"You were probably in the barbershop and somebody said, "The Bone"s in town," and you thought, "Boy, that"s great news. I"ll just go say h.e.l.lo to ole Feet." "
"You"re a famous man, Julie. Word gets around."
"And I"m just here for a short visit, right?"
"Yeah, that"s the word."
His eyes moved up and down my body. He smiled to himself and took a sip from a tall gla.s.s wrapped in a napkin, with shaved ice, fruit, and a tiny paper umbrella in it.
"You"re a sheriff"s detective now, I hear."
"On and off."
He pushed a chair at me with his foot, then picked it up and set it in a shady area across from him. I took off my seersucker coat, folded it on my arm, and sat down.
"Y"all worried about me, Dave?"
"Some people in New Iberia think you"re a hard act to follow. How many guys would burn down their own father"s nightclub?"
He laughed.
"Yeah, the old man lost his interest in garden hoses after that," he said.
"Everybody likes to come back to his hometown once in a while. That"s a perfectly natural thing to do. No one"s worried about that, Julie." I looked at his eyes. Under his sweaty brows, they were as shiny and full of light as obsidian.
He shook a cigarette out of a package on the cement and lit it. He blew smoke out into the sunlight and looked around the swimming-pool area.
"Except I"ve only got a visa, right?" he said. "I"m supposed to spread a little money around, stay on the back streets, tell my crew not to spit on the sidewalks or blow their noses on their napkins in the restaurants. Does that kind of cover it for you, Dave?"
"It"s a small town with small-town problems."
"f.u.c.k." He took a deep breath, then twisted his neck asthough there were a crick in it. "Margot-" he said to the woman playing cards under the umbrella. She got up from her chair and stood behind him, her narrow face expressionless behind her sungla.s.ses, and began kneading his neck with her fingers. He filled his mouth with ice, orange slices, and cherries from his gla.s.s and studied my face while he chewed.
"I get a little upset at these kind of att.i.tudes, Dave. You got to forgive me," he said, and pointed into his breastbone with his fingertips. "But it don"t seem to matter sometimes what a guy does now. It"s always yesterday that"s in people"s minds. Like Cholo here. He made a mistake fifteen years ago and we"re still hearing about it. What the f.u.c.k is that? You think that"s fair?"
"He threw his brother-in-law off the roof of the Jax"s brewery on top of a Mardi Gras float. That was a first even for New Orleans."
"Hey, lieutenant, there was a lot of other things involved there. The guy beat up my sister. He was a f.u.c.king animal."
"Look, Dave, you been gone from New Orleans for a long time," Baby Feet said. "The city ain"t anything like it used to be. Black kids with s.h.i.t for brains are provoking everybody in the f.u.c.king town. People get killed in Audubon Park, for G.o.d"s sake. You try to get on the St. Charles streetcar and there"s either n.i.g.g.e.rs or j.a.ps hanging out the doors and windows. We used to have understandings with the city. Everybody knew the rules, n.o.body got hurt. Take a walk past the Desire or St. Thomas project and see what happens."
"What"s the point, Julie?"
"The point is who the f.u.c.k needs it? I own a recording studio, the same place Jimmy Clanton cut his first record. I"m in the entertainment business. I talk on the phone every day to people in California you read about in People magazine. I come home to this s.h.i.thole, they ought to have "Welcome Back Balboni Day." Instead, I get told maybe I"m likea bad smell in the air. You understand what I"m saying, that hurts me."
I rubbed one palm against the other.
"I"m just a messenger," I said.
"That laundry man you work for send you?"
"He has his concerns."
He waved the woman away and sat up in his chair.
"Give me five minutes to get dressed. Then I want you to drive me somewhere," he said.
"I"m a little tied up on time right now."
"I"m asking fifteen minutes of you, max. You think you can give me that much of your day, Dave?" He got up and started past me to his room. There were tufts of black hair like pig bristles on his love handles. He c.o.c.ked his index finger at me. "Be here when I get back. You won"t regret it."
The woman with the bleached hair sat back down at the table. She took off her gla.s.ses, parted her legs a moment, and looked into my face, her eyes neither flirtatious nor hostile, simply dead. Cholo invited me to play gin rummy with them.
"Thanks, I never took it up," I said.
"You sure took it up with horses, lieutenant," he said.
"Yep, horses and Beam. They always made an interesting combination at the Fairgrounds."
"Hey, you remember that time you lent me twenty bucks to get home from Jefferson Downs? I always remember that, Loot. That was all right."
