Scarlotti dragged himself backward, his nose bleeding from both nostrils. But the elderly woman who had set the flowers out on the walk ran from the restaurant door and knelt beside him with her arms stretched across his chest, as though she were preventing him from rising. She screamed in Italian at Clete, her eyes serpentine and liquid.
Benny Grogan, the ex-wrestler, touched Clete on the elbow. Pieces of chipped beef still clung to his platinum hair. He held a ball-peen hammer in his hand, but he tossed it onto a sack of peat moss. For some reason, the elderly woman stopped screaming, as though a curtain had descended on a stage.
'You see a percentage in this, Purcel?' Benny Grogan said.
Clete looked at the elderly woman squatted by her son.
'You should go to church today, burn a candle, Mouse,' he said.
He got in his convertible and drove to the corner, his tailpipe billowing white smoke, and turned down a shady side street toward St. Charles. He took his seal-top coffee mug off the dashboard and drank from it.
NINETEEN
IT WAS EARLY SATURDAY MORNING and Clete was changing a tire in my drive while he talked, spinning a lug wrench on a nut, his love handles wedging over his belt.
'So I took River Road and barrel-assed across the Huey Long and said goodbye to New Orleans for a while,' he said. He squinted up at me and waited. 'What?' he said.
'Scarlotti is a small player in this, Clete,' I said.
'That's why you and Helen were pounding on his cage?' He got to his feet and threw his tools in the trunk. 'I've got to get some new tires. I blew one coming off the bridge. What d'you mean, small player? That pisses me off, Dave.'
'I think he and the Giacano family put the hit on Cool Breeze because he ratted them out to the Feds. But if you wanted to get even for Megan, you probably beat up on the wrong guy.'
'The greaseballs are taking orders, even though they've run the action in New Orleans for a hundred years? Man, I learn something every day. Did you read that article in the
His face was serious a moment, then he stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and the smile came back in his eyes and he twirled his porkpie hat on his finger while he looked at me, then at the sunrise behind the flooded cypresses.
I HELPED BATIST AT the bait shop, then drove to Cool Breeze's house on the west side of town and was told by a neighbor he was out at Mout's flower farm.
Mout' and a Hmong family from Laos farmed three acres of zinnias and chrysanthemums in the middle of a sugarcane plantation on the St. Martinville road, and each fall, when football season began, they cut and dug wagonloads of flowers that they sold to florists in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I drove across a cattle guard and down a white shale road until I saw a row of poplars that was planted as a windbreak and Cool Breeze hoeing weeds out in the sunlight while his father sat in the shade reading a newspaper by a card table with a pitcher of lemonade on it.
I parked my truck and walked down the rows of chrysanthemums. The wind was blowing and the field rippled with streaks of brown and gold and purple color.
'I never figured you to take up farming, Breeze,' I said.
'I give up on some t'ings. So my father made this li'l job for me, that's all,' he said.
'Beg your pardon?'
'Getting even wit' people, t'ings like that. I ain't giving nobody reason to put me back in jail.'
'You know what an exhumation order is?' I asked.
As with many people of color, he treated questions from white men as traps and didn't indicate an answer one way or another. He stooped over and jerked a weed and its root system out of the soil.
'I want to have a pathologist examine your wife's remains. I don't believe she committed suicide,' I said.
He stopped work and rested his hands on the hoe handle. His hands looked like gnarled rocks around the wood. Then he put one hand inside the top of his shirt and rubbed his skin, his eyes never leaving mine.
'Say again?'
'I checked with the coroner's office in St. Mary Parish. No autopsy was done on Ida's body. It simply went down as a suicide.'
'What you telling me?'
'I don't think she took her life.'
'Didn't nobody have reason to kill her. Unless you saying I… Wait a minute, you trying to-'
'You're not a killer, Breeze. You're just a guy who got used by some very bad white people.'
He started working the hoe between the plants again, his breath coming hard in his chest, his brow creased like an old leather glove. The wind was cool blowing across the field, but drops of sweat as big as marbles slid off his neck. He stopped his work again and faced me, his eyes wet.
'What we got to do to get this here order you talking about?' he asked.
WHEN I GOT HOME a peculiar event was taking place. Alafair and three of her friends were in the front yard, watching a man with a flattop haircut stand erect on an oak limb, then topple into space, grab a second limb and hang from it by his knees.
I parked my pickup and walked across the yard while Boxleiter's eyes, upside down, followed me. He bent his torso upward, flipped his legs in the air, and did a half-somersault so that he hit the ground on the balls of his feet.
'Alafair, would you guys head on up to the house and tell Bootsie I'll be there in a minute?' I said.
'She's on the gallery. Tell her yourself,' Alafair said.
'
She rolled her eyes as though the moment was more than her patience could endure, then she and her friends walked through the shade toward the house.
'Swede, it's better you bring business to my office,' I said.
'I couldn't sleep last night. I always sleep, I mean dead, like stone. But not last night. There's some heavy shit coming down, man. It's a feeling I get. I'm never wrong.'
'Like what?'
'This ain't no ordinary grift.' He fanned his hand at the air, as though sweeping away cobweb. 'I never had trouble handling the action. You draw lines, you explain the rules, guys don't listen, they keep coming at you, you unzip their package. But that ain't gonna work on this one.' He blotted the perspiration off his face with the back of his forearm.
'Sorry. You're not making much sense, Swede.'
'I don't got illusions about how guys like me end up. But Cisco and Megan ain't like me. I was sleeping in the Dismas House in St. Louis after I finished my first bit. They came and got me. They see somebody jammed up, people getting pushed around, they make those people's problem their problem. They get that from their old man. That's why these local cocksuckers nailed him to a wall.'
'You're going have to watch your language around my home, partner,' I said.
His hand shot out and knotted my shirt in a ball.
'You're like every cop I ever knew. You don't listen. I can't stop what's going on.'
I grabbed his wrist and thrust it away from me. He opened and closed his hands impotently.
'I hate guys like you,' he said.
'Oh?'
'You go to church with your family, but you got no idea what life is like for two-thirds of the human race.'
'I'm going inside now, Swede. Don't come around here anymore.'
'What'd I do, use bad language again?'
