“I think Smiley feels he got set up.”
“No idea who he’s working for?”
“None. Sherry Picard called.”
Clete looked at a place six inches from the side of my face. “Yeah?”
?
?She said y’all aren’t hanging out anymore.”
“It’s more like she flushed me. No big deal.”
Right. I avoided looking at his eyes. He put a cracker into his mouth and chewed. He hadn’t touched his sandwich.
“She’s off the wall, Clete.”
“I’m old, she’s young. You warned me. End of subject.”
“Age is not a factor. She has the grace of a chain saw.”
Wrong choice. Three things about Clete Purcel: Since I’d first met him, he’d never once used God’s name in vain; referred to a woman in a profane way; or criticized a woman who’d dumped him, unless you counted the postcard he sent me from El Sal when he skipped the country on a murder beef and asked me to tell his ex, who’d cheated on him, that he wanted her to have the toothbrush he’d left in the bathroom.
He wadded up a napkin and lobbed it into a trash can by the cold-drink dispenser. “Smiley say anything about Jimmy Nightingale?”
“No. But I had a strange experience with Jimmy at Baron’s Health Club.”
“Like what?”
“I was hitting the speed bag and pretty sweaty and dirty. He squeezed the back of my neck and whispered in my ear. He was standing on my foot.”
Clete’s gaze went away from mine, then came back. “He’s AC/DC?”
“He was talking about making the world into the Garden of Eden.”
“You’re making this up?”
“Jimmy isn’t the same guy I used to know,” I said. “But that’s not what bothers me. I couldn’t scrub his touch off my skin. Helen said the same thing about him.”
Clete looked into space. “I think I’m going back to the Big Sleazy for a few days. Start putting junk in my arm, hanging out at bottomless clubs, go to a Crisco party at a steam room, do something healthy for a change.”
“It’s not funny, Clete.”
“None of this is,” he replied. “I didn’t give you the whole gen on Sherry. She called one of her sniper targets a sand nigger. She tried to take it back, but it made me think about her relationship to Kevin Penny.”
“She might have decided to get rough?”
“Sherry wouldn’t make a good Maryknoll.”
* * *
CLETE WENT TO Walmart that afternoon. On the way out, he ran into Swede Jensen, the Nightingale chauffeur, whom he’d helped get a job as an extra in Levon’s film adaptation. Swede was wearing white Bermuda shorts with bananas on them and a sleeveless golf shirt, his tan as dark as saddle leather, his armpit hair stiff and bleached by the sun. His concave face always reminded Clete of a hominid replica he had seen in a natural history museum.
“What’s the haps, Swede?” Clete said.
Swede looked around but kept walking.
“Wait up,” Clete said.