Grimes put the letter down and picked up the airline ticket. It was an open one-way flight, first class, to Buenos Aires. Grimes recalled that in his youth he had found comfort in the dictum that in an absurd world one had a duty to live an absurd life. But this wasn’t absurd; it was ridiculous. Between the thin cardboard leaves of the ticket he found another piece of paper. He opened it. On it, in Jefferson’s florid hand, was written:
P.S. Give my best wishes to your daddy.
Grimes felt a rush of fear.
Jefferson was a man born for games, a Russian roulette addict, who forced others to play along with him and usually left their corpses in his wake. Now, from beyond the grave, his swollen corpse had spun the cylinder and placed the gun to Grimes’s skull. For himself, Grimes was too far retarded by his own melancholia to care if a bullet lay in the chamber or not, but the reference to his father was like being dropped into an Arctic sea. After six months of stagnation Grimes suddenly felt horribly alive. He put a hand over his eyes and squeezed the bones of his face. Bristiy hair rustled under his fingers; and from the midst of the terror spreading through his entrails came a greater fear: he couldn’t let his father see him looking like a bum.
Somewhere, he recalled, he had another black suit less shabby than the one he was wearing. If he was lucky he’d find a half-clean shirt too; maybe even a tie. George liked ties. George was his father. And George might be in danger.
The good times—the times in the pit—were over.
Cicero Grimes took his hand from his eyes and stumbled to the bathroom to find a razor.
THREE
RUFUS ATWATER was thirty-two years old and a prosecuting attorney for the city of New Orleans. He’d chosen that career rather than private practice for two reasons. First of all, while God had given him brains he had also whipped him with an ugly stick: pale orange hair, an overfreckled lopsided face with too much forehead and chin and not enough lips, and muscles like knots in string no matter how much he hit the gym and drank those bullshit drinks. People didn’t like to hire ugly lawyers, and for the same reason he would never sit behind the DA.’s desk. Second, he recognized that he had a strong natural inclination to be unpleasant, and prosecuting enabled him to probe, threaten, humiliate and imprison people, with the arms of the law wrapped around him and without being shot at like the poor saps in the police department. So far he’d remained basically clean. Okay, so he’d folded five hundred here and a grand there into his hip pocket, but they were fucking tips, virtually an insult to the intense ambition that underpinned what passed for his dignity. When Magdalena Paril-laud had contacted him to investigate the disappearance of Clarence Jefferson, Atwater’s antennae, developed over years of rooting into others’ lives, told him he was finally being offered a seat at the biggest game in town.
Atwater had just finished listening to a tape recording procured that very morning by Jack Seed. He switched off the machine, pulled out the earpieces and looked over at Jack, who was slumped beside him in the driver’s seat. They were driving north in Seed’s Chevy Impala and the late afternoon sun spilled around the oily contours of Jack’s head into Atwater’s eyes. Atwater put on his Wayfarers. Jack displayed his gold tooth in a smug grin.
“Well?” said Jack Seed.
“What did you do?” said Atwater. “Bug her pussy?”
Jack laughed, pleased. “No, man. The Mercedes. I wired the Mercedes. She got quadraphonic sound in there. I put one of my specials in the front-left speaker.”
“If Frechette finds it we’ll have a long way to paddle home.”
Seed snorted. “Frechette couldn’t find his own black dick in daylight. Anyhow, the beauty of it is, I can disable it, the bug I mean. Like right now, it’s switched off, man. Frechette can sweep that vehicle with an electron fuckin’ microscope, he won’t find a signal ‘cause there isn’t one. See I figure what’s the point of having the car miked twenty-four hours a day? She doesn’t sleep in the fuckin’ thing. But today I also figure it’s the first of the month, maybe she’s gonna visit this weird concrete hangar deal with the hayseeds and the dogs again, so I switch it on and there you are, she’s on talk fuckin’ radio.”
“You did good, Jack.”
“What do you figure she was doin’ towards the end there? Jerkin’ herself off? Man, that must’ve been some monster fuckin’ dildo.”
“The lady was upset,” said Atwater.
