I could feel the day’s fatigue in my body. I closed and widened my eyes. The long-distance hum in the telephone receiver was like wet sand in my ear.
“Would you call the dispatcher for me?” I said.
“All right. Don’t worry about anything, Dave. We’re just fine.”
After I hung up I said a prayer to my Higher Power to watch over my home in my absence, then I called Clarise, an elderly mulatto woman who had worked for my family since I was a child, and asked her to look in on Bootsie that evening and to return in the morning to do house chores.
I showered in a tin stall with water that was so cold it left me breathless, put back on the same clothes I had worn all day, ate a plate of rice, red beans, and sausage at Fat Albert’s on St. Charles, then began a neon-lit odyssey through the biker bars of Jefferson and Orleans parishes.
IT’S A STRANGE, atavistic, and tribal world to visit. Individually its members are usually hapless, bumbling creatures who were born out of luck and whose largest successes usually consist of staying out of jail, paying off their bondsmen, and keeping their appointments with their probation officers and welfare workers. It’s probably not coincidence that most of them are ugly and stupid. But collectively they are both frightening and a source of fascination for those who wonder what it might be like if they traded off their routine and predictable lives for a real fling out on the ragged edge.
The first bar I hit was one out on Airline Highway. Think of a shale parking lot covered with chopped-down Harleys whose chrome and lacquered-black surfaces seem to glow with a nocturnal iridescence; a leather jackboot stomping down on a starter pedal, the earsplitting roar of straight exhaust pipes, the tinkle of a beer bottle flung through the limbs of an oak tree, a man urinating loudly on the shale in front of a pickup truck’s headlights, his muscular, blue-jean-clad legs spread with the visceral self-satisfaction of a gladiator; the inside of a clapboard building crowded with men in sleeveless Levi’s jackets, boots sheathed with metal plates, black leather cutouts that etch the genitals and flap on the legs like a gunfighter’s chaps; bodies strung with chains and iron crosses, covered with hair and tattoos of swastikas and snakes with human skulls inserted between the fangs; an odor of chewing tobacco, snuff, cigarette smoke rubbed like wet nicotine into the clothes, grease and motor oil, reefer, and a faint hint of testosterone and dried semen.
I was sure that the man with the tiger tattoo who had ridden away from Clete’s apartment was Eddy Raintree, but he was not the same biker who had put the bribe money in my mailbox. Which meant that in all probability there was a connection between bikers, the Aryan Brotherhood, ex-convicts, and Bobby Earl or Joey Gouza. It made sense. Most outlaw bikers I had known were sexual fascists, and they were always seeking new and defenseless targets for the anger and dark blood that were trapped in their loins like throbbing birds.
But I got virtually nowhere at the bar on Airline Highway or at any of the other bars I cruised until 3 A.M. No one knew Eddy Raintree, had ever heard of him, or even thought his photograph vaguely familiar. But at the last place I visited, a narrow brick poolroom that used to be run by blacks between two warehouses across the river in Algiers, a drunk woman at the bar let me buy her a bowl of chili, and in her sad way she tried to be helpful.
Her hair was platinum, dark at the scalp, and the number 69 was tattooed on her arm. She wore a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with no bra, and a pair of Clorox-faded Levi’s that hung as low as a bikini on her hips. (I had never been able to understand the women who hung with outlaw bikers, because with some regularity they were gang-raped, chain-whipped, and had their hands nailed to trees, but they came back for more, obedient, anesthetized, and bored, like spectators at their own dismemberment.)
She kept lifting spoonfuls of chili to her mouth, then forgetting to eat them, her eyes trying to focus on my face and the photograph of Eddy Raintree I held in my palm.
“What do you want with that dumb shit?” she asked. Her words were phlegmatic, like dialogue in a slow-motion film.
“Could you tell me where he is?”
“In jail, probably. Or out fucking goats or something.”
“When did you see him last?”
She drew in on her cigarette and held the smoke down like she was taking a hit off a reefer.
