Pegasus Descending Part 30

"You have to work?" she said.

"Clete's in some trouble."

"What kind?"

I searched my mind for an honest answer. "There's no adequate scale. The rules of reason and logic have no application in his life," I said.

"Sound like anybody else you know?" she replied.

"Put my supper in the icebox."

"It already is," she replied.

The owner of the motor court where Clete lived told me Clete and a young woman had gone to a street dance in St. Martinville.

They weren't hard to find. In fact, as I drove up the two-lane through the dusk, through the corridor of live oaks that led out of town and the miles of waving sugarcane on each side of the road, I saw Clete's Caddy parked in front of a supper club left over from the 1940s. It was a happy place, where people ate thick steaks and drank Manhattans and old-fas.h.i.+oneds and sometimes had trysts involving a degree of romance in the palm-shrouded motel set behind the club. Above the entrance way was a pink neon outline of a martini gla.s.s with the long-legged reclining figure of a nude woman inside.

The refrigerated air in the dining room was so cold it made me s.h.i.+ver. Each table was covered with white linen and set with a candle burning inside a gla.s.s chimney. A man in a summer tux was playing a piano that was so black it had purple lights in it. Clete was at a table by himself, a collins drink in his hand, his face flushed and cheerful, his eyes s.h.i.+ny with alcohol.

"Where's Trish?" I said.

"On the phone."

I sat down without being asked. "Helen says Orleans Parish is cutting a warrant for your arrest."

"So I'll get out of town for a little while. You want a steak?"

"The Orleans sheriff told Helen he knows you're mixed up with bank robbers. What's the matter with you, Clete? You know how many people in South Louisiana want an excuse to blow you away?"

"That's their problem."

I was so angry I could hardly speak.

"There used to be a slop chute in San Diego that had a sign over the door like the one out there. You ever go to San Diego?" he said.

"No. Listen, Clete-"

But he had already launched into one of his alcoholic reveries that served only one function-to distract attention from the subject at hand.

"It was a joint that had a neon sign with a gal inside a pink martini gla.s.s. We used to call her the gin-fizz kitty from Texas City. A whole bunch of Marines had fallen in love with this same broad who worked the bars outside Pendleton. They said she could kiss you into next week, not counting what she could do in the sack. Bottom line is she got all these guys to put her name down as beneficiary on their life insurance policies. When CID finally caught up with her, we found out she'd been a wh.o.r.e in Texas City. We also found out a half-dozen guys she screwed ended up in body bags. How about that for pa.s.sing on the ultimate form of clap? Hey, I was one of them. Get that look off your face."

He drank from his collins gla.s.s, then started laughing, like a man watching his own tether line pull loose from the earth.

"I want to take you outside and knock you down," I said.

"It's all rock 'n' roll, Streak. Going up or coming down, we all get to the same barn. What can happen that hasn't already happened in my life?"

"I think you've melted your brain. Don't you realize the implications of the story you just told me?"

"What, that Trish is hustling me? Don't make me mad at you, big mon."

But there was more hurt in his face than indignation. In the back of the club I saw Trish Klein replace the receiver on a pay phone, then stare in our direction, her mouth red and soft, her heart-shaped face achingly beautiful in the pastel lighting. I got up from the table and left without saying good-bye.

I PLANNED DURING the next two days to talk to Trish Klein in private about her relations.h.i.+p with one of the best and most self-destructive and vulnerable human beings I had ever known. I got the opportunity in a way I didn't suspect.

Chapter.

21.

O N WEDNESDAY, Joe Dupree at the Lafayette P.D. called me just before noon.

"She's in lockup?" I said.

"I never saw anybody look so good in a jailhouse jumpsuit."

"For shoplifting at the Acadiana Mall?"

"It's a little more complicated than that. She walked out of the store with a four-hundred-dollar handbag she didn't pay for. She caused a big scene when security stopped her. She claimed she was just showing the purse to a friend for the friend's opinion on it. She probably could have gone back inside and settled the issue by putting it on her credit card. She had a gold Amex and two or three platinum cards in her billfold. Instead, she ended up throwing the purse in the store manager's face."

"She's not posting bail?"

"To my knowledge, she hasn't even asked about it." I could hear him chewing gum in the receiver.

"What are you telling me?" I asked.

"I think she likes it here."

After lunch, I drove to Lafayette in a cruiser, checked my firearm in a security area on the first floor of the jail, and waited on the second floor in an interview room while a guard brought Trish Klein down in an elevator.

The guard was a stout, joyless woman who had once been taken hostage at a men's prison and held for three days during an attempted jailbreak. I used to see her at Red's Gym, pumping iron in a roomful of men who radiated testosterone-dour, painted with stink, possessed of memories she didn't share. She unhooked Trish at the door. I rose when Trish entered the room and offered her a chair. The guard gave me a look that was both hostile and suspicious and locked the door behind her.

"Did you ever hear the story about Robert Mitchum getting out of Los Angeles City Prison?" I said.

"No," she said.

"Mitchum spent six months in there on a marijuana bust and figured his career was over. The day he got out, a reporter shouted at him, 'What was it like in there, Bob?' Mitchum said, 'Not bad. Just like Palm Springs, without the riffraff.'"

She showed no reaction to the story. In fact, she wore no expression at all, as though both her surroundings and I were of no interest to her.

"What are you doing in here, kiddo?" I said.

"Kiddo, up your a.s.s, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

"That's clever, but people with your background and finances don't go out of their way to put themselves in the slams."

"I don't like being called a thief."

