by Chris Wiltz
“We had it out last night. I'm finished with him.” She sniffled a bit and said in a small breathy helpless voice, “What am I going to do, Neal?”
It was a mystery to me how she did it, but after being supremely aggravated with her, I suddenly felt sorry for her and wanted to help. “It's time to go to the organized crime people, Jackie.”
“I've been talking to cops all day,” she complained, then she slipped smoothly into an invitational purr. “Why don't you come over. We'll talk some more.”
Right. I'd had a similar invitation just a few days before, and it wasn't to talk either.
“Once a cop always a cop, remember? I'll come ‘round in the morning and take you to the OCU.”
“Why don't you just come over now,” she said, hurt, but a second later, recovered. “You think they can get him, Neal?”
“That's what they do.”
There was no purr left now, nothing but a scratchy hiss. “That fat pig's gonna know what it feels like to burn.”
9
The Last Lick
Nope. The game wasn't over. Brevna might have torched her lounge, but Jackie swore she'd have the last lick. She called me back a couple of hours later to tell me so. She was drunk and raving, going on about how she could tell those organized crime people some stuff about Bubba Brevna. She kept bringing up another of Brevna's torch jobs, the restaurant she'd mentioned the other day, the one owned by the ex-cop of a friend of Brevna's. It was difficult to understand her, partly because she was so drunk, but also because she became so hostile. If I tried to interrupt her to get something straight, she attacked me as if I were taking Brevna's side against her. This went on endlessly.
“What restaurant is it you say he torched, Jackie?” This was the third time I'd asked.
“You think I'm just saying that? You think he didn't do it?” Whatever she said next was muffled, as if she were reaching for something and not speaking directly into the mouthpiece, but I'd have sworn she used the word hire. I told her I couldn't hear her and she yelled into the phone, “I said, if that's what you think, then you're an idiot. ‘Cause I can give the cops the person that torched it. I know who did it. I'll get the fat pig.”
“Who did it, Jackie?”
“Who? I just told you who. That pig Brevna. And that's not all he did. He took money to fix cases, but he never fixed any cases.” One of her wild raucous laughs before she said, in a baby voice, “He put the ten G's in Jackie's place.”
And that's all it took to start some serious water flowing out of those cat eyes.
“Who torched the restaurant?” They say persistence pays.
It got me a deep stupefied laugh. “He did it to get money for his new shrimp boat. Nothin’ but a goddamn fool.”
And that was all I could take. I told her to try to get some sleep. Mostly I was hoping she'd let me get some. I hadn't had much over the weekend.
But I didn't hear from her again that night. She left me in peace to eat what I don't mind telling you was a sumptuous steak dinner and to give some thought to a couple of things that were bothering me.
One was why Clem Winkler hung out at the Gemini when his girlfriend owned The Emerald Lizard. The other was why the Impastato boys hung out at The Emerald Lizard if they owned the Gemini.
Well, if I wasn't bothered enough to go try to talk to Jackie in her drunken fit that night, then neither of those things was bothering me enough to do anything about them then or—I thought at the time—ever. My intention was to take Jackie to the Jefferson Parish Organized Crime Unit where she would tell her story and whatever she remembered telling me while she was drunk. The OCU, which is a research team and not an investigative unit, would do their research and decide if the Feds should be called in. Meanwhile, exit Neal Rafferty from The Emerald Lizard affair and Jackie Silva's life. I'd had it with her hostility, her come-ons, and her reckless angry talk. For old time's sake just wasn't enough.
The next morning I didn't bother going down to the office. I drank coffee while from my living room window I watched the streetcars going up and down St. Charles Avenue. That was another thing about my apartment at the Euclid, the great view of St. Charles and of the old Victorian house that had been converted into a dress shop across from me. I liked watching those sleek glossy ladies entering and leaving it. I should have gone to the office because sitting there made me think I liked living at the Euclid too much, that I didn't want to leave. I consoled myself, however, with the thought that I would no longer have to throw a shindig on Mardi Gras Day. It wasn't my friends who came, not for more than an hour anyway. Hell, Maurice only fielded answers from witnesses in courtrooms, not Mardi Gras beads, and not much penetrated the consciousness of the gang at Grady's other than the clicking of hard balls on the baize. No, it was the old man's friends who came mostly.
