“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“The day before she died. We had some ice cream in the park.”
“You have any idea why she’d want to kill herself?”
“No, sir.”
“None?”
“No, sir.”
“I think you knew her better than you’re letting on,” I said.
His eyes were starting to film.
“Hey, you answer his questions!” Bello said.
“We went out. We slept together,” Tony said.
“Why’d you try to lie to me?” I asked.
The nylon windscreens on the court puffed in the breeze and creaked against their tethers. The color in the boy’s cheeks had the broken shape of flame.
“You knock that off, Dave. He’s cooperating, here,” Bello said.
“You need to leave us alone, Bello,” I said.
“Fuck you. This is my home. You don’t come in here pushing people around,” Bello replied.
There was nothing for it. Bello was obviously a suffocating, controlling presence in his son’s life, and I knew that without a warrant I would get no more information out of either one of them. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, give me a call, will you?” I said to Tony, handing him my business card.
“Yes, sir, I will,” he said.
I walked back to my truck, with Bello at my side, his eyes stripping the skin off my face. “You trying to make trouble here, Dave? You got an old beef with me about something?” he said.
“No,” I said, opening the door to my truck.
“Then what?”
I didn’t answer and started to get behind the wheel. Bello ’s hand sank into my arm. “You don’t demean my family and blow me off,” he said.
“A young woman is dead. Your son tried to conceal information about his relationship with her. Now, you take your hand off me.”
“He’s just a kid.”
“Not anymore,” I replied.
He stared at me, his face twitching, his lips seeming to form words that had no sound.
CLETE PURCEL, my old partner from NOPD Homicide, was not in a good mood that night. In fact, he had not been in a good mood all week, ever since a pipehead check writer and bail skip by the name of Frogman Andrepont had thrown a television set through his brother-in-law’s picture-glass window onto the front lawn, then escaped across the roof while Clete ran from the backyard to the front of the house.
Clete had opened up his own P.I. and bail bond office on Main in New Iberia, but he still chased down bail skips for his former employers Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in New Orleans. So after Frogman missed his court appearance, Clete flushed him out of his brother-in-law’s house, only to lose him in Henderson Swamp, where Clete blew out a tire highballing down the top of the levee and was almost eaten alive by mosquitoes.
But as a man on the run, Frogman had two disadvantages: His face looked exactly like a frog’s, including the eye bags, distended throat, and even the reptilian skin; secondly, he was a degenerate gambler as well as a crack addict. In Frogman’s case, this meant Louisiana ’s newest twenty-four-hour casino and all-purpose neon-lit hog trough was as close to paradise as the earth gets.
It was located in a parish to the north of us and was part of a larger complex that featured a clubhouse and horse track. But the horse races and the upscale dining areas were ultimately cosmetic. The real draw was the casino. The other bars in the parish were forced by law to close at 2 a.m. Not so with the casino. Regardless of the uproar raised by local saloon owners and law enforcement agencies and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the booze at the casino flowed from moonrise to dawn. How could anyone doubt this was a great country? They only had to ask Frogman.
Seated at the bar, a martini in his hand, dressed western in case an unsophisticated country girl or two was floating around, Frogman had a sense of security and well-being that tempted him to forgive the state of Louisiana for all the time it had dropped on his head over the years. Actually he could afford to be generous. He’d just hit a three-hundred-dollar jackpot on the slot and had treated himself to a steak dinner and a split of champagne. He’d outsmarted that fat cracker Purcel, too, even if he’d had to remodel his brother-in-law’s living room a little bit. Frogman tried to imagine his brother-in-law’s face when he pulled into his driveway and saw his broken television set and picture-glass window lying in the flower bed. Maybe he should drop a postcard and explain. Why not? It was the right thing to do. He’d take care of it first thing tomorrow.
But Frogman’s brother)in-law was not in a forgiving mood and had already dimed Frogman and his probable whereabouts to Clete Purcel. Saturday night Clete cruised the interior of the casino, not knowing that Frogman was taking a break from the machines and getting his ashes hauled by a Mexican prostitute in an Air Stream trailer out by the stables. So Clete set up shop at a blackjack table and quickly lost four hundred and seventy-three dollars.
“You lost how much?” I asked.
“The dealer had a pair of ta-tas that would make your eyes cross. She kept hanging them in my face every time I had to decide whether I wanted a hit. How can you think in a situation like that?” he said.
It was Sunday morning, and he was telling me all this in my backyard, in his own convoluted, exhaustive fashion, which usually indicated he had precipitated a disaster of some kind and was using every circuitous means possible to avoid taking responsibility for it.
Years ago Clete had fried his legitimate career in law enforcement with weed and pills and booze. He had also managed to kill a federally protected witness and had even done security in Vegas and Reno for a sadistic gangster by the name of Sally Dio, whose plane crashed into a mountain in western Montana. After Sally and several of his gumballs were combed out of the trees with garden rakes, investigators discovered Sally’s engines were clogged with sand that someone had poured into the fuel tanks. Clete Purcel blew Big Fork, Montana, like the town was burning down.
He was hated and feared by both the Mob and many of his old colleagues at NOPD. His detractors tried to dismiss him as a drunk and an addict and a whoremonger, but in truth Clete Purcel was one of the most intelligent and decent men I ever knew, complex in ways that few could guess at.
He had been raised in the old Irish Channel and talked like it-an accent more akin to Southie or Flatbush than the Deep South. His hands were as big as hams, the knuckles half-mooned with scars. With regularity his massive shoulders and broad back ripped the seams of his tropical shirts. He had a small Irish mouth, the corners downturned, and sandy hair and green eyes that crinkled when he smiled. A black witness to one of his escapades described him as “an albino ape crawling across my rooftop in skivvies,” and Clete wasn’t offended.
He talked openly about his visceral appetites, his addictions, his romances with junkies and strippers, his alcoholic blackouts that turned into scorched-earth episodes that caused people to climb out of barroom windows. But inside his violence and his reckless disregard for his own welfare was another man, one who carried images and thought processes in his head that he seldom shared: a father who used to make a little boy kneel for hours at a time on grains of rice; a wife who dumped him because she couldn’t sleep with a man who believed the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape; the grinding sound of steel tracks through a Third World village, an arch of liquid flame, the smell of straw and animals burning, and the screams of tiny men in black pajamas trapped inside a spider hole.
These were the memories his booze and pills couldn’t even make a dent in.
“What happened to Frogman?” I said.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” he said. “I got cleaned out at blackjack, so I was watching this great- looking broad shooting craps. You should have seen her ass when she bent over. Remember that song by Jimmy Clanton, ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’? I was getting a boner just watching from the bar.”
The kitchen window was open and I could see the curtains blowing inside the screen and hear Molly loading the dishwasher. “Clete, would you just-”
“Then I noticed this gal was probably part of a crew, maybe even running the crew. I think two of them had
