by Chris Wiltz
“Do you have any knowledge that your client is involved in any sort of vice operation, crime against nature, et cetera?”
“Which client is that, Lieutenant?”
“Cotton!” The name erupted from his craterlike mouth.
“Richard Cotton is frequently a client of mine, but he doesn’t happen to be right now.” After all, no money had exchanged hands, nor was it going to.
“Well, I don’t like the way he comes pussyfootin’ around the police station, and I don’t believe for one minute he don’t know who this guy is who lets himself into his house and bums up in his fireplace. I figure he’s lucky we don’t have the time to investigate dead junkies. If he thinks his name or his money or his perfect smile turns everything he says into the truth, he’s wrong.”
This last gave me a good idea of the problems Richard was going to have running for political office in a city like New Orleans.
Uncle Roddy hauled himself laboriously to his feet, and added a postscript. “In my book, he’s a liar and a murder suspect, and at that I may be tellin’ you what’s good about ‘im.”
I opened the door for him, and watched him limp down the hallway. Fonte started after him, then turned around suddenly, a look of puzzlement on his face. He came the few steps back toward me.
“Listen,” he said, “do you always dress like that when you’re alone?” His head and shoulders jerked, seeming to bring a snort of laughter up out of him. He turned and went back down the hallway, his gum pops audible until the elevator carried them
14
* * *
Mr. D.’s Laundry
It was eight-thirty the next morning before I talked to Lee. As worried as I’d been, when I heard her voice what I felt was irritation.
“Where have you been?” I wanted to know. I was cross because the woman at her answering service was in the process of telling me that Ms. Diamond had already called for her messages when Lee picked up the phone.
“Sleeping,” she said.
“Where?” All I meant by that was had she been at home or at the office.
There was, however, what you could call a pregnant pause before she answered shortly, “Here,” meaning at her office.
“Hey,” I said, trying to be light, “I’m the one who got stood up.”
“And I am sorry, which I would have said to begin with, but I wasn’t given half a chance.”
“True. So what happened?”
“I had a tail. I didn’t get in until almost four. I decided to sleep here because I have an appointment at nine.”
“You still could’ve called.”
“No, I couldn’t; I was too tired. Come on, Neal, do we have to go through the whole routine?”
“Well just excuse me all to hell.”
“Neal, please. We both know more or less what each other is doing. We both know about the risks we take. Can’t we just be glad to hear from each other and feel relief privately?”
“I’m an emotional guy, but, okay, we’ll do it your way and feel good about acting so grown-up.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m glad to know you worry about me, but hearing about it makes me feel—I don’t know—queasy.”
I held the phone away from my ear and made some faces at it, then I said, chipper as all hell, “Well, we can’t have that, can we? I’d rather show you how relieved I am, anyway. How about tonight—wanna go out?” I started to tell her about Richard Cotton’s party, but she was too fast.
“I can’t. I’ve got a job, and then I need to go home and get a good night’s sleep.”
As if she couldn’t get one with me there. Well, there was probably something to that, but I didn’t feel any warmth coming from her, no indication that it would make her glad to see me sometime. Instead, I got the impression she was anxious to get off the phone. So I got off.
The next person I had to tackle, I thought without any joy, was Mr. D. There was nothing to do but go stand around on Bourbon Street until he showed. I looked at my watch. Quarter to nine. No rush to get over there. I thought morosely about Lucky Dogs (the vendors sell them out of carts shaped like an enormous hot dog in a bun) and hot tamales, Marty Solarno’s last meal. Of course, there was always corn on the cob. But people on the street eating corn on the cob seemed to stand out in a crowd. I guess it’s the boredom—I get ravenous on a stakeout.
