by Chris Wiltz
I entered the wide center hallway with its dark, gleaming floors. He walked with me to the end, where there was a phone on a small table, and then he disappeared discreetly into another room. I used my credit card number and called my answering service. They kept me on hold much longer than they should have to see if I had any messages. As I waited, I noticed a few things, like the fact that the place on the phone where there should have been a number was blank, that outside the French doors I was standing in front of there was a two-car garage that was all closed up, and that I was catching a whiff of a smell, smoky, sweet, a little medicinal, but vague, nothing that was burning now. Then it was gone and I wasn’t sure I’d smelled it. The answering service came back on and told me Lieutenant Rankin had called.
I waited for about ten seconds before I started toward the front door. From a room on the opposite side of the hallway than the one he’d gone into, the black man reappeared. His step, even on those hardwood floors, was light, almost without sound.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Quiro.” He gave it a Spanish flavor—the first syllable sounding like “key,” a bit of roll on the “r,” his heels coming together as he said it.
“What’s your status around here, Quiro?”
“I look after the house, the grounds.” He gestured toward outside.
“Must keep you busy.”
“Not on a day like today.” He was still smiling, not minding my inquisitiveness at all.
“Do you know how I can reach Mr. Cotton?”
“He keeps very busy all the time, boss.” Seemed to me that Quiro had been well trained to be polite, show no curiosity, and offer no information.
“I need to talk to him, Quiro.”
“Lots of people need to talk to him, boss, but I’ll tell him for you.” There was some indication that he was doing me a favor, but not that he was pointedly telling me so. He opened the door.
“You do that,” I said, and ducked back out into the rain.
4
* * *
The Lure of the Diamond
I drove back to town and went up to my office in the Père Marquette, a central business district office building owned by the Jesuits. My office decor used to be a style best described as seedy—drab, bare floor, odd pieces of used furniture—but my sister redecorated it for me after a madman who thought I was fooling around with his girlfriend destroyed almost everything in it. That had happened the summer before, in August, but I didn’t fully appreciate my sister’s effort to make the place warm and comfortable until the weather got so nasty. On a day like today it looked pretty good, a much better place to be than the Euclid. I looked at the long sofa across from my desk and thought I’d just stay here until the heating unit got fixed at the apartment, but I knew that even some warmth wouldn’t make the Euclid feel like home. I wondered if I was turning into a lone creature like Maurice, who was only at home in his office, only happy while he was working, and so worked all the time. As much as I like and admire Maurice, I didn’t want that to happen to me.
I returned Uncle Roddy’s call, but he was out, so I got to work completing a report on a personal injury case for Maurice, probably the one Lee Diamond had turned down. There was more left to do than I’d thought, and I didn’t finish until late in the afternoon. I thought about calling Lee Diamond, but I was stiff from all the sitting I’d been doing. I put on my raincoat and walked across Canal Street through the French Quarter to Dumaine Street.
Number 910 was a Spanish structure, smooth terra-cotta stucco with a gateway entrance to the side. There was a row of mailboxes. Hers was the last one. I rang the bell under it and identified myself over an intercom. After being buzzed in, I walked down an alleyway to a courtyard with a small fountain, a lot of banana trees, a patio table and some chairs. Her apartment was in the two-story back part of the building that faced the courtyard, which was once the slave quarters. It was attached to the main building upstairs by a balcony, downstairs by a walkway, so it was apart and private. She leaned in the downstairs doorway, her arms folded across a camel-colored dress, a soft, sort of hairy-looking dress that was really just a long, close-fitting sweater. It had another one of those high cowl necklines, but below that I could see very clearly what hadn’t been so well defined the night before. Dressed like this, with brown high heels, a green tint to the glasses she was wearing, and more curl to the hair around her face, she seemed very different, like another person, sophisticated, elegant. She didn’t look at all as quick and strong as I knew she was, or as if she’d ever be caught dead dressed like she’d been the night before. Those glamorous, movie-version cat burglars came to mind.
She brought me into her office, and sat behind her desk rather carefully.
“How’s your neck?” I asked.
“Hurting,” she said simply, not asking for sympathy.
“Why didn’t you go get it looked at?”
“Because they would have looked at it, then poked at it, then x-rayed it, then told me to do what I could have been at home doing two hours earlier.”
She smiled when I did. I watched the way her upper lip bowed just a bit, lifting slightly over her overlapping front teeth, curving down as she smiled to create distinct laugh lines at the sides of her mouth. I was fascinated by what those crooked teeth did for her lips.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Rafferty?”
“My name is Neal,” I said. “You can tell me where Richard Cotton is.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Here was something else about her: When she’d smiled at me moments before, her face had lit up with warmth and friendliness, maybe even more—sharing a joke with an intimate; now when she said, “I don’t know,” it could have meant something or it could have meant nothing. I couldn’t hear any ambiguity in her tone, I couldn’t read the expression on her face. I wished she’d take those glasses off.
I shook a cigarette out of a pack and offered it to her.
“No thank you.” She opened a desk drawer, took out an ashtray, and slid it toward me. I watched for some sign of disapproval that I smoked, but, again, there was nothing.
