"I'm sorry, No Duh. But I didn't tell you to creep Dock's house."
"My other choice is I miss the vig again with Wee Willie Bimstine and get fed into an airplane propeller? Thanks for your charitable attitudes."
"I've got a room behind the bait shop. You can stay here till we square you with Wee Willie."
"You'd do that?"
"Sure."
"It's full of snakes out here. You want the gen on Dock? Persephone eighty-sixed him after she caught him porking his broads."
"That's old news, No Duh."
"I got in his desk. It's full of building plans for hospitals. Treatment places for drunks and addicts. There was canceled checks from Jimmy Ray Dixon. Go figure."
"Figure what?"
"Dock supplies broads for every gash-hound in the mob. That's the only reason they let a crazy person like him come around. But he don't cut no deal he don't piece off to the spaghetti heads. When'd the mob start working with coloreds? You think it's a mystery how the city got splashed in the bowl?"
"Who set up Jerry Joe Plumb, No Duh?"
"He did."
"Jerry Joe set himself up?"
"He was always talking about you, how your mothers use to work together, how he use to listen to all your phonograph records over at your house. At the same time he was wheeling and dealing with the Giacanos, washing money for them, pretending he could walk on both sides of the line . . . You don't get it, do you? You know what will get you killed in New Orleans? When they look in your eyes and know you ain't like them, when they know you ain't willing to do things most people won't even think about. That's when they'll cut you from your package to your throat and eat a sandwich while they're doing it."
I took my grocery sack of frozen crawfish and potato salad out of the truck and glanced at the priest, who stood at the end of my dock, watching a flight of ducks winnow across the tops of the cypress trees. His hair was snow white, his face windburned in the fading light. I wondered if his dreams were troubled by the confessional tales that men like Dolowitz brought from the dark province in which they lived, or if sleep came to him only after he granted himself absolution, too, and rinsed their sins from his memory, undoing the treachery that had made him the repository of their evil.
I walked up the drive, through the deepening shadows, into the back door of my house.
CHAPTER 33
at sunrise Clete Purcel and I sat in my truck on the side street next to Persephone and Dock Green's home in the Garden District. The morning was cold, and clouds of mist almost completely blanketed the two-story antebellum house and the white brick wall that surrounded the backyard. Clete ate from a box of jelly-filled doughnuts and drank out of a large Styrofoam cup of coffee.
"I can't believe I got up this early just to pull No Duh's butt out of the fire," he said. When I didn't reply, he said, "If you think you're going to jam up Persephone Green, you're wrong. Didi Gee was her old man, and she's twice as smart as he was and just as ruthless."
"She'll go down just like he did."
"The Big C killed Didi. We never touched him."
"It doesn't matter how you get to the boneyard."
"What, we got an exemption?" he said, then got out of the truck and strolled across the street to the garden wall. The palms that extended above the bricks were dark green inside the mist. I heard a loud splash, then saw Clete lean down and squint through the thick grillwork on the gate. He walked back to the truck, picked up another doughnut and his coffee off the floor and sat down in the seat. He shook an image out of his thoughts.
"What is it?" I said.
"It's forty-five degrees and she's swimming in the nude. She's got quite a stroke . . ." He drank out of his coffee cup and looked at the iron gate in the wall. He pursed his mouth, obviously not yet free from an image that hovered behind his eyes. "Damn, I'm not kidding you, Streak, you ought to see the gagongas on that broad."
"Look out front," I said.
A gray stretch limo with a rental U-Haul truck behind it pulled to the curb. Dock Green got out of the back of the limo and strode up the front walk.
"Show time," Clete said. He removed my Japanese field glasses from the glove box and focused them on the limo's chauffeur, who was wiping the water off the front windows. "Hey, it's Whitey Zeroski," Clete said. "Remember, the wetbrain used to own a little pizza joint in the Channel? He ran for city council and put megaphones and vote for whitey signs all over his car and drove into colored town on Saturday night. He couldn't figure out why he got all his windows broken."
A moment later we heard Dock and Persephone Green's voices on the other side of the garden wall.
"It don't have to shake out like this," he said.