The sky was pink over the lake at dawn the next day, and I put on my running shoes and tennis shorts and ran five miles along the lakefront with the wind cool in my face and the sun warm on my bare back. I could feel the sweat glaze and dry on my skin in the wind, and the muscles in my chest and legs seemed to have a resiliency and tension and life in them that I hadn't felt in weeks. Seagulls drifted on the air currents above the water's edge, their wings gilded in the sunlight, then they would dip quickly down toward the sand and peck small shellfish from the receding foam. I waved at families in their cars on the way to church, drank orange juice at a child's street stand under a palm tree, and pounded down the asphalt with a fresh energy, my chest and head charged with blood, my heart strong, the summer morning part of an eternal song.
I could have run five more miles when I got back to the houseboat, but my phone was ringing. I sat on the edge of a chair and wiped my sweating face with a towel while I answered it.
"Why don't you trust your own family a little bit?" my brother Jimmie asked.
"What are you talking about?"
"I understand you bopped into an interesting scene the other night. Very stylish. There's nothing like crashing a Garden District party with a.45 on your hip."
"It had been a dull night."
"Why didn't you call me? I could have bonded you out in fifteen minutes. I might even have had a little influence on that concealed-weapons charge."
"This is one you can't oil."
"The point is, I don't like my brother being taken apart by some pencil-pushers."
"You'll be the first to know the next time I'm in the bag."
"Can you get somebody over there that speaks Spanish in the next half hour?"
"What for?"
"I told Didi Gee I'd get him in the Knights of Columbus. He likes me. Who else would eat lunch with a character like that except at gunpoint?"
"What are you doing, Jimmie?"
"It's already done. Presents come in strange packages. Don't question the fates."
"Anything Didi Gee does has ooze and slime all over it."
"He never said he was perfect. Stay cool, bro," he said, and hung up.
I called a Cuban horse trainer I knew at the Fairgrounds and asked him to come to the houseboat. He arrived there ten minutes before a Cadillac limousine with tinted windows pulled up on the dead-end street by the sand dune and palm trees where my boat was moored, and two of Didi Gee's hoods, dressed in slacks, loafers, and shades, with flowered shirts hanging over their belts, got out and opened the back door with the electric motions of chauffeurs who might have been delivering a presidential envoy. Instead, an obviously terrified man sat in the gloom of the backseat with a third hoodlum next to him. He stepped out into the sunlight, swallowing, his face white, his pomade-slicked, kinky red hair and grease-pencil mustache like a parody of a 1930s leading man's. He held one palm around the fingers of his other hand.
"This guy asked us for a ride. Begged us to bring him here," the driver said. "We can't shut him up, though. All he wants to do is talk."
"But give him something for his breath. It smells like sewer gas. The guy must eat dog turds for breakfast," the other hood said.
"Hey, serious, he's got an interesting story," the driver said. "If somehow he don't remember it, tie a shirt on your TV antenna. I got to pick up a loaf of bread at the corner store a little later. We can help him fill in the empty spaces. We're just out for the morning air, anyway."
I couldn't see either one of them well behind their shades, and Didi Gee's hired help tended to run of a kind-slender young Sicilians and Neapolitans who would blow out your light as easily as they would flip away a cigarette-but I thought I'd seen the driver in a lineup two years ago after we'd prized parts of a bookie out of his own kitchen garbage compactor.
They drove off in their Cadillac, the white sun bouncing off the black-tinted glass in the rear.
"Andres, I wouldn't hang around with that bunch if I were you," I said.
But you still can't accept gratuities when they're given to you on other people's terms, particularly when they come from somebody like Didi Gee. Besides, the fingers of the Nicaraguan's left hand were wrapped in tape, and I had an idea where they had been earlier. He sat at my kitchen table, rigid, his brown eyes riveted fearfully on me as though the lids were stitched to his forehead. I put a tape recorder, a Polaroid camera, and a pint of white rum on the table.
"I don't have a tank full of piranha here, and I'll take you to the hospital if you want to go," I said to him through my Cuban friend, whose name was Jaime.
He did not need a hospital; the injuries were not serious; but he would very much appreciate a glass of Bacardi, no ice, please.
I opened the morning newspaper, pulled my chair around next to him, held up the front section between us so the headline and date were visible, and told Jaime to take our picture with the Polaroid. The Nicaraguan's breath was awful, as though there were something dead in his lungs. He drank the rum and wiped his lips, and the wispy gray scars around his mouth shone like pieces of waxed string.
