The Neon Rain Part 8

"I think with luck I can still make the fifth race."

"I'll drive you back."

"Don't worry about it. The city's got a tab with Yellow Cab."

"Take this card. My motel's number is on it."

"I believe my phone is still out of order. See you around," I said, and walked out of the courtyard onto Louisiana Avenue. Some black children roared past me on roller skates, and heat lightning flickered above the huge oak trees across the street.

I called Annie from the pay phone to try to save part of the evening, but no one was home. It started to rain and I waited a half hour under a leaky awning for my cab to arrive. I made a quiet resolution about accepting invitations from federal employees.

But, as Fitzpatrick had said, I'd written my own script, and the next morning I continued to write it, only with some disastrous consequences that made me wonder if my alcoholic, self-destructive incubus was not alive and well.

I started by looking for Bobby Joe Starkweather. I didn't have many threads, but he was the kind of guy who showed up at certain places. I tried a couple of indoor target ranges, outlaw motorcycle bars, s.e.x shops, and a survivalist store that catered to people who relished the unlimited prospects of living in a post-World War III wasteland. But I struck out.

Then, at noon, while Cletus and I were eating a pizza out of a box on a bench in Jackson Square, I wondered why I was chasing after an unknown quant.i.ty like Bobby Joe Starkweather when the primary connection was already available. We sat under a mimosa tree, and St. Louis Cathedral and the square itself were drenched in hot sunlight. There were drops of perspiration and flecks of red pizza sauce on Clete's face while he ate. His eyes were looking abstractedly at the sidewalk artists in Pirates Alley.

"What have you got on the burner for this afternoon?" I asked.

"Not much. Figure out what I'm going to do with my G.o.dd.a.m.n wife. Get this. She just sent a check for six hundred dollars to the Buddhist priest out in Colorado. I tried to put a stop-payment on it, but it already went through. That's thousands she's given to this guy. When I say anything about it, she says I'm drunk."

"Maybe y'all should separate for a while."

"I can't. She's become suicidal. Her psychiatrist says she shouldn't even be driving an automobile."

"I'm hoping to take a girl out to dinner tonight, if I can get ahold of her. Why don't you and Lois think about coming along? It's on me."

"Maybe so, Dave. Thanks."

"I want to go out to Julio Segura's this afternoon."

"What for?"

"I'm going to roust him and take him in for questioning."

"He might file a hara.s.sment charge this time."

"He was the last person to see a murder victim alive."

"Sounds shaky. It's not our jurisdiction." His eyes smiled.

"You coming or not?"

"h.e.l.l, yes."

We drove in Clete's car along the lakefront road. There was a light chop on the slate-green surface, and pelicans were diving for fish out of the white sun. The palm trees on the esplanade clicked dryly in the wind; and on the right-hand side of the road beyond the pink stucco walls, the long iron pike fences, the impa.s.sable hedges and rows of myrtle trees, lay the terraced lawns and mansions of the rich. I knew liberals out at Tulane who would tell me these were the people whom we served. But I didn't like them any better than anybody else did. Actually, they didn't like the police, either, or at least trust us, because they hired their own security, kept attack dogs on the grounds, and maintained floodlight and burglar alarm systems that were an electronic miracle. They lived in fear of kidnappers of their children, sophisticated jewel creeps, minorities who would compromise their property values. The irony was that they were among the most secure people upon earth-secure from disease, poverty, political oppression, virtually everything except death.

"How much you think these places cost?" Cletus asked.

"I don't know, maybe a million bucks."

"My pop was a milkman in the Garden District, and sometimes in the summer I'd go on the route with him. One morning I was messing around in front of this big house right off St. Charles and this lady came out and said I was the cutest little fellow she'd ever seen and I should come back at three o'clock for some ice cream. That afternoon I took a bath and put on my nice clothes and knocked on her door right at three. At first she didn't remember who I was, then she told me to go around to the back door. I didn't know what the h.e.l.l was going on. When I got into the backyard I saw the maid handing out ice cream to all these raggedy little colored kids that belonged to the yardmen around the neighborhood.

"This lady had a greenhouse back there. I came back that night with a box full of rocks and broke d.a.m.n near every pane in it. She got it repaired and three weeks later I came back and broke them again. When my pop figured out I'd done it, he whipped me with a switch till blood ran down my legs."

Clete turned onto Julio Segura's street, which was filled with trees and blooming shrubs.

"You ever get that mad when you were a kid?" he asked.

"I don't remember."

"You told me once you and your brother had some rough times."

"Who cares, Clete? It's yesterday's ball game."

