DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  "The mustaches know how to live, don't they?" Clete said, his tie askew, one arm back on the seat, flipping ashes out the window of the truck.

  "Play it cool on the remarks."

  "Ease up. There're only two rules when you deal with these guys: Don't mess with their broads and don't steal from them. These guys just aren't that complicated. What would a guy like Tony Cardo do if he couldn't deal dope? He'd probably be running a fruit stand. You think a greaseball like that could honestly earn a joint like this?"

  "I'll do most of the talking today, all right, Clete?"

  "You've got a lot of anxiety over nothing, mon. But it's your gig. What do I know?" He flipped his cigarette in an arc into a flower bed.

  A Negro man in a white jacket and black pants walked out the side door of the house and stood on the edge of the drive while we got out of the truck.

  "Mr. Cardo want y'all come out by the pool," he said. "He be with y'all in a minute." He couldn't keep his eyes from glancing sideways at the truck.

  "You like it? Dave might part with it for the right price," Clete said.

  "Mr. Cardo ax you gentlemens if you want a drink," the Negro said.

  "Give me a double Black Jack on ice," Clete said. "What do you want, Dave?"

  "Nothing."

  "You got a bathroom?" Clete said to the Negro.

  "Yes suh, follow me inside."

  I sat in a beach chair under the colonnade by the side of the pool. The bottom of the pool was inset with a mosaic mermaid that glittered with chips of light. The suntanned man on the court was hitting the ball with his back to me, but I felt that he was aware I was watching him through the myrtle trees that grew along the screens. He stayed on the balls of his feet, the muscles in his brown calves and thighs taut and glazed with perspiration, his forehand shot a white blur across the net.

  Clete came out of the side of the house with a highball glass in his hand and sat down heavily in a beach chair next to me.

  "You ought to see the can," he said. "It looks like a pink whorehouse. Erotic art all over the wallpaper, a toilet seat inlaid with silver dollars. The colored guy went in after me and started cleaning the toilet with a brush. Should I take that personally?"

  "Probably."

  "Thanks."

  The man on the tennis court turned off the ball machine and walked across the close-clipped lawn toward us, zipping up the case on his racket. He was truly a strange-looking man. His head was long and narrow, his ears tiny and pressed tightly against the scalp as though part of them had been surgically pared away. His hair grew in gray and black ringlets that were tapered on the back of his neck like the flange of a helmet. His smile exposed his long white teeth, and his chest hair was black and slick with perspiration.

  "Tony Cardo," he said, his hand outstretched like a greeter's in a restaurant.

  "It's nice to see you, Tony," I said. "This is a friend of mine, Clete Purcel."

  "What's happening, Tony?" Clete said, rising up enough from the beach chair to shake hands.

  "I remember you from somewhere," Cardo said to him.

  "You drink vodka Collins," Clete said.

  Cardo pursed his lips together in the shape of a tiny butterfly.

  "You're a bartender in the Quarter," he said.

  "I own the bar."

  "You were in the corps."

  "That's right."

  "We had some words or something."

  "No, I don't have words with people."

  "Yeah, we did. Something about the corps. No, something about 'the crotch,' right?"

  "You got me. I don't argue with people."

  "Who's arguing? But you said something, almost like getting in a guy's face. Then you walked away. I was buying a drink for the gunny."

  Clete shrugged his shoulders.

  "It must be somebody else. I just remember you drink vodka Collins, that's all," he said.

  "Hey, don't sweat it. You're a diplomat. That's good. It means you're a good businessman."

  "I got no beef with anybody, Tony."

  "I like that," Cardo said.

  "Clete was my Homicide partner a few years ago," I said. I watched Cardo's face.

  "What made you change careers?" His eyes smiled as though he were looking at a private conclusion inside himself. The black houseman brought out a tray with a Collins and a bowl of chilled shrimp on it and set it on a circular redwood table next to Cardo's chair.

