DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  "I don't either. Anyway, we have some other information, too. We've got some taps on the greaseballs over in Houston. It's not an open contract on Cardo anymore. Boggs has got the hit. It's fifty grand, a big-money whack even for these guys. But they want it to go down in the next week."

  "Why the hurry?"

  "They're afraid of him. Tony C. isn't one to take prisoners. One guy on the tape says it might have to be a slop shot. Have you heard that one before?"

  "Yes."

  "There's no innocent bystanders. His wife, his kid, anybody around him, they're all targets if necessary. Dave, if Boggs was in New Iberia, do you think it has something to do with you?"

  "Why?"

  "Who has more reason to want you off the board? It's turned around on him. I bet he gets up thinking about you in the morning."

  "Maybe."

  "Look, I want to push this stuff to a head. Can you get a wire into Cardo's house?"

  "I think so."

  "Either you can or you can't, Dave."

  "I can try, Minos."

  "Once again I'm getting a strong impression here of a lack of enthusiasm."

  "What do you expect? I'm a hired Judas goat. You want me to tell you I like it?"

  He paused a moment; then he said in an even voice, "We hear a big load of coke is going to hit town in three or four days. A lot of it is going to end up as crack in the welfare projects."

  I looked out the window into the courtyard, where my neighbor was trying to leash his dog in the flower bed.

  "Are you there?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "You know the scene. A human life isn't worth a stick of chewing gum in those places. All thanks to Tony C. and his friends."

  "How do you want to work it?"

  "Find out his connection with the shipment. Then we'll wire you. All we need is a statement that he's in on the buy or the distribution."

  "All right."

  "You sound like you've got something else on your mind."

  "It's Kim Dollinger. I think somebody's got her out there twisting in the wind."

  "Why?"

  "She was terrified when we got busted yesterday."

  "Who's she afraid of?"

  "Tony, Nate Baxter, you guys. How should I know?"

  "It's not us. You want us to pick her up?"

  "She's a hard-nosed girl. She won't cooperate. Baxter let her walk. Why would he let her walk when he rousted the rest of us? It was a good opportunity to squeeze her."

  "From what I hear about this guy, he's about as complicated as an empty closet. Save yourself a lot of grief and don't make a mystery out of morons."

  "If I only had that clarity of line, Minos."

  "Work on it. It'll come with time."

  After I hung up, I shaved, showered, and changed into a pair of clean gray slacks, a maroon shirt, combed my hair in the mirror, put a touch of Vaseline on the hard knot of stitches in my lip and head, and buffed my loafers.

  I tried to keep my mind blank and not think about the care I was putting into my appearance.

  Then I drove down St. Charles to South Carrollton and parked my pickup truck in front of the nineteenth-century building by the levee where Kim Dollinger lived.

  Her apartment was on the second floor, and there was a hand-twist bell on the door. I had to ring it twice before she answered, a towel in her hand, her neck spotted with water. She wore jeans, tan sandals, and a white peasant blouse with a pink ribbon threaded through the top. The front of her blouse hung straight down from her breasts.

  "Oh boy," she said.

  "May I come in?"

  She blotted the water on her neck and looked into my face.

  "I'm getting ready to go to work," she said.

  Her back window was open, and I smelled the draft that blew out into the hall.

  "That's not all you've been doing," I said.

  "Look—"

  "Come on, I just got out of the bag. You can't offer me a cup of coffee?"

  She stood back from the door for me to enter. I heard her close it behind me. Through the open window I could see the green of the levee and the wide, flat expanse of the Mississippi and the sandy bank and willow trees on the far side. The living room looked furnished from a secondhand store. Off to one side was a small kitchen with bright yellow linoleum. She sat down at a breakfast table that was located between the kitchen and living room. The legs of the table and chairs were chrome and had rusty scratches on them that looked like dismembered parts of insects.

  "Kim, I'm not telling you what to do, but if you've already got the dragons after you, reefer just makes the problem a lot worse," I said.

  She crumpled the towel on the tabletop. Her eyes looked out into space.

  "What is it that you want?" she said.

  "To talk with you on the square, with no bullshit."

