A Morning for Flamingos

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “I’d like to see your tennis court. I’ll be outside,” I said.

  “Yeah, we’ll hit some balls. Tell Jess to load up the ball machine,” he said, but he didn’t hide the embarrassment in his face well.

  I walked down the wheelchair ramp and across the damp, spongy Saint Augustine grass toward the court. The sun was pale and yellow above the myrtle trees, the canvas windscreens were streaked with water, and the fog blew off the lake in wisps and glistened on the waxy green surface of the citrus leaves. I could hear her voice behind me: “They can stay in the cottage… I don’t want them all over my house… Did you see the bathroom this morning… You wouldn’t have this trouble if you were reasonable, if you didn’t have to be the big war hero… Everyone’s tired of it, Tony, they’ve made allowances for a long time, they’re not going to go on doing it forever… Maybe you’re not going to like this, but I think they’ve been fair, I think you’re acting crazy… Go ahead, eat some more of that stuff. It’s only eight o’clock in the morning. That’ll fix ’em in Miami.”

  They went at it for ten minutes. I didn’t find Jess, so I began to load the automatic ball machine myself. When Tony came out of the house with an oversized tennis racket across his shoulder, he was grinning as though he were serenely in charge of the morning, but his eyes had a black, electrical glaze in them, the skin of his face was stretched tight against the bone, and I could see the pulse jumping in his neck as though he had been running wind sprints.

  “I love Indian summer in Louisiana. I love the morning,” he said.

  “It’s been a pretty fall.”

  “Fucking A,” he said, clicked on the ball machine with a remote control button, and stationed himself like a gladiator behind the baseline.

  I sat on a bench and watched while the machine hummed, then thropped balls across the net, and Tony slammed them back with a fierce energy that left skid marks in the soft green clay.

  “It’s funny how many people can want a piece out of your ass,” he said. “Wives, broads, cops, lawyers, these guys I pay to keep me alive. You rent their loyalty by the day. I can name two hundred people in this city I’ve made rich. Even a psychotic piece of shit like Jimmie Lee Boggs. Can you dig it, when I first met that guy he was doing five-hundred-dollar hits for a couple of Jews out of Miami. Even after he escaped from you, his big score was going to be to blackmail some colored woman in New Iberia. Now he’s got a half-million bucks of product.”

  “What colored woman?” I said.

  “I don’t know, he was going to move in on a hot-pillow joint or something. That’s Jimmie Lee’s idea of the big score.”

  “Wait a minute, Tony. This is important. Do you remember the name of the woman?”

  “It was French. It was Mama something.” He hit the ball long, into the canvas windscreen. “To tell you the truth, I’m not real interested in talking about colored whorehouses.”

  “I have to ask you anyway. What’d he have on her?”

  “Maybe we’re not communicating too well here,” he said, and slapped one ball hard against the tape and whanged another off the ball machine itself.

  “Maybe he knows something that might keep a kid out of the electric chair.”

  “It’s got something to do with snuffing a redbone. What the fuck do I know about redbones? I got a problem here. I hear you talking about some colored woman, about keeping a kid out of the electric chair, about a cathouse in New Iberia, but I don’t hear you talking about the half million your people put up. That bothers me a little bit, Dave.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about what happened out on the salt.”

  “Yeah? How about the guys who lost their money? Are they cool?”

  “They’re oil people. They’re not in the business. They’re not going to do anything about it.”

  “You must know a different class of people than me, then. Because the people I’ve known will do anything because of money. But you’re telling me these guys are different?”

  “It’s just something I’ll have to handle myself, Tony.”

  “Yeah, if I was you, I’d handle it. I’d really handle it.” He lowered his racket and looked at me, a dark light in his eyes. A ball whizzed past him and bounced off the windscreen behind him. He removed his sweater, wiped the sweat off his face with it, and threw it to the side of the court.

