DR08 - Burning Angel (9 page)

“Why didn't you call this in?” Then once again I saw in her face the adversarial light and lack of faith in people that always characterized her dealings with others. “I need some serious advice,”

she said. I could hear her breathing.

Her right hand opened and closed at her side. There were drops of perspiration on her upper lip. “Go ahead, Helen.”

“I'll show you something that was under my door this morning,” she said, and led the way back into her living room. She sat on her rattan couch and picked up the manila folder. The sunlight through the blinds made bright yellow stripes across her face. “Would you work with a queer?” she asked. “What kind of question is that?”

“Answer it.”

“What other people do in their private lives is none of my business.”

“How about a bull or a switch-hitter?”

“I don't know where you're going with this, but it's not necessary.” Her hand was inserted in the envelope, her teeth biting on the corner of her lip. She pulled a large glossy black-and-white photograph out and handed it to me. “It was taken two nights ago. The grain's bad because he didn't use a flash. From the angle, I'd say it was shot through that side window.” I looked down at the photo and felt my throat color. She kept her eyes on the far wall.

“I don't think that's any big deal,” I said. “Women kiss each other. It's how people show affection.”

“You want to see the others?”

“Don't do this to yourself.”

“Somebody already has.”

“I'm not going to be party to an invasion of your private life, Helen. I respect you for what you are. These photographs don't change anything.”

“You recognize the other woman?”

“No.”

“She used to be a chicken for Sweet Pea Chaisson. I tried to help her get out of the life. Except we went a little bit beyond that.”

“Who cares?”

“I've got to turn this stuff in, Dave.”

“The hell you do.”

She was silent, waiting. “Do you have to prove you're an honest person?” I said. “And by doing so, cooperate with evil people in injuring yourself. That's not integrity, Helen, it's pride.” She returned the photo to the envelope, then studied the backs of her hands. Her fingers were thick and ring less square on the ends. “The only guy who comes to mind is that paramilitary fuck, what's his name, Tommy Carrol,” she said. “Maybe,” I said. But I was already remembering Sonny Boy's warning. “But why would he put this note on the envelope?” She turned it over so I could read the line someone had written with a felt pen- Keep your mind on parking tickets, Mujfy. “Why the look?”

“Sonny Marsallus. He told me not to send anything on this guy Emile Pogue through the federal computer. All those informational requests had your name on them, Helen.” She nodded, then I saw her face cloud with an expression that I had seen too often, on too many people, over the years. Suddenly they realize they have been arbitrarily selected as the victim of an individual or a group about whom they have no knowledge and against whom they've committed no personal offense. It's a solitary moment, and it's never a good one. I worked the envelope out from under her hands. “We could do all kinds of doo-dah with these photos, and in all probability none of it would lead anywhere,” I said. I slipped the photos facedown out of the envelope and walked with them into the kitchen. “So I'm making use of a Clete Purcel procedure here, which is, when the rules start working for the lowlifes, get a new set of rules.” I took a lucifer match from a box on the windowsill above the sink, scratched it on the striker, and held the flame to the corner of the photographs. The fire rippled and curled across the paper like water; I separated each sheet from the others to let the air and heat gather on the underside, the images, whatever they were, shrinking and disappearing into blackened cones while dirty strings of smoke drifted out the screen. Then I turned on the faucet and washed the ashes down the drain, wiped the sink clean with a paper towel and dropped it in the trash.

“You want to have some early lunch, then go to the office?” I said.

“Give me a minute to change.” Then she said, “Thanks for what you did.”

“forget it.”

“I'll say this only once,” she said. “Men are kind to women for one of two reasons. Either they want inside the squeeze box or they have-genuine balls and don't have to prove anything. When I said thank you, I meant it.”

There are compliments you don't forget.

Before I drove away I put the stiffened body of one of the dead coons in a vinyl garbage sack and placed it in the bed of my truck.

The investigation had gone nowhere since the night of Delia Landry's murder. I had made a mistake and listened to Sonny Boy's deprecation of the mob and his involvement with them. Sweet Pea Chaisson's name had surfaced again, and Sweet Pea didn't change toilet paper rolls without first seeking permission of the Giacano family. If the spaghetti heads had started to crash and burn back in the seventies, it was a secret to everyone except Sonny.

