'I got a bone to pick with you,' he said.
'Oh?'
'Two Lafayette homicide roaches just left here. They said you told them to question me.'
'Really?' I said.
'They threw me up against the car in front of my landlord. One guy kicked me in both ankles. He put his hand in my crotch with little kids watching.'
'Dave was trying to clear you as a suspect. These guys probably got the wrong signal, Swede,' Clete said.
He pulled back the leather pouch on the slingshot, nests of veins popping in his neck, and fired a scarlet marble into the pecan limbs.
'I want to run a historical situation by you. Then you tell me what's wrong with the story,' I said.
'What's the game?' he asked.
'No game. You're con-wise. You see stuff other people don't. This is just for fun, okay?'
He held the handle of the slingshot and whipped the leather pouch and lengths of rubber tubing in a circle, watching them gain speed.
'A plantation owner is in the sack with one of his slave women. He goes off to the Civil War, comes back home, finds his place trashed by the Yankees, and all his slaves set free. There's not enough food for everybody, so he tells the slave woman she has to leave. You with me?'
'Makes sense, yeah,' Swede said.
'The slave woman puts poison in the food of the plantation owner's children, thinking they'll only get sick and she'll be asked to care for them. Except they die. The other black people on the plantation are terrified. So they hang the slave woman before they're all punished,' I said.
Swede stopped twirling the slingshot. 'It's bullshit,' he said.
'Why?' I asked.
'You said the blacks were already freed. Why are they gonna commit a murder for the white dude and end up hung by Yankees themselves? The white guy, the one getting his stick dipped, he did her.'
'You're a beaut, Swede,' I said.
'This is some kind of grift, right?'
'Here's what it is,' Clete said. 'Dave thinks you're getting set up. You know how it works sometimes. The locals can't clear a case and they look around for a guy with a heavy sheet.'
'We've got a shooter or two on the loose, Swede,' I said. 'Some guys smoked two white boys out in the Basin, then tried to clip a black guy by the name of Willie Broussard. I hate to see you go down for it.'
'I can see you'd be broke up,' he said.
'Ever hear of a dude named Harpo Scruggs?' I asked.
'No.'
'Too bad. You might have to take his weight. See you around. Thanks for the help with that historical story,' I said.
Clete and I walked back to the convertible. The air felt warm and moist, and the sky was purple above the sugarcane across the road. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Swede watching us from the middle of the drive, stretching the rubber tubes on his slingshot, his face jigsawed with thought.
WE STOPPED AT A filling station for gas down the road. The owner had turned on the outside lights and the oak tree that grew next to the building was filled with black-green shadows against the sky. Clete walked across the street and bought a sno'ball from a small wooden stand and ate it while I put in the gas.
'What was that plantation story about?' he asked.
'I had the same problem with it as Boxleiter. Except it's been bothering me because it reminded me of the story Cool Breeze told me about his wife's suicide.'
'You lost me, big mon,' Clete said.
'She was found in freezing water with an anchor chain wrapped around her. When they want to leave a lot of guilt behind, they use shotguns or go off rooftops.'
'I'd leave it alone, Dave.'
'Breeze has lived for twenty years with her death on his conscience.'
'There's another script, too. Maybe he did her,' Clete said. He bit into his sno'ball and held his eyes on mine.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Batist telephoned the house from the dock.
'There's a man down here want to see you, Dave,' he said.
'What's he look like?'
'Like somebody stuck his jaws in a vise and busted all the bones. That ain't the half of it. While I'm mopping off the tables, he walks round on his hands.'
I finished my coffee and walked down the slope through the trees. The air was cool and gray with the mist off the water, and molded pecan husks broke under my shoes.
'What's up, Swede?' I said.
He sat at a spool table, eating a chili dog with a fork from a paper plate.
'You asked about this guy Harpo Scruggs. He's an old fart, works out of New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado. He freelances, but if he's doing a job around here, the juice is coming out of New Orleans.'
'Yeah?'
'Something else. If Scruggs tried to clip a guy and blew it but he's still hanging around, it means he's working for Ricky the Mouse.'
'Ricky Scarlotti?'
'There's two things you don't do with Ricky. You don't blow hits and you don't ever call him the Mouse. You know the story about the horn player?'
'Yes.'
'That's his style.'
'Would he have a priest killed?'
'That don't sound right.'
'You ever have your IQ tested, Swede?'
'No, people who bone you five days a week don't give IQ tests.'
'You're quite a guy anyway. You shank Anthony Pollock?'
'I was playing chess with Cisco. Check it out, my man. And don't send any more cops to my place. Believe it or not, I don't like some polyester geek getting his hand on my crank.'
He rolled up his dirty paper plate and napkin, dropped them in a trash barrel, and walked down the dock to his car, snapping his fingers as though he were listening to a private radio broadcast.
RICKY SCARLOTTI WASN'T HARD to find. I went to the office, called NOPD, then the flower shop he owned at Carrollton and St. Charles.
'You want to chat up Ricky the Mouse with me?' I asked Helen.
'I don't think I'd go near that guy without a full-body condom on,' she replied.
'Suit yourself. I'll be back this afternoon.'
'Hang on. Let me get my purse.'
We signed out an unmarked car and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin and crossed the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and turned south for New Orleans.
'So you're just gonna drop this Harpo Scruggs stuff in his lap?' Helen said.
'You bet. If Ricky thinks someone snitched him off, we'll know about it in a hurry.'
'That story about the jazz musician true?' she said.
'I think it is. He just didn't get tagged with it.'
The name of the musician is forgotten now, except among those in the 1950s who had believed his talent was the greatest since Bix Beiderbecke's. The melancholy sound of his horn hypnotized audiences at open-air concerts on West Venice beach. His dark hair and eyes and pale skin, the fatal beauty that lived in his face, that was like a