“You don’t want to waste your time with a dumb shit like that,” she said.
“I’d really like to talk with Eddy. I’d really appreciate it if you could help me.”
“He’s into astronomy or something. He’s weird. I’ve got enough weirdness in my life without a dumb fuck like that.”
Then her boyfriend came back from the men’s room. He was huge, with a wild beard, and he wore striped overalls with no shirt. His massive shoulders were ridged with hair; his odor was incredible.
“What do you think you’re doing, man?” he said.
“Just finishing my conversation with this lady.”
“It’s finished. Good-bye.”
I left two dollars on the bar for the chili and walked back out into the night. The heat of the day had finally lifted from the streets and the cement buildings, the wind was cool blowing from across the river, and I could see the red and green running lights of the oil barges on the water, and the glow of New Orleans against the clouds.
I SLEPT UNTIL nine the next morning, had coffee and beignets at a cool table under the pavilion at the Café du Monde, and watched the water from the sprinklers click against the piked fence around the park in Jackson Square and drift in a rainbow haze through the myrtle and banana trees. Then I went over to First District headquarters a few blocks away and read Joey Gouza’s file. It was another study in institutional failure, the kind of document that makes you doubt your own convictions and conclude that perhaps the right-wing simpletons are correct when they advocate going at social complexities with a chainsaw.
Since age thirteen, he’d had forty-three arrests. He was in the Louisiana reformatory when he was seventeen, he went up the road twice to Angola, and he did a federal three-bit in Lewisburg. He had been arrested for breaking-and-entering, auto theft, assault and battery, possession of burglar tools, armed robbery, strong-arm robbery, sale of stolen food stamps, possession of counterfeit money, procuring, tax fraud, and murder. He was one of those career criminals who early on had gone about investigating and participating in every kind of illegal activity that a city offered. But, unlike most petty thieves, pimps, smalltime fences, and smash-and-grab artists, Joey had gravitated steadily upward in the New Orleans mob and had developed a skill that was at one time revered in the underworld, that of the safecracker. Evidently he had peeled and cut up safes with burnbars in four states, although he had fallen on only one job, a box in a Baton Rouge pawnshop that netted him eighty-six dollars and a two-year jolt in Angola.
He wasn’t hard to find. He owned a small Italian café and delicatessen in an old brick, iron-scrolled building shaded by oak trees on Esplanade. The inside smelled of oregano and meat sauce, crab-boil, sautéed shrimp, cheese and salami, the fried oysters and sliced tomatoes and onions that went into the poor-boy sandwiches on the counter, the steamed coffee from the espresso machines. The café was empty except for a black cook, the counterman, and a couple having breakfast at one of the checkercloth tables.
I asked for Joey Gouza.
“He’s back in the office. What’s the name?” the counterman said.
“Dave Robicheaux.”
“Just a minute.” He walked to the end of the counter and spoke through a half-opened door.
“Who’s the guy?” a peculiar thick voice inside said.
“I don’t know. Just a guy.” The counterman looked back at me.
“Then ask him who he is,” the voice said.
The counterman looked back at me again. I opened up my badge.
“He’s a cop, Joey,” the counterman said.
“Then tell him to come in, for Christ’s sake.”
I walked around the counter and through the doo
r. Joey Gouza looked up at me from behind his desk. He was deeply tanned, tall, his face elongated, almost jug-shaped, his salt-and-pepper hair cut military style and brushed up stiffly on his scalp, his eyes as black as wet paint. He wore pleated gray slacks, a lavender polo shirt, oxblood loafers; a cream-colored panama hat sat crown down on the corner of his desk. His neck was unnaturally long, like a swan’s, hung with gold chains and medallions, and his open shirt exposed the web of veins and tendons in his shoulders and chest, like those in a long-distance runner or javelin thrower.
But it was the eyes that got your attention; they were absolutely black and they never blinked. And the voice: the accent was Irish Channel, but with a knot tied in it, as though the vocal cords were coated with infected membrane.
