“I can’t believe I was in a cell with Frankie Dogs. He was a bodyguard for one of the guys who probably killed John Kennedy. It’s like standing next to a disease.”
“Go back to New Orleans for a while.”
“That’s where all these guys live.”
“So pull the plug with Zerelda.”
“Yeah,” he said vaguely, looking into space, puffing out the air in one cheek, then the other. “I think she’s still got the hots for Perry LaSalle, anyway. I guess he poked her a few times, then decided to zip up his equipment. Zerelda says he did the same thing with Barbara Shanahan.”
I busied myself at the cash register, then carried out a bucket of water that had drained from the pop cooler and threw it across one of the bait tables. When I came back inside, Clete was looking at me, his face flat.
“You don’t want to hear about other people’s sex lives?” he said.
“Not particularly.”
“Well, you’d better hear this, because this guy LaSalle has thumbtacks in his head and makes a full-time career of finding reasons to jam boards up everybody’s ass except his own.
“Barbara and Zerelda used to know each other when Barbara and LaSalle were at Tulane together. Barbara wouldn’t have anything to do with LaSalle, because LaSalle’s family let Barbara’s grandfather do time that should have been theirs. Then one night outside a law-school party on St. Charles, LaSalle saw these gangbangers tearing up two Vietnamese kids. LaSalle waded into about six of them, so they stomped him into marmalade instead of the Vietnamese.
“Barbara took LaSalle home and cleaned up his cuts and fed him soup and, guess what, they end up doing the horizontal bop.
“Guess what again? LaSalle comes around a few more times for some more boom-boom, then turns her off like she doesn’t exist.”
“This means he has thumbtacks in his head?” I asked.
“A guy who dumps a woman like Barbara Shanahan? Either he’s got shit for brains or he’s a closet bone-smoker.”
“You called her a woman instead of a broad,” I said.
Clete raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I guess I did,” he said.
The phone rang. When I got finished with the call, Clete was gone. I caught him at his car, out by the boat ramp.
“The other day the sheriff told me somebody slashed Legion Guidry’s truck tires. You were seen in the neighborhood,” I said.
“That’s a heartbreaking story,” he said.
“Stay out of it, Cletus.”
“The show is just getting started, big mon,” he replied, and drove away.
. . .
The following Monday I drove down East Main, past the antebellum and gingerbread homes along the Teche and the shady lawns scattered with the bloom of azalea bushes. I parked by the Shadows, where a tourist bus was unloading, and crossed the street and entered a two-story Victorian house that had been remodeled into the law offices of Perry LaSalle. It was like entering a monument to the past. Three secretaries sat behind computers in the front office, phones ringing, a fax machine pumping laser-printed correspondence into a basket, but these concessions to modern times were clearly overwhelmed in significance by an enormous glass-encased, sun-faded Confederate battle flag that had been carried by members of the 8th Louisiana Volunteers, its cloth rent by grapeshot or minnie balls, the names Manassas Junction, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Cross Keys, Malvern Hill, Chantilly, and Gettysburg inked into brown patches that were hand-stitched along the flag’s border. Oil paintings of LaSalles hung over the fireplace and between the high windows. A Brown Bess musket used by one of them at the Battle of New Orleans was propped on the mantelpiece, a framed letter of gratitude written to Perry’s ancestor by Andrew Jackson resting on the flintlock mechanism.
But it was not the LaSalles’ historical memorabilia that captured my attention. Through the window I saw a tall man backing a fire-engine-red pickup truck out the driveway. He wore a flower-print shirt and a straw hat, with the brim slanted over his forehead, but I could see the vertical furrows in his face, like those on a prune.
The secretary told me I could go upstairs to Perry’s office.
“You look a little battered. What happened?” Perry said from behind his desk.
“Bad day on the job. You know how it is. Who was that backing his truck out your driveway?”
Perry gazed out the window at the traffic passing on the street. “Oh, that fellow?” he said casually. “That’s Legion, the guy you were asking about once before.”
“He’s your client?”
“I didn’t say that.”