DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  One of them wrote on his clipboard. There were red marks on his nose where he had taken off his sunglasses, and his sky-blue shirt was stretched tightly across his muscular chest.

  "You think maybe somebody just doesn't like you?" he asked.

  "Could be," I said.

  "You're not in a cult, are you?" He grinned at the corner of his mouth.

  "No, I don't know much about cults."

  He put his ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket.

  "Well, there're a lot of spaced-out dopers around these days. Maybe that's all there was to it," he said. "I'd get some better locks, though."

  "Thank y'all for coming out."

  "Mr. Robicheaux, you say you used to be a police officer?"

  "That's right."

  "You never heard about a nailed-up frog before?"

  I cleared my throat and looked away from his eyes.

  "Maybe I heard something. It's a little vague."

  He smiled to himself, then wrote out a number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

  "Here's the report number in case you or the owner needs it for an insurance claim. Call us if we can help you in any way," he said.

  They left and closed the door behind them. There's a cop who won't have to write traffic tickets too long, I thought.

  Back in the bedroom Bootsie sat on the side of my bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her cotton dress was covered with gray and pink flowers.

  "I'm sorry you had to arrive in the middle of all this," I said.

  "Dave, that officer was talking about a cult. Do you know people like that?"

  "It wasn't done by cultists. He knew it, too."

  "What?"

  "I'm supposed to think I've got a gris-gris on me. You remember a Negro woman named Gros Mama Goula in New Iberia?"

  "She ran a brothel?"

  "That's the one. She'd like to shake up my cookie bag. She either sent some of her people over here to do this, or it was done by a guy named Jimmie Lee Boggs. But my guess is that the two of them are working together."

  "I just don't understand."

  "These are people who for one reason or another would like me to disappear. So they put on this gris-gris show. But whoever did this has probably spent some time in a southern prison. A frog with a nail through it means a guy had better jump or he's going to have a bad fate."

  I saw her face becoming more and more clouded.

  "Bootsie, these guys are dimwits. They're always looking for something new or clever to dress up their act. When they do some bullshit like this, it's because they're running scared."

  "I've heard that name Boggs," she said. "I get the feeling he's taken very seriously."

  "All right, he's got the contract on Tony C. He's also the guy who shot me last summer. But I think Jimmie Lee's scared. It's turned around on him."

  "Dave, what in God's name are you doing? Why did you bring me here this morning?"

  "I'm not sure, Boots."

  "God, you're incredible."

  "Maybe I don't think I'm doing right by you."

  This time her eyes saw meaning in my face.

  "I hurt you real bad a long time ago. I don't want to do it again," I said.

  Her eyes kept looking up at me. I pulled up a chair and sat across from her.

  "Maybe you have some regrets?" she said softly.

  "I didn't say that."

  "You love the past, Dave. You love Louisiana the way it used to be. It's changed. Forever. We are, too. Maybe you're discovering that." She smiled.

  "I don't know. I don't learn anything very easily."

  Her eyes went down in her lap, and she brushed her fingers over the fine hair on the back of her wrist.

  "Dave, did you do something that bothers you?" she said.

  "No."

  "Are we talking about another woman?"

  "I'm mixed up with a bunch of people I can't think straight about right now."

  She was quiet for a moment; then she said, "Who is she?"

  "I haven't been untrue to you." The words sounded hollow, marital, the banal end of something.

  "Is she one of Tony's crowd?"

  "I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to hurt some people. I don't feel good about it. I got mixed up in it because I was shot by Jimmie Lee Boggs. Now I'm at a place where I don't understand my own feelings."

  "You're an undercover cop, aren't you?"

  "I've gotten involved with people whom cops sometimes call lowlifes or geeks or greaseballs. Except I don't feel that way about all of them now, and I should. That's what it amounts to, Bootsie."

  "Do you want it over between us?"

  "I don't think it can ever be over between us."

  "You shouldn't count on that," she said, and I felt my heart drop.

  "Can you tell me why you were over at Baylor?" I said.

  "Not today. No more today."

  "You're going to close me out? You're not going to let me be your friend when you need one?"

  "Do you love me or the past, Dave? Do you think I'm the past? Do I look like the past? Am I the summer of 'fifty-seven?"

  Her eyes and her voice were kind, but I had no answer for her or myself, and the room was so quiet that I could hear the rustle of banana leaves outside the window.

  Three hours later I was sitting at a redwood table by the side of Tony's tennis court while he hit balls at Jess Ornella on the opposite side of the net. Jess wore a red sweatsuit and blue boat shoes and clubbed at the balls as though he were under attack. Three dozen balls must have littered the clay court, most of them on his side.

  "I tell you what, why don't you get us some iced tea?" Tony said.

  "I told you I ain't any good at games," Jess said.

  "You're doing good. Keep working at it. Your stroke's getting better all the time," Tony said. He sat down at the table with me, patting his neck and face with a towel, and watched Jess walk toward the house. "He looks like a hog on ice, but you ought to see him fly an airplane."

  "Jess?"

  "His old man was a crop duster during the Depression. Jess can thread a needle with anything that has wings on it. One time he flew us upside down under a power line."

  Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my lip. They felt as tight and hard as wire.

  "When are you getting them out?" he said.

  "Tomorrow."

  "Something on your mind, Dave?"

  "I guess I was still thinking about my apartment."

  "Don't go back there. Stay with me as long as you're in New Orleans. You don't need an apartment."

  "I'm still trying to figure out Boggs, too."

  "Why? You like trying to put yourself inside the head of a moron? Look, why do you think a guy like me is successful in this business? I'll tell you. A guy who can walk down the street and chew gum at the same time is king of the block. Take Jess there, and remember he's one of the few I trust, he thinks Peter Pan is the washbasin in a whorehouse."

  "Boggs is smarter than you think."

  "He's a psychopath. Look, the real badasses are in prison or the graveyard. If they're not there yet, they will be. About every two or three months I hear a rumor somebody's going to whack me out. And once in a while somebody tries. But I'm still hitting tennis balls. And a couple of other guys, guys who somebody wound up in Houston or Miami, Jess has driven down into Lafourche Parish and no telling what happened. So if you want into the life, Dave, you don't worry over it. Hey, come on, man, most people grow old and sit on the porch and listen to their livers rot."

  "I've got another problem, too, Tony. My people back in Lafayette want a chance to get their money back. A half million is a lot to lose."

  He picked up his racket cover and began pulling it over the head of his racket.

  "They're not looking for a major buy," I said. "They just want to recover what they lost."

  He zipped up the leather cover and rested the racket across his thighs.

  "Clete says there's a major score about to go down in the
projects. I'd like to get in on it," I said.

  He nodded attentively, his eyes looking off into the trees.

  "I hear you talking, Dave, but like I once said to you, I don't do business at my house." Then he glanced into my face.

  "I respect that, Tony, but these guys back in Lafayette are turning some dials on me."

  "Fuck 'em."

  "I've got to live around there."

  "Hey, give me a break. Do I take care of you or not?" His small mouth made that strange butterfly shape.

  "I'm just telling you about my situation."

  "All right, for God's sakes. We'll take a drive. You're worse than my wife."

  A few minutes later we were in the Lincoln, driving across the twenty-four-mile causeway that spans Lake Pontchartrain, with Jess and the other bodyguards behind us in the Cadillac. The sun was high in the hard, blue sky, and the waves were green and capping in the wind. Tony drove with his arm on the window, a Marine Corps utility cap pulled down snugly to the level of his sunglasses. His gray and black ringlets whipped on his neck. He looked out at a long barge whose deck was loaded with industrial metal drums of some kind.

  "We used to fish and swim in the lake when I was a kid," he said. "Now the lake's so polluted it's against the law to get in the water."

  "New Orleans has changed a lot."

  "All for the bad, all for the bad," he said.

  "Can you tell me where we're going now?"

  "A place I bet you've never seen. Maybe I'll show you my plane, too."

  "Can we talk now?"

  "You can talk, I'll listen," he said, and smiled at me from behind his glasses.

  "These guys want to give me another fifty or sixty thou if I can buy into some quick action."

  "So?"

  "Can I get in on the score?"

  "Dave, the score you're talking about is all going right into the projects. It involves a lot of colored dealers and some guys out in Metairie I don't like to mess with too much."

  "You don't do business with the projects?"

  "It's hot right now. Everybody's pissed because these kids are killing each other all over town and scaring off the tourists. Another thing, I never deliberately sold product to kids. I know they get hold of it, but I didn't sell it to them. Big fucking deal. But if you want me to connect you, I can do it."

  "I'd appreciate it, Tony. I figure this is my last score, though. I'm not cut out for it."

  "Like I am?" he said. His face was flat and expressionless when he looked at me.

  "I didn't mean anything by that."

  "Yeah, nobody does. I tell you what, Dave, go into Copeland's up on St. Charles some Wednesday night. Wednesday is yuppie night in New Orleans. These are people who wouldn't spit on an Italian who grew up in a funeral home. But they got crystal bowls full offtake on their coffee tables. They carry it in their compacts, they chop up lines when they ball each other. In my opinion a lot of them are degenerates. But what the fuck do I know? These are people with law degrees and M.B.A.s. I went to a fucking juco in Miami. You know why? Because it had the best mortuary school in the United States. Except I studied English and journalism. I was on the fucking college newspaper, man. Just before I joined the crotch."

  "I'm not judging you, Tony."

  "The fuck you're not," he said.

  I didn't try to answer him again. He drove for almost a mile without speaking, his tan face as flat as a shingle, the wind puffing his flannel shirt, the sunlight clicking on his dark glasses. Then I saw him take a breath through his nose.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "When you try to get off crank, it puts boards in your head."

  "It's all right."

  "Let's stop up here and buy some crabs. If I don't feed those guys behind us, they'll eat the leather out of the seats. You're not pissed?"

  "No, of course not."

  "You really want me to connect you?"

  "It's what my people need."

  "Maybe you should let those white-collar cocksuckers make their own score."

  I had a feeling Clete would agree with him.