His smile was easy, as relaxed as the matchstick he rolled on his tongue. A fat dark man in a green visor, who smoked a cigar, sat at a card table in the corner, adding up receipts on a calculator.
“I got some unpaid parking tickets again?” Gouza said.
I held my badge out for him to see. “No, I’m Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office, Mr. Gouza. It’s just an informal visit. Do you mind if I sit down?”
If he recognized my name, it didn’t show in his eyes or his smile.
“Help yourself, if you don’t mind me working. We got to get some stuff ready for the tax man.”
“I’m looking for Jack Gates,” I said.
“Who?”
“Or Eddy Raintree.”
“Who?”
“How about Jewel Fluck?”
“Fluck? Is this some kind of put-on?”
“Let’s start with Jack Gates again. You never heard of him?”
“Nope.”
“That’s funny. I heard he fed your brother-in-law into an airplane propeller.”
He took the matchstick out of the corner of his mouth and laughed.
“It’s a great story. I’ve heard it for years. But it’s bullshit,” he said. “My brother-in-law was killed in a plane accident on his way to Disneyland. A great family tragedy.”
The man at the other table was grinning and nodding his head up and down without interrupting his count of receipts. Then Joey Gouza put the matchstick back in his mouth and leaned his chin on his knuckle. His eyes were filled with an amused light as they moved up and down my person.
“You say Iberia Parish?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You guys gave up shaving or something?”
“We’re casual out in the parishes. Let’s cut to it, Joey. You’re an old-time pete man. Why do you want to give Weldon Sonnier a lot of grief?”
“Weldon Sonnier?”
“You don’t know him, either?”
“Everybody in New Orleans knows him. He’s a bum and a welsher.”
“Who told you that?”
“That’s the word. He borrows big dough, but he doesn’t come up with the vig. That’ll get you into trouble in this town. You saying I’m connected with him or something?”
“You tell me.”
“I know your name from a long time ago. You were at the First District, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“So I think maybe you heard stories about me. You probably read my rap sheet before you came here this morning, right? You know I’ve been up the road a couple of times, you know I burned a box or two. You heard that old bullshit story about how I got this voice, how a yard bitch put a capful of Sani-Flush in my coffee cup. How the yard bitch got his cherry split open in the shower two days later? You heard that one, didn’t you?”
“Sure.”
He smiled and said, “No, you didn’t, but I’ll give it to you free, anyway. The point is it’s not true. I was never a big stripe, I did easy time, I made full trusty in every joint I was in. But the big word there is did. Past tense. I did my time. I’ve been straight seven years. Look—”
He bounced his palm on top of a paper spindle and gazed reflectively out the window at some black children skateboarding by under the oaks.
“I’m a businessman,” he continued. “I own a bunch of restaurants, a linen service, a movie theater, a plumbing business, and half a vending-machine company. Are we on the same wavelength here?”
He flexed his nostrils as though there were an obstruction in them and rubbed the grained skin of his jaw with one finger.
“I’ll try again,” he said. “You said it a minute ago, I was a pete man. I punched, peeled, and burned ’em. I went down for it twice, too. But safecracking became a historical art a long time ago. Today it’s all narcotics.”
“Bad stuff?” I smiled back at him.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms up.
“Who am I to judge?” he said. “But go out to the welfare projects and see who’s running the action. They’re all colored kids. They scrape out crack pipes, they call it bazooka or something, and sell it for a buck a hit. Nobody who could think his way out of a wet paper bag is gonna try to compete with that.”
“Maybe my information isn’t very good. Or maybe I’m a little bit out of touch. But it’s my understanding that you’ve got connections with Bobby Earl, that Jack Gates is a button man for you.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. He took the matchstick out of his mouth and dropped it in the waste can.
“I’ve tried to be polite,” he said. “You’re from out of town, you had some questions, I tried to answer them. You think maybe you’re abusing the situation here?”
