“I checked with some shylocks in Vegas and Tampa. Except they don’t call themselves shylocks anymore. They’re ‘lending institutions.’ I’m not making this up. This fat fuck in Tampa probably has ten million on the street and went to the fifth grade. The vig is four points a week.”
“Can you get to the point?”
He gave me a look. “Everybody I talked to said Desmond Cormier is up to his eyes in debt. Kind of like Francis Ford Coppola when he made Apocalypse Now, except he didn’t borrow from people who do collections with chain saws. Maybe Wimple and Gemoats and the other gash hound were here to protect Cormier. The Mob can bleed Cormier for the rest of his life; plus, they love being around actors.”
“Wimple was supposed to take out Tillinger and didn’t, so somebody sicced the two hitters on him?”
“That’d be my bet,” Clete said.
But I was not thinking about Miami button men or Smiley Wimple or the daily immersion into a sewer that constituted my livelihood. Clete followed my gaze to the sweating green bottle of Mexican beer on the table.
“Can I make an observation?” he said.
“No.”
“You’re falling in love with a young woman, and you think it’s wrong. Stop pretending you’re a monk. It’s going to get you drunk again.”
“Butt out, Cletus.”
“I know your thoughts before you have them. You think you have to marry every woman you sleep with. Except this time she’s too young. So instead of being human, you’re going to do a number on your own head and get back on the dirty boogie. In the meantime, you don’t let the young woman have a vote. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. Who died and made you God?” He drained the bottle, his throat working, and dropped it loudly into the trash can. “You’re peeling my face off.”
“I wonder why.”
“Search me. I think you’re too sensitive.”
• • •
I LEFT THE OFFICE early that afternoon and drove to Bella Delahoussaye’s house. Through the houses I could see Bayou Teche and the elephant ears that undulated in the current at high tide. I was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a music box with chocolates inside. Bella was wearing tight jeans and a pullover when she answered the door. She tilted her head. “Look at Santa Claus.”
I stepped inside and handed her the roses and set the music box on the couch. “?‘Jolie Blon’ is on it.”
“You come to court me, baby?”
“You’re an extraordinary woman.”
“Come here.”
I stepped closer to her. She worked her sandals off by pushing one foot against the other. She stood on top of my shoes and put her arms around me and pressed the entirety of her body against mine, her face buried in my neck, her hair soft and freshly washed and air-blown and swelling against my cheek. I squeezed her in a way I had not squeezed a woman since the death of my wife.
She stepped back and touched my face. “But you ain’t here to win my heart away, are you?”
“I’d like to. But you’re right.”
“You got a comb?”
I removed it from my back pocket and handed it to her. As a beautician might, she stroked my hair back over my head, along the sides, and through the white patch I’d carried since childhood. “I knowed when I first met you, you had the blues. You ain’t got to explain anything. Sometime down the track, you need a place to park your hips, you know where I’m at.”
“That’s a line from Bessie Smith.”
“You was born for the blues, Dave. Take care of yourself out there.”
The Maltese cross glinted at her throat. She picked up my hand and kissed the back of it and pressed it on her breast, then released it and flattened her hand on my heart. Her eyes seemed to reach inside my mind. If I ever saw death in a woman’s eyes, it was at that moment. But I did not know if I was looking at my reflection or hers or that of someone else I knew. She opened the door and remained standing in it as I walked to my truck. It was Indian summer, the evening sky porcelain blue, the sunlight like a cool burn. When I looked back at her cottage, the door was shut, the curtains closed. Bella Delahoussaye was the personification of Old Louisiana. I felt as though an icicle had pierced my heart.
• • •
I DROVE TO BAILEY Ribbons’s home on Loreauville Road and parked in front and walked up on the gallery and tapped on the screen door. When she came to the door, she was wearing a bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve got two tickets to Marcia Ball’s performance at the Evangeline Theater tonight.”