by Chris Wiltz
I offered to be the one hidden while she remained inside the house, but Lee said she would handle it solo. She didn’t add what I already knew, that Paula Cotton had decided she disliked me intensely. Hysterical women make good-paying clients, but the fee is hard earned with placation.
St. Charles Avenue, at just after eight o’clock the morning after Mardi Gras, was close to being cleaned up, but it looked as if most of the litter had been moved into the lobby of the Euclid. The plants were strung with Mardi Gras beads.
My apartment, however, was neat as a pin, cleaner than it had been. Not even a stray glass was left to tell about the party; my mother wouldn’t have slept well otherwise. But as I walked into the living room, I could hear a dripping sound, and it wasn’t coming from the kitchen sink. I went from the sun-filled living room into the darkened bedroom. When I turned on the light, there was a loud streak of profanities. They came from my mouth.
The bedroom ceiling near the bathroom was sagging heavily, and water was steadily dripping from the center of the bulge; more was leaving shiny snail tracks on the wall between the bedroom and bathroom. The carpet was saturated, and water was splashing onto the bedspread. I pushed it back. The mattress and box springs were already wet, but nothing like they were going to be if the ceiling gave, and it looked as if it might go at any moment.
I went to the phone in the living room and called the manager’s apartment. Anything past five rings was a waste of time; I hung up in the middle of the fifth. I would have tried the office downstairs, but I knew he never got there before nine, sometimes not before noon. The extra set of lock picks was in the drawer of the night table next to the bed. I took an apprehensive glance at the ceiling and dashed under it.
Waiting for the elevator would have been another waste of time. I took the stairs, three at once, and ran down the hallway to the apartment above mine. I pounded on the door, then immediately went to work on the lock.
If it’d been my apartment, I would’ve left it, too. The smell of rotting food was strong enough to move the furniture out. In the kitchen was a small delicatessen left to spoil; the living room deserved official designation as a new city dump. I kicked over a bucket of fried chicken trying to get through the apartment to the source of the trouble. The carpet at the far end of the living room squished under my feet.
It was clear that someone had cleverly seen the possibilities of the bathtub as an ice chest. Empty beer cans bobbed in the water or pirouetted slowly on the bottom of the tub. What was unclear was why a stream of water the size of a heart of palm had been left running. The drain near the top of the tub would have taken care of the overflow except that a label had soaked off a bottle of wine and blocked it. Water stood a quarter of an inch deep on the bathroom tiles, tipped over the threshold, and soaked through the carpet to run down the edge of the concrete flooring and find a low spot in my ceiling. I waded into the flood zone, turned off the water and unstopped the plug. Then I went to my apartment, took a shower, and put on a dark pin-striped suit fresh from the cleaners. I wrote a note to the manager, which I tacked to his door on the way downtown.
Leone’s growl and the cup of coffee I got from her put life back into synch. I looked forward to reading the Picayune in my dry and comfortable office.
I didn’t know about the raids yet. I took a copy of the paper off the stack on the counter of the newsstand across from the elevators, and there it was, plastered all over page one, bigger than Mardi Gras. The picture showed two portly handcuffed men trying to avert their faces from the camera. One was a judge on the criminal court; the other was a federal appeals court judge. I folded the paper and tucked it under my arm and headed for an open elevator.
But I wasn’t going to get to read the paper right away. I unlocked the office door, and the first thing I saw through the open door of the waiting room was the mess of files strewn all over the floor of the inside room. It was a thorough, professional job. The file drawers and desk drawers had all been removed so that every possible nook could be scrutinized. Every sofa and chair cushion had been tested and tossed. The small rug was rolled up. In each comer the wall-to-wall carpet was pulled back. The shades were down. The light fixtures were in pieces, the sockets unscrewed from the walls. They wouldn’t have missed a microchip. I threw the paper on the desk and scrambled through the files. Richard Cotton’s file was gone.
I put the cushion back on the chair and sat at the desk. Very slowly, I straightened the desk, but my mind was working fast. I slammed the middle drawer back in place, and grabbed the phone.
His secretary answered.
“This is Neal Rafferty,” I barked. “Put Callahan on.”
The line froze between us. “Mr. Callahan is not taking any calls.”
“He’s taking this one. It’s Rafferty.” I spelled it.
She put me on hold. The next voice I heard was no surprise. “This is Leonard Yastovich, Mr. Rafferty.”
“I asked for Callahan.”
“Mr. Callahan isn’t taking calls this morning.”
“I already heard that once.”
“Well, if you read the morning newspaper, you know why.” There was a small laugh. I could see his puckered lips trying to let loose. “It looks like you’ll either have to talk to me or wait.”
I swung my legs onto the desktop, leaning back in the chair. “No, you’ll do very nicely at that, Yastovich. Just ask your boss this—ask him if he expected me to file it away all neat and convenient for him under Richard Cotton’s name.” I waited. “Did you get that, Yastovich?”
“I got it.”
“And tell him not to bother with the apartment. It’s not there either.” I hung up.
