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The deputy was a stout, red-haired man with a brush mustache who had been one of the city cops absorbed into the sheriff’s department when the two agencies merged last year. He was a retired NCO and was called “Top” by his colleagues, although he had been a cook in the Marine Corps and never a first sergeant. Top’s admonition about surviving in a bureaucracy was simple: “Make friends with all the clerks and don’t get in the way of a supervisor who wants to be on the links by two p.m.”
“Let me talk to Monarch a minute, will you, Top?” I said.
“Take him home to dinner with you,” he replied.
Monarch was seated in the back of the cruiser, his wrists cuffed in front of him so he could hold a blood-spotted towel to his mouth and nose.
“You going to make it, Monarch?” I said.
“I done tole y’all, I tripped on the curb and busted my face. Ain’t filing no charges. Don’t even remember what happened,” he replied.
Through the back window I saw Helen pull into the parking lot, the reflected image of a giant live oak sliding off her windshield. “You got a history with Slim Bruxal?” I said.
“Who?”
“The guy who remodeled your face.”
“A white guy picked me up after I fell. That the one you talking about?”
“Cute,” I said.
But Monarch was no longer looking at me. His eyes were on Helen, who had walked over to the trash barrel where a deputy had just recovered the nine-millimeter dumped by Monarch’s friend. “I’m ready to go to the hospital. I swallowed blood. I t’ink I’m gonna t’row up again,” he said, pressing the towel to his face.
“Sheriff Soileau might want to talk with you first.”
“I ain’t got nothing to say.”
I straightened up from the passenger window and looked across the top of the cruiser. “He’s all yours, Top,” I said.
Helen came up to me after the cruiser had disappeared down the street. “Looks like you got the cap on it,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” I replied.
“Oh?”
“That tall white kid is the son of a Miami bookie by the name of Whitey Bruxal. I think Whitey Bruxal is the guy who got a friend of mine killed in an armored car robbery twenty years ago. It’s no accident my dead friend’s daughter, Trish Klein, is in this area.”
I saw the connections start to come together in Helen’s eyes. “Whatever the Klein woman’s issues are, they’re federal. Unless she manages to kill somebody in our jurisdiction, I don’t want to hear that name again,” she said.
“One other thing. I got the impression Monarch wanted to get a lot of gone between you and him.”
“His mother was a washerwoman who worked for my father. She also turned tricks at the Boom Boom Room. I used to take him for sno-balls in City Park,” she said. “Funny how it shakes out sometimes, huh, bwana?”
I’D HAD A SLIP from my A.A. program the previous year. The causes aren’t important now, but the consequence was the worst bender I ever went on—a two-day blackout that left me on the edges of delirium tremens and with the very real conviction I had committed a homicide. The damage I did to myself was of the kind that alcoholics sometimes do not recover from—the kind when you burn the cables on your elevator and punch a hole in the basement and keep right on going.
But I went back to meetings and pumped iron and ran in the park, and relearned one of the basic tenets of A.A.—that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably not have it.
Unfortunately the nocturnal hours were never good to me. In my dreams I would be drunk again, loathsome even unto myself, a public spectacle whom people treated with either pity or contempt. I would wake from the dream, my throat parched, and walk off balance into the kitchen for a glass of water, unable to extract myself from memories about people and places that I had thought no longer belonged to my life. But the feelings released from my unconscious by the dream would not leave me. It’s like blood splatter on the soul. You don’t rinse it off easily. My hand would tremble on the faucet.
The dawn always came as a form of release. The gargoyles and the polka-dotted giraffes disappeared in the light of day, and my nightmares burned into a soft and harmless glow, like a pistol flare dying inside a mist.
But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past.
The warning call from Wally, our dispatcher, came in the next day on my cell while I was having midmorning coffee at Victor’s Cafeteria. “Some guy named Whitey Bruxal and a geek wit’ him was just in here to see Helen. I told them Helen was in Baton Rouge. You know these guys?” he said.
“Bruxal is the father of the white kid we busted in the beef at McDonald’s yesterday,” I replied.
“He was seriously out of joint. When I tole him Helen wasn’t here, he wanted to talk to you.”
