by Chris Wiltz
Right off he gave me the long tour of the boat, proud that he could man it all by himself, but explaining that he preferred to have someone with him, especially if he made a big haul. He offered me a beer and asked if I'd like to go out with him. I told him I wanted to talk to Jeffrey Bonage that evening and got him to tell me where Jeffrey lived.
Aubrey unfolded a couple of lawn chairs and we settled in them to drink beer.
“So how's the shrimping?” I asked.
He balanced the beer can on his big stomach. “Oh, on again, off again,” he said. “Mostly off. I just like to be out on the water so I push for a little while ‘most every night.”
“Push” is a shrimper's term for putting the nets in the water and slowly driving the boat against the current.
“I guess this warm weather's no good for shrimp.”
“Oh no, it makes ‘em grow. Then when we get a good blow, they'll start running and it'll be payday.”
“So why does Bubba Brevna go out for two days when no one else is doing so good?”
“He's probably out in the Gulf. When you go out there, you stay for a while, but you gotta have a big boat.”
“Yeah, My New Flame. I understand the old one burned up. That he burned it up.”
Aubrey shrugged and took a long pull at his beer. He seemed more relaxed out here, not so sad, his white-booted legs stretched out and propped up on the console of the boat. He didn't seem too worried about anything, least of all Bubba Brevna.
“I thought you owned part of that boat,” I said.
“I did, but after the first brown shrimp season, Bubba bought me out. Helped pay for this baby.”
“That was the plan, for Brevna to buy you out?”
Aubrey nodded. “We were lucky the shrimp ran good that season.”
“Larry Silva didn't make out so well.”
Now Aubrey turned those big sad eyes on me. “Yeah, I know.”
We both knew why, and there didn't seem to be too much to say about it.
“You missed Dietz in a real funeral-stopping performance when he arrested Larry yesterday.”
Aubrey started to speak, stopped, puffed up his cheeks with air and expelled it. Then he said, “I stopped going to funerals about five years ago.”
We sat in the boat and watched as twilight began to creep out of the marsh grasses around us. Activity increased on neighboring shrimp boats; a couple started up and pulled out into the canal.
“About time to get going,” Aubrey said, somewhat happier. He made motions toward getting up, dropping his feet from the console to the deck.
I leaned forward and put my hand on his arm to stop him. “Aubrey, I watched Mave Scoggins pay off Clem Winkler over at the Gemini last night. Only it didn't look like she was paying off a bet. It was more like a regular pay check he was picking up because he told her he'd see her same time next week.”
“He probably books with her on a regular basis.” He slid his feet under his knees so he could stand.
“Could be, but if that's all, why is Mave giving him a phony alibi for the night of Jackie's murder?” Aubrey stopped trying to leave—I had his attention. I answered his unspoken question: “Jackie told Larry that Clem had been over there earlier, much earlier. She said she dumped him. He's acting guilty as hell and for some reason I want to put Clem and Bubba together in this.”
“You mean Bubba paying Clem to kill Jackie? Mave as the middle man?” Aubrey was fascinated by this theory.
“Maybe. Or Bubba paying Clem to torch The Emerald Lizard.”
“You think whoever torched the Lizard killed Jackie?”
“It's a good possibility.”
“But Clem has an ironclad alibi for the night of the fire.”
“What's that?” I asked.
Aubrey said, “He was in the clink all night. I caught him driving drunk through Westwego.”
24
Down and Out on Urbandale
So much for great theories.
I jumped off the skiff onto the dock.
“Sure you don't want to come along?” Aubrey asked. “If the shrimp don't run, we can always do some nighttime fishing. I know a great floundering spot.”