At nine-fifteen I put my coffee cup in the kitchen sink, went down to the garage, and headed the T-bird across St. Charles to Melpomene and the bridge entrance. I wasn't wearing my courtroom suit, but a dark blue sports coat slightly shiny with age, no tie. I even left undone the third button down the shirt. However, if I'd really wanted to achieve that Jefferson Parish look, I'd have worn at least one gold chain. But I didn't own any gold chains, so a few chest hairs would have to do.
Before I went to Jackie's house, I wanted to see what was left of The Emerald Lizard. I drove slowly along 4th Street expecting to see men from the arson unit still sifting through the rubble, but no one was there. Fourth Street itself seemed awfully quiet for a weekday, though the cars that came by slowed down to look at the charred ruins.
Jackie hadn't exaggerated when she said the place was burned to the ground. Only a couple of timbers were left standing. All the lush green of the Lizard had been turned black, aged overnight into ruins by the fire. I got out of the car for a closer look. A few emerald patches showed here and there, as if to highlight the contrast between what had been and what was now.
I didn't like looking at the ruins of Jackie's dream, the collapse of her way of life.
The Emerald Lizard was where Jackie had really lived, though her house was located within a grid of lettered avenues and numbered streets that ran between 4th Street and West Bank Expressway, Louisiana Street, and a drainage canal. The area had the look of a planned development built in the fifties, small two- and three-bedroom homes with picture windows and deep front lawns and carports. What made it look different than average American suburbia was that under most of the carports was a boat of some kind, fishing boats, flatboats, even an airboat at one house, the airplane propellor caged and mounted high for maximum propulsion through the marsh. Tied up close under several carport roofs were pirogues, mostly used down the river for duck hunting. Cars were second to boats in this community. If the car couldn't fit in the driveway it was parked on the street or pulled haphazardly up on the front lawn. One was a permanent lawn fixture jacked up on cinder blocks, a plastic garbage bag taped over one window. Maybe it was decorative, a Westwego variation of the colored globe on a pedestal or the virgin Mary framed by the manger, or maybe it was a sign of the times, a leftover from the Great Oil Bust.
Jackie's house was relatively plain, red brick, clipped grass, no landscaping, a compact foreign car under the carport, a Westwego cop at the large front window trying to get a look in between the curtains.
He turned around when I pulled up behind his car and waited for me on the concrete path to the front door.
“Something wrong, Officer?”
He was about my height, with a generous beerbelly stretching the black material of his short-sleeved uniform shirt. He had a large round head, fat doughy cheeks, and big sad brown eyes.
He smiled at me and said, just a shade away from apologetic, “Maybe you better tell me who you are and what you're doing here.”
“Yeah, I suppose you might want to know that. Name's Neal Rafferty. I'm a friend of Jackie Silva's. I told her on the phone last night I'd come by this morning.”
Big sad brown eyes don't do a
hard cop stare very well, but his stayed on me a few seconds, weighing, appraising. Then, impulsively it seemed, he stuck out his hand.
“I'm Jackie's friend, too. Aubrey Wohl.”
“Right,” I said. “She's talked about you.”
The wimp, she called him. The one who thought chicken drop contests were an okay way to make money.
“Won't she answer the door,” I asked him, “or haven't you tried?”
He took that good-humoredly. “I don't usually peek through the windows first,” he said. “I didn't think she'd be sleeping in this morning, not after the fire. I'm afraid something's wrong.”
I didn't want to tell him how drunk she'd been the night before. She was probably passed out.
“Try the bedroom windows yet?” I asked
He said no and waited. I finally said, “I'm following you.”
