I was almost out the front door of the gym when Tommy Lonighan came out of his office and shook my hand like a greeter at a casino. His muscular thighs bulged out of a pair of cut-off gray sweat trunks. His light blue eyes and pink face were radiant with goodwill.
'I saw you working out with Zoot,' he said.
'He's a good kid. I hope he does all right here, Tommy.'
'I'm a bad influence?'
'He shouldn't be going up against pros.'
'He got in the ring with that white kid, the one with the dragon tattooed on his belly?'
'Yes.'
'No kidding? That's not bad for a kid whose mother was probably knocked up by a marshmallow.'
'You know how to say it, Tommy.'
'Step into my office,' he answered, smiling. 'I want to talk.'
'I'm on my way out of town.'
'I'll buy you a beer. You want a pastrami sandwich? I got your pastrami sandwich. Forget about the other night. I had too much to drink. Come on, don't be a hard-ass.'
'What's on your mind?'
'On my mind? Somebody hurts your wife, and the next thing I know you're beating up people in my fucking driveway. Hey, it's all right. The Caluccis are scum. I just want to talk.'
I went inside his glassed-in office and sat down in front of his desk. The walls were covered with old prizefight posters and newspaper clippings about fighters that Lonighan had owned or managed. Above a shelf filled with boxing trophies was an autographed photograph of President Reagan, with two crossed American flags tucked behind the frame.
'How did you know about my wife, Tommy?' I said.
'Because Clete Purcel's been all over town, threatening to jam a chain saw up the butt of anybody with information who doesn't pass it on.' He took a long-necked bottle of beer out of a cooler by his feet, wiped off the ice, set the cap on the edge of his desk, and popped it off with the heel of his hand. He offered it to me.
'No, thanks.'
He poured it into a schooner, took a deep drink, and wiped the corners of his mouth with the back of his wrist.
'Let me cut to it, Tommy,' I said. 'You're right, a man came to our house and harmed my wife. It was right after you tried to discourage me from working for Hippo Bimstine.'
'I got a hard time believing this, Dave. You think that's how I operate, I got to send degenerates around to hurt the wives of people I respect?'
'You tell me.' I looked directly into his eyes. The cast in them reminded me of light trapped inside blue water. They remained locked on mine, as though wheels were turning over in his brain. Then he looked out the window with a self-amused expression on his face and picked up a sandwich from a paper plate in front of him.
'Is there a private joke you want to share with me, Tommy?'
'Dave, you insulted me at your table, in front of people, then you beat the shit out of a guy with a shovel in my driveway. Then you come to my place of business and tell me I'm sending perverts over to New Iberia to bother your family. What did I do to deserve this? I offered you a fucking business situation. You don't see the humor in that?'
'I remember a line a journalist for The Picayune used about you once, Tommy. I never forgot it.'
'Yeah?'
'You're a mean man in a knife fight.'
'Oh yeah, I always liked that one.' He leaned forward on his elbows. His curly white hair hung across his forehead. 'I want that fucking sub. Anything the mockie's paying you, I'll double.'
'See you around, Tommy.'
'I don't get you. You act like I got jock odor or something. But it doesn't bother you to do business with a fanatic who gets people fired from their jobs.'
'I don't follow you.'
'Your buddy, bubble butt… Bimstine, Dave. He belongs to the Jewish Defense Organization. They don't like somebody, they rat-fuck him where he works.'
'I wouldn't know. I don't like the way you talk about him, though.'
'Excuse me?'
'You take cheap shots, Tommy.'
'Like maybe I'm un-American, an anti-Semite or something?'
'Read it like you want.'
'I was sixteen years old at Heartbreak Ridge. I love this country. You saying I don't-' He stopped and smiled. 'You and me might have to forget we're mature people.'
'You don't know anybody named Will Buchalter?'
'This the guy hurt your wife?'
I didn't answer and stared straight into his face. He set his sandwich on his plate, removed a wisp of lettuce from his lip, then took a sip of beer from his schooner and brought his eyes back to mine.
'What can I say? I'm fighting with cancer of the prostate,' he said. 'You want to know what's on my mind? Dying. You know what else is on my mind? Dying broke. I don't know any guy named Buchalter.'
'I'm sorry to hear about your health problem, Tommy.'