  "A little trouble in the department, nothing big," Clete said. "I went down to the tropics for a while to get my priorities straight. Then I got into casino security out in Vegas and Tahoe for Sally Dio."

  "Yeah, Sally Dee out of Galveston," Cardo said. "His plane smacked into a mountain out in Montana or somewhere."

  "Yeah, it was too bad. He was a great guy to work for," Clete said.

  "I always heard he was a prick," Cardo said.

  "Well, some people had that opinion, too," Clete said.

  "You're not drinking anything, Dave?"

  "No thanks. Can we talk some business, Tony?"

  "Put on some swimsuits. Let's take a dip," he said.

  "It's a little cool, isn't it?" I said.

  "I keep the water at eighty-two degrees. You'll love it. There're some suits over there in the cottage," he insisted.

  He went into his own house to change, and Clete and I walked across the lawn to a small white stucco cottage that was surrounded with palm and banana trees.

  "He's one slick motherfucker. You won't get a wire into this place, partner," Clete said.

  Inside the cottage we found a cardboard box full of men's and women's bathing suits on top of the bar. Clete started rooting through them and found only one pair that wasn't too small for him, an enormous pair of red boxer trunks with a white elastic band.

  "I bet these belong to that blimp who runs the T-shirt shop," he said. He looked at my face. "It's not funny, Dave. These guys pass around VD like a family heirloom." He went into the bedroom, found a safety pin in a drawer, and began undressing by the bar.

  "He really put you under the microscope," I said.

  "They're all the same, mon. They love to peel back your skin."

  "What do you think all that Marine Corps stuff is about?"

  "Who cares? Figuring out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet."

  I laid my clothes across the back of a couch and slipped on a pair of trunks. Clete poured a glass of Jack Daniel's at the bar and looked at my chest.

  "That's where Boggs popped you, huh?" he said. "Does it give you much trouble?"

  "I'm still weak on the left side. Sometimes it throbs a little in the morning."

  "What else?"

  "What do you mean 'what else'?"

  "Don't try to put on your old partner. You remember when that kid planted a couple of .22 rounds in me? I had the nightly sweats for a long time, mon."

  "It comes and goes."

  "Like hell it does." Then he took a drink and smiled at me. His face looked as big and hard-ribbed as a grinning pumpkin under his porkpie hat. "But don't worry. Before this is over, we're going to cook Jimmie Lee Boggs's hash, I mean sling some serious shit on the walls. You wait and see, ole Streak."

  He winked at me and walked duck-footed to the door, with his drink in his hand, his red trunks askew on his hips, lighting a cigarette.

  "You think he's got any broads around?" he said.

  I took the copy of the Atlantic out of my coat pocket and followed him to the pool.

  Tony Cardo hit the water in a long, flat dive and swam with deep strokes to the diving board, blowing water out his nose, then made an underwater turn and pushed off the tiled side and swam into the shallow end. He raked the water out of his eyes and curly hair and spit into the trough that surrounded the pool.

  "That's a nasty scar on your chest, Dave," he said.

  "A nasty guy put it there."

  "Yeah, I heard about that."

  "He works for you."

  "That's not e
xactly true, Dave. He used to work for some people I do business with. He doesn't now. I don't know where he is. I heard Florida."

  "I wouldn't want a guy like that to blindside me, Tony."

  "You're an up-front guy. But you got no worries on that. Not in this town."

  "The people I represent like the quality of your product, they like the way you do business. They've given me a half million to work with. I want the same quality goods, same price on the key. Can we do some business today?"

  "You cut right to it, don't you?"

  "You're a serious man, you have a serious reputation."

  "You're talking a big score."

  "That's why I'm dealing with you. The word is that the Houston people are undependable."

  "The problem I got sometimes is access, Dave. Or what you might call transportation. The product's out there, but there're a lot of nautical factors involved here, you know what I mean? Something happens to the product out on the salt, a lot of people lose money, a lot of people get real mad."

