rejection by the wellborn had become ashes in his mouth.
“See this?” I said.
“Yeah, one of those pocket voice recorders.”
I clicked the recorder on, then off with my thumb. “I had a talk with Whitey Bruxal earlier today. I had this recorder running in my pocket. I was going to take you over the hurdles with it, Bello.”
He was grinning and I could see he didn’t understand.
“I was going to play back snippets to you and let you have a little glimpse of what your business partner has to say when you’re not around,” I said. “But you’re an intelligent man and I won’t treat you as less.”
“I ain’t sure what that means.”
“You can believe this or not. Either the Feds or Lonnie Marceaux are going to hang you by your thumbs. No matter how you cut it, you’ve got Whitey Bruxal as your fall partner.”
“What you mean, fall partner?”
“He’s the guy you’re going down with. Is Whitey the kind of guy who will take a maximum sentence rather than rat out a friend? I don’t know the answer. But I bet you do.”
“He was working a deal wit’ you?”
“Put it this way. I doubt if Whitey would tell the truth to a corpse. But if I were on a burning plane with him and the plane carried only one parachute, I have a feeling who would end up wearing it.”
Bello fitted the Stilson back on the faucet head and began to squeak the nut tighter, as though my words were of little interest to him. But I could see the fatigue in his face, and in his eyes the tangle of thoughts that probably waged war inside his head twenty-four hours a day.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“I don’t think you’ll ever experience any rest until you own up to your mistakes, Bello.”
“Starting wit’ what?”
“I think you attacked Yvonne Darbonne. I think her death is eating you alive. No amount of Holy Roller shouting in tongues is going to change that fact or relieve you of your guilt.”
“Who tole you I did that?”
“It’s written all over you.”
The heavy, oblong steel head of the Stilson rested on the rim of the aluminum tank, his hand grasped tightly around the shank. The back of his hand was brown, mottled with liver spots and lined with veins that looked like knotted package twine. I could hear a horse blowing inside the stable.
I supposed it was not a time to say anything. But there are moments when caution and restraint just don’t cut it. “Why’d you do it, partner? She was just a kid.”
“Maybe there’re reasons everybody don’t know about. Maybe t’ings just happen,” he replied.
“Run that crap on somebody else.”
“What do you know? You got everyt’ing. They killed my boy. You know what it’s like to have your kid killed?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The niggers. Monarch Little and all them niggers with black scarfs on their head, selling their dope, pimping their women, corrupting the town.”
It was hopeless. I think there are those who are psychologically incapable of honesty and I think Bello was one of them. I got back in the truck and left him to himself. In all candor, I doubt if a worse punishment in the world could have been visited upon him.
BUT I STILL HAD MILES TO GO before I slept. I called Molly on my cell phone and asked if we could have a late dinner.
“You have to work?” she said.
“Clete’s in some trouble.”
“What kind?”
I searched my mind for an honest answer. “There’s no adequate scale. The rules of reason and logic have no application in his life,” I said.
“Sound like anybody else you know?” she replied.
“Put my supper in the icebox.”
“It already is,” she replied.
The owner of the motor court where Clete lived told me Clete and a young woman had gone to a street dance in St. Martinville.
They weren’t hard to find. In fact, as I drove up the two-lane through the dusk, through the corridor of live oaks that led out of town and the miles of waving sugarcane on each side of the road, I saw Clete’s Caddy parked in front of a supper club left over from the 1940s. It was a happy place, where people ate thick steaks and drank Manhattans and old-fashioneds and sometimes had trysts involving a degree of romance in the palm-shrouded motel set behind the club. Above the entrance way was a pink neon outline of a martini glass with the long-legged reclining figure of a nude woman inside.
The refrigerated air in the dining room was so cold it made me shiver. Each table was covered with white linen and set with a candle burning inside a glass chimney. A man in a summer tux was playing a piano that was so black it had purple lights in it. Clete was at a table by himself, a collins drink in his hand, his face flushed and cheerful, his eyes shiny with alcohol.
“Where’s Trish?” I said.
“On the phone.”
I sat down without being asked. “Helen says Orleans Parish is cutting a warrant for your arrest.”
“So I’ll get out of town for a little while. You want a steak?”
“The Orleans sheriff told Helen he knows you’re mixed up with bank robbers. What’s the matter with you, Clete? You know how many people in South Louisiana want an excuse to blow you away?”
“That’s their problem.”
I was so angry I could hardly speak.
“There used to be a slop chute in San Diego that had a sign over the door like the one out there. You ever go to San Diego?” he said.
“No. Listen, Clete-”
But he had already launched into one of his alcoholic reveries that served only one function-to distract attention from the subject at hand.
“It was a joint that had a neon sign with a gal inside a pink martini glass. We used to call her the gin-fizz kitty from Texas City. A whole bunch of Marines had fallen in love with this same broad who worked the bars outside Pendleton. They said she could kiss you into next week, not counting what she could do in the sack. Bottom line is she got all these guys to put her name down as beneficiary on their life insurance policies. When CID finally caught up with her, we found out she’d been a whore in Texas City. We also found out a half-dozen guys she screwed ended up in body bags. How about that for passing on the ultimate form of clap? Hey, I was one of them. Get that look off your face.”
He drank from his collins glass, then started laughing, like a man watching his own tether line pull loose from the earth.
“I want to take you outside and knock you down,” I said.
“It’s all rock ’n’ roll, Streak. Going up or coming down, we all get to the same barn. What can happen that hasn’t already happened in my life?”
“I think you’ve melted your brain. Don’t you realize the implications of the story you just told me?”
“What, that Trish is hustling me? Don’t make me mad at you, big mon.”
But there was more hurt in his face than indignation. In the back of the club I saw Trish Klein replace the receiver on a pay phone, then stare in our direction, her mouth red and soft, her heart-shaped face achingly beautiful in the pastel lighting. I got up from the table and left without saying good-bye.
I PLANNED DURING the next two days to talk to Trish Klein in private about her relationship with one of the best and most self-destructive and vulnerable human beings I had ever known. I got the opportunity in a way I didn’t suspect.
