The Righteous Cut (5 page)

He noticed the glass in his hand, and drank half of the liquid in it, suddenly aware of how dry his throat was. He set the glass on the table and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees as he stared into her eyes. “I can see you're in a bind, and I'm sorry as hell about it, Georgia. Kidnapping is a filthy trick, but I don't know what I can do. I've been out of town for over a year, and some of the players have probably changed. Besides, the cops may be off of it officially, but don't think they aren't paying attention. They're probably sore right now, looking for somebody to drop a ten-ton safe on.”

Her veneer of toughness had been pressed to the limit. She put a trembling hand to her face as her shoulders began to shake with sobs. “Wes, I haven't got anybody else I can turn to. Even the Feds can't know all the things Whit's done. They won't know the names of all the men he's connived with or against. And Whit won't tell them. He can't. They'd put him in jail, too.”

He got up and walked to the window. The December sun was low in the sky and already the garish neon signs of Basin Street were flickering, pushing back the encroaching darkness as the music clubs began to come alive for yet another evening. “Why did you leave, Georgia? You never said, not even as you walked out.”

“Because—” She hesitated as she groped for the words. “Because I wanted somebody who was going to be around. Because I knew you'd always be on the move. And—”

He turned and looked across the room. “And what?”

Her voice trembled, but there was the ring of truth in her words. “Because I was scared—of what you'd do. I knew sooner or later somebody'd get in your way and you'd kill him for it. And—and I was afraid I'd be there when it happened.”

He nodded. He understood now. “I guess you were right, honey. That's just the way things turned out.” He raised his pale eyes to hers. “And that's why you came to me now, isn't it?”

A single word, hard and resolute: “
Yes
.”

He almost smiled. “Have you got a picture of her?”

The question startled her for a moment but she recovered, slipping a hand into her purse. She extracted a wallet, opened it, and removed a picture. Wordlessly she got up and took it to him.

Farrell received the picture and looked at it. It was a wallet-sized copy of a formal portrait. It showed him a beautiful young girl with a remarkable air of self-possession in her direct gaze. She had a high forehead, thick dark hair, and a firm mouth. Her eyes continued to draw his attention as he examined it. “A good-looking young woman. She favors you.”

“So I've been told. She has red hair, too, but it's darker than mine. Green eyes. She's about five-eight.”

“Hmmm. Tall.” He cut his eyes at her. “Must've gotten that from daddy. Whit's about six-three, right?”

She tucked a tendril of red hair behind her ear. “Yes, about that.”

He slid the photo into his shirt pocket. “All right. I'll start asking around. Maybe I'll get lucky.”

She moved a bit closer, looked up at him. Georgia was smaller than Savanna, probably no more than five-four, but she carried herself like a lot more woman, one who still had power, and knew it. She reached up a tentative hand, and like a fluttering moth, her fingers brushed his cheek, his stern lips. “I'd have done anything you wanted, Wes. Anything. You know that?”

“Yeah, but I'm not twenty-five anymore. Go home, Georgia. Don't come here again. When I know something I'll get in touch with you. Remember, the cops might be watching all of you, and if they aren't, Whit probably is.”

Her face froze for an instant. “I hadn't thought of that. I'll go now.” She turned and picked up her stole from the chair where Farrell had draped it. “Goodbye, Wes.” She looked at him bleakly. There seemed to be nothing else to say. She turned and walked to the stairwell door.

He heard the door open and close, then the faint sound of her high heels rattling on the stairs fading to nothing. He reached up with his right hand and began to massage the muscles in his neck. He had returned to New Orleans a bit reluctantly, remembering the trouble and violence, the dead friend that had made him quit the city last year. Now he was back, and already there was trouble waiting. What was that Georgia had said? “Trouble is your business.” That was a good joke, except nobody was laughing.

***

A skinny, pock-marked man with one of those mustaches that looked like something caught under your thumbnail reached Barracks Street just as the sun was beginning to go down. He'd only been up for two hours, his workday beginning when the rest of the world sat down to dinner. His name was Butch Callahan, and he managed almost two hundred whores for Whitman Richards.

He parked his Nash sedan in front of Vesey's Bar, a place that he used for a headquarters, and prepared to go inside. He paused under the neon sign to light an Italian cheroot, and as he struck the match, he saw the young man. He studied the man as he puffed the cheroot into life, watched him flipping a coin up and down. Callahan's mouth bent into a frown. He didn't like hustlers hanging out in front of his joint.

