A Morning for Flamingos (33 page)

“The mortuary?” I said.

“That’s right, man. I peeled them out of the body bags, cleaned the jelly out of their mouths and ears, washed them down, embalmed them, and boxed them. Because I’d had it with the war. And I’d lost my guts, too. I just wasn’t going out again. I didn’t care if I was a public coward or not.”

He drank from the bourbon, then leaned forward on his thighs. He rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck and looked at his hand.

“Maybe it took courage to do that, Tony,” I said.

“No, I was afraid. There’s no way around that fact.” His voice was tired.

“You could have gotten out of the bush in other ways. You could have given yourself a minor wound. A second Heart would have put you in a safe area. You think maybe it’s possible you volunteered for the mortuary to punish yourself?”

He looked up at my face. The skin around his left eye was puckered with thought.

“You can beat up on yourself the rest of your life if you want to. But no matter how you cut it, you’re no coward. I’ll give you something else to think about, too. On your worst day over there, you probably proved yourself in ways that an average person couldn’t even imagine. It was
our
war, Tony. People who weren’t there don’t understand it. Most of them never wanted to understand it. But you ask yourself this question: would any grunt who was, in the meat grinder judge you harshly? In fact, is there anyone at all who can say you didn’t do your share?”

He widened his eyes and looked between his legs at the concrete floor. He pinched the bridge of his nose and made a snuffling sound. He started to speak, then cleared his throat and looked at the floor again.

“Better get some clothes on,” I said. “You’ll catch cold down here.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

“I guess I’ll see you at the house,” I said.

“I lied about something. I don’t use this place for Paul and me to camp. You see that AR-15? I used to come down here and sit in the dark with it and think about doing myself. When you turn off the light it’s just like a black box, like the inside of a grave. I’d put the front sight under my teeth and let it touch the roof of my mouth and my mind would go completely empty. It felt good.”

I pushed on the trapdoor, which was made of steel and overlaid with concrete and swung up and down on thick black springs, and walked up the steps into the balmy November afternoon. The moss-hung oaks by the back wall were loud with blue jays and mockingbirds. I looked back down into the shelter and saw Tony still seated on the side of the bunk, his face pointed downward, the skin of his back as tight as a lampshade, bright with sweat.

I went up to the shopping center and called Minos at his office to find out about Kim, but he still hadn’t returned. When I got back to Tony’s house, the school bus had just dropped off Paul, and Jess was wheeling him inside.

“How you doing, Paul?” I said.

“Great. Special class got to go on the Amtrak train today.” He wore a striped trainman’s hat, a checked shirt, and blue jeans with a cowboy belt.

“I bet that was fun, wasn’t it? Where’s your old man?”

“Getting dressed.” He grinned broadly. “Dad was exercising on the lawn in his underwear.”

“Why not? It’s good weather for it,” I said, and winked at him.

“You got a phone message,” Jess said. “From that friend of yours who runs the bar, what’s his name?”

“Clete?”

“Yeah, he says to call him at the bar.”

“Thank you.”

“Dad said we all might go to a movie tonight,” Paul said.

“Well, I’m supposed to have dinner with a friend tonight.”

“Oh.”

“How about tomorrow night, maybe?” I said.

“Sure,” he said, but I could see the disappointment in his face.

Jess wheeled him up the ramp into the house, and I used the phone in the kitchen to call Clete.

“Where are you?” Clete said.

“At Tony’s.”

“Can you talk, or do you want to call me back from somewhere else?”

“What is it?”

“Nate Baxter’s in the bar.”

“I see.”

“He says he’s here if you want to talk to him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know Nate. Always looking inside his pants to make sure of his gender.”

“If it makes him happy, tell him I’ll be looking him up one of these days.”

“He said one thing, though, that’s a little bothersome. He said, ‘Tell Robicheaux I know he’s got the broad stashed.’”

The house was quiet except for the sound of shower water in the bathroom that adjoined Tony’s bedroom.

“You there, Dave?” Clete said.

“Yes.”

“It sounds like our man knows a little more than he should.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Drinking at the bar.”

“I’ll be there in a half hour.”