  "That's it? Nothing else?"

  "That's right."

  "You wouldn't like to ball me while you're at it, would you?"

  "Cut the badass act, Kim. It's a drag."

  "I tried to talk with you. You wouldn't hear me."

  "I can get you out of this."

  "You?"

  "That's right."

  "A guy with a mouthful of stitches."

  "I'm tired of being your dartboard. You'd better listen when a friend is talking to you."

  She put the heel of her hand against her forehead. Her skin reddened from the pressure. She crossed her legs and breathed through her mouth. There were patches of color in her throat and cheeks. She made me think of someone who might have been wrapped in invisible rope.

  "Have you ever been down?" I said.

  "Have I what?" Her mouth hung open.

  "Have you ever done time?"

  "No."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I said no."

  "Have you been in custody?"

  "You stop talking to me like this. Why are you saying these things to me?" Her voice started to break.

  "Because somebody is turning the screws on you. I suspect it's Nate Baxter. He's a sonofabitch, Kim, and I know what he's capable of."

  She pushed the heel of her hand along her hairline.

  "What does Tony know?" she said.

  "I couldn't guess. Do you sleep with him?" My eyes shifted away from her face, and I didn't want to hear her answer.

  "I used to. When he wanted me to, anyway. He doesn't want to anymore. It's the speed. It's messed him up."

  I glanced back at her face again. Her eyes met mine, then they looked away. There was a tingling in my throat, like a heated wire trembling against a nerve.

  "Did somebody make you sleep with him?" I said.

  "You don't have the right to ask me these things."

  "If Nate Baxter is behind this, he's going to have the worst experience of his life."

  "There's nothing you can do. It involves somebody else. Oh God, where's my stash?" she said.

  She got up from the table, took a clear, sealed plastic bag of reefer from a kitchen drawer, sat back down, and began to roll a joint from a sheaf of ZigZag cigarette papers. Her eyes were narrowed with concentration, but her fingers began to shake and strands of reefer fell from both sides of the paper. Then she gave it up, rested her elbows on the table, and pressed a knuckle from each hand against her temples.

  I picked up the plastic bag, splayed it open, dropped the papers inside, raked the loose strands of reefer into it, and walked down a short hallway to the bathroom.

  "What are you doing?" she said.

  I emptied the bag into the toilet and flushed it. Then I dropped the bag into a kitchen garbage sack. When I turned around she was standing a foot from me. Her hair hung on her forehead, and she had accidentally smeared her lipstick.

  "Why did you do that?" she said.

  "You don't need it."

  "I don't need it?"

  "No."

  "Tony says it's all a cluster fuck."

  "He's wrong."

  Her eyes were green and mois
t and they looked directly into mine. I could hear the wetness in her throat when she swallowed. The top of her pink-ribboned peasant blouse was crooked on her shoulders.

  "There's always a way out of trouble," I said. "You just have to trust your friends once in a while."

  I touched her on the upper arm with my palm. I meant it in a protective and friendly way. Yes, I know that was the way I meant it. I could see the freckles on her shoulders, feel her breath on my face. She stepped close to me, and my arms were on her back, my hands lightly touching the coolness of her skin, the thickness of her hair. She rubbed her face under my chin, and I felt a shudder go through her body like tension leaving a metal spring.

  Then she remained motionless in my arms, her breath small and regular against my chest. In the distance, I could see the hard, stiff outline of the Huey Long Bridge against a bank of purple rain clouds.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  After I left Kim's, I drove into the French Quarter and tried to find a place to park close by Clete's nightclub. But it was Saturday afternoon, the Quarter was crowded with tourists, and I had to park off Elysian Fields and walk back down Decatur to the club. A noisy crowd was at the bar, and a five-piece band was blaring out "Rampart Street Parade" by the dance floor.

  "Take a walk with me," I said to Clete, who was behind the bar in a pair of gray slacks and a green Tulane sweatshirt.

  "It's a little busy right now, Streak."

  "It's important."

  We crossed the street and walked down to the du Monde, where I ordered beignets through the takeout window.

  "Beautiful day," I said.

