A Morning for Flamingos

  “Put out the smoke, Lionel,” he said quietly. His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Go on, put it out. We’re in the man’s home.”

  “I don’t think it’s smart dealing with him. I said it then, I’ll say it in front of him,” Lionel said. He wet the cigar under the tap and dropped it in a garbage bag.

  “The man’s money is as good as the next person’s,” Fontenot said.

  “You were a cop,” Lionel said to me. “That’s a problem for me. No insult meant.”

  “You creeped my apartment. That’s a problem for me.”

  “Lionel had a bad experience a few years back,” Fontenot said. “His name doesn’t make campus bells ring for you?”

  “No.”

  “Second-string quarterback for LSU,” Fontenot said. “Until he sold some whites on the half shell to the wrong people. I think if Lionel had been first-string, he wouldn’t have had to spend a year in Angola. It’s made him distrustful.”

  “Get off of it, Ray.”

  “The man needs to understand,” Fontenot said. “Look, Mr. Robicheaux, we’re short on protocol, but we don’t rip each other off. We establish some rules, some trust, then we all make money. Get his bank, Lionel.”

  Lionel opened a cabinet next to the stove, squatted down, and reached his hand deep inside. I heard the adhesive tape tear loose from the top of the cabinet behind the drawer. He threw the brown envelope, with tape hanging off each end, for me to catch.

  “We want you to understand something else, too,” Fontenot said. “We’re not here because of some fifty-thou deal. That’s toilet paper in this town. But the gentleman we work for is interested in you. You’re a lucky man.”

  “Tony C. is interested?”

  “Who?” He smiled.

  “Five keys, ten thou a key, no laxative, no vitamin B twelve,” I said.

  “Twelve thou, my friend,” Fontenot said.

  “Bullshit. New Orleans is white with it.”

  “Ten thou is the discount price. You get that down the line,” Fontenot said.

  “Then go fuck yourself.”

  “Who do you think you are, man?” Lionel said.

  “The guy whose place you just creeped.”

  “Let’s split,” he said.

  I looked at Fontenot.

  “What I can’t seem to convey is that you guys are not the only market around. Ask Cardo who he wants running the action in Southwest Louisiana. Ask him who punched his wife in a bathroom stall in the Castaways in Miami.”

  “There’re some people I wouldn’t try to turn dials on, Mr. Robicheaux,” Fontenot said.

  “You’re the one holding up the deal. Give me what I want and we’re in business.”

  “You can come in at eleven thou,” he said.

  “It’s got to be ten.”

  “Listen to this guy,” Lionel said.

  “The money’s not mine. I’ve got to give an accounting to other people.”

  “I can relate to that. We’ll call you,” Fontenot said.

  “When?”

  “About this time tomorrow. Do you have a car?”

  “I have a pickup truck.”

  He nodded reflectively; then his mouth split in a grin and I could see each of his teeth like worn, wide-set pearls in his gums.

  “How big a grudge can a man like you carry?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and shook all over when he laughed, his narrowed eyes twinkling with a liquid glee.

  The next morning I was walking down Chartres toward the French Market for breakfast when a black man on a white pizza-delivery scooter went roaring past me. I didn’t pay attention to him, but then he came roaring by again. He wore an oversized white uniform, splattered with pizza sauce, sunglasses that were as dark as a welder’s, and a white paper hat mashed down to his ears. He turned his scooter at the end of the block and disappeared, and I headed through Jackson Square toward the Café du Monde. I waited for the green light at Decatur; then I heard the scooter come rattling and coughing around the corner. The driver braked to the curb and grinned at me, his thin body jiggling from the engine’s vibration.

  “Tee Beau!” I said.

  “Wait for me on the bench. I gotta park my machine, me.”

  He pulled out into the traffic again, drove past the line of horse-and-carriages in front of the square, and disappeared past the old Jax brewery. Five minutes later I saw him coming on foot back down Decatur, his hat hammered down to the level of his sunglasses. He sat beside me on a sunlit bench next to the pike fence that bordered the park area inside the square.

