The Emerald Lizard

by Chris Wiltz

  “He is big,” I agreed, “and he doesn't seem to have much to say. Did Brevna rip out his vocal cords?” Frankie laughed. “Maybe he cut out his tongue,” I suggested.

  Frankie sobered up, checked in with Vinnie, and said, “Mr. Bubba brought him to lots of doctors when he was a boy,” he told me. “They say he had a trauma.” As in, he had the measles.

  “Is he Brevna's son?” I asked, somehow finding this hard to believe.

  “His nephew. He came to live with Mr. Bubba when his mama died.”

  “Is he stable?” I asked, and when Frankie didn't seem to understand this, looking at Vinnie with cocked eyebrows, I translated, “Does he ever get out of control, violent?”

  Frankie grinned at Vinnie, then told me, “He gets out of control, Mr. Bubba gets out his bullwhip.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say, stunned speechless myself. Yet another sign of the times, the Age of Violence. I felt vague stirrings of sympathy for Rodney Nutley. I trash-canned them fast. After all, enough abuse, and you turn the victim into a monster.

  We sat for a few minutes, sipping at our drinks, then I looked at Vinnie and said, “Vinnie doesn't seem to have much to say either.”

  Vinnie's eyes turned into menacing slits. Frankie said, without his usual friendliness, “Vinnie can talk if he wants to. He doesn't usually want to.”

  “Sure,” I said, shrugging indifferently. I let a few more moments of silence pass. Vinnie's eyes never left me. Frankie might be the talker, but I was beginning to sense that Vinnie had all the power. Finally, I let my eyes drift around the room. “Nice place you guys have here.” The twins didn't go for this soft soap. “I don't see any numbers on the floor anywhere. No chicken drop contests here?”

  “Not here,” Frankie said.

  “But you had them at The Emerald Lizard,” I said. Frankie started to speak but stopped. Vincent glared at me; I felt sure he'd given Frankie some unspoken command. “Even though Jackie didn't want them,” I went on. “But I guess you go wherever the boss tells you to

  go.”

  I waited but the twins had nothing more to say to me.

  Men of straw go up in smoke too easily.

  30

  Torch Song

  I'd like to tell you that I went over to the trailer park and had a confrontation with Bubba in which he broke down and confessed to the murder of Jackie Silva and the torching of The Emerald Lizard. Instead, ten minutes with Bubba at his mobile home and I had to revise my thinking about both crimes.

  He certainly wasn't what you'd call cordial when I arrived, but he did let me in without a fuss. He had overnight bags under his eyes, and he hadn't bothered to shave. He was wearing a pair of pajama bottoms, but he seemed too tired to care much about it, too tired to be very talkative dressed or undressed. The TV was on in the bedroom.

  He sat on a creaky rattan stool on the living room side of his kitchen counter, the fat on his stomach fluffing over the waist of his pajamas as baking bread rises over the sides of the pan. I stood where I was, near the door, not that I was invited any farther.

  I said, “Why didn't you tell Dietz I came over here to talk to you about Jackie Silva's debt?”

  “I don't like talking to cops,” he said. “That includes you.”

  “I can understand that. After all, you were threatening Jackie, you got ten grand off someone you were supposed to fix a case for, and you had no signed papers on the loan anyway. But what I don't understand is why Dietz leaned on Jeffrey Bonage hard enough for him to say he didn't know whether I'd come over here or not. That sounds like he might be helping you cover some tracks, doesn't it?”

  If I thought that would get a spark out of him, I could forget it. He just sat there, looking at me, and not very hard at that.

  “I don't guess it would do much good for me to ask where you were on the night the lounge was torched or the night Jackie was murdered.” I waited but not for long. “I suppose Dietz gets his share to corroborate whatever you tell him.” His mouth may have turned down a bit more, but it was already so inverted, I could have been wrong.

  “You know"—I was undaunted—"Larry Silva knows Jackie never signed any papers for the loan. He has no intention of turning any insurance money over to you.”