  "I'm not kidding, Dave, I've got a bar to run. What is it?"

  "Come on," I said. We walked over the top of the levee and out onto the gentle green slope that led down to the river. On the far side of the water was the shabby outline of Algiers. "I need a cover story."

  His eyes went up and down my shirt.

  "What are you talking about?" he said.

  "Minos is going to put a wire on me. I need to make Tony talk about a big drug delivery that's about to go down. I have to have some way of bringing it up."

  "You might need a cover story about something else," he said, and reached out and removed a long strand of red hair from my shirtfront. "Brush up against somebody on the streetcar, did you?"

  "Let's keep to the subject."

  "Have you lost your mind?"

  "Lay off it,Clete."

  "I told you one of the cardinal rules when you get involved with the greaseballs: Don't mess with their broads."

  "Have you heard anything about a big delivery?"

  "I bet she's one hot item, though, isn't she?"

  "I need your help. Will you cut out the bullshit?"

  He took a beignet out of the napkin in my hand and bit off half of it. His green eyes were thoughtful as he looked out at the river.

  "I hear crack prices are up in the Iberville welfare project, which means the supply is down," he said. "But next week everybody is going to have all the rock they can smoke. That's the word, anyway. What's the DEA say?"

  "Same thing."

  "That crack is some mean shit. You ever watch them huff that stuff? They remind me of somebody having a seizure."

  "You know I'm staying out at Cardo's?"

  "I called Dautrieve. He told me. Why is it that guy makes me feel like anthrax?"

  "Boggs has been given a contract on Cardo."

  "And you're living with him? That's great, Streak. Maybe you ought to look into some real estate buys on the San Andreas fault."

  "I'm going to play it one more week, then I'm out."

  "I think you're in. The operative word there, mon, is in. Bootsie Giacano wasn't dangerous enough. You had to get in the sack with Cardo's main punch."

  "That's not the way it is. Don't talk about her that way, either, Clete."

  "Excuse me. It's my lack of couth. We're talking the parochial school sodality here. Dave, you'd better get your head on straight. You live among these people, you start to believe they're like us. They're not, mon. When it comes down to saving their own ass, they'd sell their mothers to a puppy farm."

  "Boggs has been in New Iberia. I think he's got me on his dance card. I'd rather deal with him in New Orleans than around Alafair."

  "I think you're being used. I think you should forget Cardo and these DEA jerk-offs and you and I should go after Boggs and blow out his candle. What do you care if Cardo sells dope? You shut him down, the price on the street goes up. The dealers come out ahead any way you cut it. Look, most of the dope has gone back to the slums, anyway. That's where it started, that's where it's going to stay. Then one day the poor dumb bastards will get tired of watching their own kind get hauled away in body bags."

  "I was in jail last night. Nate Baxter rousted Tony and me and his driver. Can you get to somebody in the First District, find out what Baxter's doing?"

  "In jail?"

  "That's right."

  "You remind me of these kids with their crack pipes. It takes a guy like me twenty years to go to hell. They can do it in six months. But, Streak, you've got a talent for fucking up your life in weeks."

  "Will you see what you can find out about Baxter?"

  "A cop who blew the country with a murder warrant on him? I'm your liaison person?"

  He put the rest of the beignet in his mouth and laughed while he rubbed his palm clean with his napkin.

  I walked back to my truck in the cooling shadows and drove down Canal to the corner of St. Charles, where Clete had seen Tee Beau Latiolais working in a pizza place. Young black men lounged in front of the liquor stores and arcades, their bodies striped with the purple and pink neon glow from the windows. I found Tee Beau in the back of a long, narrow café, his white paper hat pulled down to his eyebrows, so that he seemed to be staring at me from under a visor.

  "Take a break. I need to talk with you, Tee Beau," I said.

  His eyes were peculiar, melancholy, as though he were witnessing a bad fate for a friend that the friend was not aware of.

  "What is it?" I said.

  He didn't answer. He wiped his hands on his apron and put on a pair of sunglasses. We walked around the corner to the Pearl and sat at the bar. A white man farther down the bar was shucking oysters with a fierce energy on a sideboard. Tee Beau ordered a Falstaff and kept looking at me out of the side of his eye.

