by Chris Wiltz
The beach house and the poker game were another Ace ritual. The story went that Rivers had won The Ace in an all-night poker game. Only three people were left in the game and one of the other two men had won all the cash from Rivers and the previous owner of the lounge. The winner offered to play one more hand if Rivers and the bar owner could come up with something worth betting on. The bar owner put up his bar, and Rivers put up all he had in the world, his house on the Gulf Coast, and, so the story went, his peace of mind. The game was five card draw and Rivers was dealt everything he needed for a royal flush except the ace. He asked for one card and got both the card and the place.
No one knew exactly how the story had originated, except it was the kind of story Tom Rivers himself might have told after one drink too many. But whenever someone could add something new and clever to the story about The Ace, Tom Rivers would order Schnapps for everyone at the, bar and make a toast, “To our unmade memories, and all of our delusions.” Everyone would down the Schnapps in one gulp and be extremely pleased with the performance of the ritual. Maybe it was Tom Rivers’ routines and rituals that gave The Ace its staying power—there were no surprises here. Myra, the romantic she could be sometimes, loved the ritual of the Schnapps and Rivers’ toast. She thought it was poetic and was fond of quoting it, especially whenever I talked about our future together.
“And not too much more Schnapps going around either,” Rivers said, “but enough for us.” He reached behind him, got a bottle off the shelf, and poured Schnapps up to the little white lines on two shot glasses. He raised his glass and started to speak.
“Don’t say it,” I said.
We both tossed the liquor down our throats. My eyes were still watering when he asked, “So what brings you around, Neal? Is it Marty Solarno?”
Tom Rivers never did miss much.
“Was he still coming around, Rivers?”
“Not as much as he used to, but some.”
“Do you know who he was hanging with, what he was doing?”
Rivers stared at me and I could see little gears clicking behind his eyeballs. It wasn’t his style to question me, or anyone. And I figured it was a fifty-fifty chance that he would tell me he knew nothing. He was measuring his reply like he measured the Schnapps. He blinked and said, “Do you know Mr. D.’s Laundry over on Bourbon?” I told him I’d never noticed it. “It’s a hole in the wall in the same block as Solarno’s apartment. You have to call and make an appointment with Mr. D. Danny Dideaux’s his name.” He blinked again. “Try not to tell him I sent you.”
11
* * *
Monuments to the Past
Mr. D.’s Laundry, at just after four o’clock in the afternoon, was closed, a small padlock on the front door. Through a smudgy storefront window, I peered into the dim interior. One giant step from the window was a counter. Beyond it was a rod that stretched from one wall to the other, maybe eight feet across, that was about a third full of hanging clothes. Most of the clothes were pushed to the right side, but only a few of them were covered in those thin plastic garment bags. Behind the rod was a greenish wall mottled by peeling paint, cracked plaster and dinge. The whole place was just a big closet, ill-kept, and probably closed most of the time. But I guessed it was all Mr. D. needed to show he had a legitimate income.
I moved several inches so that I was standing at the far left of the window, my eyes still on the clothes all huddled together, discarded props shoved out of the way. But that’s not at all what they were. They were camouflage. Without most of my body blocking what little daylight could get through the dirty window, I saw the two straight lines that met at a right angle just above the rod, a narrow door covered by shirts and dresses that could have come from a rummage sale. And what went on behind the green door? Take your pick—gambling, bookmaking, pimping, drug pushing, peep shows, blackmail setups, maybe a little bit of everything. Whatever you chose you could bet it was a good deal more profitable for Mr. D. than his laundry.
I turned around and looked across the street at the police unit pulled up on the sidewalk in front of a door that must have gone to Marty Solarno’s apartment. The door was sandwiched between two strip joints. One of the buildings had a big window on its front, rigged so that at night a girl could get up on a velvet-covered swing and jut her stockinged legs back and forth through the opening. Lined up on the window’s ledge were beer cans, plastic cups, hot dog wrappers, even a corn cob from the Corn King down the street. Why remove the sleaze when it would just be put back there the next night?
The whole block, Solarno’s neighborhood, was a depressing sight. It stayed trashed-out most of the time because not many people cared if they littered in front of enterprises that made money by appealing to the lust, lewdness and weakness for bathroom humor that occupies a space, no matter how small, in most of us. The most chaste and upright sightseer could come to Bourbon Street and have a raunchy, unembarrassed guffaw, and go home still chaste and upright. Or if you didn’t like it, you could go home and shake your head and tell about the sinful, appalling things that go on in the world. If you really didn’t like it, you could stand out on a corner and preach against it. It stays here and it thrives because it’s in all of us in one form or another.
But that’s just what’s out front, what you can see. It’s the stuff that goes on behind closed doors, like Mr. D.’s green door, that gets scary. That’s where the action can become addictive, where there’s no love, only fornication and sexual abuse, no satisfaction in work, just greed. Where people get their faces carved and their throats cut.
Yeah, and which corner are you going to rent, I asked myself.
I started walking back to Dumaine Street, wishing I’d never met Myra, that what happened to her had not become a part of me.
