A Morning for Flamingos by James Lee Burke Page A

exists in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle and operates like a drain in an enormous sink. Finally I bought a book on cats and left.
    I called New Iberia that night to check on Alafair, and the next morning I walked over to Clete’s Club on Decatur, across from the French Market. For years Clete had been my partner in the First District. He’d learned his law enforcement methods from an uncle who had walked a beat in the Irish Channel—“Bust ‘em or smoke ‘em,” Clete always said—and had literally terrorized the lowlifes in the First. All you had to do was mention to a pimp or house creep or jackroller that Cletus Purcel would like to interview him, and he would be on the next bus or plane to Miami. Then Clete got into debt to the shylocks, ruined his marriage with whores and his stomach with booze and aspirin, and finally went on a pad and took ten thousand dollars from some drug dealers and right-wing crazies to get rid of a federal witness.
    Later he would run house security at a casino in Nevada and become the bodyguard for a midlevel Mafia character and ex-con by the name of Sally Dio. But eventually what I thought of as Clete’s most essential characteristics—his courage and his loyalty to an old friend—had their way, and he managed to walk away reasonably intact from all the wreckage in his life.
    He was at the back of the bar, loading the stainless steel cooler with bottles of long-necked Jax. He looked up and smiled when he saw me. His body always looked too big for his clothes. He loved pizza, poor-boy sandwiches, deep-fried shrimp and oysters, dirty rice, beignets , ice cream, which he would eat with a tablespoon by the half gallon. He was convinced that he could control his weight by pumping iron every other night in his garage, and limit his ulcer damage by smoking Lucky Strikes through a cigarette filter and drinking his scotch with milk.
    “What’s happening, Streak?” he said. “I had a feeling you’d be by.”
    “How’s that?”
    “I’m hearing weird stuff about you, mon.”
    “Did somebody leave a message for me?”
    “Nope.”
    “Then what did you hear?”
    He stood erect from his work, flexed the stiffness out of his back, and grinned at me. His skin was ruddy, his hair sandy and combed straight back on his head, his green eyes intelligent and full of humor. A scar that was the color and texture of a bicycle tire patch ran down through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose.
    “How about you spring for some oysters and I’ll fix you a drink?” he said.
    “I don’t have time.”
    “Yeah, you do.” Then he turned to a Negro who was sweeping between the tables by the dance floor. “Emory, go down to Joe Burda’s and get us a couple of dozen on the half shell.”
    The Negro went out, and Clete fixed me a tall glass of shaved ice, 7-Up, Collins mix, candied cherries, and orange slices. He poured a cup of coffee for himself behind the bar, then came around and sat down beside me. The club was empty, the front door open; the light outside was bright under the colonnade.
    “What the fuck are you up to, Streak?” he said.
    “I’ve got an apartment over on Ursulines. I haven’t bounced back too well since that guy put a hole in me.”
    “You like listening to drunks break bottles out in the street all night?”
    “It’s not bad.”
    “I bet. How many queers are in your building?”
    “Lay off it,Clete.”
    “Then tell me why I’m hearing these weird stories.”
    “I don’t know what you’ve heard.”
    “That an ex-Homicide roach is trying to score five keys of coke. That he got canned from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department because he was taking juice. That he’s floating Tony C.‘s name around town.”
    “Word spreads.”
    “Among some people I’d stay away from, the kind we used to mash into the cement.”
    “The kind you used to mash.”
    “I’m not kidding you, partner. I heard this bullshit from three different guys.”
    “Who?”
    “I