The Neon Rain (12 page)

“Before we go anywhere, let’s sort out a couple of things,” I said. “I don’t think you’ve paid enough dues to be telling people to shut up or making threats to them over the phone. But if you think you’re a serious rock-and-roller, we can go over to the Y and slip on the gloves and see what develops.”

He nodded and clicked his fingernails indifferently on the steering wheel.

“Don’t worry, they’ve got a first-aid man there in case you’re a bleeder,” I said.

“Okay, you’ve made your point.”

“You’re not too big on hanging tough, are you?”

“I wanted you out of your office. If you’ll notice your present geography, you’re sitting in my automobile and not at the First District. Is it all right if I start the car now?”

“I think you federal guys just have to do everything with three-cushion shots. Wouldn’t it be easier for you and me to go into Captain Guidry’s office and talk about this stuff in a reasonable way? We don’t want guys like Philip Murphy and his trained psychopaths running around New Orleans any more than you do. The captain’s a good man. He’ll help you if he can.”

He started the engine and pulled into the traffic. The sunlight fell across his freckled face and candy-striped Arrow shirt.

“Is Purcel a good man?” he asked.

“He’s got some problems, but he’s working on them.”

“You think he’s clean?”

“As far as I know.”

“Six weeks ago we had reason to be in a trick pad. His name was in the girl’s book. He was a weekly banger. There was no entry about charge, either.”

I took a deep breath.

“He’s had marital trouble,” I said.

“Come off it. We’re talking about a compromised cop who started popping caps yesterday on a possible government witness. Which of you nailed Segura?”

“I did. He was trying to get out the door, and he raised up right in front of me.”

“I’ll bet one of Purcel’s rounds was already in him. What did the autopsy say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Great.”

“You’re telling me Clete wanted to kill Segura?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“You don’t buy lots of things, Lieutenant. But there’s people just like you in my bureau. That’s why they’re sending me back to Boston next week.”

“You’re off it?”

“I will be. I haven’t made my case and there’s other work waiting.”

He looked across at me, and for the first time I felt a liking for him. Under all the invective he was a full nine-inning pitcher. We bought a bucket of fried shrimp and two cartons of dirty rice and ate it in a small, shady park off Napoleon Avenue. A bunch of black and white and Chicano kids were playing a workup game in front of an old chicken-wire backstop. They were rough, working-class boys and they played the game with a fierce physical courage and recklessness. The pitcher threw spitters and beanballs; the base runners broke up double plays with elbows and knees, and sanded their faces off in headlong slides; the catcher stole the ball out from under the batter’s swing with his bare hand; and the third baseman played so far in on the grass that a line drive would tear his head off. I thought it no wonder that foreigners were awed by the innocent and naive nature of American aggressiveness.

“Does anything about elephants figure in all this?” I asked.

“Elephants? No, that’s a new one. Where’d you get it?”

“I heard Lovelace Deshotels was giggling about elephants when Segura’s people shot her up. I dropped it on Segura, and his face twitched like a plumber’s helper.”

“Well, we’ve got a second chance. I found her roommate, a Mexican girl from the same massage parlor, and she wants to stick it to all these bastards.”

“Why is she talking to you instead of me?”

“She seems to think you guys are cretins. Is there a vice sergeant down there named Motley?”

“Yep.”

“She says his zipper’s open.”

“Sounds accurate.”

“She’s a dancer in a nude bar out by the airport now. For three hundred dollars she says she can turn a couple of interesting people for us, then she wants to take her little girl back to San Antonio and study to be a hairdresser.”

“It sounds like a shuck to me.”

“I think she’s straight. Her boyfriend was a Nicaraguan ex-national guardsman who worked for Segura. Then he beat her up and stole her money. They’re a class bunch, those guys. Now she wants to blow Dodge. It seems reasonable to me.”

“I think she’s selling the same information Didi Gee already gave me.”

“She’s hip about Bobby Joe Starkweather. She says he’s a latent bone-smoker and can’t make it with women. He threw a waitress out of a hotel window, and some local hood got fried for it up at Angola.”

I looked away at the boys playing workup.

“What’s the matter?” Fitzpatrick asked.

“I knew him. His name was Johnny Massina.”

“Were you tight with him or something?”

“I tried to help him get off the hooch once. Does she know where Starkweather might be?”

