by Chris Wiltz
“I don't know, but her husband's been arrested for her murder and I'm pretty certain he didn't do it.”
I gave him the story on Larry, the good-hearted born-again who might possibly drop dead at any moment and showed no anger or jealousy, only sadness, over his wife's extra-marital affairs. I asked Maurice if he had either the time or inclination to represent Larry.
“Oh, sure, sure, I'll be glad to,” he said, but he was distracted, thinking about something else. His eyes drifted over to a window and held. I waited, wondering what he was going to come up with and, as usual, he asked a question I least expected.
His eyes came back to me. “Do you know if Brevna has an interest in any other lounge, either ownership or financing or any other kind of backing?”
“No. I asked Jackie the same question, but she didn't know, and Larry keeps telling me Brevna's a fisherman. Any reason?”
“Just find out. I'll go over and see Larry tomorrow. I'll call you afterwards.”
“When's Nita supposed to be here? I'd like to talk to her.”
Maurice glanced at his watch. “Not for a while, actually. When I'm waiting for her it's always earlier than I think.”
Maurice has such a way of saying things.
“Now there's a definition of love,” I told him. I pushed myself out of the chair. “Well, I'm off to the West Bank. Mind if I use Pinkie's phone on my way out?”
Maurice was in an intense state of thought, his usual state, before I was across the threshold.
Out in the reception area, I pulled the chair out and sat behind Pinkie's desk. In back of her name plate was a pink and gray pen set with a memo pad of pink paper imprinted with “From the desk of Pinkie Dean” and a head sketch of a girl with spiky hair and a turned-up nose, wearing a pair of cat-eye glasses.
While I waited for Diana to answer the phone I started drawing a monster with walleyes and lightning bolts around his head on the top sheet of the memo pad.
The princess was getting dressed for our date.
“Sorry, princess. I've got to work.” I gave the monster an apelike body.
“That's absolutely no fair,” she protested. “I think if I don't get out of here tonight I'll go crazy!”
I started drawing curlicues of hair all over the ape's body. “Call that lawyer—what's his name?—Wylie St. Cyr.”
There was a moment of silence after which I expected a scathing remark. Instead I heard a remarkable thing—sniffling. The princess, it seemed, was crying. I stopped drawing.
“Diana?”
“I really wanted to see you, Neal. We haven't been together all day.”
This had never bothered her before. “I'm sorry, princess. I didn't expect to have to work.”
“What do you have to do?”
“Oh, just some regular ole gumshoeing across the river. I could come over afterwards.” I decided to put a see-through suit on the ape's hairy body.
While I was coloring in the tie, Diana said, “I have a much better idea.” Indeed, she sounded much chirpier. “It's five o'clock—you can't go across the river now. Let's meet at K-Paul's and have dinner. It's so early we won't have to wait in line, and then I'll go across the river with you.”
You could say I was stunned by this suggestion. “I don't know, Diana. It may take a while and you'll probably be bored. Not only that, you'll hate the places I have to go to. They're places I'm not so sure you should go to.” I was thinking chiefly of the trailer park and the Gemini lounge. I put a pair of aviator sunglasses over the monster's walleyes, blocking them out.
“I'll wait in the car if you want me to, and I promise not to complain.”
“I don't know . . . “ I changed the monster's mouth into a roguish grin.
She spoke quickly. “You're the one who says I always want to do the same things, go to the same places. Please, Neal. I won't get in your way and I'll do whatever you say, no questions. Say yes,” she finished breathlessly.
“Well, no questions, no complaints . . .” Behind my now rather rakish-looking ape man, I penned in a silhouette of the T-bird.
“I promise! At K-Paul's in twenty minutes?”
I was still in my funeral suit, which is also my power suit and my going-to-court suit. “I've got to change,” I told her. “Meet me at the Euclid.”
I hung up the phone, added a couple of touches like watch and shoes, and wrote under my drawing, LOW-LIFE ABOUT TOWN.