The young man seemed to notice him for the first time as he shook the match out. He stiffened slightly, almost guiltily, Callahan thought. He sauntered toward him, watching as the slightly built man faded into the shadow in front of a grocery store. He waited there as Callahan drew closer, the light from a street lamp glinting off the glasses he wore.

“What're you doin' there?” Callahan demanded.

“Mindin' my own business,” the bespectacled young man replied. He spoke in a low, husky voice.

Callahan laughed nastily. “You're new in town, huh?”

He shrugged. “There a law against it?”

Callahan's voice hardened. “Not on the books, but, ya see, this is my territory. You want to hang around here, you gotta have business with me, but you ain't because I don't do business with punks like you.”

The young man laughed. “Do tell.”

Callahan didn't like that. “Don't get smart with me, you pissant. I don't have to take shit like that from nobody. You know what's good for you, you'll get your ass up the road.”

“And if I don't?”

Callahan threw his cheroot to the ground, ignoring the sparks that flew around his feet. “I'll show you what.” Callahan grabbed his lapel, jerked the other man toward him, his right hand flying back to strike. Before the blow fell, Callahan heard two muffled reports as something struck his chest. Weakness flooded through him. He stepped back, looked down at himself. “You—you b-bastard.” Too late, Callahan saw the silenced muzzle of an automatic in the other's hand now. He looked down at the blood on the front of his shirt, felt the hot fire of the wounds. A wave of dizziness hit him as the pavement rushed up to meet his face.

Chapter 4

Easter Coupé sat alone at his kitchen table. He read the NAACP magazine,
The Crisis
, while he drank rye whiskey from a tall glass. He'd spent much of his life alone, and had until recently been content with his lot. Lately, however, he'd found himself with questions he couldn't answer, and the uncertainty was vaguely troubling to him. He'd taken to reading Negro magazines. They helped him pass the time, and sometimes he found the stories about the achievements of other Negroes strangely compelling.

The telephone on the kitchen counter began to ring. The sound was unwelcome to him. The look on his face would have silenced a man, but it had no effect on the instrument. When it rang a fourth time, he reached out a reluctant hand and snatched it from the cradle. “'Lo?”

“Easter? That you? It's Johnny Parmalee.”

“Hey, Johnny. How's it goin', man?”

“You okay, Easter? You sound like you been laid up.”

“Naw, man. What is it?”

“I'm in a bind. Me and Joey are hooked up. Somethin' big. We pulled a job today, but we had a hitch.”

“A hitch?”

“A guy. He seen some things he ought not seen.”

“Uh, huh. Why you need me?”

“It's a colored kid, name of Skeeter Longbaugh. We put the arm on him 'cause we needed him to get us into a place. He got away. He shoots his mouth off, it's bad all around.”

Coupé rubbed his hand stiffly across his face. “You want him shut up, is that it?”

“He seen us kill a guy.”

“Uh, huh. Where's he live?”

“Twelve-seventeen D'Hemecourt Street. Don't reckon he's gone back there.”

“No, but it's a place to start. If you got the price.”

Johnny hesitated. “How much?”

“A grand,” Coupé said with the air of a man who knows he's charging too much but doesn't care.

“Done. This guy talks to the wrong people and Joey and me step off for it. You fix it, okay?”

Easter Coupé's jaw tightened. “I get you. It's taken care of. I'll call you.” Coupé hung up without giving Johnny time to reply. He and Johnny had fought on some of the same cards in the old days. They had an easy informality for men of two different races. That was why Johnny had come to him, that and the fact that Coupé always did what he was paid to do. Except he hadn't with Merced Cresco. Something he couldn't seem to understand had stopped him.

He pushed that thought aside as he rose from the chair. He went to the bedroom, knotted a tie around his neck and slid into a black alpaca jacket. He clamped a black hat on his round head, pulling the brim low over his dark, expressionless eyes. He paused for a moment, then reached up to the shelf again. He took down a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver with a two-inch barrel. He slipped the gun into his hip pocket as he turned and left the house.

***

Casey was on his way home when a radio call diverted him to Magazine Street. He pulled up across the street from Bockman's Shoe Repair, where three radio cars and the crime lab van were already parked. Ray Snedegar came out to meet him and conducted him toward the rear of the repair shop.

“What've we got here, Ray?”

“Looks like a slaughterhouse in there, chief.” As he shoved the door open, the coppery smell of dried blood cut through the odor of leather in the workshop.

Casey picked his way across the floor, stopping to stare down at the ravaged face of a man who lay with his head in a puddle of blood. “Jimmy Doughtery.”

“Yeah, and over there is Hugo Bockman, Spence Markham and Morrie Crowder. All gunshot wounds.”

“A .22?”

