DR01 - The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  "Nope."

  "Thataboy. Jimmie's still holding his own, isn't he?"

  "He's the same."

  "Yeah, I checked on him at noon. He's going to make it, Dave. If they get through the first day, they usually make it all the way. It's like something down inside of them catches a second breath."

  "I'm in some serious trouble. I thought about just riding it out, then I thought about getting out of town."

  He reached over from where he sat on the couch and clicked off the ball game.

  "Instead, I figured I better face it now before it gets worse, if that's possible," I said.

  "What is it?"

  "I had to kill Philip Murphy last night in Biloxi."

  I saw his jaw set and his eyes light angrily.

  "I was going to bring him in," I said. "That's the truth, Captain. I let him go into the bathroom to take a leak, and he had a Walther taped inside the toilet tank. He called the play."

  "No, you called the play when you started acting on your own authority, when you refused to accept the terms of your suspension, when you went as a vigilante into another state. I asked you at the hospital to have a little patience, a little trust. I guess those were wasted words."

  "I respect you, Captain, but how much trust have people had in me?"

  "Listen to what you're saying. Can you imagine making a statement like that in a courtroom?"

  I felt my face flush, and I had to look away from his eyes.

  "You still haven't told me everything, though, have you?" he said. "No."

  "You left the scene and you didn't report it?"

  "Yes."

  "What else?"

  "I think Purcel killed Bobby Joe Starkweather."

  "What for?"

  "I don't know."

  "Maybe he was just riding around in St. Charles Parish one morning and decided he wanted to blow away a redneck," the Captain said.

  "There was a witness. I have her name and where she works."

  "But you didn't bother telling this to anyone before?"

  "She's a doper and a hooker, Captain. Her brains are as soft as yesterday's ice cream. I didn't know what would happen to her if they kept her as a material witness, either."

  "I'm having a hard time assimilating all this, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but this Purcel business sounds like it came out of a bottle. Maybe his personal problems are about to screw up his career with the department, but he's not an assassin, for God's sakes."

  I felt tired, empty, my options all spent, and all of it for no purpose whatsoever. The captain was a good man. I didn't know what I had expected of him, actually. In going to his house with my strange stories, I had given him even fewer alternatives than I had myself.

  "Give me the address," he said. "I'm going to call the Biloxi police department. Then we need to go down to the station, and I think you should call an attorney."

  He made the long-distance call, and I listened glumly while he talked with someone in their homicide division. I felt like a child whose errant behavior would now have to be taken over by a group of bemused authority figures. The captain finished and hung up the phone.

  "They're sending a car out there and they'll call me back," he said.

  I sat in the silence. "Did that black kid ever find anything in the mug books?"

  "No, he was too scared, poor kid. We found out he's a little bit retarded, too. You don't think Murphy pulled the trigger?"

  "No."

  The captain blew air out of his nose. His fingers made a design on the arm of the couch as we sat in the gloom.

  "Captain, did you hear anything about Didi Gee being indicted?"

  "No, but you know how they are in the prosecutor's office. They dummy up on us sometimes, particularly when they're thinking about a roll of drums on the six-o'clock news. What did you hear?"

  "He thinks he's going to be indicted."

  "He told you this? You've been talking with Didi Gee?"

  "He asked me out to Mama Lido's. He gave me the line on Murphy."

  "Dave, I'm advising you at this point that you should be careful of what you tell me."

  "I believe he thinks he might actually go to Angola."

  "If the prosecutor's office is taking Didi Gee before the grand jury, it doesn't have anything to do with homicide. We had two cases I thought we could tie to his tail, and the prosecutor sat on his hands until one witness blew town and another time a clerk threw away a signed confession. You remember two years ago when somebody cut up a bookie named Joe Roth and stuffed him into the trash compactor in his own house? The next-door neighbor heard a Skilsaw whining in the middle of the night, and saw two guys leave the house at dawn, carrying a bloody paper sack. We found out later it contained the overalls they wore while they sawed up Roth's body. The neighbor picked out one of Didi Gee's hoods from a lineup, the guy had no alibi, his car had blood on the seat, he was a two-time loser and psychotic who would have sold Didi Gee's ass at a garage sale to stay out of the electric chair. But the prosecutor's office messed around for five months, and our witness sold his house at a loss and moved to Canada. So I can't take their current efforts too seriously. If they want to put the fat boy away, they should be talking to us, and they're not.