Cholo Manelli had been born of a Mexican washerwoman, who probably wished she had given birth to a bowling ball instead, and fathered by a brain-damaged Sicilian numbers runner, whose head had been caved in by a cop"s baton in the Irish Channel. He was raised in the Iberville welfare project across from the old St. Louis cemeteries, and at age eleven was busted with his brothers for rolling and beating the winos who slept in the empty crypts. Their weapons of choice had been sand-filled socks.
He had the coa.r.s.e, square hands of a bricklayer, the facial depth of a pie plate. I always suspected that if he was lobotomized you wouldn"t know the difference. The psychiatrists at Mandeville diagnosed him as a sociopath and shot his head full of electricity. Evidently the treatment had as much effect as charging a car battery with three dead cells. On his first jolt at Angola he was put in with the big stripes, the violent and the incorrigible, back in the days when the state used trusty guards, mounted on horses and armed with double-barrel twelve-gauge shotguns, who had to serve the time of any inmate who escaped while under their supervision. Cholo went to the bushes and didn"t come back fast enough for the trusty gunbull. The gunbull put four pieces of buckshot in Cholo"s back. Two weeks later a Mason jar of prune-o was found in the gunbull"s cell. A month after that, when he was back in the main population, somebody dropped the loaded bed of a dump truck on his head.
"Julie told me about the time that boon almost popped you with a .38," he said.
"What time was that?"
"When you were a patrolman. In the Quarter. Julie said he saved your life."
"He did, huh?"
Cholo shrugged his shoulders.
"That"s what the man said, lieutenant. What do I know?"
"Take the hint, Cholo. Our detective isn"t a conversationalist," the woman said, without removing her eyes from her cards. She clacked her lacquered nails on the gla.s.s tabletop, and her lips made a dry, sucking sound when she puffed on her cigarette.
"You working on that murder case? The one about that girl?" he said.
"How"d you know about that?"
His eyes clicked sideways.
"It was in the newspaper," he said. "Julie and me was talking about it this morning. Something like that"s disgusting.You got a f.u.c.king maniac on the loose around here. Somebody ought to take him to a hospital and kill him."
Baby Feet emerged resplendent from the sliding gla.s.s door of his room. He wore a white suit with gray pin stripes, a purple shirt scrolled with gray flowers, a half-dozen gold chains and medallions around his talc.u.med neck, ta.s.seled loafers that seemed as small on his feet as ballet slippers.
"You look beautiful, Julie," Cholo said.
"f.u.c.king A," Baby Feet said, lighting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth with a tiny gold lighter.
"Can I go with y"all?" Cholo asked.
"Keep an eye on things here for me."
"Hey, you told me last night I could go."
"I need you to take my calls."
"Margot don"t know how to pick up a phone anymore?" Cholo said.
"My meter"s running, Julie," I said.
"We"re going out to dinner tonight with some interesting people," Baby Feet said to Cholo. "You"ll enjoy it. Be patient."
"They"re quite excited about the possibility of meeting you. They called and said that, Cholo," the woman said.
"Margot, why is it you got calluses on your back? Somebody been putting starch in your sheets or something?" Cholo said.
I started walking toward my truck. The sunlight off the cement by the poolside was blinding. Baby Feet caught up with me. One of his other women dove off the board and splashed water and the smell of chlorine and suntan oil across my back.
"Hey, I live in a f.u.c.king menagerie," Baby Feet said as we went out onto the street. "Don"t go walking off from me with your nose bent out of joint. Did I ever treat you with a lack of respect?"
I got in the truck.
"Where we going, Feet?" I said.
"Out by Spanish Lake. Look, I want you to take a message back to the man you work for. I"m not the source of any problems you got around here. The c.o.ke you got in this parish has been stepped on so many times it"s baby powder. If it was coming from some people I"ve been a.s.sociated with in New Orleans, and I"m talking about past a.s.sociations, you understand, it"d go from your nose to your brain like liquid Drano."
I headed out toward the old two-lane highway that led to the little settlement of Burke and the lake where Spanish colonists had tried to establish plantations in the eighteenth century and had given Iberia Parish its name.
"I don"t work narcotics, Julie, and I"m not good at pa.s.sing on bulls.h.i.t, either. My main concern right now is the girl we found south of town."
"Oh, yeah? What girl"s that?"
"The murdered girl, Cherry LeBlanc."
"I don"t guess I heard about it."
I turned and looked at him. He gazed idly out the window at the pa.s.sing oak trees on the edge of town and a roadside watermelon and strawberry stand.
"You don"t read the local papers?" I said.