17
The Operative
Diana was telling me, informing me, she would be my operative for the evening. She was wearing a black turtle-neck, black slacks, and over that a fuchsia jacket made of raw silk. On her feet were a dainty pair of black flats.
“And that's what you think an operative should wear?” I asked her as I tucked a plain white dress shirt into a pair of jeans.
“Without the jacket, of course,” she said. “That's to go to dinner in.”
“I see.” I tied the laces on a pair of Converse low quarters. “And do you think that as an operative you're worth the price of a dinner at K-Paul's?”
“Without a doubt,” she answered without pause. “Don't you?” She wandered over to the bedroom windows.
“On experience, I couldn't say. On sight, I'd say absolutely.”
She turned to give me a come-hither smile and return the compliment. “You know, you look very sexy dressed like that. There's almost nothing sexier than a well-built man dressed in a white shirt and jeans.”
“I'll remind you of that next time you demand to be taken to a fancy restaurant,” I said and responded to her smile by walking over to her and putting my arms around her waist.
She ran her hands over my chest. “Especially a man with a sexy scar dressed like that.” She circled her arms around my neck and the way she kissed me could have made me forget all about going over to the West Bank if I wasn't such a responsible guy.
There were lots of things I liked about Diana. Besides being gorgeous and great in bed, especially lately, she thought the scar on my face was attractive. I don't think I'm particularly vain, but for a while after I was cut, I was self-conscious partly because the scar was red and swollen, but mostly because it caused my eyelid to droop, which I thought made me look mean and ugly. I began wearing sunglasses a lot. Gradually the redness went away, but there had been no improvement in the eyelid. Then along came Diana who didn't want to mother me because I'd been hurt and marked for life and wasn't repulsed for the same reason, who thought the scar enhanced my looks, made me look, as she said, dangerously glamorous. I began wearing sunglasses only when I was out in the sun.
I pulled her toward me by the hips, then finally pushed her away, saying, “Time to go.” I grabbed my navy blue sportscoat and her hand and headed out.
We went down to the lobby in a different elevator than we'd come up in. It appeared as if someone had slashed the wall covering on one side of this elevator.
Diana pointed at the rip. “What's going on around here, Neal? Is it vandals? Is the place deteriorating? I noticed from your window that the canopy out front is all ripped up, too.
“Nobody's bothering to fix anything anymore. They're turning the place into a hotel. Everyone's got to be out by the first of the year.”
“Good. Maybe you'll find a decent place to live.” By that I had a feeling she meant a place more like hers.
“What? I like living at the Euclid. I wish I didn't have to move.”
She looked at me with some disgust. “I hope you won't move into one of those horrible apartment complexes.”
“I swear, Diana, you are so uptown.” Actually, it was one of the things that, for the most part, I liked about her. It was part of her allure, her hauteur, her self-confidence.
She now looked at me with some alarm. “You haven't already rented an apartment in one, have you?”
“Yes, out in the suburbs, in Fat City.” Alarm turned to horror. “No,” I told her, “I haven't had time to look for anything yet.”
“Good,” she said
again. “I'll help you look.” By this time we'd hit the lobby. We walked out through a back door into the garage. The spring hinge at the top of the door was bad and the heavy door raced after our heels behind us. Diana moved out of the way without appearing to rush. “In fact,” she continued as we headed over to the T-bird, “why don't you come stay with me until we find you a place?”
“Thanks, princess, but we'd probably kill each other.”
“Hmm,” she said, with a sidelong, highly suggestive look at me out of those chocolate-drop eyes, “sounds like fun.”
Our next stop was K-Paul's, down in the French Quarter.
“This is ridiculous, Diana. I don't know why we couldn't just grab a burger across the river.”
“Because I'm craving a Cajun martini and blackened redfish.”
“Well, I don't give a damn about either one of those things. Once again you've conned me into taking you to a fancy restaurant even if it isn't exactly a fancy restaurant.” What I meant was the prices are fancy even if you don't have to dress up. Diana fingered the hair on the back of my neck and smiled a Cheshire cat smile. “If more than two people are waiting, we leave,” I told her.