"I want you to understand something," I said. "You're going to be a cooperative person, but not because of Didi Gee's hoods and the business with your fingers. Those guys will not get to you again, at least not because of me. If you want, you can file assault and kidnapping charges against them. I'll drive you to either the police station or the FBI."
He watched me carefully as Jaime translated. The thought of reporting Didi Gee's people to the authorities was evidently so absurd to him that his eyes didn't even register the proposal.
"But our photograph here is another matter," I said.
"I'll make copies, many of them, and circulate them around town for those who might be interested. Maybe you have the trust of your friends, and this will be of little consequence to you. Maybe you are in command of your situation and this is childishness to you."
His face clouded, and his eyes flicked meanly at me for a moment, the way an egg-sucking dog might if you pushed it inside a cage with a stick.
"Qué quiere?" his voice rasped.
It was a strange tale. It was self-serving, circumventive, filled in all probability with lies; but as with all brutal and cruel people, his most innocent admissions and most defensive explanations were often more damning and loathsome in their connotations than the crimes others might accuse him of.
He had been a sergeant in Somoza's national guard for seven years, a door gunner on a helicopter, and he had flown in many battles against the communists in the jungles and the hills. It was a war of many civilian problems, because the communists hid among the villagers and posed as workers in the rice fields and coffee plantations, and when the government helicopters flew too low they often took hostile fire from the ground, where the peasants denied there were any Sandinistas or weapons. What was one to do? Surely Americans who had been in Vietnam could understand. Those who fought wars could not always be selective.
The soldiers went forth in uniform, as men, in plain sight, while the communists threaded their way among the poor and fought with the methods of cowards and homosexuals. If I did not believe him, witness his eye, and he pulled down the skin on one side of his face and showed me the dead, puttylike muscle under the retina. Their gun-ship had come in low over a secured area, and down below he could see Indians stacking green hay in the field, then a rocket exploded through the armored floor of the helicopter, blew one man out the door, and left a steel needle quivering in Andres's eyeball. The American journalist who visited the army hospital in Managua did not seem interested in his story, nor did he take pictures of Andres as the journalists did of the communist dead and wounded. That was because the American press's greatest fear was to be called rightist by their own membership. Like the Maryknoll missionaries, they kept their own political vision intact by compromising the world in which others had to live.
If I was offended by his statement, I must remember that he did not choose exile in this country any more than he chose the ruination of his vocal cords and lungs.
"I heard his regular punch gave him some special gargle water," I said.
"What?" Jaime said.
"He and some other guys gang-raped a girl before they executed her. Her sister poured muriatic acid in our friend's drink."
"This is true?" Jaime asked. He was a small and delicate man with a sensitive face. He always wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and rolled his own cigarettes from illegal Cuban tobacco. His toylike face looked from me to the Nicaraguan.
"Our man from Managua is a big bullshitter, Jaime."
The Nicaraguan must have understood me.
The story about the execution and the acid was a lie, he said, a fabrication of Philip Murphy and the maricón Starkweather. They took pleasure in the denigration of others because they were not real soldiers. Murphy was a morphine addict who made love to his own body with his syringes. He pretended courage but was flaccid like a woman and could not bear pain. Did I really want to know how he, Andres, had his throat and lungs burnt out, how this terrible odor came to live in his chest like a dead serpent?
"I was blind in one eye, but I could not stop in the fight for my country," Jaime translated for him. "Just as they posed as priests and labor organizers, I went among them as a radical who hated the Somoza family. But a diseased puta, a worthless army slut, betrayed me because she thought I had given her the foulness in her organs. The Sandinistas cocked a pistol at my head and made me drink kerosene, then they lighted matches to my mouth. I suffered greatly at their hands, but my country has suffered more."
"Where are Philip Murphy and the Israeli?" I asked.
"Who knows? Murphy lives in airports and pharmacies and finds people when he needs them. Jews stay with their own kind. Maybe Erik is with the rich Jew who owns the warehouse. They're a close and suspicious people."
"What Jew? What warehouse?"
"The warehouse where the weapons to free Nicaragua are kept. But I don't know where it is, and I don't know this Jew. I'm only a soldier."
His face was empty. His eyes had the muddy, stupid glaze of someone who believed that the honest expression of his ignorance was an acceptable explanation to those who had the power to make judgments.
