“Kermit is a sunshine patriot.”
“A what?”
“Read Thomas Paine.”
“I don’t need to. He treated Alafair dirty. He’s a four-flusher and a punk, if you ask me. Who’re the greaseball and the other guy at the table?”
“Who knows? The old man was famous on the cockfighting circuit. He used to fly in a DC-3 to Cuba and Nicaragua with his cocks. He was pals with Batista and the Somozas.”
“I need a drink. You want anything from the bar?” Clete said.
“Take it easy on the booze.”
“I wish I was stone drunk. I wish I was wearing a full-body condom. You think these chairs have been sprayed for crab lice?”
A man sitting in front of us turned around and gave us a look.
“You got a problem?” Clete said.
The man turned his back to us and didn’t reply. Clete leaned forward and punched him with one finger between the shoulder blades. “I asked if I could help you with something.”
“No, I’m fine,” the man said, looking at Clete from the side of his eye.
“Glad to hear it. Enjoy your evening,” Clete said. He went to the bar, scraping his chair loudly. When he returned, carrying a highball glass packed with ice that was dark with bourbon, his gaze was fixed on the Abelard table. “See the guy next to the greaseball, the one with his arm in a sling? There’s a cast or a big wad of bandages on his hand. You clipped a guy’s fingers off at the gig on the river?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“You remember his face at all?”
“I didn’t see any of their faces except the guy who got his ticket canceled.”
“The guy in the sling is hinky. He saw me looking at him and turned away real quick, like he’d made me.”
A different man in front of us turned in his chair, his brow furrowed. “Will you people be quiet?” he said.
“Mind your business,” Clete said.
“Sir?”
Clete leaned forward in his chair. “Call me ‘you people’ again and see what happens.”
I put my hand on Clete’s arm. He pushed it away and raised his glass and drank from it, his eyes already taking on an alcoholic luster, and I realized he had probably had a shot or two straight up before returning from the bar.
“What?” he said.
“Shut up.”
“These guys all smell like Brut. You know what Brut smells like? An armpit. Take a whiff. The barman could make a fortune selling gas masks.”
“Lower your voice.”
“I’m very collected and cool and simpatico. You need to lighten up.” Clete took a deep drink from his glass and filled his jaw with ice and began crunching it between his molars. He tapped the soles of his loafers, creating a staccato like a drumroll on linoleum. Then he said out of the side of his mouth, his eyes lowered, “The guy in the sling just turned around. He knows who we are. He was on the river. We need to get this guy in the box.”
In his own mind, Clete was still a cop. His mistakes at NOPD, his flight from the country on a murder beef, the security work he did for the Mob in Vegas and Reno, his history of addiction and vigilantism and involvement with biker girls and junkie strippers and street skells of every stripe all seemed to disappear from his memory, as though the justice of his cause were absolution enough and his misdeeds were simply burnt offerings that should not be held against him.
But he was not alone in his naïveté. I was out of my jurisdiction, my judgment suspect, my behavior perhaps driven more by obsession than by dedication. I was a neocolonial who had walked in the footprints of German-speaking French legionnaires and whose mark was as transient as tracks blowing in a Mesopotamian desert. My life, as Clete’s, was a folly in the eyes of others. And here we were, the court jesters of Acadiana, with neither evidence nor personal cachet, about to take on forces that our peers found not only normal but even laudable.
I went into the men’s room and used my cell phone to call a detective-grade cop in the Lafayette Police Department by the name of Bertrand Viator. “I’m at the Derrick and Preservation Club,” I said. “There’s a guy here who might be a suspect in a homicide in Jeff Davis Parish.”