DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  "Think about putting Purcel on the payroll. He knows more about the lowlifes than any cop in New Orleans."

  "Yeah, not many ex-cops can produce letters of reference from the Mafia. You really come up with some good ones, Dave."

  That afternoon a message was left for me at Clete's bar. But it was not what I was expecting. It was written in ballpoint in a careful hand on a flattened paper napkin, and it read:

  Dear Dave,

  I was surprised to learn that you were back in New Orleans. I had heard that you had returned to New Iberia to live. I was surprised to hear some other things, too. But maybe life has changed a lot for both of us. I'd love to see you again. I've thought about you many times over the years. Call or come by if you feel like it. I live in the Garden District. It's a long way from Bayou Teche, huh, cher?

  Your old friend,

  Bootsie Mouton Giacano

  Her telephone number and street address were written at the bottom.

  Sometimes the heart can sink with a sense of mortality and loss as abrupt as opening a door to a shop filled with whirring clocks.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  If her name is Bootsie Mouton and it sends you back to 1957 and the best summer of your life. It was after my sophomore year at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, and my brother and I worked all summer on an offshore seismograph rig to buy a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible that we waxed and rubbed with rags until it had a glow like soft butter. One night at a dance out on Spanish Lake I saw her standing by herself under the oak trees by the water's edge, the light from Japanese lanterns flickering on her honey-colored hair, her moist brow and olive skin, the lavender dress she wore with a spray of white flowers pinned above the breast. She kept lifting her hair off her neck in the warm breeze that blew across the water, and pulling at the straps of her dress with her thumb.

  "Would you like to dance?" I said.

  "I can't. I have a fresh sunburn. We went crabbing at Cypremort Point today."

  "Do you want a drink or a beer or a Coke or something?"

  "Somebody went to get one for me."

  "Who?"

  "The boy I came with."

  "Who's that?"

  She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes were dark, her mouth parted and red in the shadows.

  "A boy from Lake Charles," she said.

  "I don't see anybody from Lake Charles here. What kind of drink do you like?"

  "A vodka Collins."

  "Don't move. I'll be right back," I said.

  She lived on the lake, out by the little town of Burke, which was composed mostly of Negro tenant farmers. I told her that I wanted to come out to her house, that night, after her date dropped her off. I was insistent, aggressive, rude, I suppose, but I didn't care. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever met. Finally her date got angry and petulant and left with a group headed for Slick's Club in St. Martinville, and I drove her home down the blacktop highway between the sugarcane fields, the breeze drowsy with the scent of jasmine and magnolia and blooming four-o'clocks, the moss-hung oaks and cypress etched against the moon out on the lake.

  Two weeks later we lost our virginity together. A man always remembers several details about that initial experience, if he has it with someone he loves. I recall the warmness of the evening, the washed-out lilac color of the sky, the rainwater dripping out of the cypress trees onto the motionless surface of the lake, the banks of scarlet clouds in the west that glowed like fire through the cracks in the boathouse wall. But the image that will always remain in my mind was her face in that final heart-twisting moment. Her eyes closed, her lips parted silently, and then she looked up at me like an opening flower and cupped my face in her hands as she would a child's.

  It should never have ended. But it did, and for no reason that I could ever explain to her. Nor could I explain it to my father, a priest in whom I trusted, or myself. Even though I was only twenty years old I began to experience bone-grinding periods of depression and guilt that seemed to have no legitimate cause or origin. When they came upon me it was as though the sun had suddenly become a black cinder, and had gone over the rim of the earth for the last time. I hurt her, pushed her away from me, wouldn't return her telephone calls or answer a poignant and self-blaming note she left on our front screen. Even today I'm hard put to explain my behavior. But I felt somehow that I was intrinsically bad, that anyone who could love me didn't know who I really was, and that eventually I would make that person bad, too.

  It was not a rational state of mind. A psychologist would probably say that my problem was related to my mother's running off with a bourré dealer from Morgan City when I was a child, or the fact that my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked up in the parish jail. I don't know if theories like that would be correct or not. But at the time there was no way I could think myself out of my own dark thoughts, and I became convinced that the happy times with Bootsie had simply been part of the summer's rain-spangled illusion, as transient and mutable as the season had been warm and fleeting.

  When she would not be dissuaded, I took out another girl, a carhop from up north who wore hair rollers in public and always seemed to have sweat rings under her arms. I took her to a lawn party given by Bootsie's aunt and uncle on Bayou Teche, where she got drank and called the waiter a nigger.