“She’s vague on that.”

“I thought so,” I said. “Write her name and address down for me, would you, but I’m going to pass on her right now. They’ve got me on a short leash, anyway.”

“Lieutenant, can I broach something personal?”

I started to say “Why not?” since he had never shown any restraint about anything before, but he kept right on talking before I could speak.

“It’s obvious you’re a good cop and a private kind of man, but you’re a Catholic and you must have feelings about what’s going on down there,” he said.

“Where?” I already knew the answer, but I wasn’t ready to pursue the discussion.

“Central America. They’re doing some bad shit to our people. They’re killing priests and Mary knoll nuns and they’re doing it with the M-16s and M-60 machine guns we give them.”

“I don’t think you ought to take all that responsibility on yourself.”

“It’s our church. They’re our people. There’s no way to get around the fact, Lieutenant.”

“Who’s asking you to? You’ve just got to know your limits, that’s all. The Greeks understood that. Guys like you and me need to learn from them.”

“You think that’s good advice, huh?” he said.

“It beats walking around with a headful of centipedes.”

“Since you’re fond of classical metaphors, try this one: Why do we admire Prometheus and have contempt for Polonius? Don’t try to tilt with a Jesuit product, Lieutenant. We’ve been verbally demolishing you guys for centuries.”

He grinned at me the way a high school pitcher would after throwing you a Carl Hubbell screwball that left you twisted in your own swing.

That night I drove to the Tulane campus to hear Annie Ballard’s string quartet play. She was pretty on the lighted stage in her dark skirt and jacket and frilly white blouse. Her face was both eager and concentrated while she read the music sheet on the metal stand in front of her and drew her bow back and forth on her cello. In fact, her face had a lovely childlike quality in it while she played her music, the kind you see in people who seem to go through a photogenic transformation when they do that private thing that they hold separate for themselves. Afterwards, we were invited to a lawn party in the Garden District. The trees were strung with Japanese lanterns; the swimming-pool lights glowed smokily below the emerald surface; the air smelled of jasmine and roses and the freshly turned, watered dirt in the flower beds; and Negro waiters carrying trays of champagne glasses and cool tropical drinks moved deferentially among the groups of laughing people in evening dresses and summer tuxedoes.

She was having a good time. I saw that her eyes were empty now of the fear and self-loathing that Bobby Joe Starkweather had put in them, and she was doing her best, also, to make me forget what had happened in the back of Julio Segura’s Cadillac yesterday. But I was selfish.

I couldn’t let go of those ten seconds between the time the gatekeeper pulled the automatic out of the door pouch and the moment when the .45 roared upward in my hand and Segura’s head exploded all over the inside of the car. I’m convinced that, unlike most of the hapless and pathetic people whom we usually dealt with, he was truly an evil man, but anyone who has ever fired a weapon at another human being knows the terrible adrenaline-fed sense of omnipotence and arrogance that you feel at that moment and the secret pleasure you take in the opportunity being provided you. I had done it in Vietnam; I had done it twice before as a police officer, and I knew that simian creature we descend from was alive and well in my breast.

I was also bothered by Sam Fitzpatrick and his admonition to me about my religion and my humanity. I wanted to dismiss him. He was a kid, an idealist, a federal hotdog who probably broke a lot of bureau rules and would eventually blow out his doors. If he hadn’t become a Treasury agent, he would probably be pouring chicken blood on draft files. A half-dozen like him could have a whole city in flames.

But I couldn’t get rid of him. I liked him and he had gotten to my pride.

I genuinely tried to enjoy myself that night. The people at the lawn party came from another world than mine, but they were pleasant and friendly and went out of their way to be courteous to me. Annie was a fine girl, too. When she saw my expression wandering away from the conversation, she would touch the back of my hand with hers and smile at me with her eyes. But it wasn’t any good. I gave it up, made an excuse about having to go to work in the morning, and drove her home. On her porch I saw the faint look of hurt in her face when I said I couldn’t come in.

“Do you like to be alone, Dave?” she asked.

“No. It’s not a good life.”

“Another time, huh?”

“Yes. I’m sorry about tonight. I’ll call tomorrow.”

She smiled and then she was gone, and I drove home more depressed than I had been in years.

