A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  “I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I don’t know, it was just what I thought.” She talked carefully, as though the inside of her mouth were hurt. “There’s some beer and pop in the refrigerator if you want some.”

  “Who did it, Kim?” I said.

  “Jimmie Lee Boggs.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. Just after I got up. I opened the door to get the newspaper and he hit me in the face and knocked me back inside the room. I never had anybody hit me like that. I didn’t believe anyone could hit that hard.”

  I could hear the humiliation in her voice, see the shame in her face. I had seen the same look of debasement in victims of violence many times, and it was almost impossible to convince them that they were not deserving of their fate. I could feel Clete’s awkwardness next to me.

  “I think I’ll take that beer,” he said, walking to the refrigerator. “Then I’ll just step out here on the balcony and have a cigarette.”

  He slid open the glass doors that gave onto a small balcony with a barbecue grill on it, then closed them behind him and looked out over a lighted, weed-filled lake that was dented with rain.

  She sat on the couch with her hands in her lap and her head bowed.

  “Why didn’t you think I’d come?” I asked again.

  “Because you know I’m a snitch.”

  “What else?”

  Her eyes were averted. She looked small sitting on the couch. I sat down next to her. She turned her face up, then looked away again.

  “What else, Kim?”

  “Because you know I betrayed you. I told Lieutenant Baxter about the buy down at Cocodrie. That’s why Jimmie Lee Boggs came after me. He said he figured it was either you or me who dropped the dime on him. He beat me all over the apartment. Then he twisted a towel in my mouth and filled up the sink and held my head under the water until I almost passed out. He kept saying, ‘Gargle time, beautiful. Rinse out your mouth, now. Think about the canary I’m gonna stuff in it.’ He would have killed me if the landlady hadn’t started banging on the door for the rent.”

  She glanced sideways at my face.

  “Why were you snitching for Nate Baxter?”

  “My brother’s a groom at the Fairgrounds. Lieutenant Baxter has him in jail for possession. He says he can upgrade the charge to conspiracy to distribute, and Albert—that’s my brother—will get fifteen years in Angola.”

  “Baxter put you inside Tony’s crowd?”

  “I already had the job at the club. All I had to do was become available.”

  “Available?” I said.

  “I said to Baxter, ‘What do you mean, exactly?’ He says, ‘You’ve got a piece of equipment that’ll get you anything you want.’ He looks across his desk, then he goes, ‘That’s big-picture clear, isn’t it? Talk it over with your brother. Let me know what you decide. It doesn’t matter to me, hon, one way or another.’ ”

  “You should have reported him, Kim.”

  “Great. I work in a skin joint run by the Mafia, my brother’s a druggie in custody, and I’m going to report a Vice lieutenant? Look, it doesn’t matter what he said. I did what he wanted. I told him everything Tony was doing, I told him about you, I’m to blame for what happened down at Cocodrie.”

  “You tried to warn me. Give yourself a little credit.”

  “Are you going to tell Tony?”

  “No. But as of tonight, you’re out of the life, Kim. You don’t go back to that job, or back to your apartment, or out to Tony’s. I also advise you to stay away from Nate Baxter. He’s a liar and a coward and a bully. Also, he doesn’t have the power to upgrade your brother’s charges. That comes out of the prosecutor’s office. Believe me, your brother will be better off taking his own chances.”

  She took a Kleenex out of her robe and touched one nostril with it. Her face had no makeup on it, and it looked shiny and white where it wasn’t bruised.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I only have a little money. I have to have a job.”

  “Somebody’s going to take care of you. I guarantee it.”

  She put the Kleenex away and played with her fingernails.

  “I have to ask you something,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not a very appropriate question, I guess, but there’s no chance, is there? Not now.”

  “Of what?” I said, although I already knew the answer.

  “What I mean is, it’s like when people do something to one another, or maybe to themselves, something shameful, it kills what might have been between them, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Kim.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s why my brother Albert is the way he is. Years ago he had a wife and a little girl. Then one night he got drunk at a party and slept with another woman. So he had all this Catholic guilt about what he’d done, and rather than blow it off, he got his wife drunk and talked her into getting into the sack with another guy. All he got out of it was the knowledge that he couldn’t love himself anymore, and so he doesn’t think anybody else can, either.”

  “I wouldn’t try to figure it all out now, Kim.”

  “Tony’s right. We’re the cluster fuck. The human race is.”

  “Cynics and nihilists are two bits a bagful,” I said. “Don’t let them sell you that same old tired shuck. Listen, a man named Minos Dautrieve is going to contact you. He’s an old friend with the DEA, so trust him. We’re going to take care of you.”

  “I was right, then. You’re still a cop.”

  “Who cares? The only thing that matters here is that you’re out of the life. We’re clear on that, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  I put my hand on her forearm.

  “Kim, you stood up for your brother,” I said. “Everything you did took courage. Most people aren’t that brave. I think you’re one special lady.”

  She looked up at me. Her unswollen eye glimmered softly.

  “Really?” she said.