  Then a strange transformation took place in him. The tautness of his face, the hard, black shine in his eyes, the rigidity of the muscles in his body, suddenly left him like air rushing out of a balloon. His skin grew ashen, sweat ran out of his hair, he began swallowing deep in his throat, and his lungs labored for air.

  “What is it, partner?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  I took him by the arm and walked him to the bench. His arm felt flaccid and weak in my hand. He propped the racket on the clay and leaned his head down on it. Sweat dripped off the lobes of his tiny ears.

  “You want me to take you to a doctor?” I said.

  “No.”

  “You want me to get your wife?”

  “No. It’s going to pass.”

  I picked up his sweater and blotted his hair and the back of his neck with it, then draped it over his shoulders. He began to breathe more regularly; then he pinched the bridge of his nose and held his head back in the cool air as though he had a nosebleed.

  “I think you need to talk to somebody,” I said. “I think you’re dealing with something that’s going to eat your lunch.”

  He folded his arm on top of his perpendicular racket and rested his head on his arm.

  “What are you gonna do, a kid needs a mother. It’s all a pile of shit, man,” he said. “All of it.”

  When I went back to my room, which gave onto a side yard that contained a swing set and a solitary moss-hung oak tree, my clothes from my apartment were laid out neatly on the tester bed. Even my .45, with the spare clip and a box of shells, lay on top of a folded flannel shirt. I went to look for Tony, but he was in the shower. I walked out the front door and down the long, tree-lined drive to the front gate, where Jess sat in a chair, wearing a blue jumpsuit. It was zippered only halfway up his chest, and I could see the leather straps of his shoulder holster against his T-shirt.

  “Where’s the closest drugstore?” I said.

  “What do you need?”

  “Some razor blades.”

  “It’s five blocks, down by the lake. We’ll send a car.”

  “I need the walk. I still feel like I’ve got rapture of the deep.”

  “What?”

  “How about opening up?” I said.

  He unlocked the chain and slid back the gate wide enough so that I could step out on the street. I walked past the rows of banked lawns and oleander-lined piked fences to a thoroughfare and a tan stucco and red-tiled shopping center that looked as if it had been torn out of the ground in southern California and dropped in the middle of New Orleans. I used a pay phone outside a drugstore to call Minos.

  “You pulled it off, Dave. You’re across the moat and inside the castle,” he said before I explained.

  “How’d you know where I was?”

  “Everybody who goes in that gate is on videotape. How do you like it with the spaghetti-and-meatball crowd?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I told you, didn’t I, Cardo’s head was in the blender too long.”

  “Minos, you guys are all turning the screws on this guy, and, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure why.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s just one guy. What about these guys in Miami and Houston who’ve got a contract out on him? The odds are Tony’s going to lose.”

  “Let us worry about Houston and Miami. You want in or out, Dave?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “You’d damn well better.”

  “I want Boggs.”

  “You’re in the right place, then. He’ll be back. He’s not
a guy who leaves loose ends. Besides, we hear it’s an open contract. It’s the perfect opportunity for him.”

  “Did you find out who dropped the dime on the buy?”

  “Baxter said he couldn’t compromise his informant.”

  “He’s not going to share a bust with a federal agency.”

  “Forget about that guy. Look, Washington called yesterday with some information about Cardo’s military record. He got a Silver Star for going after a point man who stepped on a mine.”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “After he was wounded, he got moved back to Chu Lai for the last four months of his tour.”

  “Why was he moved back to Chu Lai?”

  “How should I know?”

  “There’s something not right. The Marines were real hard-nosed about keeping a guy in his platoon until he had a million-dollar wound or two Purple Hearts.”

  “Maybe he had some pull. Listen, Dave, don’t get involved with the guy’s psychology. Eventually we’re going to punch his ticket. You’ll probably be there when it happens. Or you’ll be in court testifying against him. All this semper fi bullshit won’t have anything to do with it. You want a lesson from Vietnam? Don’t think about the guy who’s in your sights.”

  “You always cut right to the bone, Minos.”