'Save it. That sweaty pile of gorilla shit you call a friend is trying to break me. We get casino gambling in New Orleans, he's gonna own it all. I got to take a piss. Which I do with my eyes closed because half the time there's blood in the bowl. You want a beer, they're in the cooler.'
He opened a small closet that had a toilet inside and, without closing the door, began urinating loudly into the water while he flexed his knees and passed gas like it was a visceral art form.
How do you read a man like Tommy Lonighan?
Heartbreak Ridge, Irish bigotry, right-wing patriotism, morbidity that he used like a weapon, speech and mood patterns that had the volatility of tinfoil baking in a microwave.
The day a person like Lonighan makes sense to you is probably the day you should seriously reexamine your relationship to the rest of the human gene pool.
And on that note I waved good-bye and left before he had finished shaking himself and thumbing his gray sweat trunks back over his genitalia.
I stopped by Clete's office on St. Ann to see if he had found out anything about the man who called himself Will Buchalter.
'If the guy's local, he's low-profile,' Clete said. 'Like below street level. I think I talked to every dirtbag and right-wing crazoid in town. Have you ever been to any of these survivalist shops? I think we ought to round up some of their clientele while there's still time.'
He started to take a cigarette out of a pack on his desk; instead, he put a mint on his tongue and smiled at me with his eyes.
'How about hookers?' I said.,
'The ones I know say he doesn't sound like any of their Johns. I don't think he's from around here, Streak. A guy like this earns people's attention.'
'Thanks for trying, Clete.'
'Hang on. You've got two messages,' he said, taking his feet off his desk and looking at two memo slips by his telephone. 'That black sergeant, Ben Motley, you remember him, he always had his fly unzipped when he was in Vice, he wants you to call him about some dude who electrocuted himself in custody last night-'
'What?'
'Hang on, mon. I got a similar message from this character Reverend Oswald Flat. Isn't that the guy who was out at your bait shop? He's got a voice like somebody twanging on a bobby pin.'
'That's the guy.'
'Well, he called Bootsie and she told him to call here. NOPD picked up some wild man in the Garden District, can you dig this, a forty-year-old guy with tattoos on his head, wearing black leather in August. The autopsy showed he'd been shooting up with speed and paint thinner. How about that for a new combo?'
'What's the connection?'
'He had a silenced.22 Ruger automatic on him and Hippo Bimstine's address in his pocket. We'd better go talk to Motley and this guy with a mouthful of collard greens.'
'We?'
'Let's be serious a minute, Dave. I think you're fucking with some very bad guys. I don't know who they are, why they're interested in this submarine, or what the connections are between this citizens committee and dope dealers in the projects having their hearts cut out. But I'll bet my ass politics doesn't have diddle-shit to do with it.'
'I think this time it might.'
'Anyway, I'm backing your action, Jackson, whether you like it or not.' He leaned back in his swivel chair, grinned, and drummed on his stomach with his knuckles like a zoo creature at play.
I called Motley and told him that Clete and I would meet him at his office.
'You don't need to bring Purcel,' he said.
'Yeah, I do.'
'Suit yourself. I remember now, you always did drink down.'
'Thanks, Motley.'
Then I called the Reverend Oswald Flat and asked what I could do for him.
'Hit's about this man killed hisself in custody,' he said.
'Why would you call me?'
'Because you cain't seem to keep your tallywhacker out of the hay baler.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You disturb me. I think there's people fixing to do you some harm, but you have a way of not hearing me. Is there a cinder block up there between your ears?'
'Reverend, I'd appreciate it if you'd-'
'All right, son, I'll try not to offend you anymore. Now, get your nose out of the air and listen to me a minute. I do counseling with prisoners. I bring ' em my Faith Made Easy tapes. I tried to counsel this crazy man they brought in there with tattoos on his head and a stink you'd have to carry on the end of a dung fork-' He stopped, as though his words had outpaced his thoughts.
'What is it?' I said.
'Hit wasn't a good moment. No, sir, hit surely wasn't. I looked into his eyes, and if that man had a soul, I believe demons had already claimed hit.'
'He was shooting up with speed and paint thinner, Reverend.'
'That may be. Your kind always got a scientific explanation. Anyway, I taped what he said. I want you to hear hit.'