  “You bet. I’ve had some good people cover my back, like Cletus out there, but I’d put my money on you anytime.”

  She smiled, and her free hand touched the backs of my fingers.

  It was still raining when we left the apartment building and got back inside my truck.

  “Your face looks like a thunderstorm,” Clete said.

  “Nate Baxter,” I said.

  “She was working for him?”

  “Yep.”

  “He’s the guy mommies warned them about. I always had the feeling that if we ever had a Third Reich here, you might see Nate manning the ovens.”

  “There’s a bar up here on the corner. I want to stop and use the phone.”

  “You’re not going after Baxter?”

  “Not now. But he’s not going to get away with this.”

  “Hmm,” Clete said, grinning in the dashboard light, his eyebrows flipping up and down like Groucho Marx’s.

  We went inside the corner bar, and Clete ordered a drink while I called Minos at his guesthouse from a phone booth next to a pinball machine. I told him about Kim, the beating she had taken from Jimmie Lee Boggs, the fact that she was an informant for Nate Baxter.

  “Can you get her into a safe house?” I said.

  “If she wants it.”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “No problem.”

  “But I’ve got one. Why did you guys cut Cletus from the payroll?”

  “I was going to tell you about it. It just happened today. I didn’t have any say in it.”

  “We had a deal.”

  “I don’t control everything here.”

  “He saved my life out on the salt. I didn’t see any DEA guys out there.”

  “I’m sorry about it, Dave. I’m a federal employee. I’m one guy among several in this office. You need to understand that.”

  “I think it’s a rotten fucking way to treat somebody.”

  “Maybe
it is.”

  “I think that’s a facile answer, too.”

  “I can’t do anything about it.”

  “Tell your office mates Clete has more integrity in the parings of his fingernails than a lot of federal agents have in their whole careers.”

  “Drop by and tell them yourself. I’m not up to a harangue tonight. It’s always easy to throw baboon shit through the fan when somebody else has to clean it up. We’ll pick up the girl in the morning, and we’ll get the tape recorder to you at your doctor’s office. Good night, Dave.”

  He hung up the receiver, and I could hear the pinball machine pinging through the plywood wall of the phone booth. Outside the window, the mist and blowing rain looked like cotton candy in the pink glow of the neon bar sign.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning was bright and clear, and I went to the doctor’s office off Jefferson Avenue and had the stitches snipped out of my head and mouth. When I touched the scar tissue above my right eyebrow, the skin around my eye twitched involuntarily. I opened my mouth and worked my jaw several times, touching the rubbery stiffness where the stitches had been removed.

  “How does it feel?” the doctor asked. He was a thick-bodied, good-natured man who wore his sleeves rolled up on his big arms.

  “Good.”

  “You heal beautifully, Mr. Robicheaux. But it looks like you’ve acquired quite a bit of scar tissue over the years. Maybe you should consider giving it up for Lent.”

  “That’s a good idea, Doctor.”

  “You were lucky on this one. I think if you’d spent another hour or so in the water, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “I think you’re right. Well, thank you for your time.”

  “You bet. Stay out of hospitals.”

  I went outside into the sunlight and walked toward my truck, which was parked under an oak tree. A man in khaki clothes with a land surveyor’s plumb bob on his belt was leaning against my fender, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag.

  “How about a lift up to the park?” he asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “I have a little item here for you. Are you going to give me a ride?”

  “Hop in,” I said, and we drove up a side street toward Audubon Park and stopped in front of an enormous Victorian house with a wraparound gallery. Out in the park, under the heavy drift of leaves from the oaks, college kids from Tulane and Loyola were playing touch football. The man reached down into the bottom of his lunch sack and removed a miniaturized tape recorder inside a sealed plastic bag. He was thin and wore rimless glasses and work boots, and he had a deep tan and liver spots on his hands.

  “It’s light and it’s flat,” he said. He reached back in the sack and took out a roll of adhesive tape. “You can carry it in a coat pocket, or you can tape it anywhere on your body where it feels comfortable. It’s quiet and dependable, and it activates with this little button here. Actually, it’s a very nice little piece of engineering. When you wear it, try to be natural, try to forget it’s on your person. Trust it. It’ll pick up whatever it needs to. Don’t feel that you have to ‘point’ it at somebody. That’s when a guy invites problems.”

  “Okay.”

  “Each cassette has sixty minutes’ recording time on it. If you run out of tape and your situation doesn’t allow you to change cassettes, don’t worry about it. Never overextend yourself, never feel that you have to record more than the situation will allow you. If they don’t get dirty on the tape one time, it’ll happen the next time. Don’t think of yourself as a controller.”

  “You seem pretty good at this.”

  “It beats being a shoe salesman, I guess. You have any questions?”

  “How many undercover people have been caught with one of these?”

  “Believe it or not, it doesn’t happen very often. We put taps on telephone lines, bugs in homes and offices, we wire up informants inside the mob, and they still hang themselves. They’re not very smart people.”

  “Tony C. is.”

