A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  “Dance with me,” she said.

  It was dark and the vinyl booths were empty at the back of the dance floor. She felt light and small in my arms, and her head rested against my chest. I felt her hair touch my cheek.

  “Look, Kim, let me buy you some gumbo at the Golden Star,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. I could feel her stomach and breasts against me, and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

  “Hey,” I said, and looked at her and smiled. “I’m an over-the-hill guy who doesn’t deserve the kindness of a pretty young woman.”

  “Tony lets me use his beach house in Biloxi. Come with me there today.”

  “It sounds like a good way to end up in an oil barrel.”

  “He won’t hurt you. He likes you. I don’t think Tony’s going to be around much longer, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “People in Miami and Houston want him out of the way. He keeps breaking all their rules. Sometimes I feel sorry for him. Will you come with me?”

  “I’m involved, Kim. You’re sure a big temptation, though.”

  Her feet stopped moving and her hand rested on my arm. She looked out at the light from the opened front door. A lock of her hair hung down on one eyebrow. Her face had the same wan expression on it that I had seen when she had been staring out at Tony Cardo’s empty tennis court. Then she touched my throat with her fingers.

  “So long, hotcakes. Don’t think too bad of me,” she said.

  She left me on the dance floor, picked up her purse from the bar, and walked through the brilliant square of light at the front onto Decatur Street. Clete parted the window blinds with his fingers and squinted out onto the street.

  “Yep, there he goes,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Nate Baxter, my man.”

  “Nate Baxter?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d forget him. The one genuine sonofabitch from the First District. I saw him watching her from under the colonnade across the street when she came in. A car just picked him up when she left.”

  “Why’s a guy from Internal Affairs interested in Kim Dollinger?”

  “He’s not in Internal Affairs anymore. He’s Vice. The perfect guy for it, too. A prick from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. What’s going on, Dave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Some sting. Half the city of New Orleans seems to be in on it. Listen, get out of that gig at Cocodrie. I’ve got a real bad feeling on this one.”

  “Those are the ones you skate through. You buy it when you’ve got your pot off and you’re reading a newspaper. You know that.” I winked at him.

  “Save the Little Orphan Annie routine for somebody else, Streak. When my ovaries start tingling, I listen to them. Anytime you see that buttwipe Baxter, it’s bad news. You can count on it.”

  Back at the apartment I called the commercial dock at Cocodrie to check on my jugboat, then called Minos at his office to confirm the pickup of the half million.

  “Our special-delivery man will be there with your bus locker key in about two hours,” he said. “Did you know a half-million dollars in hundred-dollar bills weighs exactly eleven pounds?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Don’t drop it overboard. As I mentioned before, some of my colleagues are a little anxious about this one.”

  “I’m tired of hearing about your colleagues’ problems.”

  “Your voice sounds funny.”

  “I’ve been doing push-ups. I’m still out of breath.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure. I’m all right.”

  “When I was undercover I’d wake up with my heart racing. I’d smoke a pack of cigarettes before noon sometimes.”

  “My ears keep popping, like I’ve been on an airplane.”

  “Dave, you can throw it in anytime you want, and nobody will think less of you for it.”

  “I’m copacetic. Don’t sweat it.”

  “Remember, we’re never going to be too far away.”

  Then I told him about Nate Baxter’s surveillance of Kim Dollinger.

  “They’re interested in Cardo, too,” he said. “They’re probably keeping some strings on his entourage.”

  “Why her? She’s no dealer.”

  “I’ll check. They’re supposed to coordinate with us, anyway. Have you got some kind of personal involvement with this guy Baxter?”

  “He tried to get me fired from the department when he was in Internal Affairs.”

  “So?”

  “It didn’t end there. I split his lip in the squad room, in front of about twenty-five cops.”

  “Dave, you never disappoint me,” he said.

  I rode the streetcar down St. Charles to Bootsie’s house that evening, and the wind through the open window was cool and smelled of old brick, wet moss, and moldy pecan husks. But I couldn’t concentrate on anything except my anxieties about the buy out on the salt and my questions, which I could not successfully bury, about Bootsie’s involvement with the mob. How did an intelligent and educated woman from a small Bayou Teche town like New Iberia marry a member of the Giacano family? I tried to imagine what he must have looked like. Most of the Giacanos were built like piano movers, notorious for their animal energies, their enormous appetites and bovine behavior in restaurants, their emotionalism and violence. Their weddings and funerals were covered by local television stations with the same sense of mirth and expectation that people might have when visiting an amusement park.

  The image just wouldn’t fit.

  But the image of her first husband sure did. He was a helicopter and pontoon plane pilot for Sinclair Oil Company, and I remembered him most for his suntanned, blond good looks and the confident, unblinking light in his blue eyes. In fact, I could never quite forget the night I met him, at a dance at the Frederic Hotel in New Iberia, right after I had been released from an army hospital. I was on a cane then. It was 1965, when the war was just heating up for other people, and it felt funny to go to a dance by myself and to discover that I was alone in more ways than one, that I was already used up and discarded by a war that waited in a vague piece of neocolonial geography for other boys whose French names could have belonged to Legionnaires.