I should have called Lee and told her I was sick with the malaise, or gangrene of the mind, anything, but instead I went on to her office, faithful as always. I hadn’t learned yet that good qualities, like faithfulness and persistence, can be taken too far, to no one’s benefit. I was, to say the least, a bit on the morose side.
She wasn’t waiting in the doorway; she was closed up in her office. I sat behind the desk in the waiting room. One of the buttons on the phone was lit. I’d had a few vague thoughts about Lee’s high-rent setup before, but I looked around me with a much colder eye now. It was all done very simply, but that didn’t mean it was inexpensive. She hardly ever used the upstairs accommodations, though maybe she’d spent more time there before I came along. She kept up two luxury apartments, two cars, and she had a closetful of expensive clothes that she treated rather carelessly. I let the thought go uninterrupted across my brain that it just went to show what some higher education and deceased parents could do for you, which I admit just to give you an idea about my state of mind.
Another fifteen minutes passed. I lit my seventh cigarette, and fired up my irritation. When Lee came out of her office, I didn’t get up. She walked over and kissed me.
“You won’t have much wind left for a good workout,” she remarked.
I shrugged. “I don’t feel like working out. I want to go home and eat steaks.”
I know Lee doesn’t like to break her routine, but after only a moment she said, “Okay.”
The first thing I did after I opened the door to the apartment was hit the kitchen and fix a double Scotch. I made short work of that one and immediately fixed another. Lee watched me pour it, then went into the bedroom and turned on the TV. I drank the second one slower while I threw potatoes in the oven, washed lettuce, and seasoned the steaks. I was feeling a bit lighter now.
When the news was over, Lee came into the kitchen. She started dressing the salad; her dressings are better than mine.
She said conversationally, “The police say they have no leads on Marty Solarno’s murder.” I held back the sigh that tried to escape. Then she said in a rather familiar way, “I wonder what he was up to this time. He was really crazy.”
I had too much alco
hol in me to jump exactly. “Did you know him?”
The quickness of my question turned her around. “No. Did you?”
“Yeah. He might have been more mean than crazy.”
“Why? What did he do to you?”
“Well, let’s see. One time he broke my nose.” I put my finger over the rise on its bridge. “Another time he kicked the shit out of me, cracked a couple of ribs and bruised my pancreas. That was the worst.”
Her eyebrows scaled their way up her forehead. “Why? What did you do to him?”
“Oh, I might have given him a pain in his big beefy jaw for about two hours.”
“No. I mean, why did he do that to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She didn’t push it. She took over in the kitchen while I had another drink, smaller this time. But as she took the skillet out, she closed the cabinet door a little harder than necessary. And when she got the potatoes out of the oven, she almost threw the rack back in it. Her face, however, was impassive. I couldn’t help it; I started enjoying myself. I enjoyed seeing the definition of her thigh against her tight wool skirt when she bent down, her slender fingers slinging the hair out of her face, her quick, strong arm as she lifted the steaks and tossed them over in the pan with the expertise of a chef at Charlie’s Steak House. I might have even started smiling a little, but she didn’t so much as glance at me.
We made about two comments to each other while we ate and cleaned up. I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. She went to the window and looked down on St. Charles Avenue.
“Lee. Come over here.”
She took her time, but sat down next to me. “What’s bothering you, Neal?”
I put my fingers in her hair and let them run down through it to her shoulder where they stopped for a caress before moving to her bicep, making a circle, not quite all the way, around it. I kissed her and her arm went up around my neck and she kissed me back, as responsive as ever. But when we broke apart, the question was still on her face.
I pushed the sleeve of her close-fitting cashmere sweater up and stroked her forearm. “This town can be a damned peculiar place,” I said. “It’s so provincial that sometimes it seems like not more than about a thousand people live here. It’s hard to go anywhere without seeing someone you know. People live out their entire lives in one neighborhood. I met an old woman once who lived on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter, in the same house she’d been born in. She’d never gone across Canal Street, and saw no reason to. Then you’ve got the people uptown who think Metairie is a dirty word because everything there is new. They’ve got all these codes and standards that they live by and judge other people by, that they’ve carried with them for generations. No amount of money or success can make you one of them.
“Take Maurice, for example. He’s one of the best-known lawyers in town and he’s lived in the Garden District most of his life. But his ancestors aren’t from here, and the house he lives in was built in the 1950’s, not the 1850’s. He’s nouveau riche. That’s a dirty word, too.” I was pretty wound up. “That kind of thinking isn’t confined to just the uppercrust, though. They think the same way in the Channel. All the young professionals who are moving in and renovating houses are sneered at. They’re outsiders. And even the renovators are snobs. They’re all trying to beat each other to the oldest houses. The whole city is like a monument to the past, and the way people live is a tribute to it.”
“And that’s what’s bothering you?” Lee asked incredulously. “That people try to preserve their past and their heritage? There’s another side to what you’re talking about, you know.”
“I know,” I said, “but you’ve just been treated to one of my favorite diatribes.” She smiled and that upper lip did something to my insides. But I wanted her to understand.
