“I didn’t tell them I was a cop,” I said.
Kittrel laughed bitterly. “They knew, believe me. This bunch of pissants wouldn’t arrest anybody without running them first. They’re afraid they might accidentally haul in the Big Mogul and get themselves in trouble.”
“If they ran me, why did they pull me in after they found out I was a cop?”
“Because they were repaying a favor to whoever snitched you off. Or maybe they were getting him in their debt for future use. That’s the way it works here.”
“Nice town,” I said.
“Corrupt as hell,” he said. “Makes my job easy, though. And lucrative. Crime in this country is an industry. Haven’t you noticed? It keeps all sorts of folks eating good. Cops, judges, attorneys, bailiffs, clerks…You name it.”
The wrecker service yard was five blocks down from the police station. Kittrel screeched up in front of the office in a shower of gravel and leaped from his car. By the time Nell and I stepped out on the other side, he’d shown the paperwork to the attendant and gotten his okay to pick up my deVille.
“I’ll have to come by and pay you tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t have my checkbook with me.”
He shook his head. “Forget it. There’s no way I’d charge one of Nell’s friends for something this simple. I’m just pleased to meet you.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Completely. I’m going to make a couple of phone calls and this business is all going to vanish. Count on it.”
“Then I’ll have to buy you a drink someday,” I said.
“That I can do. We’ll trade war stories.”
After we shook hands, he jumped back in his car and was gone in a rattle of gravel. I turned to Nell. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it. Maybe you can do the same for me sometime.”
“You got it if you ever need it.” We stood there grinning at one another for a few seconds, then burst out laughing. “Can you believe it?” I asked. “I was on my way home to call you and see if you wanted to go to dinner tonight.”
“You silver-tongued devil,” she said. “I’ll never swallow a story like that. ...”
“No, really—” I began.
She laughed again and slipped her arm in mine. “Oh, you’re definitely taking me to dinner tonight, whether you were planning to or not. That’s why I went ahead and got dressed while I was waiting for Vernon to get through in court.”
I’d noticed when she came in the police station that she looked great and wondered if she had something in mind. She wore a pair of black wool slacks, a gray silk blouse and a dark green blazer, and it all looked like it belonged on the cover of Vogue.
We walked over to my car, and I opened the passenger side door for her. “Where to?” I asked.
She looked up at me searchingly for a few seconds, a serious expression on her face like she was trying to decide something. “Out to my aunt’s house,” she said softly. “I need to pick up a few things.”
It turned out to be one of the oldest homes in Biloxi. Built before the Civil War, it sat only a few blocks from Beauvoir, the seaside mansion where Confederate president Jefferson Davis spent his declining years. Aunt Lurleen was a short, fat, fussy old lady with scads of money and a manner of dress that made you think of talcum powder and ceiling fans turning slowly in well-shaded rooms. The house itself was a museum of period furniture and polished wood that smelled of lavender, and out of the corner of your eye you always seemed to catch a fleeting glimpse of uniformed black maids scurrying off somewhere into the gloom with feather dusters in their hands.
When Nell introduced us, her aunt twittered and offered her hand, examining me all the while through the various lenses of her trifocals. When we started up the great curved stairway, she said, “Nell, honey…You’re not taking that young man up to your room, are you?”
“Yessum, I am,” Nell said.
“But Nell, it doesn’t look very nice to have a gentleman in your bedroom.”
“Then don’t look, dear,” Nell replied softly and gave her aunt one of her glorious smiles.
As we ascended the stairs, I glanced back to see the old lady where she stood at the base of the stairs, gazing upward, her eye-lids fluttering with gentle, well-bred alarm. Aunt Pitty-Pat rides again.
Nell’s bedroom was about what I’d expected—gray damask wallpaper and a huge four-poster canopy bed. The bed was neatly made, and not a thing in the room was out of place except for a dark blue silk robe tossed casually over the end of the bed.