  Then through the potted palm fronds and marble columns, I saw her in a pink organdy dress, dancing with him in her stocking feet. Her face was flushed from the champagne punch, and strands of her hair stuck damply to her skin like wisps of honey. They walked toward the punch table, where I was standing, and I saw her gaze focusing on me as though I had stepped unexpectedly off a bus into the middle of her life. Then I realized she was drunk.

  She started blowing air up into her face to get her hair out of her eyes.

  “Well!” she said.

  “Hello, Boots,” I said.

  “Well!” she repeated, and blew a web of hair out of her eyes again. “John, this is Dave Robicheaux. It looks like Dave has come back to visit New Iberia. What a wonderful event. Maybe he can come to our wedding.”

  He smiled with his white teeth when he shook hands. His eyes went back and forth between us, and I could see the recognition grow in them.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Dave. The wedding is Saturday at St. Peter’s,” he said. “Please come if you feel like it.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And I cleared my throat so they wouldn’t see me swallow.

  Bootsie blew more gusts of air up into her face and her eyes became brighter, as though a generator were gaining momentum inside her.

  “I could have told you I was pregnant. That would have blown your mind, wouldn’t it?” she said.

  “What?” I felt my mouth hang open, because in New Iberia at that time it was unthinkable to talk like that in a public place.

  “But that would have seriously screwed you up,” she said. “You would have ended up a family guy with kiddies and you couldn’t go off to war, then come home and stand around on a cane like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. The pose
is perfect, Dave. You look so absolutely sad and wounded. We wouldn’t rob you of it for anything.”

  “I think you’re being pretty rotten,” I said.

  “Hold on, now,” her fiancé said.

  “No, rotten is when you put it in without a rubber because you’re really promising that person you’re going to marry her, then you leave her like she’s yesterday’s backseat hand job.”

  The band had stopped playing, and her words carried out to the edge of the dance floor. People stared at us with their smiles suddenly frozen on their faces. Bootsie’s eyes were watery and shining, and there were beads of perspiration on her upper lip. In the silence I could feel the skin of my face tighten and flex against the bone.

  When I woke in the morning a note folded inside an envelope was stuck in my screen door. It read:

  I’m sick and trembling with a hangover this morning, and I guess I deserve it. I’m sorry for what I said to you last night. I shouldn’t apologize to you, but I do anyway. But tell me this, Dave, please please please tell me this, why did you push me away, why did you destroy it for both of us, why did you ruin everything we’d shared together that summer, tell me in the name of suffering God why you did it, Dave.

  Love,

  Bootsie

  P.S. On second thought it’s probably better that you don’t answer this note. I’m going to be married to John, and the past is the past, right? If I say that enough it’ll finally be true. I hope you have a good life. I really mean that even though I think you were a bastard.

  But as she’d said, the past was the past, and after we had dinner, we washed the dishes, put them away, and went upstairs to her bedroom. It was misting outside, and the sky was a soft gray, the sun a low red ball on the western horizon. The long strips of pink cloud above the trees reminded me of flamingo wings.

  I took off my shirt, then sat on the side of the bed to remove my shoes. She sat next to me in only her bra and a half-slip and put her hand on my back.

  “Your skin’s hot,” she said.

  “It happens when I’m with a certain lady,” I said, and tried to smile.

  “No, your muscles are tight as iron. What is it, Dave?”

  “I just have a couple of things on my mind right now.”

  “There’s a big buy going down, isn’t there?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I always know. I hear people talking on the phone, a lot of money gets transferred around. Dave, are you still a cop?”

  “No questions tonight, Boots.”

  “They’ll catch on to you eventually. What you don’t understand is that the narcs who get inside the organization are like them. You’re not. It’s a matter of time before they’ll see that.”

  “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want. But at some point you’ll have to confide in me. If not now, later. You know that, Dave.”

  I touched her lips with my fingers.

  “It’s going to rain,” I said. “Remember when we used to go to my father’s boathouse in the rain?”

  She laid her cheek against my bare shoulder and rested her hand lightly on my arm. I finished undressing, and she pulled her slip up over her thighs and sat on top of me. I felt myself go deep inside her, felt her heat and wetness spread across my loins. Her face became round and pale in concentration. She made love with the confidence and knowledge of an older woman, and when she came she pressed my palm hard against her breast as though she were forcing me to share the whirrings of her heart.

  It was dark outside, and the rain was slanting against the French windows. An oak tree raked wetly against the side of the house. She lay inside my arm, with her hand on my stomach, and I could smell the rose-scented shampoo in her hair and taste the thin film of perspiration on her forehead.

  Then, as though determined to pass on all my anxieties and fears to someone else, as though I had to hurt her again as I had many years before, I asked her the question that had bothered me since I’d first gone to her house on Camp Street.

  “Why don’t you get out from under them?”

  “I told you why.”

  “You said you didn’t know your husband was in the mob when you married him. I never knew one of them who wasn’t obvious, Boots.”

