here?”
I got up and opened the side door to the terrace. “Hey, Cletus, over here,” I said.
“Hey, you answer my question,” Whitey said.
But again I didn’t reply. Clete walked through the dappled shade of the live oak, his face affable and handsome behind his yellow-tinted aviator’s glasses. I could feel the air-conditioned coolness from the living room rushing past me into the heat and humidity of the afternoon.
“Hey, how’s it hangin’?” he said to Whitey as he came through the door, uninvited.
But I had underestimated Whitey. He might have been a creature of his times, his psychological makeup as hard as the concrete he grew up on, but he was nevertheless capable of mustering a level of dignity, even if it was feigned, that men of his background seldom possess.
“It’s lunchtime and I was going to ask Mr. Robicheaux to join me,” he said. “Because you’re his friend, you’re welcome, too. But this is still my home, the place where my family lives. Any guest in my house has to respect that.”
“You got it, Whitey. But I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your employee Lefty Raguza. He’s not a family-type guy,” Clete said.
“What might have happened outside this house has no application inside it, you follow? You want to eat, there’s a spread laid out for us in the dining room. You want to act rude, it’s time for you to go,” Whitey said.
“Here’s a story for you,” Clete said. “We’ve got a congressman here who was asked to describe Louisiana on CNN. He goes, ‘Half of it is underwater and half of it is under indictment.’ Right now, in your case, that means you’re anybody’s hump. Forget the lunch. Let’s talk business.”
“What business I got with you?”
“The word is your kid’s a closet bone smoker. The Iberia D.A. has got the handle he needs to jam him and you both. Dave didn’t tell you?”
The transformation that took place in Whitey’s face was like none I had ever seen in another person. The eyes didn’t blink or narrow; the color in them did not brighten with anger or haze over with hidden thoughts. The jawbone never pulsed against the cheek. Instead, his expression seemed to take on the emotionless solidity of carved wood, with eyes as dull and cavernous as buckshot. I believe I could have scratched a match alight on his face and he wouldn’t have blinked.
“What’d you call my boy?” he asked.
Clete pressed the palm of his hand against his chest. “I didn’t call him anything. That’s his rep in a couple of drag joints in Lafayette. I thought you and Dave had talked. The D.A. thinks the Lujan kid came on to your son and your son blew up his shit. The point is when piranhas smell blood, they clean the cow to the bone. You want your casino interests let alone? Maybe I can make that happen. I’m getting through to you, here?”
“Yeah, you’re both working with this twat Trish Klein,” Whitey said.
Clete looked at me. “You heard the man, Streak. I told you it was a waste of time. Hey, Whitey, this isn’t Miami. Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum. Dave knocked a tooth out of the D.A.’s mouth and he’s still got his shield. What does that tell you? You think we’re here to shake you down for chump change? While you’re in the slams, what do you think Bello Lujan is going to be doing-protecting your assets till you get out? He’ll turn your pad into a cathouse and your horses into canned dog food.”
We left Whitey standing in his living room. Outside, as we crossed the thick, carpetlike texture of his St. Augustine grass, I heard the red Morgan running in the pasture. Her neck and flanks were dark with sweat, her mouth strung with wisps of saliva. She clattered against a rail and I would have sworn she nickered at me.
Clete got in his Caddy and headed down the driveway. Just as I started my engine, I saw Whitey come out the front door.
“Hey, Robicheaux, wait up,” he called.
I rolled down the window. “What?” I said.
“What he said about my boy?”
“Yeah?”
“People are saying that, or your friend was just working my crank?”
“Your kid has problems. Homosexuality is probably the least of them.”
“You got a kid?”
“An adopted daughter.”
“How would you like it if somebody talked about her like you talk about my boy? How would you like it if my lawyers came after you through your family?”
“We’re not like you, Whitey. Dallas Klein’s blood is on your soul. On the day you die, I believe his specter will stand by your bedside. Nothing you do from now until then will change that fact. Your son is a monster. I have a feeling you know it, too.”
For a moment I saw a look in Whitey’s eyes that made me believe there are some people who are truly damned. Then the moment passed and he squinted into the haze and pinched the humidity out of his eyes. “I went to school under the Catholic nuns,” he said. “They taught us after we pissed not to shake off more than two times. Know what we did? We all ran down to the john and shook it off three times to see what would happen. Good try, Robicheaux, but you and your friend belong here. Like you say, it’s a place for jerk-offs.”
Upstairs, Slim Bruxal pushed open a window and leaned outside, his upper torso naked. “Hey, Dad, can somebody give Carmen a ride back to the dorm? I’ve got a softball game,” he said.
MY LIFE IS NOT GIVEN to prescient moments. But occasionally I have them, particularly with the advance of age. When they occur, they leave behind a sensation like a cold burn on the heart.
The sky was painted with horsetails, the trees blowing hard along the highway as I followed Clete out of Lafayette. Then he pulled into a truck stop and went inside, not glancing back to see if I was behind him.
When Clete made choices, even minuscule ones, that geographically separated him from his friends, he was usually embarking on an odyssey that invariably brought harm to only one person-himself.
I pushed open the door in the cafe area and saw him at the end of the counter, his aviator glasses in his pocket, the lines at the corners of his eyes like pieces of white thread, a bottle of beer and a foaming glass and a saltshaker in front of him. I cupped my hand on his shoulder.
“It’s twenty minutes after one,” I said. “You haven’t eaten, either.”
“I’m on a diet,” he replied.
I sat down on the stool next to him and asked the waitress for coffee. “You did great back there, Cletus.”
“Remember when we caught Augie Giacano jackrolling an old lady and threw him down a fire escape? Then we dimed him with Didi Gee so he’d get in trouble with his own people?”
“When you threw Augie down the fire escape.”
“Whatever. We didn’t get pushed around by Brooklyn skells like Whitey Bruxal.” He salted his beer and drank from it. He touched at his mouth with a paper napkin, then put the napkin aside, finished the glass in one swallow, and filled it again.
“Eat a hamburger with me,” I said.
“Everything is muy copacetico, Streakus. No problemas here.” His eyes drifted to the television anchored on the cafe wall. “Check out those tropical storms in the Atlantic. The Florida Straits are starting to look like a turnstile.”
“I’ve got to get back to the department.”
“See you later.”
“I’m not leaving you here alone.”
“What? I’m supposed to feel like the walking wounded?”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t get it, Dave. You never did. We’re dinosaurs. This isn’t the same country we grew up in. The scumbags own it, from top to bottom. Except they’re legal now and have college degrees and wear two- thousand-dollar suits. Back in our First District days, we would have fed these motherfuckers into an airplane propeller.”
A truck driver down the counter wearing a greasy bill cap looked at us, and the waitress studied the television screen with undue attention, then turned up the volume. A CNN announcer was talking about a hurricane that was strengthening off the Bahamas.