  We ate outside Covington, then took a two-lane road toward Mississippi and the Pearl River country. Finally we turned onto a dirt road, crossed the river on a narrow bridge, and snaked along the river's edge through a thick woods. The water in the river was low, and the sides were steep and covered with brush and dried river trash.

  "It's weird-looking country, isn't it?" Tony said. "Have you ever been around here before?"

  "No, not really. Just on the main highway," I said.

  But I could never hear the name of the Pearl River without remembering the lynchings that took place in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s and the bodies that had been dredged out of the Peal with steel grappling hooks. "Why do you keep your plane over here?"

  "A beaver's always got a back door," he said. "Besides, nobody over here pays any attention to me."

  We wound our way down toward the coast, splashing yellow water out of the puddles in the road. Then the pines thinned and I could see the river again. It was wider here, and the water was higher, and sunk at an angle on the near bank was an old seismographic drill barge. It was orange with rust, and its deck and rails and four hydraulic pilings were strung with gray webs of dried algae.

  "What are you looking at?" Tony said.

  "I used to work on a drill barge like that. Back in the fifties," I said. "They were called doodlebug rigs because they moved from drill hole to drill hole."

  "Huh," he said, not really interested.

  I turned and looked at the drill barge again. All the glass was broken out of the iron pilothouse, and leaves drifted from the tree branches through the windows.

  "You want to stop and take a look?" Tony said.

  "No."

  "We got plenty of time."

  "No, that's all right."

  "It makes you remember your youth or something?"

  "Yeah, I guess," I said.

  But that wasn't it. The drill barge disturbed me, as though I were looking at something from my future rather than my past.

  "You see that hangar and airstrip?" Tony said.

  The woods ended, and up ahead was a cow pasture with a mowed area through the center of it, and a solitary tin hangar with closed doors and a wind sock on the roof.

  "That's where you keep your plane?" I said.

  "No, I keep my plane a mile down the road. Just remember this place."

  "What for?"

  "Just remember it, that's all."

  "All right."

  We drove past the pasture and clumps of cows grazing among the egrets, then entered a pine and hack-berry woods again. At the end of the shaded road I could see more sunny pastureland.

  "I want to tell you something, something I haven't been honest about. Then I want to ask you a question," Tony said.

  "Go ahead."

  "I got a bad feeling, the kind you used to get sometimes in 'Nam. You know what I mean? Like maybe it was really going to happen this time, you were riding back on the dustoff in a body bag. I got that feeling now."

  "It's the withdrawal from the speed."

  "No, this is different. I feel like it's five minutes to twelve and my clock's ticking."

  "They didn't get you over there, did they? Blow it off. Guys like us have a long way to run."

  "Look, like I told you, the only guy working for me I can trust is Jess. But Jess couldn't think his way through wet Kleenex. So I'm going to ask you, if I get clipped, will you look after Paul, make sure that bitch takes care of him, keeps him in good schools, buys him everything he needs?"

  "I appreciate the compliment, but—"

  "Fuck the compliment. I want an answer."

  "Start thinking about a divorce, Tony, and get these other thoughts out of your head."

  "Yes or no?"

  He looked at me, one hand tight on the steering wheel, and we bounced through a deep puddle that splashed water across the windshield.

  "I'd do my best for him," I said. r />
  "I know you will. You're my main man. Right?" And he pointed one finger at me and cocked his thumb, as though he were aiming a pistol, and popped his mouth with his tongue. Then he laughed loudly.

  Late that afternoon I told Tony I was going to have the oil in my truck changed. I drove to a filling station by the shopping center and used the outside pay phone while the attendant put my truck on the rack. I caught Minos at his office and told him of the trip over to Mississippi.

  "When do you think this shipment's coming in?" he said:

  "Any day."

  "All right, we'll get the money in the bus locker for you. Now, let's talk about getting you wired."

  "Minos, I think there might be a problem here with entrapment. This isn't Tony's deal. I'm leading him into it."

  "Anywhere there's dope in Orleans or Jefferson Parish, he's getting a cut out of it."

  "I don't think that's true. He talked about some guys in Metairie running this deal."

  "I don't care what he says. Cardo's dirty when he gets up in the morning. Stop pretending otherwise. Look, if somebody hollers later about entrapment, that's our problem, not yours."

  "I think we're shaving the dice."

  "It's not entrapment if this guy has foreknowledge of a narcotics buy and he takes you into it." He paused to let the exasperation go out of his voice. "You've only got one thing to worry about, Dave—getting close to him with a wire. Now, we can do it two ways, with a microphone or a miniaturized tape recorder."

  "He's not going to do business in the house."

  "Which do you want to use?"

  "How far can the microphone send?"

  "Under the best conditions, without electronic interference or buildings in the way, maybe up to a quarter of a mile."

  "I think I'll be better off with the recorder. That way we won't have to worry about reception problems with the tail."

  "How do you want to pick it up?" he said.

  "I have to go to the doctor's at ten tomorrow morning to get my stitches out. Have somebody at his office." I gave him the address.

  "Then that's about it for right now," he said.

  "Minos, there's one other thing that bothers me. Maybe I imagine it."