The bartender propped his arms on the bar, his eye sockets cavernous, his impatience barely constrained. “Somebody did you something?” he said.
“Is this place named for Gatemouth Brown, the musician?” Clete asked.
“What are you doing in here, man?”
“Waiting on my change.”
“It’s on the house.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Then you got no bidness in here.”
“The twenty is for you. I need to talk to Herman Stanga.”
The muscles on the backs of the bartender’s arms were knotted and tubular, one-color tats scrolled on his forearms.
“I’m out of New Orleans and New Iberia,” Clete said. “I chase bail skips and other kinds of deadbeats. But that’s not why I’m here. How about losing the ofay routine?”
The bartender removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked toward the back door. “Some nights we cook up some links and chops. They ain’t half bad,” he said. “But don’t give me no shit out there.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Clete said.
Clete poured his Jack Daniel’s into his beer mug and drank it. He walked through a back hallway stacked with boxes, and out the back door into a rural scene that seemed totally disconnected from the barroom. The back lot was spacious and dotted with live oaks and pecan trees, the limbs and trunks wound with strings of white lights. A barbecue pit fashioned from a split oil drum leaked smoke into the canopy and drifted out over Bayou Teche. People were drinking out of red plastic cups at picnic tables, some of the tables lit by candles set inside blue or red vessels that looked like they had been taken from a church.
Clete had never seen Herman Stanga but had heard him described and had no difficulty singling him out. Stanga was sitting with a woman in the shadows, at a table under a live oak that was not wrapped with lights. Both ends of the tabletop were covered with burning candles, guttering deep inside their votive containers. The woman was over thirty, heavy in the shoulders and arms, her blouse and dress those of a countrywoman rather than a regular at a juke.
Stanga tapped a small amount of white powder from a vial on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, then held it up to the woman’s nose. She bent forward, closing one nostril, and sniffed it up as quickly as an anteater, her face lighting with the rush.
Clete walked closer, the tree trunk between him and Stanga and Stanga’s female friend. A puff of wind off the bayou swelled the tree’s canopy, rustling the Spanish moss, spinning leaves down on the tabletop and the shoulders of the two figures sitting there. Clete could hear Stanga talking with the kind of hypnotic staccato one would associate with a 1940s scat singer:
“See, baby, you ain’t no cleaning girl I brung up from the quarters in Loreauville. You’re a mature woman done been around and know how the world work. Ain’t nobody, ain’t no man, gonna make you do anyt’ing you don’t want to. That’s what I need. A strong woman that’s a people person, somebody who know how to keep the cash flow going wit’out no hitches, midlevel management out there on the ground, keep these young girls in line. You be Superwoman. You ain’t gonna be driving that shitbox of yours no more, either. Gonna put you in nice threads, gonna give you your own expense account, gonna dress you up, baby. I’ll tell you something else. You a temptation, but bidness is bidness. Ax any nigger in this town. I respect a woman’s boundaries. I’m here as your friend and your bidness partner, but the operational word in our relationship is ‘respect.’ You want some more blow, baby?”
The woman’s eyes, which had seemed sleepy and amused by Stanga’s monologue, wandered off his face to a presence that was now standing behind him. Stanga twisted his head around, the light from the candles flickering on his face, his tiny black mustache flattening under his nostrils. He laughed. “The American Legion hall is down the road,” he said.
“A couple of your girls stiffed Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine for their bail,” Clete said. “I thought you might want to do a righteous deed and direct me to their whereabouts.”
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“Number one, I ain’t got no ‘girls.’ Number two, I ain’t no human Google service. Number t’ree—”
“Yeah, I got it.” Clete removed his cell phone from his trouser pocket and opened it with his thumb. He looked at the screen as though waiting for it to come into focus. “A state narc friend of mine is sitting out front in my Caddy. He’s off the clock right now, but for you he might make an exception. You want to take a walk down to the bayou with me or run your mouth some more?”
“Look, I ain’t give you no trouble. I was talking to my lady friend here and—”
Clete pushed the send button on his phone.
“All right, man, I ain’t in this world to argue. I’ll be right back, baby. Order up something nice for us both,” Stanga said.
Clete walked down the slope, ahead of Stanga, seemingly unconcerned with the matter at hand, glancing up at the stars and across the bayou at the lighted houses on the opposite slope. The drawbridge was open upstream, and a tugboat, its deck and cabin lights blazing, was pushing a huge barge past the bridge’s pilings. Clete stared at the shallows and at the bream night-feeding among the lily pads. He watched the gyrations of a needle-nosed garfish that was maneuvering itself on the perimeter of the bream that had schooled up underneath the lilies. He did all these things with the detachment of a resigned, world-weary man who offered little threat to anyone.
“So what this is, man, them two Jews in New Orleans cain’t run their bidness wit’out siccing you on me?” Stanga said to Clete’s back.
But Clete didn’t reply. He adjusted his porkpie hat on his brow and stared at the dark green dorsal fins of the bream rolling in the water, the carpet of lily pads undulating from their movements.
“Hey, you just turn deaf and dumb or something? I been nice, but I got a short fuse with crackers who t’ink they can wipe their ass on other people’s furniture. I ain’t intimidated by your size, either, man. Have your say or call your narc friend, but you quit fucking wit’ me.”
“I identified one of the dead girls in Jeff Davis Parish,” Clete said. “The guy who did her broke bones all over her body. Was she one of yours, Herman? How many girls do you have on the stroll over in Jeff Davis?”