DR01 - The Neon Rain

  He had been busted at nine-thirty that morning and was now being held in the deadlock of the Fort Lauderdale jail, with no bond, while he awaited extradition to Louisiana. With good luck Jimmie would identify him, and with the right turn of the screw he would be willing to feed Didi Gee into an airplane propeller.

  It should have been enough. But it wasn't.

  I went back to the houseboat and found an old canvas money bag that I used to collect pennies in. The canvas had been cut out of a sail and sewn with a thick double stitch, and it closed and tied at the top with a leather drawstring. Then I sorted through my toolbox and found a half-dozen tire lugs, three ball bearings, and a huge iron nut that I used as a weight on my crab traps.

  Rain clouds drifted by overhead, and my houseboat and the lake were suddenly covered with shadow, and the waves were capping on the slate-green surface. The air was cool and smelled of trees and salt and wet sand that was alive with shellfish. I could feel caution lights start to flash in my head, the way you do when you watch the amber light shimmer in a whiskey glass; you raise the glass to your lip and you're almost eyeball to eyeball with that protean and dancing balloon of yellow light, then its heated energy hits your stomach, surges through your chest, and rips open sealed places in your brain that you did not know existed. But the marriage is made, the hyena will have its way, the caution light is locked on red, and you can't even have the pleasure of loathing yourself because the metamorphosis to which you've committed yourself is now the only self you have.

  No, I wasn't out of control. It wasn't whiskey or an adrenaline surge like it that was loose in my system. I simply had to set some things right. And sometimes you don't set things right by being reasonable. Reason is a word I always associated with bureaucrats, paper shufflers, and people who formed committees that were never intended to solve anything. I don't mean to be hard. Maybe I'm just saying that what works for other people never worked very well for me, and that's probably because I shorted out a lot of my wiring a long time ago. I was never good at complexities, usually made a mess of them when I tried to cope with them, and for that reason I was always fond of a remark that Robert Frost made when he was talking about his lifetime commitment to his art. He said the fear of God asks the question, Is my sacrifice acceptable, is it worthy, in His sight? When it's all over and done with, does the good outweigh the bad, did I pitch the best game I could, even though it was a flawed one, right through die bottom of the ninth?

  No, maybe I'm simply talking about honor. I could not define it in myself, but I recognized it when I saw it in others, and I was convinced that as a virtue it had little to do with being reasonable. And I knew absolutely that it was as dishonorable for a man to allow himself to be used as it was for him to use others. I also knew as a cop that the use of people, which is probably our worst sin, was considered the stuff of moralistic rhetoric by the legal fraternity.

  So it wasn't an afternoon for caution lights, even though they reminded me of that amber-yellow heat that could almost soak through glass into my palm and crawl up my arm. It was a day of wind, of whitecaps turning into froth on the lake, of salt spray blowing through my windows, of palm leaves straightening against the gray sky, of swimmers chop-ping for the shore as thunder rolled overhead and I pointed my car toward the Eastern Expressway and the first raindrops clicked flatly against my windshield.

  His office was in a huge liquor store he owned on Huey P. Long Avenue in Gretna, out of which he operated two beer distributorships, a catering and valet parking service, and a half-dozen delicatessens. The liquor store took up almost an entire block. It had wide, well-lighted aisles and buffed floors; music played from hidden speakers; spider plants and philodendron grew in the windows; glass collection jars for crippled children and stand-up posters advertising LSU, Tulane, and the Saints' fall football schedules stood on the front counter. Shoppers used arm baskets while they browsed through the aisles. The enclosed and refrigerated delicatessen counter was filled with shelled shrimp, squid, deviled eggs, lox, sliced cheeses, and meats from all over the world.

  It was a place that probably compensated in some way for the deprivation he had known in childhood. There was an endless supply of food and drink; the interior was made entirely of glass, plastic, chrome, stainless steel, the stuff of technology, of now; and the people who bought his booze and gourmet trays belonged to the Timber Lane Country Club and treated him with the respect due a successful businessman. It wasn't that far to the waterfront neighborhood of Algiers where he grew up, but it must have seemed light-years away from the time when the sight of his convertible, with the bloodstained baseball bat propped up in the rear seat, made Italian merchants walk sweatily to the curb with the taped brown envelope already in their hands.

  I felt a lick of fear in the back of my throat, like a pocket of needles in the voicebox, as I walked through the electronic sliding doors. The leather drawstring of the money bag was wrapped around my hand, and I could feel the collection of ball bearings, tire lugs, and the one big iron nut striking against my thigh as I walked. The shoppers in the aisles were the type you see in liquor stores only in the afternoons: by and large they're amateurs, they examine the labels on bottles because they don't know what they want, and they move about with the leisurely detachment of people who will not drink what they buy until hours or even days later. At me back of the store was an office area with a mahogany rail around it, much like the office area in a small bank. Didi Gee sat behind an executive's glass-topped desk, talking to a clerk in a gray apron and two middle-aged men who had the kind of heavy-shouldered, thick-chested breadth and slightly stooped stance that comes from a lifetime of walloping freight or lifting weights and drinking and eating whatever you want, with disregard for what you look like. Didi Gee saw me first and stopped talking, then all their heads were turned toward me and their faces were as flat and expressionless as people looking up the street at a bus about to arrive. I saw Didi Gee's lips move, then the two middle-aged men walked toward me with the clerk behind them. He was much younger than the other two, and his eyes would not focus on mine.

