A Morning for Flamingos (11 page)

“Then ignore what they say, Bootsie, and stay out of it.”

“I’m worried about you. I work with these people. You can’t believe how they think, what they’re capable of doing.”

“Oh yes I can.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Be my friend on this. Don’t mix in it, and don’t worry too much about what you hear.”

Her face was lighted with the late sun’s glow over the garden wall. She raised her chin slightly, the way she always did when she was angry.

“Dave, you left me. Do you think you should be telling me what to do now?”

“I guess not.”

“I survive among these animals because I have to. It isn’t fun. I’m on my own, and that isn’t fun, either. But I handle it.”

“I guess you do.”

“Why didn’t you marry me?” she said. Her eyes were hot and bright.

“You’d have married a drunk. It wouldn’t have been a good life, believe me.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know that at all.”

“Yes, I do. I became a full-blown lush. I tried to kill my first wife’s lover at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain.”

“Maybe that’s what he deserved.”

“I tried to kill him because I had become morally insane.”

“I don’t care what you did later in your life. Why’d you close me out, Dave?”

I let my hands hang between my knees.

“Because I was dumb,” I said.

“It’s that simple?”

“No, it’s not. But how about suffice it to say that I made a terrible mistake, that I’ve had regret about it all these years.”

Her legs were crossed, her arms motionless on the sides of the cushioned iron chair, her face composed now in the tea-colored light. The top of her terry cloth robe was loose, and I could see her breasts rise and fall quietly with her breathing.

“I do have to go,” I said.

“Are you coming back?”

“If you’d like to see me again, I’d surely like to see you.”

“I’m not moving out of town,
cher
.” Then her face became soft and she said, “But, Dave, I’ve learned one thing with middle age. I don’t try to correct yesterday’s mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once.”

“No one could ever say they were unsure where you stood on an issue, Boots.”

She smiled without answering, then walked me to the front door, put her palms on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek. It was an appropriate and kind gesture and would not have meant much in itself, but then she looked into my face and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as though she were saying goodbye to someone forever, and I felt my loins thicken and my heart turn to water.

It was almost dark when I got off the streetcar at the corner of St. Charles and Canal and went into the Pearl and had a poor-boy sandwich filled with oysters, shrimp, sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and
sauce piquante
. Then I walked to my apartment and paused momentarily outside my door while I found my key. The people upstairs were partying out on the balcony, and one of them accidentally kicked a coffee can of geraniums into the courtyard. But in spite of the noise I thought I heard someone inside my apartment. I put my hand on the .25-caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, unlocked the door, and let it swing all the way back against the wall on its hinges.

Lionel Comeaux, the man I’d found working under his car on the creeper, was in the kitchen, pulling the pots and pans out of the cabinet and placing them on the table. The jolly fat man who called himself Uncle Ray Fontenot and said he used to play trombone at Sharky’s Dream Room had emptied the drawers in the bedroom and had laid all my hangered clothes across the bed. My .45 lay on top of a neatly folded shirt. Both of them looked at me with flat, empty expressions, as though I were the intruder.

The fat man, Fontenot, wore a beige suit and a cream turtleneck shirt. I saw his eyes study my face and my right hand; then he smiled and opened his palms in front of him.

“It’s just business, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “Don’t take it personal. We’ve treated your things with respect.”

“How’d you get in?”

“It’s a simple lock,” he said.

“You’ve got some damn nerve,” I said.

“Close the door. There’s people out there,” Lionel, the man in the kitchen, said. He wore Adidas running shoes, blue jeans with no belt, a gold pullover sweater with the sleeves pushed up over his thick, sun-browned arms.

I could hear my own breathing in the silence.

“Lionel’s right,” Fontenot said. “We don’t need an audience here, do we? Getting mad isn’t going to make us any money, either, is it?”

I took my hand out of my coat pocket and opened and closed it at my side.

“Come in, come in,” Fontenot said. “Look, we’re putting your things back. There’s no harm done.”

“You toss my place and call it no harm?” I said. I pushed the door shut behind me.

“You knew somebody would check you out. Don’t make it a big deal,” the younger man said in the kitchen. He lit a dead cigar in his mouth and squatted down and started replacing the pots and pans in the cabinets next to the stove.

“I don’t like people smoking in my apartment,” I said.

