Crusader's Cross

chapter NINETEEN

By Tuesday afternoon Clete was standing at the registration desk in the lobby of an old ten-story stucco hotel on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, decked out in shades, his pale blue porkpie hat, a tropical shirt printed with bare-breasted hula girls, white polyester Bermuda shorts, and blue tennis shoes threaded with brand-new white laces. He carried a set of golf clubs on one shoulder, a flight bag on the other, registered as C. T. Perkins from Gulfport, Mississippi, and paid cash for his room.

The walls of the hotel were spiderwebbed with cracks, the patio in the center of the building spiked with weeds, the potted jacaranda dying from lack of water. But the view of the ocean from his open window on the top floor was magnificent, the overhead fan adequate to cool the room, the salt air wonderful. Clete propped his feet on the windowsill and punched in the telephone number of the Sea Breeze Escort Service. Down below, the tide was sliding high up on the sand and children were running into the waves, leaping in the froth that sucked back over their tanned bodies. On the third ring Clete found himself talking to a man who called himself Lou Coyne.

"You got the referral where?" Coyne said.

"Stevie Giacano, in New Orleans," Clete replied.

"Oh yeah, Stevie Gee. In the Teamsters, right? How's ole Stevie doin'?"

"Not too good. He's dead. But he always said your service was tops."

"We like to think so. So you're hosting a convention, that's what you're saying?"

"I'm about three blocks away from your office. What if I come on down there and maybe we work out a group rate? You give finder fees? I'll take mine in trade."

"Tell you what, I'll meet you in a half hour at that little outdoor joint by your hotel, the one looks like a straw hut."

"How will I know you?"

"You won't," the man who called himself Lou Coyne said, and hung up.

Clete read the newspaper in the lobby, then strolled down the boardwalk to a frozen daiquiri stand, one with a thatched roof, set among a grove of coconut palms. A red-headed woman with a Hawaiian skirt hooked over her bikini sat on the stool next to him and ordered a daiquiri. She looked around at the beach, then said, "Hi."

"Hello," Clete replied.

"Beautiful day," she said.

"They don't get any better."

"On vacation?" she said.

"I wish. With me it's all business," Clete said. He paid for her drink, pushing the five-dollar bill across the counter to the bartender with the heel of his hand, not asking the woman if it was all right. "C. T. Perkins is the name. I'm staying at the hotel, down the boardwalk there."

Her eyes were green and there was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. Her breath smelled heavily of cigarettes, and she had a habit of repetitively touching the pads of each of her fingers with her thumb on her left hand while she sipped from her drink.

"I bet you're in the construction business," she said.

"How'd you know?"

"You've been out in the sun a lot. You have big arms. There're calluses on your hands. But you're probably a supervisor or engineer."

"I used to be a general contractor. Now I put shopping mall deals together. Whatever blows up their skirt, that's what I do."

"You up for anything this afternoon?"

"Could be. You got a cell?" he said. She took a gold retractable pen from a canvas tote and wrote a number on a napkin. "Thanks for the drink. Keep that number under your hat, will you?" she said.

"They couldn't get it from me at gunpoint," he replied.

Clete watched her walk away, her face turned in a regal fashion toward the ocean, her hooked skirt molded tightly across her rump. She passed close to a man who wore linen slacks and a purple shirt with white suspenders, and who combed his hair as he walked toward the daiquiri stand. The two of them seemed to exchange glances, then the man sat at a table among the coconut palms, grinned, and pointed a finger at Clete. "Come talk to me, big man," he said.

Clete carried his daiquiri to the table and sat down. Lou Coyne's hair was the color of gunmetal, greased, long on the neck. His facial skin had an unnatural shine and hardness to it, as though his youth had been surgically restored at the cost of the softening influences purchased by age.

"If you knew Stevie Gee, you must know his old sidekick, Benny Frizola. Some people call him Benny Freeze," the man named Lou Coyne said.

"Never heard of him," Clete replied.

Lou Coyne grinned again. "So if I understand you, you're organizing a convention here – builders, Teamsters, subcontractors, those kinds of guys – and you need some escorts to show them the city?"

"Not exactly a convention, just a little P.R., get everybody lubricated and in a free-spending mood. Maybe around Thanksgiving. We'll be in town for five days," Clete said.

Lou Coyne's cheeks were sunken, as though he were sucking the spittle out of his mouth. His ears were small, the way a club fighter's get when he's been too long in the ring. "So, up front, you know an escort service offers nothing besides sightseeing, companionship, a walk on the beach if you want it, these are nice girls we're talking about here, we're clear on all this?"

