"Can you believe anybody going for this guy's shuck today?" Clete said.
"It's in."
"Why?"
"They missed all the fun."
In reality, I probably knew a better answer. But it sounded like a weary one, even to myself, and I left it unsaid. Presidents who had never heard a shot fired in anger vicariously revised the inadequacy of their own lives by precipitating suffering in the lives of others, and they were lauded for it. Clay Mason well understood the nature of public memory and had simply waited for his time and a new generation of intellectual cannon fodder to come round again.
His pretentiousness, his feigned old man's humility and irreverence toward the totems, were almost embarrassing. He had been an academic for years, but he denigrated universities and academics. He spoke of his own career in self-effacing terms but gave the impression he had known the most famous writers of his time. In his eccentric western clothes, a Stetson hat cocked on his white head, a burning cigarette cupped in his small hand, he became the egalitarian spokesman for the Wobblies, the railroad hobos of Woody Guthrie and Hart Crane, the miners killed at Ludlow, Colorado, the girls whose bodies were incinerated like bolts of cloth in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
His poems were full of southwestern mesas and peyote cactus, ponies that drank out of blood-red rivers, fields blown with bluebon-nets and poppies, hot winds that smelled of burning hemp.
His words seemed to challenge all convention and caution, even his own death, which one poem described in terms of a chemical rainbow rising from the ashes of his soul.
The audience loved it.
Clete craned forward in his seat.
"Check it out by the door, big mon," he said.
Karyn LaRose was dressed in a pale blue suit and white hose, with a white scarf about her neck, her legs crossed, listening attentively to Clay Mason. The horn-rimmed glasses she wore only added to her look of composure and feminine confidence. Two state troopers stood within five feet of her, their hands folded behind them, as though they were at parade rest.
"Why do I feel like a starving man looking at a plate of baked Alaska?" Clete said. "You think I could interest her in some private security?"
A middle-aged woman in front of us turned and said, "Would you kindly be quiet?"
"Sorry," Clete said, his face suddenly blank.
After Clay Mason finished reading his last poem, the audience rose to its feet and applauded and then applauded some more. Clete and I worked our way to the front of the hall, where a cash drink bar was open and a buffet was being set up.
"Watch out for the Smokies. It looks like they're working on their new chevrons," Clete said.
Clay Mason stood with a group by Karyn's chair, his weight resting on his cane. When he saw me, the parchment lines in his pixie face seem to deepen, then he smiled quickly and extended his hand out of the crowd. It felt like a twig in mine.
"I'm flattered by your presence, sir," he said.
"It's more business than pleasure. A Mexican kid who worked for Buford took a dive off a flophouse roof," I said.
"Yeah, definitely bad shit. They had to put the guy's brains back in his head with a trowel," Clete said.
I gave Clete a hard stare, but it didn't register.
"I'm sorry to hear about this," Clay Mason said.
On the edge of my vision I could see Karyn LaRose seated not more than two feet from us.
"What's happening, Karyn?" I said, without looking at her.
"You gentlemen wouldn't contrive to turn a skunk loose at a church social, would you?" Clay Mason said, a smile wrinkling at the corner of his mouth.
I took the pay stub from my shirt pocket and looked at it. "The guy's name was Fernando Spinoza. You know him?" I asked.
"No, can't say that I do," Clay Mason said.
"How about you, Karyn?" I asked.
The redness in her cheeks looked like arrowpoints. But her eyes were clear with purpose and she didn't hesitate in her response.
"This man is a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," she said to the two troopers. "He's annoyed me and my husband in every way he can. It's my belief he has no other reason for being here."
"Is that right, sir?" one of the troopers said, his eyes slightly askance, rising slightly on the balls of his feet, his hands still folded behind him.
"I'm here because of a kid who had to be blotted off a flagstone," I said.
"You have some kind of jurisdiction in New Orleans? How about y'all get something to eat over at the buffet table?" the trooper said. His face was lumpy, not unpleasant or hostile or dumb, just lumpy and obsequious.
"Here's today's flash, buddy," Clete said. "This old guy you're a doorman for, he popped his own wife. Shot an apple off her head at a party with a forty-four Magnum down in Taco Ticoville. Except he was stinking drunk and left her hair all over the wallpaper. Maybe we should be telling that to these dumb kids who listen to his bullshit."
The conversation around us died as though someone had pulled the plug on a record player. I looked over at Clete and was never prouder of him.
