James Burke - Crusader's Cross

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?"