The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (10 page)

“I thought we had it all dicked out so smooth,” Ledoux said, then looked at Duncan in the rearview mirror.

Duncan did not reply.

“Mon Dieu,” Ledoux said and pulled to the side of the road. “Get in the front seat, huh? It looks sort of odd, you sittin’ back there when the front seat is empty.”

“Sure.”

When Duncan had shifted his bulk from back to front, Ledoux headed out of town on South River Road.

The edge of town was the point at which houses became more rare, but larger and newer, with lawns kept cleaner than a Presbyterian retreat and long sleek driveways that acknowledged the street only by affecting wrought-iron gates with cherub locks. Ledoux drove past these upscale snubs until River Road crossed the railroad tracks and became a white rock lane.

The lane curved and dipped deep into the lush tangle of trees, weeds, and mud that bordered the river. The VW bounced through weeds that were double its height and around trees that were nearly as thick. Ledoux stalled twice in red-mud gullies but managed to climb out both times.

Soon they came upon Ledoux’s black Pinto parked in a small clearing just back of a river bluff. Ledoux slowed enough to look over the car, then, having seen that it had not been tampered with, he drove on. A couple of football fields further on he stopped beneath the remains of a railroad bridge. The breeze bounced off of the black skeletal shape in haunting musical phrases.

He parked near the edge of the bluff, overlooking the wide expanse of strong-flowing rank water. Swirls and eddies marked the treacherous spots in the flow.

Duncan walked to look down the steep bluff, leaning carefully at the edge.

“Is it deep enough here?” he asked.

“It’s been dredged,” Ledoux said with certainty. “I know this river good. You could drop the Arch in there and just have enough stickin’ up to dive off of.”

“Hunh.” Duncan had the pistol in the front of his waistband. He
tapped at it with his fingernails. Offshore and thirty yards downstream there was a large sandbar that seemed handy, but remote. “Should I toss this piece over there, Pete? Or keep it?” He held the pistol up. “That’d be a good place to dump it.”

Ledoux had been looking through the car for anything that might have been accidentally dropped. He didn’t find anything.

“Did you use it?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“Then why toss it? That’s a Browning Hi-Power. It’s got fourteen shots and no serial number. I can’t get that many of ’em, peckerwood.”

Duncan’s face tightened and his slouch straightened indignantly.

“Hey, man, I’m workin’ for you and all, but you should know this: pricks don’t make friends.”

A well-practiced snort of derision honked from Ledoux.

“I don’t want friends, you silly shit. Friends—hah! Friends are the ones shoot you twice in the back of the head. Friends snitch you out for the long stretches. Up the joint, you see a guy doin’ life you can figure he had one too many friends.”

Duncan smirked.

“Let me see. I reckon that’s supposed to rattle me, huh? Supposed to sound hardcase and brilliant or something, ain’t it?”

“That’s what you think, but you don’t know, do you?”

After a short smile-and-stare-off between the two men Ledoux returned to the car. He released the parking brake and moved the gearshift to neutral.

“We got to walk back to my car,” Ledoux said. “I like to get exercise over with as soon as possible. Let’s sink this hunk of junk.”

The men walked to the rear of the car so they could shove in unison.

“Maybe we should wait,” Duncan said. “You know, until we can put Jewel in there like we wanted.”

“Uh-uh,” Ledoux said. “That plan is out the window. Just do what I say.”

The men leaned into the car and pushed. Once the car started rolling
it was easy. The yellow VW staggered over the slick mudbank and slid sideways into the river.

They stood on the bluff and watched. Brown waves lapped at the car doors and the bug began to shake.

“If Jewel was in there we’d be done and home clean,” Duncan said sadly.

“Yeah. Only
he
ain’t and
we
ain’t.”

The VW now picked up speed downstream, not sinking, but bobbing like a gargantuan cork.

“Oh, shit!” Ledoux said. “Those fuckin’ things don’t sink. Lucky damn thing we didn’t get the punk. He’d be propped up in there grinnin’ at fishermen and skinny-dippers all the way to Baton Rouge.”

“Nah,” Duncan said. “They sink. I think they sink. But slow.”

“It better.”

“Maybe I should shoot it, you know. Help it sink.”

