by Tom Corcoran
“Person-to-person from the doghouse,” I said.
“No shit.”
“Where do I start?”
“I’m not in a position to script your futile apology. You can start by jumping off the roof at La Concha.”
“Did you have as much fun as I did?”
“Tell me again about the thing between you and the reporter.”
“My love life for the past six months consists of our night together.”
“Right. And the nameless woman who was shot off your bike failed to rub anything off on you.”
“Right.”
“And, at the café, there’s another woman, your friend’s wife, your newest houseguest. Then, last night, I come by on my bike, the Jeep is at your place.”
“Are you keeping a watch on my house?”
“I had a bottle of wine with me. Stupid me had romantic intentions.”
“Even though I had a houseguest?”
Huge silence. “I was hoping she’d found a motel. No sign of the suspect?”
“No sign of the suspect. Look, I’ve been rude. I’ve also been preoccupied.”
“No need to explain. Get back to me when you can.”
“That’s one reason I’m calling. I’m out of town for a day or two. I’m leaving in an hour, the only plane I could get. I’d like to see you as soon as I get back.”
“Your pal Liska got the rug pulled out from under him.”
“I already got visited by a green-and-white.”
“He acts like he expected it to happen, but it’s hit him like a belly punch. Can I ask where you’re going?”
“It doesn’t involve another woman, I assure you.”
Dead silence. Then: “I don’t have to know. I was just making talk. What you do, women or no women, is your business.”
“I want the part with women to be yours. I want you to be it. How about dinner when I get back? Tomorrow, or lunch the next day. A bowl of conch chowder at Margaritaville.”
Another silence. Then: “We’ll see. Thanks for the call.”
I hung up and the phone rang. How did it know?
Kim said, “You left the restaurant with a new friend the other night.”
She meant Abby, the night I met her. “Friend of a friend.”
“You get in trouble over it?”
“Why would I get in trouble?”
“She had a friend, too.”
“How so?”
“Right after you came into Louie’s, a guy walked up from the deck and sat at my bar inside. He sipped a Courvoisier and stared out the window. When you and the lady took that cab with your bike on the trunk rack, he went out and took the next taxi. I got the impression he wanted to follow you.”
“It’s possible.”
“I even called your house. I got your answering machine. I figured you’d gone to another restaurant. I know how you complain about the food prices at Louie’s.”
The non-message on my machine, while Abby was in the shower.
“I would’ve left you a warning, but then you might have been home, doing something that would make it hard to answer your phone. I didn’t want to broadcast the fact that I was worried about you. Then I forgot about it until two hours ago, when I saw that lady walk in.”
“Alone?”
“Near as I could tell. She shot the breeze with Alain for a while, then left.”
I thanked Kim for the call, dialed Sam’s number, woke him from a nap. I asked him to put up Claire for the night so she wouldn’t have to stay in my house alone. I packed a nylon computer case with my shaving kit, a couple extra shirts, two pair of skivvies, and the small zoom-lens idiot-proof camera that, twenty-four hours earlier, I had neglected to return to its hiding spot. I walked up to Carmen’s to beg a ride to the airport.
With Maria in the car, Carmen and I chose not to review our earlier talk; our hypothetical speculation. Carmen got out of the car at the airport to give me a hug and a kiss and the simple admonition “Be careful.”
The flight crossed Florida Bay toward Naples, then traced the coastline past the western Everglades that, four decades ago, had been surveyed and subdivided for development. There’d been no takers. The developers had gone broke. Nature one, encroachment zero. It happened too seldom. Nearing Orlando, the pilot alerted us to the fact that we were flying over Lakeland. The darkness made it difficult to appreciate the scenery. It must have been their daytime speech. I could see a ten-mile, northsouth string of streetlights intersected by a five-mile, east-west business strip. A cruciform glow rising from the central Florida landscape. Lightning danced in the distance.
I took a cab from the Orlando airport to a classic no-tell motel called the Citrus Blossom Suites. The ten-foot chain-link fence around the parking lot gave me my first warning. The key deposit gave a second warning. I felt too tired to argue, too wiped out to run off in search of a decent place. I needed a pillow. Throw in a shower, I’d be overjoyed.