The heir to the old fat boy, Didoni Giacano, also known as Didi Gee, whose logo had been the bloodstained baseball bat that rode in the backseat of his Caddy convertible when he was a loan collector and who sometimes held down the hand of an adversary in an aquarium filled with piranhas, was his nephew, a businessman first, a gangster second, but with a bizarre talent for clicking psychotic episodes on and off at will-John Polycarp Giacano, also known as Johnny Carp and Polly Gee.

Friday morning I found him in his office out by a trash dump in Jefferson Parish. His eyes, nose, and guppy mouth were set unnaturally in the center of his face, compressed into an area the size of your palm. His high forehead was ridged and knurled even though he wasn't frowning. His hair was liquid black, waved on the top and sides, like plastic that had been melted, molded, and then cooled again.

When I knew him in the First District, he had been a minor soldier in the organization, a fight fixer, and a Shylock with jockies out at Jefferson Downs and the Fairgrounds. Supposedly, as a kid, he had been the wheel man on a couple of hundred-dollar hits with the Calucci brothers; but for all his criminal history, he'd only been down once, a one-year bit for possession of stolen food stamps in the late sixties, and he did the time in a minimum security federal facility, where he had weekend furloughs and golf and tennis privileges.

Johnny Carp was smart; he went with the flow and gave people what they wanted, didn't contend with the world or argue with the way things were. Celebrities had their picture taken with him. He lent money to cops with no vig and was never known to be rude. Those who saw his other side, his apologists maintained, had broken rules and earned their fate.

“You look great,” he said, tilting back in his swivel chair. Through the window behind him, seagulls were wheeling and dipping over mountains of garbage that were being systematically spread and buried and packed down in the landfill by bulldozers.

“When did you get into the trash business, Johnny?”

“Oh, I'm just out here a couple of days a week to make sure the Johns flush,” he said. He wore a beige suit with thin brown stripes in it, a purple shirt and brown knit tie, and a small rose in his lapel. He winked. “Hey, I know you don't drink no more. Me, neither. I found a way around the problem. I ain't putting you on: Watch.”

He opened a small icebox by the wall and took out an unopened quart bottle of milk. There were two inches of cream in the neck. Then he lifted a heavy black bottle of Scotch, with a red wax seal on it, from his bottom desk drawer. He poured four fingers into a thick water glass and added milk to it, smiling all the while. The Scotch ballooned and turned inside the milk and cream like soft licorice.

“I don't get drunk, I don't get ulcers, I don't get hangovers, it's great, Dave. You want a hit?”

“No thanks. You know why anybody would want to take down Sonny Boy Marsallus?”

“Maybe it's mental health week. You know, help out your neighborhood, kill your local lunatic. The guy's head glows in the dark.”

“How about Sweet Pea Chaisson?”

“Clip Sonny? Sweet Pea's a marshmallow. Why you asking me this stuff, anyway?”

“You're the man, Johnny.”

“Uncle Didi was the man. That's the old days we're talking about.”

“You have a lot of people's respect, Johnny.”

“Yeah? The day I go broke I start being toe jam again. You want to know about Marsallus? He came out of the womb with a hard-on.”

“What's that mean?”

“He's read enough books to sound like he's somebody he ain't, but he's got sperm on the brain. He uses broads like Kleenex. Don't let that punk take you over the hurdles. He'd stand in line to fuck his mother … I say something wrong?”

“No,” I said, my face blank.

He folded his hands, his elbows splayed, and leaned forward. “Serious,”

he said, “somebody's trying to whack out Sonny?”

“Maybe.”

He looked sideways out the window, thinking, his coat bunched up on his neck. “It ain't anybody in the city. Look, Sonny wasn't never a threat to anybody's action, you understand what I'm saying? His problem is he thinks his shit don't stink. He floats above the ground the rest of us got to walk on.”

“Well, it was good seeing you, Johnny.”

“Yeah, always a pleasure.”