I told Tony that I had to run a couple of errands downtown, then I was going to Bootsie’s for supper.

“Was that Bootsie on the phone?” he asked. He stood in his bedroom door, with a towel wrapped around his waist, raking the water out of his hair with a comb.

“No, it was Clete. He knows a guy who might give me a good deal on a boat.”

“I feel a lot better after a shower.” He stopped combing his hair. “Hey, tell me straight about something. Down there in the shelter, you weren’t just playing with my head? I mean… we’re not talking about a loss of respect here?”

“No.”

“Because I don’t push myself on people.”

“You didn’t push yourself on me.”

“You wanted to know what happened, I told you.”

I nodded without replying.

“But if a guy thinks less of me because of it, I don’t hold it against him. We’re clear on this?” he said.

“You’re not the only guy who brought back a problem from there, Tony. I’ve got my own. Maybe they’re worse than yours.”

“Yeah?”

“I got four of my men killed on a trail because I did something reckless and stupid. Everybody has his own basket of snakes to deal with.”

“Your voice has a little edge to it, Dave.”

“I think pride’s a pile of shit.”

He laughed. “You sure don’t hide your thoughts, do you?” he said. “How about bringing Bootsie out here for supper, then we’ll all go to a movie.”

“It’s kind of a private evening, Tony.”

“Paul was looking forward to it.”

“Then you should have told me earlier, podna,”

He nodded silently, then began dressing in front of a full-length mirror as though I were not there.

I didn’t have time to worry any more about Tony’s mood changes and his addict’s propensity for trying to control everyone and everything in his environment. In fact, maybe we were too much alike in that regard, and for that reason I not only got along better with him than I should have as a policeman, I also saw my own menagerie of snapping dogs at work inside him. When I got to Clete’s Club, Nate Baxter was by himself at the far end of the bar, one shined brown loafer propped on the brass footrail. He wore sharply creased tan slacks, an open-necked yellow shirt, and a herringbone sports coat. His gold watch and gold identification bracelet gleamed softly in the light.

“You’re looking sharp, Nate,” I said.

He tipped his cigarette ashes neatly into an ashtray and took a sip from his highball glass, his eyes looking at me in the bar mirror.

“You know a DEA agent by the name of Minos Dautrieve?” he asked.

“He’s out of Lafayette. Yeah, I know him.”

“He’s in New Orleans now. He’s running a sting.”

“Why tell the family secrets to me?”

“I underestimated you,” he said.

“I have to be somewhere in a few minutes. What did you want to say to me, Nate?”

“She’s my snitch. You shouldn’t have messed with her.”

“What are we talking about here?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You were in her place out in Metairie. You got her stashed. But it’s not going to do you any good. She’s our witness, and she’s going to testify for us. You can tell that to Dautrieve for me if you want to.”

“You’re going a little fast for me.”

“The girl she was staying with works in the same club out on the Airline Highway. She told us you and Purcel were in her place. She said later some feds picked up the Dollinger broad. So I underestimated you. You’ve still got your badge, haven’t you? But that doesn’t mean you get to screw up our operation.”

“This is what you had to tell me?”

He tipped his cigarette ashes into the ashtray again. He still had not looked directly at me. He took a puff off his cigarette, then scratched his beard with one fingernail.

“You can tell Kim Dollinger she either comes in or we send her brother up the road,” he said. “Don’t let that broad jerk you around, Robicheaux. I could have charged her when we busted her brother. She was as dirty as he was.”

“Do you know that Jimmie Lee Boggs almost killed her?”

“You got a vested interest or something? We’re talking about a snitch who was setting Tony C. up for a fall while she was banging him cross-eyed over in a beach house in Biloxi.”

“Listen—”

“No, you’ve got it wrong. You listen. We’ve worked on this case eight months. You guys come along and think you’re going to wrap up Tony C. in a few weeks. In the meantime you don’t inform us that you’re working undercover, and then you’ve got the balls to grab my snitch.”

“You coerced her into prostituting herself.”

He turned his head and looked at me. The neon bar lights made the neatly trimmed edge of his beard glow with a reddish tinge.

“She was working at Tony C.‘s club before she ever came to our attention,” he said. “He probably had to tie a board across his ass to keep from falling inside.”

