DR01 - The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  In the meantime, I was still curious as to why the Colombians, if Johnny Massina was right, were interested in Dave Robicheaux. I went through my case file and didn't see any connection. I had a whole file drawer of misery to look at, too: a prostitute icepicked by a psychotic john; a seventeen-year-old runaway whose father wouldn't bond him out of jail and who was hanged the next morning by his black cellmate; a murder witness beaten to death with a ball-peen hammer by the man she was scheduled to testify against; a Vietnamese boat refugee thrown off the roof of the welfare project; three small children shot in their beds by their unemployed father; a junkie strangled with baling wire during a satanic ritual; two homosexual men burned alive when a rejected lover drenched the stairwell of a gay nightclub with gasoline. My drawer was like a microcosm of an aberrant world populated by snipers, razor-wielding blacks, mindless nickel-and-dime boost artists who eventually panic and kill a convenience-store clerk for sixty dollars, and suicides who fill the apartment with gas and blow the whole building into a black and orange fireball.

  What a bunch to dedicate your life to.

  But there was no umbilical cord that led to the south-of-the-border account.

  Cletus was watching me.

  "I swear, Dave, I think your feelings are going to be hurt unless you find out the greasers got the hots for you," he said.

  "We don't have a lot of perks in this business."

  "Well, I'll tell you what. Let's go to lunch early, you buy, and I'll introduce you to Potts. The guy's a delight. Your day is going to be filled with sunshine."

  It was hazy and bright when we drove into the Quarter. There was no breeze, and the palm fronds and banana trees in the courtyards were green and motionless in the heat. As always, the Quarter smelled to me like the small Creole town on Bayou Teche where I was born: the watermelons, cantaloupes, and strawberries stacked in crates under the scrolled colonnades; the sour wine and beer and sawdust in the bars; the poor-boy sandwiches dripping with shrimp and oysters; the cool, dank smell of old brick in the alleyways.

  A few genuine bohemians, writers, and painters still lived in the Quarter, and some professional people paid exorbitant rents for refurbished apartments near Jackson Square, but the majority of Vieux Carré residents were transvestites, junkies, winos, prostitutes, hustlers of every stripe, and burnt-out acidheads and street people left over from the 1960s. Most of these people made their livings off middle-class conventioneers and Midwestern families who strolled down Bourbon Street, cameras hanging from their necks, as though they were on a visit to the zoo.

  I couldn't find a place to park by Pearl's Oyster Bar, and I kept driving around the block.

  "Dave, when does a guy know he's got a drinking problem?" Cletus asked.

  "When it starts to hurt him."

  "It seems I've been getting half-stoned near every night of recent. I can't seem to go home unless I stop at the joint on the corner first."

  "How are you and Lois getting along?"

  "I don't know. It's the second marriage for both of us. Maybe I've got too many problems, or maybe both of us have. They say if you don't make it the second time around, you ain't going to make it at all. You think that's true?"

  "I don't know, Clete."

  "My first wife left me because she said she couldn't stay married to a man that brought a sewer home with him every day. That was when I was working vice. She said I smelled like whores and reefer all the time. Actually, vice did have its moments. Now Lois tells me she doesn't want me to bring my gun home at night. She's into Zen, meditates every day, sends our money to some Buddhist priest out in Colorado, and tells me she doesn't want her kids growing up around guns. Guns are bad, see, but this character out in Colorado that takes my bucks is good. Two weeks ago I came in wired, so she started crying and blowing her nose into a whole box of Kleenex. So I had a couple more hits of Jack Daniel's and told her how you and I had spent the afternoon combing pieces of a fourteen-year-old kid out of the garbage dump with a garden rake. Fifteen more minutes of tears and nose-honking. So I cruise for some booze and almost get nailed on a DUI. Not very good, huh?"

  "Everybody has family trouble sometimes."

  He was frowning out the window, his thoughts collecting in his eyes. He lit a cigarette, drew in deeply, and flicked the match out into the sunlight.

