The Emerald Lizard

by Chris Wiltz

  All those people were in their own little world, a world so different from mine that I'd never completely understand it without being born into it or moving myself into it the way Jackie had done. It was a world as hard to crack as uptown New Orleans was, a closed society, open only to those who grew up there or were accepted by tacit agreement. It was that way in the Channel and it was that way in the Garden District. So it was in Westwego. The same laid-back, hot bayou country where people carved their niches the way you carve a school desk or a tree with your initials. You stake out your territory, you know everyone in it, and you stay there. Everyone has always agreed that it's too hot to move around too much.

  So I didn't understand why Jackie had bothered to call me. She had the situation under control. Was it part of the game she was playing with Brevna, or had she gotten nostalgic after too many bourbons one night and decided to look up an old friend? And lover. Her first, in fact.

  Whatever it was, the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. She hadn't thought a thing about using me or adding me to her list of ass-kissers.

  I'd lied. I didn't have an early dinner date or any date at all. I still hadn't talked to Diana. I resisted the urge to take time to stop at the Euclid and have a quick drink while I used the phone. The Euclid was the apartment building where I lived. It was on St. Charles Avenue just a couple of blocks farther, but instead I stopped at a pay phone and checked with my answering service. There were no messages from Diana. Unless she'd had some event to attend, she'd be getting home from work about now. Or she might have a date. I decided to take my chances and go over to her apartment.

  I'd begun to know Diana's ways pretty well. I had a hunch that since I hadn't gone to her place last night after playing pool, she wouldn't be inclined to be very kind to me. If I called her she would almost certainly tell me not to come over. If I arrived and she already had a date there, she would use the situation to be as beautifully and desirably cruel as possible. Thinking about how mean she could be made me feel mean toward her.

  Diana lived on the top floor of a 1930s duplex on Baronne Street where it ends at Dufossat. It was a nice old building, not fancy on the outside, but stately. It was on a corner, and the entrance to the upper and lower floors were each on different sides of the building, the upper on Baronne, the lower on Dufossat, so that from either side the house looked like a single dwelling. The place was big, three bedrooms and a sun room upstairs that made you feel as if you were in a tree house because of a giant oak right outside. The duplex was owned by Diana's daddy. It was also not too far from the family home on Calhoun Street which Diana had pointed out to me once—a large shuttered house they call a raised cottage around here, with a wide veranda and opulent side yards full of magnolia trees and camellia bushes.

  Diana was from a wealthy and social uptown family and the way she talked she got along with them well enough, but she was rejecting her place in society. Her parents wanted her to marry some lawyer named Wiley St. Cyr, who was from another prominent family and also a member of the Boston Club, the Krewe of Comus (the oldest carnival organization), and the Lawn Tennis Club, all of which meant he was as blue-blooded a New Orleanian as you can be. He also happened to be madly in love with her. She refused to marry him so he hung around with her parents when he couldn't be with her, poor lovesick pup. Wiley St. Cyr seemed to be the one area of conflict Diana had with her parents.

  Diana worked in the French Quarter but lived uptown because Daddy thought it was safe, and she agreed. She dated mostly out-of-town men she met at the hotel, I gathered, and talked about the uptown men with distaste, saying they all were either ultra-conservative, like Wylie, or closet gays. I was an exception, but of course I wasn't one of the group she was talking about—I was from the wrong side of the tracks, born too far away from St. Charles Avenue. I didn't regularly attend carnival balls, museum and art fetes, charity dinners, or most of the multitude of soirees that happened constantly in private homes. But I attended some of them now and then, and I was presentable enough. Diana attended some of them now and then, too, but not with me. When we were together we mostly stuck to restaurants, hotel lounges, and her apartment.

  When I rang her doorbell, I was still feeling mean. She buzzed me in at the downstairs door. I pushed the door open and walked into a small foyer with a marble-top antique table, a gilt-edged mirror, and a black iron umbrella stand. The wide palatial stairs were carpeted in a deep red, the mahogany banister stained to a satiny reddish-brown glow by many years’ worth of palm oil.

