The Emerald Lizard

by Chris Wiltz

  I told him I was there that morning to take Jackie to the OCU, convinced as she was that Brevna had torched The Emerald Lizard. I asked him about the restaurant, the one Jackie kept talking about the night before, telling him that Jackie had said she could finger the person who'd done the job.

  “No name?” Aubrey asked.

  “No. Every time I asked her who it was, she'd say something about Brevna, that Brevna had done it, and she was going to get him for it. She wasn't really making any sense, except what I think she was saying was that she knew who'd done the restaurant job, someone Brevna hired, and she could get Brevna by giving the cops that person. Maybe she thought the same person torched the Lizard, I don't know. Whatever, she said Brevna was behind both arsons.”

  “Could be,” Aubrey said. “The Lizard was done the same way that restaurant was.”

  The restaurant had been owned by a woman named Kathy Thibodeaux. She divorced her husband and opened the place with money she got from the property settlement. The ex-husband was still loaded, but he ran around saying he'd been taken to the cleaners and was going to get even, so the police thought he'd given the order to have the place torched.

  It was done with a plastic soda bottle, a piece of plastic pipe, and a rope, Aubrey told me. A hole was drilled in the walls of both the restaurant and the lounge, and the pipe was inserted with the rope threaded through it. Then the top part of a soda bottle was cut as a funnel and a mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel, added so the gasoline wouldn't explode, was poured into the pipe. The rope was used as a wick to ignite the mix.

  But nothing was ever proved and, as far as Aubrey knew, the case was still open though probably not under active investigation anymore.

  “Yesterday's arson will change that,” he said.

  Cigarettes are good stall tactics, so I lit yet one more before I told him what I knew: “You know, Aubrey, Jackie told me something else. She told me she went to you first about Brevna. It was only after you told her to go ahead and make some money off the chicken drop contests that she called me.”

  He gave a one-blow-through-the-nose sardonic laugh. “Because I wouldn't take on Bubba Brevna? Well, you know what? I'm not paid to take on Bubba Brevna. I'm just a Westwego patrolman. I give out tickets to anyone who speeds through our fair town, I give the town drunks a nice clean cell to sober up in, and if an armed robbery or a murder or anything important happens, well, I call the Sheriffs office. Bubba Brevna doesn't even live in Westwego. Jackie knew that.”

  Maybe I'd sounded too much like I was the one doing the questioning because then Aubrey said, “I hate to bring it up, but I know Detective Dietz will.” He pointed. “Those scratches on your face and neck.”

  Involuntarily, my hand touched the side of my neck. Diana had gotten quite vicious on Sunday night and done some fresh damage, but I knew it wasn't fresh enough to worry about. I gave Aubrey a cherchez-la-femme routine.

  He shook his head. “A real hellcat, huh?”

  11

  The Khaki Room

  Detective Delbert Dietz of the Jefferson Parish Homicide Unit didn't like me at all. He didn't like that I was a private cop, he didn't like that I'd shown up at the scene of the murder, he didn't like that I'd been in the room with the victim, that I was her friend, that she'd called me, or that I claimed to have been taking her to the Organized Crime Unit. He seemed to like even less the reason I said we were going. In fact, he so little liked anything I had to say that I didn't try to explain to him all I'd told Aubrey, and I didn't hear Aubrey filling it in, either. I kept it all real simple: I told him about the loan, the contract on Jackie's tongue, my visit to Brevna, and Jackie's phone calls after the Lizard had been torched.

  The kind of cop Dietz was could be pegged as easily as the taste of Glenfiddich. He was a combination of the know-it-all cop and the cop with a chip on his shoulder. He was ticked off all the time except when he got a laugh off getting the better of somebody. Anyone who wasn't a cop was automatically an idiot, and undoubtedly most cops made the category without halfway trying. Aubrey was small fry, but he got Dietz's approval (and a large measure of indifference) because he knew his place, which was on the phone immediately to Dietz and on guard in front of the murder site.