  "Man, I'm going to be a chainsaw by two o'clock," he said. "I'm going to have a couple of beers with lunch. Sedate the brain, settle the stomach, mellow the nerves. Does that bother you?"

  "It's your day. You can do whatever you want to with it."

  "She's going to split. I know the signs."

  "Maybe y'all will work it out."

  "Come on, Dave, you didn't get off the boat yesterday. It doesn't work that way. You know how things were just before your wife took off."

  "That's right, I do. I know how things were. Nobody else does. You get my drift?" I grinned at him.

  "All right, I'm sorry. But when it's going down the toilet, it's going down the toilet. You don't turn it around by leaving your piece in a locker. Pull into that truck zone. It's too damn hot out here."

  I parked in the loading zone by Pearl's and cut the engine. Cletus was sweating in the sunlight.

  "Tell me honestly," he said, "would you have done something like that just to please your wife?"

  I didn't even want to think about the things I had done to please my wife, my pale, dark-haired, beautiful wife from Martinique who left me for a Houston oilman.

  "Hey, lunch is on you after all," I said.

  "What?"

  "I didn't bring any money."

  "Use your MasterCard."

  "They wouldn't renew it. Something about exceeding my credit limit by four hundred dollars."

  "Great, I've got a buck thirty-five. What a class act. All right, we eat on the tab. If he doesn't like it, we tell him we're calling Immigration about the Haitians he's got working in his kitchen."

  "I didn't know he had any."

  "Me either. It'll be fun to see what he says."

  The pornographic theater was right on Bourbon Street. Bourbon had changed since I used to come here as a college student over twenty years ago. The old Dixieland bands like Papa Celestin's and Sharky Bonnano's had been replaced by imitation country bands made up of kids in designer jeans, vinyl vests, and puffed white silk shirts with lace brocade, like mambo dancers or transvestites would wear. The burlesque houses had always been seedy places where the girls hustled drinks between sets and hooked loose Johns before closing, but the city code had required them to wear G-strings and pasties, and there hadn't been any dope around, except a little reefer among the desperate, burnt-out musicians who played in a small, dark pit at the bottom of the runway. But now the girls danced completely nude on the stage, their eyes glowing with black speed, their nostrils sometimes still twitching and wet from snorting coke through a rolled-up dollar bill.

  The windows of Plato's Adult Theater had been walled up with cinder blocks so no one could see in, and the interior of the small, gold and purple lobby was decorated with erotic art that might have been painted by blind people. We went through the lobby into the office without knocking. A thin man with a pointed, shiny face looked up, startled, from his desk. He wore a powder-blue polyester suit and patent-leather shoes with silver buckles, and his receding, oiled hair glistened in the light from the desk lamp. Cans of movie reels were stacked in a wooden rack against one wall. The surprise and fear went out of the man's face, and he scratched his cheek with one hand and picked up a filter-tipped cigar from the ashtray.

  "What do you want, Purcel?" he said indifferently.

  "Dave, meet Wesley Potts, our resident bucket of shit," Cletus said.

  "I don't have time for your insults, Purcel. You got a warrant or something?"

  "That's what they say on television, Pottsie," Cletus said. "You see any TV cameras, Dave?"

  "I don't see any TV cameras," I said.

  "On television some guy is always saying 'Yo
u got a warrant?' or 'You got to read me my rights,'" Cletus said. "But in big-people land we don't do it that way. You ought to know that, Pottsie."

  "I thought you didn't work vice anymore," Potts said.

  "That's right. I'm in homicide now. My partner here's last name is Robicheaux. Does that make your swizzle stick start to tingle?"

  The man behind the desk blew cigar smoke out in front of him and looked into it with his eyes flat, but I saw his fingers crimp together on the desk blotter.

  "Your little brother up at Angola says you're blabbing it around that Dave here is going to get snuffed," Cletus said.

  "If that's what my brother says, you ought to be talking to him. I don't know anything about it."

  "The people up at Angola don't like cops hitting on their convicts. Bad for their image and all that," Cletus said. "But you and us, well, that's a whole different caper, Wes."

