lost how much?” I asked.
“The dealer had a pair of ta-tas that would make your eyes cross. She kept hanging them in my face every time I had to decide whether I wanted a hit. How can you think in a situation like that?” he said.
It was Sunday morning, and he was telling me all this in my backyard, in his own convoluted, exhaustive fashion, which usually indicated he had precipitated a disaster of some kind and was using every circuitous means possible to avoid taking responsibility for it.
Years ago Clete had fried his legitimate career in law enforcement with weed and pills and booze. He had also managed to kill a federally protected witness and had even done security in Vegas and Reno for a sadistic gangster by the name of Sally Dio, whose plane crashed into a mountain in western Montana. After Sally and several of his gumballs were combed out of the trees with garden rakes, investigators discovered Sally’s engines were clogged with sand that someone had poured into the fuel tanks. Clete Purcel blew Big Fork, Montana, like the town was burning down.
He was hated and feared by both the Mob and many of his old colleagues at NOPD. His detractors tried to dismiss him as a drunk and an addict and a whoremonger, but in truth Clete Purcel was one of the most intelligent and decent men I ever knew, complex in ways that few could guess at.
He had been raised in the old Irish Channel and talked like it—an accent more akin to Southie or Flatbush than the Deep South. His hands were as big as hams, the knuckles half-mooned with scars. With regularity his massive shoulders and broad back ripped the seams of his tropical shirts. He had a small Irish mouth, the corners downturned, and sandy hair and green eyes that crinkled when he smiled. A black witness to one of his escapades described him as “an albino ape crawling across my rooftop in skivvies,” and Clete wasn’t offended.
He talked openly about his visceral appetites, his addictions, his romances with junkies and strippers, his alcoholic blackouts that turned into scorched-earth episodes that caused people to climb out of barroom windows. But inside his violence and his reckless disregard for his own welfare was another man, one who carried images and thought processes in his head that he seldom shared: a father who used to make a little boy kneel for hours at a time on grains of rice; a wife who dumped him because she couldn’t sleep with a man who believed the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape; the grinding sound of steel tracks through a Third World village, an arch of liquid flame, the smell of straw and animals burning, and the screams of tiny men in black pajamas trapped inside a spider hole.
These were the memories his booze and pills couldn’t even make a dent in.
“What happened to Frogman?” I said.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” he said. “I got cleaned out at blackjack, so I was watching this great-looking broad shooting craps. You should have seen her ass when she bent over. Remember that song by Jimmy Clanton, ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’? I was getting a boner just watching from the bar.”
The kitchen window was open and I could see the curtains blowing inside the screen and hear Molly loading the dishwasher. “Clete, would you just—”
“Then I noticed this gal was probably part of a crew, maybe even running the crew. I think two of them had been counting cards at my blackjack table earlier. The gal crapped out twice, then the dice came back to her again. Soon as she picked them up from the stick man, a guy collides into the drink waitress and splashes cups of beer all over the place. That’s when she switched the dice. It was smooth, too. The boxman didn’t have a clue. She made seven passes in a row. Then she switched them back out, to one of the guys who’d been counting cards at my table.”
“What’s the point?” I said, my impatience growing.
We were sitting on the back steps. He squinted with one eye at the bayou, as though organizing his thoughts. “A half hour later she was back at the same table and switched them out again. Except this time she got greedy. She was doubling up her bets, until she had about eight or nine grand on the felt. Everyone around the table was starting to go apeshit and stacking chips on the pass line. The boxman called up a couple of security guys and I figured she was dead meat. That’s when Frogman showed up.”
“He was in her crew?”
“Dig this. The boxman and security guys were just about to bust the broad, then Frogman cam
e stumbling into the crowd and went down on the floor like he’d stepped on a high-voltage wire. At first I thought it was part of the switch-off. I had to shove my way through the crowd to look at him close-up. He was curled in a ball, shivering all over, spit coming out of both sides of his mouth, then somebody started yelling, ‘The guy’s having an epileptic fit!’
“Except I knew Frogman didn’t have epilepsy. His hands were shriveled up like claws against his chest and his eyes were popping out of his head. I told the boxman to get a resuscitation cup out of their first-aid kit, but he just stared at me like I was talking Sanskrit. So I shouted at him, ‘Nobody does mouth-to-mouth in a time of AIDS. Get the cup out of your fucking first-aid kit.’
“You know what kind of medical aid they have in a dump like that? French ticklers and aphrodisiacs you buy from the rubber machine in the can. I couldn’t believe what I had to do next. I don’t think Frogman Andrepont has gone near a toothbrush since he got out of Angola five years ago. I grabbed his nose and opened up his mouth and was just about to do the unthinkable, when the broad with the bod that looks like Venus in blue jeans pushed me aside and said, ‘Move it over, bub.’
“She closed off Frogman’s nostrils and blew air down his throat and pounded on his chest until he finally made this terrible sucking sound and started breathing again. The security guys still weren’t sure if they were watching a scam or not. They were checking the dice on the table, but they couldn’t find the ones she’d switched into the game. Then the paramedics got there and Venus in blue jeans beat it out the back door.
“I showed some deputies my papers on Frogman and cuffed him to the gurney and was going to ride to the hospital in the ambulance with him, when I saw Venus hauling that beautiful ass of hers across the parking lot. I caught up with her and said, ‘You just ripped off the casino and saved a guy’s life at the same time. Grifters don’t do that.’
“She was walking real fast and says, ‘Grifter up your nose. Who do you think you are?’
“I go, ‘I’m a private investigator. I was chasing a bail skip, the guy you saved. I got my clock cleaned at the blackjack table.’
“She says, ‘You ought to stay out of casinos.’
“I say, ‘What’s your name?’
“She says, ‘Trouble.’
“I go, ‘How about a drink? Or something to eat?’