  "That's the other thing I want to talk to you about. I grew up in the wetlands. I know every bayou and channel from Sabine Pass over to Barataria. I can get it through for you, and on a regular basis."

  "I bet you can," he said.

  But his attention was no longer on me. His arms were folded on top of the trough, and he was looking across the blue-green expanse of lawn and trees at the front porch of his house, where a blond woman in a red dress and a hat was counting the suitcases the houseman was bringing outside. A moment later one of the gatemen walked up the drive and backed a restored 1940s Lincoln Continental convertible out of the garage. It had wire wheels, a deep maroon finish, and an immaculate white top. The gateman and the Negro put the woman's luggage in the trunk. She never glanced in our direction.

  "What do you think of my car?" he said finally.

  "It looks great."

  "Yeah. That's what I think." But his eyes were still concentrated on the woman. "You married?"

  "Not now."

  He continued to stare as she got into the Lincoln and the gateman drove her down the long driveway toward the street. Then his eyes clicked back onto mine.

  "Hey, let me ask you something else. Because I like you. I like the way you talk," he said. "What's your attitude about dealing in the product?"

  "I don't understand."

  "You're an educated man. I want to know what an educated man thinks about dealing in the product."

  "I never saw anybody chop up lines because somebody forced him to."

  "I think that's an intelligent attitude. But I want you to understand something else, Dave. I got lots of businesses. Vending and video machines, a restaurant, nightclubs, half of a trucking company, real estate development out by Chalmette, some investments in Miami. This other stuff comes and goes. Five years from now the in thing might be huffing used cat litter. There's always a bunch of bozos around with money. Why fight the fashion?"

  His eyes looked at the empty drive and the front gate that was closed once again.

  "Excuse me," he said, and raised himself out of the pool, walked dripping to the redwood table, and punched one button on the phone. He put his little finger in one of his tiny ears and shook water out of it. At the end of the drive I saw the other gateman walk to a box that was inset in the stucco wall.

  "Tommy, get some people over here, call up the catering service," he said. "I got some guests here, I want to entertain them right… Don't ask me who, I don't give a shit, get them over here."

  He hung up the phone and looked at me.

  "I live in a place that costs a million bucks, and half the time it's like being the only guy in the fucking Superdome," he said.

  "Before your friends get here, can we agree on a deal of some kind, Tony?" I said.

  "There's some people I bring out here like I order lawn furniture. There's other people I invite because I respect their experience and what's in their heads. Don't hurt my feelings," he said.

  His guests arrived like actors who played only one role, their smiles welded in place, their eyes aglitter with the moment. They were people without accents or origins, as though they had lived on the edge of a party all their lives. But besides their good looks and their late-season suntans, their most singular common denominator was their carefree trust in the walled-in tropical opulence that surrounded them. They smoked dope by the pool, snorted lines off a mirror in the guest cottage, ate chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches from the caterer's tray, with never a sideways glance at gatemen who wore shoulder holsters or a thick-bodied, silent man in cutoffs who waxed an Oldsmobile in the driveway with such a mean energy that his jailhouse tattoos danced like snakes on his naked back.

  Even Clete quickly fell into the ambience, his arms spread out on the tile trough in the deep end, his pale blue canvas hat low on his brow, a twenty-year-old girl hovering within the crook of his arm. Her mouth was red and cold from the whiskey sour she sipped from a glass in one hand, and she laughed at everything he said and balanced herself by cupping his shoulder whenever she started to float away from the pool's edge. I could see her knee rake against his thigh.

  The air was becoming cooler now, and I treaded water to stay warm. It was impossible to get Cardo alone. He sat at the redwood table in a white terry cloth robe, one leg crossed on his knee, smoking a Pall Mall in a gold cigarette holder, while four of his guests sat around him and smiled brightly into his words. I hung from the diving board by one arm and began to think it was better to mark the day off.

