DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  He smiled with his white teeth when he shook hands. His eyes went back and forth between us, and I could see the recognition grow in them.

  "It's nice to meet you, Dave. The wedding is Saturday at St. Peter's," he said. "Please come if you feel like it."

  "Thank you," I said. And I cleared my throat so they wouldn't see me swallow.

  Bootsie blew more gusts of air up into her face and her eyes became brighter, as though a generator were gaining momentum inside her.

  "I could have told you I was pregnant. That would have blown your mind, wouldn't it?" she said.

  "What?" I felt my mouth hang open, because in New Iberia at that time it was unthinkable to talk like that in a public place.

  "But that would have seriously screwed you up," she said. "You would have ended up a family guy with kiddies and you couldn't go off to war, then come home and stand around on a cane like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. The pose is perfect, Dave. You look so absolutely sad and wounded. We wouldn't rob you of it for anything."

  "I think you're being pretty rotten," I said.

  "Hold on, now," her fiancé said.

  "No, rotten is when you put it in without a rubber because you're really promising that person you're going to marry her, then you leave her like she's yesterday's backseat hand job."

  The band had stopped playing, and her words carried out to the edge of the dance floor. People stared at us with their smiles suddenly frozen on their faces. Bootsie's eyes were watery and shining, and there were beads of perspiration on her upper lip. In the silence I could feel the skin of my face tighten and flex against the bone.

  When I woke in the morning a note folded inside an envelope was stuck in my screen door. It read:

  I'm sick and trembling with a hangover this morning, and I guess I deserve it. I'm sorry for what I was to you last night. I shouldn't apologize to you, but I do anyway. But tell me this, Dave, please please please tell me this, why did you push me away, why did you destroy it for both of us, why did you ruin everything we'd shared together that summer, tell me in the name of suffering God why you did it, Dave.

  Love,

  Bootsie

  P.S. On second thought it's probably better that you don't answer this note. I'm going to be married to John, and the past is the past, right? If I say that enough it'll finally be true. I hope you have a good life. I really mean that even though I think you were a bastard.

  But as she'd said, the past was the past, and after we had dinner, we washed the dishes, put them away, and went upstairs to her bedroom. It was misting outside, and the sky was a soft gray, the sun a low red ball on the western horizon. The long strips of pink cloud above the trees reminded me of flamingo wings.

  I took off my shirt, then sat on the side of the bed to remove my shoes. She sat next to me in only her bra and a half-slip and put her hand on my back.

  "Your skin's hot," she said.

  "It happens when I'm with a certain lady," I said, and tried to smile.

  "No, your muscles are tight as iron. What is it, Dave?"

  "I just have a couple of things on my mind right now."

  "There's a big buy going down, isn't there?"

  "Why do you think that?"

  "I always know. I hear people talking on the phone, a lot of money gets transferred around. Dave, are you still a cop?"

  "No questions tonight, Boots."

  "They'll catch on to you eventually. What you don't understand is that the narcs who get inside the organization are like them. You're not. It's a matter of time before they'll see that."

  "Let's not talk about it anymore."

  "All right, if that's what you want. But at some point you'll have to confide in me. If not now, later. You know that, Dave."

  I touched her lips with my fingers.

  "It's going to rain," I said. "Remember when we used to go to my father's boathouse in the rain?"

  She laid her cheek against my bare shoulder and rested her hand lightly on my arm. I finished undressing, and she pulled her slip up over her thighs and sat on top of me. I felt myself go deep inside her, felt her heat and wetness spread across my loins. Her face became round and pale in concentration. She made love with the confidence and knowledge of an older woman, and when she came she pressed my palm hard against her breast as though she were forcing me to share the whirrings of her heart.

  It was dark outside, and the rain was slanting against the French windows. An oak tree raked wetly against the side of the house. She lay inside my arm, with her hand on my stomach, and I could smell the rose-scented shampoo in her hair and taste the thin film of perspiration on her forehead.