But our moment with Clay Mason wasn't over. Outside, we saw him walk from under the blue canvas awning at the front entrance of the restaurant toward a waiting limo, Karyn LaRose at his side, leaning on his cane, negotiating the peaked sidewalk where the roots of oak trees had wedged up the concrete. A small misshaped black and brown mongrel dog, with raised hair like pig bristles, came out of nowhere and began barking at Mason, its teeth bared and its nails clicking on the pavement, advancing and retreating as fear and hostility moved it. Mason continued toward the limo, his gaze fixed ahead of him. Then, without missing a step, he suddenly raised his cane in the air and whipped it across the dog's back with such force that the animal ran yipping in pain through the traffic as though its spine had been broken.
The next evening, at sunset, I drove my truck up the state road that paralleled Bayou Teche and parked in a grove across the water from Buford's plantation. Through my Japanese field glasses I could see the current flowing under his dock and boathouse, the arched iron shutters on the smithy, the horses in his fields, the poplars that flattened in the wind against the side of his house. Then I moved the field glasses along the bank, where I had thrown the oar lock tied with my handkerchief. The oar lock was gone, and someone had beveled out a plateau on the slope and had poured a concrete pad and begun construction of a gazebo there.
I propped my elbows on the hood of my truck and moved the glasses through the trees, and in the sun's afterglow, which was like firelight on the trunks, I saw first one state trooper, then a second, then a third, all of them with scoped and leather-slung bolt-action rifles. Each trooper sat on a chair in the shadows, much like hunters positioning themselves in a deer stand.
I heard a boot crack a twig behind me.
"Hep you with something?" a trooper asked.
He was big and gray, close to retirement age, his stomach protruding like a sack of gravel over his belt.
I opened my badge holder.
"On the job," I said.
"Still ain't too good to be here. Know what I mean?" he said.
"I don't."
"This morning they found work boot prints on the mudbank. Like boots a convict might wear."
"I see."
"If he comes in, they don't want him spooked out," the trooper said. We looked at each other in the silence. There was a smile in his eyes.
"It looks like they know their work," I said.
"Put it like you want. Crown comes here, he's gonna have to kill his next nigger down in hell."
The backyard was dim with mist when I fixed breakfast in the kitchen the next morning. I heard Bootsie walk into the kitchen behind me. The window over the sink was open halfway and the radio was playing on the windowsill.
"Are you listening to the radio?" she said.
"Yeah, I just clicked it on."
"Alafair's still asleep."
"I wasn't thinki
ng. I'll turn it off."
"No, just turn it down."
"All right," I said. I walked to the sink and turned down the volume knob. I looked out the window at the yard until I was sure my face was empty of expression, then I sat down again and we ate in silence.
We were both happy when the phone rang on the wall.
"You have the news on?" the sheriff asked.
"No."
"I wouldn't call so early but I thought it'd be better if you heard it from me . . ."
"What is it, skipper?"
"Short Boy Jerry. NOPD found his car by the Desire welfare project a half hour ago . . . He was beaten to death . . ."
I felt a tick jump in my throat. I pressed my thumb hard under my ear to clear a fluttering sound, like a wounded butterfly, out of my hearing. I saw Bootsie looking at me, saw her put down her coffee cup gently and her face grow small.
"You there, podna?" the sheriff said.
"Who did it?"
"NOPD thinks a gang of black pukes. I'll tell you up front, Dave, he went out hard."
"I need the plane," I said.
CHAPTER 24
The sun was pale, almost white, like a sliver of ice hidden behind clouds above Lake Pontchartrain, when Clete Purcel met me at the New Orleans airport and drove us back down I-10 toward the city.
"You really want to go to the meat locker, Streak?" he asked.
"You know another place to start?"
"It was just a question."
Morgues deny all the colors the mind wishes to associate with death. The surfaces are cool to the touch, made of aluminum and stainless steel, made even more sterile in appearance by the dull reflection of the fluorescent lighting overhead. The trough and the drains where an autopsy was just conducted are spotless; the water that wells across and cleanses the trough's bottom could have issued from a spring.
But somehow, in the mind, you hear sounds behind all those gleaming lockers, like fluids dripping, a tendon constricting, a lip that tightens into a sneer across the teeth.
The assistant wore a full-length white lab coat that looked like a nineteenth-century duster. He paused with his hand on the locker door. He had a cold and kept brushing at his nose with the back of his wrist.
"The guy's hands are bagged. Otherwise, he's like they found him," he said.
"This place is an igloo in here. Let's see it, all right?" Clete said.
The assistant looked at Clete oddly and then pulled out the drawer. Clete glanced down at Jerry Joe, let out his breath, then lifted his eyes to mine.
"When it's this bad, it usually means a tire iron or maybe a curb button. The uniforms found him on the pavement, so it's hard to tell right now," the assistant said. "You knew the guy?"
"Yeah, he knew the guy," Clete answered.