  "You know, Tee Beau, I don't think sunglasses in the evening are the best kind of disguise."

  "Why you want to see me, Mr. Dave?"

  "I heard Jimmie Lee Boggs has been in New Iberia. I'd like to find out why. Can you talk to Dorothea?"

  "I ain't got to. Talked to her last night. She didn't say nothing about seeing Jimmie Lee. But she tole me what Gros Mama Goula say about you, Mr. Dave."

  "Oh?"

  "You got the gris-gris. She say you been messin' where you ain't suppose to be messin'. You ain't listen to nobody."

  "Listen, Tee Beau, Gros Mama is a big black gasbag. She jerks your people around with a lot of superstition that goes back to the islands, back to the slave days."

  But my words meant nothing to him.

  "I made you this, Mr. Dave. I was gonna come find you."

  "I appreciate it but—"

  "You put it on your ankle, you."

  I made no offer to take the perforated dime and the piece of red string looped through it from his hand. He dropped them in my shirt pocket.

  "You white, you been to colletch, you don't believe," he said. "But I seen things. A man that had snakes crawl all over his grave. They was fat as my wrist. Couldn't keep them off the grave with poison or a shotgun. You stick a hayfork in them, shake them off in a fire, they be back the next morning, smelling like they been lying in hot ash.

  "A woman name Miz Gold, 'cause her skin was gold, she taken a man away from Gros Mama, then come in Gros Mama's juke with him, wearing a pink silk dress, carrying a pink umbrella, laughing about Gros Mama's tattoos saying
she ain't nothing but a nigger putain that does what white mens tells her. The next day Miz Gold woke up with hair all over her face. Just like a monkey. She do everything to get rid of it, Mr. Dave, pull it out of her skin with pliers till blood run down her neck. But it didn't do no good. That woman so ugly nobody go near her, no white peoples hire her. She use to go up and down the alley, picking rags out of my gran 'ma-man's trash can."

  "Okay, Tee Beau, I'll keep it all in mind."

  "No, you ain't. In one way you like most white folks, Mr. Dave. You don't hear what a black man saying to you."

  He upended his bottle of Falstaff and looked at me over the top of his glasses.

  The evening air was cool and moist, purple with shadow, when I walked back to my truck. I saw a car parked overtime at a meter. I broke the red string off the perforated dime that Tee Beau had given me, slipped the dime into the meter, and twisted the handle. In front of the liquor store two Negro men in bright print shirts and lacquered porkpie hats were snapping their fingers to the music on a boom box. One of them smiled at me for no reason, his teeth a brilliant flash of gold.

  I didn't go back to Tony's right away. Instead, I parked by Jackson Square and sat on a stone bench in front of St. Louis Cathedral and watched people leaving Saturday evening Mass. My head was filled with confused thoughts, like a clatter of birds' wings inside a cage. I used a pay phone on the corner to call Bootsie, but she wasn't home. The square was dark now, the myrtle and banana trees etched in the light from the du Monde, and there was a chill in the wind off the river. After the cathedral had emptied, I went inside and knelt in a back pew. A tiny red light, like a drop of electrified blood, glowed at the top of a confessional box, which meant that a priest was inside.

  Many people are currently enamored with Cajun culture, but they know little of its darker side: organized dogfights and cockfights, the casual attitude toward the sexual exploitation of Negro women, the environmental ignorance that has allowed the draining and industrial poisoning of the wetlands. Also, few outsiders understand the violent feelings that Cajun people have about the nature of fidelity and human possession.

  When I was twenty I worked as a welder's helper with my father on a pipeline outside of a little town north of the Atchafalaya Basin. Someone discovered that a married woman in the town was having an affair with the priest. A mob came for her at night, in a caravan of cars, and took her from her home and drove her to an empty field next to the church. They formed a circle around her, and while she cried and begged they beat her black and blue with hairbrushes. Simultaneously someone phoned her husband at his job in Baton Rouge and told him of his wife's infidelity. He was killed driving home that night in a rainstorm.