I would regret my decision. Efficiencies only, a kitchenette with a two-burner stove, a sink the size of an ice bucket, towels that felt like absorbent sandpaper, art prints of spindly herons in Dollar General frames, one Formica table. Smells of dirt, mildew, old soap that had failed to eradicate dirt and mildew, a musty bedspread. The plumbing would provide nonstop, all-night sound effects: creaking and screeches from pipes and neighboring faucets. Abby Womack, the night I’d met her, had said that her motel room smelled like fifteen years’ worth of roach spray and Lemon Pledge. I pictured the motel owners, out back each morning, mixing a noxious maintenance brew in a fifty-five-gallon drum. On my way back to Key West I would track down the ticketing agent and strangle him with the cord to his goddamn headset.
I risked a four-minute walk to a convenience store for a can of beer. The poor man’s sleeping pill. Killer selection: fifteen versions of Budweiser and ten different brands of malt liquor. Cheese snacks, bear claws, sugar bombs, chips. I paid for a plastic container of Sprite and a quart of Busch Light, then called home from a coin phone in front of the store. A message from Claire: “Sam said he told you about our idea. Marnie’s hot after something, and I’m lukewarm on the trail. I may have to fly back to Chicago for a day. Good luck, amigo.”
I woke to clumping footfalls in the corridor, smokers’ morning hacks and sneezes, out in the darkness a dozen pickup trucks starting, revving and slamming and departing—migratory roofing and construction crews off to a day’s work. I’d slept lightly, much as I might have napped aboard a bus.
Just before seven A.M. I reflected on another subliminal thorn that had kept me from solid sleep: Tazzy Gucci’s mention of Omar Boudreau as his “former employee.” When had rat-faced Omar been Makksy’s employee? And when had his status shifted to “former”?
Was Tazzy Gucci’s invitation to “talk about it on the sidelines” a ploy to remove me from Key West? Or a ploy to remove me?
I should have left written instructions: I wanted a sax-trumpet combo to play at my funeral.
18
A gray morning in New Orleans, a choppy landing into a south wind, dark, wet streets below, backed-up traffic. Reason for hope: a slim pocket of blue sky just west of Lake Pontchartrain. The commuter plane halted outside Gate D-4A. Fifteen of us puddledodged to the concourse access, the others pissed at not having been delivered to a telescoping chute. Key Westers have no such modern luxury, tough pioneers we are. Come on, people. A light breeze, misty rain. It’s eighty degrees out here. An executive-rype with his arm in a shoulder-to-thumb cast having no fun with his briefcase and umbrella. A woman who’d employed the spatula makeup method looked around sternly as if it were law: anyone tolerating the outdoors was socially deficient.
Inside, opposite the ticketing kiosk, a vendor’s cart, a seven-foot double hot dog on wheels, extra mustard, a tall yellow-and-red umbrella. The middle-aged concessionaire in a red hat talking to himself, unhappy with the conversation’s progress. Lucky Dogs, indeed. Only the lucky can afford a four-dollar-twenty-five-cent tube stea
k. No matter. I’d just finished ComAir’s condensed version of breakfast. I searched for a pay phone to call Tazzy Gucci, found one in an echo cavern, under the arched ceiling of the airport’s main hall. Gleeful jazz greats smiled down from a massive mural. So happy to play the blues. Toddlers wailed as Tazzy—calling himself Ernie Makksy—barked at me with his new-sounding Louisiana accent.
“You shoulda called us leaving Orlando. We‘da picked yo’ ass up in a damn Town Car, partner.” He made it sound like “Town Caw, pawdno.”
“I don’t mind a taxi.”
“I got one thing I gotta do, down on the Quarter. Then we meet and eat. Tell your cabdriver you comin’ to Guy’s Po’-Boys, corner of Magazine and Valmont. That’s Uptown. He gonna come down Carrollton and Claiborne to Jefferson. You pass the college signs up St. Charles, past the Audubon Zoo, that man gone the wrong way. Make him U-turn, turn around, come back. You get to Napoleon, all them dentist office and churches and the Rite-Aid, you gone too far again. Don’t you know, that cabdriver can’t find shit. See you in thirty minutes.”