“Not now.”

The car submerged slowly as it drifted with the current. When only the roof and part of the rear window were above water the car nudged into the sandbar and stuck.

“I could blast the windows out if you want.”

“No. It beat us. Let it go.”

Ledoux stared at the uncooperative vehicle for another moment, then turned and stomped down the lane toward his own car. His face was pursed in serious thought and his feet sank in the mud of the lane.

“Tell me,” he said, “has the moon been actin’ odd lately, or anything like that?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“I mean, have you noticed?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Duncan replied, humoring the older man.

“But you wouldn’t anyway, would you? You wouldn’t know odd if you saw it.”

“I think I might, yeah. If it was real odd.”

Ledoux snorted, then sped up.

“Real odd makes the newspapers, peckerwood. For God’s sake—it’s the
minor
odds you got to train yourself to spot. I learned that the hard way.”

“Not well enough, though,” Duncan said with a laugh.

“That,” Ledoux said, “will have to be proved.”

9

E
ARLIER IN
the afternoon Shade had been directed to Captain Bauer’s office. He knocked on the thick maple, windowless door, then let himself in. The captain was standing in front of the far office window, his hands hanging limply at his sides. Mayor Crawford, dressed in black funereal garb of Italian cut and gemstone worth, sat on the settee with his legs crossed and his hands clasped over the dominant knee.

The cloud of contentment that Nicole’s visit had left Shade on evaporated abruptly.

The mayor nodded toward a young dark man of stovepipe build in a three-piece blue pinstripe suit, with a yellow hankie flourish in the breast pocket.

“I don’t believe you two need an introduction,” he said.

“No, I think not,” Shade said, sensing a skillful squeeze play beginning to develop. “How’s tricks, Francois?” he said to his younger brother.

“Unsuccessful,” Francois replied. “That’s why I concentrate on just being good.”

The captain turned to look at him, grimaced, then swiveled back to the apparently mesmerizing view outside the window.

The mayor caught Shade’s eye and smiled.

“Your brother has caught the Rankin case—isn’t that cozy? We like to see good coordination between the police and the D.A.’s office.”

“Yes, Mayor,” Francois said, hunching forward into the power mode squat. “That’s crucial to winning cases.”

“Uh, yes,” said the mayor with a peaked smile. “Of course.” He stood then and walked to the door. “Frank—if I may call you Frank?”

“Please do.”

“—has been briefed on the case. You two do whatever it is you do. Share info, or whatever.”

“What info?” Shade asked.

“Look, Shade,” Mayor Crawford said, “we have files and more files on a cornucopia of burglars, I’m sure. How about starting with
that
information?”

When the mayor had gone, Captain Bauer excused himself with an embarrassed grunt, and left the brothers alone in his office.

Francois stood, smiled nervously, then strode to the massive desk and perched on the edge of it. He ran a long-fingered hand across his thirty-dollar haircut.

“Look,” he said. “This is business, blood.”

Shade nodded slowly.

“I’m a hundred percent ears.”

“Well, what it is is there’s beaucoup pitfalls surrounding this case, Rene. I mean, a dude could make one little bitty step wrong here, but it could turn out to be the giantest step he ever took—right or wrong.”

Shade looked away, feeling the blood rise in his face. In front of other lawyers or businessmen or women in Parisian attire, Francois spoke in the official tongue of the upwardly mobile—articulate, guardedly precise, and devoid of any personal flair—but with his own brother he felt obliged to revert to the patois of Lafitte Street and childhood. It was as if he was not certain that Shade could understand anything else.

“Righteous,” Shade said. “Everything’s wired, and that’s on the maximum square, blood.”

Francois had a longer face than his brother, with sharper, more Gallic features, and his eyes were hazel rather than blue, but there was equal belligerence in the lines of their jaws. He cocked one thick eyebrow at his brother’s response.

“Been going to night school, eh, Rene?”

“Don’t do that,” Shade snapped. He had not finished college, had in fact only acted as if he intended to for one year, and Francois often intimated that this lack of letter-grade accreditation was a huge gulf between them. This regularly pissed Shade off, and he found that, for some reason, with a mysterious link to logic, blood relatives could spark his temper more surely and fiercely than any other members of the planet. “This is business, I thought. We can dozen it out some other time.”