  "How do you like being in the life?" a voice said behind me.

  She sat on the diving board that in a light green dress covered with tiny pink flowers. She had tucked her red hair up into a green beret, but one side of it had fallen down on her neck. Her lipstick was bright red, and she wore too much of it, but when she parted her mouth and looked directly at me, she disturbed me and made me keenly aware that there is no safety for the male in either age or pride.

  "What's happening, Kim?" I said.

  "What's happening with you, hotshot?"

  "Like you say, enjoying the life. You don't want to swim?"

  "I think I'll pass. Two nights ago they were screwing in here."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You heard me. On a rubber raft, with the lights on. What a bunch."

  I lifted myself out of the pool and walked to the guest cottage to shower and dress. I heard her laugh behind me. When I came back out she was sitting on a cushioned, scrolled iron chair with her legs crossed. I sat down on the dry mat on the back edge of the diving board.

  "You're a case," she said.

  "How's that?" I said, looking toward the shallow end, where Tony was tapping a beach ball back and forth with two girls.

  "You make me think of a cat that's trying to like sitting on a hot stove," she said.

  "Where did you say you're from?"

  "I didn't."

  "I need to talk to Tony alone. It's hard to do."

  "You're still out for the big score, huh, hotshot?"

  "How about cutting me a little slack?"

  "All you want, babe."

  "Are you his girl?"

  She looked away from me at the trees in the yard, her face cool and sculpted, her hair thick and dark red where it was pinned up on the back of her neck. She touched at an area between her teeth with her little fingernail, then glanced back into my face. Her eyes looked directly into mine, but they were impossible to read.

  "What?" I asked her.

  Still she didn't answer, and instead continued to stare into my face. I took a breath.

  "I think I need to get something to eat," I said.

  "If you want to see Tony alone, he'll be going up to the house soon to check on his little boy. He always does."

  "His little boy?"

  "It's the reason his wife's always taking off. She can't handle it."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Do yourself a favor and go home, Robicheaux."

&n
bsp; She stood up, tucked her hair under her beret, and walked off alone toward the tennis court. A moment later I saw her leaning on her arms against the wire mesh, looking at nothing, her face wan and empty in the shadow of the myrtle bushes.

  She was right about Tony Cardo, though. Ten minutes later, when I was about to signal Clete that it was time to hang it up, Cardo excused himself from his guests and walked across his lawn to a glassed-in sun porch at the back of his house. I went to the side door of the house and knocked. The Negro houseman answered, a polishing cloth in his hand.

  "I'd like to see Mr. Cardo," I said.

  "He be out directly."

  "I'd like to see him inside, please."

  "Just a moment, suh," he said, and walked into the back of the house. Then he returned and unlatched the screen. "Mr. Cardo want you to wait in the library."

  I followed the houseman through a huge, gleaming kitchen, a living room furnished with French antiques and hung with a chandelier the size of a beach umbrella, into a pine-paneled study whose shelves were filled with encyclopedias, sets of science and popular history books, novels from book clubs, and plastic-bound collections of classics, the kind that are printed on low-grade paper and advertised on cable TV stations. The chairs and couch were red leather, the big glass-topped mahogany desk one that would perhaps befit Leo Tolstoy.

  Tony slid open the far door and stepped inside in his terry cloth robe and sandals. Before he closed the door again, I looked out on the sun porch and saw the back of a wheelchair framed against a lighted television screen. The floor around the chair was strewn with toys and stuffed animals.

  "I didn't give you your magazine," I said, and took the copy of the Atlantic out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  "Hey, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it."

  "I have to go, too. I just wanted to tell you I'd like to do business with you, but I have to have something firm. Like this afternoon, Tony."

  "I want you to understand something, and I don't want you to take offense. The house is a family place, I don't do business in it. Call Ray Fontenot tomorrow. We'll work something out. You got my word on it."