He turned his head at me and paused in his work. The red Navy tattoo on his flexed bicep was ringed with blue stars. He was balanced on the ball of one foot, the cigar between his fingers, a tooth working on a bloodless spot on his lower lip. Fontenot walked out of the other room.

“Put out the smoke, Lionel,” he said quietly, His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Go on, put it out. We’re in the man’s home.”

“I don’t think it’s smart dealing with him. I said it then, I’ll say it in front of him,” Lionel said. He wet the cigar under the tap and dropped it in a garbage bag.

“The man’s money is as good as the next person’s,” Fontenot said.

“You were a cop,” Lionel said to me. “That’s a problem for me. No insult meant.”

“You creeped my apartment. That’s a problem for me.”

“Lionel had a bad experience a few years back,” Fontenot said. “His name doesn’t make campus bells ring for you?”

“No.”

“Second-string quarterback for LSU,” Fontenot said. “Until he sold some whites on the half shell to the wrong people. I think if Lionel had been first-string, he wouldn’t have had to spend a year in Angola. It’s made him distrustful.”

“Get off of it, Ray.”

“The man needs to understand,” Fontenot said. “Look, Mr. Robicheaux, we’re short on protocol, but we don’t rip each other off. We establish some rules, some trust, then we all make money. Get his bank, Lionel.”

Lionel opened a cabinet next to the stove, squatted down, and reached his hand deep inside. I heard the adhesive tape tear loose from the top of the cabinet behind the drawer. He threw the brown envelope, with tape hanging off each end, for me to catch.

“We want you to understand something else, too,”

Fontenot said. “We’re not here because of some fifty-thou deal. That’s toilet paper in this town. But the gentleman we work for is interested in you. You’re a lucky man.”

“Tony C. is interested?”

“Who?” He smiled.

“Five keys, ten thou a key, no laxative, no vitamin B twelve,” I said.

“Twelve thou, my friend,” Fontenot said.

“Bullshit. New Orleans is white with it.”

“Ten thou is the discount price. You get that down the line,” Fontenot said.

“Then go fuck yourself.”

“Who do you think you are, man?” Lionel said.

“The guy whose place you just creeped.”

“Let’s split,” he said.

I looked at Fontenot.

“What I can’t seem to convey is that you guys are not the only market around. Ask Cardo who he wants running the action in Southwest Louisiana. Ask him who punched his wife in a bathroom stall in the Castaways in Miami.”

“There’re some people I wouldn’t try to turn dials on, Mr. Robicheaux,” Fontenot said.

“You’re the one holding up the deal. Give me what I want and we’re in business.”

“You can come in at eleven thou,” he said.

“It’s got to be ten.”

“Listen to this guy,” Lionel said.

“The money’s not mine. I’ve got to give an accounting to other people.”

“I can relate to that. We’ll call you,” Fontenot said.

“When?”

“About this time tomorrow. Do you have a car?”

“I have a pickup truck.”

He nodded reflectively; then his mouth split in a grin and I could see each of his teeth like worn, wide-set pearls in his gums.

“How big a grudge can a man like you carry?” he asked.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, and shook all over when he laughed, his narrowed eyes twinkling with a liquid glee.

The next morning I was walking down Chartres toward the French Market for breakfast when a black man on a white pizza-delivery scooter went roaring past me. I didn’t pay attention to him, but then he came roaring by again. He wore an oversized white uniform, splattered with pizza sauce, sunglasses that were as dark as a welder’s, and a white paper hat mashed down to his ears. He turned his scooter at the end of the block and disappeared, and I headed through Jackson Square toward the Café du Monde. I waited for the green light at Decatur; then I heard the scooter come rattling and coughing around the corner. The driver braked to the curb and grinned at me, his thin body jiggling from the engine’s vibration. “Tee Beau!” I said.

“Wait for me on the bench. I gotta park my machine, me.”

He pulled out into the traffic again, drove past the line of horse-and-carriages in front of the square, and disappeared past the old Jax brewery. Five minutes later I saw him coming on foot back down Decatur, his hat hammered down to the level of his sunglasses. He sat beside me on a sunlit bench next to the pike fence that bordered the park area inside the square.