"I'll give you an easier question, then," I said. "What did you all do to Sam Fitzpatrick before he died?"
Jaime translated, and the Nicaraguan's face became as flat as a shingle.
"Did you wire up his genitals?" I asked.
He looked out at the lake, his mouth pinched tight. He touched the rum glass with his fingers, then withdrew them.
"Murphy gave the orders, but I suspect you and Bobby Joe carried them out with spirit. Your experience stood you well."
"I think this one has a big evil inside him," Jaime said. "I believe you should give him back to the people who brought him here."
"I'm afraid they're not interested in him, Jaime. The man they work for just wanted to knock his competition around a little bit."
His small face was perplexed under the brim of his baseball cap.
"We use them. They use us. It keeps everybody in business," I said.
"If you don't need more of me, I'll go. Sunday is a bad day to be with this type of man. I've smelled that odor before. It comes out of a great cruelty."
"Thank you for your help. I'll see you at the track."
"Send him away, Dave. Even a policeman should not look into the darkness of this man's soul."
I reflected upon Jaime's statement after he had gone. Yes, it was about time that the Nicaraguan became somebody else's charge, I thought.
I locked a handcuff on one of his wrists, walked him out to my rental car, and hooked the other end through the safetybelt anchorage on the back floor. I went back inside the houseboat, dropped the tape cassette in my pocket, and looked up the number of Nate Baxter, from Internal Affairs, in the phone book.
"I've got one of the guys that killed Fitzpatrick," I said. "I want you to meet me down at the office."
"You've got who?"
"I've got the Nicaraguan in cuffs. I'm going to bring him in."
"You're suspended, Robicheaux. You can't bring anybody in."
"I can't book him, but I can sign the complaint."
"Are you drinking?"
"Maybe I ought to drop by your house with him."
"Listen, I can deal with you personally on any level you want. But you better not drag your bullshit into my life. If you haven't figured it out by this time, there's a lot of people that think you should be locked up in a detox unit. These are your friends I'm talking about. Other people think you're a candidate for a frontal lobotomy."
"The last time you talked to me like this, I was in a hospital bed. Don't take too much for granted, Baxter."
"You want to clarify that, make it a little more formal?"
I looked out at the sun beating on the water.
"I've got the man that helped kill a federal agent," I said. "He can clear me, and I'm bringing him in. If you want to ignore this phone call, that's your choice. I'm going to call Captain Guidry now, then I'm going down to the First District. Are you going to be there?"
He was silent.
"Baxter?"
"All right," he said, and hung up.
Then I called Captain Guidry. His mother said he had gone to a band concert in the park. I poured out the rum remaining in the Nicaraguan's glass and started to wash the glass in the sink. Instead, I threw it as far as I could into the lake.
I could see the Nicaraguan's hot eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. He had to bend forward because of the way his wrist was handcuffed to the floor, and his face was flushed and beaded with sweat in the seat.
"Adónde vamos?" he said.
I didn't answer him.
"Adónde vamos?"
I wondered which he feared most: Didi Gee's people, the city police, or Immigration. But, regardless, I wasn't going to help him out about our destination.
"Hijo de puta! Concha de tu madre!" he said.
"Wherever it is, I don't think it's Kansas, Toto," I said.
I parked in front of the First District headquarters on Basin, cuffed both of the Nicaraguan's wrists behind him, and led him by the arm into the building.
"Is Nate Baxter back there?" I asked the sergeant at the information desk.
"Yeah, he's sitting in your office. What are you doing, Dave?"
"Give Purcel a call for me. Tell him I have some freight he ought to check out."
"Dave, you're not supposed to be down here."
"Just make the call. It's not a big deal."
"Maybe you should make it yourself."
I set the Nicaraguan down on a wooden bench and used the phone on the sergeant's desk to call Clete at home. I don't know what I had in mind, really. Maybe I was still pulling for him. Or maybe like a jilted lover I wanted to deliver a little more pain in a situation that was beyond bearing it.
"I can't come down there now. Maybe later. Lois is going apeshit on me," he said. "She took all the beer bottles out of the icebox and busted them all over the fucking driveway. On Sunday morning. The neighbors are watering their lawns and going to church while beer foam and glass are sliding down my drive into the street."
"Sounds bad."
"It's our ongoing soap opera. Drop around sometime and bring your own popcorn."
