The man at Ricky Scarlotti's side had platinum hair and a chemical tan. He put down his fork and got to his feet and stood flat-footed like a sentinel in front of Ricky Scarlotti's table. His name was Benny Grogan and he had been a professional wrestler before he had become a male escort for a notorious and rich Garden District homosexual. NOPD believed he had also been the backup shooter on at least two hits for the Calucci brothers.
"I hope you're here for the brunch, Purcel," he said.
"Not your gig, Benny. Get off the clock," Clete said.
"Come on, make an appointment. Don't do this. Hey, you deaf?" Then Benny Grogan reached out and hooked his fingers on the back of Clete's shirt collar as Clete brushed past him.
Clete flung the chipped beef into Benny Grogan's face. It was scalding hot and it matted his skin like a papier-mâché mask with slits for the eyes. Benny's mouth was wide with shock and pain and an unintelligible sound that rose out of his chest like fingernails grating on a blackboard. Then Clete whipped the bottom of the skillet with both hands across the side of Benny's head, and backswung it into the face of the man who was trying to rise from his chair on the other side of Ricky Scarlotti, the cast-iron cusp ringing against bone, bursting the nose, knocking him backward on the floor.
Ricky Scarlotti was on his feet now, his mouth twisted, his finger raised at Clete. But he never got the chance to speak.
"I brought you some of your own, Ricky," Clete said.
He jammed a pair of vise grips into Ricky Scarlotti's scrotum and locked down the handles. Ricky Scarlotti's hands grabbed impotently at Clete's wrists while his head reared toward the ceiling.
Clete began backing toward the front door, pulling Ricky Scarlotti with him.
"Work with me on this. You can do it, Mouse. That a boy. Step lively now. Coming through here, gangway for the Mouse!" Clete said, pushing chairs and tables out of the way with his buttocks.
Out on the street he unhooked Scarlotti from the vise grips and bounced him off the side of a parked car, then slapped his face with his open hand, once, twice, then a third time, so hard the inside of Scarlotti's mouth bled.
"I'm not carrying, Mouse. Free shot," Clete said, his hands palm up at his sides now.
But Scarlotti was paralyzed, his mouth hanging open, his lips like red Jell-O. Clete grabbed him by his collar and the back of his belt and flung him to the sidewalk, then picked him up, pushed him forward, and flung him down again, over and over, working his way down the sidewalk, clattering garbage cans along the cement. People stared from automobiles, the streetcar, and door fronts but no one intervened. Then, like a man who knows his rage can never be satiated, Clete lost it. He drove Scarlotti's head into a parking meter, smashing it repeatedly against the metal and glass. A woman across the street screamed hysterically and people began blowing car horns. Clete spun Scarlotti around by his bloodied shirtfront and threw him across a laddered display of flowers under the canvas awning.
"Tell these people why this is happening, Ricky. Tell them how you had a guy's teeth torn out, how you had a woman blindfolded and beaten and held underwater," Clete said, advancing toward him, his shoes crunching through the scattered potting soil.
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 Star about Hitler hiding out in Israel?"
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."