  Later that night I got into a fistfight at Slick's, tore the fenders off my car on the drawbridge over the Teche, and woke up in the morning handcuffed to the bottom of the iron ladder on the Breaux Bridge water tower, because it was during Crawfish Festival and the small city jail was already full. As I looked up at the white sun, smelled the hot weeds around me, and swallowed the bile in my throat, I didn't realize that I had just made the initial departure on a long alcoholic odyssey.

  Then the years passed and I would not see her again until I came home from the war. In the meantime I committed myself totally to charcoal-filtered bourbon in a four-inch glass, with a sweating Jax on the side, and finally I didn't care about anything.

  Now she lived on Camp Street in the Garden District. Her married name was Giacano, the same as that of the most notorious Mafia family in New Orleans. I told myself that I should put her note away and save it for another time, when I could afford a futile pursuit of the past. But I seldom listen to my own advice, and that evening I rode the old iron streetcar down St. Charles under the long canopy of spreading oaks, past yards filled with camellias and magnolia trees, sidewalks cracked by oak roots, without having called first, and found myself on Camp in front of a narrow two-story white-painted brick home with twin chimneys, a gallery, and garden walls that enclosed huge clumps of banana trees and dripped with purple bugle vine.

  She answered the door in a one-piece orange bathing suit and an open terry cloth robe, and explained with a flush that she had been dipping leaves out of the pool in the back. Her Cajun accent had been softened by the years in New Orleans, and she was heavier now, wider in the hips, larger in the breasts, thicker across the thighs. She brushed the gray straight up in her honey-colored hair, so that it looked as though it had been powdered there. But Bootsie was still good to look at. Her skin was smooth and still tanned from the summer, her hair cut short like a girl's and etched on the neck with a razor. Her smile was as genuine and happy as it had been thirty years before.

  We walked through her house and onto the patio and sat at a glass-topped table by the pool. She brought out a tray of coffee and milk and pecan pie. The water in the pool was dark and glazed with the evening light, and small islands of oak leaves floated against the tile sides. She had been widowed twice, she told me. Her first husband, an oil-field helicopter pilot, had flown a crew out to a rig south of Morgan City, then hit a guy wire and crashed right on top of the quarter boat. Five years later she had met her second husband, Ralph Giacano, in Biloxi.

  "Have you ever heard of him?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said, and tried to keep my eyes veiled.

  "He told me he had a degree in acc
ounting and owned half of a vending machine company. He didn't have a degree, but he did own part of a company," she said.

  I tried to look pleasant and show no recognition.

  "I found out some of the other things he was involved in after we were married," she said. "Last year somebody killed him and his girlfriend in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack. Poor Ralph. He always said the Colombians wouldn't bother him, he was just a small-business man."

  "I'm sorry, Bootsie."

  "Don't be. I spent two years feeling sorry for Ralph while he mortgaged this house, which was mine from my first marriage, and spent the money in Miami and Las Vegas. So now I own his half of the vending machine business. You know who owns the other half?"

  "The Giacanos were always a tight family."

  "I guess I can't surprise you with very much."

  "Ralph's uncle was a guy named Didi Gee. He's dead now, but three years ago he hired a contract killer to shoot my brother. Jimmie's doing okay now, but for a while I thought I was going to lose him."

  "I didn't know."

  "Maybe it's time to get away from your in-laws."

  "When you sell to the Giacanos, it's twenty cents on the dollar, Dave. Nobody else is lining up to buy into their business, either."

  "Get away from them, Bootsie."

  Her eyes glanced into mine. There was a curious bead of light in them.

  "I don't understand this," she said.

  "What?"

  "You're telling me to get away from them. Then I'm hearing this strange story about you."

  I looked away from her.

  "You hear a lot of bullshit in the streets," I said.

  "This is from my in-laws, Dave. They work for Tony Cardo."

  I didn't answer and tried to grin good-naturedly. Her eyes peeled the skin off my face.

  "They say you're dirty. Don't they have a wonderful vocabulary?" she said.

  I pushed at a piece of piecrust on my plate with my fork.

  "They say you want to deal," she said.

  "You have to make up your own mind about people."

  "I know you, Dave Robicheaux. I don't care what you've done in your life, this stuff isn't you."

  "Then ignore what they say, Bootsie, and stay out of it."

  "I'm worried about you. I work with these people. You can't believe how they think, what they're capable of doing."

