DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  "You think a war's ever going to come here?" he said.

  "No, this is a good place, Paul," I said. "We don't worry about things like that. I bet you're going to have a good time at the ice factory."

  "Do you have any little boys or girls?" Paul said.

  "A little girl, about your age. Her name's Alafair."

  "What's she like to do?"

  "She has a horse. She likes to feed him apples and ride him when she comes home from school."

  "A horse?" he said.

  "Yeah, we call him Tex because we bought him over in Texas."

  "Boy."

  He had a genuinely sweet face, with no recognition in it of his own limitations.

  "Maybe we'll go riding with Dave and his daughter one day," Tony said.

  "That'd be fine," I said.

  "There's a couple of bridle paths here, or sometimes I take Paul on trips over by Iberia Parish," Tony said. "Maybe we'll drive over, take you guys out to eat, go out for a boat ride, something like that," he said.

  "Yeah, that's a good idea, Tony."

  "I hear the bus," Paul said.

  His father hooked his canvas book bag, which had a lunch kit strapped onto it, on the back of the chair and wheeled him down the ramp to the waiting bus. The driver lowered a special platform from the back of the bus, and he and Tony fixed the wheels of Paul's chair to it. Before the driver raised the platform, Tony leaned down and hugged his son, pressed his head against his chest, and kissed his hair.

  He came back in and sat down at the table. He wore white tennis slacks and a thick white sweater with blue piping on it.

  "You have a fine little podna there," I said.

  "You'd better believe it. How'd you sleep last night?"

  "Good."

  "You like my home?"

  "It's beautiful."

  "I wish my mom had lived to see it. We lived in Algiers and the Irish Channel. We had colored people living next door and across the street from us. You know what my mom used to do for a living?"

  I shook my head no.

  "She washed the hair of corpses. She'd come home, and I could smell it on her. Not just the chemicals. That same smell when you pop a body bag. Not as strong, but that same smell. Man, I used to hate it. I think that's why she always talked about lemon and lime trees back in Sicily. She said on her father's farm there was this old Norman tower made out of rocks, and lemon and lime trees grew all around it. When it was real hot she and her sisters would play inside the rocks where it was cool, and they could smell the lemons and limes on the wind."

  Two men walked into the kitchen, their faces full of sleep, and began clattering around in the cabinets.

  "Where's the cereal bowls at?" one of them said. He was dark and thin; he wore slippers and his print shirt was unbuttoned and hung half out of his slacks, but he hadn't forgotten to put on his shoulder holster.

  "Right-hand side," Tony said. "Look, you guys, there's eggs and bacon in the warmer out in the dining room. There's extra coffee there, too."

  They shuffled around in the kitchen and didn't reply. Then they went out into the dining room. These were only two of eight hired men I had seen in the house since the night before. They had slept on couches, in the attic, the television den, and guest cottage, and had taken turns walking around on the grounds and driveway during the night.

  "They're good boys, just not too sophisticated," Tony said. "Do they make you uncomfortable?"

  "No."

  "A couple of them made you."

  I looked at him blankly.

  "They can spot a cop," he said. "I told them you're all right, though. You're all right, aren't you, Dave?"

  His eyes took on that strange, self-amused light again.

  "You have to be the judge of that, Tony."

  "I think you're a solid guy. You know what a solid con is?"

  "Yes."

  "You're that kind of guy. You've got character."

  "Maybe you don't know everything about me."

  "Maybe I know more than you think," he said, and winked.

  I didn't know his game, or even if he was playing one, but I didn't like meeting his eyes. I took a bite of my soft-boiled eggs and looked out at the mist in the citrus trees.

  "Where's the contract coming from?" I said,

  "There's one guy in Houston that wants me out bad. Two or three in Miami. Maybe they got permission from Chicago, maybe they're acting on their own, I don't know. You heard stories about me, Dave, about some stuff I do, waving the flag around, bullshit like that?"

  "I guess I have."