  Then, as though determined to pass on all my anxieties and fears to someone else, as though I had to hurt her again as I had many years before, I asked her the question that had bothered me since I'd first gone to her house on Camp Street.

  "Why don't you get out from under them?"

  "I told you why."

  "You said you didn't know your husband was in the mob when you married him. I never knew one of them who wasn't obvious, Boots."

  "I wasn't very careful, I guess."

  "Bootsie, you had to know."

  "He was good-looking and well-mannered. He said he had a degree from Tulane. He smiled all the time. He was fun to be around, Dave."

  "All those game-room machines you distribute are made by a Mafia front in Chicago. You're into it big-time, old pal."

  Her hand left my stomach, and she sat up on the side of the bed and looked out at the wet treetops. Then she walked barefoot in her bra and half-slip to a cabinet above a small desk, her hips creasing softly. I could see the dark outline of her sex through her slip.

  "I'm going to have a glass of cream sherry," she said. "You don't mind, do you? It helps me to sleep sometimes. I always have trouble sleeping when it thunders. It's a silly way to be."

  She kept her face turned toward the French windows, but I could see the wet shine on her cheeks.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  It was black and raining hard when I guided the jugboat from the dock down the canal toward open water. The boat was built to float high up in the water, but the tide was out, the canal was shallow, and yellow mud and tangles of dead hyacinths boiled up under the propeller. The long expanses of saw grass on each side of us were bent in the rain.

  Ray Fontenot and Lionel Comeaux both wore yellow raincoats with hoods and sat hunched forward in their chairs by my small butane stove, which held a pot of coffee. The weather had turned cold, and their faces were morose and irritable. When we hit open water I pushed the throttle forward and felt the engine surge and the bow lift into the waves. The coastline became gray and indistinct and then dropped behind us altogether. In the distance I could see a gas flare burning on an offshore oil well.

  "Turn off your running lights," Lionel said.

  "There's a fogbank up there."

  "I don't care. Turn off your lights."

  "Look, if you're worried about the Coast Guard, it monitors the traffic by radar. You don't become invisible by turning off your lights."

  He got up from his chair, walked to my instrument board, and clicked off the two toggle switches that controlled the red and green running lights on the stern and bow. I pulled the throttle back to idle and cut the ignition. Suddenly it was quiet except for the rain against the roof and the glass. The jugboat pinched in one trough and then slid over the top of a black wave into another; the coffeepot crashed on the floor.

  "These are the rules, partner. There's one skipper on a boat," I said. "You're looking at him. If that doesn't sit right with you, we'll turn it around here."

  "We've made this run a dozen times. You don't advertise," Lionel said.

  "What's the matter with you?" I said. "The best way to attract attention is to do something stupid like run without lights."

  "It's your first time out. I'm trying to be helpful."

  "What's it going to be, Fontenot?"

  "Muc
h ado about nothing," he said from his chair. "Let him have his lights, Lionel."

  I hit the starter and pushed the throttle open again. We hit a cresting wave in a shower of foam and then flattened out in a long trough. The water was black and rolling and hammered with raindrops. Then the fog-bank slipped over the bow and the pilothouse, as cold and damp on the skin as a gray, wet glove.

  "What's Tony going to get out of the score?" I asked Ray Fontenot.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's my buy, my stash. What's the profit for him?"

  "He gets a cut from the Colombians. The action gets pieced off all the way back to Bogota."

  "Where's your piece come in?"

  "We're doing it as a favor."

  "No kidding?" I said.

  "We like you." He smiled from under his yellow rain hood.

  Lionel rubbed the moisture off the window glass with his palm.

  "There it is," he said.

  A shrimp boat with its wheelhouse lighted rose in the swell, then slipped down below a long, sliding wave.

  "How do we make the exchange?" I said.

  "I'll take the money on board and come back with the stash," Lionel said.

  "They're shy?" I said.

