Part 31 (1/2)
THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of New Orleans. Not the New Orleans of today but the city where Clete and I had been young patrolmen, in a cruiser, sometimes even walking a beat with nightsticks, at a time when the city in its provincial innocence actually feared Black Panthers and long-haired kids who wore love beads and Roman sandals.
This was before crack cocaine hit New Orleans like a hydrogen bomb in the early eighties and the administration in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., cut federal aid to the city by half. Oddly, prior to the eighties, New Orleans enjoyed a kind of sybaritic tranquillity that involved a contract between the devil and the forces of justice. The Giacano family ran the vice and maintained implicit understandings with NOPD about the operation of the city. The Quarter was the cash cow. Anyone who jackrolled a tourist got his wheels broken. Anyone who jackrolled an old person anywhere or stuck up a bar or cafe frequented by cops or who molested a child got his wheels broken and got thrown from a police car at high speed on the parish line, that is, if he was lucky.
The Giacanos were stone killers and corrupt to the core, but they were pragmatists as well as family men and they realized no society remains functional if it doesn't maintain the appearances of morality.
New Orleans was a Petrarchan sonnet rather than an Elizabethan one, its mind-set more like the medieval world, in the best sense, than the Renaissance. In the spring of 1971 I lived in a cottage by the convent school on Ursulines, and every Sunday morning I would attend Ma.s.s at St. Louis Cathedral, then stroll across Jackson Square in the coolness of the shadows while sidewalk artists were setting up their easels along a pike fence that was overhung by palm fronds and oak boughs. At an outdoor table in the Cafe du Monde, over beignets and coffee with hot milk, I would watch the pinkness of the morning spread across the Quarter, the unicyclists pirouetting in front of the cathedral, jugglers tossing wood b.a.l.l.s in the air, street bands who played for tips knocking out ”Tin Roof Blues” and ”Rampart Street Parade.” The balconies along the streets groaned with the weight of potted plants, and bougainvillea hung in huge clumps from the iron grillwork and bloomed as brightly as drops of blood in the sunlight. Corner grocery stores, run by Italian families, still had wood-bladed fans on the ceilings and sold boudin and po'boy sandwiches to working people. Out front, in the shade of the colonnade, were bins of cantaloupe, bananas, strawberries, and rattlesnake watermelons. Often, on the same corner, in the same wonderful smell that was like a breath of old Europe, a black man sold s...o...b..a.l.l.s from a pushcart, the ice hand-shaved off a frosted blue block he kept wrapped in a tarp.
Traditional New Orleans was like a piece of South America that had been sawed loose from its moorings and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean, until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States. The streetcars, the palms along the neutral grounds, the shotgun cottages with ventilated shutters, the Katz and Betz drugstores whose neon lighting looked like purple and green smoke in the mist, the Irish and Italian dialectical influences that produced an accent mistaken for Brooklyn or the Bronx, the collective eccentricity that drew Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and William Burroughs to its breast, all these things in one way or another were impaired or changed forever by the arrival of crack cocaine.
Or at least that is the perception of one police officer who was there when it happened.
But in my dream I didn't see the deleterious effects of the drug trade on the city I loved. I saw only Clete and me, neither of us very long out of Vietnam, walking down Ca.n.a.l in patrolmen's blues, past the old Pearl Restaurant, where the St. Charles streetcar stopped for pa.s.sengers under a green-painted iron colonnade, the breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain, the evening sky ribbed with strips of pink cloud, the air pulsing with music, black men shooting c.r.a.ps in an alley, kids tap-dancing for change, the kind of moment whose perfection you vainly hope will never be subject to time and decay.
When I woke in the early dawn, with Molly beside me, I didn't know where I was. It was misting and gray in the trees, and out on the bayou I could hear the heavy droning sound of a tug pus.h.i.+ng a barge down toward Morgan City. The ventilated shutters on the front windows were closed, and the light was slitted and green, the way it had been in the cottage where I lived on Ursulines.
”You okay, Dave?” Molly asked, curled on her side under the sheet.
”I thought I was in New Orleans,” I replied.
She rolled on her back and looked up at me, her hair spread on the pillow like points of fire. She cupped her hand around the back of my neck. ”You're not,” she said.
”It was a funny dream, like I was saying good-bye to something.”
”Come here,” she said.
She kissed me on the mouth, then touched me under the sheet.
Later, after I had showered and dressed, Molly made coffee and heated a pan of milk and poured our orange juice while I filled our bowls with Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas. Both Tripod and Snuggs came inside, and I split a can of cat food between the two of them and gave each his own water bowl (Tripod, like all c.o.o.ns, washed his food before he ate it) and spread newspaper on the linoleum to preempt problems with Tripod's incontinence. The mist outside had become as thick and gray in the trees as fog, and I couldn't see the green of the park on the far side of the bayou.