Three fingers drummed the desktop briefly, then my hand was back on the phone. I called Richard Cotton’s office. He wasn’t in yet. I left a message for him to call as soon as he got there. I pushed the buttons and made one more phone call, to Mr. D.’s Laundry, but there was no answer.
I reeled in the newspaper. Over eighty people had been busted in simultaneous raids at a couple of barrooms, one in the French Quarter, once across Basin Street where Storyville used to be, a motel on Tulane Avenue, and, of all places, the Bucktown Tavern. The two judges were rounded up at the motel where skin flicks were being shown as a backdrop to live displays of various forms of copulation, and cocaine was being passed around the table. There were similar scenes taking place at the other locations, along with bookmaking and a high-stakes poker game at the Bucktown Tavern. Drugs, including cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines and Quaaludes, were found at all of the locations. The barrooms and the tavern were out of business—padlocked. Clarence “Chance” Callahan’s office was responsible for orchestrating the raids, the result of months of investigation. Callahan himself was quoted as saying that this was only “the tip of the iceberg,” that the vice operations were linked with organized crime, people “who have escaped our clutches before, but won’t this time.” He wouldn’t release the details yet, that master of suspense. This would probably be worth weeks of free publicity to the silver seal.
There was another item worthy of interest. It was about the kid on the motorcycle who’d been gunned down by the cop. Callahan coolly explained that a half a million dollars’ worth of cocaine and an unspecified amount of opium had been found in the kid’s bedroom at his parents’ home. This information had been withheld because the district attorney’s office did not want to jeopardize their investigation. When he was asked specifically about the shooting, Callahan told the reporter that the black youth, although his record was clean, was a known drug dealer, and that he had been considered dangerous, possibly armed. In his opinion—and who else’s counted?—no charges would be pressed against the policeman. He reminded the reporter of the youth’s connection to the Bucktown Tavern, and, hence, to the bigger issue of organized crime. It always sounded good for the district attorney’s office to be going up against the Mafia, but my guess was that after the election there would be no more talk about it.
>
As always, Callahan had an answer for everything. It was sweet, very sweet, and very glib. And Callahan’s self-confidence was compelling.
But, I thought as I looked at the mess in my office, he wasn’t confident about everything.
20
* * *
Runnin’ Scared
A paying customer who walked in on me right now might decide to pay someone else, so I got busy straightening up, but not before I called Central Lockup to see if Mr. D. was there or had been sent down for arraignment. He had managed to escape the police net. One part of me was glad because I admired the street smarts of the boxy-faced sleazeball; the other part of me would have liked to see his back screwed to the wall so I could get a shot at making him talk.
It was going to take a few days to go through the files and put them back as they had been, but for now I put them in enough order that I could find something if I needed to. I tacked the carpet back down and went to work on the light fixtures. They were large and unwieldy. I had to move the desk out to the middle of the room to get to them. Then I had to move it back and get down on my hands and knees to find the missing screws in the tarnished metal–colored carpet. Half an hour on all fours and I began to feel hostile.
The afternoon dragged. The sun moved behind a tall building, and the office took on a twilight tone. Still nothing from Richard Cotton. I called his office again. His secretary told me he’d been in and left. She said she’d given him my message. I was about to call his house, reluctantly, when the phone rang. It was Lee.
“Don’t come over,” she said. “I’ll be at the Cottons’ tonight.”
“Did Paula Cotton just call you?”
“Yes.”
“Would she have called if Richard was there?”
“Probably not. Why?”
“I’m trying to track him down. She didn’t say where he was, did she?”
“No, just that he said he’d be late.”
I thought a moment. “Lee, do you have the Covington number?”
“Hold on.” She was back in a few seconds and gave it to me. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “You sound agitated.”
“Try aggravated. I’m wondering why Richard Cotton is making himself so scarce.”
There was a pause, and I could tell we were each waiting for the other to say something informative. I spoke first. “I tell you what. If he isn’t in Covington, I’ll call you back, and when you get to his house, you can put one of the extensions outside, and we’ll see if he answers that.”
She laughed, and we joked around a bit about who might answer the phone, then she got serious again.
“Neal, when you talk to Richard Cotton, you aren’t going to tell him I’m with his wife, are you?”
I mulled that over. “We’re in a peculiar situation, aren’t we?” She agreed. “Look,” I told her, “I wouldn’t break your confidence unless I had a damned good reason to. If I felt like I had to, I’d let you know first. I wish she’d tell him herself what’s going on. Maybe he’d stay home with her.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t,” she said.
“Yeah, maybe he wouldn’t. Anyway, what I want to talk to him about has nothing to do with the problems between him and his wife.” I heard her other line start buzzing. I said, “Call me when you get home.”
She said she would.
I sat back and lit a cigarette. Just then I’d felt like telling Lee the whole thing. I didn’t want it to seem as if we were working on opposite sides of the fence, because that was not the way it was at all. Not in my mind. I smoked for a while, wondering why the urge to lay it all out to her always hit me when it was impossible to do so, when there wasn’t any time. Then I had this strange thought about the violence of the past affecting the future. A single act of violence—seeing it, or seeing the result of it—could train your reactions much more quickly than you could willfully train them yourself. It could produce fear or more violence. Or maybe alienation, isolation. I’d been thinking that I couldn’t be really comfortable with anyone who didn’t know about Myra and what had happened afterward. But maybe that was wrong. Maybe I didn’t really feel comfortable with anyone who knew. Maurice was the only exception I could think of. Maybe I was sick and tired of it being part of me.
