“That’s far enough, Frank,” I said.
He turned around, half smiling. “You following me?” he said.
“Nope.”
“Then we got no problem here. Right?”
“Yeah, I think we do,” I said.
“No, no, man,” he said, wagging his finger. “I ain’t done nothing wrong.”
“That’s a matter of definition, Frank,” I said.
“We talking about a racial issue here?”
“You’re going back to your motel, Frank. You’re going back alone. Got the drift?”
“I checked you out, Robicheaux. You’re an A.A. rum-dum people around here feel sorry for. But that don’t mean you get to beat up on guys like me ’cause I’m Italian or from New Orleans or whatever the fuck it is about me that bothers you.”
I looked at my watch. “Your coach is about to turn into a pumpkin,” I said.
He stepped toward me. “This is a free country. You don’t like what me and the lady are doing, I say suck my dick. Now, you get out of my face and out of my space ’cause I really fucking don’t like you, man.”
“At this point I’m placing you under arrest. Put your hands behind you and turn around, please,” I said.
“Arrest? For what?” he said, his face incredulous.
“Disturbing the peace, creating a public nuisance, using profanity in public, that sort of thing. I’ll think of some more charges on the way down to the jail,” I said.
“This ain’t even your jurisdiction,” he said.
But I wasn’t listening now. I turned him toward the wall and hooked him up, then pushed him out the door into the parking lot. It had stopped raining, and the air was cold and wet, and fog was rolling out of the trees across the road. Sugar Bee and several other patrons of the cafe and bar had walked outside and were watching us.
“You armed, Frank?” I said.
“Want to search my crotch? Be my guest,” he replied.
I fitted my hand under his arm and moved him toward the hood of my truck. That’s when he hawked phlegm out of his throat and spat it in my face.
I felt it in my eyelashes, on my mouth, in my hair, like a skein of obscene thread clinging to my person. I picked him up by his belt and slammed him into the fender of the truck, then drove his head down on the hood. But Frank Dellacroce was not one to give up easily; though his wrists were cuffed behind him, he brought one hand up and clenched it into my scrotum.
I smashed his head into the hood again, then got my handcuff key out of my pocket and unhooked him. I spun him around and drove my fist into his mouth, throwing all my weight into the blow, snapping his head back as though it were on a spring. I saw his lip burst against his teeth, and I hooked him in the eye with a left, caught him on the jaw and in the throat and on the nose as he went down.
He was whipped, but I couldn’t stop. I picked him up by his shirt and hit him again, rolled him off a car fender and drove my fist repeatedly into his kidneys. He collapsed in a mud puddle and tried to drag himself away from me. But I knelt beside him and twisted his shirt in my left hand and drew back my fist to hit him again. He tried to speak, his ruined face pleading. I heard people screaming and felt Sugar Bee slapping at my head with a shoe, her voice keening in the damp air.
A light on a pole burned overhead. I stared at the circle of faces around me, like a drunkard coming out of a blackout. Their eyes were filled with fear and pity, as though they were watching a wild animal tear his prey apart inside a cage. But there was one man in the crowd who did not belong there. He was white and had narrow shoulders and wore a seersucker suit with a pink tie. His ears were small, convoluted, hardly more than stubs on the sides of his head. His face and expression made me think of the bleached hide on a baseball.
As I looked up into his eyes I had no doubt in the world who he was, no more than you can doubt the presence of death when it suddenly steps into your path. I got to my feet and helped Frank Dellacroce up, then propped him against the grill of an ancient gas guzzler, no more than five feet from the man in the seersucker suit.
“Frank, meet a guy you’ve probably been looking for all your life,” I said.
Then I walked off balance to my truck and drove away.
Chapter 10
Early the next morning I soaked my hands until the swelling had gone out of my fingers, then I put Mercurochrome on the cuts in my knuckles and tried to cover them unobtrusively with flesh-colored Band-Aids. I picked up the morning paper off the gallery and went through it page by page, just as I had done for years when I was coming off a drunk, wondering what kind of carnage I may have left in an alley or on a rain-swept highway.