“I’ll bet I could bargain with you if you didn’t already know where your client is,” I said as tonelessly as I could, looking at her over the flame I held to my cigarette. I’m cool as hell when the occasion calls for it.
Her eyes didn’t leave me until she started laughing. She threw her head back just a little too far and winced with pain, but still she kept on laughing. Actually, the situation was pretty ludicrous.
“No, Neal,” she said finally. “We still couldn’t bargain—I really don’t know where your client is. I lost him around midday yesterday and never did find him. That’s why I was out in front of his house last night.”
“Well, if you think I’m embarrassed because I can’t find my client,” I said, “forget it.” She laughed again. “The burned man, Lee—did you ever see him with Cotton?”
“No.” There it was, that same inscrutability, the same possibility that she was somehow outside the truth, stretching it or testing it—or lying. I hated to admit it to myself because I liked her, but I thought she was lying.
Perhaps my question had been too specific. “Do you know of any connection he has to Cotton?”
“I know what you know, that he had a way into Cotton’s house.”
The way she said it, I believed her now, and my own sudden involuntary change in the way I was thinking confused me. If only I could see her eyes better . . .
“Are you going to press charges against him?” I asked.
“So no one has told you,” she answered quietly. “He died this morning.”
“I guess that’s why Uncle Roddy called,” I murmured.
“Who’s Uncle Roddy?” she asked, but I didn’t answer her. I was looking at her and thinking that she had stood there watching him burn up in the fireplace. “Neal?” she was saying. “Who is Uncle Roddy?”
“Oh. Lieutenant Rankin. We�
��ve been missing each other today.” I think that’s what I said, anyway. I was feeling off balance, the way you get when there’s something going on that you don’t understand and no one is going to explain it to you. “Did they identify him?”
“By his fingerprints. His name was Christopher Raven. They ran a rap sheet—drug possession seven years ago, suspended sentence. A year later he was picked up again for dealing. They cut a deal with him down in narcotics and put him back on the street.”
Christopher Raven had become what is known as a rat, an informant. I asked her if she knew who the cop was he’d ratted for. These vice cops and their rats become like family to each other. The cop would know just about everything there was to know about Raven—how he got his money, what kind of drugs he used, if he was trustworthy, if he was a coward, who else his old lady slept with—and he would have used it to put the heat on Raven if he got uncooperative. For Raven’s trouble he would get enough drugs to keep him dependent. Most of the rats had to turn to a life of crime to get the money they needed to live. They also had to make sure they had some information, even if they made it up, so they could get their drugs. The informant system of fighting crimes is ugly, breeding more crime. The average cop doesn’t have the stomach for vice.
The cop was no one I knew, someone named Delahoussaye. She’d talked to him that morning while she was downtown to see Uncle Roddy. Delahoussaye told her Raven never had given him much he could use, and then he decided he wanted to go straight, and got on a methadone program. He got cut loose and Delahoussaye hadn’t seen him for about two years. He said Raven had no known relatives, no current address and was bisexual. He had a half ounce of cocaine on him, some heroin, and track marks on his arms and legs. The “fit” was tied to his calf, which was where he always wore it, Delahoussaye told her. The “fit,” the outfit, is the drugs and all the drug paraphernalia—needle, spoon, something to tie off with.
She gave me the information very matter-of-factly. I thanked her, told her she’d saved me some legwork.
“Lieutenant Rankin,” she asked, “he’s your uncle?”
I was too curious to leave her yet, but I wanted out of her territory, away from the white walls, the shelves of books that went all the way up to the ceiling, away from having to look at the fireplace that was behind her. I wanted her desk from in between us. “Uh, Lee, would you like to go get a drink with me? I’ll tell you all about him.”
We went into the outer reception area where my raincoat, hanging from a coatrack, was still dripping. There was a white desk with a typewriter on it, a sleek sofa and a glass coffee table. Through another doorway I could see a refrigerator. A spiral staircase was off in a corner.
“What’s upstairs?” I asked.
“Books, files and a sofa bed.” She took a black hooded cloak out of a closet, and before I could help her, she had it around her and was buttoning it at the neck.
The rain had stopped, but it was still misty and it felt as if it was getting colder. Lee pulled the hood up over her head, and we went through the alleyway to Dumaine Street. I stopped out front, trying to decide which way to go.
“I don’t drink,” Lee told me, so we walked over to The Coffee Pot, a small restaurant on St. Peter.
Over my drink and her espresso, I told her about Uncle Roddy and the old man, some things about the Irish Channel where I grew up, and that I had quit the New Orleans Police Department to become a private investigator. Talking to her seemed to open up my memory, especially when I was telling her what it was like to grow up in the Channel, but when it came to my resignation from the NOPD, I was very selective. I didn’t tell her about Angelesi or Myra Ledet, or any of the trouble all that had caused me.
