Heaven's Prisoners (28 page)

“Search me.”

“I also have the feeling that you don’t care how these guys get scratched, as long as they’re off the board.”

I walked down to the Toyota’s open passenger door, rested my arm on top, and looked inside again. There wasn’t much of significance to see: shards of glass on the floorboards, two exit holes in the cloth of the passenger’s seat, pieces of splintered lead embedded in the dashboard, a long furrow in the headliner. A warm, wet odor rose from the upholstery.

“I think Romero drove the Toyota out here to dump it,” I said. “I think Keats was supposed to meet him with another car. Then for some reason Romero blew him away. Maybe it was just an argument between the two of them. Maybe Keats was supposed to whack him and it didn’t go right.”

“Why would Keats want to whack Romero?”

“How the hell should I know? Look, we shouldn’t even be talking about Romero. He should have been sent up the road when he first got busted. Why don’t you turn the screws on your colleagues?”

“Maybe I have. Maybe they’re not happy with the situation, either. Sometimes these assholes get off their leashes. One time we put a street dealer in the protected-witness program and he paid us back by shooting a liquor store clerk. It works out like that sometimes.”

“I’m not sympathetic. Come on, Cecil. See you around, Minos.”

Cecil and I headed down the levee past boat rentals, the bait shops and beer joints, the fish camps set up on stilts. Out in the water, the strips of moss on the dead cypress trees lifted and fell in the wind. I bought Cecil a catfish plate in a Negro café in Breaux Bridge, then we drove back to New Iberia while the heat danced on the road in front of us.

I spent the next two hours doing paperwork at the office, but I couldn’t concentrate on the forms and folders that were spread around my desktop. I was never good at administration or clerical tasks, primarily because I always felt they had little to do with the job at hand and were created for people who made careers of running in place. And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was far greater than any theft of my goods or money.

I fixed a cup of coffee and stared out the window at the trees in the sunlight. I called home to check on Alafair, then called Batist at the dock. I went to the rest room when I really didn’t have to go. Then once again I looked at my uncompleted mileage report, my time and activity report, my arrest reports on local characters who had already bonded out and would probably be cut loose altogether before court appearance. I opened the largest drawer in my desk and dropped all my paperwork into it, eased the drawer shut with my shoe, signed out of the office, and went home just in time to see a taxicab leave Robin Gaddis with her suitcase on my front porch.

She wore patent leather spiked heels with Levi’s, and a loose blouse that looked as if it was touched with pink and gray shades from a watercolor brush. I turned off the truck’s engine and walked toward her across the dead pecan leaves in the yard. She smiled and lighted a cigarette, blowing the smoke up into the air, and tried to look relaxed and pleasant, but her eyes were bright and her face tight with anxiety.

“Wow, this is really out among the pelicans and the alligators,” she said. “You got snakes and nutrias and all that stuff crawling around under your house?”

“How you doing, Robin?”

“Ask me after I’m sure I’m back on earth. I flew on one of those greaseball airlines where the pilot’s got a three-day beard and blows garlic and Boone’s Farm all over the place. We were dropping through the air pockets so fast you couldn’t hear the engines, and all the time they’re playing mambo music on the loudspeakers and I’m smelling reefer out of the front of the plane.”

I took her hand, then felt as awkward as she. I put my arms lightly around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. Her hair was warm and there were fine drops of perspiration behind her neck. Her stomach brushed against me, and I felt my loins quiver and the muscles in my back stiffen.

“I guess it’s not your day for Cro-Magnon bear hugs,” she said. “That’s cool, Streak. Don’t worry about it. I’m copacetic. Don’t worry about what you might have to tell me, either. Mommy’s been taking care of herself a long time. I just got this urge to get on a thirty-nine-dollar flight with Kamikaze Airlines and couldn’t resist.”

“What happened in Key West?”

“I made a change that didn’t work out.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes went away from me and looked out into the hot shade of the pecan trees.