Why? Because the truth was that I wanted to drink. And I don’t mean I wanted to ease back into it, either, with casual Manhattans sipped at a mahogany and brass-rail bar with red leather booths and rows of gleaming glasses stacked in front of a long wall mirror. I wanted busthead boilermakers of Jack Daniel’s and draft beer, vodka on the rocks, Beam straight up with water on the side, raw tequila that left you breathless and boiling in your own juices. And I wanted it all in a rundown Decatur or Magazine Street saloon where I didn’t have to hold myself accountable for anything and where my gargoyle image in the mirror would be simply another drunken curiosity like the neon-lit rain striking against the window.

After four years of sobriety I once again wanted to fill my mind with spiders and crawling slugs and snakes that grew corpulent off the pieces of my life that I would slay daily. I blamed it on the killing of Julio Segura. I decided my temptation for alcohol and self-destruction was maybe even an indication that my humanity was still intact. I said the rosary that night and did not fall asleep until the sky went gray with the false dawn.

That afternoon I still had Sam Fitzpatrick on my mind. I called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and was told by the Assistant Special Agent in Charge that Fitzpatrick was not in.

“Who is this, please?” he asked.

I told him my name and who I was.

“Are you calling from your office?”

I said I was.

“I’ll call you there in two minutes,” he said, and hung up.

Sure enough, the phone rang a minute and a half later. They were a very careful bunch down at the Federal Building.

“We’re worried about him. He hasn’t checked in and he’s not at his motel,” he said. “Are you the guy who smoked Segura?”

“Yes.”

“Bad day at Black Rock, huh?” he said, and laughed.

“Do all you guys have the same sense of humor?”

“We’ve got an agent out of the nest, Lieutenant. Do you have something we ought to know?”

“He was going to see a Mexican girl, a nude dancer out by the airport. She told him she could turn a couple of Segura’s people.”

“We already know about her. What else?”

“That’s it.”

“Stay in touch. Drop by and have coffee sometime. We need a better liaison with you people. By the way, Lieutenant, Agent Fitzpatrick has a way of wandering beyond some of our parameters. That doesn’t mean that some local authorities should reciprocate by wandering themselves into a federal jurisdiction. You get the picture, don’t you?”

There was a pause, then the receiver went dead.

Late that afternoon I went to the Mexican girl’s apartment building out in Metairie. No one was home, and the apartment manager said she had not seen the girl, whose name was Gail Lopez, or her daughter in a couple of days. I stuck a small piece of Scotch tape between the bottom of the door and the doorjamb, and drove out to the strip bar by the airport in the fading twilight.

Jet airliners lifted off the runway across the road and roared over the top of the bar into the lavender sky. The building was constructed of cinder blocks that had been painted purple; the door was fingernail-polish red; and the interior smelled of cigarette smoke, refrigerated air, and bathroom antiseptic. Behind the bar was a burlesque runway where a stand-up comic with a face like crinkled parchment went through a lifeless and boring routine that no one at the tables or bar listened to. In the middle of his routine, some bikers in the corner plugged in the jukebox and turned it on full tilt.

The bartender was a big man, about thirty, with a huge granite head that was bald and shining on top with oiled ducktails combed back on the sides. He wore black trousers, a white shirt, and a black velvet vest like a professional bartender, but his thick arms and neck and massive chest and the wooden mallet on a shelf behind him indicated something about his other potential. I asked him about Gail Lopez.

“You don’t recognize me, Lieutenant?” he asked, and smiled.

I squinted at him in the smoke and against the glare of lights on the burlesque stage.

“Five or six years ago, right?” I said. “Something about driving a
Picayune
delivery truck over a Teamster steward.”

“Actually, it’s been eight years and I never really got to tell my side of that story, Lieutenant. But it don’t matter now. I’m always walking toward something rather than away from something. You know what I mean? Let me ask a little favor of you, though. My PO don’t need to know about this situation, does he? He’s a good guy and kind of protective and he don’t want me working in no shitholes, but some of the guys down at the union hall hold a grudge and don’t want to give me my card back and there ain’t many places I can make six bucks an hour and tips. Hell, it’s degrading to work in a dump like this. I got to pick up cigarette butts from the urinals with my hands and scrub out toilets and mop up the vomit every time one of these fuckers pukes. What do you want to drink? It’s on me.”