“You’d be surprised what people get up to in cars. I could tell ya some things. And dogs? Man, guy I did a job for one time? Lab technician at a private clap clinic, up in the Garden District? He told me ten percent of the women check in there for a once-over got dog sperm up their snatches. Can you believe that? Ten percent. Jesus, I was shocked. I mean four-five percent, sure, why not? But ten? And these are high-class babes, not pigs. See, the clinic do what he called ‘high vaginal swabs’ …”
“Thanks, Jack, I got the picture.”
“Well, this technician guy’s wife was getting her high vaginal swabs from a washing-machine salesman just sold her a brand-new …”
“Jack,” said Atwater. “I need to think. Gimme a break.”
Jack shrugged, not offended, and stared out the windshield. Atwater picked up an envelope from his lap and pulled out a stack of grainy black-and-white photos.
Atwater didn’t mind Seed’s inexhaustible anecdotes on human sexual behavior. They were the obsession at the core of his genius. His motto was: “If you can get an eight-by-five glossy of a married guy—with kids at private school and pulling three hundred G’s a year—down on his knees, sticking his thumbs up a Chinaman’s ass, with a stainless steel drinking straw ready in his mouth, you can get a shot of just about anything.” Seed had been eager to display the said picture; Atwater had declined.
Seed’s real name was Jack Santini. He’d learned his trade in the CIA but the Agency had been forced to retire him quietly after one of Noriega’s army colonels in Panama interrupted Jack in the midst of doing unspeakable things to his wife. Jack had killed both the colonel and the wife with his bare hands. With his severance pay Jack Santini had set himself up in New Orleans as a private investigator, but at the prices he felt his expertise commanded, business had proved nonexistent. Then he’d hit upon the brilliant idea of changing his name. “You know? Like Archibald Leach changing his name to Cary Grant.” Reborn as Jack Seed—“Your secret is safe with me”—he’d never been out of work since.
Atwater had previously employed Seed for the City when a result was particularly vital; for instance during the D.A.’s reelection campaigns. Jack had always delivered and his discretion was absolute. If he ran his mouth off with Atwater it was because he saw him as a fellow pro and, Atwater speculated, because the pressure of keeping all those secrets to himself must have been just too intense. On this job Jack was working for Atwater privately. His fee of two thousand dollars a day was being paid, via Atwater, by Parulaud. As Atwater sifted through the stack of photos that Jack had had taken of her, the irony of this financial arrangement gave him considerable pleasure.
The sequence of photos showed Parulaud getting out of her black Mercedes, talking to a bony-shouldered Deliverance type in white overalls with a bunch of evil-looking dogs, then entering what looked, as Jack Seed had said, like a concrete aircraft hangar but was probably some kind of warehouse … A second hillbilly emerging from the hangar … A few more shots of the hayseeds playing with their dogs … Then Parulaud coming out again.
“How long does she spend inside?” said Atwater.
“Ten, twenty minutes. Takes nothing in, brings nothing out.”
Atwater studied a shot of Parulaud in a black pantsuit walking toward her car. Her blond hair was pulled back into a tight knot. The picture had been taken from some distance and her features were a little blurred, but Atwater could remember them well enough. His lip curled. He did not like his employer. Not to put too fine a point on it, he thought she was an arrogant slut rich-bitch whom he’d like to have put on the street t
o give blow jobs to vagrants. In the photo she looked thirty; in the flesh thirty-five; in reality she was forty-one. In addition to having great tits—whether surgically maintained or not seemed irrelevant to Atwater—she was able to make deals that took up inches in The Wall Street Journal and referred to her assets in terms of “units.” A “unit” was rich supercocksucker talk for a hundred million bucks. To make matters worse Atwater would have liked to fuck her. His gut dislike of her somehow stoked up her sex appeal, whereupon his unrequited lust made him hate her all the more, which made the hard-on he couldn’t use even harder. It was a spiral of bullshit he didn’t understand.