I asked him to meet Clete and me down at Motley's office. He said he'd be there, but he didn't reply when I said good-bye and started to hang up.
'Is there something else?' I said.
'No, not really. Maybe like you say, he was just a man who filled his veins with chemicals. I just never had a fellow, not even the worst of them, claw at my eyes and spit in my face before.'
Oswald Flat was wearing a rain-spotted seersucker suit, a clip-on bow tie, white athletic socks with black shoes, and his cork sun helmet when he came through the squad room at district headquarters and sat on a wood bench next to me and Clete. He carried a small black plastic tape recorder in his hand. He blew out his breath and wiped his rimless glasses on his coat sleeve.
At the other end of the room we could see Motley through the glass of Nate Baxter's office. Motley was standing; he and Baxter were arguing.
'You want to hear hit?' Oswald Flat said, resting the recorder on his thigh. The side of his face wrinkled, as though he were reluctant to go ahead with his own purpose.
'That'd be fine, Reverend,' I said.
When he pushed the Play button I could hear all the noises that are endemic to jailhouses everywhere: steel doors clanging, radios blaring, a water bucket being scraped along a concrete floor, cacophonous and sometimes deranged voices echoing through long corridors. Then I heard the man's voice-like words being released from an emotional knot, the syntax incoherent, the rage and hateful obsession like a quivering, heated wire.
'You got mud people coming out of your sewer grates, you got-' he was saying when Motley came out of Baxter's office and Oswald Flat clicked off the recorder.
'Movie time,' Motley said, scratching at the side of his mustache.
'What's Nate Baxter on the rag about?' Clete said.
'What do you think, Purcel? He's just real glad to see you guys down here again,' Motley said.
'Get him transferred back to Vice. At least he could get laid once in a while,' Clete said. He looked at the expression on my face. 'You think I'm kidding? The transvestites in the Quarter really dug the guy.'
The four of us went inside Motley's office. He closed the door behind us and inserted a videocassette into a VCR unit.
'The guy's name was Jack Pelley,' Motley said. 'He had a dishonorable discharge from the Crotch for rolling queers in San Diego, priors in New Orleans for statutory rape and possession of child pornography. One federal beef for possession of stolen explosives. From what we can tell, he became an addict in the joint, muled tar for both the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia while he was inside, then jumped his parole about three years ago.'
'How'd he get picked up?' I said.
'He locked himself in a filling station rest room on Carrollton and wouldn't let anybody else in. When the owner opened the door, Pelley had his leathers down over his knees and was shooting into his thigh with a spike made out of an eyedropper. The Ruger was sitting on top of the toilet tank.'
'How far away was he from Hippo Bimstine's house?' I said.
'About two blocks,' Motley said. 'His pockets were full of rainbows, blues, purple hearts, leapers, you name it. I think somebody gave him the whole candy store to fuck up Bimstine's day.' He glanced at Oswald Flat. 'Sorry, Reverend.'
'Get on with hit,' Flat said.
Motley dropped the blinds on his office glass, turned off the overhead light, and started the VCR.
'The arresting officers put him in the tank,' Motley said. 'In five minutes half the guys in there were yelling through the bars at the booking room officer to move him to a holding cell. The guy had five-alarm gorilla armpit odor. Anyway, we messed up. We should have transferred him to a psychiatric unit.'
The film, made without sound by a security camera, was in black and white and of low grade, the images stark in their contrast, like those in booking room photography. But the tortured travail of a driven man, flailing above a self-created abyss, was clearly obvious. Like those of most speed addicts, his body was wasted, the skin of his face drawn back tightly over the bone, the eyes sunken into skeletal sockets. His head looked like it had been razor-shaved and the hair had grown out in a thin gray patina, the color of rat's fur, below a wide bald area. Beginning at the crown of his skull, right across the pate, was a tattoo of a sword, flanged by lightning bolts.
He paced about maniacally, urinated all over the toilet stool, banged with his fists on the bars, whipped at the walls with his leather jacket, then began slamming the iron bunk up and down on its suspension chains.
'This is where we blew it big-time,' Motley said. 'That cell should have been shook down when the last guy went out of it.'
