Heaven’s Prisoners Page 8

  I walked up to Robin's apartment, but as I approached her door a middle-aged, overweight man in a rain spotted gray business suit with an American-flag pin in his lapel came toward me, squinting at a small piece of damp paper in his hand. I wanted to think he was a bill collector, a social worker, a process server, but his eyes were too furtive, his face too nervous, his need too obvious. He realised that the apartment number he was looking for was the one I was standing in front of. His face went blank, the way a man's does when he suddenly knows that he's made a commitment for which he has no preparation. I didn't want to be unkind to him.

  "She's out of the business, partner," I said.

  "Sir?"

  "Robin's not available anymore."

  "I don't know what you're talking about." His face had grown rounder and more frightened.

  "That's her apartment number on that piece of paper, isn't it? You're not a regular, so I suspect somebody sent you here. Who was it?"

  He started to walk past me. I put my hand gently on his arm.

  "I'm not a policeman. I'm not her husband. I'm just a friend. Who was it, partner?" I said.

  "A bartender."

  "At Smiling Jack's, on Bourbon?"

  "Yes, I think that was it."

  "Did you give him money?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't go back there for it. He won't give it back to you, anyway. Do you understand that?"

  "Yes."

  I took my hand away from his arm, and he walked quickly down the stairs and out into the rain-swept courtyard.

  I looked through the screen door into the gloom of Robin's apartment. A toilet flushed in back, and she walked into the living room in a pair of white shorts and a green Tulane T-shirt and saw me framed against the wet light. The index finger of her left hand was wrapped in a splint. She smiled sleepily at me, and I stepped inside. The thick, drowsy odor of marijuana struck at my face. Smoke curled from a roach clip in an ashtray on the coffee table.

  "What's happening, Streak?" she said lazily.

  "I just ran off a client, I'm afraid."

  "What d'you mean?"

  "Jerry sent a John over. I told him you were out of the business. Permanently, Robin. We're moving you to Key West, kiddo."

  "This is all too weird. Look, Dave, I'm down to seeds and stems, if you know what I mean. I'm going out to buy some beer. Mommy has to get a little mellow before she bounces her stuff for the cantaloupe lovers. You want to come along?"

  "No beer, no more hooking, no Smiling Jack's tonight. I've got you a ticket on a nine o'clock flight to Key West."

  "Stop talking crazy, will you? What am I going to do in Key West? It's full of faggots."

  "You're going to work in a restaurant owned by a friend of mine. It's a nice place, out on the pier at the end of Duval Street. Famous people eat in there. Tennessee Williams used to come there."

  "You mean that country singer? Wow, what a gig."

  "I'm going to square what those guys did to you and me," I said. "When I do, you won't be able to stay in New Orleans."

  "That's what's wrong with your mouth?"

  "They told me what they did to your finger. I'm sorry. It's my fault."

  "Forget it. It comes with my stage career." She sat down on the stuffed couch and picked up the roach clip, which now held only smoldering ash. She toyed with it, studied it, then dropped it on top of the glass ashtray. "Don't make them come back. The white guy, the one with the cowboy boots, he had some Polaroid pictures. God, I don't want to remember them."

  "Do you know who these guys are?"

  "No."

  "Did you ever see them before?"

  "No."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes." She squeezed one hand around the fingers of the other. "In the pictures, some colored people were tied up in a basement or something. They had blood all over them. Dave, some of them were still alive. I can't forget what their faces looked like."

  I sat down beside her and picked up her hands. Her eyes were wet, and I could smell the marijuana on her breath.

  "If you catch that plane tonight, you can start a new life. I'll check on you and my friend will help you, and you'll put all this stuff behind you. How much money do you have?"

  "A couple of hundred dollars maybe."

  "I'll give you two hundred more. That'll get you to your first paycheck. But no snorting, no dropping, no shooting. You understand that?"

  "Hey, is this guy out there one of your AA pals? Because I told you I don't dig that scene."

  "Who's asking you to?"

  "I got enough troubles without getting my head shrunk by a bunch of ex-drunks."

