“You don’t owe me.”
“A guy with my track record owes the whole fucking earth. Anyway, here’s the deal. Yesterday this punk by the name of L. J. Potts from Magazine Street is pushing a broom out in the corridor, clacking it against my bars and making all kinds of noise so I can’t sleep. So I say I ain’t working on the Good Housekeeping Award and would this punk take his broom somewhere else before I get my hands on it and shove it up his hole. So the punk, who’s got a brother named Wesley Potts, tries to impress me. He asks if I know a New Orleans homicide roach named Robicheaux, and he’s smirking, see, because he thinks you’re one of the cops that nailed me. I tell him maybe, and he keeps smirking and says, well, here’s some good news because his brother Wesley has it that this particular homicide roach has stuck his nose in the wrong place and if he don’t stop it he’s going to get whacked.”
“He sounds like a gasbag, Johnny.”
“Yeah, he probably is, except the difference with him and his brother is I think they’re connected up with the greasers.”
“The Colombians?”
“Fucking A. They’re spreading around the country faster than AIDS. They’ll take out anybody, too—whole families, the children, the old people, it don’t matter to them. You remember that bar on Basin that got torched? The greaser that did it stood in the doorway in broad daylight with a fucking flamethrower on his back and because he was in a good mood he gave everybody one minute to get out of the place before he melted it into a big pile of bubbling plastic. You watch out for those cocksuckers, Streak.”
He lit a fresh Camel from the butt in his hand. He was sweating heavily now, and he wiped his face on his sleeve and smelled himself simultaneously. Then his face got gray and still and he stared straight ahead with his palms gripped on his thighs.
“You better leave now. I think I’m going to get sick again,” he said.
“I think you’re a stand-up guy, Johnny.”
“Not on this one.”
We shook hands. His hand was slick and light in mine.
They electrocuted Johnny Massina at midnight. Back in my houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, with the rain beating on the roof and dancing on the water outside, I remembered the lines I had heard sung once by a black inmate in Angola:
I ax my bossman, Bossman, tell me what’s right.
He whupped my left, said, Boy, now you know what’s right.
I wonder why they burn a man twelve o ‘clock hour at night.
The current much stronger; the peoples turn out all the light.
My partner was Cletus Purcel. Our desks faced each other in a small room in the old converted fire station on Basin Street. Before the building was a fire station it had been a cotton warehouse, and before the Civil War slaves had been kept in the basement and led up the stairs into a dirt ring that served both as an auction arena and a cock-fighting pit.
Cletus’s face looked like it was made from boiled pigskin, except there were stitch scars across the bridge of his nose and through one eyebrow, where he’d been bashed by a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel. He was a big man, with sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, and he fought to keep his weight down, unsuccessfully, by pumping iron four nights a week in his garage.
“Do you know a character named Wesley Potts?” I asked.
“Christ, yes. I went to school with him and his brothers.What a family. It was like having bread mold as your next-door neighbor.”
“Johnny Massina said this guy’s talking about pulling my plug.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me. Potts is a gutless lowlife. He runs a dirty movie house on Bourbon. I’ll introduce you to him this afternoon. You’ll really enjoy this guy.”
“I’ve got his file right here. Two narcotics, six obscenity busts, no convictions. Evidently one serious beef with the IRS.”
“He fronts points for the greasers.”
“That’s what Massina said.”
“All right, we’ll go talk to him after lunch. You notice I say ‘after lunch,’ because this guy is your real genuine bucket of shit. By the way, the parish coroner in Cataouatche returned your call and said they didn’t do an autopsy on that colored girl.”
“What do you mean, they didn’t do one?” I said.
“He said they didn’t do one because the sheriff’s office didn’t request it. It went down as a drowning. What’s all this about, anyway, Dave? Don’t you have enough open cases without finding work down in Cataouatche Parish? Those people down there don’t follow the same rules we do, anyway. You know that.”
Two weeks before, I had been fishing in a pirogue on Bayou Lafourche, flycasting popping-bugs along the edge of the lily pads that grew out from the banks. The shore was thickly lined with cypress trees, and it was cool and quiet in the green-gold morning light that fell through the canopy of limbs overhead. The lily pads were abloom with purple flowers, and I could smell the trees, the moss, the wet green lichen on the bark, the spray of crimson and yellow four-o’clocks that were still open in the shade. An alligator that must have been five feet long lay up close to some cypress roots, his barnacled head and eyes just showing above the waterline like a brown rock. I saw another black swelling in the water near another cypress, and I thought it was the first alligator’s mate. Then an outboard boat passed, and the wake rolled the swelling up into the cypress roots, and I saw a bare leg, a hand, a checkered shirt puffed with air.
