Two nights later the air was cool and dry, and the cypress trees in the swamp bloomed with heat lightning. Clete came into the bait shop as I was closing up. I smelled him before I saw him. He helped himself to a water glass off a wall shelf and sat down heavily at the counter and unscrewed the cap from a pint bottle of bourbon wrapped in a brown-paper sack. A noxious fog, an odor of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and beer sweat, begin to fill the shop like a living presence. Clete poured four fingers of whiskey in his glass and drank it slowly, watching me turn the electric fan on an overhead shelf in his direction. The lid of his left eye was swollen, a bruise like a small blue mouse in the crow’s-feet at the corner.
“You got a reason for trying to blow me out the door?” he asked.
“Nope. How you doin’, Cletus?”
“Joe Zeroski is back in town. At my motor court with Zerelda Calucci and half the greaseballs in New Orleans. Last night I’m trying to take a nap and this collection of shitbags are cooking sausages on a hibachi ten feet from my window and playing a Tony Bennett tape loud enough to be heard in Palermo. So I make the mistake of talking to them like they’re human beings, asking them politely to dial it down a few notches so I can get some sleep.
“What do I get? Nothing, like I’m not there. I go, ‘Look, just face your stereo the other way, okay?’ One guy says, ‘Hey, Purcel, I got your ten-inch frank right here. You want it with mustard?’ and grabs his flopper while the other greaseballs laugh.
“So I go back inside, take a shower, put on fresh clothes, comb my hair, give these assholes every chance to go somewhere else. When I go outside, they’re still there, except now Zerelda Calucci is sitting at the picnic table with them, the tops of her ta-tas sticking out like beach balls, her shorts rolled up so tight they almost split when she crosses her legs.
“So I walk over and ask her out for a late dinner, figuring that ought to put the lasagna through the fan if nothing else won’t. She sits there, scraping the label off a beer bottle with her thumbnail, rolling it into little balls, then goes, ‘I don’t mind.’
“I try to use the wet dream of the Mafia to provoke these guys, and instead she agrees to have dinner with me. The greaseballs know better than to say dick about it, either. I put on my sports coat and back my convertible around to pick her up. Except here comes Perry LaSalle in his Gazelle. Zerelda gets this look on her face like she’s creaming in her pants and I’m back in my room, watching TV, dinner date canceled, LaSalle and Zerelda over in her room, blinds drawn.”
He finished his glass of whiskey and opened a can of beer and broke a raw egg in the glass and poured the beer on top of it. He took a drink and stared out the window into the darkness, an unfocused light in his eyes.
“So good riddance,” I said.
“I did some checking on that dude. You know why he didn’t finish at the Jesuit seminary? He couldn’t keep it in his pants.”
“What are you talking about, Clete?”
“He belongs to Sexaholics Anonymous. The guy’s a gash hound. Why is it everybody in this town has some kind of problem? I don’t know why I keep coming over here.”
I turned off the outside floodlamps, and the bayou went dark and the tops of the cypresses were green and ruffling in the moonlight.
“Where’d you get the mouse?” I asked.
“I got up at four in the morning and walked into a door,” he replied.
At the office the next morning I glanced at the state news section of the Times Picayune and saw an Associated Press article describing the homicide of a waitress outside Franklin, Louisiana. Her name was Ruby Gravano, a member of that group of marginal miscreants I had known for years in New Orleans, what I called the walking wounded, whose criminal deeds became a kind of incremental suicide, as though they were doing penance for sins committed in a previous incarnation. The body had been found by a roadside, not far from the banks of Bayou Teche, the clothes torn off her back. The article described her injuries as massive, which usually meant the details could not be published in a family newspaper. I started out my door toward Helen’s office and almost collided into Clete Purcel. He was dressed in a tan suit and a powder-blue shirt with a rolled collar and a tie with a horse painted on it and shined cordovan loafers. His cheeks were shiny with aftershave lotion.
“Have a cup of coffee with me. I’m a little wired right now,” he said.
“Got a lot of work to do, Cletus,” I said.
“Fill me in on this Shanahan broad.”
“What?”
“I asked her out to lunch. I told her I had some helpful information on an armed robber she’s prosecuting.”
“Can’t you let one day go by without stirring something up?”
He snuffed down in his nose and nodded to a uniformed deputy passing in the corridor. The deputy did not acknowledge him.
“I’m sorry. I’ll catch you another time,” Clete said.
“Come inside,” I said.
I closed the office door behind us. Before he could speak, I said, “Remember Ruby Gravano?”
“A hooker, used to live in a flophouse by Lee Circle?”
“She was killed last night. Maybe beaten to death.”
“I heard she was out of the life. You talk to her pimp?” he said.