"Clete?"
"What is it?"
"Get down here."
I led the Nicaraguan through the traffic squad room, which was filled with uniformed cops doing paperwork, into my office, where Nate Baxter sat on the corner of my desk. His sports clothes and two-toned shoes and styled hair gave you the impression of a Nevada real-estate salesman who would sell you a house lot located on an abandoned atomic test site.
I threw the tape cassette into his lap.
"What's this?" he asked.
"His confession. Also some information about gun smuggling."
"What am I supposed to do with it?"
"Listen to it. I've got an interpreter on the tape, but you can get your own."
"You taking coerced statements from suspects?"
"He had his options."
"What the hell are you doing, Robicheaux? You know this isn't acceptable as evidence."
"Not in a courtroom. But you have to consider it in an IA investigation. Right?"
"I can tell you now it's got about as much value as toilet paper."
"Look, you're supposed to be an impartial investigator. There's a murder confession on that tape. What's the matter with you?"
"All right, I'll listen to it during working hours tomorrow. Then I'll tell you the same thing I told you today. But let's look at your real problem a minute. An unverifiable tape-recorded statement brought in by a suspended cop is worthless in any kind of investigation. You've been here fourteen years and you know that. Secondly, while you were on suspension you got yourself busted with a concealed weapon. I didn't do that to you. Nobody else around here did, either. So why not quit pretending I'm the bad actor that kicked all this trouble up your butt? You got to deal with your own fall, Robicheaux. That's real. Your rap sheet is real, and so is your drinking history."
"How about Andres here? Does he look like something I made up?"
My office enclosure was half glass, and the door was open and our voices carried out into the squad room.
"Is he going to make a statement?" Baxter asked.
"Is he go-"
"That's right. You got a tape. You got a guy. Now the tape's no good, so is the guy going to talk to us?"
I didn't answer. The backs of my legs were trembling.
"Come on, tell me," Baxter said.
"He did it. He tortured a Treasury agent with a telephone crank, then burned him to death in my automobile."
"And he's going to waive his rights and tell us all that? Then he's going to put his signature on it?"
"I'm still signing the complaint."
"Glad to hear it."
"Baxter, you're a sonofabitch."
"You want to call names, be my guest."
"Ease off, Lieutenant," the desk sergeant said quietly in the doorway behind me.
I took my handcuff key from my pocket and unlocked one of the Nicaraguan's wrists, then hooked the loose end to the radiator pipe on the wall.
"Your trouble is you been making love to your fist so long you think you're the only guy around here with any integrity," Baxter said.
I swung from my side, hard, with my feet set solidly, and caught him square on the mouth. His head snapped back, his tie flew in the air, and I saw blood in his teeth. His eyes were wild. Uniformed cops were standing up all over the squad room. I wanted to hit him again.
"You want to pull your piece?" I said.
"You've finished yourself this time," he said, holding his hand to his mouth.
"Maybe so. But that doesn't get you off the hook. You want to do something?"
He lowered his hands to his sides. There was a deep, purple cut, the shape of a tooth, in his lower lip and it was starting to swell. His eyes watched me carefully. My fist was still clenched at my side.
"Don't you hear well?" I said.
His eyes broke, and he looked at the uniformed cops watching him from the squad room.
"Use some judgment," he said almost in a whisper, the threat and insult gone from his tone.
"Go on home, Lieutenant. It's no good for you here," the sergeant said behind me. He was a big man, built like a hogshead, with a florid face and a clipped, blond mustache.
I opened my hand and wiped the perspiration off my palm on my slacks.
"Put my cuffs in my desk drawer for me," I said.
"Sure," the sergeant said.
"Look, tell Purcel-"
"Go home, Lieutenant," he said gently. "It's a nice day out. We can handle it."
"I'm signing the complaint against this guy," I said. "Get ahold of Captain Guidry. Don't let anybody kick this guy loose."
"It's no problem, Lieutenant," the sergeant said.
I walked woodenly through the squad room, the skin of my face tight and dead against the collective stare of the uniformed officers. My hand was still shaking when I filled out the formal complaint of assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, and homicide against the Nicaraguan.
Outside, the glare of the sun was like a slap across the eyes. I stepped into the shade to let my eyes adjust to the light and saw Clete walking toward me in a yellow and purple LSU T-shirt cut off at the armpits and a pair of red and white Budweiser shorts. The shadow of the building fell across his face and made him look like he was composed of disjointed parts.
