The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

by Otto Penzler

  Paid in full, courtesy of the Great State of Louisiana, which would rather settle a wrongful death case than have the security procedures of its penal institutions scrutinized by the courts and the media. Half a mil for me, half for the ambulance chaser, instant French Quarter. God bless Mommy and God bless Daddy.

  Over his double espresso, Chase told me: “Your debt has been cleared.” He kept glancing around and smoking so fast that he’d light a new cigarette before the last one was half gone, even though it was obvious the clientele were all deep into their Kerouac and having narcissistic, homoerotic fantasies about Neal Cassidy. I waited as he sipped, knowing — as a man who trusts his weaknesses must know — that I had merely exchanged one debt for another. “Lazarus was not happy, not at first. This is a pretty liquid business, you know? IOU’s don’t buy shit from the Haitians, and little fingers are funny but they don’t pay bills. Yours went in his garbage disposal by the way.” He puffed heavily and glanced about, letting me take that in. I tried not to react, but I was five days sober and easy to read.

  “There’s a ship in Biloxi,” he continued. “Finnegan, ever heard of it?” I shook my head and felt the drawn skin of my cheeks tight against my face. “Gambling boat, big business. Lazarus tried to buy a big stake in it and got cut out, guy by the name of Gabriel Arentino, ever heard of him?” I shook my head again and looked at my chicory mug. “Well, that deal’s not closed. If Gabriel Arentino were to suddenly rescind his offer, Lazarus would be the high man. Lazarus badly wants to be the high man. For forgiving your debt, Lazarus wants you to convince Gabriel Arentino to have a change of heart.”

  “Change of heart how?” I croaked dryly, not sure how a cook with a high school diploma was supposed to argue asset allocation with an apparently large-living financier, afraid maybe I knew the answer.

  “Change of heart, you know. ” His eyes worked the room again while he blew as much smoke as he could, as though the clouds of tobacco would render him inaudible. “Like change from beating to still.”

  ‘Jesus, Chase,” I moaned. “I’m bad off. I’m battered and I need a fix. I can’t do that shit, I can’t even believe I’ve come to the point that someone would ask me. I’ll just sell my house and pay you off. Gimmee a couple weeks.” And to be honest, I felt good. I’d heard former rummies talk about hitting rock bottom, how only then did they truly want to stop. And I thought maybe I’d actually gone deeper than rock bottom, that I was at mantle bottom and would have to ascend to get to rock bottom. But I was wrong; I was still in free fall.

  “It’s much too late for that, my friend,” Chase grinned, and I saw something I’d never seen before. He claimed not to use what he sold, and that was obviously true of smack. But his yellow toothed, fangy, triumphant expression was the overconfident ecstasy of a speed freak. In a flash of recognition I saw how he’d overplayed my role in his debt to Lazarus, how I owed not only my soul but Chase’s as well to a small time gangster with delusions of grandeur.

  Chase said: “Lazarus knows about Faith. About Faith and about Emily. About Baltimore.” And my subconscious created a new picture to float past me, even though by this time the process had become like something out of Clockwork Orange. I saw a monster I’d never met grinding my baby in his garbage disposal, and laughing as his champagne kitchen counter top and his peach and bone checkerboard linoleum were bathed in her blood.

  I walked all the away home from the Quad, heading up Royal to the Quarter so I’d pass the LaBranche House. I stood on the corner and tried to take in the enormity of the front gate, which twisted halfway down St. Peter into the late February dusk. I wondered about the people who’d built it originally, New Orleans patriarchy and all that shit. A family home that had been passed from father to son for almost two centuries. How could that be when I couldn’t even hold my family together for three years? How could Henri LaBranche run a plantation and an export business and raise a family close enough to erect two cathedrals and preserve their name through a war with England, a war with Lincoln, and all the wars any family fights against itself? What a fucked-up proposition a family is. How can one man be a father, a husband, a worker, a creator? It isn’t possible to fill all the roles everyone expects of you without losing yourself in the process. You keep giving away pieces of yourself until all you have left are the parts no one wants, not even you.