I called the pulse of my life. Beverly, from Dr. Thurman’s office, had left a message chiding me for missing yesterday’s teeth-cleaning session. Would I care to reschedule? And Liska said: “We need your negatives to match the Chloe Tucker murder to an artist’s rendition of the cemetery murder scene. They’re checking out footprints and cigarette stubs. They’ll probably bring in some Montana trackers to look for grizzly dung piles. Call me ASAP.”
No mention of the Omar case, but Liska’s laugh, for a moment, reinstated. It would not please him to learn that I was out of the state, unable to deliver negs ASAP, or even tomorrow morning. I realized I’d forgotten to order a set of Chloe prints for Sheriff Tucker.
I wove past Baggage Claim to get a taxi, almost suffocated on fumes in the Ground Transportation tunnel. First in line was an older cab, duct tape across the dashboard and the steering wheel hub, Four-Forty brand climate control. Four windows down at forty miles per hour. The rear seat upholstery was in good shape for a veteran hack. The owner must have pulled a fresh seat base out of a junkyard sedan. Billboards alongside the airport exit road announced happening Crescent City attractions: the House of Blues; Champs Collision Center; the Bubba Gump Restaurant in the French Quarter; three gambling boats. The storm had departed, but swollen bayou air blew in the cab’s windows, dampened the seat next to me. My shirt looked like I’d showered in it.
I impressed the driver by recognizing the Neville Brothers on the radio. We shared trivia, compared the Nevilles and the Heters. A WWOZ announcer, a sweet-sounding energy source named Brown Sugar, told us: “I made a deal with my conscience. If my conscience wouldn’t bother me, I wouldn’t bother my conscience.”
I needed to subscribe.
I had been to New Orleans years before, to visit an old friend. We’d driven around town in the guy’s ancient Chevy station wagon. The man had painted it military olive drab, called it his Urban Assault Vehicle. Great in traffic: pick a path, any path, other cars kept their distance, veered away at the sight of it. My cabbie employed similar tactics, but neglected to turn left onto Claiborne. We followed the long green tunnel of overhanging live oaks down St. Charles, past old-fashioned street lamp posts, people on bicycles, iron grillwork on balconies, part of the way behind a garbage truck and fumes of three-day-old oyster shells.
Not as much Spanish moss hanging from oaks, this time around. Streetcar 945 passed in the boulevard median, heading west. Intense joggers resumed their mechanical loping, then cleared track center as 900 went by. The streetcars painted that same olive drab as my friend Carter’s station wagon. Open windows, not crowded, ten, twelve people, elbows, out, purple and white shirt sleeves in the wind. I drifted away for a moment, wondering again about Tazzy Gucci’s intentions. A new WWOZ announcer began talking about a new compilation CD. He kept pronouncing the word “copulation.”
“Got that CD for the wife, she like that,” said the cabbie. “She come out and dances in the Quarters, twiced a week. I sit back where I stay. She got more life left in her, she does have that, not me.”
A ridiculously long white limo was parked under trees in the block next to Guy’s Po-Boys. The place sported a painted glass front door, a black-and-white checkered linoleum floor. I recognized one of two men at a small table by the front window. Twenty-five extra pounds above the waist, a graying crew cut, a well-starched tuxedo shirt with an open collar, a thin gold chain.
“Makksy?”
“All right, Rutledge.” He tilted his head toward the small dark-haired man next to him. “Son-in-law, Ray Best.”
Makksy reached to shake. If he wasn’t going to stand, I’d match him. I sat before I shook his hand. Ray Best didn’t offer his. Ray Best wore a Saints ball cap, a frayed, inexpensive polo-style shirt, a thicker gold chain. He looked tightly wound. Not stupid, but intent on appearing that way.
“That mile-long vehicle out there, just outa repair, we got to get it back on the clock.” Makksy was a burned-out version of his younger self, his cheeks flabby-perhaps from not having smiled lately—the old glow in his eyes now an intermittent flicker. “We need to do our meeting in my office privacy, you with me on that?”
“So far.” I put my carry-on bag on the floor between my feet. I noticed Makksy’s shoes. Sure as hell, Gucci loafers. Identical to Omar Boudreau’s.
“We ordered for you. A Number Two and an Orange Crush.”
