TROOPS glittered by the entranceway. T. Coon wore sideburns that flared like grease pencil on his cheeks, and a Stetson and a shiny magenta shirt with pearl snap buttons and a Stars and Bars belt buckle as big as the bronze plate on a heliograph. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots, a man at peace with both Caesar and God.
Gretchen walked past him without speaking and examined the two rows of junker cars and trucks T. Coon had assembled in the pasture. “You ladies want to go for a test drive?” he said. “You can do anyt’ing you want here. Just ax. For ladies like y’all, I’ll lower my price any day of the week and twice on Sunday and t’ree times on Monday.” He crossed his heart. “If I’m lying, dig me up and spit in my mout’.”
“Tell your mechanic to wipe the sawdust off the transmission cases,” Gretchen said.
“I’m lost here,” T. Coon said.
“You packed the transmission cases with sludge and sawdust to tighten up the gears. I bet you put oil on the brake linings to keep them from squeaking. The odometer numbers are a joke. I wouldn’t sit on the seats unless they’d been sprayed for crab lice.”
“I’m blown away by this,” he said.
“There’s not a car on the lot that’s not a shitbox. Your tires are so thin, the air is showing through. I think some of these cars came from Florida. They’re rusted with salt from the bottom up.”
“This is some kind of put-on.”
“Who are you that I should put you on?”
T. Coon’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth. “I’m making a living here.”
“You see that Ford truck with the chrome engine?”
“It’s a hot rod. It belongs to my nephew.”
“I ran the plate two days ago. It’s registered in your name. You use it as a leader and claim your nephew won’t sell it unless the figures are right. What are the right figures?”
“My nephew might take fifteen t’ousand.”
“Give me the keys,” Gretchen said.
She got in the pickup and fired it up and spun rubber on the grass and swung out on the highway, the dual exhausts throbbing on the asphalt. A few minutes later, she was back, the exposed chrome engine ticking with heat. She left the keys in the ignition and got out of the cab. “I’ll give you eight. In cash, right now. It’ll have to be re-primed and painted and the interior entirely redone. The only things good about it are the chop and channel jobs and the Merc engine and the Hollywood mufflers. The rest of it blows.”
“I cain’t believe I’m being verbally assaulted like this. I feel like I inebriated a whole bottle of whiskey and am having delusions.”
She opened her tote bag and removed a brown envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. “Tell me what you want to do,” she said.
“Make it nine,” he said.
“Make it eight.”
“Make it eighty-five hunnerd. The tires are almost brand-new.”
“That’s why you’re not getting seventy-five hundred,” she said. “Stop trying to see down my shirt.”
T. Coon wore a stupefied expression, like a man who had just gotten off a centrifuge. “We got to do some paperwork in my office, that li’l trailer over there. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll leave the door open. Jesus Christ, where you from, lady? You got your spaceship parked somewhere? You need a job? I’m serious here. I got an entry-level position we can talk about.” He looked at her expression to see what effect his words were having. “Okay, I was just axing.”
Half an hour later, Gretchen followed Alafair to a restaurant on the highway and bought seafood dinners for both of them. Through the window, Alafair could see a blue-black darkness taking hold in the sky and gulls that had been blown inland circling over a cane field. “I’ve got another favor to ask you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’d like to live my life the way you do. Maybe you could give me a reading list and some tips on things.”
“That’s flattering, but why not just be your own person?”
“If I was who I started out to be, I’d be in prison or worse. I’ve got an advantage over other people who write novels and make movies. I lived inside a world that most people couldn’t imagine. Did you ever see Wind Across the Everglades, the story of James Audubon trying to put the bird poachers out of business? I know those kinds of people, how they think and talk and spend their time. I know about racetracks and drug smuggling in the Keys and CIA people in Little Havana and the money that gets laundered through the pari-mutuel windows.”
“I think you’re probably a real artist, Gretchen. You don’t have to model yourself on me. Just stay true to your own principles.”
“I need you to go with me to see Varina Leboeuf.”
“You want to do this because of Clete?”
“Varina Leboeuf tapes the men she goes to bed with. Clete doesn’t have any judgment about women. I need to have a talk with her, but in the way you would do it, not in the way I usually do things. I need you there as a witness, too. I don’t want her making up lies about me later.”
Alafair was eating a deep-fried soft-shell crab. She put it down and gazed at the seagulls cawing above the cane field. The sky was completely dark now, the clouds rippling with flashes of yellow light. “Clete can take care of himself. Maybe you should leave things alone.”
“You’re smarter than me about almost everything, Alafair, but you’re wrong about this. Most people think society is run by lawyers and politicians. We believe this because those are the people we see on the news. But the only reason we see these people on the news is because they own the media, not people like us. When things have to be taken care of-I’m talking about the kind of things nobody wants to know about-there’s a small bunch that does the dirty work. Maybe you don’t believe this.”
“That’s the way cynics think. And they think that way because it’s uncomplicated and easy,” Alafair said.
“Did you see Mississippi Burning, the story of the boys who were murdered by the Klan and buried in an earthen dam?” Gretchen said. “In the movie, the FBI outsmarts the Klan and turns them against each other and gets them to start copping pleas. But that’s not what happened. Hoover sent a Mafia hit man down there, and he beat the crap out of three guys who were only too glad to turn over the names of the killers.”
“What are you going to say to Varina?”
“Not much. You don’t have to go. I’ve asked a lot of you already.”
“Maybe it’s better I not.”
“I can’t blame you. I try to stay out of other people’s lives. But I don’t think Clete has much chance against Varina Leboeuf. I don’t think he sees everything that’s involved, either.”
“What’s that last part mean?” Alafair asked.
“I’ve known a lot of bad people in Florida. They all had connections in Louisiana. Some of them may have been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. How do you think the crack got in the projects here? It just showed up one day? The money from the crack paid for AK-47s that went to Nicaragua. But who gives a shit, right?”
“This is becoming an expensive dinner.”
“That’s why I said you don’t have to go with me.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Alafair said.
16
Gretchen Horowitz had never understood what people called “shades of gray.” In her opinion, there were two kinds of people in the world, doers and takers. The doers did a number on the takers. Maybe there were some people in between, but not many. She liked to think she was among the not many. The not many set their own boundaries, fought under their own flag, gave no quarter and asked for none in return. Until recently, she had never met a man who had not tried to use her. Even the best of them, a high school counselor and a professor at the community college, had turned out to be unhappily married and, in a weak moment, filled with greater need than charity in their attitude toward her, one of them groping her in his office, the other begging her to go with him to a
