A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  I left by the back entrance and walked down the alley to the side street where my truck was parked. I could hear the streetcar clattering down the tracks on St. Charles. The sky was a hard blue, the noon sun bright overhead, and gray squirrels raced each other around the trunks of the oak trees on the street. Now all I had to do was find a way inside the insular and peculiar world of Anthony Cardo.

  “You just fucking do it, mon,” Clete said that same day as we ate lunch at the bar in the Golden Star on Decatur. “The guy lives in a house, right, not the Vatican. We’re talking about a bucket of shit, mon, not the pope. You don’t get a number and wait when you deal with a bucket of shit, do you?”

  He took an enormous bite of his oyster loaf sandwich. His face was ruddy and cheerful, his crushed porkpie hat down low over his eyes, his sports coat as tight as a sausage skin on his broad back. His cigarette burned in an ashtray, and by his elbow was a Bloody Mary with a celery stalk in it.

  “Call up the cocksucker and tell him we’re coming out,” he said.

  “It’s not that easy, Cletus.”

  “I don’t see the problem.” His cheek was as big as a baseball with unchewed food. We were alone at the bar. The walls were covered with the framed and autographed photos of movie stars.

  “He has an unlisted number. Minos gave it to me, but I don’t have a way to explain to Cardo how I got it. I asked Fontenot for it, and he wouldn’t give it to me. He said he had to clear it with Cardo first.”

  “Fontenot’s the tub, the one with the T-shirt shop on Bourbon?”

  “That’s the man.”

  “He wants to control access to the piggy bank, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Stay here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Remain cool and copacetic, my mellow man. I’ll be back before you finish your gumbo.”

  “Wait a minute, Clete.”

  But he was out the door. Fifteen minutes later he was back, his green eyes smiling under the short brim of his hat. He dropped a slip of paper with Cardo’s phone number on it next to my plate.

  “What did you do to him?” I asked.

  “Hey, come on, Fontenot’s a reasonable guy. I just explained that you and I are in partnership now. He liked the idea. That’s right, I ain’t putting you on.”

  “Clete, if we get into Cardo’s, you’ve got to take your transmission out of overdrive.”

  “Trust me, mon.” The fingers of his big hands were spread out like banana peels on top of the bar. He grinned at me, squinted his eyes, and clicked his teeth together. “You’re looking at a model of restraint. I worked Vice, remember. I know these fuckers. They’ll love having me on board.”

  It was easier than I thought. I called Cardo’s house, a maid answered, then Cardo was on the line. He was polite, even expansive. The accent was typical New Orleans Italian, which sounded like both Flatbush and the Irish Channel.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. You play tennis?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You like to watch tennis?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “At the Golden Star, across from the French Market.”

  “Can you come out in an hour? We’ll have some drinks, I’ll hit the ball a little bit, we’ll talk.”

  “Sure. I’d like that. Can you give me your address?”

  He gave me directions to a neighborhood out by Lake Pontchartrain.

  “How’d you get this number?” he asked.

  “It came from Ray.”

  “That’s strange. Ray usually doesn’t give it out.”

  The receiver was quiet a moment.

  “You haven’t been bouncing my help around, have you?” he said; then he laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Ray needs a little excitement. Cleans the fat out of his veins. You didn’t hurt him, though, did you?”

  “I didn’t do anything to him. I’d like to bring along a friend of mine. He’s going into business with me.”

  “That’s fine with me. We’ll be expecting you. Say, you know that newsstand a few doors down from you? Pick me up a copy of the Atlantic, will you? My subscription didn’t come.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Cardo.”

  “Hey, it’s Tony or Tony C. or Tony some-other-things, but nobody calls me Mr. Cardo. Do I sound like a Mr. Cardo to you?”

  “I’m looking forward to it. We’ll see you in an hour,” I said.

  I hung up the phone and looked at Clete at the bar.

  “The Atlantic?” I said.

  “What?”

  “This guy’s a beaut.”

  His home was a short distance from the lake. The immense, sloping lawn was shaded by live oaks, and the one-story house was long and white with a wide marble porch, a three-car garage, and a gingerbread gazebo in a side yard that was planted with blooming citrus trees and camellias. The swimming pool had a colonnade built onto one side, like a Roman porch, and behind the pool was a screened-in clay tennis court, and I could see a trim, suntanned man in white shorts and a polo shirt whocking balls back at a machine that fired them automatically over the net.

  “The mustaches know how to live, don’t they?” Clete said, his tie askew, one arm back on the seat, flipping ashes out the window of the truck.

  “Play it cool on the remarks.”

  “Ease up. There’re only two rules when you deal with these guys: Don’t mess with their broads and don’t steal from them. These guys just aren’t that complicated. What would a guy like Tony Cardo do if he couldn’t deal dope? He’d probably be running a fruit stand. You think a greaseball like that could honestly earn a joint like this?”

  “I’ll do most of the talking today, all right, Clete?”

  “You’ve got a lot of anxiety over nothing, mon. But it’s your gig. What do I know?” He flipped his cigarette in an arc into a flower bed.

  A Negro man in a white jacket and black pants walked out the side door of the house and stood on the edge of the drive while we got out of the truck.