  “You ain’t gonna turn me in, are you, Mr. Dave?” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Working at the pizza place. Looking out for Jimmie Lee Boggs, too. You ain’t gonna turn me in, now, are you?”

  “You’re putting me in a rough spot, Tee Beau.”

  “I got your promise. Dorothea and Gran’maman done tole me, Mr. Dave.”

  “I didn’t see you. Get out of New Orleans.”

  “Ain’t got no place else to go. Except back to New Iberia. Except to the Red Hat. I got a lot to tell you ’bout Jimmie Lee Boggs. He here.”

  “In New Orleans?”

  “He left but he come back. I seen him. Two nights ago. Right over yonder.” He pointed diagonally across the square. “I been watching.”

  “Wait a minute. You saw him by the Pontabla Apartments?”

  “Listen, this what happen, Mr. Dave. After he killed that policeman and that white boy, he drove us all the way to Algiers, with lightning jumping all over the sky. He made me sit in back, with chains on, like he a po-liceman and I his prisoner, in case anybody stop us. He had the radio on, and I was ’fraid he gonna find out I didn’t shoot you, drive out in that marsh, kill me like he done them poor people in the filling station. All the time he was talking, telling me ’bout what he gonna do, how he got a place in the Glades in Florida, where he say—now this is what he say, I don’t use them kinds of words—where he say the hoot owls fucks the jackrabbits, where he gonna hole up, then come back to New Orleans and make them dagos give him a lot of money.

  “Just befo’ we got to town he called somebody from a filling station. I could hear him talking, and he said something ’bout the Pontabla. I heard him say it. He don’t be paying me no mind, no, ’cause he say I just a stupid nigger. That’s the way he talk all the time I be chained up there in the backseat.”

  “Tee Beau, are you sure it was Boggs? It’s hard to believe you found him when half the cops in Louisiana can’t.”

  “I found you, ain’t I? He don’t look the same now, Mr. Dave. But it’s him. His hair short and black now, he puts glasses, too. But it’s Jimmie Lee Boggs. I followed him in my car to make sure.”

  “Where’d you get a car?”

  “I borrowed it.”

  “You borrowed it?”

  “Then I put it back.”

  “I see.”

  “I followed him out to the Airline Highway. To a boxing place. No, it ain’t that. They put on gloves, but they kick with they feet, too. What they call that?”

  “Full-contact karate.”

  “I looked inside, me. Phew, it stink in there. Jimmie Lee Boggs in long sweatpants kicking at some man in the ring. His skin white and hard, shining with sweat. I got to swallow when I look at him, Mr. Dave. That man make me that afraid.”

  “You did fine, Tee Beau. But I want to ask something of you. You leave Jimmie Lee Boggs for other people. Don’t have anything more to do with this.”

  “You gonna get me a new trial?”

  “I’ll try. But we have to do it a step at a time, partner.”

  His hands were folded in his lap, and he was bent forward on the bench. His small face looked like a squirrel’s with sunglasses on it. Wiry rings of hair grew across the back of his neck.

  “I got bad dreams at night. ’Bout the Red Hat, ’bout they be strapping me down in that chair with that black hood on my face,”
he said.

  “You killed Hipolyte Broussard, though, didn’t you, Tee Beau?”

  His breath clicked in his throat.

  “I done part of it. But the part I done was an accident. I swear it, ’fore God, Mr. Dave. Hipolyte kept cussing me, tole me all the bad things he gonna do to me, do to Dorothea, tole me I got jelly in my ears, me, that I cain’t do nothing right, that I better stomp on the brake when he say, take my foot off when he say. He under there clanking and banging and calling me mo’ names, saying ‘Stomp now, stomp now.’

  “So that what I done. I close my eyes and hit on that brake, and I hit on it and hit on it and pretend it be Hipolyte’s face, that I smashing it like a big eggshell, me. Then I feel the bus rock and that jack break like a stick, and I know Hipolyte under the wheel now, I hear him screaming and flopping around in the mud. But I scared, Mr. Dave, I be running, run past the shed, down the road past Hipolyte’s house, down past the cane field. When I turn round he look like a turtle on its back, caught under that big iron wheel. But I keep on going, I run plumb back to Gran’maman’s house, she be shucking crawfish, say, ‘You go wash, Tee Beau, put on your clean clothes, you, sit down with your gran’maman and don’t tell them po-licemens nothing, you.’ ”

  “Why was Hipolyte always deviling you?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Was it because he wanted you to pimp for him? Or make Dorothea get on the bus when he drove the girls out to the camp?”

