The Emerald Lizard

by Chris Wiltz

  “She did?”

  “She did, and I never suspected a thing. Never would have. You know, Neal, now that I'm thinking about it, Jackie was really sly. You know, maybe there was another reason I didn't forgive her, and I'm not trying to make excuses because I really wish I had, but I just remembered something she did once that didn't sit at all well with me. Something I just had to forget about if she was still going to be my friend. There was something she wanted badly, some dress she'd seen at a department store downtown. She was dying for it, but her father wouldn't give her the money. One afternoon we were in the kitchen with Mom and all of a sudden Mom pulled a wad of money out of her apron pocket. She couldn't believe it. She said she must be losing her mind to have put that money in her apron. She'd gone to the store the week before and got in the checkout line, and when she went to pay, she didn't have any money in her purse. Mom was really kind of upset about it—well, I guess because Dad had a fit—but she couldn't believe she'd put the grocery money in her apron. Later on Jackie told me she'd taken the money out of Mom's purse, bought the dress, and the next weekend when she came over, she'd put the money back in Mom's apron. She said she was getting worried Mom wasn't going to find it. She never did tell me where she got the money to replace what she'd taken. And I guess I didn't want to know. I told her not to do that ever again. I don't think I felt quite the same about Jackie after that. I mean, think of it, poor Mom in the store with no money.”

  Yeah, think of it. I was thinking of too much. I was thinking that one minute a person could be crying over not forgiving Jackie and the next minute ticked over something she'd done twenty years ago. One day angry at her for calling me out of the blue and involving me in her sordid life, the next day feeling terrible over the way her father abused her. And the way I had used her.

  Reenie was saying something about feeling a lot better and being glad we'd talked. She kissed me quickly on the cheek and said she'd better go take care of her baby. She ran up the steps to the double, the skirt moving prettily around her legs and her reddish-brown hair swinging as she turned to wave at me. The black blouse pulled out of her skirt at the side of her waist as she lifted her arm and revealed a small triangle of flesh.

  I cranked up the T-bird.

  Voyeur, indeed.

  15

  Born Again to Die

  After I left Reenie, I went by Maurice's house, which isn't but a few blocks on the other side of Magazine Street from my parents’ house. I was hoping to catch Nita. I wanted to ask her about Mave Scoggins, how she knew her, how well Jackie knew her, that kind of thing. But she wasn't there, probably still with her family.

  “So I can't get you out of here, Larry. You can't be arraigned and bail can't be set until you're transferred to Jefferson Parish on Monday.”

  I was a little glassy-eyed from all the waiting around as I explained to Larry that, just as I'd figured, Dietz had made sure Larry missed the last pickup from Central Lockup to JPCC. But that bit about stripping and delousing was only more of Dietz's showing off. Larry still had on his own clothes minus his belt, tie, and jacket. Stripping him of those essentials, however, and taking his mug shot and fingerprints had managed to take over three hours.

  We were in a small interrogation room that I'd had plenty of time to arrange with some old police buddies so Larry and I could talk privately.

  He was sitting at a metal table roughly twice the size of a doormat, his arms stretched out in front of him, his fingers clasped. I stood on the other side of the table.

  “It's all right, Neal. I got no money for bail and nowhere to go anyway. I might not even be alive by Monday.”

  I turned my back to him so he couldn't see my eyes rolling. It was a little pious, a lot self-indulgent. I paced two steps and turned around.

  “Well, I don't suppose we should act on the assumption that you're going to be dead.”

  “Whether I'm dead or alive doesn't matter. I want you to find out who killed Jackie. Poor kid.” His voice caught. He turned his head sort of into his shoulder, you know, as though he were going to burst into tears. “She didn't deserve to die like that.”

  He lifted his hands to his face and pressed hard on his eyeballs. The tattoos on the backs of his hands were faded, though the X full of smaller x’s was holding up better than the bird in flight. I found myself wondering about the rest of his body and got irritated.

  “Look, Larry, we don't have time for you to have a breakdown. They could kick us out of here any minute. What can you tell me that might take the heat off you and put it on somebody else?”