  "Oh yes I can."

  "Then what are you doing?"

  "Be my friend on this. Don't mix in it, and don't worry too much about what you hear."

  Her face was lighted with the late sun's glow over the garden wall. She raised her chin slightly, the way she always did when she was angry.

  "Dave, you left me. Do you think you should be telling me what to do now?"

  "I guess not."

  "I survive among these animals because I have to. It isn't fun. I'm on my own, and that isn't fun, either. But I handle it."

  "I guess you do."

  "Why didn't you marry me?" she said. Her eyes were hot and bright.

  "You'd have married a drunk. It wouldn't have been a good life, believe me."

  "You don't know that. You don't know that at all."

  "Yes, I do. I became a full-blown lush. I tried to kill my first wife's lover at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain."

  "Maybe that's what he deserved."

  "I tried to kill him because I had become morally insane."

  "I don't care what you did later in your life. Why'd you close me out, Dave?"

  I let my hands hang between my knees.

  "Because I was dumb," I said.

  "It's that simple?"

  "No, it's not. But how about suffice it to say that I made a terrible mistake, that I've had regret about it all these years."

  Her legs were crossed, her arms motionless on the sides of the cushioned iron chair, her face composed now in the tea-colored light. The top of her terry cloth robe was loose, and I could see her breasts rise and fall quietly with her breathing.

  "I do have to go," I said.

  "Are you coming back?"

  "If you'd like to see me again, I'd surely like to see you."

  "I'm not moving out of town, cher." Then her face became soft and she said, "But, Dave, I've learned one thing with middle age. I don't try to correct yesterday's mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once."

  "No one could ever say they were unsure where you stood on an issue, Boots."

  She smiled without answering, then walked me to the front door, put her palms on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek. It was an appropriate and kind gesture and would not have meant much in itself, but then she looked into my face and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as though she were saying goodbye to someone forever, and I felt my loins thicken and my heart turn to water.

  It was almost dark when I got off the streetcar at the corner of St. Charles and Canal and went into the Pearl and had a poor-boy sandwich filled with oysters, shrimp, sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and sauce piquante. Then I walked to my apartment and paused momentarily outside my door while I found my key. The people upstairs were partying out on the balcony, and one of them accidentally kicked a coffee can of geraniums into the courtyard. But in spite of the noise I thought I heard someone inside my apartment. I put my hand on the .25-caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, unlocked the door, and let it swing all the way back against the wall on its hinges.

  Lionel Comeaux, the man I'd found working under his car on the creeper, was in the kitchen, pulling the pots and pans out of the cabinet and placing them on the table. The jolly fat man who called himself Uncle Ray Fontenot and said he used to play trombone at Sharky's Dream Room had emptied the drawers in the bedroom and had laid all my hangered clothes across the bed. My .45 lay on top of a neatly folded shirt. Both of them looked at me with flat, empty expressions, as though I were the intruder.

  The fat man, Fontenot, wore a beige suit and a cream turtleneck shirt. I saw his eyes study my face and my right hand; then he smiled and opened his palms in front of him.

  "It's just business, Mr. Robicheaux," he said. "Don't take it personal. We've treated your things with respect."

  "How'd you get in?"

  "It's a simple lock," he said.

  "You've got some damn nerve," I said.

  "Close the door. There's people out there," Lionel, the man in the kitchen, said. He wore Adidas running shoes, blue jeans with no belt, a gold pullover sweater with the sleeves pushed up over his thick, sun-browned arms.

  I could hear my own breathing in the silence.

  "Lionel's right," Fontenot said. "We don't need an audience here, do we? Getting mad isn't going to make us any money, either, is it?"

  I took my hand out of my coat pocket and opened and closed it at my side.

  "Come in, come in," Fontenot said. "Look, we're putting your things back. There's no harm done."

  "You toss my place and call it no harm?" I said. I pushed the door shut behind me.

  "You knew somebody would check you out. Don't make it a big deal," the younger man said in the kitchen. He lit a dead cigar in his mouth and squatted down and started replacing the pots and pans in the cabinets next to the stove.

  "I don't like people smoking in my apartment," I said.

  He turned his head at me and paused in his work. The red Navy tattoo on his flexed bicep was ringed with blue stars. He was balanced on the ball of one foot, the cigar between his fingers, a tooth working on a bloodless spot on his lower lip. Fontenot walked out of the other room.

  "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."