"So I know that. What's the big deal?" he said.

"You've got a rusty nail sideways in your head. Let it go, quit feeding it."

"You get a little personal sometimes, Streak."

"There he goes! Hit it!" I said.

Julio Segura's lavender Cadillac had just bounced out through his front gate onto the street. A dwarf was driving, and a blond woman sat in the front pa.s.senger's seat. Segura and another man were in back. Cletus floored the accelerator until we were abreast of them. The dwarf's face was frightened behind the gla.s.s, and he kept driving.

I held my badge out at him. He put his foot on the brake, both of his hands on the steering wheel, his chin pointed upward under his purple chauffeur's cap, and sc.r.a.ped the front tire in a long black line against the curb.

"How do you want to play it?" Clete asked before we got out of the car.

"We run up the black flag," I said.

Clete had stopped our own car in front of the Cadillac, and we walked back on opposite sides of it. I tapped on the pa.s.senger's window and on Segura's back window for them to roll down the gla.s.s. Later I was to go over this scene again and again in my mind, as well as the careless remark I'd made to Clete about the black flag, and wonder at how differently that afternoon might have turned out if I had approached the driver's side of the Cadillac or if I had kept my own counsel.

Clete reached down into the ignition, pulled the keys, and threw them into a hedge. The dwarf was petrified with fear. His little hands gripped the wheel and his jug head swiveled back and forth between Clete and the back seat.

"You don't have a blowgun hidden in your shorts, do you?" Clete said to him, then sniffed the air inside the Cadillac. "My, my, what is that aroma I smell? Colombian coffee? Or maybe we've been toking on a little muta on our way to the golf course?"

The air was heavy with the smell of marijuana. The blond woman's face looked sick. I saw the cigarette lighter from the dash lying on the floor, and I suspected she'd been snorting the roach off the lighter and had eaten it when we'd pulled them over. She had a nice figure and was dressed in white shorts and heels and a low blouse, but her hair was lacquered with so much hair spray that it looked like wire, and her face was layered with cosmetics to cover the deep pockmarks in her complexion.

I opened the door for her. "Walk on back home," I said.

"They lock the gate," she said.

"Then do the best thing you've done in years and keep on walking," I said.

"I don't know what to do, Julio," she said to the backseat.

"Do what I tell you, hon. Your Latino gumball is going to take a big fall today," I said.

Her eyes s.h.i.+fted nervously and she bit her lips, then she picked up her purse, eased past me, and clicked hurriedly down the sidewalk.

I leaned down in Segura's window. He and the gatekeeper whom Clete had hit in the stomach the other day sat behind a fold-out bar with vodka drinks in their hands. Rubber bands held the napkins around the drink gla.s.ses. Segura wore yellow golf slacks, polished brown loafers, and a flowered white s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned to his stomach. His peculiar triangular face, with the tiny b.a.l.l.s of purple skin in the furrows of his forehead, looked up at me in the slanting sunlight.

"What the f.u.c.k you think you're doing now, Rob.i.+.c.heaux?" he asked.

"Teaching you what a real bad day can be," I said.

"What do you want? Some kind of action? A piece of something downtown?"

"You're going to give me Philip Murphy, Bobby Joe Starkweather, and the little Israeli."

"I don't know none of these people. You keep coming around my house talking about things I don't know nothing about."

"Ole Streak's in a bad mood today, Julio," Clete said. "Your friends messed it up the other night and did some real bad things. They're not around now, but you are. You and Paco the barfer here." He blew his cigarette smoke into the gatekeeper's face.

"You trying to squeeze me? Okay, I'm a realist. I got business arrangements with policemen," Segura said.

"You don't fly this time, Julio," I said. "All the doors are closed. It's just me and you."

"Call Wineburger," he said to the gatekeeper.

The other man reached for the telephone that was in a mahogany box inset in the back of the front seat.

"You touch that telephone and I'll stuff it crossways down your throat," Clete said.

The man sat back in the deep leather of the seat, his face tight, his hands flat on his knees.

"You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants," Segura said.

"Try this, my friend," I said. "Lovelace Deshotels was a little black girl from the country who had big aspirations for herself and her family. She thought she'd made the big score, but you don't like broads that slop down your booze and throw up in your pool, so you eighty-sixed her back to the geek circuit. Except you had a bada.s.s black girl on your hands that wouldn't eighty-six. On top of it, she developed this fixation about elephants." I watched his face. It twitched like a rubber band. "So what does a macho guy like you do when one of his wh.o.r.es gets in his face? He has a couple of his lowlifes take her out on a boat and launch her into the next world with the same stuff she'd already sold her soul for.