"What's happening, Dave?" His eyes squinted at me out of the glare, but they didn't actually meet mine. He looked as though he were focusing on a thought just beyond my right ear.
"I brought in the Nicaraguan. Didi Gee's people dumped him on my dock."
"The fat boy is rat-fucking the competition, huh?"
"I thought you might want to check him out."
"What for?"
"Maybe you've seen him before."
He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out into the sunlight.
"You know you got blood on your right hand?" he said.
I took out my handkerchief and wiped my knuckles with it.
"What went on?" he said.
"Nate Baxter had an accident."
"You punched out Nate Baxter? Jesus Christ, Dave, what are you doing?"
"Why'd you do it, Clete?"
"A lowlife is off the board. What do you care?"
"A bad cop would have used a throwaway. He would have just said Starkweather came up in his face with it and he had to smoke him. At least you didn't hide behind your badge."
"You once told me yesterday is a decaying memory. So I got no memory for yesterday. I don't care about it, either."
"Confront it or you'll never get rid of it, Clete."
"You think all this bullshit is political and involves principles and national integrity or something. What you're talking about is a bunch of perverts and heroin mules. How you take them out is irrelevant. Bust 'em or smoke 'em, all anybody cares about is they're not around anymore. My uncle used to walk patrol in the Irish Channel back in the forties. When they caught some guys creeping a place, they broke their arms and legs with baseball bats and left one guy to drive the rest of them out of town. Nobody complained then. Nobody would complain if we did it now."
"These guys don't hire part-time help."
"Yeah? Well, I'll worry about that when I have the chance. Right now my home life is like living inside an Excedrin ad. I got a little heat rash and Lois thinks it's the gon."
"Don't you think you've been working that domestic scam a long time?"
"Sorry to tire you with it, Streak."
"I'm going to take those guys down. I hope you're not there when I do."
He flipped his cigarette off the back of a passing truck. A sign showing a woman in a bathing suit was on the side.
"Why would I be?" he said. "I'm just the guy that carried you two flights down a fire escape while a kid tried to notch our ears with a.22 rifle."
"You can't win on the game you pitched last Saturday."
"Yeah? Sounds like an AA meet. I'll see you around. Stay off the booze. I'll drink it for both of us. It's a lousy life."
He walked back toward his automobile, his sandals flopping on the pavement, a big, lumbering man whose boiled, stitched face reminded me of a bleached melon about to explode in the sun.
I pretended to be a pragmatist, a cynic, a jaded war veteran, a vitriolic drunk, the last of the Louisiana badasses; but like most people I believed that justice would be done, things would work out, somebody would show up with the Constitution in his hand. That afternoon I kept the phone on the deck table while I washed down the houseboat, polished the brass and windows, and sanded and revarnished the hatch. I put on flippers and goggles and cooled off in the lake, diving down into the yellow-green light, feeling the power in my lungs and chest that were now free of alcohol, bursting to the surface with a ringing in my ears that was never the telephone.
Finally, at six-thirty Captain Guidry called and said that the Nicaraguan remained in custody and that he would question him himself in the morning and also contact Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.
I invited Annie over for a late supper, and we cooked steaks outside on my hibachi and ate under the umbrella in the cooling evening. The western horizon was aflame with the sun's afterglow, then the clouds became pink and purple and then finally you could see the city light the night sky.
The next morning I did one hundred sit-ups, worked out with light barbells for an hour while I listened over and over to the old original recording of Iry LeJeune's " La Jolie Blonde," made out a grocery list, then asked a college kid who lived down the beach to listen for my phone while I went to a loan company and borrowed three thousand dollars on my houseboat.
The sun was straight up and white in the sky when I got back. Captain Guidry had called a half hour earlier. I dialed his extension at the First District and was told he was in a meeting and would not be out for two hours. Then I called Fitzpatrick's supervisor at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
"What did you expect me to tell you this morning?" he asked. I could almost see his hand clenched on the receiver.
"I thought by this time maybe you'd questioned the Nicaraguan."
"You must get up in the morning and brush your teeth in the toilet."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You finally nail one of them and you turn him over to the same people who're letting you twist in the wind. They put him upstairs in the tank. Last night a couple of strung-out blacks didn't like the way his breath smelled and they stuffed his head down a flooded floor drain and broke his neck."