  “So what?” he blurted with enough animation to make the rattan squeak. Then he laughed, his chest and shoulders bouncing, his upside-down smile righting itself briefly. “The poor sucker needs the money, doesn't he? He's welcome to it for all the good it will do him.” The humor disappeared as fast as it had come. He thrust his face at me belligerently. “That's right, no signed papers. So where's my motive, scumshoe? Why should I burn down the lounge if there're no signed papers?”

  “That didn't stop Jackie from thinking you did it, or had it done,” I shot at him.

  A look of shock disturbed the set of his face. He wiped it away after a fraction of a second, but it was genuine, and when he said, “That woman didn't know me very well at all,” I could have sworn it was with some degree of sadness.

  I stood there knowing full well Bubba Brevna hadn't torched The Emerald Lizard, though before that could sink all the way in, he startled me by suddenly reaching across the counter, the stool squealing with strain, and flinging open a drawer. I almost jumped him but, still stretched across the counter, he sailed something through the air at me. The keys to the Thunderbird landed with a metallic snap in the palm of my hand.

  “You ever step foot on my property again,” Bubba said, “I'll see to it both your legs are broken.”

  Bubba and I had several more vile things to say to each other, but that's not what I thought about or even particularly remembered after I left him. After all, Bubba threatening to have my legs broken if I ever stepped foot on his property again came as naturally to him as it comes to other people to say “Have a nice day.” No, what I remembered was his unmistakable shock, and I still say sadness, that Jackie could have believed he would torch the Lizard. I sat in my car, pulled up on the oyster shells flanking the trailer park, thinking in the dark, that whether a person can love another is no gauge whatsoever of his humanity.

  I was also thinking Jackie had convinced me that Bubba torched the Lizard. I thought that, and a few seconds later I felt the heat of being humiliated by my own gullibility on my neck and face as I sat all alone. I remembered Reenie telling me how sly Jackie could be, and two things that should have hooked up in my mind before stood out with crystal clarity now. One was Larry Silva telling me that Jackie had not mentioned going to the Organized Crime Unit to him. The other was Jeffrey Bonage telling me that Jackie had burgled her own lounge twice.

  Every cop instinct I ever had was telling me now that Jackie Silva had torched The Emerald Lizard.

  I wasted no time getting over to Jeffrey Bonage's Urbandale apartment.

  There was no answer to my slugging it out with the door so I picked the lock and let myself in. Nothing was different. Even the pie pan with the red gunk on it was still there.

  Jeffrey was in the bedroom on his stomach across the bed, his legs hanging off the end, one arm bent in what appeared to be an unnatural way, his hand trapped underneath him. He was clad the way I'd left him two days ago, blue jeans, no shirt, his thin body now looking agonizingly young and inert.

  Next to the bed on a night table was an empty bottle of Seconals, a prescription for—who else?—Mrs. Jackie Silva.

  Jeffrey could have been dead, but his mouth was open and I could hear him breathing, faintly and shallowly, but breathing.

  I turned him over on his back, shouting his name at him and slapping lightly on his face, my fingers contacting a line of drool running from the corner of his mouth to his ear. His eyes started trying to open, but all I saw of them for a few minutes were the whites.

  He finally woke up enough that I was able to get him off the bed. One of his arms across my shoulders, one of my arms supporting him by the waist, we got down the short hallway into the kitchen where I bruised us both considerably banging in
to counters and appliances as I tried to find a pot and some coffee. Once the water was on I walked Jeffrey up and down the kitchen, through the hallway, a couple of steps into the bedroom and back, the only relatively clear passage in the apartment. He was coming around enough that I considered it safe not to call an ambulance.

  The better part of an hour later I had him sitting on the sofa, sipping at a second cup of coffee. All this Florence Nightingale crap had given me more time to think.

  “Did Jackie help you burn down the Lizard or did she just tell you to do it?” I asked him.

