His face became wooden. He lowered his eyes and slid a cigarette in and out of the pack.
"What are you trying to do to me, Dave?" he asked.
"Nobody has done anything to you. You jumped into the pig flop by yourself."
"So I'm ashamed of leaving my weapon in a bus locker. But this isn't a home. It's a goddamn lunatic asylum. Who the hell set you up as my judge?"
"Run that game on somebody else. Ballistics will match your weapon to the bullet that came out of Bobby Joe Starkweather. You should have lost it somewhere."
"Yeah? Maybe I didn't expect my partner to boost it from me." He took the cigarette out of the pack, lighted it with a Zippo, dropped the lighter loudly on the tabletop, and rubbed his hand over his face while he blew out the smoke. "So you gonna put me in the wringer?"
"Why'd you do it?"
"Ten thousand bucks."
I didn't say anything. I looked at his big hands, the way a cigarette looked so small in them, his scarred, poached face, and wondered what had happened to the good-humored and intelligent man I used to work with.
"Come on, he was garbage and you know it," he said. "The credit union wouldn't give me another loan, I'm still paying alimony to my first wife, I owe the finance company, and I was paying fifty a week to a shylock. I could have handled it, but I had some complications with a girl. She said she was a month late, and she stiffed me for a grand to get lost without having a talk with Lois. That's about all it would have taken to put her in a hospital."
"Who paid you, Clete?"
"Murphy."
"Why did he want him killed? Why did he want a cop to do it?"
"What difference does it make?"
"You're going to have to explain it sometime."
"He said the guy was an asshole, he was out of control or something."
"Murphy didn't need to pay cops to hit somebody."
His brow wrinkled. He wiped a piece of tobacco off the corner of his mouth.
"You said 'didn't.'"
"He's not a player anymore."
It took a second for the recognition to work into his eyes.
"Man, you don't fuck around, do you?" he said.
"Come on, Clete, why a cop?"
He waited a moment, and I saw the heat come back in his face.
"He said he worked for a guy, I suppose that general, what's his name, the guy whose house you got busted at, he said the guy didn't believe in whacking his own people. It's probably bullshit. All of them are slime, anyway."
"So you knew Murphy before?"
"No. He knew me. At least he knew I was paying a shylock." He drank from his beer can, inhaled from his cigarette, studied his hands, then raised his eyes again.
"Where do we go from here, partner?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Is a piece of shit like Starkweather this important?"
"You not only killed a man for money, you could have brought him and Murphy in. You could have gotten me off the hook."
"I don't read it that way. But I don't guess that's important now. Are you going to give them my piece?"
"I don't have it."
"What?"
"I just guessed you were dropping it and picking it up at the bus locker."
He shook his head and blew out his breath as though I'd kicked him in the stomach.
"Damn, if you aren't slick, Streak." He began to flick the fly clamped in the vise with his fingernail. "What do you think I ought to do now?"
"I don't care what you do," I said. "Get out of town. Go to Colorado. Take up Zen with Lois. I just know one thing for sure—don't ever call me 'partner' again."
* * *
TWELVE
Jimmie went into surgery at eight the next morning, and they didn't wheel him into the recovery room until almost noon. The doctor found me in the waiting room and sat down in his greens on the leather couch next to me. He was prematurely bald and talked with a west Texas accent. His fingers looked as though they could cover a basketball.
"I call this kind a dusting-and-cleaning situation," he said. "There was a messy spot or two, but most everything was on the surface. All things considered, it cleaned up beautifully. I'm still concerned about that eye, but at least I don't think we're talking about paralysis anymore. I hope that's good news for you this morning."
"It is, Doctor."
"Now, about the other stuff—general recovery, post-effects, psychological trauma, we can't really tell you. There's a lot about the brain we don't understand. I've had to cut 'em open and go in with an ice-cream scoop, and somehow the other parts of the brain compensate and the person can live a fairly normal life. Then I've seen a simple fracture cause a guy headaches that almost drove him to suicide. It's like the jack-in-the-box. Sometimes you just don't know what's going to jump up at you. But we've got a great eye man here and fine therapists, and every day it's going to get better for your brother. You follow me? In other words, we've got it turned around, and that's what counts."
