I found her sitting on a tall chair-backed stool in the bar. The bar was done in mahogany and teakwood, with brass-framed round mirrors and barometers on the walls and copper kettles full of ferns hung in the windows that looked out over the yacht basin. Her eyes were clear now, and her hands lay quietly on the polished black surface of the bar, her fingers touching the sides of a Manhattan glass. She nibbled at the orange slice; then her face tightened when she saw me walk into the periphery of her vision.
I ordered a cup of coffee from the bartender.
“What do I have to say? Don’t you know how to let someone alone?” she said.
“I think you need a friend.”
“And you’re it? What a laugh.”
“I know Baxter. If you’ve got a deal going with him, he’ll burn you.”
I saw her swallow, either with anger or fear.
“What is the matter with you? Are you trying to get me killed?” she said.
“Get on a plane, Kim. L.A.’s great this time of year. I’ll get some money for you.”
She looked straight ahead and breathed hard, way down in her chest.
“You’re a cop,” she said.
“Ex.”
“Now.”
“You’d better check out my record. Cops with my kind of mileage are the kind they shove out the side door.”
“I can’t afford you. I’m going to ask you one more time, get away from me.”
“You’re a nice girl. You don’t deserve the fall you’re headed for.”
She started to speak again, but her words caught in her throat as though she had swallowed a large bubble of air. Then she sipped from her Manhattan, straightened her back, and signaled the bartender.
“This man is annoying me,” she said.
He was young, and his eyes glanced nervously at me and then back at her.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Would you tell him to leave, please?” she said.
“Sir, this lady is making a request,” the bartender said. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a black bow tie, and his hair was blond and oiled.
“Yeah, I heard her, podna. I don’t know where else I should go, though.”
“Would you tell him to get the fuck out of the bar?” she said.
“Miss, please don’t use that language.”
“I ordered a drink. I didn’t ask to have a dildo sit next to me while I drank it. Tell him to get out.”
“Miss, please.”
“What does it take to get through to you?” she said.
Other people had stopped eating and drinking and were looking at us.
“Sir, would you mind—,” the bartender said.
“No, I don’t mind,” I said. “Where should I go?”
“Try Bumfuck, Kansas,” she said.
“Miss, I’ll have to ask you to leave, too.”
“Is that right?” she said. “Would you page Mr. Cardo out on the golf course and tell him that? I would appreciate it if you would tell him that.”
“You’re Mr. Cardo’s guest?” the bartender said. His face was bloodless.
“Don’t sweat it, partner. We’re leaving,” I said.
“Is that what we’re doing? Is that what you think we’re doing? I don’t think we’re doing that at all,” she said, and shattered her highball glass on the liquor bottles behind the bar.
The bar area and dining room were silent. Her gray pillbox hat was askew on top of her forehead, and a lock of her red hair hung down in one eye. The bartender stood on the duckboards and stared wide-eyed at Jess, who had just thrust open the outer glass doors to the bar, the putter still in his hand, his face pushed out of shape like white rubber.
We were driving away from the lakefront, on Orleans Avenue, past City Park. Tony had the window down and was turned in his seat, looking back at me and Kim, and his black and gray hair blew like tiny springs in the wind.
“What were you guys doing?” he said. He tried to hold a grin on his face.
“I was trying to have a drink,” Kim said.
“Some fucking way to get the bartender’s attention,” Jess said.
“I’m sorry about that back there,” I said to Tony.
“I can’t believe it, eighty-sixed out of my own club,” he said. “You know what it took for me to get a membership in that place?”
“You want me to go back and talk with somebody about it later?” Jess said.
“What’s the matter with you? It’s a country club. You can’t come crashing into the bar with a golf club in your hand,” Tony said.
“I thought they were in trouble,” Jess said.
“So you had to knock a waiter down?”
“I didn’t see him. What the fuck, Tony. Why you reaming me? I didn’t start that stuff.”
“I think you ought to consider who you invite out to lunch,” Kim said.
“I think I ought to get a new life. Am I the only person that’s sane in this car?” Tony said.
“It’s my fault. I’m sorry about it,” I said.
“How gallant,” Kim said.
“All right, all right. I’ll try to square it. It’s just a club, anyway, right? Jesus Christ,” Tony said, and blew out his breath.
We could see golfers out on the fairways in City Park and children on horseback beyond a grove of oak trees. Jess looked in the rearview mirror and changed lanes. Then he looked in the rearview mirror again, accelerated, and passed two cars. I saw his eyes go back into the mirror.
“We’ve got some guys behind us,” he said.
“What guys?” Tony said.
“Two guys in a Plymouth. Behind the limo.”
“Can you make ’em?” Tony said.
“No.”
“They look like talent?”
“I don’t know. What d’you want to do, Tony?”
“Pull into the park and stop.”
“You want to do that?” Jess said, looking sideways at him.
“They’ll cut and run. Watch. Come on, the day’s starting to improve.”
“Bad place if it goes down, Tony. Everybody gets pissed when it goes down in a public place,” Jess said.
“Hey, is it our fault? Now, turn in here. Let’s have some fun with these guys.”