He still didn't move. He asked me point blank, “Do you know where the bedroom is in the house?”
“I've never been here before.”
He trudged off across the lawn, down the left side of the house.
The screens on the windows were made of tiny slats that made it hard to see through them. It wouldn't have mattered because the shades behind the windows were pulled down tight.
Aubrey started pounding on the side of the screen with the bottom of his fist. A woman screamed in the house next door.
Aubrey whipped around. “Pam, is that you?” he called.
“Aubrey?” I could vaguely see someone behind the same kind of screen that was on Jackie's house. She unhooked the bottom and pushed the screen out. Her head came out, too, her bleached blond hair rolled up on beer cans, those half-can-size Budweisers.
“God-a-mighty, Aubrey! You scared me half to death. What's going on?”
“Sorry, Pam. Have you seen Jackie this morning?”
“I never see Jackie in the morning.”
“Would you mind ringing her phone? I can't seem to get her up.”
Pam ducked back inside and in a matter of seconds we could hear the phone ringing in Jackie's bedroom. After the tenth ring, Pam left the phone ringing and came back to the window.
“She's not there, Aubrey.”
“Her car's there and this man has an appointment with her.”
Pam looked at me and didn't quite know what to say.
Aubrey walked on to the back of the house. He tried the back door, but it was locked. The top part of the door was panes of glass, a cinch to break in.
Aubrey thought for a moment and pointed at the deadbolt above the doorknob. “I'm pretty sure it's keyed on both sides.”
We went back to the front. Aubrey pulled at the door handle, being careful not to touch the top part of it where someone might have left a thumb print. The door moved fairly loosely in its casing.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“You're here,” I said. “I don't have to think.”
“I don't think it's bolted,” he said.
He went off to the police car, opened the trunk, and came back with a crowbar. He slipped the flat forked part of the bar along the side of the door next to the door handle as far as it would go. Then he leaned all his weight on it. Wood splintered, the crowbar slipped a little farther in, and the door swung open into a small entrance hall.
Pam stood outside her front door, arms folded tight under breasts covered by a T-shirt that came all the way down to her thighs. She also had on second-skin turquoise pants, and white fluff-edged mules on her feet. She watched us go inside Jackie's house.
I knew it right away—death was in the house. I could feel its presence, smell its sweet stale odor, hear its palpable silence. Aubrey and I crept toward the living room and it rushed over us, seeking its release through the open front door so it could rush on to its next rendezvous.
She was on the living room floor, her head turned to the right, her face swollen and bluish, no longer Jackie, one leg, her thinner lame one, bent at the knee and twisted up beside her, her bare foot pointing away from her body, to the right, the same direction as her head.
She had on a lounging outfit, silky white material with gold thread, trimming, fitted legs, a long loose top pulled up showing a couple of inches of midriff. Her arms were at her sides, palms up, away from her body, as if she'd been laid out there, her pose almost whimsical, flighty looking.
She was obviously dead, but Aubrey bent over her anyway feeling for a pulse point. Above the scoop top of her lounging pajamas were bruise marks left by a strong hand.
And I'd been mad enough at her the night before that I'd thought I'd like to throttle her. I only wished now that it had occurred to me that someone else might have been angry enough to actually do it. She'd been wild and angry herself last night, belligerent, insulting. All in all, she could be an irritating woman, but somehow undeniable in all of her troubled vulnerability. People—men—flocked around to do her bidding, to fall hopelessly in love with her. Yet last night I'd denied her need for company, for solace, a need to vent her anger over a tragedy in her life.
And someone else had denied her her life. Someone, maybe, who'd been drinking with her and smoking with her. There were two glasses with watered-down booze in them on the coffee table, an ashtray full of butts, two different kinds. The table lamps at either end of the sofa were still burning.
Aubrey stood up, his head bent down, as in prayer. When he looked at me his doughy face didn't seem so doughy anymore, clinched as it was with feeling, his sad brown eyes too shiny.
He held his arms out, palms up like hers were, his whole attitude one of disbelief.
