The Emerald Lizard

by Chris Wiltz

  “Enough!” Mave commanded, slapping the bar. We were attracting attention. Mave gave Clem some kind of eye action and he took his cowboy hat off a bar stool, jammed it on his head and let the heels on his cowboy boots dig his way out of the Gemini.

  “Okay, Rafferty. I can tell you're a persistent kind of guy, so we might as well have a talk.” The waitress was waiting for Mave at the other end of the bar. Mave called out to her, “Can you handle it, honey?”

  “Sure, Mave.” She let herself behind the bar through a flip-top opening and began mixing the drinks herself.

  Diana, who had moved down the bar away from the action, drew alongside now, smiling up at me.

  “Why are you protecting him, Miss Scoggins?”

  “Clem doesn't need any protection, Rafferty.”

  “No he doesn't, not if he didn't kill Jackie.”

  Mave gave me a soft, almost motherly smile. “Why would Clem kill Jackie? He was in love with her.”

  What was it with these people? I asked myself that question. I asked Mave, “And what about Larry Silva, her husband. You know, the one they're holding for her murder. Don't you think he loved her, too?”

  “Yes I do, but,” she shook her head sadly, “Jackie didn't love him anymore. Anyone can tell you how cruel she could be when she told a man to get lost.”

  “Ah. I see. Maybe Clem didn't tell you that Jackie told him to get lost, too. The night she was killed.”

  Mave stared at me. There was no expression on her face, but her silence spoke for itself.

  “Clem didn't tell you the truth, Mave,” I said.

  “And who told you?”

  “Jackie did.” Well, not technically. She'd told Larry, but I let that slide.

  “So then it's your word against Clem's the way I see it.”

  “Unless someone in the neighborhood saw him around and decides to say so.”

  “That's right, but no one has, so I'm gonna keep right on believing Clem, Rafferty.” This Mave stuck to her guns and to her cowboys. Must be that heart of gold Larry was talking about.

  “Is Clem a heavy gambler?” I asked.

  There was some more of Mave's expressionless yet meaningful silence.

  “I know you're a bookie, Mave. Larry told me he's in debt to you. I have no intention of using it against you. I'm just trying to clear Larry.”

  “And I hope you do. I like Larry. That's the only reason I went to the funeral today, but what Clem does isn't really any of your business, is it?” She didn't say this unkindly.

  “It is if it affects Larry in any way, or if Clem killed Jackie.”

  “I wish you'd just take my word he didn't.”

  “I wish that's all it took, Mave.”

  About this time Diana walked around the part of the bar where Clem had been standing. She went up to a pay phone on the wall at the end of the bar. The ownership papers were framed above it. Mave looked around. Diana started putting a quarter in the phone.

  “What's it say, princess?” I asked.

  “Frank Impastato and Vincent Impastato,” she read. She got her quarter back, pocketed it, and came around to where I was standing at the bar.

  “Where are the Impastatos?” I asked Mave.

  “Gone fishin’,” she told me. I would have laughed, but here on the West Bank there was a good chance that's exactly where they'd gone.

  “Those Impastatos,” I said. “An unpredictable pair. Hard to imagine them owning a place like this when they seem to be into such tasteless shenanigans as chicken drop contests.”

  “I have no idea what you're talking about,” Mave said.

  “Over at The Emerald Lizard,” I added to help her out.

  “I still don't know what you're talking about, and I don't much care either.”

  “You and Jackie weren't very good friends, were you?” She put her hands on her rounded hips which strained the seams of her cut-offs. She didn't deny it, she said, “We weren't enemies either. I think you've asked plenty enough questions for right now. I've got customers to take care of.”

  Her loyalty to her friends, her caring for her customers, her kindness to strangers while standing her ground, the bosom, the hairdo—yep, except for the cut-offs, I could see why Jackie had tagged her Miss Kitty.

  “Just one more question,” I said, “about Nita Greene.”

  “No,” Mave shook her head. “That's just one question too many.”