  I didn't mean to scare him—you've got to start somewhere—but he jumped and sloshed coffee out of the cup. The saucer caught most of it, though some dripped on his pantleg. He set the cup and saucer on his thigh. His hands were shaking. He hiccupped and almost dumped the coffee over on the sofa. I took the cup and saucer away from him and put it down on the floor, where it would probably grow mold before it was removed.

  “Let's have it, Jeffrey,” I said. He hiccupped again. “Did you get your experience on the Thibodeaux restaurant?”

  “What? No. Shit.” He put his head in his hand, resting his elbow on his knee. When he hiccupped his head bounced. His elbow slid off his knee.

  “Then how come the Lizard was burned down the same way the restaurant was?”

  “I read how they did it in the newspaper.”

  “Christ.” Why don't they just print a how-to section on crime?

  I got the story through an onslaught of the hiccups. It seemed Jackie had complained regularly to Jeffrey about her high mortgage notes, the dropoff in business since the oil bust, and the money she owed Brevna. After she told him three or four times she wished the place would just burn to the ground, he decided she was telling him to do it. After she commented another couple of times that she ought to be as lucky as Kathy Thibodeaux, he decided she was telling him how to do it.

  He stayed late one night after the lounge closed and drilled a hole in the side of the building under the raised level at the back, where it wouldn't be noticed. On Sunday, he and Jackie locked up, got in their separate cars, and left. Except Jeffrey returned, funneled gas and diesel fuel through the plastic bottle, inserted the rope, lit it, then hauled out as fast as he could.

  He didn't talk to Jackie until she called him a few hours later, hysterical, and asked him to pick her up and bring her to the fire. In front of the still smoking remains of The Emerald Lizard, she wept and told him her life was ruined. At first he thought she was putting on a show for the cops, but he soon realized she meant it. And if her life was ruined, then he had ruined it.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked and hiccupped twice. “Even you knew she loved the Lizard.” I decided he meant even someone who didn't know Jackie all that well. “I don't guess I ever could have told her,” he said miserably.

  Which meant she really did think Brevna had burned down the lounge. So maybe she had been serious about going with me to the OCU. So maybe there was still, somehow, a connection between the fire and Jackie's murder.

  “What are you going to do?” Jeffrey asked me, his brown eyes big and scared, his hiccups cured for the moment. “Are you going to call Dietz?”

  I didn't know what I was going to do. In one long minute, I tried to play out in my mind what would happen if Dietz got his hands on Jeffrey, if Jeffrey told him Jackie had burgled her own lounge, told him Jackie said she wished the place would burn down. He would become an accessory to Jackie's crime. Her fear of Brevna wouldn't play with Dietz or anyone else any more than it had played with me. She'd thought she'd outsmarted Brevna by not signing the papers on the loan, but what she'd done was remove him yet another step away from any involvement with her.

  “Are you going to call Dietz?” Jeffrey asked again.

  “No more pills,” I told him. “If I ever come over here and find you in this condition again, I'll feed you to Dietz while you're unconscious.”

  He thought about it, making sure, I suppose, he understood what I was saying, then his hiccups started up again with a vengeance.

  There was a pay phone in front of a convenience store on Urbandale. I stopped to call Maurice, both anxious to talk to him and more than a little apprehensive. It was closing in on eleven o'clock, and if Nita hadn't made it home yet—

  “She's home,” Maurice said. “She's in the darkroom.” His tone was a bit clipped, as if he were aggravated. If he was, though, it was probably with me. I was feeling pretty bad about the words between us.

  “Did you call Diana?” I asked him.

  “Yes.” A blast of expelled air rattled in my ear. “I told her the show's back on.” He spoke over my protest. “If I call it off, it's going to become an issue between us, a power struggle. She says she'll be finished sometime next week.”

  I started to remind him that Nita would never know he'd called it off, but I let it go.

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better,” I said, “Nita seems to be pretty far removed from whatever sleaziness is going on here. Aside from seeing him at the funeral, she didn't know anything about Brevna.”

  “But she does now—you told her.”

