his folded slacks on top of it. He stood raw and white in the sunlight, wearing only a black silk thong that was little more than a sling for his phallus. While other bathers gaped, he flexed his back and rolled his shoulders. "Let's hit the waves, big man," he said.
They crashed through the breakers until they were chest-deep in the water, in a flat space between the swells, the beach behind them biscuit-colored and lined with palm trees and hotels that had fallen into decay.
"You thought I was a cop?" Clete said.
"Me? I love cops. I got all the original episodes of Miami Vice"
"Need your prices, Lou."
Lou Coyne pursed his mouth and thought. "I can give you ten, no, fifteen percent discount on the item. In terms of girls, I got the whole rainbow. The client acts like a gentleman or the service is discontinued. Before the discount, the various prices are as follows —"
Clete waited until Coyne finished, then said, "Sounds okay. You remind me of a guy I used to know."
"Yeah?" Coyne said.
"But his name was Kale. It was back when I was subcontracting on the Texas coast. The guy's name was Lou Kale."
"No kidding? You never know, huh?"
"Know what?" Clete said.
"Who you're talking to these days. Hey, one other thing? We don't take coupons from Screw magazine."
Clete stared at him blankly.
"That was a joke," the man who called himself Lou Coyne said.
Clete called me that night from his hotel room and told me of what he had done.
"Get out of there. He's made you," I said.
"No, the phony name I gave him will check out on the Internet. He bought it. But tell you the truth, I'm not sure he's our guy."
"Why not?"
"The broad he sent ahead of him to scope me out came by the hotel and asked me to dinner. If they were jobbing me, she would have gone straight for my Johnson."
"They made you, Cletus."
"You never worked Vice. These people are not that complicated. Dave, you and I got inside the Mob and they were never on to us. Coyne or whatever bought it. I think this broad Babette is just a working girl."
"Babette?"
"Kind of cute, don't you think?"
How do you tell your best friend that his old enemy, a weakness for female validation, has just deep-sixed his brains?
"Call me on your cell in three hours," I said.
"Everything is solid. I'm going to exclude Lou Coyne as our Galveston pimp or find Ida Durbin. Now, pull your dork out of the wall socket."
But I did not hear from Clete again that evening and he did not respond to my calls.
She gazed out at the ocean, her chin tilted up in the breeze, and said she was originally from Hawaii, that she had been a bookkeeper before coming to Miami to work as a hostess at a supper club. But after her ex had blown town on a bigamy charge and stopped her alimony payments, she had drifted into the life. She said Babette was her real name, and that it had been the name of her grandmother, who had been born in Tahiti. Her knees touched Clete's under the table as she said these things, on a fishing pier that was framed darkly against the ocean and the wan summer light that still hung in the sky, even though it was after 9:00 p.m.
She had paid for the hamburgers and beer herself, and had made no commercial proposition to him of any kind. Her hair was mahogany-colored, bleached on the tips by the sun, and hung loosely on her bare shoulders. She lit a cigarette with a tiny gold lighter, crossed her legs, and smoked with her spine hunched, her posture like a question mark, as though she were cold.
"Want to get out of the wind?" Clete said.