“You ain’t gonna turn me in, are you, Mr. Dave?” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Working at the pizza place. Looking out for Jimmie Lee Boggs, too. You ain’t gonna turn me in, now, are you?”

“You’re putting me in a rough spot, Tee Beau.”

“I got your promise. Dorothea and Gran’maman done tole me, Mr. Dave.”

“I didn’t see you. Get out of New Orleans.”

“Ain’t got no place else to go. Except back to New Iberia. Except to the Red Hat. I got a lot to tell you ‘bout Jimmie Lee Boggs. He here.”

“In New Orleans?”

“He left but he come back. I seen him. Two nights ago. Right over yonder.” He pointed diagonally across the square. “I been watching.”

“Wait a minute. You saw him by the Pontabla Apartments?”

“Listen, this what happen, Mr. Dave. After he killed the po-liceman and that white boy, he drove us all the way to Algiers, with lightning jumping all over the sky. He made me sit in back, with chains on, like he a po-liceman and I his prisoner, in case anybody stop us. He had the radio on, and I was ‘fraid he gonna find out I didn’t shoot you, drive out in that marsh, kill me like he done them poor people in the filling station. All the time he was talking, telling me ‘bout what he gonna do, how he got a place in the Glades in Florida, where he say—now this is what he say, I don’t use them kinds of words—where he say the hoot owls fucks the jackrabbits, where he gonna hole up, then come back to New Orleans and make them dagos give him a lot of money.

“Just befo’ we got to town he called somebody from a filling station. I could hear him talking, and he said something ‘bout the Pontabla. I heard him say it. He don’t be paying me no mind, no, ‘cause he say I just a stupid nigger. That’s the way he talk all the time I be chained up there in the backseat.”

“Tee Beau, are you sure it was Boggs? It’s hard to believe you found him when half the cops in Louisiana can’t.”

“I found you, ain’t I? He don’t look the same now, Mr. Dave. But it’s him. His hair short and black now, he puts glasses, too. But it’s Jimmie Lee Boggs. I followed him in my car to make sure.”

“Where’d you get a car?”

“I borrowed it.”

“You borrowed it?”

“Then I put it back.”

“I see.”

“I followed him out to the Airline Highway. To a boxing place. No, it ain’t that. They put on gloves, but they kick with they feet, too. What they call that?”

“Full-contact karate.”

“I looked inside, me. Phew, it stink in there. Jimmie Lee Boggs in long sweatpants kicking at some man in the ring. His skin white and hard, shining with sweat. I got to swallow when I look at him, Mr. Dave. That man make me that afraid.”

“You did fine, Tee Beau. But I want to ask something of you. You leave Jimmie Lee Boggs for other people. Don’t have anything more to do with this.”

“You gonna get me a new trial?”

“I’ll try. But we have to do it a step at a time, partner.”

His hands were folded in his lap, and he was bent forward on the bench. His small face looked like a squirrel’s with sunglasses on it. Wiry rings of hair grew across the back of his neck.

“I got bad dreams at night. ‘Bout the Red Hat, ‘bout they be strapping me down in that chair with that black hood on my face,” he said.

“You killed Hipolyte Broussard, though, didn’t you, Tee Beau?”

His breath clicked in his throat.

“I done part of it. But the part I done was an accident. I swear it, ‘fore God, Mr. Dave. Hipolyte kept cussing me, tole me all the bad things he gonna do to me, do to Dorothea, tole me I got jelly in my ears, me, that I cain’t do nothing right, that I better stomp on the brake when he say, take my foot off when he say. He under there clanking and banging and calling me mo’ names, saying ‘Stomp now, stomp now.’

“So that what I done. I close my eyes and hit on that brake, and I hit on it and hit on it and pretend it be Hipolyte’s face, that I smashing it like a big eggshell, me. Then I feel the bus rock and that jack break like a stick, and I know Hipolyte under the wheel now, I hear him screaming and flopping around in the mud. But I scared, Mr. Dave, I be running, run past the shed, down the road past Hipolyte’s house, down past the cane field. When I turn round he look like a turtle on its back, caught under that big iron wheel. But I keep on going, I run plumb back to Gran’maman’s house, she be shucking crawfish, say, ‘You go wash, Tee Beau, put on your clean clothes, you, sit down with your
gran’maman
and don’t tell them policemens nothing, you.’”