"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.