  His hands fell away from his eyes and he held them palms up toward me. It was reminiscent of a pose that shows up in a lot of religious paintings. Supplication, I believe it's called.

  “Why would I leave a glass full of fingerprints and an ashtray full of butts if I killed her?” he asked.

  “Your lawyer will ask the same question, but the D.A. will probably drop the charge to second degree murder and say you were so filled with rage and passion that you forgot about the evidence.” He looked sad, sad and saintly. “Concentrate on someone else. Who did she talk about while you were with her?”

  “Mostly me, that I'm an idiot about money, which is true, that I'm self-righteous enough to make a nun puke, which depends on how you look at it, and that everyone else was in love with her so why should she stay married to some poor self-righteous idiot who might croak in the saddle?”

  “Did that make you angry?”

  It made me angry to hear about it, but Larry said, “How could it? She was right—I could keel over any second. Anyway, you know how Jackie was. When she was drunk that tongue of hers was sharp as a razor.”

  “You know about Bubba Brevna threatening Jackie?”

  “The contract on her tongue?” For the first time he smiled. No, he grinned. “Yeah, but I didn't pay any attention to that either.”

  “Why not? Didn't she tell you that I was supposed to take her to the Organized Crime Unit about Brevna the next day?”

  “No.” He drew his eyebrows together, perplexed.

  To tell you the truth, so was I. Jackie hadn't seemed to hold her tongue about much. It made me wonder if she'd been serious about going. After all, we'd apparently been on the phone just before Larry arrived at the house.

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “Jackie seemed to take Brevna's threat seriously.”

  “But he was in love with her.”

  “People kill for love, Larry, especially for unrequited love. That's what they're going to say you did.” His frown deepened. “Who else was in love with her?” I asked. I wanted to know his view of Jackie's love affairs and how angry he was about them.

  “Well, Clem Winkler for one.”

  “She told me on the phone the night she died that she was through with Winkler. Do you believe that?”

  “Hard to say. She told me he was over there earlier, before I was, but she kicked him out. But Jackie liked to play that kind of game. It didn't mean much.”

  “Maybe it does this time. He told the cops he hadn't seen her since the night before, and he had an alibi, too.” This was more information from Aubrey, though he hadn't told me who Winkler's alibi was. “Maybe he went back after you left.”

  “Aw, I don't think so, Neal. I don't much like Clem, but I don't think he'd've killed her.”

  “What about Jeffrey Bonage?”

  “Jeffrey? Naw, forget Jeffrey. He didn't do it.”

  I turned away again for another bout of eye rolling. Larry was the only person I'd ever met who I thought could rival my mother for refusing to think ill of people. He didn't think anybody could have killed Jackie, not even Bubba Brevna, but Jackie was dead and someone had done it. I asked him if there was anyone else besides Brevna, Jeffrey, and Clem on the scene. He said he didn't think so.

  “Do you know how Brevna got the money he loaned Jackie?”

  “Brevna's loaded.”

  “You don't know about the case he was supposed have fixed for th
e ten grand he gave to Jackie instead?”

  “That's news to me. Brevna makes a lot of money fishing.”

  “Larry, the man runs prostitutes and he's apparently not above a little arson on the side.”

  “Well, I know that, but case fixing . . .”

  “Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me he burns things down, but wouldn't fix cases?”

  “Not ‘wouldn't.’ Couldn't. I don't think he has those kinds of connections.”

  “Wouldn't, couldn't—it doesn't matter. Apparently he didn't. He gave the money to Jackie.”

  “I don't know about all that. I mean I know he loaned her the money, but Jackie didn't tell me everything. I guess she really didn't tell me very much.”

  “Did she tell you about the restaurant Brevna had burned down? The one owned by Kathy Thibodeaux?”

  “Bubba did that, did he?” He shook his head sorrowfully.

  “Never mind,” I said. This was getting too tedious. It was time to get down to what counted here—money. “How badly in debt are you to your bookie, Larry?”

  “Jackie told you that?”