I could tell by the way she talked that she wasn’t from New Orleans, although she said it was the first place she’d been long enough to say she was from and call home. Her father had been an officer in the Marines, and they’d lived everywhere from North Carolina and Virginia to San Diego, coming to New Orleans when Lee was old enough to think about college. That was how she ended up going to law school at Tulane University.
I let her know that Maurice had told me a few things about her, like she’d dropped out of school. “How’d you get in this racket?” I asked.
One elbow on the table, she rested her chin in her cupped hand. “There was a man, a detective.” She smiled slightly. “I worked for him one summer. That was the end of school.”
I wanted to ask her if she was sorry she’d left Tulane for him, if she’d ever thought of going back. I wanted to ask her a lot of things, but she sat back, like she was finished talking about those things now, and, anyway, I certainly didn’t want her to get curious about my origins in this business. I thought she looked a little dreamy, but who could tell.
“It’s nighttime,” I said. “Why don’t you put your sunglasses away?”
“Because they look a lot better than this.” She took the glasses off, and pushed her hair back, away from her left temple. She’d taken a blow on her head, right above the temple, when the man had jumped her, and it had caused her eyelid and the area around the corner of her eye to turn purplish and black. The place on her head was raised. It looked nasty, and it looked dangerous.
I reached across the table to put my hand up to it, but she flinched away, a reflex reaction. I put my hand down. She put her glasses back on.
“I really think you ought to have someone look at that,” I said.
“I saw a doctor today. There’s not too much brain damage, not from being hit, anyway.”
This is what I mean about the way she could get you to react to her: Suddenly I wasn’t so off balance; I didn’t feel so confused. Once I thought I understood that she was having some feelings about what had happened last night that I could identify with, the first thing about her that really got to me, I think, was her crooked teeth. God, they were sexy.
“Would you like to have dinner here,” I asked her, “or go someplace else?”
“I’ve got to go home, Neal. I don’t think I can sit up much longer.”
It’s hard to get a check and get out of The Coffee Pot quickly, but I managed. She didn’t live above her office as I’d supposed, but had an apartment uptown on Exposition Boulevard. Exposition Boulevard isn’t a street; it’s a sidewalk on the edge of Audubon Park. When you live on Exposition Boulevard, Audubon Park is your front yard. I walked with her to the lot where she kept her car. It wasn’t the brown Olds, but an all-black Mustang convertible. I didn’t say anything about the Olds or the groceries. She offered me a ride, but I told her I didn’t know where I was going yet. I watched her pull out and speed off so she could make it across Rampart Street before the light turned red.
I would have felt lonely walking through the French Quarter with no place to go and nothing in particular to do except that right before she drove off, she told me she’d have dinner with me the next night.
5
* * *
Simpático
If you think the next thing I’m going to tell you is that my client turned up dead, you’re wrong. He turned up three days later with a tan. He’d been in Acapulco with his wife.
Phil Fonte got to Richard before Richard got to me the night he returned, and, on Rankin’s orders, gave him a ride downtown, but Richard said he’d never heard of Christopher Raven nor, after looking at his mug shots, could he recall ever having seen him. We met in his office early the next morning and were talking about why he’d gone to Mexico so suddenly.
“Paula called me and told me she was going to Acapulco to think things over,” he said. “We’ve been having some trouble for a while.” He shifted in his chair, more uncomfortable with what he was telling me than with the way he was sitting.
Discomfort did not look good on Richard Cotton. He had that blond all-American kind of good looks. With his tan he could have been a surfer, except that the beachboy image was tempered by his slim-faced intelligence, his experienced blue eyes, and a straight lean body that loo
ked best in a continental-cut suit. He was supposed to exude self-confidence, not look uncomfortable.
“People don’t usually call in a private detective unless there’s trouble, Richard.” I wanted to put him at ease. I liked Richard Cotton. He and I were simpático, as they say. He was a few years younger than I am, but he’d been around as a prosecutor during Angelesi’s heyday, and he knew more than the average person about my involvement in Angelesi’s fall. But we didn’t talk too much about each other’s personal lives. Not usually. We were just simpático.
He said, “I know, but it probably isn’t what you’re thinking. Paula’s been acting strange lately, remote. I thought maybe she was seeing another man.”
“That’s about what I was thinking,” I told him. “After all, suspicion of adultery is the number one reason people hire detectives to follow their spouses. You want a divorce?”
“No. I don’t want a divorce.” He was very emphatic. “There’s never been a divorce in my family. God, my father would flip in his grave.”
So what? I thought, but that was just sour grapes. I knew Richard had practically hero-worshiped his father—still did—and I guess I was envious. The Colonel had wanted Richard to go into the banking business, but when Richard told him he wanted to take a lowly job as a prosecutor, the Colonel had backed him all the way. At one time I’d thought my old man and I were tight enough that I could tell him I wanted to be a private cop and he would have given me his blessings. I also thought I could tell him Myra was a call girl. But after she died, and I started pointing the finger at Angelesi, all he could ask me was why Angelesi would bother to kill the likes of Myra? Mostly what it was, he couldn’t take the idea that I wasn’t going to be a cop anymore.
“Okay, you don’t want a divorce, but I’m tailing Paula anyway.”