  “I didn’t invent the rules. By the way, we have that house under twenty-four-hour surveillance. If it turns to shit inside, throw a lamp or a chair through a window. In the meantime, think about how far you want to take it. Nobody’ll blame you if you decide to go back to New Iberia.”

  It was cool under the stucco colonnade, and red leaves were blowing out of a heavily wooded lot across the street.

  “Dave, are you still there?” he asked.

  “Yeah… I’ll try to call you back tonight or tomorrow. Talk to you later, Minos.”

  I hung up the phone and wondered if Minos would tell the lion tamer that he could put down his whip and chair and walk out of the lions’ cage whenever he wished. I went inside the drugstore, bought a package of razor blades, and came out just as Tony and Jess pulled to the curb in the maroon Lincoln convertible.

  Chapter 10

  Tony was in the passenger’s seat. He reached over the backseat and popped open the back door for me. He had changed into loafers, a rust-colored sports shirt, pleated tan slacks, a cardigan, and a yellow Panama hat.

  “You could have taken the car, Dave. You didn’t have to walk,” he said.

  “It’s a good day for it.”

  “How do you like my hat?”

  “It looks sharp.”

  “I got a collection of them. Hey, Jess, go inside and get me a copy of Harper’s,” he said.

  “What?” Jess said.

  “Get me a copy of Life.”

  “Sure, Tony,” Jess said, cut the engine, and went inside the drugstore.

  Tony smiled at me across the back of the seat. The Lincoln had a rolled leather interior, a fold-out bar, a wooden dashboard with black instrument panels.

  “Jess has an IQ of minus eight, but he’d eat thumbtacks with a spoon if I told him to,” he said. Then the smile went out of his face. “I’m sorry you had to hear that stuff between me and Clara. In particular I’m sorry you had to hear that about me being a war hero. Because I never told anybody I was a hero. I knew some guys who were, but I wasn’t one of them.”

  “Who was, Tony? Did you ever read a story by Ernest Hemingway called ‘A Soldier’s Home’? It’s about a World War I Marine who comes back home and discovers that people only want to hear stories about German women chained to machine guns. The truth is that he was afraid all the time he was over there and it took everything in him just to get by. However, he learns that’s not a story anyone is interested in.”

  “Yeah. Ernest Hemingway. I like his books. I read a bunch of them in college.”

  “Look, on another subject, Tony. I’m not sure your wife is ready for houseguests right now.”

  He puffed out his cheeks.

  “I invite people to my home. I tell them if they should leave,” he said. “You’re my guest. You don’t want to stay, that’s your business.”

  “I appreciate your hospitality, Tony.”

  “So we’re going back home now and get you changed, then we’re taking Kim out to the yacht club for a little lunch and some golf. How’s that grab you?”

  “Fine.”

  “You like Kim?”

  “Sure.”

  “How much?”

  “She’s a pretty girl.”

  “She ain’t pretty, man. She’s fucking beautiful.” His eyes were dancing with light. “She told me she got drunk and came on to you.”

  “She told you that?”

  “What’s the big deal? She’s human. You’re a good-looking guy. But you don’t look too comfortable right now.” He laughed out loud.

  “What can I say?”

  “Nothing. You’re too serious. It’s all comedy, man. The bottom line is we all get to be dead for a real long time. It’s a cluster fuck no matter how you cut it.”

  We drove back to his house, and I changed into a pair of gray slacks, a charcoal shirt, and a candy-striped necktie, loaded two bags of golf clubs into the Lincoln, and with a white stretch Caddy limousine full of Tony’s hoods behind us, we picked up Kim Dollinger and headed for the country club out by the lake.

  We filled two tables in the dining room. I couldn’t tell if the attention we drew was because of my bandaged head, Tony’s hoods, whose dead eyes and toneless voices made the waiters’ heads nod rapidly, or the way Kim filled out her gray knit dress. But each time I took a bite from my shrimp cocktail and tried to chew on the side of my mouth that wasn’t injured, I saw the furtive glances from the other tables, the curiosity, the titillation of being next to people who suddenly step off a movie screen.