I saw Clete walk out of his office in back and begin changing a light bulb over the bandstand. The back of the club was empty.

“You’re a bad cop, Baxter. But worse, you don’t have any feelings about people,” I said. “There’s a word for that—pathological.”

“Take somebody else’s inventory, Robicheaux. I’m not interested. Here’s what it comes down to. You fuck up this investigation, you keep getting in my face, causing me problems, I wouldn’t count on the department protecting your cover. Anyway, I’ve had my say. Just stay away from me.”

He turned back to his drink and ran his tongue along his gums. I opened and closed my hands at my sides.

“You gonna have something, suh?” the black barman said.

“No, thank you,” I said.

I continued to stare at the side of Baxter’s face, the grained skin on the back of his neck. I could hear my breath in my nostrils. Then I turned and walked toward the open front door. My body felt wooden, my arms and legs disjointed. The sun reflecting off a windshield outside was like a sliver of glass in the eye. I stopped, looked back, and saw Baxter go into the rest room by the bandstand.

When I pushed open the rest room door he was combing his hair in front of the mirror.

“If you do anything to hurt that girl again, or if you compromise my situation here in New Orleans, I’m going down to your office, in front of people, and give you the worst day in your insignificant life,” I said.

He turned from the mirror, slipped his leather comb case out of his shirt pocket, blew in it before he replaced the comb; his breath reflected into my face. He used the back of his left hand to push me aside.

I heard a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping behind my eyes and saw a rush of color in my mind, like amorphous red and black clouds turning in dark water, and as though it had a life of its own my right fist hooked into his face and caught him squarely in the eye socket. His head snapped sideways, and I saw the white imprints of my knuckles on his skin and the watery electric shock in his eye.

But I had stepped into it. His right hand came out of his coat pocket with a leather-covered blackjack, an old-fashioned one that was shaped like a darning egg, with a spring built into the braided grip. I tried to raise my forearm in front of me, but the blackjack
whopped
across the top of my left shoulder and I felt the blow sink deep into the bone. The muscles in my chest and side quivered and then seemed to collapse, as if someone had run a heated metal rod through the trajectory of Jimmie Lee Boggs’s bullet.

I was bent forward, my palm pressed hard against the throbbing pain below my collarbone, my eyes watering uncontrollably, the lip of the washbasin a wet presence across my buttocks. The expression in Baxter’s eyes was unmistakable.

“Just one more for the road,” he said softly.

But Clete pushed the door back on its springs and stepped into the room like an elephant entering a phone booth. His unblinking eyes went from me to the blackjack; then his huge fist crashed against the side of Baxter’s head. Baxter’s face went out of round, his automatic flew from his shoulder holster, and he tripped sideways over the toilet bowl and fell on top of the trash can in a litter of crumpled paper towels.

Clete grimaced and shook his hand in the air, then rubbed his knuckles.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

“He threatened to blow my cover.”

Clete looked down at Baxter in the corner. Baxter’s eyes were half-closed, his mouth hung open, and one hand twitched on his stomach.

“You hit him first?” Clete said.

“Yep.”

Clete chewed his lip.

“He’ll use it, then. That’s not good, not good,” he said, and began making clicking sounds with his tongue. He reached down and patted Baxter on the cheek. “Wake-up time, Nate.”

Baxter widened his eyes, then started to sit up among the wet towels and fell back down again. Clete lifted him by the back of his herringbone jacket and folded him over the rim of the toilet bowl.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Freshen up, Nate. That’s it, my man. Splash a little on your face and it’s a brand-new day,” Clete said.

He flushed the toilet and pushed Baxter’s head farther down into the bowl.

“That’s enough, Clete,” I said.

Someone tried to open the door.

“This toilet is occupied right now,” Clete said. He lifted Baxter off the bowl and propped him against the wall, then squatted down and blotted his face with paper towels. “Hey, you’re looking all right, Nate. How many fingers am I holding up? Three. Look, three fingers. That’s it, take a deep breath. You’re going to be fine. Look, I’m putting your piece back in your holster. Here’s your sap. Come on, look up at me, now.”