"It doesn't look like you believe me," he said. "Do you think I boosted the ID and a government car, too?" He wouldn't stop grinning.
"No, I believe you. It's just that you look like you might have escaped from 'The Howdy Doody Show.'"
"I get lots of compliments like that. You New Orleans people are full of fun. I hear you've been taking a little heat for me."
"You tell me."
"Are you going to offer me some iced tea?"
"You want some?"
"Not here. You're too hot, Lieutenant. In fact, almost on fire. We need to get you back on the sidelines somehow. I'm afraid it's not going to be easy. The other team is unteachable in some ways."
"What are you talking about?"
"They have fixations. Something's wrong with their operation and they target some schmoe that's wandered into the middle of it. It usually doesn't do them any good, but they think it does."
"I'm the schmoe?"
"No, you're a bright guy with stainless steel balls, evidently. But we don't want to see you a casualty. Let's take a ride."
"I'm taking a lady to the track tonight."
"Another time."
"No, not another time. And let's stop this business of Uncle Sam talking in his omniscience to the uninformed local flatfoot. If the shit's burning on the stove, I suspect it's yours and it's because you federal boys have screwed things up again."
He stopped grinning. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then wet his lips. He suddenly seemed older.
"You have to have faith in what I tell you, Lieutenant," he said. "You're a good man, you've got courage, you've never been on a pad, you go to Mass on Sundays, you treat the street people decently, and you put away a lot of the bad guys. We know these things about you because we don't want you hurt. But believe me, it's dumb for the two of us to be out here in the open talking to each other."
"Who's this 'we' you're talking about?"
"Uh, actually the 'we' is more or less just me, at least right now. Come on, I'll explain it. Trust me. Somebody who looks like Howdy Doody has got to be a straight shooter. Besides, I'll buy you a poor-boy sandwich on my expense account."
So this was the state of the art down at the Federal Building, I thought. We didn't see much of the federal boys, primarily because they operated on their own as a rule, and even though they said otherwise, they looked down upon us as inept and uneducated. On the other hand, we didn't have much liking for them, either. Any number of television serials portray the feds as manicured, dapper altruists dressed in Botany 500 suits, who dispassionately hunt down the oily representatives of the Mafia and weld the cell door shut on them. The reality is otherwise. As Didi Gee would probably point out, syndicate gangsters have little fear of any police agency or court system. They own judges, cops, and prosecutors, and they can always get to a witness or a juror.
The Treasury Department is another matter. Law enforcement people everywhere, as well as criminals, consider Treasury agents incorruptible. Within the federal government they are to law enforcement what Smokey the Bear and the U. S. Forest Service are to environmental integrity. Even Joe Valachi, the Brooklyn mob's celebrity snitch, had nothing but admiration for the T-men.
Fitzpatrick drove us across town to a Latin American restaurant on Louisiana Avenue. We sat at an outdoor table in the small courtyard under the oak and willow trees. There were electric lights in the trees and we could see the traffic on the avenue through the scrolled iron gate. The banana trees along the stone wall rattled in the wind. He ordered shrimp and oyster poor-boy sandwiches for us and poured himself a glass of Jax while I sipped my iced tea.
"You don't drink, do you?" he said.
"Not anymore."
"Heavy sauce problem?"
"You not only look like a kid, you're as subtle as a shithouse, aren't you?" I said.
"Why do you think I brought us to this restaurant?"
"I don't know."
"Almost everybody working here is a product of our fun-in-the-sun policies south of the border. Some of them are legals, some bought their papers from coyotes."
"That's only true of about five thousand restaurants in Orleans and Jefferson parishes."
"You see the owner over by the cash register? If his face looks out of round, it's because Somoza's national guardsmen broke all the bones in it."
He waited, but I didn't say anything.
"The man running the bar is an interesting guy too," he said. "He's from a little village in Guatemala. One day the army came to the village and without provocation killed sixteen Indians and an American priest from Oklahoma named Father Stan Rother. For kicks they put the bodies of the Indians in a U.S. Army helicopter and threw them out at high altitudes."
He watched my face. His eyes were a washed-out blue. I'd never seen a grown man with so many freckles.
"I'm not big on causes anymore," I said.
"I guess that's why you went out to Julio Segura's and put a hot plate under his nuts."
"This dinner is getting expensive."
