by Chris Wiltz
12
* * *
A Diamond Before You Die
I called Mr. D.’s Laundry intermittently most of the day with no luck. So I decided to try my luck instead with Uncle Roddy.
The district headquarters downtown was in more of a frenzy of activity than usual. Over the previous weekend, the Mardi Gras season had been kicked off officially with the rolling of several parades. All over town the mood was different, there was more traffic, more people on the streets, more drinking and carousing and visitors in a city famous for drinking and carousing and visitors. The gaiety and boisterousness would reach a pitch on the coming weekend, and stay there until Fat Tuesday itself, when the wall-to-wall crowds on Canal Street could be parted only by the oncoming tandem of floats, and the din would be deafening citywide.
The din was deafening in the police station and the mood was different there, too. Most of the cops do double shifts during Mardi Gras, and I could already see some signs of overwork and irritation, but I could also hear a lot of joking and laughing. It’s the only way to cope when you know that what faces you after very little sleep is having to see trouble before it starts in the midst of several thousand partying people.
Even in the middle of the week before Mardi Gras, the station was already getting its share of costumed visitors. One of them was an old drunk decked out in silver stockings and grape leaves. He was sleeping it off on a bench in the glutted hallway, clutching a brown paper bag like the bottle was still inside it. At the side of a desk across the hall sat two young teenagers with painted faces. The officer who’d brought them in, probably for sleeping on the street, was trying to get the girl to tell him where she was from, but all she was doing was crying. The tears weren’t disturbing the gold glitter all around her eyes, but the bright red star painted high on one cheekbone was beginning to run like streaks of blood. The boy’s eyes glowed with defiance, bright spots in a sinister mask of black and purple face paint.
I made my way through the chaos, cracking wise with some of the guys I knew, to Uncle Roddy’s office. Just as I got to his closed office door, Fonte emerged. He shoved a stick of gum folded in thirds into his mouth, and blocked the door.
“What trouble brings you in, Rafferty?” I could tell he’d been putting in his time with Uncle Roddy—he was beginning to sound like him.
“I’d like to see the lieutenant, Phil.”
I don’t think he liked my use of his first name. His upper lip curled. “Whadaya want?”
“To see the lieutenant.”
His mouth worked the gum, then rolled it up into his cheek. “Whatsa matter? Aren’t any of the uptown richies’ wives foolin’ around on ‘em?”
“I know you don’t like me or what I do very much, Fonte, but you know what? It’s all right. It really is all right.” Before he had time to compute an answer to that, I added, “Do you think it would be okay if I saw Lieutenant Rankin now, Sergeant?”
I thought I was going to have to indulge him in some more standoff time, but he shrugged and said, “It’s up to him if he wants to see you,” and walked off.
I knocked once and let myself in.
Uncle Roddy was on the phone. He looked up at me and pointed to the chair in front of his desk. I sat down.
“So that’s it?” he said into the phone. His low-slung eyelids hit bottom and came up slowly. “Yeah, I’d love to know what the bastard had for dinner.” He listened, grunted, and hung up. “Jesus, those pathologists are disgusting, and they don’t even know it. What can I do for you, Neal?”
It’s hard to know how to play Uncle Roddy. Sometimes a stall tactic works best, softens him up; other times your best shot is a direct hit. But all of a sudden I realized that I didn’t give a damn what his reaction was or what he thought of me. I didn’t feel like playing games, so I hit him. “I’d like to get into Marty Solarno’s apartment.”
There was no real reaction. He just wanted to know why. My brain went into a kind of muddle: First I wished I’d opted for some stall time to psyche myself up; then I wanted to be alone so I could call Richard Cotton and tell him I was out; then I was remembering a drunken thought about testing my limitations. Then I was saying, “Myra Ledet.”
Air whistled past his nostrils. “I should of known.”
Uncle Roddy knew as well as anybody, better than most, how obsessed I’d been. He’d been the one who’d told me to resign from the NOPD before they tossed me.
He leaned toward me over the desk. I steeled myself for some verbal abuse. “Neal, you’re gonna have to get over this one day,” he said quietly.
I think my face managed not to register shock at how reasonable he sounded. “I know, Uncle Roddy. I’m trying.”
“But what could you possibly expect to find in Marty Solarno’s apartment now?” He turned his big hands over, his fingers splayed wide.
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, Neal, we been over that place wit’ a fine-tooth comb.” His shoulders grew larger as he hunched them up around his neck. “Tell me—would you expect to find anything in there if she’d just been killed yesterday?”
“No, probably not.”
“You gotta move on. It won’t do you no good to go in there.” His eyes left my face and started wandering over the mass of papers on his desk. I was about to get the big kiss-off.
“You know, Uncle Roddy, you don’t get over something like that by being forced to turn your back on it. Every time I’ve ever tried to get close enough to the situation so I could deal with it in my own way, there’s been somebody there to stop me.”
I said it mildly enough, but I had his attention again.
“Consider that you were being saved from yourself,” he said.
“Yeah, like Solarno was saving me from myself every time he beat the shit out of me.”