But this morning the paper seemed filled with cartoons and sports and wire-service and local feature stories that had nothing to do with events in front of a cafe-and-bar on the St. Martin Parish line. Snuggs, my newly adopted cat, followed me back inside and I opened a can of food for him and put it in his bowl and sat with him on the back porch while he ate. The wind was cool and damp and sweet smelling through the trees, but each time I closed my eyes I saw the terrified, blood-streaked face of Frank Dellacroce and wondered who lived inside my skin.
Father Jimmie was still asleep, so I drove over to Clete’s cottage at the motor court and took him for breakfast at the McDonald’s on Main Street. Then I cleared my throat and told him about the previous night—at least most of it.
“Wait a minute,” he said, raising his hands from his food. “You had your piece and your cuffs with you?”
“Right,” I said.
“Why?” he said.
I shrugged.
“Maybe because you were looking for trouble when you left home?” he said.
I looked at an oak tree out on the street, one that was strung with moss and lighted by the pinkness of the early sun. “I saw Max Coll there,” I said.
“You did what?”
“In the crowd. I’ve seen pictures of him. It had to be Coll. His head looks like a used Q-tip,” I said.
Clete’s eyes studied my face. They seemed to contain a level of sorrow that I could not associate with the man I knew. “What are you doing to yourself, Streak?” he said.
At 11:30 A.M. Helen leaned her head in my door. “Pick up line two. See how much this has to do with us. If it doesn’t, don’t let it get on our plate,” she said.
The man on the other end of the line was a St. Martin Parish plainclothes named Dominic Romaine. He was a big, fat, sweaty man, known for his rumpled suits, horse-track neckties, and general irreverence toward everything. He had emphysema and his voice wheezed into the phone when he spoke.
“That guy you beat the shit out of last night, Frank Dellacroce?” he said.
“Uh, there’s a bad connection, Romie. Say again.”
“Pull on your own joint, Robicheaux. I don’t know why you busted this guy up, but it don’t matter. In other words, you’re not gonna be up on an IA beef.”
“Sorry, I’m just not reading you, partner.”
I heard him take a deep breath, the air in his lungs whistling like wind in a chimney. “After you got finished with Dellacroce, he drove to a cabin by Whiskey Bay. It’s actually a fuck pad a bunch of greaseballs out of Houston use. Get this”—he broke off and started laughing, then fought to catch his breath again—“he was behind the wheel of his car, sucking on a bottle of tequila, while this mulatto broad was giving him a blowjob, when a guy comes out of the dark and parks a big one in the back of his head. I mean a big one, too, like a .44 mag. His brains were still running out his nose when we got there.”
Dominic Romaine started laughing again. I felt my vision go in and out of focus. Outside, an ambulance passed the courthouse, its siren screaming. “You still there?” he said.
“Who was the shooter?”
“No idea. No description, either. The mulatto handing out the blowjob is retarded or something. Dave, there’s a question that needs to go into my report.”
“I didn’t see Dellacroce after my enc
ounter with him,” I said.
“Got any speculations on the shooter?”
My head was pounding, my stomach churning. “Check with N.O.P.D. Dellacroce was a hitman and fulltime wise-ass. I think he was a grunt for Fat Sammy Figorelli.”
“It sounds like his passing will go down as a great tragedy. Hey, Dave? You know that song by Louie Prima? ‘I’ll be standing on the corner plastered when they bring your coffin by’? I love that song. Hey, Dave?”
“What?”
“Next time you go looking for a punching bag, make sure it ain’t in St. Martin Parish,” he said.
I barely got through the day. I tried to convince myself the man I had seen in the crowd the previous night was not Max Coll. I had seen only photos of him, taken through a zoom lens or in a late-night booking room. The man in the crowd could have been a tourist, or someone who had walked over from the convenience store next door, I told myself. And even had it been Max Coll, was I my brother’s keeper, particularly if my “brother” was a dirtbag like Frank Dellacroce?