Snedegar shook his head. “Maybe. They're all small-caliber, but there's no shells lying around.”

Casey stood up, shoving his hands into his pockets. He looked about the room, taking in the phones, racing forms, and rifled safe. “A bookie joint full of dead bookmakers. I'll bet you didn't find any money.”

Snedegar pointed at the coat thrown carelessly across Doughtery's corpse. “The pockets are all turned inside out. Doughtery was a bagman for Vic D'Angelo. What you want to bet this was the last stop on Doughtery's route?”

Casey snorted. “Sucker bet. But that's not what interests me.”

Snedegar tipped his hat back from his forehead. “What're you getting at, chief?”

“Doughtery's a bagman for Vic D'Angelo. D'Angelo works for Whit Richards.”

Snedegar blinked. “So this happens the same day Richards' daughter is kidnapped.”

“And the day after Jack Amsterdam just happens to get murdered by a whore in a fleabag hotel.” Casey shook his head. “There's just a shade too much coincidence there for me, Ray. Something's going on, and I don't like it.”

Snedegar drew closer to Casey. “You think somebody's making a run against Richards?”

“I don't know what else it could be. And that could spell gang war.”

Snedegar looked down at Doughtery's body. “Hell of a time for something like this to come up. Here you are gettin' married in a few days.”

Casey grinned good-naturedly. “Well, Brigid's been around cops all her life, so she's no stranger to crime intruding on her personal life. We're just having a private civil ceremony in her living room.”

“Wes Farrell's standin' up for you, huh?”

Casey smiled. “I know you've got reservations about him, but there have been times when he was the best friend I had. A man needs to stick by his friends.”

Snedegar gave him a sidelong look. “Then you might need him for more than just a best man. This weekend's liable to be a pip.”

At that moment, Detective Mart stuck his head in the door. “Captain, dispatch says we got another gunshot victim over by Vesey's Bar.”

Casey looked at Snedegar.” They got an identification on the dead man?”

“Butch Callahan.” Mart paused. “He's another of Councilman Richards's cronies, ain't he?”

***

Whit Richards stared out the window, the waiting eating at his guts like a cancer. He had never been afraid of a fight in his life, but the theft in broad daylight of his only child had rendered him inert. Until his enemy called again, he wouldn't know the score.

When the phone on his desk rang, he leaped to his feet like a runner at the starting gun. It took a second ring before he recognized that it was his regular phone. He picked it up warily. “Hello?”

“Whit, it's Vic. Can you talk?”

“Yes, I got rid of the cops. You got some news?”

“Yeah, and it's all bad. Jimmy Doughtery and all the guys at Bockman's are dead.”

“Dead? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Somebody got into the back room and slaughtered everybody. Jimmy was layin' there with his head blown off.”

“The money?”

“Gone,” D'Angelo said. “Whoever hit the place must've known Bockman's was the last stop on the route.”

Richards swore at the top of his lungs, using every combination of foul words he knew. He went on like that for at least a minute before D'Angelo stopped him.

“That ain't all, Whit. I just got a call from Vesey. Somebody shot Butch Callahan to death outside the bar a little while ago.”

“And they killed Jack last night.” Richards' voice was hushed with awe.

“Somebody's pokin' holes in us, Whit, but who?”

Richards put a shaking hand to the back of his neck and squeezed like a man shutting off the flow of blood from a wound. “It's Pete.”

That stopped D'Angelo for a moment. “Pete Carson? You're outa your mind. He's been dead for eight years.”

“Like hell he has,” Richards thundered. “I was talkin' to the rat this afternoon. He's the one took my kid. He's the one tearin' down everything I spent twenty-five years buildin' up. He called me ‘Rico' so I'd know it was him.”

“God—Goddamn.” Vic sounded dazed.

“Snap it up, Vic. I want you to get on the horn to everybody who's still alive. Tell 'em to stick together in groups. Get at least a dozen of 'em out lookin' for Pete. He probably hasn't been in town very long.”

“Wait a minute, Whit. Stop and think about this a minute. Pete Carson didn't just breeze into town with a whole fuckin' organization. Somebody already here is backin' his play, or he'd never be able to pull this off.”

Richards was suddenly quiet as he recognized the truth in his henchman's argument. “But who?” He sat up in his chair, his eyes suddenly brilliant with anger. “We've got to find out. Tell the boys to tear this town apart brick by brick, but find out who's behind this, you hear me?”

“I hear you. They're pokin' holes in my ass, too.”

“Then get moving.” Richards broke the connection. He sat there seething for two or three minutes, then forced himself to calm down. He had to think.