  “No, Brevna did.”

  “What a bitch,” he said without much heat.

  “Jackie?”

  “No, my bookie. She must have told Brevna.”

  “She? Who's your bookie?”

  “Now look, Neal, I don't want you giving her any trouble. She's got a heart of gold. She never would have pushed me on it. I mean, she won't take any more bets, but she knows I'm good for it so I don't want you hassling her or anything.”

  I was beginning to feel wild. Patience, patience, I told myself as I let each word out with control: “And who is she, Larry?”

  “Mave Scoggins.”

  Ah, Mave Scoggins. Old Mave kept popping up with the regularity of toast in a roadside diner at six A.M.

  Larry was running on about not understanding why Mave would have told Bubba he owed her five grand. “She knows about the trouble between me and Bubba.”

  “The trouble over the fishing boat?”

  “Yeah. You know about that?”

  “Some. I'd like to hear it from you.”

  “Well, Bubba got his eye on this boat, a nice rig for shrimping out in the Gulf. He either didn't have all the money or he didn't want to use it. He asked me if I wanted to invest in the boat. I put up a lot of the money and Aubrey Wohl put up some, too. We were bound to get a return during the brown shrimp season, and I figured the white shrimp would get us a really solid profit. Till then, though, the boat had to be maintained. Then the wing nets had to be replaced. By that time I was out of money. Bubba said if I was out of money, I was out of the deal. There wasn't much I could do about it. There was a clause in the contract, but I hadn't bothered to get a lawyer to read the contract. It was my own fault, so I ate it, but a couple of months later, the boat burns up, right out in Turtle Bay. Bad wiring or something. Bubba's insurance pays off and he gets himself an even bigger boat, calls it My New Flame.”

  That Bubba, what a sense of humor. No wonder he'd gotten so jovial when I asked him about Larry's investment in the fishing boat. Quite a scam. No wonder, either, that Bubba didn't count on Larry giving Jackie the money to pay off her debt to him.

  “So,” I said, “your investment burned up, you've got no money for bail, no money for a lawyer, and no money for a private investigator.”

  Remember how I mentioned that the kind of work I'm most interested in usually wasn't the kind that made me much money? Here was a case in point.

  But Larry was protesting, “Oh no, Neal, I'll be able to pay you, if you can hang on till the insurance company pays off on the lounge. It shouldn't take too long.”

  “Larry, I believe you're forgetting about payday for Mr. Brevna.”

  This time when Larry grinned he wasn't looking at all saintly. A little of the tattooed, street-smart guy we all thought Jackie had married was coming through. “There was no paperwork on the loan. No signed paperwork. Jackie never quite got around to it. And for a while there, she managed to make Bubba forget he cared, if you know what I mean. The insurance money is mine.”

  “Maybe it's just as well you can't make bail, the way Bubba likes to put contracts out on people's body parts.”

  Larry was still grinning. “It's hard to scare a man who could drop dead any second.”

  “That's true,” I said dryly. “I forget you have this basic advantage over other people. But what's Bubba's excuse? He's not even afraid of the IRS”.

  Larry, I could tell, was a very literal person. He said, “I keep telling you, Neal, Bubba's a fisherman. Even the IRS can't audit fish.”

  16

  Drawing Conclusions

  So Larry wasn't very angry at all about Jackie's affairs. The fact that she slept with other men didn't seem to make him angry, jealous, or cause him to love her any less. Maybe Westwego was like a lot of small towns I've heard about where screwing is the favorite sport, the preferred leisure time activity because there's nothing much else to do.

  Or maybe Larry was just screwy. I could buy that without much trouble. I believed that Jackie was afraid of Bubba because she believed he'd burned down the Lizard. I thought it was possible Bubba had killed Jackie or had her killed. But Larry didn't think so because he believed Bubba was in love with Jackie.