I pulled on my earlobe as I got up to go.

“It's funny you'd tell me Sonny uses women badly. That was never his reputation,” I said.

“People in the projects don't work. What do you think they do all day, why you think they have all them kids? He's a nickel-and-dime street mutt. The head he thinks with ain't on his shoulders. I'm getting through here?”

“See you around, Johnny.”

He cocked one finger at me, drank from his glass of milk and Scotch, his compressed features almost disappearing behind his hand and wrist.

I don't remember the psychological term for it, but cops and prosecutors know the mechanism well. It involves unintended acknowledgment of guilt through the expression of denial. When Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody after the assassination of President Kennedy, he seemed to answer truthfully many of the questions asked him by cops and newsmen. But he consistently denied ownership of the 6.5 millimeter rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the one piece of physical evidence to which he was unquestionably and inextricably linked.

Delia Landry had been murdered, in all probability, because of her association with Sonny. The first remark out of Johnny's mouth had been a slur about Sonny's misuse of women, as if to say, perhaps, that the fate of those who involved themselves with him was Sonny's responsibility and not anyone else's.

But maybe I was simply in another cul-de-sac, looking for meaning where there was none.

As I got into my truck three of Johnny Carp's hoods were standing by the back of his Lincoln. They wore slacks with knife creases, tasseled loafers, short-sleeve tropical shirts, gold chains on their necks, and lightly oiled boxed haircuts. But steroids had become fashionable with the mob, too, and their torsos and arms were thick with muscle like gnarled oak about to split the skin.

They were taking turns firing a .22 revolver at tin cans and the birds feeding along the dirt road that led between the trash heaps. They glanced at me briefly, then continued shooting.

“I'd like to drive out of here without getting shot,” I said. There was no response. One man broke open the revolver, shucked out the hulls, and began reloading. He looked at me meaningfully. “Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said. I drove down the road, tapping my horn as cattle egrets on each side of me lifted into the air. In my rearview mirror I saw Johnny Carp walk out of his office and join his men, all of them looking at me now, I was sure, with the quiet and patient energies of creatures whose thoughts you never truly wish to know.

Friday night I went to the parish library and began to read about Jean Lafitte. Most of the material repeated in one form or another the traditional stories about the pirate who joined forces with Andrew Jackson to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans, the ships he “robbed on the high seas, the gangs of cutthroats he lived with in Barataria and Galveston, his death somewhere in the Yucatan. He had been considered a romantic and intriguing figure by New Orleans society, probably because none of them had been his victims. But also in the library was an article written by a local historian at the turn of the century that did not treat Lafitte as kindly. His crimes did not stop with piracy and murder. He had been a blackbirder and was transporting African slaves into the country after the prohibition of 1809. He sold his stolen goods as well as human cargo on the banks of the Teche. Milton and Shakespeare both said lucidity and power lay in the world of dreams. For me, that has always meant that sleep and the unconscious can define what daylight and rationality cannot. That night, as a wind smelling of salt and wet sand and humus blew across the swamp, I dreamed of what Bayou Teche must have been like when the country was new, when the most severe tool or weapon was shaped from a stone, the forest floor covered with palmettos, the moss-hung canopy so thick and tall that in the suffused sunlight the trunks looked like towering gray columns in a Gothic cathedral. In the dream the air was breathless, like steam caught under a glass bell, an autumnal yellow moon dissected with a single strip of black cloud overhead, and then I saw a long wood ship with furled masts being pulled up the bayou on ropes by Negroes who stumbled along the banks through the reeds and mud, their bodies rippling with sweat in the firelight. On the deck of the ship were their women and children, their cloth bundles gathered among them, their eyes peering ahead into the bayou's darkness, as though an explanation for their fear and misery were somehow at hand.

The auction was held under the oaks at the foot of the old Voorhies property. The Negroes did not speak English, French, or Spanish, so indigenous histories were created for them. The other property did not offer as great a problem. The gold and silver plate, the trunks filled with European fashions, the bejeweled necklaces and swords and scrolled flintlocks, all had belonged to people whose final histories were written in water somewhere in the Caribbean.