  “Yeah, but he’s crazy, too.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, partner. The only reason guys like us think he’s crazy is because he doesn’t behave like the others. Mistake.”

  “Maybe so. But you’d better talk to Minos. He got some stuff on Cardo from the V.A. this morning. Our man was locked up with the wet brains for a while.”

  “He’s a speed freak.”

  “Yeah, maybe because of his last few months’ service in Vietnam.”

  “What about it?”

  “Talk to Minos,” he said, got out of the truck, and looked back at me through the window. “Good luck on this. Remember what I said. Get what you can and let the devil take the rest.”

  Then he crossed the street and walked through the park toward St. Charles, his attention already focused on the college kids playing football by the lake. The streetcar clattered loudly down the tracks in front of the Tulane campus across the avenue. I went to a small grocery store a few blocks down St. Charles, where the owner provided tables inside for working people to eat their lunch at, and called Minos at his office to see if he had relocated Kim in a safe house. I also wanted to know what he had learned about Tony’s history in Vietnam, besides the fact that as an addict Tony had been locked up in a psychiatric unit rather than treated for addiction.

  Minos wasn’t in. But in a few hours I was to learn Tony’s story on my own, almost as though he had sawed a piece of forgotten memory out of my own experience and thrust it into my unwilling hands.

  I took Bootsie to lunch at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant on Dauphine before I drove back out to Tony’s. She looked wonderful in her white suit, black heels, and lavender blouse, and I think perhaps she had the best posture I had ever seen in a woman. She sat perfectly straight in her chair while she sipped from her wineglass or ate small bites of her seafood enchilada, her chin tilted slightly upward, her face composed and soft.

  But it was too crowded for us to talk well, and I was beset with questions that I did not know how to frame or ask. I guess my biggest concern about Bootsie was a selfish one. I wanted her to be just as she had been in the summer of 1957. I didn’t want to accept the fact that she had married into the Mafia, that she was business partners with the Giacano family, that financial concern was of such great importance in her life that she would not extricate herself from the Giacanos.

  For some reason it was as though she had betrayed me, or betrayed the youth and innocence I’d unfairly demanded she be the vessel of. What an irony, I thought: I’d killed off a large portion of my adult life with alcohol, driven away my first wife, delivered my second wife, Annie, into a nightmare world of drugs and psychotic killers, and had become a professional Judas who was no longer sure himself to whom he owed his loyalties. But I was still willing to tie Bootsie to the moralist’s rack.

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

  “What if we just give it all up? Your vending machine business, your connection with those clowns, my fooling around with the lowlifes and the crazoids. We just eighty-six it all and go back to New Iberia.”

  “It’s a thought, isn’t it?”

  “I mean it, Boots. You only get one time on the planet. Why spend any more of it confirming yesterday’s mistakes?”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Not here. Can we be together later tonight?”

  “Yeah, sure, but tell me what, Boots?”

  “Later,” she said. “Can you come for supper at the house?”

  “I think I can.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m trying to tie some things up.”

  “Would you rather another night?” She looked at a distant spot in the restaurant.

  “No, I’ll do everything I can to be there.”

  “You’ll do everything?”

  “What time? I’ll be there. I promise.”

  “They’re not easy people to deal with, are they? You don’t a
lways get to set your own schedule, do you? You don’t have control over everything when you lock into Tony Cardo’s world, do you?”

  “All right, Bootsie, I was hard on you.”

  “No, you were hard on both of us. When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself. I loved you so much that summer I thought we had one skin wrapped around us.”

  I looked back at her helplessly.

  “Six-thirty,” she said.

  “All right,” I said. Then I said it again. “And if anything goes wrong, I’ll call. That’s the best I can do. But I know I’ll be there.”

  And I was the one who’d just suggested we eighty-six it all and go back to Bayou Teche.

  Her dark eyes were unreadable in the light of the candle burning inside the little red chimney on the table.

  When I got back to Tony’s house, I hid the tape recorder in my closet. The house was empty, so quiet that I could hear clocks ticking. I put on my gym shorts and running shoes, jogged for thirty minutes through the neighborhood and along Lakeshore Drive, then tried to do ten push-ups out on the lawn. But the network of muscles in my left shoulder was still weak from the gunshot wound, and after three push-ups I collapsed on my elbow.

  I showered, put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved sports shirt, and walked out by the pool with a magazine just as Tony and Jess came through the front gate in the Lincoln, with the white limo behind them.

  Tony slammed the car door and walked toward me, pulling off his coat and tie.

  “Come inside with me. I got to get a drink,” he said. He kept pulling off his clothes as we went deeper into the house, kicking his shoes through a bedroom door, flinging his shirt and trousers into a bathroom, until he stood at the bar in his Jockey undershorts. His body was hard, knotted with muscle, and beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He poured four inches of bourbon into a tumbler with ice and took a big swallow. Then he took another one, his eyes widening above the upended glass.

  “I think I’m heading into the screaming meemies,” he said. “I feel like somebody’s pulling my skin off with pliers.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m a fucking junkie, that’s what it is.” He poured from the decanter into his glass again.