Kim was looking backward out the window. Tony reached over the seat and touched her on the knee, then winked at her and grinned.
“Tony, I don’t need this shit,” she said.
“Will you guys mellow out? Why is everybody trying to drive me nuts today?” he said. Then he slapped open the glove box and took out a chrome-plated .45 automatic.
The white limo followed us into the park. We drove along the side of a grassy lake and stopped under a spreading oak tree. The dry leaves under it blew in the wind and clicked and tumbled across the grass. Jess reached under the seat and took out a double-barrel .410 shotgun pistol wrapped inside a paper bag. He rolled down his window and held the shotgun pistol below the level of the window jamb.
When the Plymouth turned in after us, Tony put the .45 in his right-hand coat pocket and stepped out on the cement, smiling across the top of the car as though he were welcoming guests.
“What a day,” Kim said.
“Hey, give it a break,” Jess said, without turning his head.
The Plymouth followed along the grassy lake, passed the limo, and stopped abreast of us. The man in the passenger’s seat hung his badge out the window, then stepped out in the sunlight.
Nate Baxter had changed little since I had last seen him. He still wore two-tone shoes and sports clothes, but as his styled blond hair had receded he had grown a narrow line of reddish beard along his jawbones and chin. He had worked for CID in the army, and as an investigator for Internal Affairs in the New Orleans Police Department he had combined a love of military stupidity with a talent for dismembering the wounded and the vulnerable.
Jess looked straight ahead, lowered the shotgun pistol between his legs, and pushed it back u
nder the seat.
“Put your hands on top of the car, Tony,” Baxter said.
“You’re kidding?” Tony said.
“You see me smiling?” Baxter said.
“I don’t think this is cool, Lieutenant,” Tony said, his hands now resting casually on the waxed maroon hood of the Lincoln. “We’ve been out for some golf. We’re not looking to complicate anybody’s day.”
“Go tell that limo full of meatballs to get out of here,” Baxter said to his partner, who was now standing behind him. Then he turned back toward Jess and said, “Get out of the car, Ornella.”
“Why the roust, Lieutenant?” Tony said.
“Close your mouth, Tony. Did you hear what I said, Ornella?”
Jess got out of the car with his palms turned outward, his brow furrowed above his close-set eyes. He set his hands on the convertible roof.
The white limo made a U-turn behind us and drove slowly out of the park, its black-tinted windows hot with sunlight. Baxter’s partner came back and stood next to him. He was a muscular, crew-cut man, with a grained, red complexion, who wore shades and a pale blond mustache. Like Baxter, he carried a revolver under his tweed sports jacket in a clip-on belt holster. But in his face, even with his shades on, I could see a question mark about what Baxter was doing.
“Shake them down,” Baxter said.
“Come on, Lieutenant, give it a rest. This is bullshit,” Tony said.
“I look like bullshit to you?” Baxter said.
“We don’t make trouble for you guys. It’s a chickenshit roust. You know it is.”
Baxter nodded impatiently to his partner.
“I got a piece in my coat pocket. You want the sonofabitch, take it. What the fuck’s with you, Baxter?” Tony said.
“Easy, Tony. We don’t have a big problem here,” Baxter’s partner said, his hands gentle on Tony’s back and sides. “No, no, look straight ahead. Come on, man, you’re a pro.”
Then, like a dentist who had just pulled a tooth, he held up Tony’s chrome-plated automatic in the sunlight.
“I got a permit for it,” Tony said.
“You want to produce it?” Baxter said.
“It’s at home. But I got one. You know I got one.”
“Good. Your lawyer can bring it down to your arraignment,” Baxter said.
His partner pulled Tony’s arms behind him, cuffed his wrists, and sat him down on the curb. Then he ran his hands down Jess’s sides, back, stomach, and legs. He rose up and shook his head at Baxter.
“Under the seat,” Baxter said.
His partner leaned into the car, worked his hand around under the seat, and pulled out the shotgun pistol. He snapped open the breech and removed the two slender .410 shells and dropped them in his pocket.
“You’re under arrest for possession of an illegal firearm, Ornella,” Baxter said.
“You got to have cause to get in the car, Lieutenant,” Jess said.
“You took some law courses up at Angola?” Baxter said.
“You got to have cause,” Jess said.
Baxter’s partner cuffed him and led him over to the curb. Two squad cars, the backup that Baxter had probably called for, turned into the park. Baxter opened the back door of the convertible and told me to step out.
“It looks like you finally found your element,” he said.
“It must be a dull day, Nate.”
“How do you like working for the greaseballs?”
“You ought to brush up on your procedure. Probably talk a little bit with your partner. He seems to know what he’s doing.”
“No kidding?”
“Nobody here was serious. Otherwise you might have gotten your hash cooked, Nate.”
“I’m probably just lucky you were along to cool things out,” he said, put a filter-tipped cigarette between his teeth at an upward angle, and lit it with a Zippo lighter. He snapped the lighter shut and blew smoke out into the sunlight. Then he said, “I like your threads. They’re elegant.”
“Get to it, Nate. You’re wasting a lot of people’s time.”