"I was just wondering what he was doing in that neighborhood at night, that's all," the assistant said. "If a white guy's down there at night, it's usually for cooze or rock. We on the same side here?"
Most of Jerry Joe's teeth had been broken off. One of his eyes looked like a tea-stained egg. The other was no longer an eye. I lifted his left hand. It felt like a heavy piece of old fruit inside the plastic bag.
"Both of them are broken. I don't know anything about this guy, but my bet is, he went the whole fifteen before they clicked off his switch," the attendant said.
"Thank you, sir, for your time," I said, and turned and walked outside.
I talked with the scene investigator at the District from a filling station pay phone. He had a heavy New Orleans blue-collar accent, which is far closer to the speech of Brooklyn than to the Deep South; he told me he had to go to a meeting and couldn't talk to me right now.
"When can you talk?" I asked.
"When I get out of the meeting."
"When is that?"
"Leave your number."
We pulled back into the traffic. Clete's window was down and the wind whipped the hair on his head. He kept looking across the seat at me.
"Streak, you're making me tense," he said.
"You buy kids did this?" I asked.
"I think that's how it's going to go down."
"You didn't answer my question."
He took a swizzle stick off his dashboard and put it in his mouth. A neutral ground with palm trees on it streamed past his window. "I can't see Jerry Ace getting taken down by pukes. Not like this, anyway. Maybe if he got capped—"
"Why would he be down by the Desire?"
"He dug R&B. He was a paratrooper. He thought he had magic painted on him . . . Dave, don't try to make sense out of it. This city's in flames. You just can't see them."
Jerry Joe's blue Buick had already been towed to the pound. A uniformed cop opened the iron gate for us and walked with us past a row of impounded cars to the back of the lot. The Buick was parked against a brick wall, its trunk sprung, its dashboard ripped out, the glove box rifled, the leather door panels pried loose, the stereo speakers gouged with screwdrivers out of the headliner. A strip of torn yellow crime scene tape was tangled around one wheel, flapping in the wind.
"Another half hour and they would have had the engine off the mounts," Clete said.
"How do you read it?" I said.
"A gang of street rats got to it after he was dead."
"It looks like they had him made for a mule."
"The side panels? Yeah. Which means they didn't know who he was."
"But they wouldn't have hung around to strip the car if they'd killed him, would they?" I said.
"No, their consciences were clean. You hook them up, that's what they'll tell you. Just a harmless night out, looting a dead man's car. I think I'm going to move to East Los Angeles," he said.
We went to the District and caught the scene investigator at his desk. He was a blond, tall, blade-faced man named Cramer who wore a sky blue sports coat and white shirt and dark tie with a tiny gold pistol and chain fastened to it. The erectness of his posture in the chair distracted the eye from his paunch and concave chest and the patina of nicotine on his fingers.
"Do we have anybody in custody? No. Do we have any suspects? Yeah. Every gangbanger in that neighborhood," he said.
"I think it was a hit," I said.
"You think a hit?" he said.
"Maybe Jerry Joe was going to dime some people, contractors lining up at the trough in Baton Rouge," I said.
"You used to be at the First District, right?"
"Right."
"Tell me when I say something that sounds wrong—a white guy down by the Desire at night isn't looking to be shark meat."
"Come on, Cramer. Kids aren't going to kill a guy and peel the car with the body lying on the street," I said.
"Maybe they didn't know they'd killed him. You think of that?"
"I think you're shit-canning the investigation," I said.
"I punched in at four this morning. A black kid took a shot at another kid in the Desire. He missed. He killed a three-month-old baby instead. Short Boy Jerry was a mutt. You asking me I got priorities? Fucking 'A' I do."
His phone rang. He picked it up, then hit the "hold" button.
"Y'all get a cup of coffee, give me ten minutes," he said.
Clete and I walked down the street and ate a hot dog at a counter where we had to stand, then went back to the District headquarters. Cramer scratched his forehead and looked at a yellow legal pad on his blotter.
"That was the M.E. called," he said. "Short Boy Jerry had gravel and grains of concrete in his scalp, but it was from a fall, not a blow. There were pieces of leather in the wounds around his eyes, probably from gloves the hitter was wearing or a blackjack. Death was caused by a broken rib getting shoved into the heart."
He lit a cigarette and put the paper match carefully in the ashtray with two fingers, his eyes veiled.
"What's the rest of it?" I asked.
"The M.E. thinks the assailant or assailants propped Short Boy Jerry up to prolong the beating. The bruises on the throat show a single hand hel
d him up straight while he was getting it in the stomach. The brain was already hemorrhaging when the rib went into the heart . . ."
"What's that numeral at the bottom of the page?" I asked.
"The blows in the ribs were from a fist maybe six inches across."