THE STARS WERE out when Clete parked his Caddy behind Ozone Eddy’s tanning parlor on Airline. He went through the back door into the cluttered room that Eddy called his office. Eddy and a woman Clete didn’t know were drinking coffee at a desk while the albino sat shirtless in a heavy chair, his arms secured behind him, his forehead knurled, his skin like white rubber. “What kept you?” Eddy said.
“What kept me? What happened to him?” Clete said.
“You wanted him brought here. So we brought him here,” Eddy said.
“I didn’t tell you to boil his face off. Who’s she?”
“Connie. I pieced off the job. You got any weed on you?”
“Where’s his shirt?” Clete said.
“He puked on it,” Eddy replied. “Actually, he puked inside the bag we put over his head, and it drained on his shirt. What’s with the attitude?”
“I said get him in here. That I’d talk to him when you got him here. That doesn’t mean you turn him into a boiled shrimp,” Clete said.
“You were gonna put an albino in a tanning bed, but you’re lecturing us on abusing people?” the woman said.
“Get her out of here, Eddy,” Clete said.
“You weren’t so choosy that New Year’s Eve when you tried to grab my ass in the elevator at the Monteleone,” the woman said.
Clete tried to think straight, but he couldn’t. Lamont Woolsey was looking at him from under his brow, his face sweaty, his body starting to stink, his slacks streaked with grease and dirt from the car trunk.
“What’s your fucking problem?” Eddy said.
“You don’t hurt people when you don’t have to,” Clete said.
“The guy’s a geek,” Eddy said.
“Beat feet, Eddy, and take her with you,” Clete said. “I’ll lock up.”
“If you haven’t noticed, this is my salon, my office, my girlfriend.”
“You forget what happened here tonight, and with luck, you won’t get melted into soap,” Clete said.
“You don’t throw me out of my own place.”
“What did you say? Melted into soap?” the woman said.
“Did you frisk this guy?” Clete asked.
“What do you think?” the woman said. “I told Eddy to leave this shit alone. I also told him you were a masher. What was that about the soap?”
“I’m going to bet Woolsey here had a fob on a key ring that looked like a dolphin,” Clete said.
The woman and Ozone Eddy glanced at each other. “What about it?” she said.
“That fob means Woolsey has ties to a Nazi war criminal,” Clete said. “I’ve been in a dungeon operated either by him or by his friends. There were chains and steel hooks in that room that had pieces of hair and human tissue on them.”
“Are you drunk?” the woman said.
“Tell her,” Clete said to
Woolsey.
A blue vein pulsed in Woolsey’s scalp. His lifted his eyes to the woman’s. They were electric, the pupils as tiny as pinheads. A solitary drop of sweat rolled off the tip of his nose and formed a dark star on his slacks. “I was a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio. I’d like to take you dining and dancing some night,” he said. “You have a nice mouth. Your lipstick is too bright, but your mouth is nice just the same.”
The certainty had gone out of the woman’s face.