Considering the hand she’d been dealt, who would take her to task?
* * *
AT NOON ON Wednesday, Clete was about to go across the street
to Victor’s Cafeteria when a midnight-blue Buick with tinted windows pulled to the curb and a chauffeur in gray livery got out and looked across the roof at Clete and said, “Got a minute, Mr. Purcel?”
Peroxide hair, dented-in face, shades, flat stomach, concrete deltoids, scar tissue around the eyes, a half cup of brains. Where had he seen him before?
“You’re Swede Jensen. You parked cars at the casino.”
“You got a good memory,” the chauffeur said. “I work for Ms. Nightingale now.”
“I’m closed till one.”
“She gave me orders. I told her you probably didn’t want to be bothered. She pissed in the swimming pool about it. How about cutting me a break?”
Clete tried to process what he’d just heard. It was impossible. “Come in and make it fast.” He went back into the office and closed the blinds. His secretary had already gone to lunch; the waiting area was empty. He sat behind his desk and opened a drawer and took out a roll of mints and put one into his mouth. He left the drawer open. A .25-caliber semi-auto lay under a notepad. Swede took a chair.
“She wants to hire you,” he said.
“So why doesn’t she come in?”
“She’s shy.”
“I’ll believe that in a minute.”
“I told her we go back.”
“We don’t go back, Swede. I remember you. That’s a long way from ‘we go back.’?”
“This is my meal ticket, Purcel.”
“Before Tony Nine Ball got you a job parking cars, you were a porn actor in that studio out on Airline Highway.”
Swede took off his shades and pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes were blue, one of them defective, as if there were an ice chip in the lens. “I took a pinch for a lewd act with a minor. I had to wait eight months in jail to go to court. The charges got dropped. You want me to leave, that’s fine with me.”
“What’s on Ms. Nightingale’s mind?”
“She thinks Levon Broussard’s lawyers are going to put the Kevin Penny torture/murder on her brother.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Clete asked.
“What do you think? To break his sticks.”
“So he can’t get elected to the U.S. Senate?”
“The Senate is just the rosin box,” Swede said. “Jimmy Nightingale is the man for our times.”
“I knew a mobbed-up guy from Jersey who knew Nightingale in the casino business. He’s doing life for tying a guy to a tree and shooting him in the balls. He said Nightingale was a Murphy artist without the virtues.”
“Go to one of his rallies. All those people are wrong?”
Clete looked at Swede again. His eyebrows were irregular in shape, like earthworms that had been stepped on. “You were in the ring?”
“Ham-and-egg stuff. Nothing to write Ring magazine about.”
“Where’d you learn to fight?”