“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I’d like to tear them both apart. Limb and joint.” He walked away from the bar, swaying slightly, as though his gyroscope had stopped working.
Isolde and Johnny went into Dale and Grace’s version of “I’m Leaving It All Up to You.” When they finished, the crowd went wild.
I couldn’t find Clete. I looked in the restroom and checked the Caddy. It was parked just where we had left it. My mouth was dry, my hands stiff when I tried to close them, my heart racing for no reason; a pressure band was tightening around the right side of my head, a prelude to hitting the deck, getting sloshed, or bursting a vessel in the brain.
Then I saw Clete smoking a cigarette by the side of the club. He was grinning, his teeth as big as tombstones, his porkpie hat slanted on his forehead, the Clete Purcel of old — unafraid, irreverent, always slipping the punch and shining on the worst the world could throw at him.
My cell phone throbbed in my pants pocket. I put it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.
Clete saw my expression when I heard the voice on the other end. The joy went out of his face as though someone had clicked off a light.
“Do you know who this is?” the voice said.
“Your voice is not one people forget,” I replied.
“Are you mocking me?”
“No, sir, I know better than that.”
Clete flipped away his cigarette and began walking toward me. The front door of the bar was open, and I could hear Johnny and Isolde singing “Red Sails in the Sunset.”
“Look, Mr. Richetti—” I began.
“Be quiet,” he said. “I need to ask a favor of you.”
“Sir?”
“Tell the Jewish girl I’m sorry.”
“Which Jewish girl?”
“Her child is crippled.”
“You’re sorry about what?”
“She’ll know,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell her yourself?”
“I’m ashamed. I would frighten her also.”
“Buddy, you’re one for the books.”
“You and your friend Mr. Purcel must leave the nightclub.”
“Why?”
“Evil men are there.”
“You’re talking about evil? The guy who tried to light up my best friend?”
Suddenly, the transmission was filled with static. “You’re breaking up,” I said.
“Don’t underestimate what you’re dealing with, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You mean you or these evil guys you’re talking about?”
“It’s not my choice to be what I am,” he said.
“That’s a hard sell. You have free will, right?” All I could hear was the wind in my other ear. “Still there?” I said.
“Yes, I have free will, and I misused it.”
“That takes us to the heart of the matter. What exactly are you, sir?”
He cleared his throat with a sound like scrofulous matter breaking loose inside a clogged sewer pipe. Then Clete grabbed the cell phone out of my hand and put it to his ear. “If this is who I think it is, be advised that I’m going to kick a telephone pole up your ass.” Clete waited for a response, his eyes on mine. He took the phone away from his ear and looked at it. “He must have hung up.”
“Do you realize what you just did?” I said.
A vein was pulsing in his temple; his eyes were cups of sorrow. “I want to blow up somebody’s shit.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
We went back inside and stood at the bar. Clete ordered a lemonade. Johnny and Isolde were singing “The Wild Side of Life.” It wasn’t Swamp Pop, but nonetheless it was the flagship of every honky-tonk ballad ever written.
Clete drank half his lemonade in one long tilt of the glass. I had the feeling he had spiked it with his flask. “Sorry I blew it with Richetti,” he said.
“He’ll be back.”
“Think so?”
“Unto the grave, if he has his way.”
Clete gazed at the bandstand and the multicolored lights playing on Isolde’s sequined dress. “Jesus, I love that song. It’s like a hymn.”
“It was. The melody is from ‘The Great Speckled Bird.’ ”
He finished his drink and this time ordered a whiskey sour; he gazed across the dance floor. “Adonis is pinning us.”
“Let him.”
“I don’t know how I defended that guy,” Clete said. “Maybe because he was in the 173rd. How could he sell out his stepdaughter like that?”
“A fraud is a fraud, a bum is a bum. There’s no mystery about human behavior.”
“I’m going to have a talk with Adonis.”
“I thought you wanted to leave him alone,” I said.
“That was before Richetti called. Something’s about to go down. I think Adonis knows what it is. Otherwise he wouldn’t have those two button men with him.”
“It’s your call,” I said.
I followed him across the dance floor to Adonis’s table. Both his people had the dark, lean faces of men who work in extreme heat; neither one looked directly at us.
“How’s it going, Adonis?” I said.
His hands formed a pyramid; he tapped the ends of his fingers together. I realized his face was heavily made up. I knew that at some point I would pay a price for the beating I had given him.
“Fine, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “And you? Seen my wife lately?”
“Cut the cutesy routine, Adonis,” Clete said. “We just had Gideon Richetti on the phone. I think you and him and Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo are all hooked up. I also think Richetti is just a guy, a world-class creep but flesh and blood, not some evil spirit delivering telegrams from a pizza parlor run by Leonardo da Vinci or whoever.”
The eyes of the two bodyguards took on a muddy, troubled look, as though an element had entered the situation that they were not prepared to deal with. “How about it, fellas?” Clete said. “You capisci who Gideon Richetti is?”
Both men looked at Adonis like sentinels waiting for the go-ahead.
“My employees aren’t part of this, Mr. Purcel,” Adonis said.
“You pimped out your stepdaughter,” Clete said. “Do these guys know that? How do you say ‘pimp’ in greaseball?”
“Time for you to leave our table, sir,” Adonis said.
“You tell Eddy Firpo I’ll be dialing him up,” Clete said.
“I have nothing to do with Firpo, and neither do Isolde and Johnny Shondell,” Adonis said. “They got out of their contract with him.”
“So that puts you in control?” I said.
“I own restaurants and fisheries and an olive oil company in Italy,” Adonis said. “Ta-ta, gentlemen.” He jiggled his fingers at us.
I cupped my hand around Clete’s bicep. It felt like concrete. “I talked with Richetti tonight, Adonis,” I said. “He showed concern for our safety. That means his alliances have changed. I don’t know if that’s of interest to you or not.”
A single strand of oily mahogany-dark hair hung on his forehead. He touched a place on his cheekbone where I had kicked him. “Would you repeat that, please?”
“I like your threads,” I said. “Keep fighting the good fight.” I gave him a thumbs-up and went back to the bar.
Clete joined me seconds later. He was wheezing with laughter. “You pissed in his brain. The guy won’t sleep for a week.” He kept laughing and snorting at the same time.
“You want some gumbo?” I said.
“These guys got gumbo?”
“You bet,” I said.
“Maybe there’s some sunshine in all this.”
That was Clete.
Ten minutes later, Clete finished his gumbo and washed it down with a Bud and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Do you know Louisiana has the highest rate of heart and vascular disease in the country?”