by Lee Thomas
She chewed for a moment. “Nah.” Her face pinched, exploded with wrinkles. More chewing and she said, “I think that Oriental girl told me they was going to Baton Rouge. That was a few days back now, and she said it would be a few days. Hope it’s soon. Got no one to play rummy with when that Oriental girl goes away. I don’t suppose you play rummy, young man?”
“No, ma’am. I never learned.”
After smashing her lips together like she was working through a steak, she put her hands on her hips and looked up at the sky. “Funeral weather,” she said, and then turned and yanked open the screen door; its hinges squealed like an injured cat before it crashed closed.
“Thank you,” Butch called, wondering on her hasty departure.
Instead of walking back to Hollis’s place, Butch took advantage of the break in the weather and after returning to the Quarter he followed Burgundy Street to St. Anne, where he made a left and walked toward the river. The city’s residents had emerged from their homes and shops to enjoy the respite. A fat man in an A-shirt stood on a balcony across the street and leaned on the wrought-iron railing, smoking a cigarette and looking at the sky. A plump black woman swept the sidewalk, for no purpose Butch could see but to move the wet around. At the corner of Chartres Street he stopped and glanced over his shoulder, thinking he might return the way he’d come, but the sight of two men who had stopped midway along the block behind him changed his mind. Both men, who now faced one another with their chins down as if in secretive conversation, were slender and wore good suits and hats. They carried umbrellas. One of the men nodded in Butch’s direction and the other shook his head. Hollis’s comments about the corruption in New Orleans, the way it tied back to Chicago’s syndicates, skittered into his thoughts and began to gnaw. What if Lowery had put it together? What if he’d sniffed out the kind of men who would take interest in Butch’s story? The chatting men could have been nothing more than a couple of businessmen out for a late afternoon stroll, or a couple of tourists. They could also be syndicate men or cops—not that there was much difference between the two. Whatever the case, they were putting on a good show, not looking his way, even though they’d clearly been headed toward him only moments ago. Butch faced forward and set off toward the river, walking at a brisk pace until he reached Decatur. The train station stood a short ways down the street. He didn’t have enough cash to go far, but he had enough to get out of town. Should he run, again? Hide? Start all over even if it meant sharing a Hooverville tent for the next ten years? Eventually, he might be able to learn a trade and practice it in some small burg off the syndicate’s map.
All of these thoughts came at once like a swarm of worked-up bees. His paranoia had disturbed the hive, sent the ideas to buzzing. But when the two men came around the corner only a minute after Butch, they were laughing, clapping one another on the back. They tossed glances Butch’s way but the sight of him caused no reaction, not so much as a twitch of recognition. Chattering happily, the two men walked through the doors of a diner, never giving him a second look.
Butch exhaled. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath until it blew from him in a noisy shush. Rubbing the back of his neck, a nervous gesture he’d employed since childhood, he shook his head.
He needed to get Rory on the phone, needed to know if his friend had found the money in Butch’s apartment, needed to get a read on what was happening back in Chicago.
Beneath the roiling black sky, Butch strolled to the end of the block and turned back into the heart of the Quarter. When the rain resumed, he opened his umbrella, but he kept his pace slow and steady, even as the men and women around him dashed here and there, scurrying through gates and doorways to get out of the rain.
• • •
Early the next morning with sweat drying on his belly, Butch slid up on the bed and propped against the headboard. Next to him, Hollis sipped a drink. Butch reached over and took the glass from his friend and emptied the whiskey into his mouth. Then he handed it back for a refill.
“You’ve certainly made yourself comfortable,” Hollis said.
“I am comfortable,” Butch replied. “I wish it could last a while.”
“But it won’t.”
“It might, but the odds aren’t in our favor.”
“The odds brought us together,” Hollis said.
“Rory brought us together because he knew I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”
“I still find it strange you didn’t have any friends or family who’d take you in.” Hollis reached over to put his hand on Butch’s cock. “You’re not such a bad guy.”
