"What else do the girls know?"
"They're airheads, Dave. The intellectual one reads the shopping guide on the toilet. Besides, they're not interested in dealing anymore. Their pimp decided to plea out, so they're off the hook."
"Write down their names, will you?"
He took a piece of folded paper from his pants pocket, with the names of the two women and their addresses already written on it, and set it on the plank table. He started eating again, his green eyes smiling at nothing.
"Old lesson from the First District, big mon. When somebody wastes a couple of shit bags…" He realized I wasn't listening, that my gaze was focused over his shoulder on the swimming pool. He turned and stared through the tree trunks, his gaze roving across the swimmers in the pool, the parents who were walking their children by the hand to an instruction class a female lifeguard was putting together in the shallow end. Then his eyes focused on a man who stood between the wire enclosure and the bathhouse.
The man had a peroxided flattop, a large cranium, like a person with water on the brain, cheekbones that tapered in an inverted triangle to his chin, a small mouth full of teeth. He wore white shoes and pale orange slacks and a beige shirt with the short sleeves rolled in neat cuffs and the collar turned up on the neck. He pumped a blue rubber ball in his right palm.
"You know that dude?" Clete said.
"His name's Swede Boxleiter."
"A graduate?"
"Canon City, Colorado. The FBI showed me some photos of a yard job he did on a guy."
"What's he doing around here?"
Boxleiter wore shades instead of the granny glasses I had seen in the photos. But there was no doubt about the object of his attention. The children taking swim lessons were lined up along the edge of the pool, their swimsuits clinging wetly to their bodies. Boxleiter snapped the rubber ball off the pavement, ricocheting it against the bathhouse wall, retrieving it back into his palm as though it were attached to a magic string.
"Excuse me a minute," I said to Clete.
I walked through the oaks to the pool. The air smelled of leaves and chlorine and the rain that was sprinkling on the heated cement. I stood two feet behind Boxleiter, who hung on to the wire mesh of the fence with one hand while the other kneaded the rubber ball. The green veins in his forearm were pumped with blood. He chewed gum, and a lump of cartilage expanded and contracted against the bright slickness of his jaw.
He felt my eyes on the back of his neck.
"You want something?" he asked.
"We thought we'd welcome you to town. Have you drop by the department. Maybe meet the sheriff."
He grinned at the corner of his mouth.
"You think you seen me somewhere?"
I continued to stare into his face, not speaking. He removed his shades, his eyes askance.
"Soooo, what kind of gig are we trying to build here?" he asked.
"I don't like the way you look at children."
"I'm looking at a swimming pool. But I'll move."
"We nail you on a short-eyes here, we'll flag your jacket and put you in lockdown with some interesting company. This is Louisiana, Swede."
He rolled the rubber ball down the back of his forearm, off his elbow, and caught it in his palm, all in one motion. Then he rolled it back and forth across the top of his fingers, the gum snapping in his jaw all the while.
"I went out max time. You got no handle. I got a job, too. In the movies. I'm not shitting you on that," he said.
"Watch your language, please."
"My language? Wow, I love this town already." Then his face tilted, disconcerted, his breath drawing through his nose like an animal catching a scent. "Why's Blimpo staring at me like that?"
I turned and saw Clete Purcel standing behind me. He grinned and took out his comb and ran it through his sandy hair with both hands. The skin under his arms was pink with sunburn.
"You think I got a weight problem?" he asked.