  It made Aubrey sweat, though, when Dietz put him through an intensive explanation of why he'd broken into the victim's home. Two times of going through his concern for his friend because of the fire, her failure to answer her phone, his subsequent visit to check on her, and my arrival got Aubrey a quick affirmative jerk of Dietz's head, which had a bald spot the size of a beanie that he tried to cover with strands of hair almost the same color as his pale slick scalp.

  But Dietz was going to have the most fun with me. The first thing he did after my initial explanation of my presence on the murder scene was make me cool my heels while he questioned all the neighbors. Aubrey went with him. Lots of them were at home because they were unemployed. Forty-five minutes of listening to the birds whistling to each other in a quiet suburban neighborhood made me antsy. Also, I was running out of smokes. There was half a pack or so in my car, so I started to go get them, but the deputy posted outside Jackie's house stopped me. He was one of those cops of few words and he didn't care what I wanted, I had to wait for Dietz. Right then I began to get an uncomfortable feeling that I was going to be the chief suspect until somebody else got available.

  Dietz came back, more short-tempered, more abrupt than he had been.

  He looked at his notes.

  “At exactly what time did the victim first call you?” he demanded, though I'd already told him. I was also getting sick of his constant reference to Jackie as “the victim.” I didn't like thinking of Jackie as a victim.

  “Jackie Silva,” I said, “called me at about seven-thirty. I told you I can't be any more exact than that.”

  He looked up from his notes. “Try,” he said nastily.

  My jaw tightened. What I tried to do was keep my voice as even as possible. “At about seven-thirty,” I repeated.

  “The second time,” he snapped, like a drill sergeant.

  “Like I told you, before ten o'clock. The ten o'clock news came on while we were still on the phone.”

  He got in my face. “The only name she mentioned in either of those conversations was one Bubba Brevna?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Again,” he snarled. His breath shriveled my nostrils.

  “The one and only name she mentioned was Bubba Brevna.” My jaw was locked.

  “Take him in,” he said to the deputy.

  “For what?” This erupted with some fury.

  But Dietz didn't have to listen to me. “Get a statement,” he said to the deputy. He went on into Jackie's house.

  The deputy, the authoritative-silence type, indicated his car with a finger and stood aside so I could walk in front of him.

  Aubrey walked alongside me. “I'll bring your car around,” he said quietly. I fished out my keys and passed them to him. The deputy chose to ignore this. I chose not to tell Aubrey I assumed he was under orders from Dietz to search my car.

  At the Detectives Bureau in the old Gretna Courthouse, which is no longer a courthouse, I gave my statement and smoked my last cigarette while I waited for the statement to be typed so I could sign it. I was sitting in a dingy khaki room, the color a banana leaf turns when it's dead. They could pretend it was some kind of waiting room, but it looked like an interrogation room to me with its one table and chair, hanging light fixture, bare walls, and no windows. I wanted out.

  The strong and silent deputy brought me the statement, I signed it, and got up to leave. He pushed me back in the chair.

  “Wait for Dietz,” he said. So far this was the only thing he'd said to me, twice now, except for “Start talking,” when I was to give the statement.

  I waited, with no cigarettes and nothing to do except tell myself to calm down and not act riled in front of Dietz or I wouldn't make it home till long past bedtime, and when
I got there I'd be too sore to sleep. I tried thinking about my phone conversations with Jackie, about what she'd left out, not what she'd said. Then I remembered that the very first night she called me, after sixteen years, when she was also tying one on, she'd told me Brevna was a stupid man, stupid and cheap and dangerous because of it. He had a small-time operation and he hired people, probably stupid and cheap people, to do his dirty work. Jackie had known at least one person he'd hired and I would have, too, if I hadn't been so intent upon staying home last night. Dietz gave me plenty of time to be irritated with myself, until I started thinking Jackie hadn't acted like she thought Bubba Brevna was stupid and dangerous, she had acted as though she thought he was nobody's fool and dangerous. I decided she'd meant he was stupid about how to live well, cheap because of his small-time operation. Stupid, too, because he didn't know how to be anything other than cheap and small-time, but he was effective on his level. No Peter Principle problems for Bubba Brevna.