"I'm sorry I've been boring you," he said, and broke up a bread stick in three pieces and stood each piece upright. "Let's talk about your immediate concerns. Let's talk about the three guys who gave you gargling lessons in the bathtub last night. I bet that'll hold your interest."
"You don't hide hostility well."
"I get a little emotional on certain subjects. You'll have to excuse me. I went to Jesuit schools. They always taught us to be up front about everything. They're the Catholic equivalent of the jarheads, you know. Get in there and kick butt and take names and all that stuff. I just think you're a lousy actor, Lieutenant."
"Look, Fitzpatrick-"
"Fuck off, man. I'm going to give you the scam and you can work out your own options. I'm surrounded by indifferent people and I don't need any more of them. I just don't want you on my conscience. Also, as a matter of principle I don't like another guy taking the heat for me, particularly when he blunders into something he doesn't know anything about. You're damn lucky they didn't blow out your light last night. The girl's, too."
He stopped talking while the waiter put down our plates of oyster and shrimp sandwiches, then he took a bite out of his sandwich as though he hadn't eaten for weeks.
"You don't like the food?" he said, his mouth still full.
"I lost my appetite."
"Ah, you're a sensitive fellow after all."
"Tell me, do all you guys have the same manners?"
"You want it straight, Lieutenant? We've got some firemen and pyromaniacs on the same side of the street."
"Who was that bunch last night?" I said.
"That's the easy part. The one named Erik is an Israeli. He's somebody's little brother back in Haifa and they keep him around to clean up their mess, change toilet-paper rolls, stuff like that. The one you called Bobby Joe in your report is a real cut-up. That's Robert J. Starkweather of Shady Grove, Alabama. The state took away his kid from him and his wife for the kid's own protection. They think he fragged an NCO in Vietnam but they couldn't prove it, so they eased him out on a BCD. How do you like that tattoo about killing them all and letting God sort them out? He's sincere about it, too."
"How about the guy in charge?"
"He's a little more complex. His name is Philip Murphy, at least we think it is. We've run this guy all kinds of ways and we come up with some blank spots-no addresses, no record of earnings, no tax returns for a couple of years here and there. Or he shows up owning a shoe store in Des Moines. With this kind of guy it usually means protected witness or CIA. He's probably one of those that bounces in and out of the Agency or freelances around. I suspect he's off their leash right now. But it's hard to tell sometimes."
I picked up my poor-boy sandwich and started to eat. The shrimp, oysters, lettuce, onions, tomato, and sauce piquante tasted wonderful. The shadows of the oak and willow leaves moved in etched, shifting patterns across our table.
"I still don't understand the connections. What have these guys got to do with Segura's whores and dope?" I said.
"Nothing directly." Then he started grinning again. "Come on, you're a detective. Give me your opinion."
"Are you sure these guys aren't after you because of what you fancy is a sense of humor?"
"Maybe. Come on, give me your opinion."
"I have a hard time believing you're a Treasury agent."
"Sometimes my supervisor does too. Come on."
"You're with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."
"Good."
"Are we talking about guns?" I said.
"Excellento."
"Nope, not excellento. I still don't see it, and I already told you this meal has gotten expensive."
"It's simple. I think Segura is putting his dope money back into military equipment for the Contras in Nicaragua. It explains these other guys. The Israelis supplied arms to Somoza for years and they still sell to right-wing guys like Pinochet in Chile. From what we know about Buffalo Bob, who almost pinched your head off at the shoulders, he's cowboyed for the CIA down on the Honduran border when he wasn't mixing up his phallus with an M-16, and I'll bet Philip Murphy is the tie-in to some arms contractors and military people here in the States. There's nothing new or unusual about it. It's the same kind of unholy trinity we had working for us down in Cuba. Look, why do you think the CIA tried to use some Chicago wiseguys to whack Castro? The mob had a vested interest. They got along very well with Batista, then Castro shut down all their casinos."
"How did you get onto this current stuff?"
"We had our eye on a paramilitary training camp in Florida and one in Mississippi, then Buffalo Bob left a submachine gun in a Biloxi bus locker. We could have picked him up, but instead we let him keep ricocheting off the walls for a while. Philip Murphy showed up and it got a lot more interesting."
He paused a minute, then looked me flatly in the face again with those washed-out blue eyes that seemed to be immune to both protocol and insult.
"Have you ever had to dust anyone?" he said.