The man in custody, Jack Pelley, raised the bunk one final time and crashed it down on its chains, then stared down at a piece of electrical cord that had fallen out on the concrete floor. He picked it up in both hands, stared at it, then began idly picking at the tape and wire coil that were wrapped on the end of it.
'What do you call them things?' Flat said.
'A stinger,' Motley said. He paused the VCR. 'It's like a home-made hot plate. Except our man here has got other plans for it. You sure you want to watch this, Reverend?'
'You got something on that tape worse than Saipan?' Flat answered.
Motley took a Baby Ruth out of his desk drawer, started the film again, sat on the corner of his desk, and peeled the wrapper off his candy bar while he watched the television screen.
Jack Pelley splashed water from the toilet bowl onto the cement floor of the cell, peeled off his leather trousers, flattened his skinny buttocks into the middle of the puddle, inserted the stinger's coil into his mouth, sank one hand into the toilet, then calmly fitted the other end of the stinger into a wall socket.
His head snapped back once, as though he had just mainlined a hot shot; his eyes widened, one arm trembled slightly inside the toilet bowl; his lips seemed to curl back momentarily from his clenched teeth, then his jaw fell open like that of someone experiencing an unexpected moment of ecstasy. Then he slumped against the stool, his head on his chest, as though he had tired of a wearisome journey and had simply gone to sleep.
'The ME said the shock shouldn't have killed him by itself,' Motley said. 'But he'd probably hyped eight or nine times in the twenty-four hours before he got busted. The ME said his heart looked like a muskmelon.'
'Have you got any registration on the Ruger?' I asked.
'The serial numbers are burned off,' Motley said.
'Sounds like the greaseballs,' Clete said.
'The greaseballs don't send speed freaks on a hit,' Motley said.
'How about ties to the AB?' I said.
'Maybe. But these guys don't have much organization outside the joint. Most of them are more worried about their cock than politics, anyway,' Motley said. 'Reverend, why don't you go ahead and play your tape?'
Flat snapped the Play button down on his recorder, then set the recorder on the desktop. Once again, I heard the heated voice of Jack Pelley, like a disembodied hiss rising with gathering intensity out of the din of jailhouse noise.
'You got mud people coming out of your sewer grates, you got 'em eating dogs out of the city parks, fucking like minks in the projects, queers spreading AIDS in the blood banks, you think I'm kidding, you ever heard of Queer Nation, it ain't an accident half of them got kike names, how about that mud person over there in New Iberia thinks he's gonna deliver up the gift to a Jew, you think we come this far to let that happen, the sword ain't gonna allow it, no way, motherfucker, tell the screw to send down some toilet paper, they didn't leave none when they fed me, hey, you put that on that tape, what the fuck you think you doing, man-'
The recording ended with a brittle, clattering sound.
'That's when he knocked hit out of my hand,' Flat said. 'I never saw a man in so much torment.'
'Run it again,' Clete said.
We listened once more. I saw Clete put a breath mint on his tongue, then crack it between his molars and stare thoughtfully into space. When the tape ended he smiled in order to hide whatever thought had been in his eyes.
'How's it feel to be a mud person, Streak?' he said.
'We talked to the feds and a couple of snitches in the AB about any group that might call itself "The Sword." They never heard of it,' Motley said.
'Who's "we"?' I said.
'Me.'
'Baxter's blowing it off?' I said.
'What do I know?' Motley said.
Clete, Oswald Flat, and I walked out into the squad room. Clete and Flat went ahead of me. I stepped back into Motley's office.
'I appreciate what you've done, Motley,' I said.
'Tell me straight, Robicheaux, what's "the gift" this guy was talking about?'
'I don't have the slightest idea.'
'Somebody thinks you do.'
'Maybe he was talking about somebody else.'
'Yeah, probably the archbishop. A thought you might take with you-if they're using meltdowns like Jack Pelley, you can bet they've got a shit pile of them in reserve. Purcel's a cracker, but sometimes he's got his point of view, you know what I mean?'
'Not really.'
'People tend to fuck with him only once. There's never any paperwork around later, either.'
'Bad advice from a cop, Motley.'
'I got a flash for you, Robicheaux. I made a copy of the preacher's tape and gave it to Baxter. Ten minutes later I saw him erase it and throw it in the trash.'
He bit down on his Baby Ruth and stared at me reflectively.