“Look, I don’t think people should throw away their past. But I don’t think it should rule them either. Look at my old man—he’s a great one for family tradition. He’s never going to get over the fact that I’m not a cop anymore. He thinks I should be because he was. a cop and my grandfather was a cop. I broke the tradition, and he doesn’t like it, and he lets me know it. I’m an outcast, a deviant. I’m not a good son.”
“You’re talking about families now, Neal, not a town,” Lee said reasonably.
“But the town has something to do with it. When you’re surrounded by the past, when everything is so old, tradition runs deep and your roots grow deep, especially if where you’re from means anything at all to you. Maybe it’s hard for you to understand because you didn’t grow up here. Your roots aren’t here. Richard Cotton would know exactly what I’m talking about, and we’re from different sides of the track. He probably wishes he never had to go to another Mardi Gras ball, but he’ll keep going to them because it’s expected of him, because Mardi Gras is as much a part of his family tradition and heritage as it is the town’s.” I was just about played out.
“Hm,” was all Lee said.
I was beginning to get a headache from all this deep thinking, and it didn’t look as if she understood, anyway. “Richard called me today,” I told her, “and asked me to do something for him.”
“Ah, so you’re a detective with a case again.”
“Not exactly. I’m doing him a favor. I deliberately put it on a very informal basis because what he asked me to do is going to have me scrounging around in my past, and I’m not sure I’m going to like it. If I don’t, then he can get somebody else, and there’ll be no hard feelings.”
Lee cupped her chin in her palm, and her fingers beat a light tattoo on her cheek. “So it was Richard Cotton’s phone call that’s got you brooding about the past and slugging down alcohol and chain-smoking cigarettes?”
I didn’t like her tone of voice at all. I took my hands off her. “Look, Lee, I’ve been trying my best to get you to understand. It was the best I could do.”
“Why don’t you try telling me exactly what it is about the past? Why can’t you talk in concrete terms instead of all these abstractions about codes and traditions?”
“Because I think it would be bad luck.”
“You’re superstitious, too?”
I got up and went around the cocktail table. “Yeah,” I said. “I brood and I’m superstitious.” I didn’t say it very pleasantly either.
Now she stood up. She folded her arms. “Neal, are you afraid to tell me something about your past? Are you afraid it’s going to cause trouble between us?” She said it very calmly; I didn’t like being talked to like I was an adolescent.
“It looks like it already has.”
“No, it hasn’t. We see things differently, that’s all. I see this city as being old and charming, not rancid with the past.”
That word “rancid” grated on me. “That’s because you didn’t grow up here.” I wasn’t going to give her a break. Stubbornness instead of blood runs in the Raffertys’ veins. And, okay, the booze in my system was probably making me belligerent.
“I can’t help that,” she said sharply, but her face was a mask of self-control. “I think all this talk about the past is self-indulgent.”
“Oh. Self-indulgent.”
“Yes.” She wasn’t going to give me a break either. She came around the other side of the cocktail table, and said in that matter-of-fact way of hers, “I don’t see the world like you do; I don’t look for the ironies and the negative associations. I don’t speculate about what the people on the other side of the tracks think, and I don’t judge anybody because they like old houses better than new ones. I go for the facts and I don’t miss them for being sentimental.” She was not riled or ruffled in any way.
But I was: “Go ahead. Add sentimental to the list of what’s wrong with me. Judgmental, too. I do tend to make judgments about the way people die, and I get sentimental, too.” I was almost shouting.
A quizzical look passed over her face, then it was gone. “Marty Solarno?” she asked.
I shouted back, “N
o, I am not sentimental about Marty Solarno!”
Her face was completely unemotional, but there was that tenseness in her body, that same readiness I’d seen in her the first night at Richard Cotton’s house. It moved her over to the windows again. She stood with her back to me, saying nothing more.
I went into the kitchen to get another drink, but as I started pouring it into the glass, I thought better of it. Exactly what I’d never wanted to happen was happening, and it was happening for exactly the reason I hadn’t wanted it to. Hadn’t I just finished telling Lee that people shouldn’t let the past rule them?
I walked back into the living room and put my hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.” I kissed her hair, moved it, and kissed her neck. She didn’t react. I wanted to start the night over again. I wanted to be with her, just the two of us without this other monument to the past, that I had put there, between us. I turned her around.
“I’m going now,” she said.
And then she was gone, so fast that I almost looked around the room, surprised I was alone.
Back in the kitchen I poured out a drink and thought about going over to Grady’s, a bar in the Channel, to play a few games of pool, but I never did. Instead I sat around drinking, and thinking about how Lee and I saw the world differently, and how we got angry in such different ways. Any thoughts I might have had to make sense of it all got booze-soaked, and anything I was going to do about any of it I would have to face later.
But as I sat there I started feeling very contrite, and after a while I called her. She wasn’t home, and her answering service got the phone at her office. I realized I had no idea where she would have gone or who she might be with. For all the time we’d spent together, we were still strangers.
I eventually went to bed, and fell into a drunken, fitful sleep only after I had the thought that the way you get to know someone better is by testing your relationship. And that made me think that the way you get to know yourself better is by testing your limitations.
