by Chuck Logan
An acoustic flip in the breeze brought a trill of happy laughter from the wedding party up over the hedges. Broker heard it as a crazy jungle sound.
They stayed that way for two minutes, exploring the twists and barbs of a silence as tangled as the iron lilacs that fenced General LaPorte’s home. Then a clatter of metal announced Hiram returning with a tray and silver service. After he set it on the table between the chairs, he bent and whispered in Lola’s ear. She smiled and turned to Broker. “Hiram is curious about what you wear on the gold chain around your neck.”
Broker pulled the tiger tooth out. Hiram executed a delicate hop, ancient and birdlike, and stared at the pendant. “It need cleanin’ up,” he said. “I got just the thing for it down in the pantry.”
Lola nodded indulgent assent, so Broker removed the chain and handed it to the septuagenarian butler, who cradled it in his crevassed palm and withdrew.
Lola held her coffee cup in both hands and blew on the thick liquid. The heat clotted around them and her voice sounded far away, underwater. “It says in your dossier that you work undercover…”
Clouds hid the sun and in the diffuse light her skin acquired the parchment softness of a Renaissance Madonna. She had long dark eyelashes. He wondered if they were real.
“But so far you’ve only played the sticks. How do you think you’d do in the big time?”
He cleared his throat. “Define big time.”
“The difference between Minnesota and the big time, Broker, is the difference between the frying pan and the fucking fire.”
She was grabbing at straws, too.
“I heard your husband’s wish list. What’s yours?” asked Broker.
“Sometimes I sit up here and I think how nice it would be if I were a widow before I was a corpse.”
“A very rich widow,” said Broker. The subject was murder.
“Exactly.” She inhaled and steepled her fingers. “I am chattel in this house, Mr. Broker—”
“Phillip.”
She inclined her head slightly. “I have no money of my own to speak of. But, with Bevode gone, we are quite insecure at the moment. Virgil is hardly reliable.” She took a deep breath. “If the gold in that safe disappeared, considering where it came from no one is going to report it missing.” She exhaled. “Be discreet and it could make your loan problem go away.” She continued to gaze at the slowly tossing foliage. “We could call it a good faith down payment. Do we understand each other?”
“So far.”
She turned and drew an X with one cool finger at the base of his throat where the tiger tooth chain had hung. “Don’t forget, Cyrus has your little pendant,” she said.
“I have some questions…”
She patted her cheeks lightly with her palms as a flush of color rose from her throat. “In time. Right now there are some words I find difficult to get past my lips.”
They stood up together, without a signal. A mutual arising.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“The Doniat. On Chartiers,” he said for the second time.
“I’ll come see you. At nine,” she said, still staring into the distance.
Broker smelled the lingering mint of LaPorte’s after-shave evaporate like frost in the humid air and he heard the rattle of a streetcar and the hooves of a mule-drawn carriage clip-clop on St. Charles. Below them and through a screen of hedge, the bride and groom assembled in front of a white gazebo where a flutist played a wedding march. A hot gust of Gulf wind grabbed the stately notes and threw them in their faces.
Impulsively, she seized his arm and tugged him off the gallery, into the study, into hiding, in a furl of billowing curtain. She arched up on tiptoe and kissed him on the throat, on an electric spot just under his left ear. Her lips lingered in a wanton squirm of tongue that sent shivers down the inside of his chest and almost pried his stomach muscles inside out.
She stepped back and inspected his reaction, which was biologically predictable. She drew a cool tentative finger down his cheek. “You should really stop at a barber shop, Phillip. That long hair is all wrong for your face.”
Lola LaPorte spun away and ran down the hall, as light on her feet as a girl.
32
BROKER PAUSED IN THE HALL IN FRONT OF A gilded mirror and studied the trademark rosette of the hickey stamped on his neck. Now he had one too. Just like Bevode.
A little creative tension maybe. Two widowmakers applying for the same job. Okay. He kept his hands at his sides. He didn’t want to touch anything. The walls probably leaked shit. His move. Hiram did it with Trin’s tiger tooth in the kitchen.
He pushed through the wedding crowd and spied Hiram stooped over, with a platter of finger food balanced precariously on his shoulder. Gracefully the old man sidled up. “Take one of the crabmeats, they pretty good. When this tray empty you follow me back into the house.”