Butch chuckled. “Unfortunately, my friends are employed by the people who want me dead, and my family…well, that’s not an option anymore.”
“Something happen there?”
“Something,” Butch said. Having the subject broached made him uneasy. He shifted against the headboard, trying to relieve the pressure on his neck. “I have a sister. We were close as kids.”
“But not anymore?”
“After my career went south because of that Simm business, I found I had a little time off, so I went to visit her. She’d married this guy from town, a kid I went to school with: Myron Huckabee.”
“There’s a winner’s name,” Hollis said.
“Myron was a scrawny kid, and he grew into a scrawny man, but I never thought he was a bad guy. He worked hard. Had himself a job at a lumber mill and seemed to do well by Clara. I’d only seen them a few times since their wedding, and usually it was only for a day or so before I had to get back on the road.
“That last trip, I was there for more than a week, and I still hadn’t figured out where I was going next. Clara seemed to like having me around, and Myron didn’t put up a fuss. We went to the tavern together a few times so he could shoot pool with his buddies and he made it sound like I was a real big shot, even though those days were over.
“That last night, he drank a little too much and when I got him home he started yelling at Clara to make him eggs. I told him to settle down and I’d scramble some up. No reason to bother my sister, waking her and all. But there was nothing rational in that scrawny man. I don’t know if it was the booze or if something had been building up, but he was just nuts. He wanted eggs and Clara had to fix them.
“When she didn’t move fast enough, he hit her. He slapped her across the cheek, and I just stood there. Our father used to beat up on us, but mostly Clara. I think she took a lot of his hate so I wouldn’t have to, and I couldn’t believe she’d gone off and found another man like our dad to marry. But she did. After Myron slapped her, Clara lowered her head and closed her eyes, all calm and resolved, and I realized this was not a rare thing. It was a…I don’t know, a ritual or something. Then Myron hauls off and punches her in the mouth.
“Clara didn’t make a sound.”
Hollis rubbed his palm in a gentle circle over Butch’s stomach. His eyes, saddened but hungry for more of the story, locked on Butch’s face. “What did you do?”
“A few times in my life I’ve lost control. What do they call it? Seeing red? You know, when everything just becomes a blur and you want to know that someone else is hurting. The thing about wrestling is, what I loved about it, was that you couldn’t lose control. You had to stay focused no matter what the other fella was throwing at you. I liked that. I needed it. But with Myron, I saw red. I hurt him real bad.
“When my mind cleared some, I went to Clara, who was still on the floor from Myron’s punch and I held her and told her to pack a bag. I’d take her with me. She didn’t have to stay in that house. But…”
Butch looked at the ceiling.
“She didn’t want your help,” Hollis said, finishing his thought.
“No,” Butch said. “In fact, she slapped me, and she started screaming, telling me I had no right to treat her husband that way. Said I’d abandoned her in Burlington and I had no right to come back and mess with her life. She crawled across the floor to Myron and sobbed over
that scrawny little prick like he was a heroic prince who’d nearly died protecting her honor. I didn’t know what was happening. How could she want that kind of life?”
“Sometimes there’s no figuring it,” Hollis said. “There are folks who get pain and love mixed up. Can’t separate them out.”
“Well, she gave me another good slap when I went over to help Myron up. I didn’t say anything else to her. I drove her and her husband to the doctor’s and then I kept driving. Haven’t heard a word from her since.”
“You miss her?” Hollis asked. He slid his massaging hand up to Butch’s chest.
“Yeah,” Butch said.
She had been the last, the best remnant of his childhood. Without her and his wrestling career, he’d felt wholly adrift from his past—alone, ice-cold empty and alone for the first time in his life. He’d felt that way before he and Hollis had become friends. Now he didn’t feel as though he were drifting. Instead he felt as if he had washed up on an unfamiliar shore in a place where fear was as much a part of the landscape as comfort.
He rolled over and kissed Hollis, hard and insistent. Intimacy served to occupy his thoughts. It shielded him from past and present traumas with physical exertion and narcotic sensation. When he was with Hollis the ugly, hard-edged world receded. Joy helped him forget. More and more, Butch needed to forget.