  "You don't want to meet them," Fontenot said. "They're not a nice group, our garlic-scented friends. They seem to like Lionel, though. The colored woman who cooks for them likes him very much. Lionel had a big change of luck at the track after he met her."

  "You ought to get laid more, Ray. You wouldn't have all these cute things to say," Lionel said.

  I saw the shrimp boat drift to the top of the swell again. Its white paint was peeling, its scuppers dripping with rust. Lionel had taken off his raincoat and was putting on a life jacket.

  "You should appreciate Lionel's efforts on your behalf," Fontenot said.

  "Forget the appreciation. Just put it hard against the tires and keep it there till I'm on the ladder," Lionel said.

  He laced the life jacket under his chin, then slipped a rope through the aluminum suitcase that contained the money and tied it crossways on his chest.

  "I go between the hulls and you're out a half mil," he said.

  "We can make the exchange without you getting on their boat," I said. "There's a thirty-foot coil of rope in that forward gear box. Tie it onto the suitcase, throw the other end on the shrimper, and we'll get the stash back the same way."

  "I gotta check it."

  "We'll check it when it's on board."

  "You don't inspect the goods after the fact when you deal with spies," he said.

  "Let's not have discord on the Melody Ranch, boys and girls," Fontenot said. "Lionel's an old pro at this, Mr. Robicheaux. He's not going to drop your money."

  "I'm going in on the swell," I said. "Get ready."

  Two deckhands came out of the wheelhouse and stood by the gunwales in the rain and wind. They were unshaved, and their black hair and beards dripped with water. I came in on the lee side of the shrimper, gunning the engine in the trough, and bumped against the row of tires that were hung along the hull. Lionel grabbed the rope ladder, pushed himself with one foot off the handrail of the jugboat, and scampered on board the shrimper, the aluminum suitcase banging across the gunwale with him.

  "What are you going to do with all your money, Mr. Robicheaux?" Fontenot said. He had a lit cigarette cupped on his knee, and he was looking out indifferently at the glaze of light from the shrimp boat on the water.

  "Why is it I get the feeling you're not interested in the questions you ask other people?" I said.

  "Oh, forgive me, good sir, if I ever convey that impression. That would be a terrible sense to give someone, wouldn't it?"

  "I'm going back through Atchafalaya Bay, not to Cocodrie. I can put you guys ashore at several places. You tell me where."

  "Not to Cocodrie? But our car is there," he said. And he said it in a whimsical manner, his eyes still fascinated with the patches of yellow light on the waves.

  "I think it's smart to off-load in a different spot. I told Tony I've got the access he needs, a couple of bayous nobody uses except in a pirogue."

  "I'm sure he'll be intrigued."

  I looked at the side of his face in the glow of the instrument lights. Then I saw the color in his eyes brighten and the corner of his mouth twitch in a grin when he realized that I was staring at him.

  "Excuse me if I don't bubble up at the perfection of it all," he said. "I'm afraid it's my fate to simply be an old mule. But Tony will love a tour through the bayous. You two can talk about 'nape.'"

  I continued to stare at him.

  "What are you wondering, kind sir?" he said.

  "Why he keeps you guys around."

  "We don't measure up, do we? Listen, you lovely boy, we take the risks but Tony gets the big end of the candy cane. Some might think he's done very well by us. Would you like to jump between boats like Lionel just did? I don't think Tony would."

  "My impression is the guy can handle the action."

  "Oh, you must tell him that. He loves that kind of big-dick talk."

  "I don't know what's bugging you, Fontenot, but I think this is our last run together," I said.

  "You can never tell," he said, and grinned again and puffed on his cigarette in the luminescence of the instrument panel.

  Ten minutes passed, and I kept the jugboat steady in the trough so it wouldn't slam up against the hull of the shrimper. Through the rain I could see the silhouettes of several people in the wheelhouse. Then I saw Lionel talking, but his face was turned toward the front glass, not toward the people around him. I squinted hard through the rain.

  "He's talking on the shortwave," I said.

  "Who?"

  "Lionel. What's going on, Fontenot?"

