I showered and shaved and went to an early Mass at Sacred Heart, then stayed alone in the church and said the rosary. But when I came out into the daylight the sun and humidity were like a flame on my skin and I curled and uncurled my fists for no reason.
Legion Guidry bonded out of jail at 10 a.m. An hour later I saw him crossing Main Street to eat lunch at Victor's Cafeteria. For just a moment I could taste his tobacco and saliva in my mouth and smell the testosterone on his clothes. My palm ached to fold around the checkered grips of my.45, to feel the heavy, hard, cold weight and the perfect balance of the frame resting securely in my hand.
Zerelda Calucci had tried to find Clete Purcel for two days, then discovered he'd hooked up a bail skip to the D-ring inset in the back floor of his Cadillac and had driven back to New Orleans to deliver the bail skip to the bondsmen for whom he worked.
Zerelda tracked Marvin Oates down on a side street in New Iberia's old bordello district, where he had dragged his roller-skate-mounted suitcase to the porch of a wood-frame store and was eating from a paper plate filled with rice and beans and sausage in the shade of a spreading oak. A half-block away was a stucco crack house, also shaded by an oak tree, the yard filled with trash, the windows broken, the screens slashed and rusted-out and hanging from the frames. White and black crack whores sat on the porch, walking in turns down to the store for beer or food or cigarettes, but Marvin did not look up from his paper plate when they walked past him.
Zerelda pulled her pearl-white Mustang convertible onto the oyster shells and did not cut the engine.
'Throw your suitcase in the back, sweetie, and let's take a drive,' she said.
'Where we going?' Marvin asked.
Her eyes roved over a barked area by his eye, a bruise on his chin. Her face became suffused with pity and anger.
'To straighten out somebody who thinks he's a swinging dick because he can knock around someone half his size. Now get in the car, Marvin,' she replied.
'I dint want to cause no trouble, Miss Zerelda,' Marvin said.
She opened the car door and started to get out.
'I'm coming,' he said.
It was almost dusk when Zerelda crossed the Mississippi River and drove down Canal and into the French Quarter and parked around the corner from Clete's office and upstairs apartment on St. Ann Street. The doors were locked, but a note addressed to an infamous nuisance in the New Orleans underworld was stuck in the corner of a window. It read: 'Dear No Duh, I'm over at Nig and Willie's-Clete.'
The bail bond office of Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater was located just off Basin, just inside the ragged edges of the Quarter, not far from St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park. Zerelda pulled to the curb and parked next to a cluster of overflowing garbage cans. Down the street and across Basin she could see the old redbrick buildings and the green wood porches of the Iberville Project, a community whose crack addicts and gangbangers and teenage prostitutes would not only mug tourists and roll Johns in die adjacent cemetery but occasionally execute them out of pure meanness. In fact, the city had poured cement barricades across some of the streets leading into the Iberville so that tourists would not drive into it by mistake.
But Marvin Oates's attention was focused on the window of the bail bond office, where Clete was playing cards at a desk with a thin, nattily dressed, deeply tanned man who wore an oxblood fedora with a gray feather in the band and a mustache that looked like it had been grease-penciled on his upper lip.
Marvin's face was wind-burned from the trip to the city, and now he was sweating heavily in the dusk, pinching his mouth dryly in his hand.
'I'll wait out here,' he said.
'Nobody's going to hurt you,' Zerelda said, getting out of the car.
'That's 'cause I'm staying out here.'
She walked around to his side of the convertible. 'Comb your hair, sweetie. Then I'm going to take you out to dinner. Don't you ever be afraid. Not when you're with me,' she said, and smoothed his hair back up on his head.
His face looked like a fawn's.
Then she went through the door of the bail bond office, her purse swinging heavily from a cloth strap wrapped around her wrist.
'Zerelda, what's the haps? Great coincidence. I wanted No Duh here to check out our man Marvin the Voyeur, see if he wasn't a guy No Duh ran across in central lockup,' Clete said.
'Where the fuck do you get off knocking around an innocent boy like that?'
'He has a way of showing up in places where he has no business,' Clete replied.
'Oh, yeah?' Zerelda said, and swung her purse with both hands at his head, the cloth bottom bulging with the weight of her.357 Magnum.
He caught the blow on his forearm, but she swung again, this time hitting him squarely across the back of the head.
'Come on, Zerelda, that hurts,' Clete said.
'You tub of whale sperm, you thought you could just dump me and get it on with some pisspot at the D.A.'s office?' she said.
'Remember strolling off to the ice cream parlor with dick brain out there? I took that as a signal to get lost. So I got lost,' Clete said.
'Well, lose this, you fat fuck,' she said, and hit him again.
'What's going on?' No Duh Dolowitz said. 'Hey, Nig, we got some people getting hurt out here!'
Nig Rosewater came out of the back office. His porcine neck was as wide as his head inside his starched collar, so his head looked like the crown of a white fireplug mounted on his shoulders. Nig took one look at Zerelda and went back inside his office and closed and bolted the door.
'All right, I'll talk to him! Calm down!' Clete said, and rose from his chair.
'You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' Zerelda said.
'That guy is a bullshitter, Zee,' Clete said.
She took a step toward him, but he raised his hand in a placating gesture. 'All right, we've got no problem here,' he said, and went outside in the dusk, into the noise of the street, the smells of stagnant water and over- ripe produce and flowers blooming on the overhanging balconies, the air crisscrossed with birds.
Clete took a deep breath and looked down at Marvin. 'If I falsely accused you of something you didn't do, I apologize,' Clete said. 'But that also means you keep that stupid face out of my life and you don't get anywhere near certain friends of mine. This is as much slack as you get, Jack. We clear on this?'
'The twelve disciples are my road signs. I ain't afraid of no bullies. There ain't no detours in heaven, either,' Marvin said.
'What?' Clete said.
'I dint do nothing wrong. I think you was trying to seduce Miss Barbara and somebody messed it up for you. So you put it on me 'cause I give her a Bible.'
'You listen, shit-for-brains-'
Marvin got out of the car and lifted his suitcase from the backseat, wrapping the pull strap around his wrist, blade-faced under the brim of his hat, a hot bead of anger buried in his eye.
'Come back, Marvin,' Zerelda said from the doorway of the bail bond office.
But Marvin pulled his suitcase down the street between the rows of dilapidated cottages toward Basin, his rumpled pale blue sports coat and coned straw hat and cowboy boots almost lost in the mauve-colored thickness of the evening. Then he crossed Basin amid a blowing of horns and a screeching of tires and tugged his suitcase on its roller skate over the curb and into the bowels of the Iberville Project.
'You're mean through and through, Clete. I don't know what I ever saw in you,' Zerelda said.
But Clete wasn't listening. No Duh was staring into me distance, into the glow of sodium lamps that rose in a dusty haze above the project.
'You know him?' Clete asked.
'Yeah, I definitely seen that guy before,' No Duh said.
