“Who knows? Did you roust him or something?”
“I went to Pierre Dupree’s office on South Rampart yesterday. I talked with the grandfather. He lied to me about the safe. What’s in the manila folder?”
“Nothing.”
“You want to level with me, or should I leave?”
“It’s a file on a kid in Fort Lauderdale. I got it from a friend in the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee.”
“Who’s the kid?”
“Just a kid. One who was abused.”
“Abused how?”
“As bad as it gets. So bad you don’t want to know. Dave, don’t look at that.”
I took my hand away from the folder. Clete pulled out a drawer under the table and removed a clear plastic bag of weed and a sheaf of cigarette papers.
“Lay off that stuff,” I said.
“I’ll do what I please.”
“No, you won’t.” I pulled the bag from his hand and opened the front door and shook the weed into the rain. I threw the bag and the papers into a waste can.
“Even my ex didn’t do that.”
“Too bad. What’s in the folder?”
“Let it slide, big mon.”
I picked up the folder regardless and looked at the black-and-white photographs of a small child. I read the medical report written by an emergency room physician. I read the statements of a social worker who threatened to quit her agency if the state didn’t remove the child from the home. I read the report of a Broward County sheriff’s detective detailing the arrest of the mother’s live-in boyfriend and the condition in which he found the child upon his last visit to the mother’s apartment. Most of the photos and the paperwork were almost twenty-five years old. The photos of the child were of a kind you never want to see or remember or discuss with anyone. “Who’s the mother?” I asked.
“A junkie.”
“You knew her?”
“She used to strip and hook out of a joint on Bourbon. She was from Brooklyn originally, but she’d moved to New Orleans, and she and her pimp were running a Murphy game on conventioneers. They blew town on an assault warrant. The john got wise to the scam when the pimp showed up as the outraged husband, because the same pimp had shown up on the same john six months earlier. So the pimp busted up the john with a pair of brass knuckles. How about that for a bunch of geniuses?”
“The pimp is the one who did this?” I was holding one of the photos, the paper shaking slightly in my fingers.
“No, Candy would screw anybody who’d give her heroin. There were always different guys living with her.”
“That’s when you were in Vice?”
“Yeah, and on the grog and pills and anything else I could cook my head with.”
“You got it on with her?”
“Big-time.”
“What’s going on, Cletus?”
He got a beer out of the icebox and ripped the tab and sat down at the table. The scar that ran through his eyebrow and touched the bridge of his nose had flushed a dark pink. He drank from the can and set it down and took his hand away from it and looked at the prints his fingers had left on the coldness of the can. “The kid in those photos had a miserable life.”
“Who is she?”
“You already know.”
“Tell me.”
“Let it go, Dave.”
“Say it, Cletus.”
“It won’t change anything.”
“Is she alive?”
“You’d better believe it.” He was breathing harder, through his nose, his face shiny under the overhead light.
“Come on, partner.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Her name is Gretchen.” His hands were propped on his knees, his big shoulders bent forward. He looked like a man experiencing vertigo aboard a pitching ship. “I made some calls to people around Miami and Lauderdale. In Little Havana people talk about a hitter they call Caruso. The old Batistiano and Alpha 66 crowd don’t mess with her. The greaseballs in Miami Beach say she’s like the Irish button men on the west side of New York: all business, no passion, a stone killer. They say maybe she’s the best on the East Coast. I think Caruso might be my daughter, Dave. I feel like somebody drove a nail in my skull.”
5
Clete took a shower and dressed and sat down again at the table, his hair wet-combed, his eyes clear. “I didn’t know I had a daughter until Gretchen was fifteen,” he said. “Her mother called collect from the Dade County stockade and said Gretchen was in juvie and I was her father. I don’t think Candy could have cared less about her daughter; she wanted me to bail her out of the can. I got a blood test done on Gretchen. There was no doubt she was mine. In the meantime she’d been transferred from juvie to foster care. Before I could get the custody process in gear, she disappeared. I tried to find her two or three times. I heard she was a hot walker at Hialeah, and she started hanging with some dopers and then got mixed up with some Cuban head cases, guys who think a political dialogue is blowing up the local television station.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Think I’m proud I fathered a child who was left in the hands of a sadist? I’m talking about the guy who did what’s in those pictures.”
I waited for him to go on. His beer can was empty, and he was staring at it as though unsure where it came from. He crunched it and tossed it in the trash, his eyes looking emptily into mine.
“What happened to her abuser?” I asked.
“He moved down to Key West. He had a small charter boat business. He used to take people bone fishing out in the flats.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s still there,” Clete said.
I looked at him.
“He’s going to be there a long time,” Clete said.
I didn’t acknowledge the implication. “How can you be sure she’s the one who shot Golightly?”
“Candy sent me pictures showing the two of them together only two years ago. Candy is back on the spike and says Gretchen comes and goes and drops out of sight for a year at a time. She doesn’t know what Gretchen does for a living.”
“You know who killed Bix Golightly. You can’t hold back information like that, Clete.”
“Nobody at NOPD wants to see me anywhere near a precinct building. When is the last time they helped either one of us in an investigation? You were fired, Dave, just like me. They hate our guts, and you know it.”
“Does Gretchen know you’re her father?”
“I’m not sure. I saw her for maybe five minutes when she was in juvie.”
“Does she know you live in New Orleans?”