Most laundries and dry cleaners are open early, not that Mr. D.’s was like most. But since I knew the number so well, I gave it a try. I nearly forgot what I was going to say when a man answered on the first ring, “Mr. D.’s Laundry.” His voice had that New Orleans nasal quality that, for some reason, seems most prevalent out in Jefferson Parish, though I’m sure that’s my own personal bias. The best way I know to describe it is to say that it sounds like Brando’s Godfather, except that the Godfather had a huskiness in his throat, as if he had some physical difficulty speaking. In New Orleans the nasalness just sounds like laziness.
I slipped over into a lazier speech pattern myself. “Mr. D.? Been tough to find you open. If you gonna be there awhile, I’m on the way.”
“Who’s on the way?”
“Name’s Rafferty?”
“Who sent you?”
This was the question I’d been trying to avoid. “No one. I’m bringin’ some clothes.”
“Look, pal, I do custom cleaning here, pickup and delivery, no off-the-street trade. I gotta full loada customers.”
“I gotta reference.”
“Who might that be?”
I knew it was wrong before I said it. “Marty Solarno.”
“Not good enough.” He hung up.
I grabbed my coat and literally ran the two blocks across Canal Street, and the four blocks into the French Quarter. I knew he would beat me, but I had to try.
I had played Mr. D. wrong. It was no consolation to think I would have been here anyway, standing on Bourbon Street on a damp and dismal day in February, amidst the ammonia and disinfectant smells over the food and garbage smells, all of which, though, worked well as an appetite suppressant.
It was over seven hours later that a man in a black leather sports coat stopped in front of the door to the laundry and put a key in the padlock. Although it wasn’t that cold—the temperature was in the sixties—the dampness made it feel much colder. My feet felt wet and they hurt as they rubbed inside my shoes. My ankles creaked when I walked across the street.
Mr. D. wasn’t as old as he’d sounded on the phone. He was pushing thirty, but not hard. He was about five eleven and thin, but not weak looking. His shoulders were broad and his hands had that long, sinewy look; I guessed his leather-clad arms did, too. But he wasn’t anything to worry about. I didn’t, however, want to have to strong-arm Mr. D. He probably had more friends on Bourbon Street than I did in the rest of the city, and I doubted that they occupied themselves all day making five-dollar bets on friendly games of pool, or practicing law (not in a courtroom, anyway).
As soon as I opened the door, he looked up from a plastic container of what appeared to be laundry slips and grinned at me. His grin was like his head, wide and boxy.
“Mr. Rafferty, I presume,” he said, good-natured as hell, friendly as a used car salesman.
“Okay,” I said. “I give up.”
“Seven hours don’ make you parta the masonry, pal.”
I suppose that everyone I’d seen come out of his business establishment with a broom that day was part of a network of spies.
“So what can I really do for you, Rafferty?”
“I’m interested in some films.”
“Well, there’s no harm in that, is there? You coulda said so to begin wit’.”
This Mr. D. was so streetwise that he was making me feel like I had scrambled eggs for brains instead of breakfast. The thing is, in Orleans Parish you can’t just walk into a store or video rental place and buy, rent or view pornographic films or tapes anymore, even though showing, selling or renting them is not necessarily illegal unle
ss they can be determined to be obscene under the obscenity law. This may seem confusing, but what it means is that if there is no penetration or ejaculation by the male, which is clearly termed hard-core, what is obscene is left to a judge’s discretion. This discretionary law got rid of the peep shows and glory holes. Of course, there are other illegal activities generally associated with the porn industry, like pimping and prostitution and drugs, but I’d like to see the law that can get rid of those. Anyway, I had to credit myself with not being sleazeball enough to know how to play a purveyor to the more esoteric of sexual appetites.
He came around the counter to activate a photoelectric sensor so a buzz would sound if anyone opened the door.
“I rent three shorts, sixty dollars for three days; five for seventy-five. Feature films are more.” He turned and gave me some swift eyebrow action. “How ‘bout your own double bill—Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat?”
I told him I thought the shorts. He parted the clothes in front of the green door, opened the door, and waited for me to go through first.