She steered me towards an odd sort of armless lounge chair and sat down in front of her dressing table. After doing a few things with her makeup, she rose to her feet and pulled an alligator-skin overnight bag off the top shelf of her closet. The blue silk robe and a few items from her dresser drawers went inside it, along with a traveling makeup kit. “That’s it,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Aunt Lurleen still waited gaping at the bottom of the stairs. “I won’t be home until tomorrow morning,” Nell told her. “I’m spending the night with a friend who lives down Beach Boulevard a ways.”
“Well, if you think it’s all right...” the old woman began uncertainly.
“But of course it will be, darling,” Nell said, and kissed the old woman on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Aunt Lurleen turned to me, a dubious expression on her face. “Well, it certainly was a pleasure to meet you, sir,” she said.
“The pleasure was all mine, ma’am.”
“And Nell said you are a… ?” she asked, leaving the question mark hanging in the air like a balloon.
“I don’t believe she said,” I replied politely. “But I’m a retired lawman from Texas.”
“Oh, my…” Her eyelids fluttered once more. “And your name was?”
“Manfred, ma’am. Manfred Webern. But my friends call me Tush Hog.” “Oh, my!!”
“I shouldn’t have done that to her,” I said sheepishly once we were in the car. “I think the devil made me do it.”
“She’ll live,” Nell responded with a grin. “And she’s not quite as daffy as she seems. In fact, she can manage that money of hers as well as most New York investment counselors could.”
“Really?” I asked with surprise.
“You better believe it. Last year a banker in town cut back one of her CDs a quarter point at rollover time without telling her. She called him out here, and by the time he left she’d chewed his tail bloody. He later said it was one of the worst experiences of his life.”
“That’s a great story,” I said.
“She’s a great old lady. I hope I have her kind of guts when I’m her age.”
We went back to my motel room so I could shower and change. Nell sat propped up in bed and talked to me through the door while I shaved and made myself marginally presentable. “Where do you want to eat?” she asked as I came in the bedroom pulling on my tweed sport coat.
“Beats me. It’s a little early anyway.”
“That’s why I asked,” she replied. “There’s a great Cajun place called Balfa’s about an hour down the coast if you feel adventurous.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
Seven
It was an hour down to the restaurant and an hour back. In between lay one of the most memorable interludes of my life. It was a Cajun place to end all Cajun places, and we both ate too much. We hadn’t even gotten seated when the kitchen door flew open and a tall, thick-bodied man of about fifty with a hatchet nose and graying black hair emerged and headed quickly toward us. Scooping Nell up in his arms, he swung her around and around, and said, “Hey, chérie! When you gonna marry me?”
“You’re already married, Walter,” she said laughing merrily. “And you’ve got four kids.”
“No matter! We jest go to Utah and join the Mormons and we all be happy!”
When he finally put her down, she introduced him as the owner, Walter Balfa. Like many Cajuns I’d met, he seemed to pulsate with a hap
py inner energy that was infectious. He shook my hand, winked, then called the waitress over and told her to give us extra-good service.
“What’s good tonight, Walter?” Nell asked.
“It’s all good, chérie. As always. But be sure to have a little gumbo.”
We each ordered a cup of gumbo as an appetizer, and finally settled on shrimp Creole for our entre. The gumbo turned out to be at least half fresh crabmeat. We quickly polished it off with hot cornbread muffins, then our salads came and we ate for a while in silence.
“Want to hear a true story about Jasper Sparks?” Nell finally asked. “He’s got a Cajun connection too.”
“Sure, go ahead,” I said.
“I heard this tale a while back, and the man I heard it from wouldn’t be telling it unless he knew it really happened. About five years ago Jasper was on trial for burglary in a little town down in Cajun country barely big enough to have a courthouse. The case against him was pretty solid, but he had no scruples about intimidating jurors. He’d done it before, and he’d do it again if he could. As it happened, there was a guy named Harvey Doucet who got picked for the jury. He came from a big family.…Half the people down there in that town are named Doucet, it seems like. So the night after the trial started, one of Jasper’s running buddies goes to Harvey Doucet’s house and tells Harvey he better hang the jury in Sparks’s favor or they’re going to do something bad to his kids. Real bad.