Sometime during the last few seconds all of the old resentments started coming up; I was determined now to get into Solarno’s apartment if for no other reason than Uncle Roddy didn’t want me to. He was having the same effect on me as the old man: The more he didn’t like what I was doing, the more determined I was to do it.
“And who’s supposed to save me every time I see Myra lying there with her throat cut?” I asked him.
There was the threat of thunder in his deep voice. “The bottom line, Neal, is that there’s still an investigation going on, and I can’t give you permission to go over and poke around at the site of it.”
“Then you come with me.”
It’s hard to say whether I won this contest because he pitied me, or wanted to get rid of me, or on the strength of my own will. Maybe it was just because I could keep my eyes opened wider while we stared at each other. But finally he muttered an obscenity under his breath, got up and came around his desk. He jerked his head in the direction of the door.
We made the short drive over to Bourbon in silence. While he figured out which of the keys went to which of the locks on the outer door, I stole a good look across the street. Mr. D.’s was still closed, but I thought the clothes on the rod were arranged a little differently. Maybe there were more of them, though the bulk of them had not been pulled off sentry duty in front of the green door.
Uncle Roddy preceded me up the stairs. I had noticed when we left the station that he was walking funny, and that he’d had a little trouble getting into the car. He was limping slowly up the stairs now.
“What’s with the leg, Uncle Roddy?”
“Damned arthritis,” he said. “Fluid on the knee. I’m supposed to stay off it for three days. Imagine that. Mardi Gras, and I’m supposed to stay off the leg for three days.” He wheezed (his humorless laugh), then started fingering the keys.
There were two more locks on this door.
“He had himself barricaded in like an old lady,” I said. “Is there another door to the place?”
“Nope. No forced entry. He opened the door to whoever killed him.” He flipped the bolt on the second lock and pushed the door open, standing off to the si
de so I could go in first.
I stopped dead in the doorway. Directly across the front room, hung above an overstuffed sofa, was a collection of ten or twelve tribal masks, each savage face intent upon me, forbidding me. Any one of them would have been arresting, the eyeless sockets alive and staring because of the brutal markings around them, but as a group they had a power of intimidation, ominous and evil, foreboding death. I was convinced that only a thoroughly evil man like Solarno could have lived with their daily presence.
“That musta been where they got the idea,” Uncle Roddy said behind me. “That’s about what he looked like when they finished with him, just messier.”
“They?” I asked and walked on into the room.
“It wouldof taken more than one person to hold him. Whoever did the knifework on his face did a precision job, and there was nothin’ in him, no sedative, nothin’ like that. Just some tamales and hot dogs that he ripped in half wit’ his teeth and swallowed wit’out chewing much, like a starving dog stuffin’ his gut as fast as he can wit’ any garbage he finds on the street.” I assumed he was quoting the disgusting pathologist. “He was filleted in there,” he said, leading the way into a back room.
I didn’t understand his use of the word “fillet” until he gave me the graphics, and what he told me made what the pathologist said sound like Chef Paul Prudhomme explaining how to prepare blackened redfish.
The room smelled like vomit. It was set up as an office, with a metal desk and another long table, but it didn’t look like a place where any office work got done. It was more of a junk room, too much clutter on the desk to work on it, stacks of Hustler, Penthouse and other skin-trade magazines on the table top. Under the table were boxes of household items, kitchen utensils, light bulbs, those kind of things, that looked as if they’d been sitting there since Solarno had moved in, never needed, so never unpacked. At a glance, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly remarkable about the junk. There wasn’t even that much of it. The middle of the room was clear except for a huge bloodstain on the carpet and the outline of Solarno’s spread-eagle body. They’d strung him between the desk and the table. The table, Uncle Roddy explained, had been moved out of its position against the wall so they could tie his wrists to its legs, his ankles bound in the same way to the desk legs. Then they’d started carving him with a fillet knife, making pairs of blunt triangles, symmetrical, like the tribal mask markings, at the sides of his mouth, nose and eyes. The skin inside the triangles had been peeled away from the bone, cut out around the mouth, and discarded at the side of his body. Someone had vomited in a corner of the room.
As Uncle Roddy talked, I began to feel nauseated myself, and a little faint, with images of Solarno’s face swimming in front of my eyes. I saw the killer’s face, too, swathed in its own sinister mask of black and purple face paint. I closed my eyes and it floated for a few seconds inside my eyelids, the face of the boy in the police station.
Uncle Roddy was giving me the rest of it, the fillet knife in the bathroom sink, the time of the face carving, the time of death by multiple stab wounds, the anonymous phone call to the police, while I tried to maintain my equilibrium.
I went back into the living room, looking for a place to sit, but I couldn’t stay in there with those masks. I sort of reeled across the room, heading for the door to the bedroom, but when I got in there the only place to sit was on the bed, and I couldn’t do it, not on the rumpled, messy-looking sheets. I finally backed up and leaned against the doorjamb, hung there really, to wait for the sickness to pass.
Uncle Roddy was right on top of me. “You all right?”
“It’s the worst thing I ever heard.”
“It’s the worst thing I ever saw.”
The room stopped sloping at such a peculiar angle. “Could you tell if they took anything?” I asked. “Did they look around?”