It wasn’t a big room unless you compared it to the room out front, but it was big enough to hold an extremely antiquated dry cleaning machine, an ironing board, iron on top, a large movable clothes rack stuffed with a variety of dress-up togs including lots of leather and Frederick’s of Hollywood–type lingerie, a movie projector and screen, and a bed. The bed was over in the corner of the room guarded by a couple of silver lights on tripods. On a table next to it was a super-eight movie camera. The bathroom was a toilet and sink in a cubicle; the door was a curtain that was now pushed back. There was a back door exit with a long sliding bolt, and black cloth was tacked over the two windows. It was a perfect nook for Mr. D.’s purposes.
“What are you into—hetero; gay; ménage à trois, both ways; S and M; B and D; pintos . . . It’s your first time—I’ll give you a sample,” he offered. Generous guy.
I went for the pintos—live and learn is my motto.
He pulled a straightback chair to the side of the projector for me, and started going through the cans of film stacked on the shelves of the projector stand.
While he found my thrill, I gave him a good once-over. He had a professional, clean-cut hair style. There were some bad pock-marks on his face, but his skin wasn’t oily or slimy, and his teeth were white and regular. He had on a polyester shirt, jungle-print motif, not my taste but not horrible either, under the supple, well-cut leather coat. The pants were well cut, too. And he certainly was friendly, a rectangular smile always on his face, and very polite, but there was still something sleazy about him. I guess it could have been the lagoon-scum-green alligator shoes.
He threaded the film and a Southern belle decked out like Scarlett O’Hara in a taffeta dress, her hair in coils, was up on the screen. She was in a white, bare room; it could have been this one. There was no sound, but from the faraway look in her eyes and the way she was moping around and kissing the picture of some Rhett type, I got the idea. She sat on the side of a bed done in white ruffles and frills, closed her eyes and ran her tongue all around her red, red lips so you could tell she was going into some kind of ecstasy. Next thing, she hikes up the dress, under which she has on only a garter belt and black fishnet stockings, and begins to masturbate. Someone must enter the room, because suddenly she sits up with terror on her face. The camera pans slowly to a big black buck wearing a tuxedo jacket over leather pants with the crotch cut out of them. He’s carrying a whip.
I lost some of the continuity at this point because I realized with a start that I was supposed to go to Richard Cotton’s party in a couple of hours, and the last time I’d pulled out my tux I’d discovered it was full of tiny holes—the work of some kind of insect that lives in New Orleans’ closets. I’d never make it to one of the rental places.
By now the buck has ripped the girl out of her gorgeous dress, tied her to the bed, and is whipping her fiercely, leaving red slashes all over her buttocks and thighs. Her mouth is wide open; she is screaming, but soon her screams turn into defeated whimpers. The film is cut, and in the next scene, the same girl, though it takes you a moment to realize it, has gone through a dramatic transformation. Her hair is down and frizzed all around her head, and when she smiles, you can see that one of her front teeth is dead. She is giving the buck the come-on. She is still wearing nothing but red stripes. They get down to more serious entertainment, but nothing that would be considered hard-core pornography by a judge who has to decide whether or not to issue an arrest warrant.
I’d had enough. I told Mr. D. to can it.
“Not into costume drama?” he asked. I almost choked. “You wanna be more specific about what you like, I got somethin’ for everybody here.”
“Show me one of Marty Solarno’s favorites.”
He was very cool. He picked out a film without a look or a comment. It was called Party Time. A lot of naked men and women cavorted around doing odd things with even odder accoutrements, like coat hangers and candles, but, again, only soft-core stuff. The girl with the dead front tooth was in this one, too, although it might have been another girl with a dead tooth. I studied the faces of the rest of the actors. There was no one even vaguely familiar. I told Mr. D. that wasn’t it either.
“How about some local celebrities?” I requested.
He turned off the projector. “Okay, Rafferty, I got you pegged as some kinda private cop. Whadaya want?”