We shook hands, then I stopped by the gift shop downstairs and had fresh flowers sent up to Jim's room. I saw a big plastic crawfish in the gift case, and I had the salesgirl tie it with a bow to the flower vase.
I went back to the files at the Picayune's morgue. Once again, the photographs and news stories sent me back across the sea, back into the era that would always be mine, whether I had wanted it or not. As I stared at the pictures of grunts loading their wounded into a dustoff, the elephant grass flattening around them, their dust-filmed faces streaked with dried sweat, their heads twisted back at the gunfire they still heard behind them, I felt like a leper who could not stop picking at his own crusted lesions. And like that leper, I knew I was about to sink my finger into a dark recess of pain and grief that did not cauterize with time. I flipped the frames of microfilm up on the viewing screen until I saw again the series of photographs taken during and after the My Lai massacre. I had never been able to rid myself of one of those photographs since I had first seen it in Newsweek magazine fifteen years ago. The villagers had been herded together, a GI with an M-16 was facing them, and a woman was begging with clasped hands while her little boy, not more than five, held her skirt and looked out from behind her with uncomprehending terror on his face. His mouth was open, the skin of his face was stretched tight with fear, and his eyes were wide with the knowledge that his mother's words could not protect him from what was about to happen.
The next frame on the microfilm showed the ditch where they were executed. On the floor of the ditch, amid the tangle of dead adults, was the body of a little boy who wore the same short pants and T-shirt as the child in the first picture. This was the war that an American President called a holy cause.
I knew that I would always be caught in that lens, too, locked inside a frame of film that people would never be able to deal with, because to deal with it would require an admission of responsibility that would numb an entire nation.
That is why the word obsession is a convenient one in the analytical vocabulary. We apply it to those who were trapped inside the camera, who can never extricate themselves from those darker periods in history that were written for them by somebody else. But I had a feeling that the general would understand what I meant, that he too had heard the click of the shutter in an unexpected moment, had realized with a quickening of the heart that some of us are meant to be only sojourners in the present.
Then a strange thing happened that afternoon. I drove back to my houseboat, ate a sandwich and drank a glass of iced tea, and suddenly felt very tired. I took a nap, with the fan blowing across me in the hot cabin, and awoke an hour later with the thick heat of the afternoon in my head. I pumped water into the kitchen sink, splashed my face and dried it with a paper towel, and stared abstractedly out the window into the glaring sunlight. Then my eyes focused on a man who stood under a palm tree farther down the beach. His hair was absolutely white, his skin deeply tanned, his posture erect as he smoked a cigarette in a holder and looked out at the shimme
ring lake from behind pilot's sunglasses. I rubbed the moisture out of my eyes with my fingers and looked again. I suspected that possibly I was obsessed after all. I went out on my deck and saw him turn and look at me. Cigarette smoke drifted away from his mouth in the wind. I walked quickly across the gangplank onto the dock and headed down the beach toward him. He looked at me a moment longer, removed the cigarette from his holder and dropped it into the sand, then casually walked to a gunmetal gray Chrysler and drove away. The heat was like steam rising from a stove.
I put on my running shoes and shorts, did four miles along the beach, showered in my tin stall, and called Annie and told her I would pick her up for supper after I visited Jimmie at the hospital. But just as I was locking up, Captain Guidry parked his car under the palm trees by my dock and walked down the path through the sand dune toward me. He carried his coat over his shoulder, and he wore his badge on one side of his belt and his clip-on .38 holster on the other. He wore long-sleeved white shirts and a tie even in the summer, and there were huge loops of sweat under his arms.
"Give me a few minutes of your time," he said.
I unlocked the door, fixed him a rum and Coke, made myself a glass of instant iced coffee, and sat down with him at my deck table under the canvas umbrella. The heat and humidity of the afternoon had started to lift and break apart in the evening breeze, and there were patches of dark blue floating in the green of the lake.