  “I wasn’t very careful, I guess.”

  “Bootsie, you had to know.”

  “He was good-looking and well-mannered. He said he had a degree from Tulane. He smiled all the time. He was fun to be around, Dave.”

  “All those game-room machines you distribute are made by a Mafia front in Chicago. You’re into it big-time, old pal.”

  Her hand left my stomach, and she sat up on the side of the bed and looked out at the wet treetops. Then she walked barefoot in her bra and half-slip to a cabinet above a small desk, her hips creasing softly. I could see the dark outline of her sex through her slip.

  “I’m going to have a glass of cream sherry,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you? It helps me to sleep sometimes. I always have trouble sleeping when it thunders. It’s a silly way to be.”

  She kept her face turned toward the French windows, but I could see the wet shine on her cheeks.

  Chapter 8

  It was black and raining hard when I guided the jugboat from the dock down the canal toward open water. The boat was built to float high up in the water, but the tide was out, the canal was shallow, and yellow mud and tangles of dead hyacinths boiled up under the propeller. The long expanses of saw grass on each side of us were bent in the rain.

  Ray Fontenot and Lionel Comeaux both wore yellow raincoats with hoods and sat hunched forward in their chairs by my small butane stove, which held a pot of coffee. The weather had turned cold, and their faces were morose and irritable. When we hit open water I pushed the throttle forward and felt the engine surge and the bow lift into the waves. The coastline became gray and indistinct and then dropped behind us altogether. In the distance I could see a gas flare burning on an offshore oil well.

  “Turn off your running lights,” Lionel said.

  “There’s a fogbank up there.”

  “I don’t care. Turn off your lights.”

  “Look, if you’re worried about the Coast Guard, it monitors the traffic by radar. You don’t become invisible by turning off your lights.”

  He got up from his chair, walked to my instrument board, and clicked off the two toggle switches that controlled the red and green running lights on the stern and bow. I pulled the throttle back to idle and cut the ignition. Suddenly it was quiet except for the rain against the roof and the glass. The jugboat pitched in one trough and then slid over the top of a black wave into another; the coffeepot crashed on the floor.

  “These are the rules, partner. There’s one skipper on a boat,” I said. “You’re looking at him. If that doesn’t sit right with you, we’ll turn it around here.”

  “We’ve made this run a dozen times. You don’t advertise,” Lionel said.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “The best way to attract attention is to do something stupid like run without lights.”

  “It’s your first time out. I’m trying to be helpful.”

  “What’s it going to be, Fontenot?”

  “Much ado about nothing,” he said from his chair. “Let him have his lights, Lionel.”

  I hit the starter and pushed the throttle open again. We hit a cresting wave in a shower of foam and then flattened out in a long trough. The water was black and rolling and hammered with raindrops. Then the fogbank slipped over the bow and the pilothouse, as cold and damp on the skin as a gray, wet glove.

  “What’s Tony going to get out of the score?” I asked Ray Fontenot.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s my buy, my stash. What’s the profit for him?”

  “He gets a cut from the Colombians. The action gets pieced off all the way back to Bogotá.”

  “Where’s your piece come in?”

  “We
’re doing it as a favor.”

  “No kidding?” I said.

  “We like you.” He smiled from under his yellow rain hood.

  Lionel rubbed the moisture off the window glass with his palm.

  “There it is,” he said.

  A shrimp boat with its wheelhouse lighted rose in the swell, then slipped down below a long, sliding wave.

  “How do we make the exchange?” I said.

  “I’ll take the money on board and come back with the stash,” Lionel said.

  “They’re shy?” I said.

  “You don’t want to meet them,” Fontenot said. “They’re not a nice group, our garlic-scented friends. They seem to like Lionel, though. The colored woman who cooks for them likes him very much. Lionel had a big change of luck at the track after he met her.”

  “You ought to get laid more, Ray. You wouldn’t have all these cute things to say,” Lionel said.

  I saw the shrimp boat drift to the top of the swell again. Its white paint was peeling, its scuppers dripping with rust. Lionel had taken off his raincoat and was putting on a life jacket.

  “You should appreciate Lionel’s efforts on your behalf,” Fontenot said.

  “Forget the appreciation. Just put it hard against the tires and keep it there till I’m on the ladder,” Lionel said.

  He laced the life jacket under his chin, then slipped a rope through the aluminum suitcase that contained the money and tied it crossways on his chest.

  “I go between the hulls and you’re out a half mil,” he said.

  “We can make the exchange without you getting on their boat,” I said. “There’s a thirty-foot coil of rope in that forward gear box. Tie it onto the suitcase, throw the other end on the shrimper, and we’ll get the stash back the same way.”

  “I gotta check it.”

  “We’ll check it when it’s on board.”

  “You don’t inspect the goods after the fact when you deal with spics,” he said.

  “Let’s not have discord on the Melody Ranch, boys and girls,” Fontenot said. “Lionel’s an old pro at this, Mr. Robicheaux. He’s not going to drop your money.”