been counting cards at my blackjack table earlier. The gal crapped out twice, then the dice came back to her again. Soon as she picked them up from the stick man, a guy collides into the drink waitress and splashes cups of beer all over the place. That’s when she switched the dice. It was smooth, too. The boxman didn’t have a clue. She made seven passes in a row. Then she switched them back out, to one of the guys who’d been counting cards at my table.”
“What’s the point?” I said, my impatience growing.
We were sitting on the back steps. He squinted with one eye at the bayou, as though organizing his thoughts. “A half hour later she was back at the same table and switched them out again. Except this time she got greedy. She was doubling up her bets, until she had about eight or nine grand on the felt. Everyone around the table was starting to go apeshit and stacking chips on the pass line. The boxman called up a couple of security guys and I figured she was dead meat. That’s when Frogman showed up.”
“He was in her crew?”
“Dig this. The boxman and security guys were just about to bust the broad, then Frogman came stumbling into the crowd and went down on the floor like he’d stepped on a high-voltage wire. At first I thought it was part of the switch-off. I had to shove my way through the crowd to look at him close-up. He was curled in a ball, shivering all over, spit coming out of both sides of his mouth, then somebody started yelling, ‘The guy’s having an epileptic fit!’
“Except I knew Frogman didn’t have epilepsy. His hands were shriveled up like claws against his chest and his eyes were popping out of his head. I told the boxman to get a resuscitation cup out of their first-aid kit, but he just stared at me like I was talking Sanskrit. So I shouted at him, ‘Nobody does mouth-to-mouth in a time of AIDS. Get the cup out of your fucking first-aid kit.’
“You know what kind of medical aid they have in a dump like that? French ticklers and aphrodisiacs you buy from the rubber machine in the can. I couldn’t believe what I had to do next. I don’t think Frogman Andrepont has gone near a toothbrush since he got out of Angola five years ago. I grabbed his nose and opened up his mouth and was just about to do the unthinkable, when the broad with the bod that looks like Venus in blue jeans pushed me aside and said, ‘Move it over, bub.’
“She closed off Frogman’s nostrils and blew air down his throat and pounded on his chest until he finally made this terrible sucking sound and started breathing again. The security guys still weren’t sure if they were watching a scam or not. They were checking the dice on the table, but they couldn’t find the ones she’d switched into the game. Then the paramedics got there and Venus in blue jeans beat it out the back door.
“I showed some deputies my papers on Frogman and cuffed him to the gurney and was going to ride to the hospital in the ambulance with him, when I saw Venus hauling that beautiful ass of hers across the parking lot. I caught up with her and said, ‘You just ripped off the casino and saved a guy’s life at the same time. Grifters don’t do that.’
“She was walking real fast and says, ‘Grifter up your nose. Who do you think you are?’
“I go, ‘I’m a private investigator. I was chasing a bail skip, the guy you saved. I got my clock cleaned at the blackjack table.’
“She says, ‘You ought to stay out of casinos.’
“I say, ‘What’s your name?’
“She says, ‘Trouble.’
“I go, ‘How about a drink? Or something to eat?’
“She looks over my shoulder and sees the security guys coming for us. Then she looks all around for her friends, but she’d already lost them in the crowd. She goes, ‘I’m up Shit’s Creek, handsome. Can you get us out of here?’ My big-boy started flipping around in my slacks, like it had gone on autopilot and was trying to break out of jail.”
Molly shut the kitchen window.
“Sorry,” Clete said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She said her name is Trish Klein. She says you and her old man were buds. She says you were there when some guys took his head off with a shotgun.”
I stared through the trees at the bayou, trying to assimilate Clete’s story and connect it with the other information I had on Dallas Klein’s daughter. But Clete wasn’t finished. “This morning an FBI broad knocked on my door. Her name is Betsy Mossbacher and she’s got a king-size broom up her ass. The Feds had a tail on Trish Klein last night, and now they’ve connected me with her and you with me. What’s this bullshit about, Dave?”
“You’re getting it on with grifters now?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I knew Trish Klein’s father in Miami. He was a guard on an armored truck. He owed money to some wiseguys and I think they made him give up the truck’s schedule. They cleaned the slate when they boosted the truck. I think Trish Klein is here on a vendetta. The Feds think she was mixed up in taking down a savings and loan in Mobile that was a laundry operation for the Mob.”
His big arms were propped on his knees, his face pointed straight ahead. But I could tell he was thinking about the girl now and not about her father.
“You were in the sack with her?” I asked.
“I wish. Do I look old, Dave? Tell me the truth,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine.
Chapter 5
IF YOU EVER BECOME a low-bottom boozer, you will learn that the safest places to drink, provided you know the rules, are blue-collar saloons, pool halls, hillbilly juke joints, and blind pigs where two thirds of the clientele have rap sheets.
Upscale hotel bars and Dagwood-and-Blondie lounges in the suburbs have a low tolerance for drunks and shut you down or call security before you can get seriously in the bag. When you drink in a rat hole, you can get shit- faced out of your mind and not be molested as long as you understand that the critical issue is respect for people’s privacy. Marginalized people don’t want confrontation. Violence for them means life-threatening injuries, bail bond fees, fines paid at guilty court, and loss of work. It could also mean a trip back to a work camp or a mainline joint. They couldn’t care less about your opinion of them. They just ask that you not violate their boundaries or pretend you understand the dues they have paid.
In New Iberia, most of the dope is sold on inner-city street corners by gangbangers. At dusk they assemble in dirt yards or in front of boarded-up shacks, their caps on backward, sometimes wearing gang colors, and wait for passing cars to slow by the curb. They’re territorial, armed, street-smart, and dangerous if pushed into a corner. Most of them do not know who their fathers are and have sentimental attachments to their grandmothers. Oddly, few of them expect to do mainline time. None of them will deliberately challenge authority. Most important of all, none of them has any desire to become involved with respectable society, except on a business level.
But Tony Lujan and a friend knew none of these things about marginal people or chose to ignore them on Monday afternoon, when they decided to stop at the McDonald’s on East Main, far from the black neighborhood where a dealer by the name of Monarch Little sold crystal meth and rock and sometimes brown skag to all comers, curb service free.
Monarch had a thick pink tongue that caused him to lisp, a gnarled forehead, and skin whose shiny pigmentation made me think of a walrus. He wore two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes with gas cushions in the soles, the stylized baggy pants of a professional weight lifter, and a huge ball cap turned sideways on his head, which, along with a washtub stomach and the shower of brown moles on his face, gave him the harmless appearance of a cartoon character.
But in a street beef, with nines, shanks, or Molotovs, Monarch did not take prisoners. As a teenager he had been in juvie three times, once for setting fire to the house of a city cop who had felt up his sister in the backseat of a cruiser. He marked his eighteenth birthday by shoving a pimp in the face and watching him tumble down a staircase. The pimp’s brother, a human mastodon who had once torn a parking meter out of concrete and thrown it through a saloon window, put out the word he was going to cook Monarch in a pot. The pimp’s brother caught
