John Raven Beau

by O'Neil De Noux

  “They sent three. One says it’s a woman. Which one you want?” Kay is huffing now. “If we don’t make some progress, they’ll take over this Task Force. You know the drill. They have unlimited funds and the political know how to convince politicians to let them run the show.”

  Jesus. The FBI. All we need is them fuckin’ this up. Hell, we can fuck it up by ourselves. Kay goes on to spell out new assignments. Thankfully, he doesn’t mention me. When he assigns Bob Willson, the one with two “Ls” in his name, to parish prison, chuckles erupt. Seems some guards got information from some prisoners that might be useful. Two-L isn’t amused. Poor bastard’ll be spending his evenings in prison talking to junkies and stone-fuckin-nuts criminals who’ll say anything to get out of their cells for a little while.

  “Way to go Two-L. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Tim Rothman declares, then starts laughing. When Two-L glares at him, he laughs even louder, nearly falling out of my chair. Two-L seethes. As the meeting breaks up, I spot Two-L moving our way. He kicks a chair over and lumbers right up to us and leans over Rothman.

  “Listen, you frizzy-headed Jew bastard. The name’s Willson. W ... I ... L ... L ... S ... O ... N. That other name, ain’t my name.”

  Rothman grins. “Yes, it is.”

  Two-L is breathing hard now, his fists clenched.

  “All right,” Kay declares. “Y’all lighten up.”

  Two-L remains there for a few moments to make his point, then backs away.

  Rothman puts his hands behind his head.

  “Obviously, Two-L,” Rothman adds, “someone in your family’s dyslexic. Wilson is spelled with one ‘L’ as in Woodrow Wilson and Wilson tennis balls.”

  Two-L lunges and grabs Rothman’s shoulder, raising his right fist. I grab his fist and he leers at me. “You want a piece of this, Cochise?”

  Rothman pulls away and has to tell Two-L, “You’re not only ugly, but stupid. He’ll scalp you.”

  I let go of Two-L’s fist and nod toward Rothman. “Go ahead and hit him.”

  Rothman’s looks stunned.

  I fold my arms. “Kay’s watching. I can’t hit you first. Go ahead and clip Rothman. Then I can break your ugly jaw, you fuckhead.”

  Two-L points his ugly jaw in my face and says, “Yeah?”

  “Count on it. I haven’t hit anyone in a while. I need the exercise.”

  Bob Kay steps between us, forcing us both back a step.

  “What’s this all about?”

  Two-L waves me forward. “Come on, Geronimo. Any time.”

  “Wrong tribe, moron. Cochise and Geronimo were Apache.”

  Kay tries Rothman. “What’s all this about?”

  “Beau and I were just asking who the fuck was stupid enough to let dipshit Burglary detectives in this, anyway.”

  Tony Dunn belches loudly behind my ear and everyone starts yelling and pointing fists and it takes all of Kay’s diplomatic skills to keep another cop from being killed. As Two-L and Dunn and the other burglary dicks, including One-L, back away, Kay growls, “Dammit! From now on, no one brings guns to a Task Force meeting. I mean it!”

  Storming off, he adds, “Leave them in your goddamn cars. We don’t need any more dead cops!”

  I look at Rothman who crosses his eyes.

  I point my finger at his nose. “Fuckin’ trouble maker.”

  He nods, stands and stretches.

  “You’da looked pretty goofy if that big bastard had hit you.”

  “Not as goofy as he’da looked with a broken jaw.”

  From the back of the room someone yells, “Beau. Line two!”

  I pick up the phone. It’s Sandie.

  “Hey, Baby,” she says. “His name’s Mullet.”

  “Who?”

  “Your damn killer.”

  In the Twilight Zone

  I found six men with the last name of Mullet in our files, as well as nine men also known as Mullet. Some fuckin’ moniker. I also found one Mudfish and one Muddy and threw them into the mix.

  It’s taken me three hours to put together seventeen separate photo line-ups with seven different pictures in each, throwing one Mullet in each except the ones with Mudfish and Muddy. Amazingly, most of the men looked alike, fuckin’ ugly or as well call them – fugly. Pretty boys aren’t called Mullet.

  Wearing a pink blouse and extra-tight, iridescent blue jeans, Sandie sits next to my desk. Her hair is curled and her face adorned with extra make-up. Bob Kay in a black suit and Gonzales, in a dark green shark-skin suit, stand on either side of my desk.

  I pass the first line-up to Sandie, giving her the standard spiel. “If you see anyone you recognize, let me know.”

  “He in here?”

  “If you see anyone you recognize, let me know.”