“I'll tell you, Aubrey, I've had two unforgettable fishing experiences. One started on an Audubon Park lagoon one summer when I was a kid. We left home early in the morning and fished all day, a buddy and myself, sweating in the heat, getting soaked in the afternoon rain and bitten by hundreds of mosquitoes. Come five o'clock we had a respectable string of perch between us. I thought my mother would be really pleased when I showed up with dinner. We were too young to think about anything so practical as an ice chest, so in the five o'clock rush, we got on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar carrying our string of perch. Nobody was particularly anxious to sit by us, but one old lady got bent out of shape when the streetcar lurched and the tail of a perch sort of slipped down her blouse. We got thrown off the streetcar. By the time we walked to my house, dinner was over, my mother took one whiff of the perch and threw them out, and my old man was so ticked that I'd been gone all day without telling anyone where I was that he made sure I didn't sit down to eat leftovers.”
I let Aubrey chuckle a bit before I went on. “The second time I went fishing it was with my uncle on his boat in the dead middle of the winter. It was so damn cold that when I went to bait my hook with a shrimp I baited it with my finger instead. I didn't realize what I'd done till I saw the blood. We had to go back and get the hook cut out. Needless to say, I wasn't asked again, not that I wanted to go, you understand. So thanks for the invitation, but I think I'll pass.”
“Okay, Neal,” Aubrey laughed, “but this is a great escape. There's peace and quiet and no hooks, just nets and gigs for the flounder.”
“I'd probably gig my foot.”
He assured me my foot looked nothing like a flounder. “If you change your mind,” he said, “just call. I'll be here every evening until I go on the nightshift next week, and sometimes I even go around midnight after I get off. It's real relaxin’ after a long day.”
“Listen,” I told him, “if I ever call and tell you I want to go fishing, assume it's a mayday call.” I took a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket and reconsidered. “I don't know, maybe if I solve this case I'll be ready for some relaxing.”
I untied the last line for him and stood there smoking a cigarette as I watched him slide off into the night.
Jeffrey Bonage lived on the first floor of an apartment complex on the Westwego-Marrero line, a street with the oxymoronic name of Urbandale. Most of the apartments on the side of the complex where Jeffrey lived had aluminum foil covering the windows instead of curtains. The place looked as if it had been deliberately built to fall down in exactly fifteen years and this was year fourteen.
I knocked several times and was about to give up when I heard noises inside that sounded like somebody kicking things out of the way.
“Who is it?” he called.
“Neal Rafferty.”
“Who?”
“Friend of Jackie's.”
He opened the door cautiously. It was six o'clock on a Saturday night and I must have just awakened him. He had on a pair of jeans but no shirt and no shoes. His wiry hair stuck out at odd angles. He rubbed an eye with his fist. The other hand he stuck in his pocket, his arm closely guarding his body.
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about Jackie.”
I pushed on through the door and he backed away.
The living room, lit only by the light from the hallway, was in complete disarray. There were a couple of large cardboard boxes over in a corner.
“Moving?” I asked.
He glanced around the room as if the question perplexed him. “No.”
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see that the disarray was clothes dropped on the floor, dishes used and left, record albums, books, newspapers, and so on. In short, Jeffrey Bonage lived like a pig.
“How ab
out some light,” I said, but he stood there, apparently unable to wake up entirely.
I pushed a nylon duffle bag out of the way with my foot, encountered phone books, both white and yellow pages, avoided a pie pan, crumbs glued to it by sticky-looking reddish stuff, and switched on a table lamp. I took in the sofa and waited until Jeffrey rubbed his eyes some more before I said, “How about if we sit.” Frankly, I wasn't up to tackling the sofa alone.
Reluctantly he pulled his hand from his pocket and cleared off the sofa by picking up everything on it and dumping it all on the floor, giving us barely enough room to put our feet down in front of us.
Jeffrey sat heavily, his shoulders slumped, his chest caved in. His eyes were dopey. He kept rubbing them, trying to wake up. I didn't see evidence of a lot of booze or empties around and Jeffrey didn't smell like a distillery. My guess was he'd been knocking back downers.
I told him I was trying to clear Larry Silva, that I didn't believe he'd killed Jackie even though Dietz seemed determined to make a case against him.
