An hour later Clete rolled up to the dock in his convertible, with Holtzner beside him and the daughter and boyfriend following in a Lincoln. The four of them strolled down the dock and sat at a spool table under a Cinzano umbrella.
"Ask the waiter to bring everybody a cold beer," Holtzner said.
"We don't have waiters. You need to get it yourself," I said, standing in the sunlight.
"I got it," Clete said, and went inside the shop.
"We'll pay you a month's lease but we'll be shooting for only two or three days," Anthony, the boyfriend, said. He wore black glasses, and when he smiled the gap in his front teeth gave his face the imbecilic look of a Halloween pumpkin.
"Thanks anyway," I said.
"Thanks? That's it?" Holtzner said.
"He thinks we're California nihilists here to do a culture fuck on the Garden of Eden," Geraldine, the daughter, said to no one.
"You got the perfect place here for this particular scene. Geri's right, you think we're some kind of disease?" Holtzner said.
"You might try up at Henderson Swamp," I said.
Clete came back out of the bait shop screen carrying a round tray with four sweating long-neck bottles on it. He set them one by one on the spool table, his expression meaningless.
"Talk to him," Holtzner said to him.
"I don't mess with Streak's head," Clete said.
"I hear you got Cisco's father on the brain," Holtzner said to me. "His father's death doesn't impress me. My grandfather organized the first garment workers' local on the Lower East Side. They stuck his hands in a stamp press. Irish cops broke up his wake with clubs, took the ice off his body and put it in their beer. They pissed in my grandmother's sink."
"You have to excuse me. I need to get back to work," I said, and walked toward the bait shop. I could hear the wind ruffling the umbrella in the silence, then Anthony was at my side, grinning, his clothes pungent with a smell like burning sage.
"Don't go off in a snit, nose
out of joint, that sort of thing," he said.
"I think you have a problem," I said.
"We're talking about chemical dependencies now, are we?"
"No, you're hard of hearing. No offense meant," I said, and went inside the shop and busied myself in back until all of them were gone except Clete, who remained at the table, sipping from his beer bottle.
"Why's Holtzner want to get close to you?" he asked.
"You got me."
"I remembered where I'd seen him. He was promoting USO shows in Nam. Except he was also mixed up with some PX guys who were selling stuff on the black market. It was a big scandal. Holtzner was kicked out of Nam. That's like being kicked out of Hell… You just going to sit there and not say anything?"
"Yeah, don't get caught driving with beer on your breath."
Clete pushed his glasses up on his head and drank from his bottle, one eye squinted shut.
THAT NIGHT, IN A Lafayette apartment building on a tree-and-fern-covered embankment that overlooked the river, the accountant named Anthony mounted the staircase to the second-story landing and walked through a brick passageway toward his door. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and blue strings of smoke from barbecue grills floated through the palm and banana fronds that shadowed the terrace. Anthony carried a grocery sack filled with items from a delicatessen, probably obscuring his vision, as evidently he never saw the figure that waited for him behind a potted orange tree.
The knife must have struck as fast as a snake's head, in the neck, under the heart, through the breastbone, because the coroner said Anthony was probably dead before the jar of pickled calf brains in his sack shattered on the floor.
* * *
SIXTEEN
HELEN SOILEAU AND I MET Ruby Gravano and her nine-year-old boy at the Amtrak station in Lafayette Monday afternoon. The boy was a strange-looking child, with his mother's narrow face and black hair but with eyes that were set unnaturally far apart, as though they had been pasted on the skin. She held the boy, whose name was Nick, by one hand and her suitcase by the other.