  "Make your own choice. It's your life, kiddo."

  "Yeah, but you're always up to something on the side. You should have been a priest. You still go to Mass?"

  "Sure."

  "You remember the time you took me to midnight Mass at St. Louis Cathedral? Then we walked across the square and had beignets at the Café du Monde. You know, I thought maybe you were serious about me that night."

  "I have to ask you a couple of questions before I go."

  "Sure, why not? Most men are interested in my jugs. You come around like a census taker."

  "I'm serious, Robin. Do you remember a guy named Victor Romero?"

  "Yeah, I guess so. He used to hang around with Johnny Dartez."

  "Where's he from?"

  "Here."

  "What do you know about him?"

  "He's a little dark-skinned guy with black curls hanging off his head, and he wears a French beret like he's an artist or something. Except he's bad news. He sold some tainted skag down on Magazine, and I heard a couple of kids were dead before they got the spike out of their arms."

  "Was he muling for Bubba Rocque, too?"

  "I don't know. I don't care. I haven't seen the guy in months. Why do you care about those dipshits? I thought you were the family man now. Maybe things aren't too good at home."

  "Maybe."

  "And you're the guy that's going to clean up mommy's act so she can wipe off tables for the tourists. Wow."

  "Here's the airline ticket and the two hundred dollars. My friend's name is written on the envelope. Do whatever you want."

  I started to get up, but she pressed her hands down on my arms. Her breasts were large and heavy against her T-shirt, and I knew secretly that I had the same weakness as the men who watched her every night at Smiling Jack's.

  "Dave?"

  "What?"

  "Do you think about me a little bit sometimes?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you like me?"

  "You know I do."

  "I mean the way you'd like an ordinary woman, somebody who didn't have a pharmacy floating around in her bloodstream."

  "I like you a lot, Robin."

  "Stay just a minute, then. I'll take the plane tonight. I promise."

  Then she put her arm across my chest, tucked her head under my chin like a small girl, and pressed herself against me. Her short-cropped, dark hair was soft and smelled of shampoo, and I could feel her breasts swell against me as she breathed. Outside it was raining hard on the courtyard. I brushed her cheek with my fingers and held her hand, then a moment later I felt her shudder as though some terrible tension and fear had left her body with sleep. In the silence I looked out at the rain dancing on the iron grillwork.

  The neon lights on Bourbon looked like green and purple smoke in the rain. The Negro street dancers, with their heavy metal clip-on taps that clattered like horseshoes on the sidewalk, were not out tonight, and the few tourists were mostly family people who walked close against the buildings, from one souvenir shop to the next, and did not stop at the open doors of the strip joints where spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests were having a hard time bringing in the trade.

  I stood against a building on the opposite corner from Smiling Jack's and watched Jerry through the door for a half hour. He wore his fedora and an apron over an open-necked sports shirt that was cover
ed with small whiskey bottles. Against the glow of stage lights on the burlesque stage behind him, the angular profile of his face looked as though it were snipped out of tin.

  The weight of the.45 was heavy in my raincoat pocket. I had a permit to carry it, but I never had occasion to, and actually I had fired it only once since leaving the department, and that was at an alligator who attacked a child on the bayou. But I had used it as a police officer when the bodyguard of New Orleans's number-one pimp and drug dealer threw down on my partner and me. It had kicked in my hand like a jackhammer, as though it had a life of its own; when I had stopped shooting into the back of the Cadillac, my ears were roaring with a sound like the sea, my face was stiff with the smell of the cordite, and later my dreams would be peopled by two men whose bodies danced disjointedly in a red haze.

  This district had been my turf for fourteen years, first as a patrolman, then as a sergeant in robbery investigation, and finally as a lieutenant in homicide. In that time I got to see them all: male and female prostitutes, Murphy artists, psychotic snipers, check writers, pete men, car boosters, street dealers, and child molesters. I was punched out, shot at, cut with an ice pick, stuffed unconscious behind the wheel of a car and shoved off the third level of a parking garage. I witnessed an electrocution in Angola penitentiary, helped take the remains of a bookie out of a garbage compactor, drew chalk outlines on an alley floor where a woman had jumped with her child from the roof of a welfare hotel.