“I couldn’t take serving corn fritters to the Howdy Doody crowd from Des Moines any longer. I met this guy who owns a disco on the other side of the island. It’s supposed to be a high-class joint, full of big tippers. Except guess what? I find out it’s full of queers, and the guy and his head bartender are running a clever late-hour scam on these guys. A tourist comes in, some guy who’s not out of the closet yet, who’s probably got a wife and kiddies in Meridian, and when he’s good and shitfaced and trying to cop some kid’s bread, they use his MasterCard to run off a half-dozen charges for thirty-dollar magnum bottles of champagne and trace his signature on them later. When he gets the bill a month later in Meridian, he’s not going to holler about it because he either doesn’t remember what he did or he doesn’t want anybody to know he was hanging around with Maneaters Incorporated.

“So one night just after closing I told the owner and his bartender I thought they were a couple of pricks. The owner sits on the stool next to me, with a kindly smile on his face like I just walked off the cattle truck, and slides his hand up my leg. All the time he’s looking me in the eyes because he knows that mommy doesn’t have any money, that mommy doesn’t have another job, that mommy doesn’t have any friends. Except I’m drinking a cup of coffee that’s hot enough to take the paint off a battleship, and I pour it right on his oysters.

“I heard the next day he was walking around like he had a mousetrap hanging off his equipment. But”—she clicked her tongue and tossed back her hair—“I’ve got a hundred and twelve bucks, Streak, and no compo because the guy and his bartender told the state employment office I was fired for not ringing up drinks and pocketing the money.”

I rubbed the back of her neck with my hand and picked up her suitcase.

“We have a big house here. It gets hot during the day sometimes, but it’s cool at night. I think you’ll like it,” I said, and opened the screen for her. “I need somebody to help me at the dock, too.”

And I thought,
Oh Lord
.

“You mean sell worms and that stuff?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Wow, Worms. Out of sight, Streak.”

“I have a little girl and a baby-sitter who live with me, too. But we have a room in back we don’t use. I’ll put a fold-out bed in it and a fan in the window.”

“Oh.”

“I sleep out here on the couch, Robin.”

“Yeah, I see.”

“Insomnia and all that bullshit. I watch the late show every night until I fall asleep.”

I saw her eyes stray to the lock and hasp on my bedroom door.

“It looks like a great place. Did you grow up here?” she said.

“Yes.”

She sat down on the couch and I saw the fatigue come into her face. She put out her cigarette in the empty candy dish on my coffee table.

“You don’t smoke, do you? I’m probably polluting your house,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Dave, I know I’m making complications for you. I don’t mean to. A girl just gets up against the wall sometimes. You know, it was either hit on you or go back to the T-and-A circuit. I just can’t cut that anymore.”

I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulder. I felt her resist at first, then she lay her head under my chin. I touched her cheek and her mouth with my fingers and kissed her forehead. I tried to tell myself that I would be only a friend to her and not her ex-lover whose heart could be so easily activated by a woman’s quiet and regular breathing against his chest.

But my life’s history was one of failed promises and resolutions. Alafair, the baby-sitter, Robin, and I ate red beans, rice, and sausage on the kitchen table while it thundered outside and the wind shook the trees against the house and the rain clattered on the roof in sheets and poured off the eaves. Then the skies cleared, and the moon came up over the wet fields and the breeze smelled of earth and flowers and sugar-cane. She came into the living room after midnight. The moonlight fell in ivory squares on the floor, and the outline of her long legs and bare shoulders and arms seemed to glow with a cool light. She sat on the couch, leaned over me, and kissed me on the mouth. I could smell her perfume and the baby powder on her neck. She put her fingers on my face, slipped them through my hair, brushed the white patch above my ear as though she were discovering a curiosity in me for the first time. She wore a short negligee, and her breasts were stiff against the nylon, and when I moved my hands up her sides and along her back, her skin was as hot to the touch as if she had been in the sun all day. I pulled her lengthwise against me, felt her thighs open, felt her hand take me inside her. Then I was lost inside her woman’s heat, the sound her mouth made against my ear, the pressure of her calves inside mine, and finally my own confession of need and dependency and my inability to impose order on my life. Once I thought I heard a car on the road, I felt myself jerk inside, as though I were being pulled violently from sleep, but she propped herself up on her elbows over me, looked quietly into my face with her dark eyes, and kissed me on the mouth while her hand pressed me inside her again, as though her love were enough to dispel shadows from the corners of my nocturnal heart.

