“I didn’t mean to be rough around the edges a minute ago,” I said.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“No, that’s it. I just—”
He hung up. Chapter 13
C LETE PURCEL WAS NOT sleeping well these days. His shoulder ached where Lefty Raguza had driven a steel tool almost to the bone, and, worse, he could not think straight about Trish Klein, nor was he any longer sure about his own motivations in getting involved with her. Was he just an aging fool trying to regain his lost youth? Was she playing him? Were the sounds she made in bed manufactured?
Why would a woman with her looks, money, and education mess around with a disgraced ex-policeman who skated on the edges of alcoholism and criminality? The question implied an answer he hated to even think about. Was that exactly the kind of man she was looking for, or rather needed, to perpetrate a vendetta on Whitey Bruxal for her father’s murder?
Her retinue was made up of pretenders. The horse jockey ate hamburgers like potato chips. The prizefighter had sticks for wrists. The country songstress carried a tune like a piano falling down a stairwell. The Hollywood screenwriter admitted his only experience in the industry had consisted of running a film projector at a neighborhood theater in Skokie, Illinois. As grifters scamming casinos, they weren’t bad. But did they actually boost banks? The answer was probably yes. And that’s what disturbed Clete most.
He had known their kind back in the late 1960s. They came from traditional blue-collar and middle-income homes, and became imbued with a political or social cause that allowed them to justify criminal acts normally associated with Willie Sutton or Alvin Karpis. The irony lay in their level of success. Most criminals get nailed in the aftermath of their crimes, largely because of their lifestyles and their associations. But the sixties bunch was not composed of junkies, degenerate gamblers, whoremongers, or porn addicts, nor did they hang out with recidivists or network with professional fences and money launderers. Instead, they lived in the suburbs, felt no guilt whatsoever about their crimes, jogged five miles before breakfast, and considered themselves patriotic and decent. In custody, they didn’t attempt to defend their actions any more than they would have attempted to explain the nature of light to a blind man.
Clete sat on the side of his bed, his electric coffeepot bubbling on the counter in his small kitchen, the early sun glowing through the closed slats of his blinds. He knew Trish liked him, but that didn’t mean she loved him, nor did it mean she wouldn’t use him. He had learned in Vietnam there were three groups of people who got you killed—pencil pushers, amateurs, and idealists. Trish didn’t fit into the first category but she qualified for the other two. So far, his involvement with her had cost him a visit from the FBI, a stab wound in the shoulder, and possibly a warrant for the fire hose caper and bomb scare at the casino on Canal. How big a bounce was he willing to take in order to feel he was thirty again?
He ate four scrambled eggs and a slab of ham in his skivvies, shaved and showered, then dressed in a new suit, fitted on his porkpie hat, and went outside to greet the day.
The previous night he had pulled a vinyl cover over his Caddy to protect it from bird droppings. But someone had unhooked the elastic loops from the bumpers and folded back the cover in a neat stack on the ground, then had tiger-striped the paint job with acid. There was also a silver indentation the width and flat shape of a screwdriver tip under the gas flap, and Clete guessed the flap had been prized in order to pour sugar or sand into the tank.
He used his cell phone to call Triple A for a wrecker, then called me at the office. “I think Lefty Raguza paid me a visit last night,” he said, and described the condition of his car.
“You should have pressed assault charges against him when you had the chance, Clete,” I replied.
“You know how much business that fire hose situation probably cost the casino? I’ll be lucky if I don’t have to blow the state.”
It was pointless to argue with Clete. Besides, he was right. His history of mayhem and environmental destruction both inside and outside the New Orleans Police Department preempted any chance of his being presumed innocent in a conflict between Clete and a business enterprise that brought millions of tourist dollars into Orleans Parish. “You’ll need an investigative report for your insurance. I’ll send somebody out,” I said.
“Thanks. Raguza didn’t do this on his own. Whitey Bruxal had to give his approval.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Wake up, Streak. These guys have used the state of Florida for toilet paper since the 1920s. You’re spending your time on people at the bottom of the food chain. Fraternity pissants and black street pukes aren’t the problem. The word is Whitey Bruxal has bought juice with a televangelical lobbyist who closes down Bruxal’s competition. Like Trish says, you hurt the big guys in their pocketbook.”
“Stay away from that woman,” I said.
But he had already closed his cell phone.
I HAD ALWAYS BELIEVED Colin Alridge was far too complex a man to be dismissed as a tawdry charlatan. His father had been an insurance executive who mixed pleasure with business in both Fort Lauderdale and New Orleans, his mother a survivor of internment by the Japanese in the occupied Philippines. After the father drank up the family money and shot himself, Colin attended a poor-boy Bible college in South Carolina, wandered around the Upper South as an encyclopedia salesman, then became a regular on a Sunday-morning religious program that was broadcast out of Roanoke, Virginia. Colin quickly learned that his good looks, corn-bread accent, and family-oriented Christian message were a combination that could ring like coins bouncing on gold plate. More important, he discovered that beyond the television camera there was a huge political constituency hungry for conversion and affirmation, provided that it was conveyed by someone they could trust.
It’s inadequate to describe him as handsome. It was the totality of his appearance that charmed his audiences and made him an iconic figure sought out by political and religious groups all over the country. He was clean-cut, immaculately groomed, straightforward, his face marked with an ever present serenity that was obviously born of inner conviction. Working-class women who touched his hand called him “godly.” When he whispered his message of love and redemption into a microphone, their faces crumpled and their eyes swam with tears.
He returned to his birthplace and bought a modest home on Camp Street, in the Garden District, and often appeared at shelters for battered women and the homeless. But there were stories about a second home outside Bay St. Louis, one with a breathtaking view of the Gulf. The deed was in the name of the incorporated ministry that others administered for him, but the rich and the powerful were often seen dining on the deck with Colin at sunset, the blood-streaked skies and rustle of palms a triumphal backdrop to those who had successfully managed to give unto both God and Caesar.
Colin Alridge had remained free of the type of scandals that had brought down many of his predecessors. If there was a repressed libertine inside him, no one ever saw it. He was devoted to his work and I suspect sincere when he often mentioned his mother as the source of his political and spiritual convictions. Even I sometimes wondered if the rumors about his ties to casino gambling were manufactured by his political enemies. Why would anyone who had achieved so much risk it all by involving himself with a Miami lowlife like Whitey Bruxal?
Clete Purcel had his Caddy towed into the shop, then drove in a rental to Whitey Bruxal’s business office on an oak-shaded stretch of Pinhook Road near the Lafayette Oil Center. But Whitey Bruxal was not there and his receptionist said she had no idea where he was.
Clete looked around at the deep carpet and heavy, ornate furniture in the reception area. The office was located next to a motel built of soft South Carolina brick, and through the windows he could see the shadows of the live oaks out on Pinhook Road and the sun winking on the motel swimming pool. “You got a nice location here,” he said. When she didn’t respond, he added, “Whitey just blows in and out but doesn’t tell his employees where he is?”
“Would you like to leave your name and phone number?” the receptionist said. Her hair was platinum, her tan probably chemically induced. She picked a piece of lint off her skin and dropped it in a wastebasket.
“Is Lefty Raguza around?” Clete asked.
“I think Mr. Raguza is at the track.”
“Too bad. Tell Whitey Clete Purcel was by. He doesn’t need to call. I’ll drop by another time. Or maybe catch him at his house. He goes to his house sometimes, doesn’t he, when he’s not blowing in and out of the office?”