  We stood in the center of the wide aisle, and I could feel the shoppers moving away from us, their eyes a bit askance, their brows slightly furrowed, as though a violent presence could come into their midst only if they looked directly at it. Both of the big men wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts and rested easily on the soles of their feet, the way boxers and oldtime career soldiers do.

  "What do you want?" the larger of the two asked. He wore big rings on his thick fingers, and a gold watch with a black face that matched the black hair on his arms.

  "So far you guys aren't in it," I said.

  "We're in everything. What do you want, Robicheaux?" the second man asked. He had a puckered scar in the center of his throat. He had been chewing gum, but now he had stopped.

  "It's Lieutenant Robicheaux."

  "You want to buy some liquor? Go get him a fifth of Jack Daniel's," the first man said to the clerk. "It's on the house. Now what else you want before you leave?"

  "It's not worth it for you," I said.

  "We'll walk you to your car. Charlie, put his bottle in a sack."

  Then the first man touched me slightly on the arm, just a brush with the callused inside of his palm. I swung the canvas bag from the side and caught him across the eye and the bridge of the nose, felt the lugs and ball bearings flatten against the bone, saw the pain and shock grab the rest of his face like a fist. He stumbled backward through a conically stacked display of green bottles, and the stack folded into a rain of wine and glass all over the aisle. I saw the second man's fist leap out at the side of my head; I bobbed, bent my knees, felt a ring rake across my scalp, and came around with the bag full circle and laid it right across his chin and mouth. His lips went crooked, his teeth were streaked red, and his eyes stared straight into mine with a fearful knowledge. I swung at him again, but he had his shoulders bent and his arms over his head now. A woman was screaming somewhere
behind me, and I saw a man drop a red arm basket on the floor and walk quickly toward the electronic sliding doors. Others had formed into a crowd at the far end of the aisle.

  Then the first man crunched through the glass and spilled wine and came at me holding a broken bottle of vermouth by the neck. The side of his face where I had hit him was red and swollen. His head was low, his shoulders rounded, his weight flat-footed, his eyes close-set and glaring. He poked at me with the bottle, as though it were a pike. I swung at his wrist, missed, heard the canvas clink on the bottle's tip, and he came forward again and lunged at my face. He must have been a knife fighter at one time, and even though he was heavy and breathed with the controlled rasp of the cigarette smoker, his reflexes were fast, his thighs and big buttocks were cocked like springs, and there was no fear in his eyes, but only a steady heated light that would accept any attrition to get to a murderous end.

  But impatience was his undoing. He jabbed the bottle at my eyes again, and when he thought I was going to jerk backward, he raised it to slash at my head. But I didn't give ground, and I swung the heavy knot of metal from behind me, the canvas actually whipping in the air, and caught him solidly on the temple. His face went gray, his eyes rolled, the lids fluttered like bruised flower petals, and he crashed into the shelves and lay still.

  Somebody was calling the police on the telephone. The second middle-aged man and the clerk in the apron retreated in front of me as I walked through the broken glass and the pools of wine, whiskey, and vermouth. Didi Gee rose from his desk like a leviathan surfacing from the depths. He had knocked over the ashtray when he stood up, and his perfumed cigarette was burning on the desk blotter. His face was still filled with disbelief, but there was something else at work in his eyes, too—a flicker, a twitch, the rippling edge of a fear he had hidden inside himself all his life.

  "You're fucked," he said.

  Don't talk. Do it. Now, I thought.

  "You hear me? Fucked. Your brother, your girl, you're all a package deal."

  "He thought you were his friend. You bastard," I said.

  I saw his eyes sweep the store, look impotently at his employees, who were having no part of it now, then his hand went inside the desk drawer and flattened on top of a blue automatic. I came straight overhead with the canvas bag, struck him across the forearm, and snapped the side panel out of the drawer. His fingers straightened and trembled with the shock, and he wrapped his hand around the swelling on top of his forearm, held it against his chest, and backed away from me. His lower buttocks and the backs of his thighs hit against the mahogany rail that surrounded the office area, bolts popped loose from their fastenings, and the rail suddenly snapped flat against the floor. Then he turned and ran with his head twisted back at me.

  I followed him behind the delicatessen counter, onto the duckboards, into the midst of his countermen and butchers, whose faces at that moment dared show no partisan expression. Didi's breath was wheezing, his huge chest laboring, his black curly hair hanging in his face like snakes, his dark eyes hot and desperate. His breath sounded as though he was strangling on air bubbles in his throat. The fat across his heart quivered under his shirt. He tried to speak, to gain control of the situation a last time, to click over the tumblers that he had always used to make terrified supplicants of his enemies. Instead, he fell against the wooden butcher's block and held on to the sides for support. The block was streaked brown and covered with bits of chopped chicken. His stomach hung down like a huge, water-filled balloon. His face was sweating heavily, and his mouth worked again on the words that wouldn't come.