"I respect what you got to do, but I don't have time for people's bullshit," Clete said.

"What'd you say?"

"I can put together a package in Vegas for the same prices I get here. Except some of the guys like to go deep-sea fishing. Besides, the seafood is better here. What can you do for me, Lou?"

Lou Coyne pulled on his nose. "Slip on a swimsuit. Let's take a dip," he said.

Clete went back to his hotel and changed into his Everlast boxing trunks and rejoined Lou Coyne on the beach.

"You going to swim in your clothes?" Clete asked.

Coyne began walking toward the surf, dropping his suspenders, pulling off his shirt as he went. "I ain't got a problem with the human body. Other people do, it's on them," he replied.

He removed a weighted-down copy of the Miami Herald from someone's beach blanket and laid his shirt, shoes, socks, and finally his folded slacks on top of it. He stood raw and white in the sunlight, wearing only a black silk thong that was little more than a sling for his phallus. While other bathers gaped, he flexed his back and rolled his shoulders. "Let's hit the waves, big man," he said.

They crashed through the breakers until they were chest-deep in the water, in a flat space between the swells, the beach behind them biscuit-colored and lined with palm trees and hotels that had fallen into decay.

"You thought I was a cop?" Clete said.

"Me? I love cops. I got all the original episodes of Miami Vice"

"Need your prices, Lou."

Lou Coyne pursed his mouth and thought. "I can give you ten, no, fifteen percent discount on the item. In terms of girls, I got the whole rainbow. The client acts like a gentleman or the service is discontinued. Before the discount, the various prices are as follows -"

Clete waited until Coyne finished, then said, "Sounds okay. You remind me of a guy I used to know."

"Yeah?" Coyne said.

"But his name was Kale. It was back when I was subcontracting on the Texas coast. The guy's name was Lou Kale."

"No kidding? You never know, huh?"

"Know what?" Clete said.

"Who you're talking to these days. Hey, one other thing? We don't take coupons from Screw magazine."

Clete stared at him blankly.

"That was a joke," the man who called himself Lou Coyne said.

Clete called me that night from his hotel room and told me of what he had done.

"Get out of there. He's made you," I said.

"No, the phony name I gave him will check out on the Internet. He bought it. But tell you the truth, I'm not sure he's our guy."

"Why not?"

"The broad he sent ahead of him to scope me out came by the hotel and asked me to dinner. If they were jobbing me, she would have gone straight for my Johnson."

"They made you, Cletus."

"You never worked Vice. These people are not that complicated. Dave, you and I got inside the Mob and they were never on to us. Coyne or whatever bought it. I think this broad Babette is just a working girl."

"Babette?"

"Kind of cute, don't you think?"

How do you tell your best friend that his old enemy, a weakness for female validation, has just deep-sixed his brains?

"Call me on your cell in three hours," I said.

"Everything is solid. I'm going to exclude Lou Coyne as our Galveston pimp or find Ida Durbin. Now, pull your dork out of the wall socket."

But I did not hear from Clete again that evening and he did not respond to my calls.

She gazed out at the ocean, her chin tilted up in the breeze, and said she was originally from Hawaii, that she had been a bookkeeper before coming to Miami to work as a hostess at a supper club. But after her ex had blown town on a bigamy charge and stopped her alimony payments, she had drifted into the life. She said Babette was her real name, and that it had been the name of her grandmother, who had been born in Tahiti. Her knees touched Clete's under the table as she said these things, on a fishing pier that was framed darkly against the ocean and the wan summer light that still hung in the sky, even though it was after 9:00 p.m.

She had paid for the hamburgers and beer herself, and had made no commercial proposition to him of any kind. Her hair was mahogany-colored, bleached on the tips by the sun, and hung loosely on her bare shoulders. She lit a cigarette with a tiny gold lighter, crossed her legs, and smoked with her spine hunched, her posture like a question mark, as though she were cold.

"Want to get out of the wind?" Clete said.

"No, I like it here. I come here often to be by myself. I write poetry sometimes."

"You do?"

"It's not very good. But I'm gonna take a creative writing class at Miami-Dade Community College this fall. I showed my poems to a professor there. He said I had talent but I needed to study."

"I bet your poems are good," Clete said.