  Dietz swaggered into the khaki room at two-thirty in the afternoon. He'd shed his jacket and loosened his tie. One button of his cream shirt was popped over his gut. He threw my statement down on the table.

  “We got discrepancies in your statement,” he informed me, except in that tone of voice he could just as easily have said, “We found the murder weapon in your car.” Though of course the murder weapon in this case was attached to somebody's arm.

  I waited.

  “In her statement to the arson unit, the victim never said she asked you to talk to one Robert G. Brevna of Marrero.”

  I nodded. “Yes, she told me . . .”

  “The victim never mentioned you at all in her statement to the arson unit.”

  This time I didn't bother to say anything.

  “Robert G. Brevna of Marrero says you never came to see him, he doesn't know you.”

  I stared straight ahead, noticing that the khaki paint was peeling to show a light yellowy beige underneath. Too cheery for this chamber of tortures, but a little imagination and I could make the light beige splotch into a palm tree.

  “Robert G. Brevna says he never threatened the victim, he asked for a show of faith on money he loaned her by this Friday.”

  I was getting attached to my palm tree, but a little more flaking and it would turn into a mushroom cloud.

  Dietz's voice about shattered my left eardrum. “You have a comment?”

  “No,” I said calmly, in a moderate to soft tone, “I have a suggestion.”

  This Dietz was an animal. With his foot—and quick, too—he knocked the chair out from under me. I caught myself on the table, scraping it forward a couple of inches, and slowly lifted myself up. Every muscle was tensed for a working over. But Dietz righted the chair. I sat down.

  “What might that be?” he asked in a cloying, sappy voice, his mouth curled with disgust, his nose wrinkled, apparently from my stench. Looking at his monochromatic coloring, the shirt almost the same sickly bland color of his face and hair, and his fleshy distorted lips without a drop of blood in them, made me want to puke. Or at least look as if I wanted to puke.

  “Talk to Jackie Silva's bartender Jeffrey Bonage. He knows about the threat Brevna made and he was in The Emerald Lizard the day she asked me to go see Brevna.”

  “That's not in your statement,” Dietz said. “Are you revising your statement?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you'll change your mind. Let's talk about that second phone call allegedly made by the victim to you on the night of the murder. Were you aware that there was anyone with her?”

  “No.”

  “She mentioned no names . . .”

  “. . . other than Bubba Brevna,” I finished for him. I could feel my nerves starting to snap like rubber bands.

  He put his foot on the rung of the chair, his gut grazing my shoulder. I braced myself for another fall. Instead he grabbed my hair and jerked my head back as if he were trying to break my neck.

  “Just how good-a-friends were you and the victim,” he said, changing his speech pattern, showing his versatility. “Good-a-nuff for a few fucks? She scratch your back up like she got your neck? Or'd she git you before you crushed her trachea?”

  I was looking down the bridge of my nose. I kept on looking down the bridge of my nose. He let go of my head.

  I shrugged and rolled my head then turned to face him, not moving away from his distended stomach, which was right on top of me.

  “Get your gut out of my face, Dietz.” I had a strong urge to bare my teeth, growl, and snap at his rolls of flesh.

  He waited long enough for me to think he would already have made some sort of retaliatory move, then he used the foot on the chair rung, his gut against my shoulder, crashing the chair to the side. When I reached out for the table he toppled it, too. This offensive use of the gut must be big time on the West Bank. For that matter, guts themselves must be big, so to speak. Every-one there seemed to have one, or else they were sickly thin like Jeffrey Bonage and Larry Silva.

  I got up. “Press charges or I want out of here, Dietz.” I stepped away from the chair in case he had any other fancy moves.

  The door opened a crack and the deputy rolled an eye over the situation and started to close the door. Dietz waved his arm, motioning for the deputy to come in.

  “This asshole has trouble sitting in chairs,” he said. “You better walk him to the door so he doesn't break his neck.”

  He flung himself out of the room.