In contrast to Parillaud, Atwater’s own wife was twenty-eight and, since the second kid, looked like a sack of potatoes. Atwater actually liked his wife but fucking her had demanded a lot from his imagination for a long time. Since Parillaud had hired him Atwater had often thought about her while fucking his wife; sometimes he imagined Parillaud going down on the vagrants in the street; and enjoying it. Atwater had sworn to himself that if he ever did get the chance to slip it to Parillaud, he would turn it down and walk away. He wouldn’t give the bitch the satisfaction. He would tell her, Sorry, honey, you’re just too fucking old. Atwater shook himself; he was turning into Jack Seed. He went on to the next photo, which was a blowup of Parillaud accepting a white envelope from the older of the two hillbillies. Atwater tapped a thumbnail against his teeth. He would have given a lot to see inside that envelope. It had to have something to do with this guy Grimes he’d spent the morning running through the computer.
Jack Seed glanced at the blowup and read his thoughts.
“So what did you get on this Grimes guy?”
“Nothing worth a shit so far,” said Atwater, still looking at the pic. “He’s some kind of shrink, specializes in addiction.”
“Drugs? Maybe she’s developed a sweet tooth,” suggested Jack.
Atwater shook his head. “Not her. You need blood in your veins to get into hard drugs and she’d don’t have any.”
“She’s so ice fuckin’ cool, what’d make her crack up the way she did this morning?”
“I don’t know,” said Atwater. “But I want to.”
Atwater shuffled through the photos; he’d seen them all. There was a frantic tension in his belly that he didn’t like. The train was starting to move and if he wasn’t careful he’d get left standing at the station with nothing more than his fee. Another fucking tip. Atwater wanted more. Much more. He wanted a house in the country, a walk-in closet full of foreign suits and a speedboat and a couple of teenage girlfriends. He closed his eyes and ran it all through his mind for the hundredth time.
Thirteen years ago Filmore Faroe had driven his Porsche into an oak tree—on this very road—with his wife sitting in the bucket seat next to him. Faroe, no seat belt, had left the best part of his face stuck to the tree trunk; Lenna Parillaud had broken an arm and some ribs. A stupid commonplace fuckup; no foul play suspected or looked for. Parillaud had inherited the plantation estate toward which Atwater and Seed were now driving, plus the rest of Faroe’s vast fortune. Instead of spending her time shopping and getting her hair coiffed by overpaid faggots—like most other women in her position would have done—Parillaud had taken back her maiden name and launched a series of aggressive corporate raids and takeovers that had stunned the good old Louisiana boys who believed that the state and its riches belonged to them by divine right. Respected, if not liked, Parillaud had become an accepted force. Things had gotten more interesting when the state legalized gambling: Parillaud had gone after a casino license and certain parties had tried to dissuade her.
According to Jack Seed, the remains of the four men sent to do the dissuading had been found, chained hand and foot, in a bayou pig pound. They’d been eaten alive by hogs. Atwater had a momentary vision of the four guys watching each other writhing in the mud and pig shit and screaming while the porkers tugged them apart. Death by hogs was a recognized trademark of Captain Clarence Jefferson, a giant vice cop and law-unto-himself known in the wrong circles as the Three-Hundred-Pound Shithammer. Six months ago Jefferson had disappeared without trace, and a lot of folk were starting to soil their underwear. Atwater, never having had any dealings with the Captain, wasn’t among them. Atwater guessed that that was one reason he’d been hired by Lenna Parillaud.
“You did some work for Clarence Jefferson, didn’t you, Jack?” asked Atwater.
Seed nodded. “Enough to have some idea what everyone’s looking for. Remember the guy felching the Chinaman’s ass with the stainless steel straw? That was your local senator’s eldest son. The Captain’s got the negs. He also had me track down some bank accounts in the Cayman Islands set up by representatives of a cartel who’d won drilling leases in the Gulf. Accounts are controlled by the state governor’s wife. And believe me that’s just the tip of a very large and infected dick. I tell ya, that shit ever gets out, Court TV’ll have to franchise ten new channels.”