  “Mr. Cardo want y’all come out by the pool,” he said. “He be with y’all in a minute.” He couldn’t keep his eyes from glancing sideways at the truck.

  “You like it? Dave might part with it for the right price,” Clete said.

  “Mr. Cardo ax you gentlemens if you want a drink,” the Negro said.

  “Give me a double black Jack on ice,” Clete said. “What do you want, Dave?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You got a bathroom?” Clete said to the Negro.

  “Yes suh, follow me inside.”

  I sat in a beach chair under the colonnade by the side of the pool. The bottom of the pool was inset with a mosaic mermaid that glittered with chips of light. The suntanned man on the court was hitting the ball with his back to me, but I felt that he was aware I was watching him through the myrtle trees that grew along the screens. He stayed on the balls of his feet, the muscles in his brown calves and thighs taut and glazed with perspiration, his forehand shot a white blur across the net.

  Clete came out of the side of the house with a highball glass in his hand and sat down heavily in a beach chair next to me.

  “You ought to see the can,” he said. “It looks like a pink whorehouse. Erotic art all over the wallpaper, a toilet seat inlaid with silver dollars. The colored guy went in after me and started cleaning the toilet with a brush. Should I take that personally?”

  “Probably.”

  “Thanks.”

  The man on the tennis court turned off the ball machine and walked across the close-clipped lawn toward us, zipping up the case on his racket. He was truly a strange-looking man. His head was long and narrow, his ears tiny and pressed tightly against the scalp as though part of them had been surgically pared away. His hair grew in gray and black ringlets that were tapered on the back of his neck like the flange of a helmet. His smile exposed his long white teeth, and his chest hair
was black and slick with perspiration.

  “Tony Cardo,” he said, his hand outstretched like a greeter’s in a restaurant.

  “It’s nice to see you, Tony,” I said. “This is a friend of mine, Clete Purcel.”

  “What’s happening, Tony?” Clete said, rising up enough from the beach chair to shake hands.

  “I remember you from somewhere,” Cardo said to him.

  “You drink vodka Collins,” Clete said.

  Cardo pursed his lips together in the shape of a tiny butterfly.

  “You’re a bartender in the Quarter,” he said.

  “I own the bar.”

  “You were in the corps.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We had some words or something.”

  “No, I don’t have words with people.”

  “Yeah, we did. Something about the corps. No, something about ‘the crotch,’ right?”

  “You got me. I don’t argue with people.”

  “Who’s arguing? But you said something, almost like getting in a guy’s face. Then you walked away. I was buying a drink for the gunny.”

  Clete shrugged his shoulders.

  “It must be somebody else. I just remember you drink vodka Collins, that’s all,” he said.

  “Hey, don’t sweat it. You’re a diplomat. That’s good. It means you’re a good businessman.”

  “I got no beef with anybody, Tony.”

  “I like that,” Cardo said.

  “Clete was my Homicide partner a few years ago,” I said. I watched Cardo’s face.

  “What made you change careers?” His eyes smiled as though he were looking at a private conclusion inside himself. The black houseman brought out a tray with a Collins and a bowl of chilled shrimp on it and set it on a circular redwood table next to Cardo’s chair.

  “A little trouble in the department, nothing big,” Clete said. “I went down to the tropics for a while to get my priorities straight. Then I got into casino security out in Vegas and Tahoe for Sally Dio.”

  “Yeah, Sally Dee out of Galveston,” Cardo said. “His plane smacked into a mountain out in Montana or somewhere.”

  “Yeah, it was too bad. He was a great guy to work for,” Clete said.

  “I always heard he was a prick,” Cardo said.

  “Well, some people had that opinion, too,” Clete said.

  “You’re not drinking anything, Dave?”

  “No thanks. Can we talk some business, Tony?”

  “Put on some swimsuits. Let’s take a dip,” he said.

  “It’s a little cool, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I keep the water at eighty-two degrees. You’ll love it. There’re some suits over there in the cottage,” he insisted.

  He went into his own house to change, and Clete and I walked across the lawn to a small white stucco cottage that was surrounded with palm and banana trees.

  “He’s one slick motherfucker. You won’t get a wire into this place, partner,” Clete said.

  Inside the cottage we found a cardboard box full of men’s and women’s bathing suits on top of the bar. Clete started rooting through them and found only one pair that wasn’t too small for him, an enormous pair of red boxer trunks with a white elastic band.

  “I bet these belong to that blimp who runs the T-shirt shop,” he said. He looked at my face. “It’s not funny, Dave. These guys pass around VD like a family heirloom.” He went into the bedroom, found a safety pin in a drawer, and began undressing by the bar.

  “He really put you under the microscope,” I said.

  “They’re all the same, mon. They love to peel back your skin.”

  “What do you think all that Marine Corps stuff is about?”

  “Who cares? Figuring out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet.”

  I laid my clothes across the back of a couch and slipped on a pair of trunks. Clete poured a glass of Jack Daniel’s at the bar and looked at my chest.

  “That’s where Boggs popped you, huh?” he said. “Does it give you much trouble?”

