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“Jennings shot his own partner on the Atchafalaya? You come up with some novel ideas, Dave.”
“Can you get his jacket?”
“I have it sitting in front of me. I was just going to call you about Purcel. Where is he?”
I had put my foot in it.
Axel Jennings lived uptown in the small yellow bungalow on Baronne in which he had grown up. It had a neat green yard, a stone porch, and an alleyway with palm trees that grew between the garages. The neighborhood was like neighborhoods had been during World War II, places where people cut the grass on Saturday evening and listened to the ball game on radios that sat in open windows. At least that’s what his father had said.
Axel’s father had flown with General Curtis L
eMay on incendiary raids against Japanese targets between the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay’s raids didn’t do any good. It took a second atom bomb to vaporize another city to bring the war to an end. Most civilians, particularly these peace types, didn’t know squat about what went on over there. That’s what Axel’s father had said.
Axel had three loves: firearms, model railroading, and the memory of his father, whose picture in uniform he kept on the mantel.
He was a member at a gun range in St. Charles Parish, and almost every weekend he packed up his boxes of hand-loaded ammunition and his three favorite weapons—his .45 auto, a scoped ’03 Springfield, and the civilian equivalent of the M-14 rifle—and fired them from under a wood shed at paper targets clipped to wires in front of a dirt embankment.
His father used to say marksmanship was simply the coordination of angles with the beat of your heart and the rise and fall of your lungs. The bullet’s behavior was mathematically predictable and was governed by no rules other than physical principles. You simply had to make the weapon an extension of blood and sinew and thought so that the squeeze of your finger created a geometric certainty for your target.
It was all about control and order.
The same way with life, his father had said. People didn’t respect authority anymore. You had to find a leader, a man you could respect, and put your faith in him, just as he placed his faith in you. His father called it a reciprocity of personal honor.
Axel’s sunporch and guest room were covered with electric trains. The tracks ran across floors and tables and sections of plywood screwed down on sawhorses. The tracks wound through papier-mâché mountains and tiny forests, past water towers and freight depots and miniature communities; there were toy brakemen and gandy walkers along the tracks and switches that diverted locomotives past each other at the last possible moment, and warning bells and flashing lights at the crossings.
When Axel cranked up all his trains at once, the smells of warm metal and oil and overheated electrical circuits reminded him of the clean acrid smell of gunpowder at the range.
Two kills with a department-issue M-16, a third kill shared with Burgoyne.
He thought he might feel bad about the first barricaded suspect he popped.
He didn’t. The guy had every opportunity to come out of the building. Instead, he turned on the gas jets and was going to take his child out with him. Just as the guy was about to light the match, Axel, in a prone position on a rooftop, sucked in his breath, exhaled slowly, and drilled a round through a glass pane and nailed him through both temples.
You believed in what you did. You trusted the man you took orders from. And you didn’t look back. That’s what his father had said.
It must have been grand to be around during World War II. Working people made good money and for fun went bowling and played shuffleboard in a tavern and didn’t snort lines off toilet tanks; you walked a girl home from a café without gang bangers yelling at her from a car; blacks lived in their own part of town. Kids collected old newspapers and coat hangers and automobile tires and hauled them on their wagons down to the firehouse for the war effort. The enemy was overseas. Not in the streets of your own city.
Axel’s occasional girlfriend, a barmaid named Cherry Butera, said he’d been depressed since Jimmy Burgoyne was killed in that shooting on the Atchafalaya. He’d taken a couple of vacation days, and he and the girlfriend had driven down to Grand Isle. A storm was tearing up the Gulf and the sky had turned green and the surf was wild and yellow with churning sand.
“There’s a Nazi sub out there. The Coast Guard sunk it with planes in ’42,” he said. “I wish I’d been alive back then.”
“What for?” she asked.
“I would have been there. I would have been part of all that,” he replied.
They drove back to New Orleans in the rain and drank beer in a small pizza joint two blocks from his house. Banana trees thrashed against the side of the building, and the shadows from the neon signs in the windows cascaded like water down Axel’s face.
“Somebody’s following me,” he said.
“You’re blaming yourself because you weren’t there when Jimmy was killed,” his girlfriend said.
He looked at her a moment, then his eyes disconnected from hers and looked at nothing. He peeled the gold and green label off his beer bottle and rolled it into tiny balls.
“I saw somebody outside my window. He was behind us on the road tonight,” he said.
“The road was empty, hon. The bad guys are afraid of you. Everybody knows that.”
“I wish Jimmy was here. I wish he wasn’t dead,” he said.