"Maybe."
"Be straight."
"Twice."
"How'd you feel about it?"
"They dealt the play."
"The next time you see Murphy or Buffalo Bob and Erik, they're going to take you out. You know that, don't you?"
"You said you're an up-front guy. Let me tell you a couple of my own meditations. I don't think you're an upfront guy."
"Oh?"
"I don't think you want me out," I said. "I think you want a partner. I've already got one. He's paid by the city, just like I am."
"You're a pretty slick cop."
"I don't like somebody trying to use me."
"I can't blame you. There's something I didn't tell you. The American priest that was killed in Guatemala was a friend of mine. Our government is into some real bullshit down there, buddy, but everybody who works for the government isn't necessarily on the same team. Some of us still believe in the old rules."
"Good for you. But if you're into the Boy Scout Manual, don't try to run a game on another cop."
"Nobody's asking you to sign a loyalty oath. What are you so afraid of?"
"You're genuinely starting to piss me off," I said.
"I didn't write this script. You got into it on your own. I'll tell you something else, too: you're not going to walk out of it easily. I guarantee it. Guys like Segura and Murphy are just functionary jackoffs for much bigger people. Here's another question for you, too, Mr. Clean. What were you thinking about while you were oiling your guns out on your boat deck? Maybe blowing bone and cartilage all over Buffalo Bob's walls?"
"I think with luck I can still make the fifth race."
"I'll drive you back."
"Don't worry about it. The city's got a tab with Yellow Cab."
"Take this card. My motel's number is on it."
"I believe my phone is still out of order. See you around," I said, and walked out of the courtyard onto Louisiana Avenue. Some black children roared past me on roller skates, and heat lightning flickered above the huge oak trees across the street.
I called Annie from the pay phone to try to save part of the evening, but no one was home. It started to rain and I waited a half hour under a leaky awning for my cab to arrive. I made a quiet resolution about accepting invitations from federal employees.
But, as Fitzpatrick had said, I'd written my own script, and the next morning I continued to write it, only with some disastrous consequences that made me wonder if my alcoholic, self-destructive incubus was not alive and well.
I started by looking for Bobby Joe Starkweather. I didn't have many threads, but he was the kind of guy who showed up at certain places. I tried a couple of indoor target ranges, outlaw motorcycle bars, sex shops, and a survivalist store that catered to people who relished the unlimited prospects of living in a post-World War III wasteland. But I struck out.
Then, at noon, while Cletus and I were eating a pizza out of a box on a bench in Jackson Square, I wondered why I was chasing after an unknown quantity like Bobby Joe Starkweather when the primary connection was already available. We sat under a mimosa tree, and St. Louis Cathedral and the square itself were drenched in hot sunlight. There were drops of perspiration and flecks of red pizza sauce on Clete's face while he ate. His eyes were looking abstractedly at the sidewalk artists in Pirates Alley.
"What have you got on the burner for this afternoon?" I asked.
"Not much. Figure out what I'm going to do with my goddamn wife. Get this. She just sent a check for six hundred dollars to the Buddhist priest out in Colorado. I tried to put a stop-payment on it, but it already went through. That's thousands she's given to this guy. When I say anything about it, she says I'm drunk."
"Maybe y'all should separate for a while."
"I can't. She's become suicidal. Her psychiatrist says she shouldn't even be driving an automobile."
"I'm hoping to take a girl out to dinner tonight, if I can get ahold of her. Why don't you and Lois think about coming along? It's on me."
"Maybe so, Dave. Thanks."
"I want to go out to Julio Segura's this afternoon."
"What for?"
"I'm going to roust him and take him in for questioning."
"He might file a harassment charge this time."
"He was the last person to see a murder victim alive."
"Sounds shaky. It's not our jurisdiction." His eyes smiled.
"You coming or not?"
"Hell, yes."
We drove in Clete's car along the lakefront road. There was a light chop on the slate-green surface, and pelicans were diving for fish out of the white sun. The palm trees on the esplanade clicked dryly in the wind; and on the right-hand side of the road beyond the pink stucco walls, the long iron pike fences, the impassable hedges and rows of myrtle trees, lay the terraced lawns and mansions of the rich. I knew liberals out at Tulane who would tell me these were the people whom we served. But I didn't like them any better than anybody else did. Actually, they didn't like the police, either, or at least trust us, because they hired their own security, kept attack dogs on the grounds, and maintained floodlight and burglar alarm systems that were an electronic miracle. They lived in fear of kidnappers of their children, sophisticated jewel creeps, minorities who would compromise their property values. The irony was that they were among the most secure people upon earth-secure from disease, poverty, political oppression, virtually everything except death.