  "That I been breaking one of the big rules, getting mixed up in politics, focusing attention on the organization?"

  "That's what you hear sometimes."

  "Let me tell you about a guy used to live in Plantation, Florida. You remember the name Johnny__? This guy went back to the days of Bugsy Siegel, I mean he survived gang wars for forty years. But Johnny and a couple of other guys thought they could jerk the CIA around. They told some CIA people they could whack out Castro for the government, like do a patriotic act and maybe get the casinos open in Havana again. So the CIA buys it, and the word is out that our guys are going to clip Castro. Maybe they even sent a couple of kamikaze gumballs to do it, but the bottom line is that Castro looks pretty healthy today. In other words, it looks like it was a scam to pump juice and influence out of the government. So the commission in Chicago tells these guys that what they're doing is stupid and they'd fucking better knock it off. But Johnny doesn't listen. So one day a couple of guys invite him fishing out in Biscayne Bay, except they put one in his ear, cut his legs off, and stuff him inside an oil barrel.

  "They weighted the barrel down with chains, and shoved an ice pick in Johnny's stomach to break the gas bag. Nobody would have ever seen him, but they screwed it up. They missed the wall of his stomach, and he floated the barrel up.

  "It makes a good story, doesn't it, about what happens when a guy decides to get political?"

  "I've heard it before."

  "Then maybe you also know it's bullshit. Johnny got clipped because of money. It's always money, Dave. Those guys in Miami and Houston want to take over the action on the Louisiana coast. There's four or five other guys in New Orleans they'll have to cut in, guys who are anybody's cornhorn, but the word is I'm definitely not going to be a player." He smiled and put a dripping spoonful of cereal in his mouth. "There's supposed to be some real talent in town right now. I hear it's a twenty-five-thou contract."

  "Maybe it's a good time to take the family on a vacation to the islands," I said.

  "They don't hurt families. We don't do that to each other. Not even these guys, Dave." But I saw the cloud slide across his face. He looked out at the lawn and rubbed his finger against his temple.

  "I need to use your phone," I said. "A lady was coming up to see me at the hospital this morning."

  "Who is she?" he asked, and smiled again.

  "Bootsie Giacano."

  "No kidding? You got good taste. She's a class broad, I mean lady. You gotta excuse my vocabulary. I went to college, but most of the time you wouldn't know it."

  "You know her?"

  "Sure. I own part of her business. She's nice. I like her."

  I used the phone in the kitchen and told Bootsie where I was and that I would see her later.

  "You're where?" she said.

  I cleared my throat and told her again I was at Tony's. I could hear her breathing into the mouthpiece of the receiver.

  "I won't ask you any more questions," she said. "I'm sure you know what you're doing, Dave. You know what you're doing, don't you?"

  "Sure," I said, then, "I'll call you tonight. Everything's fine, kiddo."

  "Yeah, sure it is," she said, and hung up.

  I sat back down with Tony just as his wife came into the kitchen in a blue house robe and slippers, her face dull with sleep, her hair in pink foam-rubber curlers. She didn't speak. She filled a coffee cup from the electric pot on the Formica
counter, shook two aspirins from a bottle and set them by the side of her saucer, and sat at the kitchen table with her back to us, smoking silently while she drank her coffee. The backs of her hands were coarse and heavily veined, and her nails, long and bright red, made clicking sounds when she picked up her coffee cup.

  "Clara, this is Dave Robicheaux. He stayed with us last night," Tony said.

  Again she didn't speak. Her blond hair was dark close to her scalp. I could see nicotine stains on her fingers, dried makeup around the corners of her mouth, her thin whitened nostrils when she breathed.

  "Dave and I were talking about taking Paul for a horse ride," Tony said.

  She blew smoke up against the window glass and flicked her ashes in her saucer.

  "I think maybe everybody was making a little too much noise last night," Tony said.

  "May I speak to you alone, please?" she said.

  "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 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 lose 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.