A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  That afternoon, four days after Tante Lemon and Dorothea’s visit, I drove to Minos Dautrieve’s house in Lafayette. He lived in the old part of town on the north side, a neighborhood of Victorian homes, deep lawns, enormous live oak trees, iron tethering posts, gazebos, screened galleries, and cascading leaves. He had grown up in a shotgun farmhouse outside of Abbeville, but I always suspected that inside his cynicism he had a jaded reverence for the ways of late-nineteenth-century southern gentility.

  We sat on cushioned wood lawn chairs in his backyard and drank lemonade amid the golden light and the leaves that scratched across the flagstones, or floated in an old stone well that he had turned into a goldfish pond.

  “You already talked to the sheriff?” he asked.

  “He says it’s between me and you. I’ll be on lend-lease to the Presidential Task Force, but my salary will still come from the department. Evidently everybody thinks this task force is big stuff right now.”

  “You’re not impressed?”

  “Who cares what I think?”

  “Come on, you don’t believe we’re winning the war on drugs?” He was smiling. He had to squint against the yellow orb of sun that shone through the oak limbs overhead.

  “The head of the DEA says the contras deal cocaine. Reagan and the Congress give them guns and money. It’s hard to put all that in the same basket and be serious about it,” I said.

  He stopped smiling.

  “But there’s one difference,” he said. “No matter what those guys in Washington do, we still send the lowlifes up the road and we trash their operation everywhere we can.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m not making my point very well, though.”

  “Yes, you are. Look, I respect your agency, I appreciate its problems.”

  “Respect’s not enough. When you work for the federal government, you have to obey its rules. There’s no area there for negotiation.”

  “This whole business was your idea, Minos.”

  “It’s a good idea, too. But let’s look at your odometer again. Sometimes you’ve had a way of doing things on your own.”

  “Maybe that’s a matter of perception.”

  “You remember that guy you busted with a pool cue in Breaux Bridge? They had to use a mop to clean up the blood. And the guy you cut in half through an attic floor in New Orleans? I won’t mention a couple of other incidents.”

  “I never dealt the play. You know that.”

  “I can see you’ve had a lot of regret about it, too.”

  “I’m just not interested in the past anymore.”

  “There are some people who aren’t as confident in you as I am.”

  “Then let them do it.”

  He smiled again.

  “That happens to be what I told them,” he said. “It didn’t light up the room with goodwill. But seriously, Dave, we can’t have Wyatt Earp on the payroll.”

  “You’re the skipper. If I do something that causes problems for your office, you cut me loose. What’s the big deal?”

  “You know, I think you have another potential. Maybe in scholarship. Like reducing the encyclopedia to a simple declarative sentence.”

  I set my empty glass on a table. The wafer of sun was low in the sky now, the air cooler, the leaves in the goldfish pond dark and sodden. A neighbor was barbecuing, and smoke drifted over the garden wall into the yard. I leaned forward in the chair, one hand pinched around my wrist.

  “I think your concern is misplaced,” I said. “When I got hurt the second time in Vietnam, it was a million-dollar wound. I was out of it. I didn’t have to prove anything, because there was no place to prove it. This one’s different. It’s ongoing, and I don’t know if I’ll measure up. I don’t know if you have the right man.”

  I saw his eyes move over my face.

  “You’re going to do fine,” he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Like I said, it’s not much more complicated than a simple sting,” he continued. “We take it a step at a time and see where it leads. If it starts to get nasty, we pull you out. That has nothing to do with you. We don’t want any of our people hurt. It’s not worth it. We figure the shitbags all take a fall sooner or later.

  “Look, this is the way it’s going to work. We’ve got an apartment for you on Ursulines in the Quarter, and the word’s going to be out on the street that you’re fired and dirty. There are five or six dealers around there you can approach to make a buy. Nothing real big right now, four or five keys, maybe a fifty-thousand-dollar buy. They’re not going to trust you. They’ll jerk you around, give you a lot of bullshit probably, maybe test you in some way. But these are low-level, greedy guys who are also dumb, and they get a hard-on when they see money. You set up the score, we let it go through, then we move up to bigger things.”

  “Where’s all this money coming from?”

  “It’s confiscated from drug deals. Don’t worry, we’ll get it back. Anyway, once these guys are convinced you’re the real article, you tell them you want to reinvest your profits. Then we offer them some serious gelt. They don’t want the action, you tell them you can make the score in Houston. Tony Cardo hates the guy who runs the action out of Houston. The word is he screwed Tony’s wife in a bathroom stall at the Castaways in Miami. We’re talking about a real class bunch here. The goal, though, is to get Cardo involved in the deal. He’s a weird fucking guy.”

  I had to laugh.

  “What’s your idea of normal?” I asked.

  “No, this guy’s special. He not only looks weird, he’s deeply fucked up in the head. Maybe it’s his background. His mother used to shampoo corpses for funeral homes.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how she made her money. She washed the hair of corpses for a mortician. Finally she bought her own funeral parlor in Algiers. Tony C. must not have liked it, though, because he put it up for sale two days after he inherited it.”