"Yeah, I bet it was shocking to learn your photo is in the Griffin Book at casinos from Vegas to Atlantic City."

"Why are you here?"

"Because I think you and your friends are planning a big score on Whitey Bruxal. I think you're setting up your alibi."

She looked out the window at the street. "You don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"You guys are going to get yourselves killed. That's your own choice, but you're taking Clete Purcel down with you."

"He's a grown man. Why don't you stop treating him like a child?"

Down the corridor I could hear someone yelling, a scuffling sound of chains clinking, and a heavy object cras.h.i.+ng against a metal surface, perhaps against the door of an elevator. But Trish Klein paid no attention to the distraction.

"Clete's been my friend for over thirty years. That's more time than you've been on earth," I said, regretting the self-righteousness of my words almost as soon as I had spoken them.

"I suspect I should go back upstairs now," she said.

"You don't think Whitey is onto you? This guy was a protege of Meyer Lansky. Your people impersonated gas company employees and creeped his house. Want to hear a couple of stories about people who tried to burn the Mob?"

She didn't answer, but I told her anyway. One account dealt with a man in Las Vegas whose skull was splintered in a machinist's vise, another who was hung alive by his r.e.c.t.u.m from a meat hook. I also told her what insiders said was the fate of a middle-cla.s.s family man in a Queens suburb who accidentally ran over and killed the child of his neighbor, a notorious Mafia don.

"These b.a.s.t.a.r.ds might look interesting on the movie screen, but they're the sc.u.m of the earth," I said.

"I wouldn't have guessed that, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux. I always thought the people who murdered my father were closet humanists."

It was obvious that my best efforts with Trish Klein were of no value. It was like telling someone not to gargle with Liquid Drano. I was about to call for the guard and leave Trish and her friends to their own fate, when she lifted her eyes up to mine and for just a moment I understood the tenacity of Clete's commitment to her.

"A week before my father's death, he took me snorkeling off Dania Beach," she said. "We cooked hot dogs on a grill in a grove of palm trees and played with a big blue beach ball. Then two men parked a convertible under the trees and made him walk off with them, down where the water was. .h.i.tting on the rocks. I remember how sad he looked, how small and humiliated, like he was no longer my father. I couldn't hear what the two men were saying, but they were angry and one man kept punching my father in the chest with his finger. When my father came back to our picnic table, his face was white and his hands were shaking.

"I asked him what was wrong and he said, 'Nothing. Everything is fine. Those guys were just having a bad day.'

"Then he put my snorkel and mask on my head and walked me down to the water and swam backward with me on his chest, until we were at the end of a coral jetty. He said, 'This is where the clown fish live. Anytime you're having a problem, you can tell it to the clown fish. These guys love children. Come on, you'll see.'

"That was the first time I ever held my breath and went all the way under the water. There were clown fish everywhere. They swam right up to my mask and brushed against my shoulders and arms. I never thought about those men again, not until years later when I realized they were probably the ones who murdered my father."

I wanted to be sympathetic. Dallas had been a good man, a brave soldier, and a devoted parent. But he had been corrupted by his addiction and had become a willing party to an armored car and bank heist that cost not only his life but also the life of the teller who had tried to foil the robbery by pus.h.i.+ng shut the vault door. Now Trish's single-minded obsession with vengeance might cost Clete Purcel his life, or at least a large chunk of it, and that simple fact seemed totally lost on her.

"Why not let Whitey and his pals fall in their own s.h.i.+t? It's a matter of time before either the Feds or the locals take them down," I said.

"You said Bruxal was friends with Meyer Lansky?"

"That's right."

"Did the system get Lansky?"

"He died of cancer."

"When he was an old man. You're a laugh a minute, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

I banged on the door for the guard to let me out. I was determined to let Trish have the last word, to be humble enough to remember my own mistakes and not contend with the certainty and confidence of youth. But when I looked at the earnestness and ego-centered determination in her face, I saw a moth about to swim into a flame.

"You probably noticed the hack who brought you in here seemed out of joint," I said.

"The hack?"

"The female correctional officer. She was held three days in a male prison riot and pa.s.sed from hand to hand by guys psychiatrists haven't found names for. She ended up in these guys' hands because she thought she knew what was inside their heads and she could handle whatever came down the pike. Don't ask her what they did to her, because she's never told anyone, at least no one around here."

I saw her fingers twitch on top of the table.

On the way back to Lafayette, I left a message with Betsy Mossbacher's voice mail.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, she called me on my cell phone. "You visited the Klein woman in jail?" she said.

"Briefly. But I didn't learn a whole lot."

"What'd she tell you?"

"A story about her father and swimming with clown fish."

"Clown fish?"

"I guess they're a symbol of childhood innocence for her. Anyway, I think she deliberately got herself arrested."

"We have the same impression at the Bureau. Some of her griffins have been showing up at three or four casinos where Whitey Bruxal is a part owner. It seems they make a point of standing in front of security cameras and getting themselves escorted off the premises."

I waited for her to go on.

"Did I catch you on the john?" she said.

"No," I lied. "I didn't know you had finished. You think they're planning to take down a casino?"

"I'd say it's a diversion of some kind. But my supervisor says I always overestimate people's intelligence."

"You guys deal with higher-quality perps," I said.

"Actually, he was talking about you and Purcel."

Two uniformed deputies entered the restroom, talking loudly. One of them slammed down the seat in the stall next to me. "Hey, there's no toilet paper on the roller. Get some out of the supply closet, will you?" he called out to his friend.