But my problem was not with the weather. I could not get rid of the sense that something bad was about to happen, that an evil medium of some kind, if left unchecked, was about to hurt someone.
All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It's like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he c.o.c.ks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.
What was it that bothered me so much? Loss of my youth? Fear of mortality? The systemic destruction of the Cajun world in which I had grown up?
Yes to all those things. But my greatest fear was much more immediate than the abstractions I just mentioned. As every investigative law officer will tell you, the clues that lead to a crime's solution are always there. It's a matter of seeing or touching or hearing or smelling them. Nothing aberrant happens in a vacuum. The causality and connections wait for us just beyond the perimeter of our vision, in the same way a piece of spiderweb can attach itself to your hand when you grip the undersurface of a banister in a deserted house. The perps aren't smart. They just have more time to devote to their work than we do.
”Lost in thought?” Molly said.
”The deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan are all related. But I don't know if any one of those cases will ever be solved.”
”Time's on your side.”
”How?”
”Down the line, everybody pays his tab,” she said.
”I'm not always so sure about that.”
”Yes, you are.”
”How you know?” I asked.
”Because you're a believer. Because you can't change what you are, no matter what you say about yourself.”
”Is that right?” I said.
”I don't hang around with the B team, troop,” she said.
Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Wally, our dispatcher. ”Got a nine-one-one from Bello Lujan's wife. She said the black man who works for her went out to the stable and found Bello on the flo', inside the stall. She said a horse kicked him. We got Acadian Ambulance on the way.”
”Why'd you call me?”
”'Cause Miz Lujan sounded like my wife does when she tells me to get a dead rat out from under the house. I don't trust that woman.”
”Keep me updated, will you?”
”Why is it every time I call you I seem to say the wrong t'ing? The problem must be me.”
Just before I went out the door, the phone rang again. ”Here's your update. Acadian Ambulance just called. Ole Bello won't be posing wit' the roses for a while. Helen went to New Orleans, so you want to take over t'ings?” he said.
”Will you get the crackers out of your mouth?”
”If the guy blew his nose, his brains would be in the handkerchief. That's the way the paramedic put it. He says it wasn't done by no horse, eit'er. That clear enough?”
THE EMERGENCY VEHICLES parked by Bello's stable still had their flashers on, rippling with blue, red, and white light inside the mist. I stooped under the crime scene tape and walked down the concrete pad that separated two rows of twelve-by-twelve stalls. Koko Hebert was already on the job-gloved, furrow-browed, morose, his gelatinous girth like curtains of fat hanging on a deboned elephant. In the gloom of the stable he kept turning his attention from the stall to the sliding back doors, both of which were pushed back on their tracks. Out in the pasture, a sorrel mare was eating in the gra.s.s, one walleye looking back at the stable.
Bello Lujan lay on his left side in the stall. The floor of the stall was comprised of dirt and sand, overlaid with a layer of straw. The wound in the back of Bello's skull was deep and tapered and had bled out in a thick pool on the straw. His eyes were open and staring, his face empty of expression, in fact, possessed of a serenity that didn't fit the level of violence that had been done to his person. A bucket of mola.s.ses b.a.l.l.s was overturned in the corner of the stall. I suspected he never saw his a.s.sailant and perhaps, with luck, he had not suffered, either.
”You got a weapon?” I said.
”It's outside, in the weeds. A pick with a sawed-off handle. The black guy who found him says the chain was down on the stall and the sorrel was out,” Koko said. ”There're some tennis-shoe impressions on the concrete. Watch where you walk.”
”How do you read it?” I asked.
”Bello went into the stall with the mare and somebody came up behind him and put it to him long and hard.”
”What do you mean, long and hard?”
”That hole in the back of his head isn't the only one in him. He took one in the rib cage and one in the armpit. Take a look at the slats on the left side of the stall. I think Bello bounced off the boards, then tried to get up and caught the last one in the skull.” Koko laughed out loud. ”Then he got s.h.i.+t on by the horse he was trying to feed. I'm not kidding you. Look at his s.h.i.+rt.”
”Why don't you show some respect?” I said.
Koko coughed into his palm, still laughing. ”Do you ever get tired of it?”
”Of what?” I said.
”Being the only guy in the department with any humanity. It must be tough to be a full-time water-walker,” he said.
”Hey, Dave, come see a minute,” Mack Bertrand said from the back entrance. He had arrived shortly before I did and had done only a preliminary survey of the crime scene. A camera hung from his right hand.