“Yeah, they looked around. There were a coupla valuable things they couldof taken but didn’t bother to. Why do you ask?”
“Because I’d rather think about that than what you just told me.”
He walked past me and flipped on the bedroom light. “I think they took some films,” he said.
That piece of information gave me back my strength. Solarno had told Richard Cotton he had something to show him.
Next to the bed, where I hadn’t seen it until I went past the door, was a small side table with a movie projector on it. The bed faced a blank white wall.
“Apparently Solarno titillated himself wit’ porno movies before he went to bed,” Uncle Roddy said.
Well, that sounded like Solarno, but I wanted to know how he knew.
“We found a piece of one. It musta come off the one they ripped outta the projector,” he told me.
“A little home entertainment, or was Solarno still into big vice operations?” I asked, examining the projector.
“That’s what the vice boys tell me.” He shrugged. “Old dogs don’t learn new tricks.”
“They have anything on him?”
“Not my department, Neal.” Translate that: None of your business.
I went to the other side of the bed where there was a dresser. On top of it in a Royal Sonesta ashtray was a Rolex watch and a pair of gold cufflinks. “Some good vice busts could help make Mr. Callahan’s office look better right now,” I remarked with my back to him.
He didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to get any information about Solarno’s vice activities.
I opened the top drawer of the dresser. Inside was a cigar box. And inside that was a gold star with a diamond on one of its points. I had given the star to Myra for Christmas one year.
There was still some fingerprint powder on it. I turned it over and wiped the dust off our initials.
It could have happened yesterday: We were strolling down Canal Street the week before Christmas when Myra spotted the star in a jeweler’s window. I could hear her exclamations about how pretty it was, how much she liked it, dropping enough hints that I would have had to be retarded not to get them. She’d never taken it off while she was alive. The little gold loop it had hung from was still on it; the broken chain had been found next to her bed.
Uncle Roddy came up beside me. “What is it?”
I held it out to him in the palm of my hand. “I gave it to Myra.” I gave it to her, and not long afterward, she died.
He stood there looking at it, looking at me. “Go on,” he said. “Take it.”
“No.” I tossed it back in the cigar box. “He took it.” And he died, too.
When we got downstairs, Mr. D.’s was open. I could see a man moving behind the counter, but I didn’t want to look too hard.
I stopped in front of the district headquarters, but Uncle Roddy just sat there, his eyes fixed on my face.
“He got his, Neal,” he said.
I nodded. “Do me another favor, will you, Uncle Roddy? Don’t mention any of this to Dad.”
He peered out from under those eyelids at me, then he hoisted himself and his bad leg out of the car. I knew he’d get on the phone as soon as he got upstairs.
13
* * *
My Ticket to the Action
I bolted back over to Bourbon Street, but I was too late. Mr. D.’s was locked up tight again. I was beginning to get the idea that the only way to catch up with Mr. D. was to stake out the laundry. But now was not the time, since Mr. D. had already come and gone. And, anyway, there was someone else I wanted to talk to besides Danny Dideaux.
It was almost four-thirty, about the time I usually packed it in for the day and headed over to Lee’s office. But when I’d talked to Lee on the phone that morning, she’d told me not to come to the office, but to meet her at her place at eight o’clock. So I had time to kill, and I wanted to kill some of it with Chance Callahan.
I started driving over to Tulane Avenue and South White Street, which wasn’t far from where I was, but the traffic was snarled with everybody trying to get to where they had to go before streets were bl
ocked off for the parade that night. I parked and was going through the office door at ten minutes of five. Callahan’s secretary was locking up her desk.
I told her who I was, and she said, “It’s Mardi Gras, Mr. Rafferty, and we’re all trying to get out of here, including Mr. Callahan. Why don’t you call tomorrow and let me set up an appointment for you.” When you tell them you’re a private investigator, they don’t exactly consider you a mover and shaker.
I put on what I hoped was a persuasive smile, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind just letting him know I was here.
She sighed. “You’ll have to tell me what it’s in reference to.”
I told her it was in reference to Marty Solarno, my ticket to the action these days.
She got a peculiar expression on her face (Was I dangerous? Would she never be rid of Marty Solarno?) and got on the phone to the inner sanctum. She tonelessly stated my name, my business and why I was there, then told me one of the assistant district attorneys would be with me in a moment, and left.
I waited for about five minutes before a young man, mid-twenties, came out of Callahan’s office. He was very clean-cut, dressed in a green LaCoste sweater over his striped tie, khaki pants and penny loafers. His round tortoiseshell glasses made him appear studious and serious, but under the glasses was a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and under the alligator on his sweater were a pair of well developed pectorals. A tough guy disguised as Clark Kent gone preppy.
He smiled a tight smile. “I’m Leonard Yastovich, Mr. Rafferty.” He shook my hand briefly and weakly. “Mr. Callahan is tied up right now, and he has an early engagement tonight.” His voice was strong but low, and more sympathetic than apologetic. I could have been talking to the director of a funeral home. “Of course, he’s very interested in any information you might have about Marty Solarno, but he’d appreciate it if you would talk to me about it first.”