I didn’t want Mr. D. turning mean on me, so I stood up and gave it to him straight. “I want a film that Solarno was anxious to show, only he didn’t make it through the night.”
He didn’t play dumb. “Blackmail?” he asked. “Look, Marty rented films from me, but they were films like you just saw. I get ‘em from a New York distributor.”
“It looks to me like you go in for some local production.” I nodded at the super-eight.
“Sure. We do some skits, for private parties.”
“Maybe it was one of those.”
“Uh-uh. I keep my operation clean.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you ever loan the camera to Solarno?”
“I can tell you didn’ know Marty, pal. I’da never seen it again. I don’ know about this film, pal.”
There was no use pressing him; he wasn’t going to talk no matter what he knew. I said quietly, “I hope not, Mr. D., because I think the film got him killed.”
He held up a hand to stop me. “I don’ wanna know nothin’.”
I started toward the door, but got an idea. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the clothes rack. “You got a tuxedo I can rent?”
15
* * *
The Party
I held the tuxedo up closer to the light. “Is it clean?” I asked. Mr. D. wasn’t offended. He just smiled wider, his face sharp with right angles. “This is a cleaners,” he said, his voice so shallow and nasal that he sounded like Peter Lorre.
I thought Chance Callahan might be unfashionably early to avoid those being fashionably late, so I got to Richard Cotton’s house on time. Quiro opened the front door.
“Good evening, Quiro.”
He was suited up, looking suave and handsome. “Please come in.” He didn’t call me boss; he didn’t act as if he’d ever seen me before. I followed him down the hallway, having to fight an impulse to imitate his smooth, graceful, soundless walk.
The furniture in the double parlor had been rearranged, for openness, not intimacy. In the second parlor, a couple stood in front of the clean, cold fireplace, but I could see the logs burning and the man’s legs stretched across the wide hearth, and Lee standing over him.
Quiro took me past them, through the dining room where a lot of elaborate, untouched food was laid out on the table, to a narrow passageway between the dining room and the kitchen where a bartender was stationed. The doorbell sounded, and he left me there.
Paula Cotton came into the passageway from the kitchen side. Her blonde hair was swept up, one shoulder was bare. From the other shoul
der a mass of white sequins fell to the floor. She looked like the Snow Queen.
“Mr. Rafferty,” she said formally. Her pale pink lips looked uncomfortable and unfriendly pressed together as they were. It seemed to me we had been on a first-name basis once.
“Mrs. Cotton,” I answered in kind, dipping my head in a bow.
She ignored the gesture and the irony, issued some fast instructions to the bartender, and left, back through the kitchen.
I returned to the dining room, my lips burning nicely from the first sip of Scotch. I surveyed the food and decided it was too pretty to be appetizing. I escaped from row after row of grinning pink crescents of jumbo shrimp, laid out in such perfect order in their marinade, through another doorway.
I’d never been this far back in the house, which was much larger than you would think from its deceptively narrow front. The room I was in, to the side of the kitchen, was a den, with another large fireplace and a floor of huge marble squares. In front of the fireplace was a bearskin rug. Over the mantel was a deerhead. The room was a deviation from the traditional New Orleans velvet-draped formal front parlor, but it was a standard deviation—the lodge effect. Beyond it was a glassed-in sun porch, white wicker furniture, green plants. Off to the side was the library, a long comfortable sofa, bookshelves over cabinets, the obligatory antique desk and Oriental rug, the rich smell of the books. There was, of course, the odd, spectacular piece of furniture, for instance in the library a glass-fronted art deco cabinet. Each room, the house as a whole, was stamped with a certain look: stylishly comfortable, fashionably conservative, with a few calculated and rich-looking discrepancies in the decor. There were probably four more houses a lot like it in this block alone.
I stayed in the library until I finished my drink—I wasn’t in the mood for idle social chitchat. The drink put a dull glaze on everything; my throat felt scratchy. Some payoff for seven hours on cold concrete.