I set down my fly rod, rowed closer, and touched the body with my paddle. The body turned in the water, and I saw the face of a young black woman, the eyes wide, the mouth open with a watery prayer. She wore a man’s shirt tied under her breasts, cut-off blue jeans, and for just a second I saw a dime tied on a string around her ankle, a good-luck charm that some Acadian and black people wore to keep away the
gris-gris
, an evil spell. Her young face looked like a flower unexpectedly cut from its stem.
I looped my anchor rope around her ankle, threw the anchor back into the trees on the bank, and tied my red handkerchief on an overhanging branch. Two hours later I watched the deputies from the parish sheriff’s office lift the body onto a stretcher and carry it to an ambulance that was parked in the canebrake.
“Just a minute,” I said before they put her in. I lifted up the sheet to look again at something I’d seen when they had pulled her out of the water. There were tracks on the inside of her left arm, but only one needle hole that I could see inside the right.
“Maybe she gives blood to the Red Cross,” one of the deputies said, grinning.
“You’re a pretty entertaining guy,” I said.
“It was just a joke, Lieutenant.”
“Tell the sheriff I’m going to call him about the autopsy,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
But the sheriff was never in when I called, and he didn’t return calls, either. So finally I telephoned the parish coroner’s office, and now I discovered that the sheriff didn’t believe an autopsy for a dead black girl was that important. Well, we’ll see about that, I thought.
In the meantime, I was still curious as to why the Colombians, if Johnny Massina was right, were interested in Dave Robicheaux. I went through my case file and didn’t see any connection. I had a whole file drawer of misery to look at, too: a prostitute icepicked by a psychotic john; a seventeen-year-old runaway whose father wouldn’t bond him out of jail and who was hanged the next morning by his black cellmate; a murder witness beaten to death with a ball-peen hammer by the man she was scheduled to testify against; a Vietnamese boat refugee thrown off the roof of the welfare project; three small children shot in their beds by their unemployed father; a junkie strangled with baling wire during a satanic ritual; two homosexual men burned alive when a rejected lover drenched the stairwell of a gay nightclub with gasoline. My drawer was like a microcosm of an aberrant world populated by snipers, razor-wielding blacks, mindless nickel-and-dime boost artists who eventually panic and kill a convenience-store clerk for sixty dollars, and suicides who fill the apartment with gas and blow the whole building into a black and orange fireball.
What a bunch to dedicate your life to.
But there was no umbilical cord that led to the south-of-the-border account.
Cletus was watching me.
“I swear, Dave, I think your feelings are going to be hurt unless you find out the greasers got the hots for you,” he said.
“We don’t have a lot of perks in this business.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. Let’s go to lunch early, you buy, and I’ll introduce you to Potts. The guy’s a delight. Your day is going to be filled with sunshine.”
It was hazy and bright when we drove into the Quarter. There was no breeze, and the palm fronds and banana trees in the courtyards were green and motionless in the heat. As always, the Quarter smelled to me like the small Creole town on Bayou Teche where I was born: the watermelons, cantaloupes, and strawberries stacked in crates under the scrolled colonnades; the sour wine and beer and sawdust in the bars; the poor-boy sandwiches dripping with shrimp and oysters; the cool, dank smell of old brick in the alleyways.
A few genuine bohemians, writers, and painters still lived in the Quarter, and some professional people paid exorbitant rents for refurbished apartments near Jackson Square, but the majority of Vieux Carré residents were transvestites, junkies, winos, prostitutes, hustlers of every stripe, and burnt-out acidheads and street people left over from the 1960s. Most of these people made their livings off middle-class conventioneers and Midwestern families who strolled down Bourbon Street, cameras hanging from their necks, as though they were on a visit to the zoo.
I couldn’t find a place to park by Pearl’s Oyster Bar, and I kept driving around the block.
“Dave, when does a guy know he’s got a drinking problem?” Cletus asked.
“When it starts to hurt him.”