Chef Paul Prudhomme's restaurant is so popular people line up clear down Chartres Street to get in. K-Paul's has become almost exclusively a tourist restaurant. Most locals don't go anymore unless they're with someone from out of town. That's because K-Paul's won't take reservations and sometimes you wait an hour or more to get in. If you want a drink while you wait, you have to walk down the block to the Napoleon House. But Diana loves Cajun food and she knows almost everyone who works in the place, which means we usually don't wait long and we're treated like royalty, the part the princess loves the most.
When Paul Prudhomme invented blackened redfish, which is not burned as some people joke, but black with pepper, it became such a national craze that redfish catches have had to be limited. Fisherman were going out into the Gulf of Mexico with closed-at-the-bottom nets called purse seines that they threw over huge schools of “bull” reds, the spawners. Sometimes the catches were so big they couldn't haul all the fish into the boat, so they dumped them back into the Gulf. Unfortunately, fish die in purse seines, so tons of dead redfish were washing up on the barrier islands. The Wildlife and Fisheries got worried about the brood stock. The Feds made purse seines illegal, imposed strict limits on offshore catches and, later, inshore fishing as well. But blackened trout just didn't sound as good, I guess.
Anyway, people were already waiting at the door of K-Paul's but they were moving steadily into the restaurant.
“Let me out and I'll have a table by the time you park,” Diana said.
I didn't object too strenuously because she probably would have jumped from the moving car if I hadn't stopped and also because K-Paul's gets people in and out fast, sometimes seating two couples who've never seen each other before at the same table, which I do object to strenuously. However, Diana knew that.
I parked around the corner and by the time I walked back, she was sitting at the only table for two in the restaurant, sipping a Cajun martini out of a Mason jar, which is how they serve them, a Scotch and water in front of my place. I'd often kidded Diana, telling her to get off this Parisian French bull, when she can sit in K-Paul's and slurp down two of those fire-hot martinis without shedding a tear.
“God,” I said, mentally scaling the latest price hike on blackened redfish, “I bet someone could make a killing if they marketed blackened fish sticks in the frozen food department at the supermarkets.”
“Fish sticks?” Diana said incredulously and rinsed her mouth with another sip of Cajun martini.
Forty-five minutes later I had the princess fueled on enough pepper to blast us across the Mississippi River Bridge.
18
Mave
The evening of gumshoeing began uneventfully.
I told Diana a bit about Jackie's murder as we drove to the Marrero Trailer Court. She waited in the car while I trekked across the oyster shells to Bubba's trailer. No lights were on, and the Lincoln and the flatboat were gone. The trailer court wasn't quite so depressing in the dark, but only because you couldn't see as much of it.
The next stop was the Gemini. The Gemini, like the Lizard, was located on 4th Street, but the part of 4th Street that runs through Marrero. It was also in a pretty unsavory neighborhood, another lounge across the street, a lot of litter, and several ramshackle clapboard buildings that could have been unoccupied. A woman leaned on the front wall of one of them. In a neighborhood like this you might have expected her to be a bag lady with stringy hair, tennis shoes with holes, and a dress hanging together by the last of its threads. But she had platinum blond hair, cherry red stiletto high heels on her feet, and a dress to match that was sewn to her skin. A siren in the slums. She was interested in the car until Diana stepped out of it. Then she gave a giant yawn and began sucking at one of her fingernails.
As we walked to the Gemini a very dirty pickup truck came speeding up the street, its empty bed slamming on the chassis as the wheels bounced in and out of potholes. It screeched to a stop in front of the woman, who was able to get up into the truck cab only because of a slit in the front of her dress, almost to her crotch.
We watched as the truck roared off. Aside from the pickup action, the street was relatively quiet for a Friday night. Inside the lounge, though, was the beginning of a good crowd.