  I spat on the sidewalk in front of the grand mansion — not as cool as spitting on the carpet, but as close as I was likely to get — and moved up Royal toward home. I had never imagined it possible to feel as hopeless as I felt and keep going on anyway. Who is weaker, the man who gives up in the face of defeat or the man who marches into that defeat hoping to lose anyway, just to get it all over with? Chase had convinced me that my estranged family would truly be in danger if I didn’t kill Gabriel Arentino. Having them killed wouldn’t get him his gambling ship, but at least the word would get around: Don’t cross Lazarus! Damn Chase for lying about my debt. Lazarus no doubt thought I’d brought down a small savings and loan fronting for horse I couldn’t afford. Nevertheless, having accepted the bargain, I’d talked Chase into giving me two syringes worth. And then I promised to pay him back for them.

  With the sun down, I packed a gym bag with what I thought I’d need to kill a guy. I was a little bit proud of myself for holding out against the heroin. Two needles under my roof and I hadn’t used either. I got everything ready first, knowing that despite how badly my brain was squirming without the drug, I’d be much more useless once I’d scratched the itch.

  When I had it all together, I went into the bathroom to do up. It was an old habit from the days when Faith knew but didn’t want to know and I sure didn’t want my daughter to see. Guilt is the great inhibitor, they ought to use it instead of those silly government warning signs. We could all smoke “Your Kids Are Watching” menthols and drink “Little Timmy Junior Sees This” lite. And speaking of light, the one in the bathroom just couldn’t make the grade, not as jittery as I was and as drawn in as my veins were. It was as though they knew they were on the verge of a victory; another week in hiding and they would never be invaded by the liquid devil again. So I tied up in the bathroom and then walked to the breakfast nook where I fixed under the ten-bulb chandelier, best spot in the house.

  Finished studying the map of veins in my arm, I commenced to studying the map Chase had given me. We’d done the whole exchange right there in the Quad coffee shop, Chase passing his wares to me inside a hollow book. It was his way of out irony-ing the ironic students whose seriousness made their self-righteousness an annoyingly convenient foil. Just another dude in black sharing some Sartre or Kant.

  While I was high, my subconscious conjured an alternate future in which I got aboard the Finnegan and gambled the house so broke that Gabriel Arentino couldn’t pay me. In a supremely satirical moment, I cashed in the favor that I owed Lazarus via Chase and forced Gabriel Arentino to kill himself.

  Chase made mention of a firearm he possessed ■— untraceable, he claimed — but I declined. Daddy’s Colt was secure in my top nightstand drawer. There ain’t many places you can pay a third of a mil for a one-story flat and still need a pistol by your head to sleep soundly, but the Quarter is one of them. I remember how Daddy loved to hunt, how he took me to the woods near DeSoto National Forest when I was eight to track deer (this would have been a year before David did his John the Baptist on me). I remember how we made camp and roasted weenies over a fire belching with knotted pine and Daddy taught me how to count points on a buck. And I remember how, so early the next morning it may as well have still been last night, an eight pointer crossed our path while we were calling turkeys.

  “There he is, Esau,” Daddy mouthed to me, his breath sweet with venison jerky. He smiled that crooked hound-dog grin and motioned with his rifle. The buck was looking the other way, but I believe I could have stared at his innocent, pure-souled face and popped the trigger anyway, Bambi eyes or no. All I saw was Daddy smoking a pipe in the den and pointing
to the antlers on the wall and saying “my youngest brought that one down, summer seventy-eight.” My volley was high, probably wide too but I took no notice. My first thought was that the gun had misfired and the round had exploded in the chamber. I dropped the rifle in shock at the sting of my hands while the echo of the shot — BLAM — bounced inside my brain from lobe to lobe.

  “Dern,” said Daddy soon as he realized I’d dropped my weapon. He took a bead on the deer but by then it had discerned its circumstances and begun to bolt for cover. David, who had set up a 45-degree triangle of crossfire (something he’d learned as a child watching coverage of Vietnam without realizing it, he of the unexplored, deaf-mute subconscious), damn near felled the animal, but it spun on a dime, hind quarters twisting grotesquely before it camouflaged itself.