“It seems I’ve been getting half-stoned near every night of recent. I can’t seem to go home unless I stop at the joint on the corner first.”
“How are you and Lois getting along?”
“I don’t know. It’s the second marriage for both of us. Maybe I’ve got too many problems, or maybe both of us have. They say if you don’t make it the second time around, you ain’t going to make it at all. You think that’s true?”
“I don’t know, Clete.”
“My first wife left me because she said she couldn’t stay married to a man that brought a sewer home with him every day. That was when I was working vice. She said I smelled like whores and reefer all the time. Actually, vice did have its moments. Now Lois tells me she doesn’t want me to bring my gun home at night. She’s into Zen, meditates every day, sends our money to some Buddhist priest out in Colorado, and tells me she doesn’t want her kids growing up around guns. Guns are bad, see, but this character out in Colorado that takes my bucks is good. Two weeks ago I came in wired, so she started crying and blowing her nose into a whole box of Kleenex. So I had a couple more hits of Jack Daniel’s and told her how you and I had spent the afternoon combing pieces of a fourteen-year-old kid out of the garbage dump with a garden rake. Fifteen more minutes of tears and nose-honking. So I cruise for some booze and almost get nailed on a DUI. Not very good, huh?”
“Everybody has family trouble sometimes.”
He was frowning out the window, his thoughts collecting in his eyes. He lit a cigarette, drew in deeply, and flicked the match out into the sunlight.
“Man, I’m going to be a chainsaw by two o’clock,” he said. “I’m going to have a couple of beers with lunch. Sedate the brain, settle the stomach, mellow the nerves. Does that bother you?”
“It’s your day. You can do whatever you want to with it.”
“She’s going to split. I know the signs.”
“Maybe y’all will work it out.”
“Come on, Dave, you didn’t get off the boat yesterday. It doesn’t work that way. You know how things were just before your wife took off.”
“That’s right, I do. I know how things were. Nobody else does. You get my drift?” I grinned at him.
“All right, I’m sorry. But when it’s going down the toilet, it’s going down the toilet. You don’t turn it around by leaving your piece in a locker. Pull into that truck zone. It’s too damn hot out here.”
I parked in the loading zone by Pearl’s and cut the engine. Cletus was sweating in the sunlight.
“Tell me honestly,” he said, “would you have done something like that just to please your wife?”
I didn’t even want to think about the things I had done to please my wife, my pale, dark-haired, beautiful wife from Martinique who left me for a Houston oilman.
“Hey, lunch is on you after all,” I said.
“What?”
“I didn’t bring any money.”
“Use your MasterCard.”
“They wouldn’t renew it. Something about exceeding my credit limit by four hundred dollars.”
“Great, I’ve got a buck thirty-five. What a class act. All right, we eat on the tab. If he doesn’t like it, we tell him we’re calling Immigration about the Haitians he’s got working in his kitchen.”
“I didn’t know he had any.”
“Me either. It’ll be fun to see what he says.”
The pornographic theater was right on Bourbon Street. Bourbon had changed since I used to come here as a college student over twenty years ago. The old Dixieland bands like Papa Celestin’s and Sharky Bonnano’s had been replaced by imitation country bands made up of kids in designer jeans, vinyl vests, and puffed white silk shirts with lace brocade, like mambo dancers or transvestites would wear. The burlesque houses had always been seedy places where the girls hustled drinks between sets and hooked loose Johns before closing, but the city code had required them to wear G-strings and pasties, and there hadn’t been any dope around, except a little reefer among the desperate, burnt-out musicians who played in a small, dark pit at the bottom of the runway. But now the girls danced completely nude on the stage, their eyes glowing with black speed, their nostrils sometimes still twitching and wet from snorting coke through a rolled-up dollar bill.
The windows of Plato’s Adult Theater had been walled up with cinder blocks so no one could see in, and the interior of the small, gold and purple lobby was decorated with erotic art that might have been painted by blind people. We went through the lobby into the office without knocking. A thin man with a pointed, shiny face looked up, startled, from his desk. He wore a powder-blue polyester suit and patent-leather shoes with silver buckles, and his receding, oiled hair glistened in the light from the desk lamp. Cans of movie reels were stacked in a wooden rack against one wall. The surprise and fear went out of the man’s face, and he scratched his cheek with one hand and picked up a filter-tipped cigar from the ashtray.