  One question too many, or the wrong one? Was Mave protecting Nita, too? Why? What was Nita up to?

  19

  Prostitutes

  See you ‘bout this time next week, Mave.

  Something like that was what the cowboy had said to Mave as he was getting ready to leave, after he'd counted his money.

  That didn't sound like a gambler. He'd been too businesslike. And, anyway, what gambler takes his winnings and counts it out like a bank teller? Well, okay, that may be stretching the theory, but it was gnawing at me that Mave was paying the cowboy for something other than a bet he'd won, as if he'd come in to collect his weekly pay.

  I was trying hard to imagine that Clem Winkler worked for the Impastato twins, but I was diverted by Diana getting into the car and immediately beginning to laugh.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nita Greene.”

  The key was in and I was ready to turn it. I let my hand fall away. “What about her?”

  “You know how secretive she's been about her project. Well, I figured it out. It's the prostitutes. With Mave's help she's getting into their hearts and minds. With them she's experiencing another ‘slice of life.’ Remember how she talked that night?”

  A creeping sense of alarm came over me. “What do you mean? I thought she took pictures.”

  Diana could get very exasperated with me when she thought I was being dense. “She does, Neal. She's a photographer. In order to take good photographs, to make the camera see the subjects, the prostitutes in this case, she has to strip them down, if you'll forgive the pun, to their vulnerabilities—their sadness, their grotesqueness, their funniness. Don't you remember how she talked? She has to understand how they experience life. She has to become one of them. That's how some photographers work.”

  “She has to ‘become’ one of them? Nita?”

  “No, no. I don't mean that literally. She talks to them, she gets them to tell her how they feel about what they do, about themselves, so that they expose themselves to her, then to the camera.” She put her hand on my thigh. “Oh, Neal,” she laughed, “just imagine Nita, preppy receptionist by day, turned Marrero prostitute by night!”

  “I just did,” I said. “It was not a pretty picture.”

  Diana thought this was uproarious. “She's an artiste, Neal, not an adventuress!”

  I was not nearly so amused. After all, if it concerned Nita, it concerned Maurice. And if it concerned Maurice, it concerned me. I felt about Maurice the way I would have felt about a brother. Odd, really, if you considered that we came from such entirely different backgrounds, his father a graduate of Harvard Law School, mine of the New Orleans Police Academy, yet we became friends, good friends, immediately. Our friendship, though, wasn't the typical male friendship, getting together to play sports or watch sports or take in some action. When we got together we talked, mostly about our work, sometimes about our fathers, less often and only if it was important, about women. Nita was important. It bothered me that I didn't know exactly what Nita was up to. It bothered me even more that Maurice probably didn't know either.

  Following 4th Street over to Barataria Boulevard, I headed south, down-river direction, though we were not on the highway that follows alongside the river. I was on my way to Lafitte, which is separated from the river by a lot of marshland, bays, waterways, and bayous. These are a part of the wetlands that are endangered, fragile as they are and constantly changing, eroded away by natural causes such as hurricanes, and man-made causes such as dredging by oil companies. There are people who know the waterways so well, boating
, hunting and fishing on them all their lives, that they can point out changes in the coastline as they happen. Then there are other people, like me, who could get lost forever in these waterways, like the man who never returned.

  Diana got very quiet, and when she finally spoke I thought she'd want to know where we were going, but there was something else on her mind.

  “What did that cowboy mean, you don't take long to mourn the dead?” she asked.

  “Who knows.”

  She'd left her hand resting on my thigh as I drove, but she took it back now.

  “Were you and Jackie lovers?”

  I considered this question in all seriousness, but finally I had to answer, “Yes.”

  She was quiet again before she followed up with, “For long?”

  Again I considered before answering, “For a while.” For the better part of a year.