"Right now you're wondering how I know all this, aren't you, Julio? It's because the guys that work for you have diarrhea of the mouth. It's information you can get across a lunch table. There are probably only several dozen people we can march by a grand jury right now."

"Then do it, smart guy."

"Let me give you the rest of it, just so you'll be fully informed when Wineburger tries to bond you out this afternoon. I'm going to have your car towed in, vacuumed, and torn apart with crowbars. Possession in Louisiana is fifteen years, and all we need is the carbon ash, either off that cigarette lighter or the upholstery.

"Any way you cut it, your a.s.s is busted."

Then Cletus committed what was probably the stupidest and most senseless act of his career.

"And this little piggy is busted, too," he said, and reached in the window and caught the gatekeeper's nose between his fingers and twisted.

The gatekeeper's eyes filled with tears; his hand slapped at Clete's, then his hairy, tattooed arm dipped into the leather pouch on the side door.

"No lo hagas! No lo hagas!" Segura screamed.

But it was forever too late for all of us. The gatekeeper's hand came up with a nickel-plated automatic and let off one round that hit the window frame and blew gla.s.s all over Clete's s.h.i.+rt. It was very fast after that. Just as I pulled the .45 from the back of my trousers, I saw Clete rip his nine-millimeter from his belt holster, crouch, and begin firing. I stepped back a foot, to clear the angle away from Segura, and fired simultaneously with my left hand locked on my wrist to hold the recoil down. I fired five times, as fast as I could pull the trigger, the explosions roaring in my ears, and saw no one thing distinctly inside the car. Instead, it was as though an earthquake had struck the inside of the Cadillac. The air was filled with divots of leather, stuffing from the seats, flying shards of gla.s.s and metal, splinters of mahogany, broken liquor bottles, cordite, smoke, and a film of blood and vodka that drained down the back window.

There was no place for Julio Segura to hide. He tried to shrink into an embryonic ball away from Clete's line of fire, but his position was hopeless. Then he suddenly leaped up into the window with his hands pressed out toward me like claws. His eyes were pleading, his mouth open with a silent scream. My finger had already squeezed tight in the trigger guard, and the round caught him in the top of the mouth and blew the back of his head all over the jerking body of the gatekeeper.

I was trembling and breathless when I fell back from the Cadillac and leaned on top of Clete's car, the .45 hanging from my hand. Clete's scarred, poached face was so bloodless and tight you could have struck a kitchen match to it. His clothes were covered with flecks of gla.s.s.

"The sonofab.i.t.c.h missed me from two feet," he said. "Did you see that? That f.u.c.king window gla.s.s saved my life. Go back and look inside. We blew them apart."

Then the dwarf chauffeur climbed down from the driver's seat and ran down the middle of the esplanade on his stubby legs amid a wail of sirens. Clete began to giggle uncontrollably.

FIVE.

The next morning Cletus and I sat across from each other at our desks in our small, gla.s.s-enclosed office with its smudged yellow walls that made you think of a dressing cubicle at the YMCA. Cletus pretended to read a long memo from the superintendent's office, but his eyes were either empty or glazed with the pain of his hangover. He was chain-smoking and eating breath mints, but last night's Scotch was down deep in his lungs. Both of us had already made written reports to Captain Guidry.

"I'm not going to bail you out again, Clete," I said.

"What do you mean, bail out? I put one through his brisket before you popped your first cap."

"I'm not talking about that. You provoked it. It didn't have to happen." , "You're sure about that, huh? What if Paco had come up with the automatic while you were cuffing Segura? There was a nine-round clip in there. He could have cut both of us in half."

"You provoked it."

"So what if I did? Scratch two lowlifes that should have been fertilizer a long time ago. Save the hearts and flowers, Dave. n.o.body's going to be interested in how Julio Segura bought it. I don't think you could find three people to attend the guy's funeral."

"Don't bet on it."

Sergeant Motley came down the corridor and stopped in our doorway. He had just come in from outside, and his round, black head glistened with perspiration. He was eating an ice cream cone, and there were flecks of ice cream in his thick mustache.

"Somebody in the lab said they had to wash Segura's brains off the seat with a hose," he said.

"Oh yeah? That sounds like it might make a clever Excedrin ad," Clete said.

"Guess what else I heard?" Motley said.

"Who cares?" Clete said.

"You'll care, Purcel. The lab says the Cadillac was dirty. Reefer on the cigarette lighter, c.o.ke in the rug. Who would have thought Segura would let his broads be so careless?" He smiled. "You guys didn't salt the mine shaft, did you?"