“He’s become invisible,” Walsh said. “Gone to ground.”
Or more likely to air, I thought: up.
“I do keep running into your friend Doo-Wop. Ask me, I think he likes the idea of working with a cop.”
“He have anything?”
Walsh shook his head.
“Sooner or later, he will. Of course, it could just as easily be three years from now as it could be next week.”
“And he wouldn’t recognize the difference.”
“Exactly.”
Four P.M. We were sitting in Dunbar’s, at a table whose top still showed evidence of the noontime rush: crumbs, splotches of sauce, a plug of bread lodged against the sugar bowl. Several tables remained uncleared. Officially the restaurant was closed, and we were the only customers. The owners-Alphee Dunbar, whom everyone called Tia, her companion of fifty-some years, Gilbert, and a somewhat younger man, John Gaunt, whose role both in restaurant and the others’ private life had been all these years a matter of speculation-sat at the table nearest the kitchen over a steaming pot of barbequed shrimp. A platter of ribs covered most of our own table. We each had a couple of beers lined up there too. On the TV up by the cash register Danny Thomas had just given way to Science Fiction Theater. The sound was turned off.
I filled Walsh in on my visit from beret brothers Leo and Clifford, what they’d had to say about Yoruba. He told me yeah, NOPD’d been running into these rumors about some kind of underground banking organization for two, three years now. Word was, it just might violate a handful of federal laws, in principle if not letter, and both the FBI and T-men were supposed to be looking into it.
The police didn’t think either the FBI or Treasury Agents could find their own asses, mind you.
Walsh dropped a slab of rib back on the platter. It looked like piranha had stripped it clean to the bone. He pulled a paper napkin off the stack of them delivered with the ribs and wiped mouth, chin, fingers.
“These guys in the hats,” he said. “They potential heroes? Kind that might take things into their own hands?”
“I don’t get that feeling, no.”
“Good. Enough vigilantes running around already. So how far are these guys bent?”
“Hard to say. The gleam’s there in their eyes, no doubt about that. But you can still see around it. So can they.”
“For now, anyway.” Walsh killed his first beer and put the bottle down. It was smeared with barbeque sauce. “Dangerous?”
“I don’t think so. Could be to themselves, given the right circumstances.”
“Or the wrong ones.”
I nodded.
Then we both concentrated on our ribs and no one said anything more for a while. Just lots of animal noises, as LaVerne would put it.
John Gaunt went behind the counter for another beer and glanced over to see if perhaps we might be in need as well. Walsh stuck up a couple of fingers. What the hell. He had three days off. And I’d had a rough week. Not to mention feet resembling hamburger.
“Still no connection between these guys and the shooter, way you see it? Or this Yoruba thing?”
“Other than the fact there’s no one here but us chickens, you mean. Not that I can make out.”
“So why hasn’t he stepped forward again? Man seemed awful damn determined. You know? But it’s been a long time now since the last killing.”
“Could be his knowing you’re back here behind him has a lot to do with it. Having to watch over his shoulder.”
I set my empty bottle alongside his. John Gaunt thumped new ones, held between first and second fingers, onto the table and snagged the empties between third and fourth fingers, all in a single sweep.
“This isn’t some repressed accountant or crazed cabdriver who one night watched a TV show that shook him loose from his moorings then grabbed his old man’s gun from the closet and headed off to restore justice to the world. This guy’s no wig-out. Not a Quixote, either.
“Or maybe,” I said, “come to think of it, he is. But whatever else he is, the man’s a soldier.
“Think about it. He’s behind enemy lines. Hell, he lives in enemy territory. There’s nothing he can take for granted-nothing. Nothing’s safe. He can’t trust the people he comes across. Can’t trust the language, can’t trust the water, can’t even trust whatever new orders might reach him. Now someone, another soldier, is crowding up close behind him. The enemy knows he’s here. The enemy’s seen him. What else can he do-”
“-but become invisible?”
“Exactly.”
“And wait.”
“Exactly.”
But we didn’t wait long.
“Regardez,” Alphee said.
John Gaunt walked over to turn up the TV’s sound. Our eyes went with him.
A street scene. Block-long stretch of low Creole cottages fanning out behind, downtown New Orleans looming in the distance, lots of open sky. Reporter in tailored suit and silk blouse holding mike. Full lips, good teeth, golden eyes. Sound of traffic close by.
Just moments ago, in what was believed may have been the latest in a series of terrorist-style killings, a resident in cardiology at Charity Hospital was gunned down in the parking lot of this convenience store near the river.
The camera pulls away to show a stretcher being fed into an ambulance. All around the ambulance are police cars with headlights aglare, bubblelights sweeping.
Coming off forty-eight straight hours on call, much of it spent at the front lines of a battlefield most of us couldn’t even imagine-gunshot wounds, knifings, drug overdoses, a man who fell asleep on the tracks and was run over by a train-Dr. Lalee had told coworkers she planned to stop off for coffee, half ’n’ half and frozen pizza on the way home, then spend the next two days in bed with several good books of resolutely nonmedical sort.
A single bullet-fired, officials believed, from an abandoned factory nearby-ended those plans. Ended all this physician’s plans. And ended, as well, a young woman’s life. A fine young woman who against her parents’ wishes relocated here from Palestine. Who had chosen New Orleans as the place where she would serve her final years of medical apprenticeship. Where she would become a part of the team working to provide our community a level of medical care elsewhere unsurpassed.
Now, even as we watch from our living rooms, other members of that team worked frantically to save Dr. Lalee’s life. One of their own.
This, just in from Charity Hospital.
The camera pulls back to the announcer’s face.
Chief of staff Dr. Morris Petrovich has announced that, at 4:56 local time, despite heroic measures on the part of physicians and staff, Dr. Lalee, a resident in their own cardiology section, expired of complications accruing from a gunshot to the chest.