  “What if I run across Jimmie Lee Boggs?”

  “You let us handle him. We’ll figure out a way to have him picked up without compromising you.”

  “There’s one other thing. Tee Beau Latiolais, the black kid who escaped with Boggs, he’s in New Orleans. He told his girlfriend he’s going to try to find Boggs for me.”

  “Why does he want to do that?”

  “I sent word to him that I’d help him if he’d help me. I didn’t mean for him to go looking for Boggs, though.”

  “You worry too much. It’s just a sting. Hey, you’re going back to New Orleans.”

  Chapter 4

  I took Alafair to stay at the home of my cousin Tutta, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. It wasn’t easy. I carried her suitcase and her paper bag of Curious George and Baby Squanto books and coloring materials up onto the gingerbread porch and sat down with her in the swing. The sun was bright on the lawn. Bumblebees hummed over the hibiscus and the pale blue hydrangeas in the flower beds.

  “It’s not going to be for long, little guy,” I said. “I’m going to call you almost every night, and Tutta will take you out to feed your horse. If I can, I’ll come back on a weekend.”

  She looked out blankly at the dew shining on the grass.

  “It’s a business trip, Alafair. It’s just something I have to do.”

  “You said we wouldn’t leave New Iberia again. You said you didn’t like New Orleans anymore, that it was full of dope and bad people.”

  “That doesn’t mean we have to be afraid of those things, does it? Come on, we’re not going to let a short trip get us down, are we? Guys like us are too tough for that.”

  Her face was sullen. I took off her Astros cap and set it sideways on her head, then looked down into her face.

  “Trust me on this one, Alf,” I said. My cousin came out on the porch. I squeezed Alafair against me. Her body felt hard and unyielding. “Okay, little guy?”

  Her eyes were blinking, and I touched her face with my hand.

  “Hey, you remember what my fathe
r used to do when he had a problem?” I asked. “He’d grin right in its face, then give the old thumbs-up sign. He’d say, ‘You mess with us coonass, we gonna spit right in yo’ mouth.’ ”

  She looked up at me and smiled faintly. My cousin held the screen for her.

  “Dave?” Alafair said.

  “Yes?”

  “When you come back, it’s gonna be like it was?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Playing and joking, like we always did. You always coming home full of fun.”

  “You bet. I just have to clear up some problems, that’s all.”

  “I can go with you. I can cook meals, I can wash clothes in the machine.”

  “Not this time, Alf.”

  Tutta took Alafair’s hand in her own.

  “Dave, those bad people, they’re not gonna hurt you again, are they?” Alafair said.

  “You remember what Batist did when that gator got inside his fishnet and tore it up?” I said.

  She thought, then grinned broadly.

  “That’s right,” I said. “He grabbed the gator by its tail, swung it around in the air, and threw it all the way over the levee. Well, that’s the way we handle the bad guys when they give us trouble.”

  I hugged her again and kissed her forehead.

  “Good-bye, little guy,” I said.

  “ ’Bye, Dave.”

  Her eyes were starting to film, and I walked down to the picket gate before I turned and glanced back at her. She stood in the open screen door, one of her hands in Tutta’s, her ball cap low on her ears. She looked back at me from under the bill of her cap and raised her thumb in the air.

  I left Batist to manage the bait shop and boat dock, and on Halloween I moved into my apartment on Ursulines in the Quarter. Most people identify the Quarter with the antique stores on Royal, the sidewalk artists around Jackson Square, and the strip joints and T-shirt shops on Bourbon Street, but it has a residential and community life of its own: a Catholic elementary school, a city park, small grocery stores with screen doors, wood floors, ceiling fans, display coolers loaded with cheeses, sausages, and skinned catfish, and bins of plums and bananas set out on the sidewalk under the colonnade.

  My apartment was inside a walled courtyard that you entered through an iron gate and a domed brick walkway. The flower beds were thick with blooming azalea and camellia and untrimmed banana trees, and the people who lived in the second-story apartments had placed coffee cans of begonias and hung baskets of impatiens along the balcony.

  My place was on the first floor, and it had a bedroom, a small kitchen, a bath with a shower, and a living room. Like those of most residences in the Quarter, its walls were marked with all the historical attempts of its owners to adapt to technological change. The gas lamps had been removed and plastered over at the turn of the century; bricks had been torn out of the walls to replumb and rewire the kitchen and the bath; big hand-twist electric switches stuck out of the plaster but turned on no light.

  I opened the windows and began to hang my clothes in the closet. Maybe I should have felt good to be back in New Orleans, where I had been a policeman for fourteen years in the First District, but it felt strange to be alone in a rented apartment, with the late-afternoon light cold and yellow on the banana trees outside. Or maybe it was simply a matter of age. Solitude and the years did not go well with me, and even though I had lived over a half century, I had concluded that I was one of those people who would never know with any certainty who they were, that my thoughts about myself would always be question marks; my only identity would remain the reflection that I saw in the eyes of others.