But I knew in my heart my thought processes were self-serving and futile and that I had helped set up a man’s death. I worked late at the office, past sunset, then turned out the light on my desk and drove home, just as it began to rain.
I pulled into my drive, expecting to see Father Jimmie’s car under the porte cochere. Instead, I saw Theodosha Flannigan’s Lexus parked in the shadows and a light burning in the kitchen. The trees in the yard and the bamboo along the edge of the driveway were shrouded in mist, and yellow leaves floated in the rain puddles. The front door and the windows of the house were open, and I thought I could smell the odor of freshly baked bread. In fact, the entire scene, the dark cypress planks in the walls of the cottage, the rusted tin roof, the black-green overhang of the oaks and pecan trees, and the warm radiance emanating from the kitchen windows, all made me think of the house where I had lived many years ago with my father and mother.
As soon as I stepped into the house I saw Snuggs resting on the arm of the couch, his eyes shut, his paws tucked under his chest, a red satin bow tied around his neck. I walked into the brightness of the kitchen and stared woodenly at Theodosha, who was lifting a loaf of buttered French bread out of the oven. Behind her, steam curled off a pot of gumbo. Her mouth parted slightly when she saw me, as though I had dragged her away from a troubling thought.
“I fixed you some supper. Hope you don’t mind,” she said.
“Where’s Father Jimmie?” I asked.
“He went to Lafayette. He said he’s probably going to stay over.”
“Is Merchie here?” I said.
“I’m not sure where he is. He’s just out being Merchie. Do you want me to go?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I’m just a little disconnected today.”
She began setting the table as though I were not there. Her hair looked like it had just been cut and shampooed. She wore Mexican sandals and khakis with big pockets and a denim shirt embroidered with roses and stovepipe cactus. In fact, as I looked at her moving about the room, I realized what it was that drew men to her. She was one of those women whose intelligence and élan and indifference to public opinion allowed her to give symmetry and order to what would have been considered chaos in the life of a lesser person.
“Theo, I’d feel a lot better if we could ask Merchie over,” I said.
“I knew you’d say something like that.”
She set a gumbo bowl on the table and stared at it emptily. She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth and walked to within a foot of me. She started to touch me, then folded her arms in front of her, as though she had no place to put her hands. Her breath was cold and smelled of bourbon and orange slices.
“I was going to a meeting today. I had no plans to drink. I swear. I drove twice around the block, then went into a bar and drank for two hours.” She looked up at me desperately. “Dave, I’m seriously fucked up. Nothing I do works.”
She lowered her head and inverted her palms and clasped them around my wrists. She stood on my shoes with her sandals and her stomach touched my loins. I could smell the shampoo in her hair and the perfume behind her ears. She pulled my hands to her sides and held them there. I could feel a thickness growing in me, a dryness like confetti in my mouth. She slipped her arms around my waist and pressed her face sideways against my chest.
“Dave, why didn’t you ask me to marry you?” she said.
“This is no good, Theo.”
“We had fun together. Why did you go away?”
“I was a drunk. I would have made any woman unhappy.”
Her eyes were wet against my shirt. I patted her on the back and tried to step away from her. Then she turned up her face to be kissed.
“I’ll see you,” I said.
“What?”
“I have to go back to the office,” I lied. “I just came home to get something. I don’t even remember what it was.”
Then I left my own house, feeling stupid and inadequate, which was perhaps an honest assessment.
When I returned to the house two hours later she was gone. The kitchen was immaculate, the food she had fixed carted away. I didn’t fall asleep until after midnight. Then I woke at three in the morning and sat on the edge of the mattress, my skin filmed with sweat, my loins like concrete, the darkness creaking with sound. I put my loaded .45 under the pillow and when the sun came up the hardness of the steel frame was cupped in my palm.
