“We need every swinging dick on the line. Tell him to get his ass back here.”
“That’s what Nate Baxter used to say.”
“Remind me to scrub out my mouth with Ajax,” she replied.
I caught a ride on another boat to high ground, then walked the rest of the way into the Quarter. The Quarter had taken a pounding from the wind and the rain, and ventilated shutters had been shattered off their hinges and the planked floors of whole balconies stripped clean from the buildings and sent flying like undulating rows of piano keys down the street. But the Quarter had not flooded and some of the bars, using gasoline-powered generators, had stayed on the full-tilt boogie for three days—their patrons zoned and marinated to the point they looked like waxworks figures that had been left under a heat lamp.
I found Clete in a corner dump two blocks from his office, his tropical shirt and cream-colored slacks black with oil, his skin peeling with sun blisters, his face glowing from the huge mug of draft beer he was drinking and the whiskey jigger rolling around inside it. A brunette woman in a halter and cutoff blue-jean shorts and spiked heels was drinking next to him, her thigh touching his. The tops of her breasts were tattooed with chains of roses, her neck strung with purple and green glass beads, her mascara running like a clown’s.
“Time to dee-dee, Cletus,” I said.
“Lighten up, big mon. Have a soda and lime. The guy’s got cold shrimp on dry ice,” he said.
“You’re shit-faced.”
“So what? This is Dominique. She’s an artist from Paris. We’re going over to my place for a while. Did you see that big plane that flew over?”
“No, I didn’t. Step outside with me.”
“It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a fly-over. Gee, I feel better now.”
“Did you hear me?”
He leaned over the counter, filled his mug from the tap, and poured a jigger of Beam into it. He upended the mug, drinking it to the bottom, his eyes fastened on mine. He smiled, his face suffused with warmth. “This is our country, big mon. We fought for it,” he said. “I say screw all these cocksuckers. Nobody jacks the Big Sleazy when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are on the job.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But in AA you do not try to reason with drunks. In Clete Purcel’s case, you did not invade the private cathedral where he sometimes lived.
“I’ll tell Helen you’ll catch us later,” I said.
He laid the full weight of his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me to the door. The cloud of testosterone and beer sweat that rose from his armpit was suffocating.
“Give me an hour. I just need to clean up and fix some supper for me and Dominique,” he said.
“Supper?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That woman isn’t from France. She used to work in a massage parlor in Lafayette. She was one of Stevie Giacano’s whores.”
“Who’s perfect? You’ve got something negative to say about every woman I meet.”
“That’s a comment on your judgment, not mine.”
I saw the hurt flicker in his face before I could take back my words. He took his arm from my shoulders and stepped out on the sidewalk. The street was strewn with plaster, broken glass, chimney bricks, beer cans and red plastic beer cups, roofing shingles, and thousands of water beetles that had been forced up through the sewer grates and that snapped under your feet when you stepped on them. But in the waning of the afternoon, in the pool of shadow made by the building at our back, in the popping of a Mardi Gras flag someone had hung on a staff from a balcony, I felt for just a moment that an older and fonder vision of New Orleans might still be available to us.
“I’m sorry for what I said, Clete.”
His eyes crinkled, threading with white lines at the corners. He pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and offered it to me. “Aside from her painting career, Dominique coincidentally knows every working girl in the Quarter. You still want to find that junkie priest who’s hooked up with the sister of the MS-13 dude?” he said.
You didn’t put the slide or the glide on Clete Purcel. Chapter 7
O N OUR WAY back to rendezvous with Helen, we stopped at the second-story apartment where Jude LeBlanc lived with the Hispanic woman by the name of Natalia Ramos. But the apartment door was locked and the shutters latched. A neighbor, a Cajun woman who had ridden out the storm, said Jude had left the apartment for the Ninth Ward on Friday afternoon and Natalia had decided to join him. “I heard there’s bad t’ings happening down there. Maybe they ain’t coming back, no,” the neighbor said.
“Do you know where they went in the Ninth?” I asked.
“There’s a church down there that don’t ax no questions about him. Natalia said it’s made of stucco and got a bell tower,” she replied.
“Thank you,” I said, and started to go.