"I'm down in front, Janet. I'll wave to you when I'm sure we've got the right seats. Yeah, wait for me to wave. It's mass confusion here," he said, and clicked off his phone.
By now Sammy had seen us and was watching us out of the corner of his eye while he tried to hold a conversation with the other singers. Clete mounted the wood steps that led onto the stage as though he were part of the production, stepping carefully over the plastic flowers clumped around the footlights. "Got a second, Mr. Figorelli?" he said.
Fat Sammy walked toward him, his eyes like hot BBs. "What do you think you're doing, Purcel?" he asked.
"Check out the ladies in the doorway at the back of the hall. They've been doing a little weed, so I hope they don't get too giggly," Clete replied.
Sammy stared at the back of the hall like a man witnessing the erection of his own gallows. His cheeks bladed with color and pinpoints of sweat popped on his forehead. He labored down the steps, forcing Clete to follow him. "You get rid of them people," he said hoarsely.
"And miss the reception afterwards? You kidding? Can we get introductions to the archbishop?" Clete said.
"What are you after?" Sammy said, his breath coated with funk.
"Give us the name of the guy who sicced the Dellacroces on Dave."
Sammy's face was shiny with a greasy film now, his boutonniere like a red wound on his jacket. "You got no right to do this to me, Purcel," he said.
"I'm counting to three, then waving Janet Gish into action."
"The guy's out there now, you dumb Mick."
"Where?" Clete said, twisting his head to survey the crowd.
"Don't do that. You're gonna get me clipped," Sammy said.
"I don't see anybody out there I know. Do you, Dave?"
"We're done here," I said.
"No, no. Sammy's going to give us a name," Clete replied, waving a finger.
"Sammy's going down with the ship. Right, Sammy?" I said.
But Sammy Fig's embarrassment was such he could no longer speak. In fact, I thought he was on the edge of having a coronary attack. The fatty layer under his chin trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat ran like hair oil into his shirt collar. I was convinced, at that moment, that inside every adult human being the child was still present, in this case an obese little boy struggling to free himself from the metal coils of a tuba while a packed football stadium laughed at his discomfort.
"We're going to boogie. Tell the guy who pissed on me I'll be looking him up," I said.
"You already burned me. Y'all don't know what you've done," Sammy said.
"That's the breaks. Anything else happens to Dave, I'm going to see you first. That means you're going to be the deadest douche bag in New Orleans," Clete said, jabbing Sammy in the chest with his finger.
We left Sammy standing numb and shaken in front of his audience and rounded up Janet Gish and her friends and headed for Gala-to ire on Bourbon Street.
On the way out of the rental hall I searched the crowd for a familiar face, one that might belong to the man who had crisscrossed me from head to foot with his urine. But if he was there, I did not see him.
"You blew it, Dave. Fat Sammy would have cracked," Clete said later.
"What did Sammy do when you and your friends threw water-bomb condoms at him and his girlfriend?" I said.
We were coming out of Galatoire's, into the pre-Christmas holiday atmosphere of late-night Bourbon Street. The street was loud with music, the neon like purple and pink angel hair inside the fog blowing off the river. "He cried and came at us with both fists," Clete said.
"He's still the same kid."
"All of us are. Except Fat Sammy became a pimp and dope pusher. It's only rock 'n' roll, Dave. Everybody dies. Go with the flow and try to have a few laughs," Clete said. He propped his shoe on a fire hydrant and buffed the tip with a cloth napkin he had taken from the restaurant.
Chapter 16.
I went back to work Monday morning. I took a legal pad from my desk drawer and wrote Junior Crudup's name at the top of it, then drew a circle around it. This is where it had all started, I thought, both for me and the Lejeune family. Under Junior's name I wrote the names of Castille Lejeune, Theodosha, Merchie, and Theodosha's psychiatrist in Lafayette, the man who supposedly committed suicide.