Atwater pursed his thin lips. Jefferson was what you might call an enigma. The evidence he’d accumulated on the corruption of others had allowed him to do more or less what he wanted. Yet materially, at least, he had lived simply and as far as anyone could tell strictly within the limits of his salary. He’d owned a modest home not much bigger than Atwater’s and an Eldorado, and that was all. Sure, a man like Jefferson could have stashed millions where even Seed couldn’t have found them; but if he had done so he’d never spent it so as you could tell: no stocks and shares; no racehorses or real estate; no gambling; Hawauan shirts rather than foreign suits. Atwater had traced Jefferson’s life all the way back through his career with the police department and a spell in the air force to a private school he’d attended in Atlanta from the age of twelve. There the trail had ended. Atwater had been unable to discover anything about his family or his childhood. It was like he’d just appeared at puberty from another planet. But, again, it would not have been beyond the Captain’s ingenuity to alter his own past.
Atwater said, “I never met Jefferson.”
“Then you oughta be happy. Dealin’ with the Captain is like fuckin’ a rattlesnake with AIDS, without a condom. Cross J. Edgar Hoover with George Foreman, stir in a four-figure IQ and the worst bits of the snake, and that’s the Captain.”
“You’re talking like he’s still around,” said Atwater.
He peered over the top of his Wayfarers. It may have been his imagination but Jack’s skin looked a shade paler.
“You holding out on me, Jack?”
Jack squeezed the steering wheel and rolled his shoulders. His earlier bonhomie had evaporated. He didn’t answer. Atwater waited. Finally Jack grunted and reached into the glove pocket of the car door and pulled out another of his photographs. He handed it to Atwater.
The photo showed one of the hayseeds carrying something into the concrete hangar. Atwater squinted at the blurred shape between the hayseed’s hands.
“What’s he carrying?” he said.
“Lunch,” said Seed. “It’s a tray, with a coupla plates and a Styrofoam cup.”
Seed fished out a magnifier, something like a jeweler would use, and placed it flat on the photo. Atwater shifted the lens over the tray and squinted and convinced himself that Seed was correct. He looked at him.
“You’re saying they got someone in there?” said Atwater.
Jack Seed nodded. “I reckon that place is a high-max jail. For one.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“ ‘Cause I know my limitations,” said Jack. “And I don’t want to mix it with the Shithammer.”
Atwater’s mind reeled. Jefferson was dead. He said, “She’s got Jefferson in there?”
Seed said, “Who else would be worth the effort?”
Atwater pulled out a pack of Kools and stuck one in his mouth. Seed held a flaming Zippo across the seat for him. Atwater dragged deeply.
“So Parillaud’s hired us to find out what happened to him even though she’
s got him locked up.”
“That’s a blind,” said Jack. “She wants the Captain’s treasure but she can’t sweat it out of him, which doesn’t surprise me.”
“I thought Jefferson couldn’t be taken.”
“Plenty’ve tried over the years. Was like the Captain had a charmed life. The worst ones always do. Physically he was the strongest guy I ever even heard of, but when you come down to it he’s just a man, and if you got pussy in the picture anything’s possible, especially rich blond pussy. And Christ, even I never seen a pussy worth a hundred million bucks.”
Atwater was in turmoil. He couldn’t work out if all this was good news or bad. So far he and Jack had kept their investigation stricdy between themselves; that, and Atwater’s lack of any personal history with Jefferson, had enabled them to be discreet. They’d come across the footprints of other interested parties hunting for the Captain’s hoard: the Mafia, who’d always given him a wide berth; the governor’s people, total losers; a couple of stiffs from the Bureau in Washington, D.C., who’d gotten themselves mugged and hospitalized in a strip club in the Quarter their first week in town; and certain City cops who, while not in principle unhappy to see him go, were shitting blue-serge bricks at the prospect of exchanging their uniforms for striped pajamas at the Angola State Pen. There was panic in the air but Atwater, being essentially outside the frame, had kept his head. As far as he could tell the other parties didn’t know he and Jack were in business on Paril-laud’s behalf. The question arose: should they go into business on their own?
Atwater said, “Okay. If Parillaud wanted to she could hire the U.S. Marine Corps. And if Jefferson breaks out—which can’t be beyond him—he’ll be in a very bad mood. Then there’s you and me: brains to burn, but no muscle. In other words, we can’t compete with these characters on their own ground.”
“I’m glad you got that much worked out.”
“But we can pick a side and make ourselves worth whatever we’re worth to whoever’s willing to pay. Am I making sense?”