  And Tony must have read my thoughts.

  “Watch this,” he said, and motioned the maître d’ over. “Give everybody in the bar and dining room a glass of champagne, Michel.”

  “It’s not necessary, Mr. Cardo.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Some of our members don’t drink, Mr. Cardo.”

  “Then give them a dessert. Put it on my bill.”

  Tony wiped his small mouth with a napkin. The maître d’ was a tall, pale man who looked as if he were about to be pushed out an airplane door.

  “Hey, they don’t want it, that’s okay,” Tony said. “Lighten up, Michel.”

  “Very good, sir.” The maître d’ assembled his waiters and sent them to the bar for trays of glasses and towel-wrapped bottles of champagne.

  “That was mean,” Kim said.

  “I didn’t come here to be treated like a bug,” Tony said.

  We finished lunch and walked outside into the cool afternoon sunlight and the rattle of the palms in the wind off the lake. The lake was murky green and capping, and the few sailboats that were out were tacking hard in the wind, the canvas popping, their glistening bows slapping into the water. Tony and most of his entourage loaded themselves into golf carts for nine holes, and Kim and I sat on a wood bench by the practice green while Jess made long putts back and forth across the clipped grass without ever hitting the cup.

  She wore a gray pillbox hat with a net veil folded back on top of it. She didn’t look at me and instead gazed off at the rolling fairways, the sand traps and greens, the moss-hung oaks by the tees. The wind was strong enough to make her eyes tear, but in profile she looked as cool and regal and unperturbed as a sculptor’s model. Behind her, the long, rambling club building, with its glass-domed porches, was achingly white against the blue of the sky.

  “Maybe we should go inside,” I said.

  “It’s fine, thanks.”

  “Do you think it’s smart to jerk a guy like Tony around?”

  She crossed her legs and raised her chin.

  “He’s got a burner turned on in his head. I wouldn’t mess with his male pride,” I said.


  “Is there something wrong with the way I look? I wish you’d stop staring at me.”

  “I think you’ve got a guilty conscience, Kim.”

  “Oh you do?”

  “Did you drop the dime on us?”

  She watched Jess putt across the green. The red flag on the pin flapped above his head in the distance. Finally the ball clunked into the cup. My eyes never left the side of her face. She pulled her dress tight over her knee. Her hips and stomach looked as smooth as water going over stone.

  “Somebody told the Man. It wasn’t Lionel or Fontenot,” I said.

  “Do you think Tony would be taking me out for lunch if he thought I was a snitch?”

  “I think only Tony knows what goes on in Tony’s head. I think he likes to live on the outer edge of his envelope. Eating black speed is like sliding down the edge of a barber’s razor.”

  “Why do you keep saying these things to me? I have nothing to tell you.”

  “Do you know a Vice cop named Nate Baxter?”

  I could see the color in her cheeks.

  “Why should I know—,” she began.

  “He was following you the day you were in Clete’s place. This guy’s a lieutenant. Why’s he interested in you, Kim?”

  Her eyes were wet, and her lip began to tremble.

  “All right, come on now,” I said.

  “You’re a shit.”

  Jess had stopped putting and was looking at us. The gray hair on his chest grew like wire out of his golf shirt.

  “Maybe I’m just a little worried about you,” I said.

  “Leave me alone. Please do that for me.”

  “I’ll buy you a drink inside.”

  “No, you stay away from me.”

  “Listen to me, Kim—”

  She picked up her purse and walked in her high heels across the lawn toward the club. Her calves looked hard and waxed below the hem of her knit dress. Jess walked off the green with the putter hanging loosely at his side.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he said.

  “I guess I don’t know how to talk to younger women very well.”

  “She’s a weird broad. I don’t trust her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She don’t ask for anything. A broad who don’t ask you for anything has got a different kind of hustle going. Tony don’t see it.” He twirled the putter like a baton in his fingers.