“Okay,” he said. “You’re a hardnose, Dave. You gonna pay for that, you.”
We walked through a narrow hall and a storage room full of keg and bottled beer and out into an alley lined with Dumpsters and garbage cans. Two people were copulating vertically behind a Dumpster. They took no notice of us. We walked down the alley to the side street. In the mist I could see the glow of spotlights in the town square. They stayed focused at night on the pillared courthouse and on the church that had been there since 1844 and on the Evangeline Oak and on the graveyard where I first kissed a girl named Bootsie Mouton who later became my wife.
I looked back at the couple behind the Dumpster, then took off my hat and wiped the mist off my face with a handkerchief.
“The fuck is with you, Dave?”
“Nothing.”
“You got a look like the whole world is ending.”
“Shut up and listen, Marcel. You told me the Shondell vic went out hard. You said he was a marshmallow, that he made baby sounds.”
“You get off on this?”
“What’d y’all do to him?”
“I ain’t saying. And it wasn’t me done it. I tole you I drove, nothing else.”
“Clete Purcel said you were in on the Tommy Fig hit. Y’all freeze-wrapped his parts and tied them to the ceiling fan in his shop.”
“I was sixteen years old.”
“Who did the vic molest, Marcel?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said y’all took Polaroids for Pietro Balangie?”
“Yeah, he didn’t allow molesters in the city or jackrollers in the Quarter.”
“I got that. But none of that was personal with Pietro. The whack on Gerald Shondell Levine and the photos were.”
“I ain’t getting into this, man.”
“Who was the molester’s victim, Marcel?”
“It was hearsay.”
I shoved him against a brick wall. He tried to slap my arm away. I grabbed him by the throat and pinned him hard against the bricks. His whiskers felt like wire. “Was it a child?”
“Who you t’ink molesters molest?”
“Lose the coon-ass pronunciations and theatrics.”
“You already know,” he replied.
I grabbed his lapels and banged him again and again into the wall. “I want to hear it from you. Say it!”
“The two other guys are dead. That leaves me as probably the only guy who knows who the perv put his hands and mout’ on. That’s why I’m not a reg’lar visitor to New Orleans. That’s why I went nort’ and did some work in Camden and Brooklyn. That’s why I don’t go down Memory Lane with Adonis Balangie. The painter sodomized him for five years. Use my name to Adonis and I’ll punch your whole ticket. Now get your fucking hands off me before I forget we go back.”
I began to walk away, then stopped. “Where’d y’all dump the body?”
“We put acid on it. It ain’t a body no more,” Marcel said.
“Where’d you put it?”
“I already tole you. On the nort’ side of Pontchartrain Lake.”