  Diana waited in the upstairs doorway. I took my time, feeling each spongy carpeted stair as I went. She tapped one foot. I reached the landing and put out the cigarette I was smoking in a Chinese vase on another antique table. She stood in the doorway looking at me contemptuously and blocking my way in, and it made me feel meaner. She was dressed in another one of her elegant little black numbers, silver collar around her throat. She was dressed to kill, but the only car parked outside was mine.

  “Just finishing your game?” she asked with the kind of condescension that rolled over you like Sisyphus letting go of the rock while you were at the bottom of the hill.

  “You should have stuck around, princess. It was over real fast.”

  “Is that so?” There was a wicked curve to her mouth and a cutting edge to her voice. “You do lots of things real fast, don't you?”

  I grabbed her upper arm so it hurt and pushed her backwards into the living room, closing the door behind me with my foot. She tried to twist her arm away from me, but that only hurt her more. As soon as she opened her mouth to protest, I clamped mine over it and pulled the zipper down on her dress. Her free arm reached back to stop me, but I'd been too quick. She stood there as tense and unyielding as she could be. I finally let up, but still held her arm.

  “I have a date,” she informed me, breathing hard with anger.

  “Where,” I said and let my eyes take in the empty living room for a couple of seconds. The moment she started to answer I put my mouth over hers again.

  My grip on her arm must have gotten stronger because she started pulling her shoulder up and making little hurting sounds in her throat. When I released her we both could see the beginnings of a bruise where my thumb had pushed against bone.

  I fastened her mouth this time with a stare that dared her to complain. She didn't. But she was furious, her body rigid with barely controlled anger. I pushed one shoulder of her dress down. Underneath she was wearing a filmy black slip held up with a skinny round strap. I pulled that down, too.

  She slapped me hard in the face. Without thinking, I slapped her back. She was shocked for a second, but just a second. She belted me again, harder. It wasn't a reflex this time. I hit her deliberately, but not nearly as hard as she was hitting me. She lifted her hand to strike again, but I caught it.

  “We could do this all night,” I said.

  She smiled, almost as if she couldn't help it. I relaxed my grip on her arm and she attacked, her fingernails catching me at my jawline and raking my neck.

  It was my turn to be shocked. Not for too long, though, because she was getting ready to start again. I could see it in her eyes. I grabbed her, pinning her arms. She started to kick. I smacked her on the behind.

  Now she fought, viciously and strongly for a woman of her size and build, for any woman. We fought all the way down the hallway and into her bedroom. She got me again with those fingernails, on the cheek. I shoved her backwards onto the bed.

  She landed stretched out full length, sideways across the bed, propped on her elbows. She stayed where she was and gazed at me coolly, clearly enjoying the hell out of herself.

  “Get undressed,” I told her.

  “Make me,” she said insolently and with about the most inviting look I've ever seen on a woman's face.

  I did. Everything else I did, she took, and it was clear she could take more. We were going at it pretty good when the doorbell rang.

  Diana's date. We both had forgotten
all about him.

  She jumped up, grabbing a robe hanging over the back of a chair. “I'll tell him I'm sick,” she said and flew toward the front door.

  Sick? She was radiant, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, her hair tousled, her bare body underneath that loosely wrapped robe all soft and rosy. This guy wasn't going to know what to think. I supposed it was possible he would think she was flushed with fever, her eyes rheumy. It sure as hell wouldn't have fooled me.

  I wondered if her date was one of those ultra-conservative uptowners. It suddenly occurred to me that when she used that term, it had nothing to do with politics.

  Sounds of voices, the door closing solidly, and Diana was running back along the hallway.

  Afterwards I took the princess out to dinner at a fancy restaurant.