The Gemini itself was a smallish red brick building, nothing fancy, but the newest construction on the street. It was set back so five or six cars could park in front. I guess I expected the inside to be done up in the Lizard's kind of style, all dark and plush with carpet. I was surprised by the simplicity of the place: a gleaming wood bar stretched across the back of the room, tables and chairs on a short-napped, red-mottled-with-black carpet in front of it. On the walls were carriage house-type light fixtures lit with chandelier bulbs. No intimate levels, no candlelight, no parquet dance floor. Who needed any of that when you had Mave?
She was fixing drinks behind the bar, her red hair shining in its elaborate beehive, her penciled-in beauty mark dramatic against peaches and cream skin. She had on a white blouse cut so low that I held my breath when she bent over to scoop some ice into a glass.
She went to the cash register where she rang up the drink she'd just made and got change for the waitress who was waiting at one end of the bar. She returned to the register and stood there several more seconds. From behind she seemed to be counting money. It was in her hand when she turned around and took it to the other end of the bar.
There were only two patrons, both male, sitting at the bar, but not together. One of them was at the end Mave was approaching now, standing to the side on the part of the bar that was perpendicular to the wall. Mave put the money down in front of him. Then she sat on a high stool facing him, so her profile was to us, and rested a foot on the edge of the bar. She wore a pair of cut-off jeans and her thigh coming out of that faded blue fringe was smooth and shapely. She sat forward, her forearm across her knee and watched as Clem Winkler counted the money.
He didn't have his cowboy hat on, but even from across the room I could see the dent left by it in his thick brown hair. His leathery hands moved fast as a card shark's counting the money.
Luckily there were enough people in the lounge and the jukebox was loud enough that neither Clem nor Mave noticed our entrance. But the real stroke of luck was finding the cowboy and the bookie together, exchanging money yet.
As I inched forward, I said to Diana, “The papers for the lounge will be posted somewhere behind the bar. See if you can read the names off them.” Somehow it made no sense that the Impastato twins owned this place. One thing, there was no chicken drop board.
Diana nodded and we bellied up to the bar on little cat feet as Winkler pocketed the money and drawled, “Well, then, Mave, I'll see you ‘bout this time next week.”
Clem started to leave and Mave started to ask what she could get me, then they
both realized I had a familiar face.
“Well, I'll be goddamned,” Winkler said.
“I hope not,” I told him, “not after such a nice payoff. Horse come in?”
Clem was ready to turn nasty, but Mave intervened. “Something I can do for you, mister?” She had a drawl that sounded like Texas, like Winkler's, but more refined than his.
“I hope so, Miss Scoggins. I was a friend of Jackie Silva's. I'm investigating her death.” I told her my name and gave her a card. I introduced Diana as an agency operative.
Clem snorted at that. “Don't take you long to mourn the dead, does it?”
“I wouldn't be so cocky if I were you, Winkler. It's just a matter of time before the cops figure out you were over at Jackie's the night she was murdered.”
“I wasn't anywhere near there.”
“Sure you were, hours before she was killed. What I'm wondering is why you lied, why you were afraid to tell the truth, unless you went back there later.”
His wiry body tensed. If I hadn't already knocked him out once, he would have pounced.
But Mave didn't know our history of duking it out, and she wasn't taking any chances. She reared up over the bar so her hairdo was in between us and said in a low threatening voice, “I don't want any funny business in my barroom. You boys got that?” Clem let the balled-up fists at his sides relax. To me Mave said, “I don't know where you get your information, mister, but Clem was with me the night Jackie was murdered. The cops already know that.”
“You sure about that, Miss Scoggins? You sure you didn't come in to work that night, or go to the grocery store, or out to dinner? Eyewitnesses have a bad habit of showing up when you least expect them. If Winkler's a murderer, lying for him makes you an accessory.”
It's hard to say whether Clem was defending his own honor or Mave's, but he tried that right hook on me again. I blocked it and jabbed at his chin with my left, all in one movement. My jab didn't hit him hard enough to move him except that he was off balance to begin with. He staggered back a couple of steps.