"I been busy. You saying I talk bulls.h.i.t, Dave?"
"Put it this way, Feet. If you"ve got something to tell the sheriff, do it yourself."
He pinched his nose, then blew air through it.
"We used to be friends, Dave. I even maybe did you a little favor once. So I"m going to line it out for you and any of the locals who want to clean the wax out of their ears. The oil business is still in the toilet and your town"s flat-a.s.s broke. Frankly, in my opinion, it deserves anything that happens to it. But me and all those people you see back on that lake-" He pointed out the window. Through a pecan orchard, silhouetted against the light winking off the water, I could see cameras mounted on booms and actors in Confederate uniforms toiling through the shallows in retreat fromimaginary federal troops. "We"re going to leave around ten million dollars in Lafayette and Iberia Parish. They don"t like the name Balboni around here, tell them we can move the whole f.u.c.king operation over to Mississippi. See how that floats with some of those c.o.o.na.s.s j.a.c.k.o.f.fs in the Chamber of Commerce."
"You"re telling me you"re in the movie business?"
"Coproducer with Michael Goldman. What do you think of that?"
I turned into the dirt road that led through the pecan trees to the lake.
"I"m sure everyone wishes you success, Julie."
"I"m going to make a baseball movie next. You want a part in it?" He smiled at me.
"I don"t think I"d be up to it."
"Hey, Dave, don"t get me wrong." He was grinning broadly now. "But my main actor sees dead people out in the mist, his punch is usually ripped by nine A.M. on weed or whites, and Mikey"s got peptic ulcers and some kind of obsession with the Holocaust. Dave, I ain"t s.h.i.tting you, I mean this sincerely, with no offense, with your record, you could fit right in."
I stopped the truck by a small wood-frame security office. A wiry man in a khaki uniform and a bill cap, with a white scar like a chicken"s foot on his throat, approached my window.
"We"ll see you, Feet," I said.
"You don"t want to look around?"
"Adios, partner," I said, waited for him to close the door, then turned around in the weeds and drove back through the pecan trees to the highway, the sun"s reflection bouncing on my hood like a yellow balloon.
IT HAPPENED MY SECOND YEAR ON THE NEW ORLEANS POLICE force, when I was a patrolman in the French Quarter and somebody called in a prowler report at an address on Dumaine. The lock on the iron gate was rusted and had beenbent out of the jamb with a bar and sprung back on the hinges. Down the narrow brick walkway I could see bits of broken gla.s.s, like tiny rat"s teeth, where someone had broken out the overhead light bulb. But the courtyard ahead was lighted, filled with the waving shadows of banana trees and palm fronds, and I could hear a baseball game playing on a radio or television set.
I slipped my revolver out of its holster and moved along the coolness of the bricks, through a ticking pool of water, to the entrance of the courtyard, where a second scrolled-iron gate yawned back on its hinges. I could smell the damp earth in the flower beds, spearmint growing against a stucco wall, the thick clumps of purple wisteria that hung from a tile roof.
Then I smelled him, even before I saw him, an odor that was at once like snuff, synthetic wine, rotting teeth, and stomach bile. He was a huge black man, dressed in a Donald Duck T-shirt, filthy tennis shoes, and a pair of purple slacks that were bursting on his thighs. In his left hand was a drawstring bag filled with goods from the apartment he"d just creeped. He swung the gate with all his weight into my hand, snapped something in it like a Popsicle stick breaking, and sent my revolver skidding across the flagstones.
I tried to get my baton loose, but it was his show now. He came out of his back pocket with a worn one-inch .38, the grips wrapped with black electrician"s tape, and screwed the barrel into my ear. There was a dark clot of blood in his right eye, and his breath slid across the side of my face like an unwashed hand.
"Get back in the walkway, motherf.u.c.ker," he whispered.
We stumbled backward into the gloom. I could hear revelers out on the street, a beer can tinkling along the cement.
"Don"t be a dumb guy," I said.
"Shut up," he said. Then, almost as an angry afterthought, he drove my head into the bricks. I fell to my knees in the water, my baton twisted uselessly in my belt.
His eyes were dilated, his hair haloed with sweat, his pulse leaping in his neck. He was a cop"s worst possible adversary in that situation-strung-out, frightened, and stupid enough to carry a weapon on a simple B & E.
"Why"d you have to come along, man? Why"d you have to do that?" he said.
His thumb curled around the spur of the pistol"s hammer and I heard the cylinder rotate and the chamber lock into place.
"There"re cops on both ends of the street," I said. "You won"t get out of the Quarter."