Francois hoisted his chin in silent agreement.

“Okay,” he said. “Now, as I have it, Rankin surprised an intruder and was killed by the undoubtedly terrified individual. Perhaps because Rankin could identify him.”

“Jesus shit,” Shade said. He found himself walking to the same window the captain had been drawn to. “You’re supposed to ride herd on me. They put my little fuckin’ brother on me to make sure I only uncover the
right
dirt. I saw it comin’, soon as I opened that door.”

“Come on,” Francois barked. “Look, I’m just here to coordinate things. You know, a lot of people are nervous about this case. Some nasty misunderstandings could come out of this if it’s played to the crowd, man. You know that. So we need to straighten it out quickly.” He then pushed up from the desk and faced his shorter brother. “Besides, I’m only a year younger.”

“You haven’t really been younger for a long time.”

A smile spread Francois’s thick lips.

“I know,” he said.

A sort of fond sadness meandered through Shade. It was partly because he loved his brother and knew him perfectly, partly because he did not know him at all. The unlighted chamber where one’s true and most secret longings and convictions are housed has a door that is impressively sealed. The more you turn the knob and peek through the keyhole, the more you have to guess, and the less you know.

“You sound proud to be older than you should be,” Shade said.

“Oh,” Francois breathed theatrically, “being young is an overrated sidetrack.” He shrugged his shoulders like a wink. “I’m more impressed by the mainline of things.”

“You’re willing enough to pay the price of riding it.”

“You pay the price, big bro, whether you ride
it
or
it
rides you. Let’s be our ages, huh?”

There had been a time, not too long ago, when Francois had been energetic in his defense of the stepped-on multitudes, passionate in his pleas for those mendicants before the bar, those old neighborhood losers whose humanity he would not deny. He’d had a threat in his stance toward the system that had not always been kind to those close to him, and a mind quick to become belligerent in his quest of justice for the smallfry. Justice. But over the last few years something had changed, an unexpected metamorphosis brought on by the passing of days. Marriage to a Hawthorne Hills lady; turning thirty; a series of educational connivings with triple-last-named deal cutters who groveled profitably, and only into golden cups; and consequent greenbacks. He still sought justice, but more and more, justice had become a pseudonym, an alias, for Francois Shade, late of Lafitte Street, but lately of Wyndham Lane.

“Okay,” Shade said. “Let’s us
do
talk some turkey. What’s in this for you, ol’ brother o’ mine?”

Their eyes met and there was no shame or fear in either face.

“It’s my job. For now.” Francois made an excusing gesture with his hands. “This thing could have interesting ripples for years. Alvin Rankin was black, you know.”

“I think I made a mental note of that, yes.”

“Well, he was a good man. A good Democrat. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for me to be the man who prosecuted on this. But that depends on whom I’m prosecuting, too.”

“Ah. So if you can cook it up in a way that the party’s skirts are entirely clean you might make city councilman, or something.”

“Well, yes. But that’s just the crudest bit of it. As far as cities are concerned, Rene, if you want to be elected in the next thirty years, you better have good rapport with blacks and Latins. A lot of whites aren’t ready to understand that, but they’re going to the hard way if they don’t get with it.”

“And this helps you there.”

“It could. It’s not a career maker, but, yes, it could help. I mean, any white pol who wants to be mayor and stay mayor had best take wide steps away from those old amusing Irish sorts of ways. It’s quaint, but it won’t play much longer.”

“Well, thanks,” Shade said. “That’s fairly blunt.”

Both men smiled, and Shade felt tickled by the vibrations of some strange, submerged pride, for he’d just been tipped by a knowing tout who had the extra grace of kinship. There was a kind of backroom pleasure in it, and he could see how a man could be captivated by the process of success.

“That’s as blunt as it’s going to get, too,” Francois said. “And all this has put me in mind of our rather motley family constellation. To wit: how’s Tip?”

“Nasty as always.”

“That’s reassuring. People keep mentioning him to me, you know. I wish he’d change his name.”

Shade laughed.

“I have an idée fixe that
he
feels ditto about us.”