  I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life. I finished putting my shirts, underwear, and socks in the dresser drawers, stripped down to my skivvies, and did ten one-arm chins on an iron pipe in the kitchen, forty leg lifts, and fifty stomach crunches, and got into the shower and turned the water on so hot that my skin turned red and grainy through my suntan.

  I dried off and combed my hair in the mirror. I had lost fifteen pounds since Boggs had shot me; my stomach was flat, the love handles around my waist had almost disappeared, the scar tissue where a bouncing Betty had gotten me in Vietnam looked like a spray of small gray arrow points that had been slipped under the skin on my right thigh and side. I still had my father’s thick black hair and mustache, except for the white patch above my ear, and if I didn’t pay attention to the lines in my neck and around my eyes and the black-peppery flecks of skin cancer on my arms, I could still pretend it was only the bottom of the fifth.

  Question: Where do you score a few grams of coke in New Orleans?

  Answer: Almost anywhere you want to.

  But where do you score a thousand grams, a kilo? The question becomes more complicated. Minos had accused me of being simplistic. Later I would wonder when he had last been on the street with his own clientele.

  It was dusk when I got to the address on Esplanade on the edge of the Quarter; the air was crisp, the dry palm fronds on the neutral ground clattered in the breeze, and costumed Negro children with jack-o’-lanterns ran in groups from one high, lighted gallery to the next. The man I was looking for lived in a garage apartment behind a columned one-story wood house on the corner, which like many New Orleans antebellum homes was built up high above the lawn because of floods. But the wood doors on the drive were padlocked, and the iron gate that gave onto the side yard wouldn’t open either. I could see a man working under an automobile in the drive, with a mechanic’s lamp attached to an extension cord.

  I shook the gate against the iron fastenings in the brick wall. The man slid out from under the car on a creeper. A lighted cigar lay on the cement by his head. One eye squinted at me like a fist.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I’m looking for Lionel Comeaux.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Are you Lionel Comeaux?”

  “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “The latch is inside, at the top of the gate,” he said, and picked up a crescent wrench off the cement to begin working under the car again.

  I entered the yard and walked through flower beds filled with elephant ears and caladium and waited for him to slide back from under the car again. He didn’t, so I had to squat down to talk to him. “I want to make a buy.”

  “Buy what?” he said, blinking at the rust that fell out of the car frame into his eyes. He wore jeans and a purple and gold LSU jersey with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. His arms were big and covered with tan, and he had a deep red U.S. Navy tattoo on one bicep. His head was square, his dark hair crew cut. He chewed gum, and there were lumps of cartilage behind his ears.

  “I want some pure stuff, no cut, a good price,” I said. “I hear you’re the guy who can help me.”

  “Pure what? What are you talking about, buddy?”

  “What the fuck do you think I’m talking about?”

  He stopped working, removed a piece of grit from his eyelashes with his thumb, and looked at me. The backs of his hands were shiny with grease.

  “Who sent you here?” he said.

  “Some people in Lafayette.”

  “Who?”

  “People I do business with. What do you care?”

  “I care, man. What’s your name?”

  “Dave Robicheaux.”

  He pushed the creeper out from under the car and raised himself up on one elbow. He was maybe twenty-five and had the neck and shoulder tendons of a weight lifter.

  “You’re talking about dope, right? Skag, reefer, stuff like that?” he said. He picked up his cigar off the cement and puffed it alight.

  “I’m talking about cocaine, podna. Ten thou a key. I can take five keys off you.”

  “Cocaine?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s interesting. But number one, I’m not
your podna, because I don’t know who you are. Number two, I don’t know where you got my name or this address, but you’ve got the wrong information, wrong person, wrong house.”

  “You see Tony Cardo?”

  “Who?”

  “Look, I don’t mean to offend you, but the bozo routine is wearing thin. You tell Cardo there’re some oil people in Lafayette with a lot of money to invest. He doesn’t want the business, that’s fine. You don’t want to pass on the information, that’s fine. We can get what we need out of Houston. You know where Clete’s Club is?”

  “No.”

  “You know where Joe Burda’s Golden Star is on Decatur?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s two doors up from there. If you want to do some business, leave word at the bar.”

  “Make sure the gate latches on your way out,” he said.

  The next two people whose names and addresses Minos had given me were equally unproductive. One was a bar owner who was in jail in Baton Rouge, and the other, a wrestling promoter, had died of AIDS.

  At eleven that night I walked down Bourbon in the roar of noise from the bars and strip joints, amid the Halloween revelers, the midwestern conventioneers, breathless, red-faced college kids who spilled beer from their paper cups down the front of their clothes, and the Negro street dancers whose clip-on taps rang like horseshoes on the cement. Bourbon is closed to automobile traffic, so that the street itself is like an open-air zoo, but by and large it’s a harmless one. The girls still take off their clothes on the runways and hookers work out of taxicabs in the early morning hours. Occasionally a cop will cool out a drunk with a baton in a side-street bar, and the burlesque spielers in candy-striped vests and straw boaters can conjure up visions right out of adolescent masturbation; but ultimately Bourbon offers the appearance of sleaze to the tourists with the implicit understanding that it contains no real threat of injury to them.