  12

  Funeral in Never-Never Land

  For the next few days I let the police do their work on Jackie's murder while I did some of the kind of work that makes me some money. After all, I had to pay for the Thunderbird.

  There are several lawyers around town who consider me unbeatable at questioning witnesses to auto accidents, personal injuries, robberies, occasionally a shooting, and so on. I get witnesses to remember details they thought they'd forgotten, the kind of details that build strong cases, or sometimes I get them to question what they saw, put doubt in their ability to recall those same kinds of details. It depends from whose perspective I'm building the case. There are always several different possibilities, several different “truths.” In fact, for every person involved, there's usually a slightly different truth. Once you've grasped this concept, that in most cases there is no single absolute truth, just varying and occasionally vehement opinions of the truth, the job is easy.

  This kind of work pays well and doesn't usually give me a lot of headaches. Unfortunately, it is not the kind of work I find most interesting.

  I gave Aubrey a call the day before Jackie's funeral to see if there was anything new on either the arson or her murder. Aubrey was not exactly privy to Dietz's every move, but that way he had of being apologetic, a bit servile, appealed to a guy like Dietz and got Aubrey some information. And Aubrey wasn't adverse to passing it on to me: the pathology report stated that Jackie had died as a result of a blow to the throat which had crushed her trachea at the voice box. She had not been strangled. Aubrey had talked to the pathologist, who'd told him that the blow looked as if it had been delivered by a powerful hand, but the possibility of a weaker person, even a woman, who'd struck out in intense anger couldn't be overlooked. As of the day before the funeral there was still no arrest, but Dietz was looking hard at Larry Silva. Some neighbor had told Dietz she'd seen Larry's car parked outside the house about ten. So Larry had been there at the right time, the second glass on the coffee table was his, and the cigarettes that weren't Kools were his brand. He said he was gone before eleven, at which time he drove down to Lafitte where he was temporarily staying on a friend's houseboat.

  That statement put him on the scene when the coroner said the murder occurred, between twelve and twenty-four hours before he saw the body, which was after it was brought into his office. Since there is only one pathologist in Jefferson Parish, he rarely goes to the scene of a murder. So that put the time of death anywhere between ten o'clock, when I last spoke to Jackie,
and midnight or a little past. Unless anyone else had spoken to Jackie after Larry left and anyone in Lafitte could corroborate his story, he'd picked a lousy time to visit his estranged wife.

  Well, you could've fooled me. That day at the Lizard Larry had come off as some kind of peacenik, with his beard and his shabby clothes, bending over Clem Winkler, complaining about the violence in the lounge. That's not to say he didn't have a motive, what with his wife kicking him out of his own house when he was down and out and didn't know whether he was going to live or die, while she was blatantly seeing another man. People have killed for less than that. Not too long ago the New Orleans racetrack bugler was killed for eleven bucks.

  The day of Jackie's funeral was a clear November day, sky like a glazed enamel tile. There was something like the snap of fall earlier in the morning, but by eleven o'clock, the time of the funeral, it was getting warm enough to want shed your jacket and roll up your sleeves. Winter was unthinkable.

  I picked up my mother and sister. The old man is always up for a wedding, but no way was he going to a funeral. He'll go if it's family, and I guess he'll go to Roderick Rankin's, a New Orleans homicide detective and the old man's best friend, if he outlives Rankin.

  The three of us took off for Canal Street to one of New Orleans’ long-established funeral homes. My mother was up front with me, my sister in the back of the car. My mother is small, barely five feet, but somehow I never think of her as being that small. Maybe it's because she moves so fast. At home she always seems to be everywhere at once, in control of everything, efficient, competent, talking incessantly. Altogether, she seems larger than life, maybe because she's so full of life, fairly bursting with it as she moves and talks and does several things at one time.

  But next to me in the Thunderbird that morning she was small in a navy blue dress with a collar of what looked like old lace. She probably looked small because she was weepy, a state she's rarely in, dabbing at her eyes with a thin white handkerchief, calling Jackie “that poor girl.” To her Jackie was still a girl, at her eldest a young blushing bride.