The blackboard said I would get the red-beans-and-rice lunch plate with smoked sausage and a salad. Only twenty cents more than a Lucky Dog. Not counting air fare and the nine-dollar cab ride, I said, “Perfect.”
“Thought so,” drawled Makksy, proud of his resourcefulness. “I didn’t guess you’d eat in a place with pictures of food on the menu.
Ray Best loudly vacuumed the last drops of iced tea through his straw. A harried waitress rushed to refill the glass.
Twenty minutes later we were in Makksy’s eight-year-old stretch Lincoln, going back out Carrollton toward Imperial Limo and Vending. Makksy and I sat comfortably on the rear bench seat with after-lunch beers in hand. Some crooner, probably Harry Connick, mellow in stereo. Ray Best drove too fast for traffic, pushy, like a New York cabbie. All biz behind the wheel, focused, competitive. This road is mine. He’d removed the Saints ball cap he’d worn in the restaurant.
“I’ve wondered for twenty years how I got snookered into smuggling pot.” Makksy sipped his beer and kept his eyes on the passing scenery. “Back in prison, bunch of us came up with a theory. We were, most of us, in college, barely out of high school. We went and rode those boats to impress girls. Not just with profits, but the fact that we did it, we went out on the big ocean and risked our necks to bring harmless marijuana into the States. The girls loved that bit. And we had good tans.”
“I recall, twenty years ago, none of the scam-boat boys had trouble in the romance department.”
“Well, that was true. We were layin’ pipe like we were born to the calling. They were choice ladies, not dogs. There was pirate appeal, the risk factor, and you’ve always got volunteers who want to help spend profits. It was our moral duty not to squander free poontang. But, soon enough, the cute ladies figured they could hold out till the cocaine got served. The ante went up bigtime. The scene also went around the bend. I never knew a man who did toot because he liked the drug, not at first. He bought dust so he could use it for bait, draw women like a lamp draws a moth. He’d put it up his nose to be sociable, and not be suspected of working for the other team. Next thing you know, he’s blitzed, calling some dealer at three A.M. for a quarter-ounce of stepped-on trash, getting too messed up to get it up. By morning the girl had split, the dude’s in a vicious circle of waking up in time for cocktail hour, and the only way to clean up is to go back out on a southbound boat, never believing for a minute he’d ever get caught …”
I said, “Free poontang?”
“Good point, partner. In the end, very expensive poontang.”
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br /> Ray Best wedged the limo left in a sweeping curve, seventy in a thirty-five zone, high on a two-lane I-10 bridge. No vehicle in sight doing under seventy. Ernest Makksy, aka Tazzy Gucci, probably didn’t realize that he’d lost his nasal New Orleans twang about the time we left the New Orleans city limits. He reverted to the Carolina low-country drawl I remembered him having years ago.
“You know, on the beach,” he said, “me, Scotty Auguie, Buzzy Burch, we all sort of went our separate ways. But on the sailboats, the three or four trips we took together, we clicked. You go to sleep at night, you need to trust the man at the helm. In a storm, or loading the boat with gun-happy Colombians standing around, drinking piss-rot beer, you depend on the others to make right moves, cover your butt, not be stupid. Me, Buzzy, Scotty, we were good. Total trust. A hang-together team.”
Another speech about teammates.
He said, “Deep down, I think we all wanted to be Jamaicans. We went to see The Harder They Come about once a week, and we listened to Jimmy Cliff singing ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want,’ which was our theme song, and ‘Sittin’ in Limbo,’ which defined our lifestyle. Sitting around, smoking that super weed we brought in, we were in deep limbo, waiting for the next thing to happen.” He glanced around at the inside of the limousine. “I’m not much different now, doing the same thing in a different place, the land of gumbo. Problem is, these days the women are married or they got their ears covered by Walkman earphones. And I’m not smoking pot, not breaking the law.”
“You’re hangin’ in gumbo limbo.”
He looked over at me. “Waiting for the next thing to happen. You ever wonder why you never got asked to crew a scam boat?”
I shook my head. “I never went out tryin’ to get a ride. Nobody invited me to join in. I’m glad now that I didn’t. But I never thought about it.”
“Pure discrimination. Where you from, Rutledge?”
“Originally? Ohio.”