  “Yes suh.”

  “But Dorothea said Gros Mama Goula wouldn’t let men bother her.”

  “Yes suh, that’s right.”

  “That Hipolyte was afraid of Gros Mama, that she could put a gris-gris on him.”

  “Yes suh.”

  “Then Dorothea was safe, really?”

  “What you saying, Mr. Dave?”

  “Dorothea wasn’t your main problem with Hipolyte.”

  He looked out at the shadows of the palm fronds on the pavement.

  “It was something else,” I said. “Maybe not just the pimping. Maybe something even worse than that, Tee Beau.”

  I could not see his eyes behind the dark glasses, but I saw him swallow.

  “What was it?” I said.

  “For why you want to study on that?” he said. “It gonna get me a new trial? It gonna make all them white people believe I ain’t knock that bus on top of Hipolyte, I ain’t stuff a dirty rag down his mouth? I ain’t talking about it no mo’, Mr. Dave.”

  “You’ll need to at some point.”

  He looked small inside his white delivery uniform. The sleeves almost covered his folded hands.

  “Hipolyte was selling dope for Jimmie Lee Boggs. That ain’t all they was doing, either. They send some of them girls to Florida, to Arizona, anywhere Hipolyte take the bus. Them girls never come back. They families ain’t ever find out where they at. All I ever done was taken Mr. Dore car, taken an old junk fan out his yard, but people be wanting to kill me. I tired of it, Mr. Dave. I tired of feeling bad about myself all the time, too.”

  I took a piece of paper from my wallet and wrote on it.

  “Here’s my address and phone number, Tee Beau,” I said. “Here’s the address and number of a bar where you can leave messages, too. Call me if I can help you with anything. Do you have enough money?”

  “Yes suh.”

  “Don’t look for Boggs anymore. You’ve done enough. Okay?”

  “Yes suh. You want to know where I’m staying at?”

  “I don’t want to know. Give me your word you won’t borrow any more cars.”

  He didn’t bother to reply. He looked down between his knees and tapped the soles of his shoes on the pavement. Then he said, “You think I ever gonna get out of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Gros Mama tell Dorothea that Jimmie Lee Boggs gonna die in a black box full of sparks. She say you go in there with him, you gonna die, too.”

  “Gros Mama’s a juju con woman.”

  “She put the gris-gris on Hipolyte. When he in the coffin, his mouth snap open and a black worm thick as my thumb crawl out on his chin. It ain’t no lie, Mr. Dave.”

  I had breakfast at the Café du Monde, then walked back to the apartment to call Minos at the DEA office. Before I could, the phone rang. It was Ray Fontenot.

  “Your offer’s accepted,” he said.

  “Ten thou a key, no cut?”

  “What I just said, Mr. Robicheaux.” Then he told me to meet him that afternoon in the parking lot of a bar just the other side of the Huey Long Bridge.

  “You want me to make the buy in the parking lot of a bar?” I asked.

  “We start it from there. Quit sweating it. You’re gonna be rich,” he said, and hung up.

  I called Minos.

  “It’s on at five today,” I said.

  “Where?”

  I told him about the bar.

  “We’ll have somebody inside, somebody outside taking pictures with a telephoto lens,” he said. “But you won’t know who they are, so you won’t need to look at them. This is what’s going to happen, Dave. They’ll take you somewhere in their car, or you’ll follow them in your truck. At some point they’ll probably check you for a wire. We’ll have a loose tail on you, but we’re not going to get too close and blow it. So when you make the buy, you’re pretty much on your own. Are you nervous?”

  “A little.”

  “Carry your piece. They’ll expect that. Look, you’ve handled it fine so far. The deal’s not going to sour. They want you in.”