  Part of Diana must have been thinking she shouldn't be jealous of someone who'd been murdered, but I knew she was jealous nonetheless. You see, she always let me know she had dates when we weren't together, but I never told her what I did when I wasn't with her unless I was working. I guess she'd been thinking all along that if I wasn't with her that's what I was doing, working.

  I enjoyed torturing the princess all the way to the Lafitte LaRose Highway, then I finally told her Jackie and I had been lovers years ago.

  No, Jackie had not been my lover when she was murdered. She'd been my client, the only client I'd ever had who'd been murdered.

  I didn't like that.

  20

  Pirates

  “He was a violent man,” I said. “He controlled his own men with violence.”

  Diana and I were discussing Jean Lafitte, the pirate. We were past the subdivisions at Barataria Boulevard and on the part of the Lafitte LaRose Highway that is flanked on either side by dense woods. We were approaching Crown Point and the only national park in the state of Louisiana, which happens to be named for Jean Lafitte. I had remarked that it was typical Louisiana to honor a pirate this way, a smuggler who increased the slave population of the state almost a hundred times during the first part of the nineteenth century.

  Diana was arguing that he was a patriot because he turned down the British offer of thirty thousand dollars and helped Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans instead. It was obvious to me that thirty thousand, even if it was an enormous sum of money in 1814, was a drop in the bucket when Lafitte could get a thousand dollars a slave. His finances might not have continued to flourish under British rule, I told Diana.

  She dismissed that, saying it was a way of life that was too deeply ingrained. “Anyway, Lafitte was known to be a gentleman. He was stylish, charming, and glamorous. He was friends with many aristocrats in the city; he was accepted by them.”

  “Of course he was, but that's nothing to be proud of your ancestors for. He sold them slaves and got rich off it. They probably liked him because he was richer than they were.”

  “The only people who consider it a cardinal sin to be rich are those who don't have any money,” Diana replied.

  I won't go on repeating this ridiculous argument. I'm only telling you about it because we were en route to the little towns of Barataria and Lafitte out of which the pirate conducted his marauding and smuggling and where the intricate waterways he knew so well made it easy for him to hide, and escape. And I also tell you because in a strange way, the story of Lafitte ends up having some bearing, if only peripherally, on the story of Jackie's murder.

  Not only that, but you can see that Diana and I obviously loved to argue.

  We got to Crown Point and came up over the high rise of the Intracoastal Canal Bridge there. Once you're over the bridge, the woods end and it's nothing but flat marshland all the way to the Gulf. It is only from a promontory like the bridge—the only kind of promontory around New Orleans, unless you want to consider skyscrapers—that you can fully appreciate the beauty of the terrain. It's a quiet beauty. It doesn't shout at you and announce itself from the hilltops, because there aren't any hills. It's not flashy; it doesn't titillate you by changing colors much. Its colors are infinite shades of green, from emerald to gray-green, which quietly change to a yellowy brown. The color change usually signals the very end of fall, not the beginning of it. Out in the marsh there isn't even much flowering in the spring, and most of that is hidden, for the benefit only, it seems, of the creatures who live there.

  Its beauty lies in its apparent sameness, mile after indistinguishable mile stretching out, offering itself to the destructive waters of the Gulf. Even if you are out in the marsh, which I was only a couple of times in an uncle's boat, it all seems the same, confusing in its sameness because one cut of water looks much the same as another, a labyrinth of cuts, grassy islands, and mud lumps which only ends by presenting you with another expanse of another shade of green, the coastal Gulf water.

  The marsh is formidable land if you don't know it, but it is, as I said, fragile, constantly in danger of disappearing before your very eyes. I remember my uncle saying every time he went out in the marsh to fish or hunt, which was usually every weekend, that he could see more changes—they happened that fast. All I knew was that being out there had made me very uncomfortable, once because there was nowhere to get away from the sun and intense heat, another time because there was no shelter from the dampest, iciest wind I'd ever felt. It was a weird kind of open-air entrapment. I much preferred to view the marsh as I was viewing it now, illuminated by the full moon, a misty and eerily lit mass of spectral gray with pillowy patches of fog shining whitely, a kind of low-forming cloud bank, penetrated by soft lumpy forms.

