“You should. You’re a one-man clusterfuck.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “How many times have you seen Rebel Without a Cause?”
“Four, I think. I saw Paul Newman in The Left Handed Gun six times.”
“I knew it. You’re like me. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“Could be, kid.”
“I don’t usually let any man call me that,” she said, “but for you I might make an exception.” She removed her shades, revealing the violet and magical intensity of her eyes. Her forehead was popping with sweat, her nostrils dilated. “I don’t understand my feelings about you. You’re a nice guy. But every nice guy I’ve ever known ended up wanting something from me. For some of them, that didn’t work out too good. What do you have to say to that?”
“I’m a used-up jarhead and alcoholic flatfoot with no tread left on his tires. What’s to say?”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Clete drove the boat through a bay that was copper-colored and flecked with a dirty froth when the wind blew. When the keel struck bottom, Gretchen dropped off the bow into the water and waded through the shallows and threw the anchor up on dry sand. Clete stood up in the cockpit and gazed through a pair of binoculars at the line of plastic-capped coffee cans disappearing in the south.
“I don’t understand what we’re doing,” Gretchen said.
Clete eased himself over the gunwale and dropped heavily into the shallows and walked up on the beach beside her, the water darkening his khakis up to the knees. “This is the place where the body of Blue Melton floated up,” he said. “If you look to the southeast, you’ll see a channel that flows through the bay and into the Gulf. It’s like an underground river that flows in and out with the tides. I think the guys who dumped her overboard didn’t know much about tidal currents. I believe they intended for her body to sink and be eaten by sharks or crabs. If the body was found, it would look like she fell off a boat and drowned. Because the ice hadn’t melted, I think they were in pretty close to shore. What I’m saying is I think these guys were on a big boat, one with a freezer unit, but they’re not seafarers, and they’re probably not from around here.”
“Why are rich guys hanging around with a poor Cajun girl from St. Martinville?” Gretchen said.
“Try sex.”
“She had a balloon in her mouth?”
“It probably held the same skag she was injected with. There was a message in it that said her sister was still alive. After she was abducted, somebody decided she knew more than she was supposed to and had her killed. Somebody gave her a hotshot and let her die in a freezer.”
“Why are we talking about this now?”
“My buddy Dave keeps insisting that we’re up against some big players. I told him we were dealing with the same collection of lamebrains we’ve been locking up for thirty years. I was wrong.” Clete looked at the giant trunk of an uprooted cypress that had washed up onto the beach in a storm, now lying sun-bleached and worm-scrolled and polished by wind and salt next to a stand of gum and persimmon trees. “Sit down a minute, Gretchen.”
“What for?”
“Because I asked you to. I don’t know how to say this. Three New Orleans lowlifes who tried to scam me out of my office building and apartment got whacked. The mechanic who did the job was probably an out-of-towner, maybe somebody who’s been mobbed up for a while. These three guys were criminals and knew the rules of the game. They made their bet and lost. The girl who floated up here wasn’t a player. She was an innocent girl that a bunch of real cocksuckers got their hands on and murdered. Her sister, Tee Jolie Melton, may be in the hands of those same guys. You smell that?”
Gretchen turned her face into the breeze. They were sitting in the shade on the cypress trunk, the metallic reflection of the bay as bright and eye-watering as the arc from an electric welding torch. “It smells like a filling station,” she said.
“You can’t see it yet, but it’s oil. Nobody knows how much of it is out there. The drilling company sank it with dispersants so there would be no way to accurately calculate how many barrels they’d be held responsible for spilling. Tee Jolie Melton said something to Dave about her boyfriend being mixed up with some guys who were talking about centralizers. Dave thinks the boyfriend is Pierre Dupree. Maybe the blowout was caused because there weren’t enough centralizers in the casing. But everybody already knows that, so that’s not the issue.”
“Yeah, I think I got all that. Go back to what you said about the three guys who messed with you and got shot.”
“They’re dead. End of story. Maybe the person who smoked them did the world a favor, know what I’m saying?”
“No, I don’t. Not at all.”
“The hitter was somebody who goes by the name Caruso.”
“Like the singer?” she said.
“Yeah, when Caruso sings, everyone else becomes silent. Permanently.”
“Sounds like urban-legend Mafia bullshit to me. You ever go to Miami in the winter? The whole beach is littered with greaseballs. They have physiques like tadpoles. Before they leave New York, they get chemical tans. Their skin looks like orange sherbet with black hair. My mother used to turn tricks in a couple of big hotels on the beach. She said some of these guys wore prosthetic penises inside their Speedos. Most of these pitiful fucks have day jobs on sanitation trucks. If they weren’t in the union, they’d be on welfare.”
Clete hung his head, his hands folded between his knees, his eyes unfocused. The wind was cool inside the shade, the leaves of the gum trees rustling overhead. His boat was rocking in the small waves sliding back off the beach.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked.
“No,” he replied.
“What are you thinking about?”