  "I'm not sure what you're getting at, Dave, but it doesn't make any difference. It's our territory now, not yours, even though we're talking about your brother. What's that word they use when they're talking about characters in Shakespeare's plays?"

  "Hubris?"

  "Yeah, that's the word. Pride, a guy not knowing when he should sit one out. I think maybe that's the origin of our problem here."

  Captain Guidry turned the ball game on and pretended to watch it while we waited for the call. He was clearly uncomfortable. I suppose he was thinking he might actually have to arrest me. Finally he got up, went into the kitchen, and brought us back two bottles of Dr Pepper.

  "You remember a drink called Dr. Nut when we were kids?" he said.

  "Sure."

  "Boy, those were good, weren't they? The closest thing to it is a Dr Pepper. I guess that's why Southerners drink Dr Pepper all the time." He paused in the silence and brushed the tops of his fingers with his palms. "Look, I know you think the bottom's dropped out of everything, but try to look at what you got. You've put the cork in the jug, you've still got good friends, and you have a hell of a fine record as a police officer behind you."

  "I appreciate it, Captain."

  The phone rang, and he answered it with obvious relief. He listened for almost a full minute, his eyes blinking occasionally, then he said, "That's what he said—on Azalea Drive, the last pink stucco duplex. Next to a vacant lot." He looked at me. "That's right, isn't it, Dave? It's the last place on the street, and the apartment next door has newspapers on the lawn?"

  I nodded.

  "You got the right house," he said into the phone. "Did you find the landlord?… I see… No, sir, I don't understand it, either. I'd appreciate it, though, if you'd keep us informed, and we'll do the same… Yes, sir, thank you for your time and courtesy."

  He hung up the phone and touched the hair implants in his scalp.

  "The place is empty," he said.

  "What?"

  "There's no Philip Murphy, no body in the shower, no clothes in the closets, nothing in the cabinets or drawers. The next-door neighbor says a couple of guys were there this morning with a U-Haul trailer. The only thing that checks out is that the glass is gone from the shower doors, and it looks like somebody sawed a piece out of the bathroom doorjamb. Did it have some lead in it?"

  "Yeah, I caught the edge of it with the first round."

  "I don't know what to tell you, Dave."

  "What about the landlord?"

  "He lives in Mobile. They haven't talked with him yet."

  "What about blood?"

  "The place is clean. You're off the hook, at least for now."

  "This means there's more of them out there. They're like army ants that trundle off their dead
."

  "I have thirty-two years in the department. Only once before have I run into something like this, and to tell you the truth it unnerved me for a long time. About twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, a car with three soldiers in it got hit by a train on Tchoupitoulas. They were all killed, and I mean really ground up under the engine. What bothered me was that all three of them were wearing seat belts. What are the odds of three fatalities all wearing their seat belts? Also, guys that are that careful don't put themselves in front of trains. Anyway, it was winter and they were supposed to be on leave from Fort Dix, New Jersey, but they had suntans like they'd been lying on the beach for six months. I think they were dead before that train ever hit them. Somebody belted them in their car and put them on the track at three in the morning.

  "But I'll never know for sure, because the army claimed their bodies, bagged them up, and that's the last I heard of it. We'd better talk to the Treasury people tomorrow morning."

  "They have a way of becoming comatose when they hear my voice on the phone."

  "I'll call them. You did the right thing, coming here tonight. Things look a little better than they did a while ago, don't they?"

  "Yes, sir, they do."