  "Nothing."

  "Don't tell me that. Why's the man on the radio?"

  "I don't know. You think he's calling the Coast Guard? Use your judgment, sir."

  "Fontenot, if you guys—"

  "I'm not up to any more words of assurance tonight, Mr. Robicheaux. I don't believe you belong in our business, to tell you the truth. It isn't the Rotary Club. It isn't made up of nice people. I've grown a bit weary of you wrinkling your nose at us."

  The two deckhands carried two wooden crates out of the forward hatch and set them inside a cargo net that was slung from a boom. Lionel stepped out of the wheelhouse and waved for me to bring the jugboat alongside again. I waited until the shrimper dipped into the trough, then bumped up against the row of tires. When both boats rose with the swell, Lionel sprang from the shrimper onto my deck. His jeans and denim shirt and canvas life preserver were dark with rain.

  One of the deckhands operated the motor on the boom and swung the cargo net out over the jugboat, letting the net collapse in a tangle, with the two crates inside, on the deck. Lionel pulled the crates free, and I put the engine in reverse and backed away from the side of the shrimper. The empty cargo net swung out in open space and cut through the tops of the waves.

  I shifted the engine forward again and turned the bow toward the southern horizon.

  "I'm going to help him stow it," I said. "Hold the wheel and keep it pointed into the waves. The throttle's set, so you don't need to touch it."

  "Really, now?" Fontenot said.

  Outside, the rain was cold and stung my face and hands, and the waves broke hard on the bow and blew back across the deck in a salty spray. I unlocked the forward gear box and lifted one of the wooden crates inside. It was heavy, and the sides were stamped with the name of a South American cannery. Lionel swung the second crate up on the edge of the gear box.

  "What were you doing on the radio?" I said.

  "What?" He wore long underwear buttoned at the throat under his denim shirt, but he was shivering with the cold.

  "You heard me."

  "I wasn't on the radio."

  "You had the mike in your hand, partner."

  He wiped the water out of his eyes, then focused on my face again.


  "Maybe I got a weather report. Maybe I moved it to pick up my coffee cup. Maybe you need glasses." He dropped the crate on top of the first one. "It doesn't matter. Tony C. cut you in as a favor. If you want to know, the weight and quality are right. You got a sweet deal, man. I don't think you deserve it."

  He flipped the top of the gear box shut and walked away toward the pilothouse, balancing himself against the roll of the deck.

  It had stopped raining, but the fog was thick and white on the water and I could hardly see the bow of the jugboat.

  "This stuff will probably start to lift with first light," I said. "When we come out of it, I'm going to turn northwest for Atchafalaya Bay. Where do you guys want to go ashore?"

  Lionel was looking out into the fog through the front glass. His eyes were narrowed and red-rimmed with fatigue.

  "Where do y'all want me to put you off?" I repeated.

  We passed a shut-down oil platform. The waves were black and streaked with oil as they slid through the steel pilings.

  Still neither Lionel nor Fontenot answered me. Then I heard a boat engine out in the fog before I saw its running lights. Fontenot looked up from his cup of coffee. I turned to port, away from the sound of the engine, just as the hull of a thirty-foot white cabin cruiser came out of the fogbank. I could see the silhouette of a solitary figure at the wheel. I turned to look again at Lionel and Fontenot, as though all the frames in a strip of film negatives had suddenly made sense, and I guess my right hand was already moving toward the .25-caliber Beretta strapped to my ankle, but it was too late. Lionel had taken a nine-millimeter automatic from the canvas carry-on bag at his foot, and he placed the iron sight hard behind my ear. His free hand went down my right leg and pulled the Beretta from its holster.

  "Cut the engine," he said.

  I didn't move.

  "It's not a time for thought," he said.

  I heard his thumb cock the hammer. I turned off the ignition switch, and we drifted sideways with the waves and dipped down breathlessly into a trough.

  "Oops," Fontenot said, and his mouth made an O inside the yellow hood of his raincoat.