“Now, Harvey Doucet was a naturally hardheaded sort of fellow, and he didn’t like the idea of caving in to these people. So for advice he went to his granddaddy, old Papa Doucet, the clan patriarch. Papa called a family meeting that very night to decide how to handle the problem, and a decision was made.
“The next evening one of Harvey’s cousins came into this little café where Jasper was eating supper. He went right up to Jasper’s table, and as soon as he had his attention, he says, ‘You remember that frien’ of yours you sent to talk to my cousin Harvey? Well, he fell in the bayou ‘bout four o’clock this afternoon and the alligators et him all up except for this ear. I thought you might want it.’ Then he pulled a human ear out of his pocket and dropped it right in Jasper’s gumbo.”
She had my attention. “You’re joking,” I whispered.
She shook her head. “Jasper looked around. There were about a dozen people in the little café that night, including a deputy sheriff, and they were all staring straight at him. Right then he noticed something he hadn’t been aware of before. They all looked like they were blood relations, every one of them, including the lawman.”
“The cop actually saw the ear?” I asked.
She nodded. “That’s right. And so did everybody else in the place.”
“How did things go at Jasper’s trial?”
“Jasper wisely backed off of Harvey Doucet and got five years in Angola, three of which he served. But you’re still not asking the right question.”
“Which is?”
“The name of the town,” she said with an impish grin.
“All right, I’ll bite. What was the name of the town?”
“Doucet.”
I rolled my eyes in disbelief. “Please. Give me a little credit. You’re just teasing me.”
“I swear I’m not. I’m telling you the story just as it came to me. Besides, later on I asked Jasper if it was true and he admitted it.”
“But whatever happened to Harvey Doucet’s cousin?”
“You met him a few minutes ago,” she said and nodded toward the doorway. “In fact, he cooked that gumbo you just ate, but I don’t think he put any ears in it this time. ...”
We took our time coming back and rolled into Biloxi a little after eight. For a while we drove around town, zigzagging back and forth through the old residential district I’d seen the day before. But this time it was like a travelogue with Nell filling me in on the stories and gossip about the families who’d lived there. Biloxi is a coastal town like Galveston and Savannah and Charleston where the Old South mixed and mingled with a seafaring culture that dates back to the Phoenicians. A place of white beaches and palm trees; of antebellum mansions and tough commercial fishermen; of shrimpers and debutantes; of ancient live oaks and hanging shrouds of Spanish moss; of magnolias and moonlight and sin. It’s an old town, one that’s cosmopolitan for a place its size, with large communities of Yugoslavs and Italians whose ancestors arrived around the turn of the century. Throughout much of its history the city and county governments have been corrupt to the core. Consequently, local politics have swung back and forth between periodic reform impulses and a balmy, live-and-let-live attitude that allows the strip clubs and gambling joints to flourish with impunity. Aside from the air base, its major industries are seafood, tourism, and vice.
Like New Orleans, it has an enticingly wicked flavor about it, as though it were a place where people come to shed their inhibitions and be what they were before the moralists and politicians got their hooks into them. Where they come to satisfy their less respectable appetites and give rein to a few of their darker urges. And I was beginning to like it.
After about a half hour Nell asked, “Want to go see who’s at the Gold Dust? I could use a drink.”
“Thought you’d never ask,” I replied.
The place was nearly full. A strip show had just ended and the waitresses and the B-girls were working the crowd hard. I guided Nell back toward the corner booth. When we were halfway across the room Jasper Sparks saw us and punched one of his buddies. Soon everybody at the table was looking our way. Sparks began chanting loudly, “Tush Hog! Tush Hog! Tush Hog!”
Obviously the story of my arrest had hit the Gold Dust. Soon the other patrons, many of whom were half-drunk anyway, picked up the chant, and before long the whole room was rocking. “Tush Hog!! Tush Hog!! Tush Hog!!”
