The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (3 page)

As Shade watched, Tip poured a double shot of bourbon and pulled a draw for a lanky hustler named Pavelich, who’d once bowled the best game in town, but now regularly bowled the second best for better side money. Tip shoved him his change, then walked down to Shade’s end of the bar.

“Another rum, li’l blood?” Tip asked in his slow but somehow belligerent voice.

“But of course. Put it on your bill.”

Tip smiled and raised a bottle of Jamaican dark and poured a healthy dollop into Shade’s glass.

“Free rum is one thing, drivin’ my business away would be another. You lookin’ for somebody, or just lonesome to mix with your peers?”

“Have I ever busted anybody in here?”

“Thankfully, no. Or I’d have to bust you.”

There was more in that comment than sibling rivalry, Shade thought.
Tip always had acted as if he could punish Shade whenever there was a need to. Shade conceded that it could be true. At one seventy, he was outweighed by about sixty pounds, had an advantage in speed but none in unrefereed experience, and knew that their battle hearts were of equal girth.

Shade smiled and nodded.

“I haven’t busted any of this crowd, but I could easy enough.” He turned on his chair to view more of the room. “I could make six busts on my way to the pisser.”

“And lose the goodwill of your neighbors and childhood playmates, li’l blood.”

“I could probably pop you, Tip, if I spent ten or twelve minutes in the effort.”

Tip began to nod, then shook his head. “I could be eight kinds of crooked, there, piglet, but I ain’t never been no kind of dumb.”

Shade wondered, for perhaps the thousandth time, what his older brother might’ve become had his knees held out for more than two memorable seasons of college ball.

“Genes will tell,” Shade said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Ah, I can’t be sure, but I’d be a more confident man if I was.”

Tip moved down the bar to tend to a group of men who’d begun shaking their empty mugs at him.

Shade returned to his contemplation of the clientele. He’d known many of them since his childhood, had teamed with them in sandlot games of every sort, sparred with them beneath the elms of Frechette Park on cool summer mornings, and clustered with them at Catholic Church dances where they shared whiskey cleverly secreted in Coke bottles. He’d fought them in the crowded-alley scraps of youth that still seemed more important than those of adulthood, run errands for the older men, and watched as their daughters were happily married off to outsiders, returning to Frogtown only for very short holidays and funerals.

A compact hand nudged him on the shoulder, rousing him from a nostalgia he wasn’t sure he believed in.

“Rene. Don’t see you much these days. What’re you up to tonight?”

It was Wendell Piroque, a keg-shaped teamster who had probably steered more blackjacks than trucks. Shade had known him since grade school, when Piroque had hung out at his mother’s poolroom.

“Just drinkin’ on Tip.”

“Lucky for you,” Piroque said, resting on the next stool. “A good brother to have, a bartender is.” Piroque had a sweet, round face, with dark features, and his smile was all innocence. “And your mother runs a poolroom. Must be the Irish half of you, gives you that luck.”

“Must be. There are no famous sayings about Frogs having it.”

“Not in this town, anyhow,” Piroque said as he tapped a finger on the bar surface. He suddenly pointed toward the pool table at the rear of the room, a table that was mysteriously underused. “Shoot a game?”

“You got the table roll figured or something?”

“Would I do that to you?” Piroque asked in mock horror.

“You’d do it to yourself, I think, if you could be two chumps at once.”

Shade led the way through the maze of tables, nodding at those who nodded at him, saying hello twice, and being stared down once.

“Nine ball?” Piroque asked when they reached the table.

“If you insist,” Shade said. “But you might as well just hand me your cash.”

Piroque was bent over the green felt, his tongue peeking from the side of his mouth, studiously racking the balls.

“I think different,” he said.

“That’s good,” Shade said. He was a broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, chronically fit man, not youthful but still young, and his blue eyes lit up with the prospect of competition. “That’s what keeps me interested enough to hang on to the planet.”

The two uniformed patrolmen entered the Catfish at a few minutes past 1
A.M
. The larger of the two was a black man who loomed over his squat partner. As they approached the bar the squalling conversations dropped to a whisper, then silence. The patrolmen attempted to meet the glares of the patrons to show command of the situation, but found
that two pairs of eyes cannot upstage thirty, and that their erect postures and imitative confidence were seen as comic acting rather than cool control.