He stopped mauling his eyes. “You put that creep Dietz on me.” Not a statement with much fervor, but I'm sure his system was too depressed to get fervored.
“No, I told Dietz you heard Jackie tell me Brevna threatened her and ask me to go see him for her. Did you tell him?”
“Yeah, I told him, and after he practically broke my arm I told him I didn't know for sure if you'd gone either.”
That got me riled. Somebody ought to put Dietz out of his and everyone else's misery.
“Does that suggest anything to you about the relationship between Dietz and Brevna?” I asked.
“What do I know,” Jeffrey said, “I'm just a bartender out of work.” With that he scrunched down farther into the sofa.
“Well, you must know something about the relationship between Jackie and Brevna,” I suggested.
“I know it was like all the others.”
“How's that?”
“He comes in swaggerin’ and talkin’ loud, she flirts, he decides he wants to possess her, she gives him the big kiss-off.” His tone of voice was bored, but his eyes seemed a bit more focused now.
“But Brevna didn't kiss off so easily,” I encouraged him.
“None of them do. Jackie went for the macho types. She wanted to be swept off her feet, but she didn't want anyone to tell her what to do. She wanted to be possessed, but then she wanted to be in control of everything. She wanted a wimp in a gorilla suit,” he finished.
“So what happened when she tried to get rid of Brevna?”
“He started sending over his goons and threatening her.”
“I thought he was doing that because of the money she owed him.”
“Well, sure,” Jeffrey said. “Whenever they had trouble it always became an issue over the money.”
“You don't believe it was the money, though.”
“The bottom line wasn't the money, no.”
This, of course, was Jackie's theory, that what Brevna was mostly upset about was getting shot out of the saddle, as she put it. Jeffrey might have been mouthing what Jackie had told him.
“So maybe Jackie wasn't as afraid of Bubba as she said she was. Maybe it was all part of a game they were playing.” That was my theory.
“That's not so,” Jeffrey said with as much heat as he could muster in his semi-soporific state. “She was actually talking about putting the lounge up for sale and getting out of Westwego to get away from Bubba.”
I wasn't impressed. “I don't know, Jeffrey. Jackie was the big fish here, this was her scene. I can't imagine her letting Brevna scare her away.”
“You don't think so, huh? Well, let me tell you how bad she wanted to get Brevna off her back. You remember she told you the lounge was broken into and mostly booze was stolen?” I nodded. “Twice that happened, twice when she needed to pay Brevna. She paid him with the insurance money. But when she replaced the bottles, it was with the same ones, some with a jigger or two missing, others half empty.”
“You're telling me Jackie swindled the insurance company?”
“Maybe I shouldn't, but what does it matter now? I never let on that I knew.” He laughed bitterly. “She must have thought I was real idiot.”
“Or else she thought you'd understand and wouldn't say anything.” I guess I was feeling sorry for Jeffrey. “What you're mainly telling me, you realize, is that she loved the place enough to go to some extremes to save it.”
“Yeah,” he said and seemed lower than he had when I walked in, “I guess you're right. Jackie loved The Emerald Lizard.”
And almost everybody loved Jackie.
25
Pam
I stuck around Jeffrey's a while longer, asking him about the people who'd showed up at the funeral, if anyone was among them who might possibly have wanted to kill Jackie. He didn't think so. Bubba Brevna still looked like the suspect of choice to me, but for the second night in a row, he wasn't around. Neither were the Impastato twins. I thought I'd go spend some time with Jackie's friend, Pam.
Pam was so glad to see me she could have fainted. She was so worried about Larry she was practically crazy. She was so nervous her stomach was one big knot, and she hadn't eaten a bite in two days.
She told me all this while she slapped around the kitchen in her white-fluffed mules, fixing both of us a couple of stiff drinks. A little boy about eight or nine appeared in the kitchen doorway and whined that he was hungry. Pam's voice traveled up the scale an octave as she yelled at him to get out, that the kitchen was closed until further notice. The kid let out a wail but took to his heels when Pam went after him with a raised hand. The noise from the shoes on the kitchen tiles would have been enough to turn a herd of cattle.