"I shouldn't drink this," he said. "I had a couple of belts right after work, and I probably don't need any more. But… so what? Cheers, Dave."
"You're not a man we can accuse of many vices, Captain."
"Yeah, but my life is pretty boring as a consequence. At least it is until I get hung up on a case. I want to get you back into the department. You're too valuable to be marking time out here on your boat. I'll tell you something straight out. You're probably the best investigative officer I ever had under me. You have honest-to-God talent and ability. There's nobody else I can depend on like I've depended on you."
"That's kind of you, Captain."
"Forget the kindness. I want people in custody for Jimmie's shooting. I'm ashamed of the number of homicides and attempted homicides we're not prosecuting. I'm convinced that almost every guy we don't nail keeps killing people until he finally falls. I've never bought this number that a murder is usually a one-time excursion. You remember that hit man from New Jersey we busted about five or six years ago? He's been a suspect in something like eighteen contract murders. That's hard to believe, isn't it? He'd still be out there if one of his own kind hadn't stuck an icepick in his ear. Anyway, they're not going to walk on this one. I'm going to tie the ribbon on the package and carry it over to the prosecutor's office myself, but I might need a little help. Now don't you bullshit me, Dave. You knew something when you came out of Jimmie's room the day he was shot. I want to know what it is."
"I didn't hold out on you. I just wasn't sure it meant very much. I'm still not sure it does."
"What?"
"Jimmie put his fingers on my chest, like he was trying to trace the letters of somebody's name."
"Okay."
"I think he knew he couldn't spell out an entire name. But what about initials? Whose name sounds like initials?"
"No, you tell me."
"Didi Gee. He used me. He had me out to lunch with him and his collection of assholes while Jimmie was being hit. I not only gave him an alibi, I allowed him to shoot off his mouth about his ethics and how people were forcing him to break his own rules."
"Why would he want to hit Jimmie?"
"He's going up in front of the grand jury, and I'll bet you Jimmie's going to be subpoenaed, too. He knew Jimmie wouldn't perjure himself. He'd take his own fall, and Didi would end up falling with him."
Captain Guidry drank from his rum and Coke and took his pipe and pouch out of his coat pocket.
"I'm going to tell you a few things, but I need to extract your word of honor about something first," he said.
"I've stopped dealing in those terms, Captain. That's not meant to be cynical. Considering the kind of mileage I have on my odometer, I just have a hard time thinking about personal honor."
"That's because you've convinced yourself you're one of the world's great sinners. Let me tell you something. Real honor means you're still intact and functioning after your soul's been shot out of a cannon."
"What do you want?"
"A promise you won't try to take down Didi Gee."
"I didn't plan to."
"You didn't plan that situation over in Biloxi, but it happened anyway, didn't it?"
"As a police officer I've shot four people, and I won't tell you about my record in Vietnam, except that I'm sick of all of it. There's always somebody there to convince you we got to blow 'em away, just this one more time, and the world will be a safer place. If Didi Gee deals the play, that's another matter. But I'm off of rock-'n'-roll, Captain."
He fiddled with his pipe for a while, then stuck it inside the tobacco pouch and put the pouch on the table.
"I got a call from the Fort Lauderdale police department," he said. "They try to monitor their local talent, but one of them slipped off the leash and left town for a couple of days. They think he might have been over here."
"Who is he?"
"A hit man that works for the mob in New Jersey and south Florida. They sent me a picture on the wire, and I showed it to the black kid with five others. He said that's our man."
"Where's this guy now?"
"Eating lobster on the beach, but we're going to jerk him up short. We'll cut the warrant on the kid's make, they'll pick him up for us, and we'll extradite back to New Orleans. By that time maybe Jimmie can identify him, too. The important thing is we don't let this guy fly."
"You'd better get a damn high bond, then."
"It will be. Also, the word's going to be on the street that this guy is a traveling man, a very bad risk. There's one thing you got to remember, though, Dave. We'll need Jimmie for a solid case. I don't think the kid will hold up too well by himself."
"What about Didi Gee?"
