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"How's everything at home?"
"It's okay. Good."
The smile went out of his eyes. I looked away from him.
He spread his fingers on the desk blotter. His hands looked as big as skillets.
"Bootsie's having trouble again?" he said.
"Yes."
"How bad?"
"You never know. One day's fine and full of bluebirds. The next day the gargoyles come out of the closet."
He took the gum out of his mouth and dropped it in the wastebasket. I heard him take a deep breath through his nose.
"Let's walk on over to the Pearl and have some oysters," he said. "Then we'll talk about these three buttwipes you're looking for."
"I'm a little tapped out right now."
"I've got a tab there. I never pay it, but that's what tabs are for. Let's get out into this beautiful day."
We walked down Bourbon, which was becoming more crowded with tourists now, past the T-shirt shops, jazz clubs and strip joints that advertised nude dancers and French orgies, to the corner of St. Charles and Canal, where we went inside the Pearl and sat at the long counter that ran the length of the restaurant. The tables were covered with checkercloth, wood-bladed fans turned overhead, and the e re black men in aprons were shucking open raw oysters over the ice bins behind the bar. We ordered two dozen on the half-shell, a glass of iced tea for me and a small pitcher of draft for Clete.
"Run it by me again," he said.
I went over all the details of Garrett's murder, the shootout, the description of three intruders, the names I had heard them call each other while my ears had roared like the sea with the sound of my own blood.
Clete was silent, his green eyes thoughtful under his porkpie hat while he squeezed a lemon on his oysters and dotted them with Tabasco sauce.
"I don't know about the guy named Eddy or the guy with the scrap metal in his mouth," he said. "But this sawed-off character named Jewel sounds like a local I used to know. I haven't seen him around in a while, but I think we might be talking about Jewel Fluck."
"What?"
"You heard me. That's his name. His family came from Germany and he grew up in the Cha
"Fluck? "
"You got it. Maybe his name screwed him up. When you think of Jewel Fluck, think of a hornet somebody just poured hot water on."
"Why doesn't he have a record?"
"He does. In Mississippi. I think he did four or five years in Parchman."
"What for?"
"Cutting up a colored guy who was scabbing on a job. Or something like that. Look, the only reason I know about this guy is he hid out a bail jumper I was looking for. The jumper was in the AB. I heard Fluck is, too."
"The Aryan Brotherhood?"
"Integrated jails breed them like fungus. I used to think it was the Black Muslims we had to worry about. But this is your genuine psychopathic white trash with a political cause up their butts. Hitler would have loved them."
He signaled the bartender for another pitcher of beer.
"Something wrong with your oysters?" he said.
"I'm just trying to figure this guy's tie-in with Weldon So
"Maybe it was just a robbery gone bad, Dave. Maybe it's not that complicated a deal."
"You didn't see the inside of the house. They really did a number on it. They were after something specific."
"Maybe this So
"It could be. When's the last time you saw Fluck?"
"A year or so ago. I don't think he's around town. I'll ask around, though. Look, Dave, from what you've told me, this So
"Sir, could you watch your language, please?" the bartender said.
"What?" Clete said.
"Your language."
"What about my language?"
"We're okay here," I said to the bartender. He nodded and walked farther down the bar and started mixing a drink.
Clete continued to stare after him.
"Does Fluck still have relatives in New Orleans?" I asked.
"I don't know," he answered, his eyes coming back into mine. "His mother probably wishes she'd thrown him away and raised the afterbirth. Forget about Fluck a minute. I've got a thought, a fu
"His head was real big, his face full of bone. The kind you break your fist on."
"Did he have a tattoo?"
"I don't remember."
"A red and yellow tiger on his right arm?"
I tried to see it in my mind's eye, but the only image that came back was the bone-heavy face and the ridges of muscle under the T-shirt.
"Maybe I couldn't even pull him out of a lineup with any certainty," I said.
"There's one guy around town, he has a head like a tree. His name's Raintree, from Baton Rouge. I don't know his first name, though."
"Go on."
"I get a security retainer out at the yacht club. Sometimes I check out backgrounds on potential members, keep out the riffraff supposedly, which means the south-of-the-border crowd. The tomato pickers are very big on clubs these days. But I also do security at dances, receptions, Republican geek shows, that kind of stuff. So one night Bobby Earl has a big gig out there. It's black-tie stuff, respectable, people from the Garden District, no Red Man spitters allowed, get the picture? You couldn't get the word 'nigger' out of this bunch at gunpoint.
"Except a guy shows up who Bobby Earl wasn't pla
Anyway, he's shaking hands with Bobby on the steps of the yacht club and this weird-looking kid from a radical newspaper takes their picture.
"That's when this guy Raintree, the guy with the pumpkin head and a red and yellow tiger on his arm, comes down the steps and takes the kid by the arm and walks him through the parking lot down to the lake. When I got there he'd punched the kid in the stomach and thrown his camera in the lake."
"What did you do?"
"I told Raintree to leave the grounds. I told the kid he ought to go home and leave these guys alone."
His eyes shifted away from me. He lit a cigarette. When I didn't speak, he turned on the stool and looked at me, a pinched light in his eyes.
"So it's not noble stuff. If I'd had my choices, I'd have clicked off Raintree's switch with a slapjack. But I don't get a city paycheck anymore, Dave."
"No, that's not what I was thinking about. You just tied the ribbon on the box, partner."
"You mean the co
"Weldon So
Five minutes later we were walking under a colo
"What are you going to do?" Clete said. His face was heated from our pace.
"Head back to New Iberia and check out this guy Raintree."
"You think that's the way we ought to do it?"
I looked at him.
"Leave that procedure dogshit to the paper shufflers," he said.