  I was awed by it. There are times when New Orleans can seem like the end of the earth because it is so isolated, so different from other cities, so far away, but New Orleans is the center of the universe compared to the feeling I got from the marsh. The princess, however, was only mildly interested in any land mass uninterrupted by signs of civilized life.

  Crown Point, Barataria, and Lafitte are so close together that you barely know you're out of one before you're in another. There are many bridges over small waterways running from the Intracoastal Canal to the lakes. We went over one and were in Lafitte.

  We were on the Old Lafitte Road. Lights from houses appeared through the branches of oak trees whose trunks had been twisted by the prevailing weather—wind, rain, and storms. Moss hung thickly from the trees here; in New Orleans most of it has been killed off by pollution. We passed a cemetery, one where coffins had floated up once, set loose by a hurricane, tiny vessels carrying the dead across the water as if they were crossing the River Styx. My uncle had told me about that and it had left a deep impression on me. I told Diana about it now. She said nothing, but folded her arms tightly across her breasts as if she were cold.

  I had no idea where Bubba kept his boat. In many places along the road you could see clear to the water. I slowed to a crawl and rolled down the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of My New Flame. The only reason to think I might was that parked along the edge of the bayou like cars in a parking lot, were shrimp boats, one after the other, their big wing net frames folded up to tower over the boats themselves, the nets hanging in black graceful swags like so much mosquito netting. I didn't understand why they all weren't out. I'd always heard the full moon meant good shrimping.

  Every once in a while I could see the name of a boat written across the bow, but only if it was docked beside a lighted pier. Lafitte isn't very big; in fact we were soon at the end of it and could drive no farther without a boat, but there were far too many boats in the little water town to be able to pick out Bubba's even if it had been there.

  We stopped at a barroom with no name we could see in a building shaped like a large trailer. We knew it was a bar because of all the beer signs out front.

  Inside were lots of fishermen, maybe fifteen or twenty, and a handful of women. You could tell the men were fishermen because most of them had on the white rubber calf-high boots that
the fishermen around those parts wear. The women were dressed as if they were at home, some with backless terrycloth slippers on, one with her hair up in foam rollers. All of them were watching a football game on cable TV, laughing and talking, getting riled up over a play every now and then.

  No one looked at us with hostility as we walked in, but they did look at us. They looked at Diana—especially the women. The bartender was a woman. She was small and plain with nondescript brownish hair held back off her heart-shaped face by a pair of bobby pins. She didn't ask what we wanted, she just stood there staring at us until I asked for a gin and tonic and a Scotch and water. She made them, took the ten I'd put out on the bar, and laid the change down where it had been without a word. I had a feeling that a lot of talk in the form of questions wasn't going to be welcomed.

  We sat watching the game with the rest of the crowd, but I couldn't tell you who was playing. I had homed in on a kid, about thirteen, wearing the same kind of white rubber boots as the rest of them, off to himself in a corner playing a video game. I waited until I figured everyone had forgotten we were there, then I went over to watch the kid play. It was some kind of Space Invaders game.

  He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, which was shielded by a sweep of long black hair sliding across his forehead, but kept his concentration on the game. If anything, my presence seemed to help him concentrate more. The longer he played, the faster the Space Invaders filled up the screen. He dodged several invaders, his body movements becoming more animated, but finally his last man was caught and disappeared with the computerized whine of disappointment. The kid slapped at the machine, but he wasn't really angry.

  “Pretty good score,” I told him. He seemed a little shy, and smiled slightly, but didn't answer. “Aren't you going to play again?”

  “Out of quarters.” I strained to hear him, only realizing what he'd said after a few seconds.

  I dug into my pocket and handed him one. He hesitated before taking it, then shoved it fast into the slot. Once again, his concentration was high, but he didn't do so well this time. I dug for another quarter, taking my time.