Broker stood like a hard-bitten scarecrow staked to the grass among the whirling finery and bright eyes of the wedding guests. He glowered at a sharp blonde in a black dress with a Nikon who snapped several shots of him. Finally Hiram reappeared with an empty tray and he followed him around the back of the house and through a door into the steaming kitchen.
A young black woman in a drenched white apron and a glaze of sweat stood at a stainless steel sink counter drying and sorting a huge lump of plastic forks, knives, and spoons. Broker tapped Hiram on the shoulder and pointed at the piles of plastic.
Hiram giggled. “Mr. Cyrus use that plastic shit over and over to cut the overhead. Never miss a chance to make a buck. He ’fraid somebody steal his silverware if he put it out there. C’mon, we go in here.”
He pushed open a door and they entered a narrow room with folding chairs and a banquet table. Two waiters were sitting down sipping from cups and smoking. When they saw Hiram and Broker they both quickly rose and left. Hiram pointed to a chair. Broker sat. Hiram took a chair across the table.
The old man dug in his pocket and produced the gold chain. “See, all cleaned up.” The chain and the tooth sparkled in Broker’s hand and he noticed that a narrow sliver of polished bone had been affixed to the chain next to the gold-capped tooth. He raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe that tooth help you up north but down here I give you a little added protection.” Hiram smiled, showing even nicotine-stained teeth. “That a piece out of a black cat’s tail. Go on, put it on.”
Broker slipped the pendant over his head and tucked it in his shirt. He squinted at Hiram and eased back the lapel of his jacket so Hiram could see the Colt .45 slung in the shoulder rig. “You know who I am, old man.”
“Hey, be cool, I just the messenger.” Hiram winked.
Broker opened his mouth to ask a question but Hiram wagged a wrinkled index finger in his face. “Miss Lola hope you a smart man, so be smart and listen to somebody who been breathing and kicking for seventy-six years. She send you down here to listen not play badass dick.” Hiram took the hearing aid from his ear. He grinned. “Yeah, and I still got most all my teeth too.”
Hiram leaned back in his chair and slipped a flat half-pint of Old Granddad from his pocket. He raised it to his lips, drank and sighed. He held the flask out to Broker. Broker declined and handed it back. Hiram put it back in his pocket.
“Now,” said Hiram, as he fished the stump of a cigar from another pocket and put it in his mouth unlit. “Some things you should know. Mr. Cyrus and Mr. Bevode think they real smart, too. ’Specially Mr. Bevode.
“Man is like a child, swing his skinny ass in the bathroom, sing to the mirror like old Elvis Presley. Ain’t hardly a man at all, more like a dog, wish he was a dog too, then he could lick his own balls.
“Mr. Bevode grew up way back in the swamp so he say he can smell things. So right after he come to work here, he always looking for ways to get on Mr. Cyrus’s good side. Problem was, that’s where Miss Lola always was. Well, he sniffed around Miss Lola and think he smell something and so he go diggin’, just like a damn dog.
&n
bsp; “He go paw around in this courthouse down in Jack Bayou where she born and he discover that Miss Lola’s maternal grandmother was Octoroon. You know what that mean down here?”
Broker nodded his head.
“Well, Mr. Bevode got out his pencil stub and sat down at the kitchen table and do his multiplying on the back of a grocery bag and come up with Miss Lola having one sixty-fourth Nigra blood. Tongue hanging out he scoot to Mr. Cyrus. And alla sudden Miss Lola look less like some pretty Baton Rouge white trash gal who better herself and she start looking more like Lena Horne. And there go Miss Lola’s plans to have a family in this fine big house. Mr. Cyrus been trying to get rid of her ever since. They have separate bedrooms for five years so it don’t surprise me she let you know she a bit lonely.” Hiram grinned lasciviously.
“Why doesn’t he divorce her?” asked Broker.
“What if everybody know Mr. Cyrus a dumb fool marry a nigger gal. And she say half all this hers. They deadlocked. I said she smart. Didn’t say she was ever gonna make saint. But you be gentle with her, not force her like Mr. Cyrus used to do.”
Broker cocked his head. “Used to do?”
“Uh-huh. She won’t let him touch her no more. Not after what happened.” Hiram paused and studied Broker’s face. “Now this either goin’ scare you away or it gonna piss you off. I hope it piss you off.”