“I came here to pass on a couple of observations, Joey. When you try to get a cop on a pad and you don’t know anything about him, get somebody to lend him money, don’t leave it in his mailbox.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The two thousand is in the Iberia Parish sheriff’s desk drawer. At the end of the year it’ll probably be donated to the city park program.”
He was grinning again.
“You’re saying I tried to bribe you? You drove all the way over here to tell me somebody’s two thou is wasted on you? That’s the big message?”
“Read it like you want.”
“It’s been a lot of fun talking to you. Hey, I didn’t tell you I own a couple of goony golf courses. You like goony golf? It’s catching on here in New Orleans. Hey, Louis, give him a couple of tickets.”
The man with the cigar and green visor was grinning broadly, nodding his head up and down. He took a thick pack of tickets from his shirt pocket, popped two out from under the rubber band, and placed them on the desk in front of me.
Joey Gouza made a pyramid out of his hands and tapped the ends of his fingers together.
“I heard you were an intelligent man, Joey. But it’s my opinion you’re a stupid shit,” I said.
His eyes went flat, and his face glazed over.
“You fucked with Cletus Purcel. That’s probably the worst mistake you ever made in your insignificant life,” I said. “If you don’t believe me, check out what happened to Julio Garcia and his bodyguard a few years back. I think they wished they had stayed in Managua and taken their chances with the Sandinistas.”
“That’s supposed to make me rattle? You come in here like you fell out of a dirty-clothes bag, making noise like you got gas or something, and I’m supposed to rattle?” He pointed into his breastbone with four stiff fingers. “You think I give a fuck about what some pissant PI’s gonna do? Tell me serious, I’m supposed to get on the rag because he whacked out a spick nobody in New Orleans would spit on?”
“Clete didn’t kill Garcia. His partner did.”
I saw the recognition grow in his eyes.
“Tell those three clowns they’re going down for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy,” I said. “Stay out of Iberia Parish. Stay away from Purcel. If you fall again, Joey, I’m going to make sure you go down for the bitch. Four-time loser, mandatory life.”
I flipped the goony golf passes on his shirt front. The man in the green v
isor sat absolutely still with his cigar dead in his mouth.
CHAPTER 7
WHEN I GOT BACK to New Iberia I showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes and ate lunch with Bootsie in the backyard. I should have felt good about the day; it wasn’t hot, like yesterday, the trees were loud with birds, the wind smelled of watermelons, the roses in my garden were as big as fists. But my eye registered all the wrong things: a fire burning in the middle of the marsh, where there should have been none; buzzards humped over a dead rabbit in the field, their beaks hooked and yellow and busy with their work; a little boy with an air rifle on the bank of the bayou, taking careful aim at a robin in an oak tree.
Why? Because we were on our way back to the specialist in Lafayette. The treatment of lupus, in our case, had not been a matter of finding the right medication but the right balance. Bootsie needed dosages of corticosteroid to control the disease that fed at her connective tissue, but the wrong dosage resulted in what is called steroid psychosis. For us her treatment had been like trying to spell a word correctly by repeatedly dipping a spoon into alphabet soup.
There were times I felt angry at her, too. She was supposed to avoid the sun, but I often came home from work and found her weeding the flower beds in shorts and a halter. When we went out on the salt to seine for shrimp, she would break her promise and not only leave the cabin but strip nude, dive off the gunnel, and swim toward a distant sandbar, until she was a small speck and I would have to go after her.
We got back from Lafayette at 4 P.M. with a half-dozen new prescriptions in her purse. I sat listlessly on the front porch and stared at the smoke still rising into the sky from the cypress trees burning in the marsh. Why had no one put it out, I thought.
“What’s wrong, Dave?” Alafair said.
“Nothing, little guy. How you doing?” I put my arm around her small waist and pulled her against me. She had been riding her horse, and I could smell the sun in her hair and horse sweat in her clothes.
“Why’s there a fire out there?”