by Chris Wiltz
31
* * *
A Whiter Shade of Pale
I parked in the next block down from the Cottons’ and waited until I saw Fonte and Gaudet leave. When I saw them brake at Prytania, I proceeded slowly up the street and parked in front of the house. I took my time getting out of the car, looking up at the dim light behind the curtains in the second-story windows, but I hurried past the jasmine holding my breath.
I had to ring the bell three times before he answered. His lean, handsome face was gaunt, sunken below the high contour of the cheekbones. It looked as if he’d lost some weight, and gave me an idea of how he might age, becoming angular if he got too thin, and maybe not so debonair as he’d been when he was thirty, but aristocratic to the last.
His light blue eyes were on my bandage, which had been changed and was not quite as bulky, but my eye was still covered. The sight of me made him wilt some more.
“I want to talk to you, Richard.”
He held the door open, then led me down what was becoming a familiar path in his house to the library.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked.
“No.” I was fed up with vices of all kinds.
I watched him get a bottle of Warre’s port out of a cabinet under the bookshelves, a small crystal glass on a stem from the art deco cabinet, and pour some wine for himself. He put the bottle on the desk, and the glass next to it, untouched. He stood at the side of the desk; I stood behind the sofa, my thighs pressed up against its back, my hands in my pockets.
“I hope you, too, don’t need to be convinced that I had no part in what Quiro has done,” he said.
No, I needed to be convinced that there was a damn good reason why I was never going to look the same again, but all I said again was, “No.”
He nodded, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat a couple of times. He picked up the glass of port and drank it all at once. I made a mental note never to do that in front of anyone again, never to appear to be that weak and vulnerable and dependent, no matter how much my nerves needed to be calmed.
I said to him, “I’m wondering, did you think I wouldn’t like you anymore if I knew you were a homosexual?”
He was rolling the bottom of the glass on his palm. “I thought it was possible,” he said.
“It would have shocked me a lot less for you to tell me you were gay than to tell me you’d hired Marty Solarno.”
He gave a short, sardonic laugh. “I guess so. The funny thing is, Solarno never tried to use my secret life against me. Some people have, and not all of them were straight, either.”
“They could only do that because they know you’re terrified of being found out.”
He nodded agreement. “It would cause Paula a great deal of embarrassment. It would change my life radically, and I’m not sure enough about what I want yet to make a change like that.”
“You mean running for public office?”
“That’s just one thing. There’s my law practice, which is successful partly because my name is Cotton, because I’m the Colonel’s son. The Colonel was more than a man, you know. He was a symbol of the old values, of tradition, of the establishment which is like royalty in this town.
“And the thing is that part of me likes all that, and likes being part of it, the status, the respect, maybe even the envy, all of the things that the other part of me hates and is disgusted by. Sometimes I want to just chuck it all, and then sometimes I want to have children to pass it all on to. It’s a conflict I can’t seem to reconcile. Just when I think I’ve seen my way clear to go one way, the other side starts pulling and tugging and won’t let me. So I end up leading this double life that I know is more difficult and more painful than just making a decision.”
“Are you sure you’re not confusing what’s expected of you with what you want?”
He spread his hands out in front of him. “Don’t you see? I want it all.”
“Even being district attorney? It seems to me that would make life very complicated.”
“No, I thought it would be a way to uncomplicate things, a way of deciding some things without arbitrarily making a decision. It was tossing it to the Fates.” He poured another glass of port. “But I began to realize that was only a way of justifying and camouflaging the real motivation—I cared a lot less about being district attorney than I did about beating Chance Callahan.”
I came around the sofa. “Was Callahan your first male lover?” I asked.
He took a sip of port and looked at me over the glass. “You really want to get down to it, don’t you, Neal? He was the first I cared anything about. He was fascinating, witty, sophisticated, experienced, exciting. Things happened when Callahan was around, and he could juggle two lives with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. He enjoyed doing it, said it made him feel very wicked. When I was with him, I wasn’t the scourge of the earth. I, too, was fascinating and exciting.”
“Who said you were the scourge of the earth?”
“My father. He said all homosexuals were the scourge of the earth.”
“How did he find out?”
He tried to laugh, but he grimaced instead. “I told him. I thought we were so much alike. He was my hero. I was the hero’s perfect son. I thought I could tell him. But it meant I wasn’t perfect anymore; it meant we weren’t alike. It made him sick, sick at the sight of me. No yelling, no screaming; he didn’t even want to talk to me. You know why he thought, publicly thought, it was so great that I wanted to go into the district attorney’s office? Because he didn’t want me at the bank.”
I felt acutely sorry for him, but at the same time I couldn’t help realizing that everything I’d done, no matter what I’d told the old man, about Myra, about Angelesi, he still wanted me to be a cop. The irony of it was I hated that he did. I didn’t have his stamp of approval, right?
“So you sought refuge with Callahan. Then what?”
“After a while I began to see how evil he really was. I was too young to understand the force of his ruthlessness, but I could feel it.”
I walked over to the bookshelves and sat on the edge of a cabinet in the row underneath them. “And eventually you decided you wanted to get Callahan. But something happened before that. I would guess Callahan found a way to use your sexual preference against you even though his is the same. How?”