Broker wiped sweat from his chin and lit a Spirit. The cigarette turned soggy in the humid air.
“You sure sweat a lot,” said Hiram. “You gonna carry that piece down here, get you a baggy sports shirt…”
Then Hiram’s words sliced the steamy air into cold autopsy slices. “Mr. Cyrus got likkered blind drunk one night and beat her with that whip he keep and then he get the urge to fuck her when she bloody…push her down the stairs. After that night Miss Lola find out she can’t have no baby ever.”
“Why does she stay?” asked Broker.
“Man hate hot and forget. Woman hate ice cold forever. She been waiting for Mr. Cyrus want something as much as she want a child. And now that he’s found his heart’s desire maybe she been waiting for someone to appear who could help her deny it to him.” Hiram squinted. “She think that man might be you.”
“Why in the hell do you stay around here?”
Hiram shrugged and rolled his cigar stub across his broad lips and said frankly, “Mr. Cyrus and I attached, like a cancer. Problem run in both our families.”
Broker slipped his hand in his pocket and palmed one of Nina’s hundred-dollar bills. He slid it across the table until their fingers touched. Hiram smoothly drew his hand back and dropped it in his lap.
“Royale LaPorte’s hand really in the safe in the study?” asked Broker.
Hiram’s eyes popped, polished hard as marbles. A gleam of fire deep inside. “Marie Laveau pack that dead hand in a special jar way back. Mr. Cyrus check on it every morning.”
“Where’s the key?”
“Never leaves his body. Wear it on a cord around his neck.”
“He a sound sleeper?”
“Like out cold when he been drinking and lately he been drinking, especially with Mr. Bevode gone.”
Another hundred-dollar bill moved swiftly across the table.
“That kid, Virgil, he any good?” Broker asked.
“Little dope fiend. Surprise Mr. Cyrus let him have a loaded gun. His big brother slap him up alongside the head more than once for blowin’ that toot.”
“So, not real alert.”
“Not after midnight.”
Broker stood up and walked to the small rectangular louvered window and cranked it open a few inches more and squinted at a patch of fitful sky. “Storm tonight,” he said.
Hiram grinned. “Big one. Probably tip over some of them brick and mortar graves around town. Scatter bones. Dogs be busy in the morning.”
“What would scare the shit out of Mr. Cyrus?”
Hiram grinned broadly and extended his withered right hand and delicately squeezed the shiny clip of bone on the chain around Broker’s neck. He winked elaborately.
Broker tucked the tiger tooth charm into his shirt, buttoned his sports coat, and reached over and shook Hiram’s hand.
The old man opened his palm and saw a third folded hundred. He leaned back and grinned. “Be nice if Mr. Cyrus and Mr. Bevode be gone and Miss Lola be in charge in this house. Maybe we chuck that plastic shit and be polishing the silverware again.”
Broker was out the door, pushing through the broiling kitchen onto the lawn but there was no fresh air, just a poisonous steam of magnolias and azaleas against the sticky iron lilacs. Head down, he shouldered through the blurred watercolors of the wedding party and out the front gate onto St. Charles and, from the corner of his eye, he caught the arc of a flung bouquet flash against the leafy swaying air and the outstretched hands and then, as he walked away, he laughed hilariously when he heard the happy applause.
33
THERE WAS MUSIC, BUT HE DIDN’T HEAR IT. HE walked the cramped streets of the French Quarter, looking for a barbershop. The grillwork sagged from the galleries like twisted metal guts and the people looked like lost groupie-pilgrims searching for a rock concert. A tattooed man walked by carrying a full-grown python over his arms and shoulders. Broker shook his head. Warm weather all year round was like life support for a lot of people that a good blizzard would weed out.
He grabbed a pay phone in a shopping arcade and dialed Nina’s number in Ann Arbor. Busy. Sweat ran in his eyes. He was a boreal hunter in the near tropics and right now he was shedding his winter coat. Melting. He spied a barber pole and recalled that barbers were originally surgeons. The pole stood for bloody ribbons. Bandages.
He told the barber to take it up above the ears. The dark ponytail went in one crisp snip. Not for Lola. He wasn’t going to truck all that hair through Vietnam in the summer.
If Nina found the way to Jimmy.