  Potts's eyes were small and hot and staring straight ahead.

  "Lighten up," Cletus said. "You're a businessman, you pay taxes, you're reasonable. You just got diarrhea of the mouth and you been spreading rumors around, and we want to know why you been doing that. It's no big deal. Just straighten us out about this strange stuff we heard, and you can get back to entertaining the perverts. Look at the material you got here. This is classy stuff." Cletus began to bang through the film cans on the wooden rack. He picked up one in both hands and looked at the penciled title with a critical eye. "This one is state-of-the-art porn, Dave. In one scene a guy kills a naked broad with a nail gun. She screams and begs, but the guy chases her around the house and staples pieces of her all over the woodwork." Cletus opened the can, held on to one end of the film, and dropped the reel bouncing on the floor. He held the film strip up to the light. "The funny thing, Wes, is sometimes a John goes apeshit and tears a hooker up, and I get the feeling that maybe the guy just finished eating popcorn out there in your theater. What do you think?"

  "I never look at that stuff. I couldn't tell you what's in it. I just manage the place. It's a movie house, with a license, with fire exits, with sanitary bathrooms just like any other movie house. You don't like the place, go talk to the people that give out the permit."

  Cletus began opening the other film cans, dropping the reels to the floor, and walking on them as he worked his way down the rack. Thick tangles of film were looped around his ankles and shoes.

  "You cut it out, you bastard," Potts said.

  "How'd you get into the IRS beef?" Cletus said.

  "Fuck off."

  "You're fronting points for the spicks, aren't you?" Cletus said. "You probably don't have fifteen people out there right now, but you show profits like you have the patent on the wheel. Why is that?"

  "I sell lots of popcorn."

  "All that coke and brown scag money finds a ledger to get written down on," Cletus said. "Except the Treasury boys are about to ream your butthole."

  "I don't see any Treasury men. All I see is a plainclothes prick that never grew up from high school," Potts said. "Where the fuck you get off with this stuff? You smash up my films, you come down on me because of something my little brother said which I don't even know he said, and you give me some bullshit about Mexican scag, when if I remember right you never busted anybody more serious than a junkie with a couple of balloons in his crotch. Maybe you took a little juice while you were in vice, huh? You're a fucking joke, Purcel."

  "Listen to this man carry on," Cletus said. "We're going to have to have privacy. Does this door go into the theater? Thanks, that's what I thought."

  He opened a side door that gave onto a small theater that looked like a remodeled garage. In the flickering darkness a dozen or so men stared fixedly at the screen.

  "What's happening, geeks?" Cletus said loudly, and began flicking the light switch on and off. "I'm the New Orleans heat. I just wanted to make sure everything was working all right. Enjoy your show."

  They rose quickly from their seats and moved as a group up the aisles farthest from Cletus and went through the curtained exit.

  "Big deal. The same guys'll be sitting out there tonight," Potts said.

  "Could you leave me and Wesley alone a few minutes?" I said.

  "I thought you might say that," Cletus said, and crunched again through the tangle of ruined film on the floor and closed the door behind him.

  I sat on the corner of Potts's desk and folded my hands on my thigh.

  "How do you think this is going to end?" I said.

  "What d' you mean?"

  "Just what I said. Do you think you can tell people somebody is going to blow me away and I'm just going to walk out of here?"

  His sucked in his lips and looked at the wall.

  "Tell me what you think is going to happen," I said.

  "I don't know. I never saw you before. Why would I go around talking about you?"

  "Who wants to drop the hammer on me, Wes?"

  "I don't know any such thing."

  "Do you think I'm a dumb guy?"

  "I don't know what you are."

  "Oh, yes you do. I'm the guy you never thought you'd see, just a vague figure in your mind you could laugh about getting snuffed. I've sort of showed up like a bad dream, haven't I?"

  "I got nothing against you," he said. "I run a legal business. I don't cause you guys trouble."

  "But I'm sitting here on your desk now. It's like waking up with a vulture on your bedpost, isn't it?"

  "What are you going to do? Trash the place, knock me around? Big fucking deal."

