“Clete never did anything to you, Whitey, but you’re making money off an unrighteous situation that’s not Clete’s fault.”
“I’ll make you a counteroffer. Wipe your ass with your sixty dollars. I’ll buy the round for the boys, and you and Purcel can haul everything back in the building. Then pour a shitload of Vaseline on it and cram it up your ass. I hope both of you get rich twice and go broke three times. I hope both of you inherit a house with fifty rooms in it and drop dead in every one of them.”
I had to hand it to him: Whitey was stand-up. I had tried to use my power wrongly to help a friend, and in so doing, I had probably put an unskilled and poor man at the mercy of an unscrupulous mortgage holder.
Clete and I spent the next two hours dragging furniture back into the building or wrestling it up the stairs into the apartment. It was four o’clock when I sat down heavily on the couch, my head swimming. Clete was in the kitchen, pouring four inches of Scotch into a glass packed with cracked ice. It was not a good moment. My defenses were down, the smoky smell of the Scotch like an irresistible thread from an erotic dream you can’t let go of at first light.
“You want a Dr Pepper?” he said, his back to me.
“No, thanks.”
“I got some cherries and limes.”
“I don’t want one.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I think I pulled something in my back.” I got up and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I took out a Dr Pepper and opened it.
“I thought you didn’t want one.”
“I changed my mind. Why didn’t you tell me you needed money?”
“It was eighty grand.”
“How much?”
“What I said.”
“You got it from a shylock?”
“I started gambling. I did pretty good at first.”
“Here?”
“Everywhere. I had a credit line in Vegas. Google has ruined private investigation. Anyway, I started losing, and I didn’t stop until I was broke and borrowing on the property.”
He took a long drink from the glass, his eyes on mine, the ice and mint and Scotch sliding down his throat. I felt a twitch in my face. “So the bank owns your place now?”
“It’s not a bank, it’s a mortgage company. They screw old people. Maybe they’re mobbed up.”
“Great choice.”
He set down the glass. The Scotch was drained from the ice. He dumped the ice into the sink. I felt myself swallow.
“Let’s go eat,” he said.
“There’s something you’re not telling me. Tony Nine Ball said you had trouble with Bobby Earl. What’s that about?”
“The problem wasn’t exactly with Bobby Earl. I almost feel sorry for the bastard. I heard the blacks were loading up on condoms his first night in Lewisburg.”
“Tony says you pissed in Earl’s car.”
“Yeah, years ago. At the Yacht Club.”
“Just recently.”
“Okay, I’m shooting craps at Harrah’s, and in come Bobby Earl and Jimmy Nightingale with this stripper who used to work on Bourbon. Except it was obvious Earl is carrying the stripper for Nightingale, or at least obvious to me, because Nightingale is a bucket of warm vomit who manipulates the subculture like it’s his private worm farm. But right now that’s not my business, and I’m simpatico at the table as long as these two assholes leave me alone. I’ve got twenty-six hundred dollars in chips in front of me, and a magic arm, and I’m rolling nothing but elevens and sevens. The broad hanging all over Earl is staring at me with this curious look, then a lightbulb goes off in her head and she says, ‘Hey, you’re the fat guy who came to my house.’?”