“Looks like your fame precedes you,” Nell whispered in my ear.
Finally the din died down. The booth was full, but a waitress quickly produced two chairs for us. Sparks and his friends always got first-class treatment at Lodke’s places. Weller and the little whore were both absent, but the tall girl was there, as were two men I hadn’t seen before.
“Behold!” Sparks said. “The great outlaw has been sprung.”
“How’s it going, Jasper?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be better. Do you know these guys, Hog?” he asked me, nodding toward the two men.
I knew who they were from flyers, but I acted like I didn’t and shook my head.
“This is Freddie Ray Arps,” he said, pointing at a beefy, bald-headed individual of about fifty who sat just on the other side of the tall blond whore. “And this big old boy over here at the corner is Luther Collins. They are good people.”
I nodded and shook hands with both men. I knew that Arps was a competent safe burglar and bootlegger who’d once been part of the old State Line mob that operated in McNairy and Alcorn Counties up along the Mississippi-Tennessee border. At one time he’d owned a half interest in one of the clip-joint motels in the infamous Drewery Holler on U.S. 45 just south of Corinth. His partner in that endeavor had been a particularly toxic moonshiner named Otis Finnigan who’d gone to the Mississippi death house for murdering a man over a pint of bonded whiskey worth maybe three dollars. Current bulletins said Arps was dabbling in cocaine, which was just then becoming popular.
The other man I’d heard stories about for years but never met. Luther Collins, universally known as Lardass, was one of the oddest-looking individuals I’d ever encountered. Sitting impassively there at the table he resembled nothing less than the Great Pyramid at Giza. He had to be an authentic glandular case, a man with a butt that was at least three feet wide and a short, stumpy torso that tapered upward past almost nonexistent shoulders to a neckless, pointed head that was crowned by an unruly thatch of straw-colored hair. One eye was situated about a half inch higher than the other in his head, and both peered out at the world through a pair of black-rimmed glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottles.
I’d read a number of Traveling Criminal sheets on him over the years, and I knew that he was one of the South’s most skilled car thieves. In the past decade he’d stolen literally hundreds of high-dollar vehicles, and it was said that he could slim-jim a door and pop an ignition lock as fast as most people could get in and start the car with the key. He also had several armed robberies to his credit, and the previous year his name had been mentioned in connection with the savage torture slaying down in New Orleans. As Nell later remarked, he was “deep freaky.”
“Everybody says you’ve had a few legal troubles here lately, Hog,” Sparks remarked.
“Whazzat?” Collins asked, his asymmetrical eyes bright and goofy behind his thick lenses.
“Why, didn’t you hear?” Sparks asked. “A couple of Biloxi’s finest nailed ol’ Hog this afternoon on an illegal weapons charge. Seems he was carrying a piece right here on the streets of this law-abiding little city.”
“I’m shocked,” Arps said. “I truly am.”
“No big deal,” I told them with a laugh. “Vernon Kittrel says he can get it dropped.”
“Kittrel is one bull shyster, man,” Sparks said. “You got the right guy. He knows more law than the law allows.”
Everybody but the blond nodded in sage agreement. She was so blitzed on something she hardly knew where she was. The waitress came by and I ordered a scotch and Nell asked for a brandy. I told her to bring everybody else at the table a drink and put it on my tab.
“Did you know Kittrel before you hired him, Hog?” Sparks asked. “Or did you just call him because of his rep?”
“I knew his reputation, but I didn’t think to call him. Actually, I phoned Nell and she brought him in.”
“Hey, that’s right,” Sparks said to Nell. “You and Vernon were in law school together. Right?”
I had to play the part or else she’d know I’d checked her out. And that was the last thing I wanted. “Law school?” I asked, looking at her and raising my eyebrows.
“Correct, Hog,” Jasper said. “Our Girl Nellie is quite a barrister herself. Only she worked the other side and persecuted innocent folks like me.”
The Sweet and the Dead Page 5