The telephone woke me at four a.m. I answered it in the kitchen and closed the door to the hall so as not to wake the rest of the house. The moon was still up, and a soft ivory light fell on the mimosa tree and redwood picnic table in the backyard.

“I found a bar with an honest-to-God
zydeco
band,” Minos said. “You remember Clifton Chenier? These guys play just like Clifton Chenier used to.”

I could hear a jukebox, then the record stopped and I could hear bottles clinking.

“Where are you?”

“I told you. In a bar in Opelousas.”

“It’s pretty late for
zydeco
, Minos.”

“I’ve got a story for you. Hell, I’ve got a bunch of them. Did you know I was in army intelligence in Vietnam?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s no big deal. But sometimes we had problems that fell outside the rulebook. There was this French civilian who gave us a lot of trouble.”

“Do you have your car?”

“Sure.”

“Leave it in the parking lot. Take a cab to a motel. Don’t drive back to Lafayette. You understand?”

“Listen, this French civilian was hooked in with the VC in Saigon. He had whores and some people on our bases reporting to him, and maybe he helped torture one of our agents to death. But we couldn’t prove it, and because he had a frog passport, he was a touchy item to deal with.”

“I’m not interested in talking with you about Vietnam.”

“In the meantime the major is looking like a dumb shit that can’t handle the action. So we call in a sergeant who did little jobs for us from time to time, like crawl into a ville at night and slit somebody’s throat from ear to ear with a barber’s razor. He was going to get the frog with a night scope, nail him from fifty yards out and be back at the NCO club for beers before they could blot the guy’s brains off the wallpaper. But guess what? He got the wrong fucking house. A Dutch businessman was eating snails with his chopsticks, and our good sergeant blew his face all over his wife’s blouse.”

“I’ve got some advice for you, Minos. Fuck Vietnam. Get it the hell out of your life.”

“I’m not talking about Vietnam. I’m talking about you and me, podna. It’s like something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. We serve a vast, vulgar, meretricious enterprise.”

“Look, get something to eat and I’ll come up there.”

“There’s some government people who want to cut a deal with Romero.”

“What?”

“He’s got a lot of shit on a lot of people. He’s valuable to us. Or at least to somebody.”

I felt my hand clench on the telephone receiver. The wooden chair I sat on felt hard against my bare thighs and back.

“Is this straight?” I said. “Your people are talking with Romero? They know where he is?”

“Don’t say ‘my people.’ He got word to some other federal agents in New Orleans. They don’t know where he is, but he says he’ll come in for the right deal. You know what I told them?”

I could hear my breath against the holes in the telephone.

“I told them, ‘Cut all the fucking deals you want. Robicheaux ain’t going to play,’” he said. “I have to say that made me feel kind of good.”

“Which bar are you in?”

“Forget about me. I was right, though, wasn’t I? You’re not going to bargain?”

“I want to talk with you tomorrow.”

“Hell, no. What you hear now is all you get. Now I want you to tell me something fair and square. You don’t have to admit anything. Just tell me I’m wrong. You found the Toyota, you rounded up Keats, you took him out to the levee and put that .45 of yours between his ribs and blew his lungs out his mouth, Right?”

“Wrong.”

“Come on, Robicheaux. You showed up at the Haitian’s in New Orleans right after the cops did. What are the odds of you just blundering into a situation like that? Then another guy you truly hate, somebody whose nose you crushed into marmalade with a pool cue, shows up dead by the Henderson levee. Keats was from Brooklyn. He didn’t know anything about that area. Neither does Romero. But you’ve been fishing that swamp all your life. If anybody else but a bunch of coonass cops were handling this case, you’d be in jail.”

“Take two vitamin B’s and four aspirins before you go to bed,” I said. “You won’t run the four-minute mile tomorrow, but at least the snakes won’t be crawling.”

“I’m all wet, huh?”

“You’ve got it. I’m going to sign off now. I hope they don’t put you through the wringer. For a government man, you’re a pretty good guy, Dunkenstein.”