  “This morning I heard that Jimmie Lee Boggs is in town.”

  “Where?”

  “Somebody saw him around the Pontabla Apartments two nights ago. It makes sense. Tony Cardo’s girlfriend lives there. The same night, he was at a full-contact karate place out on the Airline.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “A guy I know.”

  “Which guy?”

  “Just a guy in the street.”

  “What are you hiding here, Dave?”

  “Are you going to check out the karate club, or do you want me to do it?”

  “We’ll handle it.”

  “His hair’s dyed black and cut short now, and he may be wearing glasses.”

  “Who’s the guy in the street?”

  “Forget it, Minos.”

  “You never change.”

  “What if the deal goes sour today?”

  “Then get the fuck out of there.”

  “You don’t want me to bust them?”

  “You walk out of it. We don’t borrow people from other agencies to get them hurt.”

  “One other thing I didn’t mention to you. This guy Fontenot knows I’ve got a grudge against Boggs. I get the feeling he’d like to see me go up against him.”

  “You know what a yard bitch is in the joint? That’s Uncle Ray Fontenot, a fat dipshit who gets off watching the swinging dicks carve on each other. Call me after the score and we’ll take the dope off you.”

  I was nervous. My palms were moist, I walked about aimlessly in the apartment, I burned a pan on the stove. Finally I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a sweatshirt, jogged along the levee by the river, and circled back on Esplanade. I showered, changed into a fresh pair of khakis and a long-sleeved denim shirt. Then I fastened the holster of the Beretta to my ankle, dropped the .45 automatic in the right-hand pocket of my army field jacket, slipped the brown envelope with the fifty one-thousand bills in it into the left pocket, buttoned the flap, and backed my pickup out of the garage. The sky had turned a solid gray from horizon to horizon, the wind was blowing hard off the Gulf, and I could smell rain in the air. My palms left damp prints on the steering wheel.

  Rain began to tumble out of the dome of sky through the girders when I crossed the Mississippi on the Huey Long. The river was wide and yellow far below, and froth was blowing off the bows of the oil barges. The willows along the banks were bent in the wind. As my tires whirred down the long metal-
grid incline on the far side, I saw the low, flat-topped brick nightclub set back among oak trees on the left-hand side of old Highway 90. Jax and Dixie neon signs glowed in the rain-streaked windows, and when I crunched onto the oyster shells in the parking lot I saw Ray Fontenot, Lionel Comeaux, and a redheaded woman in a new blue Buick.

  The woman was in back, and Fontenot was in the passenger seat and had the door partly open and one leg extended out on the shells in the light rain.

  “Park your truck and get in,” he said.

  “Where we going?”

  “Not far. You’ll see. Get in.”

  I turned off the ignition, locked my truck, and got into the backseat next to the woman. She wore Levi’s, an open leather jacket, and a yellow T-shirt without a bra, so that you could see her nipples against the cloth. The air inside the car was heavy and close with the drowsy smell of reefer.

  “Great place to be toking up,” I said.

  “What do you care?” Lionel said.

  “I care when I’m in your car,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it. You won’t be long,” he said.

  “What?”

  He started the engine, drove the Buick behind the nightclub, and parked it under a spreading oak.

  “What’s the game?” I said.

  “Show-and-tell,” he said, got out of the car, walked around, and opened my door. “Step outside, please.”

  “We do the same thing with everybody. Then everybody’s comfortable, everybody’s relaxed with everybody else,” Fontenot said.

  “I’m not relaxed. Who’s the girl?” I asked.

  “Do I look like a girl to you?” she said. Her eyes were green, the whites tinged red from the reefer hits.

  “Who is she?” I said to Fontenot.

  “This is Kim. She’s a friend, a nice person,” he said.

  “I’m not fond of standing out here in the rain. You want to step outside, please,” Lionel said. He spoke with his face turned at an angle from me, as though he were addressing a lamppost.

  “What’s she doing here?” I said.

  “Certain people like her. She goes where she wants. Let’s get on with the business at hand, sir,” Fontenot said.