"We'll take it a step at a time. We won't have any trouble showing motive—the prosecutor was going to indict Jimmie and use him as a witness against Didi Gee. I think it comes down to how much time our contract man wants to spend chopping sugar cane in Angola. Fort Lauderdale says he's never had to do any hard time. The possibility of a thirty-year jolt in the Louisiana prison system might really increase his instinct for negotiation."
"Don't send Purcel after him."
"Purcel's my problem. Don't worry about him."
"He got ten thousand for Starkweather. He'll take money again. It's never a one-time thing. If you don't believe me, run his nine-millimeter through ballistics. But I bet his house will be robbed by then. Maybe you can get a match off the slugs from the Segura shooting, if they're not too beat up."
"I hope you have my job one day, Dave. Then you can be responsible for everything that's wrong in the First District. It's something to look forward to."
"I'm just squaring with you."
"Yeah, but give me some credit. I'm the one that warned you about protecting Purcel's butt in the first place. Right?"
I didn't answer. The wind was cool now, and it flapped the canvas umbrella over our heads. Twenty yards out, a half-dozen pelicans sailed low over the water, their shadows racing ahead of them on the green surface.
"Right or wrong?" he said, and grinned at me.
"You're right."
Then his face became serious again.
"But no Didi Gee, no cowboy stuff, no bullshit of any kind," he said. "The fat boy's going away, you can count on it, but it's going to be by the numbers. Right?"
"Right," I said.
But even as I spoke, I thought, If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?
Monday morning I had to go through another interview with Internal Affairs, t
his time concerning my last encounter with Internal Affairs. The three of us sat in a closed, immaculate white room that was furnished with a wooden table and three chairs. My interviewers were takers of notes. The yellow legal pads they wrote on were covered with swirls of calligraphy from their black felt pens. I didn't know either of them.
"Why did you strike Lieutenant Baxter?"
"He provoked me."
"How's that?"
"What do you care?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said why are you asking me these questions? You work with the man every day. You know him better than I do."
"Should we just indicate that you do not choose to answer the question?"
"I punched Nate Baxter because he's a bad cop. He tries to bully and degrade people. In my case, he tried to ignore evidence in the torture and murder of a federal law officer. Those things aren't demonstrable, but they're true, and both of you guys know it."
Both of them looked at me blankly across the table. I could hear the air-conditioning humming through a duct in the white silence.
On the way out I got a clerk to pull the computer sheet they had gotten on the hit man from the National Crime Information Center in Washington. It was brief, almost hazy, in its description, in the way that a facial image burned into rock with acid would be hazy and brutal at the same time.
B. 1957, CAMDEN, NJ, GRADUATED H.S. 1975, ATTENDED MIAMI-DADE C.C. 2 YRS. VOC: DRY CLEANER, APT. MANAGER, SALESMAN. SUSPECTED INVOLVEMENT IN 6 HOMICIDES ORDERED BY ORGANIZED CRIME FIGURES. 1 CONTEMPT CITATION RESULTING IN 3 MONTHS' CONFINEMENT BROWARD COUNTY STOCKADE. CURRENT ADDRESS: CASA DEL MAR, GALT OCEAN MILE, FT. LAUDERDALE, FL.
I tried to envision the man. The face remained an empty, dark oval, like the pitted center of a rotten piece of fruit, but I could see the simian hands. They were strong, ridged with knuckles, thick across the palm, but they were not made for work or for touching a woman's breast or even for tossing a ball back and forth with boys. Instead, they curved readily around certain tools that in themselves were only discardable means to an end: the .22 Magnum revolver, the .410 pistol, the barber's razor, the cork-tipped icepick, the Uzi. He loosed the souls from their bodies, the grief and terror from their eyes; he unstuck them from their mortal fastenings, sawed the sky loose from the earth's rim, eased them as a lover might into the wheeling of the stars. Sometimes at night he watched his deeds on the ten-o'clock news, ate ice cream out of a carton with a spoon, and felt a strange sexual arousal at the simplicity of it all, the purity, the strobelike glow where their bodies had been outlined with chalk, the remembered smell of death that was also like the smell of the sea, like copulation, like birth.