  8

  Of Home and Cheap Hoods

  After a particularly frustrating Monday—spent cooling my heels in a corrider outside a courtroom until almost two o'clock while waiting to be called for a personal injury case, and then nearly missing my appointment with a man whose case I decided not to take after all because he needed a sex therapist, not a detective—I was looking forward to taking a long shower and having a long drink and dinner at home, alone. It wasn't that I was tired of Diana . . . well, yes, it was. We'd spent the entire weekend together, something we'd never done before, never leaving her house except to eat. I suppose it was a sign of something to do with age, but I needed a break.

  The first thing I did after pulling into my slot in the Euclid's garage was go across the street to a grocery store where I bought a couple of New York strips, a large Idaho, a head of Boston lettuce, some brussels sprouts, and a bottle of Glenfiddich. I'd had it with béarnaises, bouillabaisses, bisques, blackened redfish, and French wine. Then I walked along St. Charles Avenue to the front doors of the Euclid, stopped at the mailbox, threw the mail in the grocery bag, and rode the elevator up to the sixth floor.

  One of the reasons I'd moved into the Euclid was because it was a building that could have been anywhere, in any town. It was a boxy ten-story building with a bland, light brick façade and an impersonal lobby. My apartment had wall-to-wall carpeting of nondescript beige, a bathroom right off the bedroom, and nine-foot ceilings which meant you could actually keep the place cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

  My apartment was completely unlike the camelback double where I'd grown up, with one room lined up after another, but the doors staggered so you couldn't shoot a shotgun straight through the place, which would have made it a shotgun double. In the back, before you got to the kitchen, there was a steep narrow stairway that led to two small bedrooms, mine and my sister's, no bath. Downstairs the bathroom was tacked on behind the kitchen. It hadn't existed before the 1940s. If you were in the bathroom at the same time as your neighbor on the other side of the double, both of you turned the water on in the bathtub whether you were taking a bath or not. As for the rest of the place, the walls were so thick that someone could have been killed on the other side and you wouldn't have known it.

  The summers were better than the winters because every room had a ceiling fan hanging from a pipe dropped low enough off the fourteen-foot ceilings that you could feel it. The house was so drafty and full of humidity that the old flowered wallpaper peeled away from the walls, always up high where it was hard to reach, releasing ancient smells of must and mold. A whiff of that smell anywhere is strong enough to call up a string of memories, some of them as comfortable as your granny's rocker in front of the fireplace, and some of them that just make your nose twitch with impatience to be rid of them.

  Coming from that, the Euclid was modern to me. There were no plaster ceiling medallions to crack and fall, or mantel pieces to get cluttered with old photographs and bric-a-brac, or fancy moldings to decorate the tops of the walls and catch dust balls; no memories to coat your tongue and pinch your nostrils; no resemblance to the past.

  But it was still a swell address on St. Charles Avenue for an ex-cop turned private detective ready to make a living off conservative uptown lawyers and the intrigues of the uppercrust.

  The Euclid had gone through a few changes in the five years I'd lived there. Sometime toward the end of the first year, a number of sophisticated call girls had moved in and dressed up the place. Because they were there a lot of the new tenants were pretty seedy, and eventually the call girls moved out to find classier digs. For a while things were bleak, broken elevators, a trashed-out lobby, very little general maintenance, until new management took over about a year ago and the place got fixed up. I was happy at the Euclid. I thought I could live there forever, although lately I'd noticed a little seediness creeping back in, small things left unrepaired, garage graffiti no one bothered to remove.

  I unpacked the groceries, poured a drink, and started going through the mail. And there it was, another of life's unpleasant interruptions, an eviction notice. They wanted us out, everybody in the building, by the first of the year. The Euclid was being turned into a hotel. Well, that explained the creeping seediness.