  I turned the key on hundreds of people. A lot of them did hard time in Angola; four of them went to the electric chair. But I don't think my participation in what politicians call "the war on crime" ever made much difference. New Orleans is no safer a town now than it was then. Why? Narcotics is one answer. Maybe another is the fact that in fourteen years I never turned the key on a slumlord or on a zoning board member who owned interests in pornographic theaters and massage parlors.

  I saw Jerry take off his apron and walk toward the back of the bar. I crossed the street in the slanting rain and entered the bar just as Jerry disappeared through a curtained doorway in back. On the lighted stage in front of a full-wall mirror, two topless girls in sequined G-strings with gold chains around their ankles danced barefoot to a 1950s rock 'n' roll record. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the turning strobe light that danced across the walls and floor and the bodies of the men staring up at the girls from the bar, then I headed toward the curtained doorway in back.

  "Can I help you, sir?" the other bartender said. He was blond and wore a black string tie on a white sports shirt.

  "I have an appointment with Jerry."

  "Jerry Falgout?"

  "The other bartender."

  "Yeah. Have a seat. I'll tell him you're here."

  "Don't bother."

  "Hey, you can't go back there."

  "It's a private conversation, podna. Don't mess in it."

  I went through the curtain into a storage area that was filled with cases of beer and liquor bottles. The room was lit by a solitary bulb in a tin shade, and a huge ventilator fan set in the far window sucked the air out into a brick alley. The door to a small office was partly ajar, and inside the office Jerry was bent on one knee in front of a desk, almost as if he were genuflecting, while he snorted a line of white powder off a mirror with a rolled five-dollar bill. Then he rose to his feet, closed each nostril with a finger, and sniffed, blinked, and widened his eyes, then licked his finger and wiped the residue off on a small square of white paper and rubbed it on his gums.

  He didn't see me until he was out the door. I caught both of his arms behind him, put one hand behind his head and ran him straight into the window fan. His fedora clattered in the tin blades, and then I heard them thunk and whang against his scalp and I pulled his head up the way you would a drowning man's and shoved him back inside the small office and shut the door behind us. His face was white with shock, and blood ran out of his hairline like pieces of string. His eyes were wild with fright. I pushed him down in a chair.

  "Goddamn, goddamn, man, you're out of your fucking mind," he said, his voice almost hiccupping.

  "How much did you get for dropping the dime on Robin?"

  "What? I didn't get nothing. What are you talking about?"

  "You listen to me, Jerry. It's just you and me. No Miranda, no lawyer, no bondsman, no safe cell to be a tough guy in. It all gets taken care of right here. Do you understand that?"

  He pressed his palm against the blood in his hair and then looked at his palm stupidly.

  "Say you understand."

  "What?"

  "Last chance, Jerry."

  "I don't understand nothing. What the fuck's with you? You come on like a crazy person."

  I took the.45 out of my coat pocket, pulled back the receiver so he could see the loaded magazine, and slid a round into the chamber. I sighted between his eyes.

  His face twitched with fear, his mouth trembled, his hair glistened with sweat. His hands were gripped on both his thighs as though there were a terrible pain in his bowels.

  "Come on, man, put it away," he said. "I told you I ain't no swinging dick. I'm just a guy getting by. I tend bar, I live off tips, I mop up bathrooms. I'm no heavy dude you got to come down on like King Kong. No shit, man. Put away the piece."

  "What did they pay you?"

  "A hunnerd bucks. I didn't know they were going to hurt her. That's the truth. I thought they'd just tell her not to be talking to no ex-cops. They don't beat up whores. It costs them money. I don't know why they broke her finger. They didn't have to do it. She don't know anything anyway. Come on, man, put it away."

  "Did you call Eddie Keats?"

  "Are you kidding? He's a fucking hit man. Is that who they sent?"

  "Who did you call?"

