“I see. You were honoring me by coming to me first about the ‘delivery’ of a seventeen-year-old girl? To me personally.” His voice started to climb. “To my home.”
“I didn’t mention her age,” I said. “But you’re correct. She’s seventeen. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.”
His jaw tightened. He paused as though counting to three in his head. He cleared his throat. “It was good of you to come by. Johnny and I had an argument. I want him to attend Tulane and study to be a physician. He wants to gyrate on a stage. So he went off in a huff. I think he has a flirtation with the Balangie girl. That’s all I know about any of this.”
His explanation seemed plausible. Or at least that was what I wanted to believe. I was about to write off our visit when the gardener got to his feet from the flower bed and turned around. He removed his straw hat and wiped his face on his sleeve, then saw me staring at him and grinned. Shondell followed my gaze. “You know Marcel?”
“Who does not know Marcel LaForchette in New Iberia?” I said.
“The man needed a job and a little help with the parole board,” Shondell said.
The room was quiet. Shondell looked at Clete. “Sir, do you have a reason for staring at me?”
“LaForchette is a button man,” Clete said.
“He’s a what?” Shondell said.
Clete picked up the orange juice and brandy I had set down, then widened his eyes and said, “Bombs away,” and drank the glass to the bottom, letting the ice slide down his throat, his cheeks filling with color. He suppressed a burp. “I’ll be out in the car, Dave. Mr. Shondell, you’ve got quite a place here. It puts me in mind of an Erector Set. In the best way.”
He went out the door. Shondell let his eyes rest on mine. “You need to leave my home, Dave.”
“Sir?”
“I won’t suffer your rudeness or your bringing that man in my home.”
“I had a problem of conscience about the girl. That shouldn’t be hard for you to understand.”
“Get out.”
I rose from the leather softness of the sofa I was sitting on. Maybe I had reached an age when I was tired of restraint and being deferential to people I secretly loathed. If you have not lived in a hierarchal culture, one that reeks of hypocrisy and arrogance and entitlement, you will probably not understand a society in which you daily give homage to people whose ancestors kept your ancestors poor, uneducated, and terrified.
“Marcel LaForchette worked for the Balangie family, who are supposedly your enemies,” I said. “Why would you bring him across the moat and into the castle? You’re too smart a man for that.”
“Do you want me to take a quirt to you?” he said. “I’ll do it.”
“I believe you,” I replied. “See you around. You put your foot in it, sir.”
Inside the darkness of his eyes, I saw a flare like the ignition of a kitchen match.
Chapter Five
CLETE HAD A PI office in both New Iberia and the French Quarter. We drove in his pink Caddy to the motor court on East Main where he stayed when he was in New Iberia. If you wonder why we didn’t ask the Balangie family first about Isolde’s safety rather than Shondell, I’ll try to explain. The Balangies were people you didn’t get involved with, not on any level, no more than you would wish to submerge your arm in a saltwater tank loaded with jellyfish.
Governor Huey Long, the prototype for all American demagogues, past and present, literally gave the state of Louisiana to Frank Costello. In turn, Costello gave the management of our statewide vice to an immigrant leg-breaker named Pietro Balangie, who put slot machines in every drugstore, grocery, nightclub, and saloon in South Louisiana. Did anyone object? In South Louisiana? Are you kidding?
Some suspected that Pietro was involved in the murder of John Kennedy. His level of rage toward the Kennedys was legendary, and Robert in particular made life miserable for him. But Pietro was old-school and took his secrets to the grave.
Clete sat on the bed in his cottage and gazed out the window at a dredge boat working its way up the bayou. “Want to take a drive?”
“To see Adonis Balangie?” That was the son of Pietro Balangie. He was also somebody I didn’t want in my life or my head or anywhere in my vicinity.
“We should have slipped the punch with these guys,” Clete said. “But we’re stuck with the situation now. Or at least I am.”
“I’m not?”
“All right, we’re both in it,” he said. “Adonis isn’t such a bad guy. I mean in terms of greaseball standards. He went to college. He doesn’t blow his nose on his napkins or anything like that.”
Did Clete know how to say it?