Later, I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and milk and sliced bananas on the kitchen table, then heard Snuggs at the back screen. I opened the door for him and he walked to his pet bowl under the kitchen sink and waited for me to fill it with the box of dry food I kept on top of the icebox. The red silk bow Theodosha had tied around his neck was coated with mud. I took a pair of scissors from the dresser in the hallway and snipped the bow loose from his fur. “It looks like Theo’s concern for you was limited, Snuggs,” I said.
Somehow that thought made me feel more comfortable about leaving her and the meal she had prepared for me the previous night. I returned the scissors to the dresser drawer. But before I shut it I glanced down at the box where I kept all the sympathy cards that had been sent to me when Bootsie died. A corner of an envelope stuck out of the pile and the return address on it made me wince inside. On my visit to Theo and Merchie’s house several weeks ago she had expressed her sympathies about Bootsie’s death, but I’d had no memory of her sending a card and had concluded her sentiments were manufactured.
But her card was in the pile and the statements on it were obviously heartfelt. I picked up Snuggs and set him on the countertop and patted his head. “How can one guy’s thought processes be this screwed up?” I asked.
Snuggs rubbed against me, brushing his stiffened tail past my nose, and made no comment.
The phone on the counter rang. I started to pick it up, then hesitated and stared at it, my heart quickening, because I knew who it was, who it would have to be, if he was the obsessed and driven man I thought he was.
“Hello?” I said.
“Is the good father there?” the voice asked.
“No, he’s not.”
“Would you be knowing his whereabouts?”
“No, I don’t. But I recommend you not call here again.”
“Oh, do you now?”
“Mr. Coll, I’m a lot less tolerant about you than Father Dolan. You drag your sickness into my life and I’m going to put a can of roach spray down your throat.”
“I’m the sick one? Two nights ago you kicked the bejesus out of that poor fuck in front of the bar. I’d say you’re a piece of work, Mr. Robicheaux.”
Use the cell phone to call the office and get the line open, I told myself. But Max Coll was ahead of me. “I’m not on a ground line, sir. You needn’t fiddle around with technologies that will serve no purpose. Tell Father Dolan he and I share a common destiny.”
“Are you insane? You’re talking about a Catholic priest.”
“That’s the point. It’s the likes of me who keep him in business. Thanks for your time, Mr. Robicheaux. I hope to meet you formally. I think you might be my kind of fellow.”
He hung up.
“So the guy’s a nutcase,” Clete said at lunch.
I pushed my food away. We were in a place called Bon Creole, a small family-owned cafe that specialized in po’boy sandwiches. It was two in the afternoon and the other tables were empty. “I’ve got another problem, Clete,” I said.
“No kidding?”
“It’s not funny.”
“Look, big mon, Frank Dellacroce’s mother was probably knocked up by leakage from a colostomy bag. He got what he deserved. Stop thinking about it.”
“I’m not talking about Dellacroce.”
“Then maybe you should take whatever it is to Father Dolan. I don’t know what else to say.”
He waited for me to reply. When I didn’t, he widened his eyes and opened his hands, as if to say, What?
I want a drink. Worse than I’ve ever wanted one in my life, I heard a voice say.
Clete’s next remark did not help. “I’m a bad guy to ask for advice. I always handled my problems with a pint of Beam and a six-pack of Dixie, then I wake up the next morning with a Bourbon Street stripper whose idea of world news is the weather channel.” He read the expression on my face and grimaced. “Sorry, Streak. Sometimes I don’t know when to shut up,” he said.
When I got back to the office, Wally, our three-hundred-pound, hypertensive dispatcher, gestured at me from the cage. Long ago every plainclothes in the department had become inured to Wally’s sardonic sense of humor and his comments about our bumbling ways and collective lack of intelligence. But this afternoon he was different. His eyes were evasive, his smile like an incision in clay. “Been to lunch, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. What’s up?”