Chapter 36
Two for the Show
Roger Lennon had no idea he’d shared a train from Chicago to New Orleans with Hayes and Brand. He’d spent most of the trip in his sleeper compartment reading Hammett’s The Glass Key, which he found intriguing, though his thoughts wandered too often to allow any real immersion in the story. The gloom and rain greeting his train in New Orleans came as a surprise. He’d expected sunshine and warm temperatures, but he imagined a lot of things in this city would surprise him. Other than whispers about depravity and the entertainments a soft morality could offer, headlines about Huey Long, and frequent references to jazz music, Lennon had been all but oblivious to New Orleans. He’d prepared as best he could with maps and a tattered guide book. In his notebook he’d written two addresses: one for Hollis Rossington’s home, and the other for the Hotel St. Pierre on Burgundy Street, the closest accommodations he could find to Butch Cardinal’s hideaway.
In a small room that smelled of mold and jasmine, Lennon lay stretched on the bed, the Hammett novel open across his chest. When the rain began to let up, Lennon stood and stretched his back. At the front desk he asked where he might buy an umbrella, and the enthusiastic gentleman with the sparkling grin who had checked him in told him to wait, “Just a quick sec.”
A quick sec after disappearing into the office behind the counter, the clerk reappeared, holding a large black umbrella in his bony fingers.
“One guest’s misfortune is another guest’s boon,” he said happily, handing the thing to Lennon.
He thanked the clerk and left the hotel. By the time he reached the near corner, the rainfall had ended, but dampness hung in the air dense and heavy.
Lennon had a fine sense of direction and he’d memorized the map he’d carried with him from Chicago, so in less than ten minutes he was standing before the gate to Hollis Rossington’s home, peering in through the wrought ironwork at the lush foliage blanketing the walls and spilling from pots. The layout of the property struck him as strange, with the main entrance to the residence being the narrow gate. It was isolating, prisonlike.
Before he rang the bell, Lennon had some decisions to make. He’d come to New Orleans to warn Butch, to give the wrestler the lowdown on where he stood in the world—which was pretty damn low—but he could muck up the works if he didn’t handle this thing right. Rossington had to know something about what was going on, and he wasn’t likely to welcome a stranger in, not if that stranger was asking for Butch Cardinal. He could strong-arm his way through the door, using his police credentials, but that might make matters worse. He didn’t want a ruckus, and he didn’t want to spook Cardinal into running off. Lennon stepped away from the gate and observed his surroundings. Two-story buildings. A lot of these courtyard jobbies. Narrow streets. He might be able to loiter on the corner and keep an eye on things, but there was no place to blend into the scenery, making an extended surveillance of the property a bust. If he were in Chicago he could park a car at the curb and pretend to read the paper, but he didn’t have a car. In no time flat, anyone exiting that gate or coming down one of the intersecting streets would spot him and have plenty of time to turn tail.
Rethinking his plan, Lennon turned and walked back to his hotel. He used the phone in the lobby and asked the operator to connect him with Hollis Rossington’s home. The bell rang a dozen times before he hung up.
Instead of returning to his room, Lennon wandered back into the street. The damp air felt heavier. Soon enough, the rain would return to batter the city in violent sheets, but he felt restless and needed to be in motion. He walked the streets, marveling at the low buildings of the French Quarter and thinking they looked somehow false, like the sets of a play, particularly against the grim, charcoal-gray sky. After an hour he decided he should eat something, and he asked a shopkeeper where he might get some supper. The clerk sent him to an oyster house a block off Bourbon Street. The inside of the restaurant was dark with beams and pillars painted black. It didn’t look particularly clean, and the menu seemed to have been written, at least partially, in code with a number of dishes he’d never heard of before. Since Lennon had never formed a taste for oysters, he questioned the waiter, who recommended a shrimp dish that Lennon couldn’t pronounce. Lennon agreed that that sounded fine. Just before his meal was served a jazz trio began to play in another part of the restaurant. The music had a peppy tempo, but it still managed to sound melancholy. Lennon, who had never heard much New Orleans jazz, found himself lost in the music and enjoying it far more than he would have expected.