  "You got a free pass, Didi," I said, and dropped the canvas money sack on the butcher's block. "Give your help a raise."

  I heard the sirens outside.

  "Tell them cops to get an ambulance," one of the clerks said. "He's got blood coming out his seat."

  They opened up Didi Gee that night. The surgeons said he had malignant polyps the size of ducks' eggs inside his bowels. They cut and snipped, sewed and stapled until almost dawn. They closed his colon, implanted a drip tube in his side, and fed him through his veins. Later he would wear a plastic bag on an emaciated frame that would lose a hundred and fifty pounds in a month. He would listen to psychologists talk to him in a vocabulary he couldn't fathom, learn to stand on a walker, sit in group-therapy sessions with people who talked about life when it was clearly evident they were dying, look dumbly at brochures describing vacations in the Islands, watch his children's discomfort at the smell that came from under his sheets.

  He would sign over his power of attorney to others, draw his signature across bits of paper that seemed now to have no more value than confetti, and try to think about the coming fall, about red leaves flying in the wind, about Christmas trees and brandy cakes and eggnog, and about the following spring that would surely come a-borning if only he could hold its shape clearly in his mind.

  Somewhere down inside him, he knew that his fear of death by water had always been a foolish one. Death was a rodent that ate its way inch by inch through your entrails, chewed at your liver and stomach, severed tendon from organ, until finally, when you were alone in the dark, it sat gorged and sleek next to your head, its eyes resting, its wet muzzle like a kiss, a promise whispered in the ear.

  The next night I couldn't sleep. At first I thought it was the heat, then I decided that it was the insomnia that plagued me two or three nights a month and left me listless and disordered in mind the next morning. Then finally I knew that it was simply the price of ambition—the Fort Lauderdale hit man was in jail, Didi Gee was dealing with a punishment far worse than any court could impose on him, and I wanted to get Wineburger and the general. But I knew they had won the day, and accepting that fact was as easy as swallowing a razor blade.

  Then about 3:00 a.m. I fell asleep and I dreamed. Shakespeare said mat all power lies in the world of dreams, and I believe him. Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly mose very things that are obscured by the light of day. I heard my father talking to me again, saw his huge muscles working under his flannel shirt as he pulled a ten-foot dead alligator up on a hook over the barn door. He pushed the point of the skinning knife into the thick yellow hide under the neck and then pulled it with both hands in a red line that ran from the mouth down to the white tip under the tail.

  I didn't see him, no, he said. That's 'cause I was thinking like me, not like him. That 'gator don't get out on them log when he hungry. He hide under them dead leafs floating next to the levee and wait for them big fat coon come down to drink.

  I woke up at dawn, dripped a pot of chicory coffee, heated a small pan of milk, cooked a half-dozen pieces of toast in the skillet, and ate breakfast out on the deck while the pink light spread across the sky and the gulls began to wheel and squeech overhead. I had always thought I was a good cop, but I was still amazed at how I sometimes overlooked what should have been obvious. My father didn't read or write, but in many ways he had learned more from hunting and fishing in the marsh than I had from my years of college education and experience as a policeman. I wondered if he wouldn't have made a better cop than I, except that he didn't like rules, authority, and people who took themselves seriously. But maybe that was his gift, I thought; he laughed at seriousness in people and consequently was never distracted by their subterfuge.

  I left the houseboat at seven-thirty and was at the Jefferson Parish courthouse when it opened at eight o'clock. I found what I was looking for in a half hour. I was actually shaking when I went into the phone booth in the marble corridor and called Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.

  "I found Larry Wineburger's warehouse," I said.

  "Oh yeah?" he said.

  "Yeah, that's right."

  He didn't respond.

  "The one the Nicaraguan mentioned on the tape," I said. "I assume you've listened to the tape."

  "We did."

  "It's way down in Jefferson Parish, off Barataria Road. I was looking for it under 'deeds' in the parish cl
erk's office. Then it hit me: Why would a slumlord like Wineburger want to buy warehouse property? He makes his real-estate money off welfare clients. A guy like Whiplash doesn't own anything that doesn't bring in a high, immediate return. So I checked leases in the Registrar of Deeds office. The law doesn't require anyone to record a lease, but a lawyer would do it automatically to protect himself."

  "Can you tell me why it is you have to share this omniscience with us?"

  "What?"

  "Who gave you this divine calling? Why is it incumbent upon you to direct our investigation?"

  "You want the information or not?"

  "We sealed that place yesterday afternoon and cut the warrant on Wineburger last night. This morning he's developed an enormous interest in the protected-witness program."

  I felt the skin of my face pinch tight in the half-light of the phone booth. The line was quiet a moment.

  "What was inside?" I said.

  "It's not really your business, Lieutenant."

  "It is. You know it is."

  "A lot of modified AR-15s, ammunition, medical supplies, and, believe it or not, a Beech King-Air B-200, outfitted with racks for electronic surveillance gear."

  "A big day for the cavalry," I said.