The sun had sunk beyond the Everglades, and the ocean was dark and flecked with whitecaps. At the end of the pier some Cuban kids had hooked a hammerhead shark and were fighting to hoist it clear of the water and over the guardrail. The woman smoked her cigarette and watched them, the thumb on her left hand repeatedly tapping the tips of her fingers. One of the kids drove a knife into the shark's head, impaling it on a plank. "Yuk," Babette said.

"I got to ask you something," Clete said.

"Go ahead," she replied, screwing her cigarette out inside a bottle cap.

"You work for Lou Coyne?"

"Yes, I do," she said, smiling in a self-deprecating way.

"You were checking me out at the daiquiri stand?" he said.

"It comes with my paycheck."

"I'm not knocking it."

"I know you're not," she said.

"I just thought Coyne might be a guy I knew a long time ago, a Galveston guy by the name of Lou Kale."

"He's always used the name 'Coyne' since I've worked for him. He's a pretty good guy, actually. He's just got to be careful."

"Dude I knew was hooked up with a gal by the name of Ida Durbin."

"You got me. Ask Lou. You like the hamburgers?"

"They're swell."

"You seem like a sweet guy. Look, I've got to check on my cousin's house. I'm taking care of her parakeet while she's out of town. You want to come?"

They drove in her compact down 1-95 and took an exit into a neighborhood of cinder-block apartment buildings and one-story wood-frame homes that looked like they had been built during the Depression years. Babette entered a dark street and turned into the driveway of a paintless house. The front porch was lit and the screens on it were stained with rust, the yard filled with waving shadows from clusters of untrimmed banana trees.

"Your cousin lives in Little Havana?" Clete said.

"She's not Hispanic, if that's what you mean," Babette replied.

"No, that's not what I meant," he said.

"Before we go in, I need to tell you something. The cell number I gave you, it wasn't mine. It belongs to a dial-in prayer service."

"Really?"

"See, Lou took a bunch of us to Lake Charles, to the hotel and casino on the lake there. We met this famous evangelical leader. It was like a spiritual experience for me. I think for the first time in a long while I can stop living the way I do. But I don't have enough money to quit yet and plus I got a little drug problem."

"That's why they have Twelve-Step programs," Clete said.

She had cut the engine and now she opened the door partway, lighting the interior of the compact. "I just wanted you to know how it is with me and why I gave you the prayer number," she said. "I'm just trying to be honest."

Clete did not try to follow her reasoning. He waited for her to ask him for money. But she didn't. "I need to use the bathroom. Then I'll clean the birdcage and we can go," she said.

The inside of the house was clean and squared away, the furniture bright, the rooms air-conditioned by two window units. Through a bedroom door he could see a water bed and a lava lamp on the nightstand. Babette went into the bathroom, then Clete heard the toilet flush and the faucet running before she came back out.

"Why do you have that funny look on your face?" she said.

"Sorry."

"You think this is a fuck pad?"

"Hey -" he said.

"If that's what you think, say so."

"Not me," he said, and tried to smile.

"I've got a pitcher of rum punch in the fridge. You want some?" she said.

"I'm good," Clete said.

"I can't find my aspirin. My head is coming off. Somebody is always hiding my aspirin," she said, opening and slamming cabinets all over the kitchen.

"I thought this was your cousin's place."

"It is. I just visit here sometimes."

Clete decided he would have a drink after all. Babette broke apart a tray of ice, dropped cubes in two tall glasses that had been standing straight up in the dry rack, and filled them with rum punch from the pitcher. She took a long drink and the color bloomed in her face. "Oh, that's a lot better," she said.

"You got a pretty heavy jones?" Clete said.

"I got into smoking China white because I didn't want to infect. But I ended up using needles anyway. I've got it down to two balloons a day. They say if you can get it down to one, it's mostly manageable."

Clete drank from the punch, crunching ice between his molars, and tried to look attentive. He put a cigarette in his mouth and asked to borrow her cigarette lighter.

"I didn't think you smoked," she said.

"Just once in a while." He opened and closed his mouth to clear a popping sound from his ears. "You never heard of a hooker name of Ida Durbin?"

"I already told you. You think I'm lying?"

"No, I just feel kind of weird," he replied.

He reached out to take the lighter from her hand, but the gold surface seemed to turn soft and sink in the middle, like a lump of butter inside the warmth of a stove. His fingers went past her hand and knocked over a salt shaker, as though his motors had been snipped in half at the back of his brain. His mouth and throat became instantly dry; the overhead lighting caused his eyes to well with tears.

"What's happening?" he said.

She stared at him mutely, her expression caught between fear and guilt. "I have a little girl. I've got to get clean. Just don't lie to them. It makes them really mad," she said.