  “David!” Daddy screamed. “You ever risk ruining a rump like that again, I’ll heat you up good!” He had nary a word for my high shot, and to this day I don’t know what to make of it. Did he think I could not take a licking like my brother? Did he think the poor shot simply bad luck? If David had failed to follow up an easy mark like that, there would have been hell to pay. Sometimes, at night when my brain won’t slow to my body’s fatigue level, when six espressos and three double shifts converge, I ask my Daddy why he was so light on me that day, so easy on David after he lit me afire. Sometimes I suppose he wanted us to grow up confident, be secure that our actions would meet with approval. But then I have to chastise myself for presupposing such courageous intentions upon the man who killed my own Momma.

  I said all that just to say this: I didn’t take Chase’s gun for the same reason I didn’t take my rifle — too goddamn noisy. Daddy’s Colt had a silencer, the one he’d bought after that trip; bought it so I’d practice my shooting and not shit my drawers in the process.

  Oil cans, stop signs, empty beer bottles, it made no difference. Sundown meant Daddy would walk the mile and a quarter home and I’d be expected to obliterate some still life. Once Daddy figured out it was the noise spooking me high and saw what I could do with some focus and a quiet piece, he bought me the silencer and the Colt was effectively mine. Among the many thoughts shaken loose in my brain as I tumbled into that camp fire a year later was: if David could still outshoot me, I’d be making him a smore right now.

  I tossed the pistol nonchalantly into the trunk along with my cheap nylon gym bag which held a change of clothes and a loaded syringe. When this was all over, I wanted to be able to medicate A.S.A.Fuck-ingP. Chase’s play-by-play told me that Gabriel Arentino would be watching the Mississippi State Bulldogs most of the night as they tanked to the U.K. Wildcats. Chase told me where and when I should be able to find my prey alone, and how I’d be able to slip out without a trace. His generous details helped fuel my suspicion that this was supposed to be his mission. The smack made me calm, and I at least felt confident that although I had obviously been set up, I hadn’t been set up to fail. After all, if I got busted, the trail led clearly back to Chase. I felt the code of the woods would let me trust him: don’t shit where you eat.

  Most people who have never been there think New Orleans is fairly isolated by the Mississippi, cut off from civilization like Walton mountain before the telegraph. But the truth is that I-10, running west to east, cuts through the heart of the city, providing easily two-thirds of the nation’s drug trade. Too many convenient entry points, too few patrols. I was less than ninety minutes from my sacrificial lamb, who was at this very moment most likely pressing with three sevens and a four-hand losing streak taunting him.

  I had an hour to burn before I was supposed to light out, but I didn’t want to spend it at home. The horse was already starting to wear off, or else my body was so primed by the first sip it had in days that the well seemed to dry up awful early. Either way, I didn’t want to be home and sobering up and contemplating a murder. There’d been too much death associated with that house already: the fall of my honesty with Faith; the decay of my pride when I did up while watching Emily alone for the evening; the collapse of my marriage — hell, the place was paid for with blood money.

  So instead I drove Dauphine to Esplanade to Ten East. I remember the first time I drove on heroin I thought it should be required medication for the elderly. I saw the other lanes, the other cars, the signals — everything — so clearly. It was too easy to understand how every vehicle operated as a component of the infrastructure, each little tin auto playing its role like tiny corpuscles in a massive cardiovascular system. You know those people on the road who anticipate changing conditions like Bobby Fischer, always four moves ahead? That’s us, baby, the hop heads, guardians of the three-seconds rule, purveyors of the stale green light.

  I drove about half an hour, hoping maybe traffic would be heavy, what with it being two days after Carnival. But everyone had either bugged out broke and hung-over or they were still hanging on to the party after it should have been over, like Elvis at the end. You hear about how heroin makes you numb to the world around you, but I had never experienced that before now. Yeah sure it cost me my wife and my kid and all that shit, but through it all I was still Creole. I knew who was president and who led the NFC West and how to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Heroin was just a way to unwind, okay? But now, driving along a lonely stretch of increasingly rural Louisiana, I realized I’d missed the Mardi Gras, had no idea if there’d been calm or the cops had been uptight or the tips good or the ta-tas plentiful or any damn thing about it other than that it had been two days ago, which meant Sunday was Lent.

  I could hear the second syringe calling me from the trunk. It’s odd how much honor this drug has. It could taunt you, call you a cock-sucking mother-fucker and cut a two-inch notch in your pee hole and you’d thank it politely and invite it into your home and not even ask it to wipe its feet. But it doesn’t. It just gently reminds you — doesn’t even nag, just nudges a recollection — that you need it. And then it goes to work. Heroin is the June Cleaver of narcotics.