"How much you think these places cost?" Cletus asked.
"I don't know, maybe a million bucks."
"My pop was a milkman in the Garden District, and sometimes in the summer I'd go on the route with him. One morning I was messing around in front of this big house right off St. Charles and this lady came out and said I was the cutest little fellow she'd ever seen and I should come back at three o'clock for some ice cream. That afternoon I took a bath and put on my nice clothes and knocked on her door right at three. At first she didn't remember who I was, then she told me to go around to the back door. I didn't know what the hell was going on. When I got into the backyard I saw the maid handing out ice cream to all these raggedy little colored kids that belonged to the yardmen around the neighborhood.
"This lady had a greenhouse back there. I came back that night with a box full of rocks and broke damn near every pane in it. She got it repaired and three weeks later I came back and broke them again. When my pop figured out I'd done it, he whipped me with a switch till blood ran down my legs."
Clete turned onto Julio Segura's street, which was filled with trees and blooming shrubs.
"You ever get that mad when you were a kid?" he asked.
"I don't remember."
"You told me once you and your brother had some rough times."
"Who cares, Clete? It's yesterday's ball game."
"So I know that. What's the big deal?" he said.
"You've got a rusty nail sideways in your head. Let it go, quit feeding it."
"You get a little personal sometimes, Streak."
"There he goes! Hit it!" I said.
Julio Segura's lavender Cadillac had just bounced out through his front gate onto the street. A dwarf was driving, and a blond woman sat in the front passenger's seat. Segura and another man were in back. Cletus floored the accelerator until we were abreast of them. The dwarf's face was frightened behind the glass, and he kept driving.
I held my badge out at him. He put his foot on the brake, both of his hands on the steering wheel, his chin pointed upward under his purple chauffeur's cap, and scraped the front tire in a long black line against the curb.
"How do you want to play it?" Clete asked before we got out of the car.
"We run up the black flag," I said.
Clete had stopped our own car in front of the Cadillac, and we walked back on opposite sides of it. I tapped on the passenger's window and on Segura's back window for them to roll down the glass. Later I was to go over this scene again and again in my mind, as well as the careless remark I'd made to Clete about the black flag, and wonder at how differently that afternoon might have turned out if I had approached the driver's side of the Cadillac or if I had kept my own counsel.
Clete reached down into the ignition, pulled the keys, and threw them into a hedge. The dwarf was petrified with fear. His little hands gripped the wheel and his jug head swiveled back and forth between Clete and the back seat.
"You don't have a blowgun hidden in your shorts, do you?" Clete said to him, then sniffed the air inside the Cadillac. "My, my, what is that aroma I smell? Colombian coffee? Or maybe we've been toking on a little muta on our way to the golf course?"
The air was heavy with the smell of marijuana. The blond woman's face looked sick. I saw the cigarette lighter from the dash lying on the floor, and I suspected she'd been snorting the roach off the lighter and had eaten it when we'd pulled them over. She had a nice figure and was dressed in white shorts and heels and a low blouse, but her hair was lacquered with so much hair spray that it looked like wire, and her face was layered with cosmetics to cover the deep pockmarks in her complexion.
I opened the door for her. "Walk on back home," I said.
"They lock the gate," she said.
"Then do the best thing you've done in years and keep on walking," I said.
"I don't know what to do, Julio," she said to the backseat.
"Do what I tell you, hon. Your Latino gumball is going to take a big fall today," I said.
Her eyes shifted nervously and she bit her lips, then she picked up her purse, eased past me, and clicked hurriedly down the sidewalk.
I leaned down in Segura's window. He and the gatekeeper whom Clete had hit in the stomach the other day sat behind a fold-out bar with vodka drinks in their hands. Rubber bands held the napkins around the drink glasses. Segura wore yellow golf slacks, polished brown loafers, and a flowered white shirt unbuttoned to his stomach. His peculiar triangular face, with the tiny balls of purple skin in the furrows of his forehead, looked up at me in the slanting sunlight.
"What the fuck you think you're doing now, Robicheaux?" he asked.