"Come here," he said, catching a piece of fabric with one hand.

But she pulled her canvas tote from him, looked back once, and rushed out the back door into the darkness.

Clete felt himself slip from the chair and crash on the linoleum, his drink glass shattering inches from his face.

Both the men who came through the front door carried lengths of chain and looked Hispanic. One wore a formfitting strap undershirt and had shaved armpits and the tapered lats and flat chest of a boxer. The other man was much bigger, his skin slick with black hair. The fingers of his right hand were inserted in the holes of a pair of brass knuckles.

A third man entered the house. He wore white slacks belted high up on his waist and a western shirt sewn with chains of purple and red flowers. "We tossed your room and found your P.I. buzzer. Sorry to do this to you, big man, but it's out of my control," Lou Coyne said.

"Yeah, you came here to get fucked, and that's what you got, spermo – fucked," the man in the formfitting undershirt said. Both he and the other Hispanic man laughed.

Lou Coyne squatted down eye-level with Clete. "You working for Robicheaux? You working for some political people? These guys here are serious. Don't underestimate their potential," he said.

Clete tried to rise to his feet, then collapsed again, pieces of broken glass knifing into his back.

"This ain't my way, big man. Please don't do this to either one of us," Coyne said.

But the words Clete heard were muffled, distorted, like someone shouting inside the downdraft of a helicopter. In his mind's eye he saw a hooch burning brightly on the edge of a flooded rice field. Boxes of AK-47 rounds were exploding inside the heat, and in the distance, against a storm-sealed sky, he could see a Zippo-track with a Confederate battle flag tied to the radio antenna grinding over a dike that flanged the rice field, automatic weapons fire dancing across the water's surface.

Clete got on his hands and knees and began crawling.

That's when a chain whipped out of the air and raked across his neck and the side of his face. Then the man with animal hair on his skin straddled him and drove the pair of brass knuckles deep into his back and a second time into his neck.

What had they given him? Clete guessed it was chloral hydrate. Or maybe acid. Or maybe both. The room had melted, the colors in the walls and floor dissolving and running together. One of the men was now wrapping a chain around his forehead, tightening the links into his scalp. Clete drove his elbow into the man's scrotum and heard him scream and the chain rattle to the floor.

Clete crashed into a laundry room off the kitchen, knocking over an ironing board and a plastic basket filled with dried clothes. On his knees, he slammed the door behind him and shot the bolt. A cast-iron pipe, an old drain of some kind, extended four feet high up on one wall. He gripped it at the top, wrenched it back and forth until it broke loose from a rusted connection, then ripped it out of the floor.

The pipe was heavy and thick in his palms. The floor seemed to be pitching under his feet, the roar of helicopter blades still thundering in his head. Or was that one of his attackers throwing his weight into the bolted door? The sounds in his head were so loud he couldn't tell where they originated, but the door was shaking hard, vibrating through the walls and floor. Then the bolt splintered loose from the jamb and the door flew open in Clete's face. Clete looked into the close-set pig-eyes of the man with brass knuckles, and drove the pipe into his mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth.

The man held his hands to the lower portion of his face, his brass knuckles shiny with the blood and saliva that drained through his fingers. Clete lifted the pipe like a baseball bat and swung it into the other Hispanic man's jaw, then across his back and rib cage. Both Hispanic men tried to shield their heads with their forearms and escape the blows raining down on them, but Clete followed them into the backyard, hitting them again and again, the pipe ringing in his palms.

"They're done! Jesus Christ! We're done!" Lou Coyne said. "You're gonna kill them guys! Hey, are you hearing me?"

Clete stumbled out of the backyard, dropping the pipe on the front sidewalk. The air smelled of smoke, perhaps from outdoor barbecue pits, and mist was blowing off an elevated highway in the distance. He staggered down the street toward a clapboard bar that glowed with the hazy iridescence of a pistol flare burning inside fog. Again, he thought he heard the downdraft of helicopter blades and the labored breath of people running, clutching at his arms, speaking words to him that made no sense.

Totally stoned, zoned, and shit-blown up the Mekong. I'm not going to make it, he thought.

Then, while a Miami P.D. helicopter with a searchlight roared by overhead, the loving hands of women who made him think of black angels guided him into the backseat of a car. Their lips were arterial-red, their perfume like that of an enclosed garden inside the car, their hands cool and gentle as they wiped his face and hair and the cuts in his scalp.

"What's the haps, ladies?" Clete said, and passed out.