  I took out my five-inch, single-blade Puma pocket knife and opened it. The blade could fillet bass like a barber's razor. It trembled with light.

  "Jesus Christ, man, what are you doing?" he said.

  I picked up his cigar from the ashtray, sliced off the burning end on the desktop, and put the still-warm stub in Potts' shirt pocket.

  "You can smoke the rest of that later," I said.

  "What the fuck! Are you crazy, man?" he said. His face had gone white. He swallowed and stared at me, his eyes full of fear and confusion.

  "You know who Didi Gee is, don't you?"

  "Sure, everybody does. Why you ask about—"

  "What's he do?"

  "What d'you mean?"

  "What's he do? Tell me now."

  "Everything. Whores, numbers, unions, y'all know that."

  "We're going to have lunch with him and I'm going to tell him what you told me."

  "What?"

  "He has lunch in Jimmie the Gent's restaurant every Tuesday at two o'clock. You and I are going to sit at the next table and have a chat with the fat boy himself. Believe me, he'll find you an entertaining guy."

  "I ain't going."

  "Yes you are. You're under arrest."

  "What for? I didn't do anything," he said desperately.

  "You said something about cash. That sounded like an attempted bribe to me."

  His eyes flicked back and forth frantically. Pinpoints of sweat broke out on his forehead.

  "I said 'trash.' I said 'trash the place.'"

  "I'm hard of hearing. Anyway, I'll think about it on the way over to the restaurant. Do you believe that story about Didi Gee's aquarium, the one full of piranha? I heard he held a Teamster's hand in it for a full minute. Maybe that's just another one of those bullshit Mafia stories, though. Put your hands out in front of you, I'm going to cuff you. You can carry your coat across your wrists if it embarrasses you."

  "I don't rattle. You're running a game on me."

  "You dealt the hand, Wes. Play it out. But right now you put your wrists in front of you or I'm going to break open your fucking worthless face."

  He was breathing loudly now, his hands clenched in fists on the desk blotter.

  "Listen, Lieutenant, I heard the other guys say something. Lot of times they're just blowing gas. It don't necessarily mean anything. I didn't hear it from Mr. Segura. You understand that? It didn't come from Mr. Segura. It's just street talk, a bunch of guys' bullshit."
<
br />   "You're talking about the Colombian?"

  "He's from Nicaragua."

  "Goon."

  He wiped his lips with his fingers, then pulled at the flap of skin under his chin.

  "It's got something to do with a nigger girl. I think she used to be a street whore. Didn't you pull a nigger out of the bayou in Cataouatche Parish?"

  "You just keep telling me what you know, Wes."

  "Jesus Christ, Lieutenant, what d'you think I am? I'm just a theater manager. Maybe once a month Mr. Segura has a bunch of guys out to his place on the lake. A buffet, a lot of booze, some broads in the pool. He shakes everybody's hand, maybe has a collins with us or plays cards a few minutes under the beach umbrella, then disappears inside."

  "What's the girl have to do with Julio Segura?"

  "You're not understanding me, Lieutenant. He don't tell me things like that. He don't talk to me about anything, in fact. Look, this is a heavy-metal cat. I think he's wired into big people. Why mess with him? The feds deal with guys like this."

  I continued to stare silently at him. His hands flicked on the desk blotter as though wires were attached to them.

  "They say you're making noise about a nigger girl you found in another parish," he said. "That ain't your territory, so they wonder why the interest. For some reason they think you're after them. Don't ask me why. I don't even like to be around that kind of talk. I walk away from it. That's the God's truth."

  "You really bother me, Wes. I have great concern about your sincerity. I also have the feeling you think you're omniscient."

  "Wha—"

  "Tell me if I'm wrong. You think you can intuit exactly what I'll accept. You're going to jerk me around and tell me bedtime stories, then snort a line or two after I'm gone to calm your nerves, and your day will be back intact again. That indicates a serious problem with vanity and pride. What do you think?"

  "Look—" he began, his mouth smiling, his eyes cast down self-deprecatingly.