“What are you doing?” I asked.
He looked sideways, then pulled on his nose and let his breath out.
“I went after Ritter. Nobody’s been by?”
“No.”
“The shit went through the fan.”
“I don’t want to know about it.”
“I was trying to help. You got somebody else willing to cover your back on a daily basis?”
He looked miserable. He rubbed his face, then knocked over his paper cup and spilled coffee on his hands.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Ritter had dials on this stripper, Janet Gish. She’d been washing stolen money at the Indian casinos for some Jersey wise guys. Ritter nailed the wise guys but he left her out of the bust. The deal was she had to come across for him at least once a month. Guess what? Janet developed the hots for Ritter, can you believe it? So he knew he had a good thing and he played along with her and said he was going to marry her as soon as he could dump his wife. In the meantime he was bopping Janet every Friday afternoon at a motel on Airline.
“Last week she’s in the supermarket and who does she see? Ritter and his old lady. Ritter looks right through Janet and studies these cans of beans on the shelf like he’s never seen one before. But what’s Ritter supposed to do? she asks herself. Introduce her? Except she’s in the next aisle now and she hears Ritter’s old lady say, ‘Did you see that? She’s got jugs like gallon milk bottles. With tattoos yet. You didn’t notice?’
“Ritter says, ‘I was never attracted to Elsie the Cow types.’ They both thought that was a real laugh.
“Janet decides it’s payback time. She’s got a bond on a soliciting charge with Nig and Wee Willie and she calls me up and asks if I can get the D.A. to cut her loose on the soliciting beef if she gives up Ritter. I told her that was a possibility but the D.A. would probably make her take the weight on the money laundering deal and maybe there was a better way to spike Ritter’s cannon.
“I got her to call up Ritter’s old lady at midnight and tell her she was sorry Don didn’t introduce the two of them at the supermarket because they probably have a lot in common. Then Janet goes into detail about Ritter’s sex habits and says it’s too bad Ritter uses the same old tired line with all his broads, namely that his wife is a drag at home and an embarrassment at departmental social functions and he’s shit-canning her as soon as he can make sure all the bills and charge accounts are under her name.
“It took about ten minutes for Ritter to come tearing across the bridge to Janet’s place on the West Bank. She dead-bolted the back door on him and he got a ball peen hammer out of his convertible and started smashing the glass out of the door and trying to get his hand on the lock. That’s when I clocked him with the birdbath.”
“You hit him with a cement birdbath?” I said.
“Hear me out, okay? Janet’s brother owns this car wash behind the apartment. Ritter’s half out of it, so I put him in the passenger seat of his convertible and hooked him up to the door handle with his cuffs and drove him up to the car wash entrance.
“I go, ‘Don, you’re a dirty cop. Now’s the time to rinse your sins, start over again, try keeping your flopper in your pants for a change. You set up that gig on the Atchafalaya and almost got my podjo, Dave, killed, didn’t you?’
“He goes, ‘No matter how this comes out, you’re still a skell, Purcel.’
“So I drove his convertible onto the conveyor and pushed all the buttons for the super clean and hot wax job. The pressure hoses came on and those big brushes dipped down inside the car and were scouring Ritter into the seats. I shut it down and gave him another chance, but he started yelling and blowing the horn, so I turned everything back on and stalled the conveyor and left him there with the steam blowing out both ends of the building.”
“You’re telling me Ritter’s still in there?” I said.
“Yes and no.” His mouth was cone-shaped when he breathed through it. “I had my hands full. Janet was getting hysterical and breaking things and throwing her clothes in a suitcase. Then I heard two popping sounds, like firecrackers in the rain. I went back to the car wash but there wasn’t anybody around. Except Ritter floating face-down in all that soap and wax. He’d taken one in the ear and one through the mouth.”
I got up from the table and looked out at my neighbor’s field and at the fog rising out of the coulee, my back turned to Clete so he couldn’t see my face.
When I turned around again Clete’s eyes were jittering with light, his lips moving uncertainly, like a drunk coming off a bender when he doesn’t know whether he should laugh or not at what he has done.
Then his eyes fixed on mine and his expression went flat and he said, as though by explanation, “This one went south on me.”
“Yeah, I guess it did, Clete.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Come inside. I’ll fix you something to eat,” I said as I walked past him toward the house.
“Streak?… Damn it, don’t give me that look.”
But I went through the kitchen into the bath and brushed my teeth and put cold water on my face and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking or take my anger out on a friend who had put himself in harm’s way on my account. But I believed Ritter’d had knowledge about my mother’s death and now it was gone.