  "There's something else I want to tell you. It looks like the prosecutor's office is going to drop the concealed-weapon charge against you."

  "Why?"

  "Elections are coming around again. It's law-and-order time. They're going to make a lot of newsprint about gambling and narcotics, and they don't want people accusing them of wasting taxpayers' money while they try a cop on a chickenshit weapons charge."

  "Are you sure?"

  "That's what I heard. Don't take it to the bank yet. But those guys over there are on their way up to higher things, and they don't care about our little problems in the department. Anyway, coast awhile, will you, Dave?"

  But scared money never wins. You don't ease up on the batter in the ninth, you don't give up the rail on the far turn.

  The next day it rained just before dawn, and when the sun came up, the trees along Carondelet were green and dripping, and the air was so thick with moisture it was almost foglike, suffused with a pink light the color of cotton candy. I parked down the street from Clete's house in a working-class neighborhood that would eventually be all black. His lawn had been recently mowed, but it had been cut in uneven strips, with ragged tufts of grass sticking up between the mower's tracks, and the cracks in the sidewalk and driveway were thick with weeds. His garbage cans had been emptied yesterday, but they still lay out front, their battered sides glistening with dew. At seven-thirty he came out the front door, dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt, a striped tie, and seersucker pants, his coat over his arm. His belt was hitched under his navel, the way a retired football player might wear it, and his big shoulders made him look as if he had put on a boy's shirt by mistake.

  I followed him across town in the traffic. Up ahead at a red light, as the heat and humidity of the day began to gather and intensify among the tall buildings and jammed automobiles, I saw him yawn widely, rub his face as though he were trying to put life back in dead tissue, and rest his head against the door. There was a man with a real dose of the yellow-dog blues, I thought. By midmorning he would be sweating heavily, emptying the water cooler, debating whether he should eat more aspirin, hiding with his misery in the darkness of a toilet stall; at noon he would emerge into the sun's glare and the roar of traffic, and drive across Canal to a café where nobody knew him so he could drink beer with his meal until one o'clock and glue his day back together. He was serving hard time, but it was about to get worse.

  He double-parked in front of the Greyhound bus depot and went inside, putting on his coat. Five minutes later he was back in his car, working his way into the traffic, looking around as though the whole world were coming at him in the rearview mirror.

  I went back to my houseboat, called the hospital about Jimmie, pumped iron, ran four miles along the lakefront, cleaned and oiled my twelve-gauge, and cooked some red-fish and dirty rice for lunch while I listened to an old recording of Blind Lemon Jefferson:

  Dig my grave with a silver spade

  And see that my grave is kept clean.

  Oh dear Lord, lower me down on a golden chain.

  I wondered why it was that only black people seemed to treat death realistically in their art. White people wrote about it as an abstraction, used it as a poetic device, concerned themselves with it only when it was remote. Most of Shakespeare's and Frost's poems about death were written when both men were young. When Billie Holiday, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Leadbelly sang about it, you heard the cock of the prison guard's rifle, saw the black silhouette suspended from a tree against a dying red sun, smelled the hot pine box being lowered into the same Mississippi soil a sharecropper had labored against all his life.

  That afternoon I went up to the hospital and spent two hours with Jimmie. He slept with the remoteness of someone who had moved off into another dimension. Occasionally his mouth twitched, as though a fly had settled on it, and I wondered what painful shard of memory was at work under the almost featureless, ashlike mask that had become his face. I hoped he was not remembering the gun flashes fired point-blank at his head through the door of the toilet stall. Few people appreciate the level of terror that a person experiences at that moment. Soldiers learn not to talk about it. Civilian victims try to explain it to friends and therapists, and are often treated with the sympathy we extend to babbling psychotics. But the best description I ever heard of it was not from a soldier or victim. We had a serial killer in an isolation cell at the First District, and he gave an interview to a woman reporter from the Times-Picayune. I'll never forget his words:

  "There's no rush in the world like it. They drown when you point it at them. They beg and piss their pants. They cry, they tell you to do it to somebody else, they try to hide behind their own hands. It's like watching somebody melt into pudding."