He finished his meal and ordered a coffee. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on his chair. The rain marched in, following a roar of thunder that rolled down the street. Hissing and rapping, the rain sounded good with the music, sounded right.
He liked this place. Unlike the joints he frequented in Chicago, the restaurant didn’t make him feel like he was on a stage, being watched, being judged.
Following his third cup of coffee, Lennon decided he had to leave the restaurant. He hadn’t come all the way to New Orleans to eat shrimp and listen to music. He paid his bill, visited the men’s room, and then smoked a last cigarette, standing in the doorway beneath a broad awning that shielded him from the rain.
That was when he saw the two men, men he recognized from Lonnie Musante’s house, men who had questioned him and threatened the lives of his family. Their names were Hayes and Brand.
The two men had just turned onto the street when Lennon flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter. The sight of them was startling to be sure, but Lennon had assumed they would cross paths again, and he was grateful that he’d seen them first. Hayes and Brand shared an umbrella and walked shoulder to shoulder toward him. Engrossed in conversation, neither man noticed Lennon in the restaurant doorway. He slipped back into the restaurant and waited for Hayes and Brand to pass. Once they did, he gave a thirty-second lead and then he followed them through the rain.
Chapter 37
Monsters with Eyes of Blue or Green
If someone had asked Hollis in that moment whether he was happy or not, he would have certainly said, “Yes,” but he didn’t know if it was the contentment of a satisfied man or the bliss of a desperate wanderer seeing the promise of a mirage on the horizon. Butch continued to surprise him, and while most of the surprises had been good ones, they also put Hollis off his balance. At first Butch had condemned the intimacies of men and had done so vehemently. Then he’d thrown himself into the very affections he’d denounced. He seemed insatiable for them. Hollis could understand how this might happen, but the ease with which Butch had adjusted to this change in attitude was unquestion
ably odd. Hollis had been with enough men—warriors against their own needs—that almost no reaction, not even outright violence, would have surprised him. What had surprised him was Butch’s acceptance of the situation. No excuses or accusations. No denial. It was as if he’d lived his life believing the sky was green, arguing it to anyone who might listen, and then one morning rising to discover it was blue and having no discernible conflict over the discovery.
Hollis closed the ledger on his desk. The club would open in thirty minutes. He would shake hands and smile, but he wanted to be at home. He wanted to be in bed with the wrestler. He hated leaving the man for even a handful of hours. Part of this was his fear that Butch’s moral calibration might revert to the conservative in the hours of Hollis’s absence, but mostly it was the feeling—a feeling he hadn’t had in ages—of sharing a bed with a man with whom he genuinely wanted to spend time. He’d never felt that with Lionel Lowery. The kid had been eager and convenient, but never prized, at least not by Hollis.
That wasn’t to say he saw nothing but a pot of gold in Butch. He couldn’t even say their relationship was a good idea. The physical attraction couldn’t be denied. Even for an athlete, Butch’s physique was exceptional. Having a handsome face on top of all the muscle didn’t hurt things either. Granted, Butch’s mind wasn’t as open as some. He constantly needed to know the rules, but his mind obviously wasn’t a tin drum, sealed with welds and rust. When he spoke about the life he’d lost, Hollis felt nothing but misery for him, because Butch had been ground down undeservingly. Of course, this was the epoch of battered humanity. Millions of people around the world had been unfairly diminished. Still Hollis found Butch’s fall from grace heartbreaking, perhaps because it had closely resembled Hollis’s own descent. He felt a unity with the man, but he wasn’t blinded by it. Butch had popped off about magic, and then had shut down tight as a clam. Was that sane behavior? It certainly wasn’t stable. Plus there was the bounty on Butch’s head, not to mention the murder rap. By sheltering the man, Hollis was making himself an accessory to murder and a target. None of which made Butch Cardinal the trophy many would claim for their own.