“So why are you here?”
“Because your messengers evidently made an implied threat when they visited Nig this morning. I thought that showed a lack of class.”
“Lack of class?”
“Is there an echo in your store?”
Sidney nodded toward a table that was set against a side wall. “Sit down. I’m about to eat. You want a coffee?”
“I wouldn’t touch a chair that Charlie Weiss or Marco Scarlotti sat in unless it was sprayed for crab lice.”
Sidney put his hand inside his shirt and scratched an insect bite on his shoulder and looked at the tips of his fingers. “It’s true you smoked a federal informant when you were with NOPD? A guy who never saw it coming?” he said.
“What about it?” Clete said, his eyes slipping off Sidney ’s face.
“Nothing. You’re just an unusual guy, Purcel.”
Clete cleared an obstruction in his throat and let the moment pass. “Here’s what it is. One way or another, I’m going to put Andre Rochon and Bertrand Melancon back in the system. That’s because I have a personal beef with these guys and it doesn’t have anything to do with you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do business. If I recover cash or goods from your house, you pay me a twenty percent finder’s fee. If that’s not cool, see what you can get from your insurance carrier.
“In the meantime, you leave Nig and Willie and me alone. I know all about that chain-saw story and the guy in Metairie. Personally I think it’s Mafia bullshit. Regardless, I take care of the pukes, and Heckle and Jeckle out there stay out of it. Sound reasonable, Sidney?”
“Ten percent on the recovery.”
“Fifteen.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“Screw you,” Clete said.
Sidney ’s gaze drifted out the front window, where his two men were playing cards in the shade. “What makes you think you can deliver?”
“It’s like prayer, what do you got to lose?”
One at a time, Sidney placed three more rose stems in the vase. “Don’t mess it up,” he said. He fixed his eyes on Clete’s, a blade of sunlight slicing like a knife across his face.
“ARE YOU CRAZY?” I said to Clete after he telephoned and told me what he had done.
“What was I supposed to do? Let an animal like Kovick threaten me and my employer?” he said.
In the background I could hear a sound like a rack of bowling pins exploding. “Why don’t you just sprinkle broken glass in your breakfast food? Save yourself the time and effort of fooling with Kovick?” I said.
“What’s that line in Machiavelli about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer?”
“Yeah, it’s Machiavelli and it’s crap,” I replied.
“Look, I need a place to stay. My power is still off and something with black tendrils on it is growing out my drains.”
“What about your room at the motor court?”
“It got rented to some evacuees.”
“Stay with us,” I said, trying to keep my voice flat, imagining any number of nightmarish events associated with Clete as houseguest.
“Molly won’t mind?”
“No, she’ll be happy.”
“I’m at the bowling alley on East Main. I’ll motor on over. Tell Molly not to fix anything. I’ve got it covered. Everything is copacetic, big mon.”
And motor over he did, at 6:00 p.m. Sharp, with a bucket of Popeyes fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits and a big carton of fried oysters and dirty rice. He also brought a separate bag of paper plates, plastic forks and knives, paper napkins, and a six-pack of Dr Pepper. He went about setting the table while Molly and Alafair tried to hide their smiles.
“Clete, we have plates and silverware,” I said.
“No need to dirty things up,” he said.
Molly shook her head behind his back to stop me from admonishing him. Alafair wasn’t as diplomatic. “You have any salad in there, Clete?” she said.
“You bet,” he replied, and proudly lifted a quart of potato salad from the sack.
But Clete’s gay mood was often an indicator of worries and memories that he shared with few people. To the world he was the trickster and irresponsible hedonist, sowing mayhem and destruction wherever he went. But in his sleep he still dreamed of two adults fighting in their bedroom late at night and of kneeling in short pants on grains of rice his father sprinkled on the floor, and of liquid flame arching into a village of straw hooches. If sometimes he looked disconcerted, he would never admit he had just glanced out a window into the darkness and had seen a dead mamasan staring back at him.
After we ate, he took a long walk into City Park by himself, then returned to the house and went to bed early in our guest bedroom. Shortly after 4:00 a.m., I heard Tripod running up and down on the clothesline where we hooked his chain. I put on my khakis without waking Molly and opened the back door. Clete was sitting at our redwood table in his skivvies, his skin netted with moonlight. When he heard the screen open, he removed a pint bottle of bourbon from the tabletop and set it by his thigh.
“You don’t have to hide that,” I said.
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I heard thunder. But the sky is clear.”
I sat down next to him. “What’s eating you, podna?”
“I went back to my old neighborhood in the Irish Channel. I always hated the house where I grew up. I hated my old man. But I went back there and saw what the storm had done, and I had feelings I’ve never had before. I missed my old man and the rattling sounds his milk truck made when he drove off at four in the morning. I missed my mom cooking pancakes in the kitchen. It was like everything in my childhood was finally over, but I didn’t want it to be over. It was like I had died and nobody had told me about it.”
He picked up the pint bottle from the bench and unscrewed the cap. The bottle was wrapped in a brown paper bag and the moonlight glinted on the neck. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and tilted it up to drink. I could smell the bourbon as it rolled back over his tongue. I envisioned its amber color inside the yellow staves of the curing barrel, the bead it made inside the bottle’s neck when it was air-locked under the cork, the splash it made when it was released again and poured over ice and mint leaves inside a glass. Unconsciously I swallowed and touched at my brow as though a vein were tightening in my head.
“It’s called a vision of mortality,” I said.
“What is?”
“The feelings you experienced when you went back to your old house.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to die?”
“You saw the Big Sleazy die, Clete. It’s like having an affair with the Great Whore of Babylon. When you finally come to your senses and get her out of your life, you find out she was the only woman you ever loved.”
Clete upended the bottle again, his throat working rhythmically, watching me with one eye, as though someone had spoken to him from one of his dreams.
BUT CLETE WAS not the only friend or acquaintance from New Orleans seeking refuge in Iberia Parish. Two weeks after I had been sent to help investigate the shooting death of Kevin Rochon and the crippling of Eddy Melancon, Helen Soileau called me into her office. She spit a piece of her thumbnail off her tongue. “Otis Baylor just moved back to town with his family. Evidently they still own a home on Old Jeanerette Road,” she said.
I waited for her to go on.
“You think he dropped those two looters or not?” she said.
“You mean is he that kind of guy? No, I don’t think he is. But-”
“What?”
“His daughter had a terrible experience at the hands of three street pukes. I don’t know what I would do if I