  But I had no way of knowing what battle Jimmie was fighting inside himself. Maybe nothing went on inside Jimmie. Tomorrow they were going into his skull with the brace and bit to pick out the fragments of lead and bone that were stuck in his brain. But maybe they wouldn't simply find brain cells that were prized and broken as though they had been teased with an icepick; it was possible that the injuries were larger, the doctor said, like the dead and pulpy edges of bruised fruit. If so, his mind could deteriorate to the point that his thoughts would be little more than sand patterns drifting back and forth under the currents of a dull sea.

  At five o'clock I was parked a block down Basin from First District headquarters when Clete walked out the front door. I followed him again to the Greyhound bus depot and watched him double-park, go inside, then return a few minutes later to his automobile. Even though I was now sure what he was up to, I had trouble believing it. We were required by department policy to carry our weapons both on and off duty, but his wife's fears and objections about guns were evidently enough to make him put himself in a position that was incredibly vulnerable.

  I watched his car head off into the traffic, then I drove to an open-air café on Decatur across from the French Market, sat at the raw bar and ate a bowl of shrimp gumbo and two dozen oysters on the half-shell, and read the afternoon newspaper. A young crowd was in the café, and they were playing Island music on the jukebox, drinking Jax on tap, and eating oysters as fast as the Negro barman could rake them out of the ice bins and shuck them open on a tray. After the traffic had thinned and the streets had cooled in the lengthening shadows, I drove back to Clete's house off Carondelet.

  When he opened the door he had a can of beer in his hand, and he wore a pair of baggy swimming trunks and a T-shirt that said don't mess with my toot-toot on the front. His eyes were bleary, and I suspected that he had skipped supper and had already committed himself to a serious evening of mentally sawing himself apart.

  "Hey, Dave, what's happening?" he said. "Come on out on the back porch. I'm tying some fli
es. I think I'm going out to Colorado and do some trout fishing."

  "Where's Lois?"

  "She took the girls to a show. I think they go to about ten shows a week. I don't care, though. She gets discount tickets from the bank, and it's better for them than watching that MTV stuff. They're her kids, anyway, right? Say, tell me something. Did I see you down on Canal this morning?"

  "Maybe."

  "Going down to see Jimmie?"

  "I saw him this afternoon."

  "Oh. How is he?"

  "He goes into surgery again tomorrow. We'll know a lot more then."

  "I'm real sorry about Jimmie. He's a fine guy."

  "I appreciate it, Clete."

  "Excuse the mess out here. Just throw those magazines on the floor and sit down. You want a Coke or coffee or something?"

  "No, thanks."

  He had built the sun porch himself three years ago. It looked like a cracker box hammered onto the back of the house. Vases of unwatered brown ferns and wilted spider plants hung in the windows, and the throw rugs he used to cover the concrete pad looked like discarded colored towels. He had set up a card table in the center of the room, and on it was a fly-tying vise, spools of thread, different types of bird feathers, and a tangle of tiny hooks. An unfinished, ragged fly was clamped in the vise.

  He sat down in a canvas chair and took another beer from an ice-filled cooler.

  "I'm going to take two weeks' vacation time, and we're going to head out to Colorado," he said. "Lois is going to visit her Buddhist priest, maybe get him out of her system, then we're going to camp on the Gunnison River, fish, backpack, live in a tent, do all that health stuff. I can get off cigarettes, lose some weight, maybe cut down on the booze. It's a chance for us to get a fresh start. I'm really looking forward to it."

  "I've got your nine-millimeter."

  "What?"

  "I followed you to the bus depot."

  The stiff skin around his mouth tried to wrinkle into a smile.

  "What are we talking about?" he said.

  "I followed you there this morning and again this afternoon. Then I got Bobo Getz to open your locker for me. You remember him. He used to buy room keys off the hookers at the Ramada."