It was obvious that Pete Carson was making a concerted effort to weaken him. Jack Amsterdam had controlled his illegal gambling interests in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Butch Callahan had managed a vast prostitution network. By killing them, Pete had taken out two of the three men Richards had depended on to keep money flowing into his operation. They had also been his two most capable fighters. Rob Langdon was a first-rate scrapper in a courtroom or a boardroom meeting, but otherwise he was a college boy with no experience on the street. Vic D'Angelo was okay in a street fight, but he was no thinker. Keeping track of the bookie joints was his main responsibility, and Pete had managed to hurt him there, too.

He squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to figure Pete's next move. Pete knew him better than anyone, and he also knew enough about the operation to think ahead. He looked at his watch and realized Meredith would soon be going home. She was a clever girl. Talking to her might help him make sense of what was going on. He opened the drawer of his desk and took from it a Remington .380 automatic. He grabbed his hat and coat from the tree as he left the study.

***

Easter Coupé stared out the car window at the Negro tavern across the street, examining it thoroughly. It had a neon sign that spelled out
THE PITTY-PAT CLUB
. As he got out of his yellow De Soto and headed over, he reflected on the words of three different men he'd spoken to. Each of them had mentioned joints where Skeeter Longbaugh was a regular, but the Pitty-Pat Club was the only one that all three had mentioned. Acting on instinct, Coupé decided to try this place first.

As he entered, he cast a sharp glance at the few customers inside, noting each was deep in his own thoughts.

A handsome dark-skinned woman tending bar looked up from the glass she was polishing as he sauntered in. He placed a half dollar on the mahogany surface and pushed it toward her. “Seven Crown please, ma'am.”

She gave him a roguish smile. “Nobody's called me ‘ma'am' since I left daddy's farm.”

“Mama taught me to treat every woman I met as a lady. Until she showed me different, that is.”

She uttered a lazy laugh. “Most of the men in here don't remember nothin' their mamas taught 'em. Hell, most of them probably don't remember they had mamas.” She laughed some more as she poured whiskey into a glass and placed it in front of him.

Coupé picked up the glass and toasted her with it. “Your good health, ma'am.”

She leaned on the bar and studied his face, clearly intrigued by him. “I answer to Kate.”

He grinned. “I thought it might be Pitty-Pat.”

She grimaced. “That was the name when I bought the place. I was afraid to change it for fear of confusing the customers.” She shot a sardonic glance around the room. “Some of these characters confuse pretty easy.” She looked at him again. “Don't recall you ever been in here before.”

“Ain't. Young fella I know mentioned the place.”

“What was his name? Maybe I know him to talk to.”

Coupé squinted at the ceiling as though deep in thought. “Has kind of a peculiar name. Scatter, Skipper—no, Skeeter. That's it. Skeeter Longbaugh.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, him. I can tell you how he got that name. He purely loves to buzz 'round the females.”

Coupé grinned. “Likes you a li'l bit, huh?”

Kate snorted. “If he ever met a gal he didn't like, I'd like to see her. I've fielded so many passes from that boy that I could be a receiver for the LSU Tigers.”

Coupé put down his glass and she silently refilled. He placed his forearms on the bar and leaned on them. “Ain't seen ole Skeeter lately. Wonder where he's got to?”

“He's got so many women he ain't got time for no men friends,” Kate replied. “Heard he's sweet on the kid sister of that woman who runs the bawdy house out by the lake.”

“Hmmm. That'd be Miss Toni Mereaux's place, right?”

“Aw,” she said, grinning. “You know it, huh?”

He shook his head primly. “Of it, Miss Kate. A smart man stays outa them kinda places. 'Sides, with women like you around, why would I bother?”

She lowered her lashes, letting him know he'd scored a point. “Hear tell Skeeter's also spendin' time with the woman who cooks at Ma Rankin's house on Mystery Street. She used to hook, but retired before it killed her. Skeeter'd never pay for his lovin' nohow. He ain't got no money.”

Coupé finished his drink and put the glass on the table. “Well, reckon I better be movin' along, Miss Kate. Sure enjoyed your company.” He stood up, looking down into her face, seeing the light of interest in her eyes.

She put her hand over one of his. “I aim to please. Think you might be comin' back this way soon?”

He reached up to tug his hat down over his forehead, smiling at her. “Reckon I might, Miss Pitty-Pat. So long now.” He gave her hand a squeeze before turning to leave. By the time he reached the door and stepped into the street, his charming demeanor had disappeared beneath an air of calculation. He decided to check Skeeter's house next. He glanced at his watch, saw that the kid had been loose on the streets for over three hours.