The bartender stood with his arms folded, his upper lip hidden by his lower in a warning pout.

“Hey, Shade,” the squat patrolman said. “Your brother here?”

Tip sneered, then swung his head upward, indicating the back of the room.

“There he is,” the black patrolman said. “At the pool table.”

Shade leaned on his cue as he watched the blue aliens approach. He scanned the layout on the table, then turned to meet them. Before they could speak, he said, “One more inning and I got it bagged.”

The smaller patrolman shook his head. “Captain Bauer says now.”

Piroque overapplied English and threw off an attempted combo of the six-nine. He straightened, scraped chalk on the cue tip, and smiled at Shade.

“You could forfeit,” he said. “If duty calls.”

“No,” Shade said. He stepped up to the table, calculated the odds on his running out, then bent over to shoot. With his left arm bulging lean muscles like twisted brown taffy he poised to stroke. “Six ball,” he said, and sank it, the high left on the cue ball carrying it to the far rail.

“Captain’s waitin’,” the short beat man said. “What’s it goin’ to cost you?”

“Nothing,” Shade said. He had a hope, and it involved a bank shot combination, for a run-out was stymied by the far-flung eight ball. “Seven-nine. In the corner, just in case I make it I’ll have witnesses.” He positioned himself for the shot, stroked the cue ball dead on, with no English, and watched as the seven ball banked across the table and did just what it was meant to do—kick the nine ball gently into the pocket.

He turned to Piroque, whose hand was already in his wallet.

“Save it, Wendell. Get your kid a model airplane.”

“Uh-uh,” Piroque said, shaking his head. “When you come up short, you got to shell out.” He handed Shade a five-dollar bill without ceremony. “You shoot decent stick, Shade. I’ll give you that. But I got
to tell you, you still ain’t good enough to hold your old man’s chalk, you know?”

“Thanks, Wendell,” Shade said.

“Detective,” the talkative patrolman said, his foot leaving the ground in a weak stomp of insistence. “It shouldn’t be takin’ us this long.”

Shade followed the uniforms toward the door, conscious of the near silence, and the truculent presence of Tip’s eyes upon him. At the bar Tip beckoned to him by crooking a finger.

“Yeah?” Shade said.

Tip leaned toward him, then did a threatening flex of his massive arms. “Keep your new friends out of here.” Tip’s blunt-featured, pockmarked face was expressionless, but his brown eyes were flat with anger. “You can play with them in the street, but not in the house, understand?”

“Why don’t you bounce them?”

Tip glared at Shade. “You owe me for the rum now, smart-ass,” he said, rearing back. “It decided not to be free.”

“I got business,” Shade said and walked toward the door.

Tip came around the bar like it was a pudgy high school lineman and Shade a passing quarterback. The two patrolmen dropped their fingers onto the handles of their street-issue pacifiers. They looked around nervously as the brothers confronted each other.

“Stay the fuck out of here if you’re goin’ to cause me trouble,” Tip said. He clenched his fist and waved it vaguely in Shade’s direction. “I told you, you cost me business and I’ll drop-kick your ass, brother or not.”

After scraping his fingers beneath his chin, an ancient taunt, Shade said, “When you feel froggy, start jumping, bro.”

Tip opened his mouth to retort, then looked at the uniforms and took a backward step. He nodded several times.

“Been a pleasure seein’ you, Rene. Drop me a postcard along about Armageddon, hear?”

Shade turned away, then paused before the large, prominent picture of himself in a bruised and humbled state.

“Next time I come callin’, Tip, it’d be good if that was gone.”

“Naw. It’s my favorite,” Tip said in a strained whisper. “ ’Cause it’s you to a tee, li’l blood. It’s you to a tee.”

Shade looked back at the picture and studied it complacently. Finally he shrugged and threw up his hands. “It’s everybody once in a while,” he said, then walked out the door.

Some of the blood had splattered the television set. Detective How Blanchette craned his neck over the expensive RCA and looked on the table behind it. There were flecks of gray and chunks of white visible in the smears of red.

“Looks like he was turnin’ the channel or somethin’, is what would be my guess,” he said. “If I was paid for guessin’ I’d be done.”

The patrolman to whom he’d spoken did not respond. He was transfixed by the crumpled body of a middle-aged black man, a man who’d been ruined by the sudden excavation of the back of his head.