He shook his head, letting me know he simply didn't understand.
“But everybody loved Jackie,” he said.
10
Dangerous Men
The clop-clop of the hard soles of Pam's mules up the concrete walkway to Jackie's house jolted Aubrey and me out of our absorption and shock over Jackie's body. I was closest to the hallway so I rushed out to it and met Pam as she was crossing the threshold into the house, calling for Aubrey.
My arm around her shoulders, I turned her around and directed her outside again. She kept looking back, asking what was wrong.
“Jackie's dead,” I told her.
Her face was bland, her eyes unblinking as her mouth opened to form the word how, but didn't quite get it out.
“Go on home,” I told her. “Aubrey'll be over to talk to you in a little while.”
For an instant—you had to be quick to catch it—there was a smirk on her face, then she cried, “Someone killed her, didn't they?”
I know people sometimes smile at first when they hear of death or see an accident, but I always felt it was a reaction of disbelief for most of them, a way of saying to the bearer of bad news, “You must be kidding,” or “This can't be happening.” But Pam's reaction came a little too late, and it was no smile, I tell you, it was a smirk.
“Run on,” I said, “Aubrey'll be along.”
She took off across the lawn, her mules slapping hard on the bottoms of her feet, wailing, “She was my best friend,” over and over until the storm door covering her front door banged shut behind her.
Aubrey joined me on the walkway.
“Pretty upset, is she?” he asked. I occupied myself lighting a cigarette. “I better go talk to her, and,” he sighed, “call the Jefferson Parish Detectives Bureau. The murders are theirs.” He started to go, but turned back, his sad eyes earnest. “You'll wait right here, won't you?”
I sat on the one step to the little concrete-slab porch, thinking that this Aubrey was a strange kind of cop. No swagger, no bull, no know-it-all attitude, no chip on the shoulder, not even that authoritative silence some cops of few words are so good at. Instead he was apologetic, almost sycophantic. Must be why Jackie called him a wimp. But I could see a watchfulness behind those sad brown eyes, and I didn't think it would be very smart to underestimate Aubrey Wohl.
Next door, Pam was hysterical, but Aubrey got her calmed down, made his p
hone call and joined me on the step to wait for the homicide detectives.
He nodded his large head toward Pam's house. “Those two were pretty close,” he said.
“Close enough for a little competition?” I lit another cigarette. Waiting around turns me into a heavy smoker.
“How do you mean?” Aubrey asked, but not hostile or even wary. Again, rather apologetic.
There was a rusting bicycle with training wheels shoved into the bushes at the side of Pam's house, a soccer ball on her porch.
“Is Pam still married?” I asked.
“No, divorced.” Now Aubrey sounded a bit wary, or maybe just puzzled.
“I thought so. Maybe she and Jackie were a little competitive about men.”
Aubrey's forearms were resting on his knees. His hands were hanging over them. He turned them over. “I'm just not sure what you mean.”
“I mean I left the telling to you, but before she ran off crying that they were best friends, she asked me if someone killed Jackie, and she smirked when she asked.”
Aubrey dropped his hands, letting them dangle again. “Well, I know that a lot of times when men got frustrated with Jackie, they went to Pam for some comforting.”
“In other words, she got Jackie's rejects, sometimes maybe angry rejects.”
“I hate for you to put it like that. I've seen men so mad at Jackie they could spit, and the next day back in the hay with her again. I don't know how well you knew her, but it was mighty hard to stay mad at her.”
I gave him a raised eyebrow, and he laughed softly.
“Oh no. We were good friends, never lovers. Can't say I would have minded, but it just wasn't like that. She was quite a gal, but I don't guess I need to tell you that.”
And then I was telling him how long I'd known Jackie, about her friendship with my sister, and how she'd called me out of the blue about Bubba Brevna after so many years. Before long I was even telling him that Jackie and I were each other's first lovers, and that's when I knew for sure there was some art to Aubrey's apologetic demeanor.