  “I’m still weak on the left side. Sometimes it throbs a little in the morning.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean ‘what else’?”

  “Don’t try to put on your old partner. You remember when that kid planted a couple of .22 rounds in me? I had the nightly sweats for a long time, mon.”

  “It comes and goes.”

  “Like hell it does.” Then he took a drink and smiled at me. His face looked as big and hard-ribbed as a grinning pumpkin under his porkpie hat. “But don’t worry. Before this is over, we’re going to cook Jimmie Lee Boggs’s hash, I mean sling some serious shit on the walls. You wait and see, ole Streak.”

  He winked at me and walked duck-footed to the door, with his drink in his hand, his red trunks askew on his hips, lighting a cigarette.

  “You think he’s got any broads around?” he said.

  I took the copy of the Atlantic out of my coat pocket and followed him to the pool.

  Tony Cardo hit the water in a long, flat dive and swam with deep strokes to the diving board, blowing water out his nose, then made an underwater turn and pushed off the tiled side and swam into the shallow end. He raked the water out of his eyes and curly hair and spit into the trough that surrounded the pool.

  “That’s a nasty scar on your chest, Dave,” he said.

  “A nasty guy put it there.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that.”

  “He works for you.”

  “That’s not exactly true, Dave. He used to work for some people I do business with. He doesn’t now. I don’t know where he is. I heard Florida.”

  “I wouldn’t want a guy like that to blindside me, Tony.”

  “You’re an up-front guy. But you got no worries on that. Not in this town.”

  “The people I represent like the quality of your product, they like the way you do business. They’ve given me a half million to work with. I want the same quality goods, same price on the key. Can we do some business today?”

  “You cut right to it, don’t you?”

  “You’re a serious man, you have a serious reputation.”

  “You’re talking a big score.”

  “That’s why I’m dealing with you. The word is that the Houston people are undependable.”

  “The problem I got sometimes is access, Dave. Or what you might call transportation. The product’s out there, but there’re a lot of nautical factors involved here, you know what I mean? Something happens to the product out on the salt, a lot of people lose money, a lot of people get real mad.”

  “That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about. I grew up in the wetlands. I know every bayou and channel from Sabine Pass over to Barataria. I can get it through for you, and on a regular basis.”

  “I bet you can,” he said.

  But his attention was no longer on me. His arms were folded on top of the trough, and he was looking across the blue-green expanse of lawn and trees at the front porch of his house, where a blond woman in a red dress and a hat was counting the suitcases the houseman was bringing outside. A moment later one of the gatemen walked up the drive and backed a restored 1940s Lincoln Continental convertible out of the garage. It had wire wheels, a deep maroon finish, and an immaculate white top. The gateman and the Negro put the woman’s luggage in the trunk. She never glanced in our direction.

  “What do you think of my car?” he said finally.

  “It looks great.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I think.” But his eyes were still concentrated on the woman. “You married?”

  “Not now.”

  He continued to stare as she got into the Lincoln and the gateman drove her down the long driveway toward the street. Then his eyes clicked back onto mine.

  “Hey, let me ask you something else. Because I like you. I like the way you talk,” he said. “What’s your attitude about dealing in the product?”

  “I don’t underst
and.”

  “You’re an educated man. I want to know what an educated man thinks about dealing in the product.”

  “I never saw anybody chop up lines because somebody forced him to.”

  “I think that’s an intelligent attitude. But I want you to understand something else, Dave. I got lots of businesses. Vending and video machines, a restaurant, nightclubs, half of a trucking company, real estate development out by Chalmette, some investments in Miami. This other stuff comes and goes. Five years from now the in thing might be huffing used cat litter. There’s always a bunch of bozos around with money. Why fight the fashion?”

  His eyes looked at the empty drive and the front gate that was closed once again.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and raised himself out of the pool, walked dripping to the redwood table, and punched one button on the phone. He put his little finger in one of his tiny ears and shook water out of it. At the end of the drive I saw the other gateman walk to a box that was inset in the stucco wall.

  “Tommy, get some people over here, call up the catering service,” he said. “I got some guests here, I want to entertain them right… Don’t ask me who, I don’t give a shit, get them over here.”

  He hung up the phone and looked at me.

  “I live in a place that costs a million bucks, and half the time it’s like being the only guy in the fucking Superdome,” he said.

  “Before your friends get here, can we agree on a deal of some kind, Tony?” I said.

  “There’s some people I bring out here like I order lawn furniture. There’s other people I invite because I respect their experience and what’s in their heads. Don’t hurt my feelings,” he said.

  His guests arrived like actors who played only one role, their smiles welded in place, their eyes aglitter with the moment. They were people without accents or origins, as though they had lived on the edge of a party all their lives. But besides their good looks and their late-season suntans, their most singular common denominator was their carefree trust in the walled-in tropical opulence that surrounded them. They smoked dope by the pool, snorted lines off a mirror in the guest cottage, ate chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches from the caterer’s tray, with never a sideways glance at gatemen who wore shoulder holsters or a thick-bodied, silent man in cutoffs who waxed an Oldsmobile in the driveway with such a mean energy that his jailhouse tattoos danced like snakes on his naked back.