I wanted a drink, but decided to resist the temptation until I got home. Home, I thought with disgust, and immediately got a bottle and glass out of the supply cabinet. No telling what further acts of violation I would find when I got back to the Euclid. But there was certainly something I could do about it. I retrieved the bulk of the paper that I’d thrown in the wastebasket after tearing out the article about the raids, and turned to the classifieds—apartments for rent. I ran my finger down the “Above Canal” listing. I wanted something uptown, not too far from the office, and some privacy. I stopped at a one-bedroom that sounded good, but the address was in the low part of uptown that flooded regularly. I’d had enough water violation at the Euclid. And I wanted privacy, not isolation. I stopped looking at one-bedroom places. We’d need the extra room for the workout equipment. Here was one—"Private, two bedrooms, Garden District” . . . And then the phone rang.
“Rafferty? Danny Dideaux. You know—Mr. D.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got the tuxedo—”
“Forget the tux. Can you meet me tonight?”
“At the laundry?”
“Stay away from the laundry.” He named a motel on Decatur Street and gave me the room number. “Six-thirty,” he said. “And keep an eye on your back.”
Since the Père Marquette garage closes at ten, I took the car out and parked it on the fringe of the central business district where the warehouses are. I went across Canal, up Chartres to a restaurant where I could get a quick meal. I ate, then I started walking in the opposite direction of the motel. It was six o’clock. I walked through Jackson Square, and got a cup of coffee at the Café du Monde. After that I took a stroll on the Moon Walk, which runs along the Mississippi. A tug pushed a barge upriver. Lights reflected on the water, making the river appear calm and peaceful instead of running with its deadly swirling currents. I stopped and smoked a cigarette. As far as I could tell I was as alone as Greta Garbo. I flipped the cigarette into the rocks below me, turned quickly and ran down the steps back onto Decatur Street. But I still didn’t go to the motel. I crossed over to Royal Street, took Royal at a fast pace to Conti and ducked into the parking garage of the Royal Sonesta Hotel. I slipped into the pedestrian stairway in the garage, went halfway up and waited. I heard no footsteps behind me. I went on up, then through the garage and out on the Iberville side.
Even at the motel I took no chances. I passed Mr. D.’s floor, and waited outside the elevators. Five minutes later I called the elevator back up, sent it down three floors, then took the stairs down to Mr. D.’s room.
I knocked lightly. Mr. D. opened the door and pointed a gun at my belly.
He waved me in impatiently with the hardware. We nearly collided as he hurried to stick his cubic head out the door to look up and down the hallway. He locked the door and put the chain in its groove. His green alligator shoes slid across the carpet toward me. He stopped in front of the double dresser.
“I’m being watched,” he said. The gun was still in his hand, but down, pointing at the floor.
“I didn’t see anyone.” I talked to the gun. “As far as I can tell, it’s just you and me.”
He followed my eyes, but held on to the piece. “You tell anyone you came to see me?” he demanded.
“No.”
“No, but last week a blind man woulda known you were there,” he said snidely.
“I didn’t see any blind men,” I said just as snidely.
“Then you wanna tell me why it is that ever since you paid me that little visit someone’s been on my tail?”
“That night?” I asked, thinking that I hadn’t picked up on anything until late the following afternoon.
He shrugged. “Yeah. You come over all hepped up about s
ome film, the next thing I know, I gotta hind man.”
“You spotted the tail that night—Thursday night?”
“Jesus, were you born yesterday, pal?” He shook his head with disgust. “When’s the last time you spotted a good tail, huh, Rafferty? Look, I leave the laundry about half an hour after you. I come back early Friday ‘cause I gotta big demand for the weekend, and the laundry’s been hit.” He pointed the gun at me. “You got any kinda idea the mess I was in? Film everywhere,” he waved the gun around, “cans all over the place. I gotta save what I can, clean it, get the orders ready . . . the biggest weekend of the year—”
He was set to rave on, but I stepped forward and grabbed his wrist. “Do you mind?” I asked.
“Yeah. Awright.” He put the gun on the dresser. His eyes snapped back to me. “You wanna hear this?” His voice went up about an octave.
“Sure,” I said, “but I can concentrate better now.”
“Jesus. Where was I? So I get everything together and go home. The next time I leave the place for longer than it takes to get a pack of smokes, the apartment gets hit. I go back there and it’s like hurricane-ville, you know?”
“When was that?”
“Monday afternoon. I left it the way I found it and checked in here.”
“Then the way I figure it, I picked up the tail from you. I was hit after that.”
“When?”
“I don’t know exactly. Sometime after three Monday, or early this morning. The building was locked up for Mardi Gras.”
“Your office, huh? You been home yet?”
We looked at each other and mustered up a laugh between us. I pulled out a cigarette; he copped it from me. I pulled out another one and sat down on a piece of stick furniture.