  His eyes went away from the gun and looked down in his lap. He held his hands between his legs.

  "Does my voice sound funny to you?" I said.

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  "It's because I have stitches in my mouth. I also have some in my head. A black guy named Toot put them there. Do you know who he is?"

  "No."

  "He broke Robin's finger, then he came to New Iberia."

  "I didn't know that, man. Honest to God."

  "You're starting to genuinely piss me off, Jerry. Who did you call?"

  "Look, everybody does. it. You hear something about Bubba Rocque or somebody talking about him or maybe his people getting out of line, you call up his club about it and you get a hunnerd bucks. It don't even have to be important. They say he just likes to know everything that's going on."

  "Hey, you all right in there, Jerry?" the voice of the other bartender said outside the door.

  "He's fine," I said.

  The doorknob started to turn.

  "Don't open that door, podna," I said. "If you want to call the Man, do it, but don't come in here. While you're at it, tell the heat Jerry's been poking things up his nose again."

  I looked steadily into Jerry's eyes. His eyelashes were beaded with sweat. He swallowed and wiped the dryness of his lips with his fingers.

  "It's all right, Morris," he said. "I'm coming out in a minute."

  I heard the bartender's feet walk away from the door. Jerry took a deep breath and looked at the gun again.

  "I told you what you want. So cut me some slack, okay?" he said.

  "Where's Victor Romero?"

  "What the fuck I know about him?"

  "You knew Johnny Dartez, didn't you?"

  "Sure. He was in all these skin joints. He's dead now, right?"

  "So you must have known Victor Romero, too."

  "You don't get it. I'm a bartender. I don't know anything that anybody on the street don't know. The guy's a fucking geek. He was peddling some bad Mexican brown around town, it had insecticide in it or something. So he had to get out of town. Then I heard him and Johnny Dartez got busted by Immigration for trying to bring in a couple of big-time greasers from Colombia. But that must be bullshit becau
se Johnny was still flying around when he went down in the drink, right?"

  "They were busted by Immigration?"

  "I don't know that, man. You stand behind that bar and you'll hear a hunnerd fucking stories a night. It's a soap opera. How about it, man? Do I get some slack?"

  I eased the hammer down carefully and let the.45 hang from my arm. He expelled a long breath from his chest, his shoulders sagged, and he wiped his damp palms on his pants.

  "There's one other thing," I said. "You're out of Robin's life. You don't even have thoughts about her."

  "What am I supposed to do? Pretend I don't see her? She works here, man."

  "Not anymore. In fact, if I were you, I'd think about finding a job. outside the country."

  His face looked confused, then I could see a fearful comprehension start to work in his eyes.

  "You got it, Jerry. I'm going to have a talk with Bubba Rocque. When I do, I'll tell him who sent me. You might think about Iran."

  I dropped the.45 in the pocket of my raincoat and walked back out of the bar into the rain that had now thinned and was blowing in rivulets off the iron-scrolled balconies along the street. The air was clean and cool and sweet-smelling with the rain, and I walked in the lee of the buildings toward Jackson Square and Decatur, where my truck was parked, and I could see the lighted peaks of St. Louis Cathedral against the black sky. The river was covered with mist as thick as clouds. The waiters had stacked the chairs in the Café du Monde, and the wind blew the mist over the tabletops in a wet sheen. In the distance I could hear a ship's horn blowing across the water.

  It was eleven o'clock when I got back home, and the storm had stopped and the house was dark. The pecan trees were wet and black in the yard, and the slight breeze off the bayou rustled their leaves and shook water onto the tin roof of the gallery. I checked on Alafair, then went into our bedroom, where Annie was sleeping on her stomach in her panties and a pajama top. The attic fan was on, and it drew the cool air from outside and moved the curly hair on the back of her neck. I put the.45 back in the drawer, undressed, and lay down beside her. I could feel the fatigue of the day rush through me like a drug. She stirred slightly, then turned her head away from me on the pillow. I placed my hand on her back. She rolled over with her face pointing at the ceiling and her arm over her eyes.