"Teaching you what a real bad day can be," I said.
"What do you want? Some kind of action? A piece of something downtown?"
"You're going to give me Philip Murphy, Bobby Joe Starkweather, and the little Israeli."
"I don't know none of these people. You keep coming around my house talking about things I don't know nothing about."
"Ole Streak's in a bad mood today, Julio," Clete said. "Your friends messed it up the other night and did some real bad things. They're not around now, but you are. You and Paco the barfer here." He blew his cigarette smoke into the gatekeeper's face.
"You trying to squeeze me? Okay, I'm a realist. I got business arrangements with policemen," Segura said.
"You don't fly this time, Julio," I said. "All the doors are closed. It's just me and you."
"Call Wineburger," he said to the gatekeeper.
The other man reached for the telephone that was in a mahogany box inset in the back of the front seat.
"You touch that telephone and I'll stuff it crossways down your throat," Clete said.
The man sat back in the deep leather of the seat, his face tight, his hands flat on his knees.
"You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants," Segura said.
"Try this, my friend," I said. "Lovelace Deshotels was a little black girl from the country who had big aspirations for herself and her family. She thought she'd made the big score, but you don't like broads that slop down your booze and throw up in your pool, so you eighty-sixed her back to the geek circuit. Except you had a badass black girl on your hands that wouldn't eighty-six. On top of it, she developed this fixation about elephants." I watched his face. It twitched like a rubber band. "So what does a macho guy like you do when one of his whores gets in his face? He has a couple of his lowlifes take her out on a boat and launch her into the next world with the same stuff she'd already sold her soul for.
"Right now you're wondering how I know all this, aren't you, Julio? It's because the guys that work for you have diarrhea of the mouth. It's information you can get across a lunch table. There are probably only several dozen people we can march by a grand jury right now."
"Then do it, smart guy."
"Let me give you the rest of it, just so you'll be fully informed when Wineburger tries to bond you out this afternoon. I'm going to have your car towed in, vacuumed, and torn apart with crowbars. Possession in Louisiana is fifteen years, and all we need is the carbon ash, either off that cigarette lighter or the upholstery.
"Any way you cut it, your ass is busted."
Then Cletus committed what was probably the stupidest and most senseless act of his career.
"And this little piggy is busted, too," he said, and reached in the window and caught the gatekeeper's nose between his fingers and twisted.
The gatekeeper's eyes filled with tears; his hand slapped at Clete's, then his hairy, tattooed arm dipped into the leather pouch on the side door.
"No lo hagas! No lo hagas!" Segura screamed.
But it was forever too late for all of us. The gatekeeper's hand came up with a nickel-plated automatic and let off one round that hit the window frame and blew glass all over Clete's shirt. It was very fast after that. Just as I pulled the.45 from the back of my trousers, I saw Clete rip his nine-millimeter from his belt holster, crouch, and begin firing. I stepped back a foot, to clear the angle away from Segura, and fired simultaneously with my left hand locked on my wrist to hold the recoil down. I fired five times, as fast as I could pull the trigger, the explosions roaring in my ears, and saw no one thing distinctly inside the car. Instead, it was as though an earthquake had struck the inside of the Cadillac. The air was filled with divots of leather, stuffing from the seats, flying shards of glass and metal, splinters of mahogany, broken liquor bottles, cordite, smoke, and a film of blood and vodka that drained down the back window.
There was no place for Julio Segura to hide. He tried to shrink into an embryonic ball away from Clete's line of fire, but his position was hopeless. Then he suddenly leaped up into the window with his hands pressed out toward me like claws. His eyes were pleading, his mouth open with a silent scream. My finger had already squeezed tight in the trigger guard, and the round caught him in the top of the mouth and blew the back of his head all over the jerking body of the gatekeeper.
I was trembling and breathless when I fell back from the Cadillac and leaned on top of Clete's car, the.45 hanging from my hand. Clete's scarred, poached face was so bloodless and tight you could have struck a kitchen match to it. His clothes were covered with flecks of glass.
"The sonofabitch missed me from two feet," he said. "Did you see that? That fucking window glass saved my life. Go back and look inside. We blew them apart."
Then the dwarf chauffeur climbed down from the driver's seat and ran down the middle of the esplanade on his stubby legs amid a wail of sirens. Clete began to giggle uncontrollably.