“No, I mean it. You’re stylish. I remember you when you smelled like an unflushed toilet with booze poured in it.” He rubbed his fingers up and down the edge of my coat lapel. Then he touched my tie, put one finger under it, drew it slowly out from my chest and let it drop.
I looked away at the grassy lake and the way the wind made the light break on the water. The golfers on the other side of the lake had stopped their game and were watching us.
“You like the pockets in that shirt?” And his two fingers slid down inside the cloth, so that I could feel them against the nipple.
“Don’t do that, Nate.”
“It’s got a nice feel to it. It pays to buy a quality shirt.”
I could see the peppery grain of his skin along the edge of his beard, a piece of yellow mucus in the corner of his eye, the pucker in his mouth that almost made a smile. His fingers felt as thick and obscene as sausages inside my pocket.
I raised my hand and pushed his arm slowly away from me.
“That’s not smart,” he said quietly, and reached his hand toward me again.
I put the flat of my hand against his forearm and moved it away from me as you would press back a slowly yielding spring. He smiled and took a puff off the filter tip of his cigarette, his lips making a soft popping sound.
“Bust him. Interference with an officer in the performance of his duty,” he said to his partner. Then to me, “I’ll ask them to process you right into the population so you can eat mainline tonight.”
“Fuck you, Baxter. We’ll make bail in two hours,” Tony said as a uniformed cop raised him to his feet.
“It’s Friday afternoon, Tony,” Baxter said. “Next arraignment is Monday morning.”
“What about the broad?” his partner said.
“Tell her to take a cab. Tow his car in and tear it apart.”
“Nate, we might be on shaky ground here,” the partner said.
“Not with this bunch,” Baxter said.
A few minutes later I sat handcuffed next to Tony behind the wire-mesh screen of a squad car. Through the window I could see Kim walking hurriedly out of the park toward the avenue, her face as white as bone.
Tony, Jess, and I were put in a holding cell a short distance from the drunk tank. Because it was a holding cell, it had no toilet or running water and contained only an iron bench that was bolted to one wall. The bars of the door had been repainted so many times that the layers of white paint formed a shell around the metal. The walls were grimed with handprints and scuff marks from people’s shoes, covered with scratched drawings of genitalia and names that had been scorched into the paint with butane cigarette lighters. The heat was turned up and the cell was hot. Someone in the drunk tank began screaming and was taken out by two uniformed cops.
Tony paced up and down, took off his rust-colored sports shirt, then worked his T-shirt over his head and used it to wipe his skin.
“What’s the drill with this guy? Somebody tell me what the fucking drill is,” he said.
“It’s Baxter. He’s a bad cop. He can’t make his case, so he finds something he can do,” I said.
“We ain’t sitting in this shithole three days. That’s out,” he said.
“Your lawyer had better know a judge, then.”
“You got it,” Tony said.
“I got to use the toilet,” Jess said.
“Hey, you hear that?” Tony shouted through the bars. “We got a man in here needs to use the toilet.”
His olive skin glistened with perspiration, and he kept biting his lower lip. By the time we were booked and moved up to the general population, on the second floor, his hands trembled and he couldn’t drink enough water. I sat next to him on the edge of an iron bunk that hung from wall chains. His back was running with sweat now. He leaned forward on his thighs and ran his hand through his wet hair.
“Lockup is at eight o’clock,” I said. “Let’s go down t
o the shower.”
“I’m cool,” he answered.
“You’ll feel better after a shower.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m solid, man.” He gripped the edge of the bunk and shuddered as though he had malaria. “Did anybody make you?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been out of New Orleans too long now.”
“Anybody make you, get in your face, tell them we’re tight.”
“All right, Tony.”
“There’s guys in here who’ll do an ex-cop, Dave. That’s not a shuck.”
“I think you just figured out Nate Baxter.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to square it with that cat. The word is he’s getting freebies from French Quarter street whores. I know one who’s got AIDS. I’m going to fix it so she gets in the sack with him.”
Then he bent over and squeezed his palm across the back of his neck and said, “Oh man, the tiger’s got me.”
I stood him up and walked him by the arm down to the shower. Inmates lounging in the open doors of their cells or sitting on the big water pipe against the corridor wall looked at him with the curiosity and reverence of their kind—prisoners in a parish or city jail—when they were in the actual proximity of a mainline con or Mafia don. Some rose to their feet, offered to help, made an extravagant show of sympathy.
“He just got hold of some bad food,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s rotten, Tony,” one man said.
“A roach crawled out of the grits one time, man. That’s no shit,” another said.
“We got a stinger and some canned goods. You’re welcome to it, Tony,” a third said.
Tony stood naked under the shower with his hands propped against the tiles. The water boiled his scalp white and sluiced over his olive skin and the knotted muscles in his back. In one pale buttock was a puckered red scar just above the colon. He held his face into the rush of hot water and opened and closed his small mouth like a guppy. When he turned off the faucets he breathed deeply through his nose, as though he were inhaling the morning air, and wiped his face slick with his palm.
“That’s a little better,” he said.
Two men farther down the shower were staring at his phallus.
A Morning for Flamingos Page 20