  Hard as I tried not to let this piece of news change the mood of the evening, I kept thinking about where I would move. During the time that the Euclid's decor was postmodern derelict, I'd thought about moving out of uptown New Orleans altogether, maybe to the Bayou St. John area or downtown to what had been a part of the warehouse district and now was being turned into swank apartment buildings and condos. I could think about that again. But I didn't have to right now. Because the oil industry was practically paralyzed, people were moving out of the city, so there were plenty of places to rent, and the prices of apartments were falling every day. In fact, that was undoubtedly the reason the Euclid was being turned into a hotel and not a condo. Tourism was the only industry left to save the city.

  So the only problem I was going to have was deciding where to go. In the words of that famous Southern temptress, I'd think about it tomorrow. I took my drink into the bedroom, turned on the shower so the bathroom could get steamy, and started getting undressed. One foot was wet when the phone started ringing.

  I almost let it fly, but it wouldn't have mattered. She would have kept calling. She wanted to chew somebody out. Anybody. Everybody.

  Leaving the shower running, I crossed the bedroom to the telephone. For this conversation hellos weren't considered necessary. She lit in before I could get one out.

  “I thought you could handle a cheap hood like Bubba Brevna.” Her husky voice purred like a large hungry cat about to turn mean. I thought about telling her I was fine, thank you, but she didn't have time for that either. “I should have known better than to send some spruced-up, suited-up, blue-blood ass-kisser to try to talk sense to a shark.”

  “Isn't this a twist,” I said. “In my neighborhood I'm usually the tough guy.”

  “This is a different world over here—”

  “You keep telling me that,” I interrupted, not pleasantly either. “A cheap hood is a cheap hood, even in China.”

  “What the hell did you say to him?”

  “You know damn well what I said to him. You want to tell me what the hell this is all about?”

  There was a pause, then I realized she was crying. “He torched the Lizard, Neal, burned it to the ground.”

  With the phone under my chin, I unleashed the expletives that count. She had me so damn mad they were right on the tip of my tongue anyway.

  “When did it happen?” I asked her.

  “Last night—early this morning. We closed up about two.”

  “You and Jeffrey?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the Impastatos and that ape?”

  “Oh no. The Imps, they left about midnight—God, before that. All the girls were out working by eleven.”

  The nicknames sounded almost affectionate. I heard ice clink in a glass and she got mean again, that purr of hers drowning in venom. “But they could have come back. Any of them. One of them did ‘cause you can bet Brevna wouldn't get his
fat hands dirty. That fat pig was either in his chintzy trailer having a party or out on his smelly fishing boat having a party. You can bet on it.”

  “You told the cops you think it's Brevna?” The cops would have been the Jefferson Parish Arson Unit.

  “Sure I told ‘em.” Then she said, with such irritation—as if I were a total idiot—that I wanted to throttle her just then, “Remember, I told you how he torches things for insurance money. He knows he'll get his money back from me now.” At that moment Bubba Brevna's contract seemed like a flash of inspiration.

  “Did you tell the cops I went to talk to him?” I spit it at her, letting my irritation show, too.

  She paused and I heard the clunk of ice hitting bottom, as if she'd just run out of gas. “No,” she said, tamed a little. “That was the right thing to do, wasn't it?”

  If she hadn't, Brevna would. The cops could make of that what they wanted. I asked her if anyone was in the lounge when she and Jeffrey closed up.

  “No, Sundays are slow. Jeffrey and I sat around and had a couple of drinks while I waited for Clem to get finished with his barhopping over at the Gemini.”

  The Gemini was the Impastatos’ bar in Marrero. “What was he doing there?” I asked.

  “How the hell should I know? You don't think it pisses me off that he's out patronizing the Imps’ bar while they're over at the Lizard crapping up the place?” She started to cry again.

  “Who runs the bar when the Impastatos aren't there?”

  “A woman named Mave Scoggins.” Suddenly Jackie laughed, a short low burst like a big engine trying to turn over. “She comes on like Miss Kitty out of ‘Gunsmoke,’ boobs as big as Sylvester Stallone's balls. Maybe that's what the cowboy goes for.”

  “Did he stay with you last night?”