  I didn’t want to answer that call, not ’til the deed was done, and since I was still way ahead of schedule, I pulled off at a truck stop in Alton. The sign from the highway said simply “Gas” but I knew that on Ten, outside the city limits “gas” meant “Diner.”

  I expected three or four greasy spoons duking it out by the town’s only red light, where every night the people gave thanks that the state legislature had seen fit to bless their small marsh with an exit. But I was disappointed to find only one truck stop and it was beside only a flashing yellow. It didn’t have a name, or not one that was posted. But in a tiny Southeast borough off the interstate, the only sign you need is a couple of rigs in your lot and a red and white “OPEN” in your glass door. Even the parking lot was paved, not dirt, so the stereotypical dust failed to envelop my car as I braked and lumbered out.

  Inside, the rebellion continued. Couldn’t these people see I was a junkie just off a jones about to commit an abominably immoral act; didn’t they know I needed a little stability from the outside world while the chaotic vortex of my inner one whirled destructively faster? No tin sounding radio playing Merle Haggard tunes in mono, no stuffed armadillos on the counter tops, and the waitress neither had high-hair nor chewed gum. And her name tag had the audacity to read “Patricia.” Not Linda Lou or Tammi with an i, just plain vanilla, waspy Patricia. I immediately dubbed her “Patsy” and felt a little better about the situation.

  ‘ The chalkboard propped behind her was lettered in bright pink: “today’s special — mean ass red bean chili.” Beneath the words, someone had drawn a chalky blue bowl with the handle of a spoon poking out, and wavy red squiggles above to simulate heat. A not-so-fine layer of dust covered the whole thing, and I could tell “today’s special” had been “today’s special” since the nameless “diner” had been (red and white letter) “open.”

  “What you want ta drink, honey?” Patsy asked without turning around, breaking me out of my wry meditation. Her accent was fifth generation Cajun, but somehow her u
nwillingness to face me seemed to stem from shyness not apathy. Then I saw that she was looking at me, in the angled mirror high above the back counter. And I saw myself as she saw me, or as I would have seen me had I been her. And I didn’t blame her for not facing me.

  By looking upwards to look down upon me, she had a prime view of the crown of scar tissue David had blessed me with. It was a cross I bore without frequent thought; after all, chefs can wear hats in the kitchen, and whenever the weather permitted I wore a light trench and fedora in the streets. The Quarter is full of freaks who cleave to and rely upon one another like ants in the mound, defending resolutely against outsiders who damn near sample the local culture into extinction. Nevertheless, I would be reminded now and again of my butchered cranium and if it wasn’t exactly a freshly cut wound, it was certainly a handful of salt ground vigorously into the oozy pus of an old one. It was like having your defining moment pinned to the breast of your shirt — I didn’t so much mind other people staring as I did being forced to realize that it was my defining moment.

  I ignored the question. “About that special,” I announced loudly, trying to distract Patsy — and anyone else x-raying my soul through my nugget — with a little levity. “What kind of man — knowing he’s gonna be locked up in the ten-square-foot cab of a truck for the next six hours — orders anything with the words ‘mean ass’ in the title?” I grinned Daddy’s crooked smile, and would have arched my eyebrows had they not both been burnt off sixteen years ago.

  “The kind what’s hungry, sugar,” Patsy answered sweetly, finally turning to make direct eye contact. “You hungry?” The question and her stare were pregnant with meaning, as though by sighting my Achilles heel so early in our encounter she had been able to discern both its source and its effects on the chain of happenstance that had become my meager existence.

  Yes, I should have cried out, Yes I hunger to be loved, or at least to be worthy of love. I long to feel that good things can last, that something gold can stay, and that I don’t have to prove myself every single day. That the people I love recognize and remember my intrinsic value from one moment to the next. I hunger to be sitting home right now with my little girl, watching Lamb Chop's Play-Along and singing “The Song That Doesn’t End” instead of venturing across state lines to kill a man I don’t know, all so I can keep alive within my arteries a slowly growing cancer (a process which gives a whole new meaning to chemotherapy).