“That’s just your guess.”
I lifted myself off the cabinet. “I want an explanation, Richard.”
He was bringing his drink to his mouth. He put it down. “I don’t believe that I owe you any kind of explanation.” Very highhanded, heir-apparent bullshit. I could see that he and Callahan must have been quite a pair.
“If not an explanation, what then? Are you going to whip out your checkbook?” He reddened. “Maybe if you’d given me an explanation from the beginning, this wouldn’t have happened.” I put a finger on my face next to the bandage.
“Please.” All of a sudden he slammed his fist down on the desk. “Don’t you think I feel guilty?” he shouted. “Everyone wants me to feel guilty, my father, my wife. The only reason I got married was because he wanted me to. He had a rotten marriage. My mother turned into a drunk because of it. Is that what he wanted for me? Revenge? Why couldn’t he just accept the way I am?”
“Why couldn’t you accept the way you are? Why did you feel like you had to keep hiding it just because it didn’t please your father?”
“Is that your answer to everything? Tell the world and the problem will go away? Are you going to deny the hypocrisy of this town’s attitude toward gays, how much fun it is to watch the queers put on their Mardi Gras extravaganzas, go to their balls, their bars, their parties, their restaurants, but don’t go to their law offices, don’t allow them any real respect or social prominence. Don’t give them anything that’s reserved for the righteous, God’ approved heterosexuals. Because what they’re good for is to provide a little local color. God help you if you’re gay and not artistic.”
; “Not everyone feels that way.”
“Well, let’s just say I was talking about my part of town. You want to tell me about yours?”
The way he said that, so arrogant, so down the goddamn nose, I snapped. “No, I don’t want to talk about my part of town, I don’t want to talk about gays, I don’t want to talk about your guilt feelings. I want to know what Callahan has on you, why you were so desperate to get something on him that you hired Christopher Raven and Marty Solarno.”
He went behind the desk and sat down, to put a solid piece of mahogany between us, I guessed. “I was Angelesi’s bagman. I didn’t know it,” he said, then he dismissed that statement with a flip of the hand. “I sort of knew it, after a while. I dummied up to play the game, and because Callahan approved of what I was doing.” A muscle at the corner of his mouth jumped. “They made video tapes of me making pickups, one of me at an all-male sex party. Callahan’s still got them and he’s vengeful enough to use them. I wanted something so there’d at least be a stalemate.”
“But Quiro told Lee Diamond that you should have let Callahan take care of Mr. D.”
“I’ve never told anyone about those tapes, not even Quiro. I was too humiliated by my own stupidity. Danny knew about my relationship with Callahan and started hitting me for money after I left the D.A.’s office, not too often, but when Quiro found out about it, he thought I ought to tell Callahan what Danny was up to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
His thin lips curved in a mirthless smile. “As a matter of fact, I did. A long time ago. Callahan was very amused by Mr. D.’s resourcefulness. He reminded me that there were worse things Mr. D. could know about. Callahan, of course, is always safe because he’s Mr. District Attorney. That’s one reason I wanted to get him out of that office.”
“Did Christopher Raven apply personally for the job?”
He raked his hand through his hair. “I was a fool, all right? I couldn’t believe it when you told me he was at the Bucktown Tavern—I’m paying him for information about Callahan and he’s on Callahan’s dope payroll. At least he had a few laughs before he died. And Callahan, he must laugh himself silly—the uptown lawyer and his Bucktown clients, a bunch of chumps having dinner and drinking beer in the middle of a drug operation. It makes me crazy, that bastard Raven, selling drugs to Quiro.”
“You don’t remember him from the D.A.’s office?” He said he didn’t. “He became a narcotics informant, until Callahan needed him. How’d you get on to him?”
“The same way you did,” he said.
“Mr. D.?”
“Mr. D-vine. I tried to get some return on the money I was giving him. I asked him first. He gave me Raven.”
Well, you had to give Mr. D. some credit. After all, he had his scruples (and a healthy fear of Callahan, I’m sure), but he wasn’t one to miss an opportunity for a kickback. Or a few good laughs, either.
Richard said, “The next thing I knew, Raven was coming to me to pay for Quiro’s dope. That’s when I told Quiro about Danny. I told him he was giving both of them more ways to get money out of me. I told him it had to be stopped. What in God’s name did he think I meant?”
“He didn’t kill Danny right away, Richard.” No, and I wondered if Quiro would have killed anyone if Raven hadn’t died after falling in the fireplace. It was too much to think about.
“He did it after I sent him to the laundry with more money the week before Mardi Gras,” Richard said. “Danny must have wanted the films he was going to lose in the raids covered. I told Quiro I couldn’t stand going there one more time.”
And Quiro must have told Richard that he killed Danny, and that’s when Richard disappeared for a few days trying to decide what to do. The only decisive action he’d been able to take, apparently, was to pull out of the D.A.’s race. I saw no point in talking to him about that. I said, “I guess Callahan called me to his office to see if I was Solarno’s replacement. He wanted to know how much you’d told me.” And I was such a logical choice, too. The thought didn’t make me happy. I went on. “I’m surprised Callahan and Angelesi let you out of their clutches after going to the trouble to make the tapes, or was that just for insurance? It seems to me that a man with your various qualifications would be hard to replace.”