“You spot any clues in the body language, there, Cooper?” Blanchette asked. Blanchette was sandy-haired and fat, and he insisted on wearing, at almost all times, a black leather trench coat that he believed slimmed his image by twenty pounds. “Maybe Rankin died in the shape of a letter of the alphabet to tip us off, huh? That look like an ‘m’ or a ‘z’ to you?” Cooper looked away. “Could be, though, that he was usin’ deaf-talk sign language, huh, Cooper? All the politicians use it now.”

Cooper finally met Blanchette’s eyes.

“You got a soft heart, How,” Cooper said. “Almost squishy.” Cooper held his hands up, then began to wander about the room. It was nicely decorated, a den with ornate lamps and polished mahogany furniture. He shook his head. “I knew this man. I was on his stinkin’ bodyguard detail, you know, back when that busin’ thing got nasty.” He paused with his back to the body. “He treated me pretty fuckin’ decent. Not like a butler who carries a gun, you know. Fuckin’ decent.”

Blanchette nodded, apparently in sympathy. “Somebody didn’t think
him so decent, though, is what I would think. What with my nine years’ experience and all, I’d have to say that could be a fact. I’d say you should get out your black notebook, there, the one full of blank pages, and start one of ’em out with—Alvin Rankin, city councilman, was whacked in the head by someone who didn’t think he was so fuckin’ decent.”

“I’ll be outside,” Cooper said. “You miserable tub of guts.”

Blanchette held up a hand to halt him.

“That’ll be Detective Sergeant miserable-tub-of-guts to you, there, patrolman.”

“Check,” Cooper said and went outside.

Blanchette surveyed the room, his dark eyes taking in the scene, his thick brows flexing as he concentrated. The room was a reluctant witness. For a crime scene, which it indisputably was, it set new levels of tidiness. Other than the blood and body fallout necessary to qualify it, Blanchette thought, the place could win a Good Housekeeping Seal for most meticulous murder site. The only thing out of place besides the wrecked remains of Alvin Rankin was the
TV Guide
that had landed about two feet to the right of Rankin’s outstretched hand.

As Blanchette speculated on the possibilities offered by the slim clues on the scene, the door from the main room opened and Captain Karl Bauer entered the den, followed closely by a pack of crime specialty men.

Bauer was a large, square man with hair the color of carp scales, still loyally fashioned into a flattop. He had stern features, and knobby fists, but many of his subordinates believed him to be an incompetent police officer. His talent as a political infighter, however, was undeniable, and he was a truly gifted backslapper.

Captain Bauer walked past Blanchette and stood with his back to him.

“The wife and the girl are across the street, at 605. Neighbors named Wilkes. Give them time to have a shot of whiskey or some coffee, then get over there.”

“Right,” Blanchette said. “She say anything else?”

“I wouldn’t keep it a secret if she did, Detective. She came home from seeing
Raiders of the Lost Ark
with the girl—” Bauer flipped through his notepad to find the daughter’s name. “Janetha, aged seventeen. It was about eleven forty-five or so.” Bauer closed the notepad and put it in his breast pocket. “End of dialogue.”

“I think maybe his wallet is gone,” Blanchette said. “It ain’t layin’ around nowhere.”

“His wallet? You break in a house, kill a city councilman with a Mercedes and a stash of chink vases, and you just take his wallet? That make sense to you? I mean, the rest of the house hasn’t even been walked through, from the looks of it.”

“Well,” Blanchette said. “Guys who ain’t used to splatterin’ people’s brains, they do funny things when it finally happens, sir. The French have a word for it, but I don’t know it, so I call it freakin’ out.”

“That’s one possibility,” Bauer said. He turned toward the other officers in the room and held both hands pointed at them, then began to click his fingers. “You guys get busy. Fariello, get plenty of shots,” he said to the photographer. Bauer had watched this scene in many movies and directed the rest of the crime squad action in a Rich Little–type whirl of unconscious imitation.

Blanchette shook his head as he watched his captain. He nodded his treble-chinned moon face whenever he noted obvious influences on Bauer’s behavior. That’s Broderick Crawford, there. Oh, that bark’s familiar, there’s more than a hint of Bogart in it. That steely glare, seems like Matt Dillon traded on it for a fortune in reruns. Where’s Kojak?