  “True.” Again, he sounded as though he were accusing me of something heinous. I didn't like that at all, but I liked even less these bad feelings between Maurice and me, so I let it go, too. I said, “I found out positively tonight that Brevna had nothing to do with The Emerald Lizard burning down. The truth is"—I was admitting this for the first time to myself as well— “I don't believe he had anything to do with Jackie's murder, either.”

  “The truth is, Neal,” Maurice said, “even if you'd found out Brevna is a mass murderer, it wouldn't stop Nita now.”

  Here was the real truth: Maurice hadn't called off Nita's show because he didn't trust Diana not to tell Nita he'd done it. As I hung up with him I thought he had no good reason to trust Diana. It was just the sort of thing she would do.

  31

  Big Blows

  The day after Thanksgiving I talked to Aubrey. All he really wanted to talk about was the weather.

  “The big blow is coming, Neal. We're gonna catch shrimp tonight.”

  Outside my office window were other office windows, no trees, nothing to indicate that the wind was shifting and the temperature dropping except an overcast sky. But I'd felt it that morning when I left the Euclid—the first serious cold snap of the season.

  “I thought you were going on the nightshift,” I said.

  “Not till Monday. I'll have to round up all the drunks early.”

  He asked me how Larry Silva was doing. Larry had done fine, taking everything in his philosophically fatalistic way, until Thanksgiving day.

  “There's just something about the holidays, you know?” He must have said it three or four times, his shoulders slumped, his eyes downcast.

  I'd spent part of the afternoon with him, feeling depressed myself because I had nothing to tell him, no hope to give him. I didn't want to tell him about Jeffrey and the torching of the Lizard, I guess because I was still thinking that Jeffrey's blind and stupid act of love and loyalty to Jackie had somehow caused her death, and I was frustrated because I couldn't figure out how. But I didn't want to tell anyone about Jeffrey's arson because I was afraid a case could be made, by the insurance company at least, that Jackie had done it herself. It would only be one more blow for Larry.

  Aubrey had nothing encouraging to tell me. Dietz had long finished his investigation and the District Attorney's office was putting together its case. Unless I could come up with something, things didn't look too good for Larry Silva.

  I wasn't being my usual talkative self. Aubrey tried to fill the silence.

  “Yep,” he said, “we'll have a blow and then over the weekend we can go catch those big reds.” Redfish, the new Louisiana gold since oil prices had plummeted. “Aren't you ready to go fishin’ yet?” he asked me, and I knew he thought Larry Silva's case was hopeless.

  “Not yet,” I said, “but
this much I do know—Jackie's killer didn't torch the Lizard.”

  He asked me how I knew, but I didn't tell him, and we got off the phone.

  The rain started in the afternoon. It whipped around the Père Marquette and slashed at my windows. And then it was gone, not as big a blow as Aubrey had thought, but enough to usher in some frost that night and make us feel that winter finally was at hand.

  32

  Nice Men

  Diana got out of bed and slipped into a little black dress that was cut to Brazil.

  I was in bed smoking a cigarette. “Why do we have to go out to dinner?” I asked. “I thought your parents had two different caterers doing this party.”

  She clipped on a pair of ruby and diamond earrings that nearly reached her shoulders. “They do, but I don't like to eat at parties.”

  She'd made reservations at an uptown restaurant not far from her parents’ house on Calhoun Street where the holiday soiree was taking place.

  We swished into the restaurant all fancied up, Diana having added black stockings, black satin very high heels and a mink jacket to her ensemble, me in my courtroom power suit.

  It was definitely an uptown New Orleans eatery what with its white tablecloths and napkins, black-suited waiters, and a menu that demanded at least a reading knowledge of French. Mirrors above wainscoting and framed caricatures of patrons who were also local celebrities filled in an atmosphere of casual bonhomie.

  Next to our table a bottle of Dom Perignon was on ice. The waiter popped the cork and filled two slender glasses.

  I took a sip, wished it was Scotch, and said, “What's the occasion?”

  Diana put those semi-sweet-chocolate eyes on me. “The occasion is a proposal. I want you to come live with me, darling.”