He hoped her copper friend was on the job. It occurred to him that if she were here she’d veto what he was going to do. Nina would put Lola off limits in two seconds flat.
But he needed a backdoor into LaPorte. Even if it swung both ways. He smiled. A handle…
The barber sheared off his burrs and Broker emerged like scrubbed bark, clean, eyebrows trimmed, but still rough to the touch. Then came steaming towels. After today, he owed himself a close shave. So he sighed and closed his eyes and enjoyed the taut scrape of the straight razor on his throat.
He allowed himself a minute of enjoyment, then he asked the barber for the Yellow Pages. As the barber massaged tonic around his temples Broker called the nearest Hertz rental and arranged for a car.
Then he hailed a cab, went to Hertz, and filled out the paperwork on the vehicle, hit the street, and parked in the nearest mall. He took some of Nina’s money shopping.
In a sporting goods store he bought a pair of black Nike crosstrainers, a baggy pair of dark cotton slacks, a loose long-sleeve matching shirt, two pairs of dark cotton gloves, a cheap charcoal gray raincoat, and a pair of thin black rubber galoshes. He searched for a heavy, strong-stitched grip bag. Finally he bought a stout black bowling bag. Then he went to a hardware store and picked up a small Wonder Bar and a sturdy razor-sharp scissors. On the way out he grabbed a couple of souvenir T-shirts for Mike and Irene.
No phone messages back at the hotel. He called Nina’s apartment in Ann Arbor. Busy again. He dug the note from his wallet where he’d noted Nina’s flight from Detroit to Minneapolis-St.Paul and called J.T.’s machine. He left another message reminding his old partner to meet her.
He took a long cool shower. Then he changed the dressing on his thumb, doused it in hydrogen peroxide, and bandaged it loosely.
He took a Jax beer from the small refrigerator under the TV and lay on the four-poster bed and talked for an hour on the phone to Northwest Airlines, rescheduling his departure. During long periods on hold, he watched the fan turn slowly on the high ceiling. Then he called Nina again. Still busy.
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p; He picked up the TV remote and scanned the cable channels and happened on an installment of Prime Suspect, the BBC series featuring Helen Mirren as Inspector Jane Tennyson. He opened another beer and watched for a while.
The thing about this British cop show was: no guns. Intricate storyline, snappy dialogue you had to pay attention to, and no guns. Broker stretched out, sipped his beer, and wondered what it would be like to catch a bad guy who spoke in complete sentences. And no guns.
He turned off the TV and watched the late afternoon shadows ink in the curlicue grillwork on the balconies across the street. Fireflies of faraway lightning flickered through the tall gallery windows.
Was Lola for real? Did it matter? She was right about one thing: No one would report that gold to the police if it went missing.
He reached for the phone and called Nina in Ann Arbor. This time he got through.
“I miss you,” she said with wispy intuition. She sounded like a woman who had been sitting watching a phone, except she’d been on the damn phone for hours.
“Down here everybody’s smiling and we’re all lying through our teeth. I called but your phone’s been busy.”
“I called some people.”
“What kind of people?” He sat up.
“Some army folks. Don’t worry. I’m being cool. Just trying to get a line on the MIA office in Hanoi. I intend to recover Dad’s remains.”
Jesus, Broker knuckled his forehead. “Is that cop still with you?”
“I’m drowning in testosterone and guns. Tomorrow I’ll be knee deep in his pals from the bank all the way to the airport.”
“Okay. Call J.T. and confirm your flight and arrival time. He’ll go with you to the Holiday Inn. I’ll meet you there tomorrow afternoon.”
“What are you going to do?”
“LaPorte wants to talk to me in the morning so,” he paused to hurtle a canyon of omission, “tonight I’ll treat myself to a meal and maybe catch some jazz.”
She said circumspectly, “You’re not a jazz kind of guy.”
“Do what J.T. says. No side trips,” Broker said a little hotly. He hung up the phone without saying good-bye. Why wasn’t he a jazz kind of guy? Hell, he could be any kind of guy he wanted. And what the hell was she doing calling around to the army…He caught himself. He sensed that he and Nina were on the verge of a boy-girl dilemma complicated by who was going to run the show. And right now she was ahead on points. He could feel a fight coming. The kind of fight where you make up in bed.