It was a slur, I admit.
“If I was worried about getting out, it was only for a little while. Because you came along.” He made that statement with some deprecation, and enjoyed it. “When you lit into Angelesi, Callahan saw his big chance. It was quite amazing to watch him play both ends the way he did. He had Angelesi believing he was working on his side. Then he got Solarno and turned him into the star witness at Angelesi’s trial. He used every allegation you made against Angelesi. While all that was going on, I eased myself out of the district attorney’s office.”
Not every allegation. There was one Callahan hadn’t used, and that was Myra Ledet’s murder. That would have been his hold over Solarno, that and the promise of sharing some power.
“I found Myra’s gold star in Solarno’s apartment,” I said out loud, but even as I said it I knew that if Solarno had killed Myra, then there would have been no reason for Callahan to fear anything Solarno had on him.
“You didn’t tell me,” Richard said.
“You didn’t ask,” I answered automatically, but then I knew why he had never asked: He had never expected me to find anything in Solarno’s apartment to link Solarno to Myra.
I shaded my eyes with one hand while a shock wave created an ungodly disturbance in my brain. All this time I’d been thinking that Solarno found out about the Bucktown Tavern and told Callahan. But that wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t what Solarno knew.
Solarno had never tried to kill me not only because he and Callahan needed me, but also because he wasn’t a murderer. He hadn’t known who the gold star belonged to—what he told Danny Dideaux about the way he’d gotten it was the truth. I wondered if Callahan unloaded the star on Solarno because it amused him to do so, or if it was another insurance policy—his word against the word of a man whose name was a joke around town. And then something else occurred to me: What if it was the gold star Solarno was going to show Richard? If Richard told Solarno about the murder, Solarno must have figured he was set up for life. After all, he didn’t want much, just to get back on Callahan’s staff. But Callahan didn’t like anyone knowing anything about him that he didn’t want known. Callahan would have told Yastovich not to remove anything of value from Solarno’s apartment. It was a coincidence, one of those coincidences that private eyes aren’t supposed to believe in, that either Yastovich or the guy with the knife couldn’t resist taking a porno film. They were probably rifling my office while I was in Callahan’s to see if I’d gotten my hands on the star, a good reason for Callahan to call me.
Callahan’s voice reverberated inside my skull: “You, Rafferty. Even what you think you know, you don’t.”
Two steps put me at Richard’s side. I grabbed a handful of his shirt front, lifted him up, kicked out the chair he was sitting in, and slammed him down in it again, pushing his neck over the back of it. “You knew Solarno didn’t kill Myra,” I shouted at him. I picked his head up with his collar and slammed it down a second time. “You baited me. You deliberately set me up, talking about Angelesi and how I went after him so I would go to Solarno’s apartment and get your dirt for you when you knew the whole time that Callahan killed Myra. You knew it, and you knew it could get me killed, too.” My fist was pushing into his throat. “It came damned close,” I yelled in his face, which was as red as a boiled crawfish, his blue eyes protruding past his wide-open lids. He tried to speak, but I had too much pressure on his throat. I shoved a little harder, then I let go.
His hand flew up to his neck, he coughed, he breathed.
I was back in his face. “Did you tell Solarno that Callahan killed Myra?” He nodded, massaging his throat. “You stupid coward! You told him, but you didn’t tell me.” I moved to get away from him. “What did yo
u think, that it didn’t matter if I died, just another piece of scum, like Solarno, like Myra?” My right hand was balled into a fist. I grabbed it with my left to keep from hitting him.
He spoke with some difficulty. “I thought telling Solarno was what got him killed.” He tried to muffle a cough. “I didn’t know he had any evidence.”
“He had it all along.” I sneered at him. “But he wasn’t going to give it to you until it failed to get him back in with Callahan. And what would you have done with it? With all you’ve known all these years, you still wouldn’t tackle Callahan—what?—because of some tapes he has that might ruin your precious standing in the community?”
I stopped to get myself under control. “Did Callahan do it himself?” I asked. He wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded once. “What did he think, that Angelesi told Myra about him—that he was in on the take, too? I would have thought he was smart enough to realize that Angelesi would only have bragged about himself, especially while he was in bed with someone he’d paid for.”
I knew Myra would have told me if Angelesi had ever mentioned Callahan. The silver seal had miscalculated that one; he had committed a murder for no reason. No wonder he’d been so smug with me—if I hadn’t come along, he might have had to invent me.
I said to Richard, “You don’t have a choice anymore. You’re going to help me go after him.”
He put his head in his hands. “I can’t.” He sounded close to tears. “It will break me. I can’t do it.”
I was about to start yelling again, but there was a movement off to the side. I whipped around.
I didn’t even know she was in the house, but Paula Cotton came into the room, her skin a whiter shade of its usual pale, her blonde hair tossed as if she’d been in bed.
Her voice was unemotional, her words final as death. “Yes you can, Richard. And you will.”