  None of this made much sense if you tried to think about it logically. Look at it this way: If Jackie had never signed the paperwork on the loan, but she was afraid enough of Bubba to pay off the loan, then it didn't make sense for Bubba to kill Jackie. On the other side, though, was the possibility that the money itself meant very little to Bubba or that Bubba thought Larry was enough of a sap to pay him the money Jackie owed even if she was dead. Or he thought he could scare Larry into paying. Larry may have been given a death sentence, but he hadn't been given a date. Or the king of the trailer park didn't like Jackie making a sucker out of him and burned her place down, then killed her. What really didn't make any sense was trying to figure it out without more facts. Whether Bubba had killed Jackie or not, it seemed to me he was the logical person to begin with. So far everything had either started with or come back to Bubba.

  I was ready to have another talk with the West Bank kingpin.

  However, it was almost four-thirty, and no sane person gets on the Greater New Orleans Mississippi River Bridge going to the West Bank during rush hour. Especially not on Friday.

  Maurice's office was over on Tulane Avenue not far from Central Lockup. In the old days, before Nita, he would almost certainly still be there.

  The office was a single-story building that had once been a double. Maurice had knocked out a few walls, removed a kitchen, added a lot of bookshelves, desks, conference tables, and computers and turned it into his law office.

  Through the front French doors I could see a light on in the outer office, but Pinkie wasn't behind the desk. Instead her chair was tucked neatly under it and its top cleared and straightened.

  There was no point checking to see if his car was in the back; Maurice never drove to work. He never drove at all if he could help it, though he still had his father's 1969 faded blue, dented Mercedes garaged at home. He took cabs everywhere. The reason for this is because whenever Maurice got behind the wheel of the car, he invariably plowed through street blockades and cone markers (the streets of New Orleans are always undergoing repairs because of the shifting mud underneath them), side-swiped parked cars, and demolished garbage cans. While he was still driving he replaced his own garbage cans about eight times, I think, and backed into his neighbor's cans across the street about four. But it was the night he creamed a St. Charles Avenue streetlight while backing out of the way of a streetcar that made him give up the car for good. He avoided the streetcar, all right, but the light pole fell on it after wiping out the electrical trolley lines above it, and before the damage was repaired the accident caused a backup of some eight cars of angry riders.

  I knocked on the French doors and before long Maurice
emerged from his back office. He was still looking very uptown preppy, wearing khaki slacks, a white Oxford shirt, and penny loafers. The next step, I feared, would be Madras bermudas and Top-Siders for weekend attire. I had a rush of nostalgia for the Western-suited, cowboy-booted Maurice, my friend the eccentric lawyer, Nita's high plains undertaker. Then I realized I was doing what I accused New Orleanians of always doing, never wanting anything or anyone to change, the way many of them had never changed out of khaki slacks and Oxford shirts.

  “I thought it might be Nita,” Maurice said, opening the door.

  “Yeah, I'm glad to see you, too.”

  Maurice takes most of what I say quite seriously. “Oh no,” he said, “I meant I was expecting her. I'm always glad to see you, Neal.” He hung an arm over my shoulders for a moment as we walked toward his office.

  Now I ask you, who wouldn't want a friend like Maurice? I grinned at him. “Thanks, but I really can't blame you for preferring to see Nita. She's okay, Maurice.”

  We hadn't had a chance to talk since the night of the disastrous dinner with Diana. Admittedly, I hadn't been so sure Nita was okay, and I guess I was feeling sorry that I hadn't called Maurice and let him know I was glad for him.

  But Maurice didn't appear to be worried about my lapses. Here was one of the most feared lawyers in town, reddening from the neck up just because I'd said his girlfriend was okay.

  “As a matter of fact, I talked to Nita for a while this morning,” I went on.

  He was clearly surprised. “At her cousin's funeral?”

  We settled down in Maurice's office, each of us slinging our feet over a corner of his mammoth desk, and I told him a bit about my relationship with Jackie Silva, near and far past, then about Jackie's problems with Bubba Brevna, The Emerald Lizard fire, and the typical New Orleans-type coincidence that Nita Greene was Jackie Silva's cousin.

  This coincidence interested Maurice least of all now.

  He looked at me intently. “Do you think Brevna killed Jackie?” he asked.