“Excuse me,” she said after the boy had disappeared, her voice back within its normal register, “I'm so wrought up I'm about ready to kill the kid.”
Lucky kid.
She finished mixing the drinks and suggested we move out to the living room. We sat on the sofa across from a gigantic television set in a fruitwood cabinet decorated with scrollwork. It was about the ugliest thing I'd seen since Rodney Nutley. On top of it was a doll braced on a stand. If asked to describe it I would have to say it appeared to be a Scarlett O'Hara replica.
The TV was ugly, but it was probably the nicest thing in the room, not that there was much. The sofa was a dull gold that looked as if a cheetah had been using it as a scratching post. The coffee table was blond wood-grained Formica missing the strip along the front edge and pitted with several cigarette burns. There wasn't any other furniture in the room, just the wall-to-wall carpet, which had large irregular stains on it. The cheetah must not have been house-broken.
We'd just gotten settled, our drinks on coasters—for what reason I can't imagine—and Pam had put out an old Saints ashtray with a schedule of that year's games printed on it. I lit a cigarette for her, and the kid appeared in the living room doorway and whined that he wanted to watch TV.
Pam opened her mouth and my eardrums flinched. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Why,” I said too loudly, “don't we sit in the kitchen?”
“Oh, okay.” She was totally irritated. “You just have to be a pest, don't you, Jason?” She picked up her drink and walked over to where Jason was making himself comfortable directly in front of the TV screen and bent down to grab him by the arm. His shoulder jerked up toward his neck. So did mine. “I don't want to hear another word from you, do you hear me?” she shrieked loud enough to be heard in Crown Point.
Jason nodded. I picked up my drink and the ashtray to follow Pam, but I stopped and said to Jason, “What's on?”
He cut his eyes toward me, but wouldn't meet mine, then said sullenly, “I dunno.”
Eight years old and already an angry young man.
Pam was furious, practically throwing dishes off the kitchen table into the sink. She started talking slowly, but then got wound up telling me how she tried to go see Larry but they wouldn't let her and told her she
wouldn't be able to until they moved him out of Central Lockup and he was arraigned. But then they wouldn't tell her when that would be. She said she didn't know if Larry could even call his lawyer, and to top if all off she'd been trying to reach Aubrey Wohl.
“He's just like every other damn man around here,” she said. “Whenever you need them they've gone fishing.”
I waited a second to see if she'd realize she'd just said that to a man. She didn't. I told her she'd probably be able to see Larry late Monday or Tuesday and assured her I'd gotten him the best criminal defense lawyer in town.
She thanked God and said she'd been praying, and she knew God would take care of Larry. I didn't mind giving God the credit, but I would love to have known if Pam was born again the day Jackie died.
I asked her if she'd been home the night Jackie was murdered, apologizing for asking questions I knew the police had already asked, but that it might help Larry.
“I don't mind at all,” she told me, “especially if it will help Larry. I was here all evening with Jason, except around dinner I went over to Jackie's to see if she wanted to come eat with us.”
“What time was that?”
“About six.”
Before Jackie called me. “Did she eat with you?” I asked.
“Oh no. She was far too upset to eat, she said.”
“Did she tell you Clem Winkler had been by?”
The question seemed to affront Pam in some way. “No,” she answered shortly.
“Did she tell you he was going to come by?”
“No, she didn't. Look, Neal—you don't mind if I call you Neal, do you?—she was pretty drunk.” She had switched into a confiding mode, leaning toward me, her voice hushed as if Jason might be trying to tune it in on the TV set. “I don't know if you knew this, Neal, but Jackie was an alcoholic,” she said in an it's-so-tragic tone. “You know, she could be very abusive when she was loaded. It wasn't easy being Jackie's friend.” She sat back to let this important piece of information penetrate my brain.
