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“Duh.” She kept walking, furious, wiping her hair out of her face.
I looked inside the limo. Tony was spread across the backseat like a dirigible with a bad leak.
“Tony, baby. What’s the haps?” I said.
“I think your daughter is the product of a busted rubber.”
“I couldn’t say. She’s adopted.”
His portable oxygen bottle was propped on his groin; his face was mottled and sweaty, a piece of dried mucus at the corner of his mouth, his breathing arduous, like a strand of piano wire sawing on a hole in a tin can. “Fuck both y’all, you arrogant cocksucker.”
“A cleaner’s out there, Tony. I think you’re next in line.”
“I shot craps in Reno with Jimmy Fratianno. I ate dinner with Meyer Lansky. A leg-breaker for a certain celebrity gave me trouble once, and I kicked a baseball bat up his ass. I’m making a movie Jimmy Nightingale thought he was gonna make. I got Levon Broussard jumping through hoops. What’s that tell you, wise guy? I got a broomstick up the ass of every one of y’all.”
“Hear that sucking sound?” I said.
“What sucking sound?”
“It’s the ground pulling on you.”
“Yeah? Guys like me live a hundred years and get hanged for rape. Play your mind-fuck games with somebody else.”
I looked up and down his person. “Your fly is unzipped.”
I left him staring down at his lap and walked along the bank in the gloaming of the day, then onto the drawbridge. The air was full of birds, the sky mauve, the bayou bladed by the wind. Far down the Teche, a solitary streak of lightning split the sky and quivered as brightly as gold in the water.
* * *
I HEARD FROM lafayette PD that the .223 shell casings I’d picked up in the Cajun Dome were clean. If the shooter was the same as the killer of the St. Mary Parish deputy and JuJu and Pookie, he probably had an arsenal at his disposal. Whether he’d tried to hit Jimmy Nightingale was debatable. The consequence wasn’t. The story was on the wire services, CNN, FOX, all the networks, and the front pages of newspapers across America as well as overseas. Jimmy was a star, a populist in whom everyone could find something to like. I had to hand it to him.
* * *
SPADE LABICHE LIVED in a rented two-story small house with a balcony and ironwork in the shadow of the drawbridge. At high tide, the bayou was almost in his front yard. He had no neighbors. The flower beds were planted with banana plants and windmill palms and caladiums and hydrangeas. The plaster on the bricks, the rain-washed lavender paint, and the trumpet vine on the balcony’s railing reminded him of his boyhood in New Orleans or, rather, the boyhood he wished he’d had.
Spade had grown up in the Iberville Project on a diet of welfare commodities and a drunk man’s breath. The Quarter was for tourists and homosexual artists. The Iberville playgrounds were the St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park, where Spade and his friends jackrolled any fool who wandered in at night. The Garden District was the other side of the universe.
Spade felt secure in his rented home. Through the front windows, he could see the bayou, the old convent on the far side, the green and red lights smudged in the fog. Behind him, the slope rose to the backside of buildings that were over a century old, the bricks fissured, the wooden storm shutters hanging askew on rusted hinges. No one could approach his house without being detected by his surveillance cameras and motion-activated floodlamps. This was Fortress Labiche. Let the world have at it.
On a muggy Saturday evening, he made a salad and grilled a chicken on his patio and ate dinner inside, first locking all the doors. The light was golden in the sky, a few raindrops striking the windows. He had never seen weather like this. The days were superheated, the nights flickering with heat lightning that promised relief but gave none, the sunrise as swampy as an egg yolk. After he washed his dishes, he turned on the television and took a touch of nose candy and a fe
w hits of reefer and a sip of Scotch on ice. But his chemical accessories didn’t work like they used to. His worries and bad dreams and paranoia seemed to intensify to the point where he feared both solitude and the company of others. He feigned composure during the day and fell apart at night. People wondered why a cop would eat his gun. Try waking up with snakes every morning not because you’re loaded but because you’re not.
After sunset, Spade walked to the bar-and-grill for a drink. But he couldn’t put up with the crowd, at least not tonight. He returned home in the dark and went inside and locked the door, his heart a lump of ice. Maybe he should quit the department on Monday and go back to the Keys, hang out at Sloppy Joe’s and the other joints on Duval, fish for marlin, screw all this Cajun bullshit. Yeah, kick the addictions, live on orange juice and sunshine and lobster tail and get it on with hippie girls who loved sugar daddies with a badge and a gun.
He went upstairs and lay down on top of the sheets in his skivvies. As he closed his eyes, he heard the rain clicking on the roof. Tomorrow would be a better day. Yes, he would quit Monday and eighty-six his woes and rock on down to his old haunts.
In the early A.M., he woke to an odor that made no sense: mayonnaise and ham and tomatoes and onions and bread. Was he dreaming? He sat up in bed, an erection dying inside his shorts. In the red glow of the clock on the nightstand, a man was eating a sandwich, the juice running down his chin. He was wearing cotton gloves and a baseball cap. His limbs looked composed of sourdough. His smile made Spade think of an open wound.
“Hi. My name is Chester,” the man said.
Spade pushed himself up on his elbows. “How’d you get in here?”
“You invited me.”
“I invited you when? Who are you?”
“When people do bad things, they invite me in. I just told you who I am.”