  She’s disappointed with the first line-up. She shakes her head through the second one. Reaching the fourth picture of the third line-up, she lets out a screech. Kay and Gonzales jump forward.

  Sandie holds up the picture and says, “I went to high school with him!”

  I snatch the picture out of her hand. It’s one of the fillers.

  Kay and Gonzales back away.

  “Jimmy Page,” Sandie tells me. “I think I fucked him, but I’m not sure.” She digs a stick of gum out of her purse and looks up at Kay. “He had the same name as the guy from Zed Leppelin. Very popular with the girls.”

  “Led Zeppelin,” I interpret.

  “Whatever.”

  We go back to the line-ups.

  Just as we reach the second to last one and I’m figuring the Mullet she met doesn’t have a police record, Sandie slaps one of the pictures down on the desk and yells, “It’s him! This is the guy.” She bounces up and down and claps her hands.

  Kay and Gonzales hover over me as I pick up the picture.

  A protruding brow over deep-set, beady eyes, a wide nose and a square, Neanderthal jaw, the man’s dark hair is long and greasy looking in the picture. We can see the top half of his muscle shirt and tufts of kinky hair cover his shoulders. In police lingo, he’s fugly as hell.

  “You sure?” I ask Sandie who nods furiously.

  I check the information on the back of the mug shot. “His name is Lloyd Singletary.” I pull out my tape recorder and put in a fresh tape. Kay and Gonzales grab chairs and it takes a good forty-five minutes to get Sandie’s statement on tape.

  “He remembered me,” Sandie beams. “He was the big one who I let feel-up my tits that first night.”

  Jesus, if this ever goes in front of a jury, they’ll fuckin’ love it.

  “I decided to hit some bars early and found him in The Honky Chateau Bar. Corner of Piety and Chartres at exactly four o’clock.”

  That’s Bywater.

  “I played it smart this time. I didn’t get drunk and didn’t talk about the killings. I just made sure he was the one and he was.”

  She pauses so I egg her on. “He was the one who did what?”

  “Told me about the badges.”

  It takes a while but we get the whole story, including the fact that Mullet drives a maroon Harley-Davidson. Besides The Honky Chateau, he also hangs out at some uptown bars, but didn’t tell Sandie their names. With the recorder still running I ask Sandie about the line-ups, how she went through fifteen before finding Mullet’s picture. I have her sign and date the back of Singletary’s picture, then put her initials on the back of every picture she viewed that evening.

  When she finishes, she bounces in her chair and asks, “What now?”

  “Tomorrow. We go back. Same time.”

  “Goody!” Sandie smiles broadly and I tell her she did well. Very well. Kay pays her another two hundred and Gonzales volunteers to take her home.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at three p.m. sharp,” I tell her.

  “Make it three-thirty at UNO, I’m modeling.”

  As he leads her away, Gonzales asks, “You model?”

  “Nude. At UNO. Beau didn’t tell you?”

  Gonzales lo
oks back with raised eye-brows. “No. He didn’t tell me.”

  “Why don’t y’all come by UNO early. Y’all can watch.”

  Gonzales points a finger at me, his eyes like saucers. “Sure,” he says. “It’s a date.”

  Kay follows me to the computer where I pull up Lloyd Singletary’s record. He’s been arrested three times: DWI, aggravated assault, aggravated battery. Each arrest also included a charge of resisting arrest. Why am I not surprised? He’s thirty. Exactly my age. At 6’5”, he’s a good three inches taller than me and outweighs me by a good fifty pounds. I point out his place of birth on the screen to Kay, who’s now looking over my shoulder.

  “Pea Ridge, Arkansas. A country boy.”

  “I’ll get the Benton County Sheriff’s Office on the phone.” Kay picks up the nearest phone. “Somebody up there might remember him.”

  “You know Pea Ridge?”

  Kay nods. “North of Beaver Lake. Just south of Mark Twain National Park. Beautiful country. Almost in Missouri.”

  Sure. It’s gotta be the garden spot of fuckin’ Arkansas. Sometimes, I feel I’m in a Twilight Zone episode. Just wish Rod Serling would step out and tell me what the fuck is going on!

  •

  The Honky Chateau occupies the first floor of a two story wooden building painted olive green. A red neon Jax Beer sign hangs in the only window, next to the only door, which opens to Chartres Street. Across Chartres is the concrete sea wall, the levee and beyond, the Louisa Street Wharf and the river.

  Three motorcycles, a red pick-up and a yellow AMC Pacer are parked in the small shell parking lot on the Piety Street side of the building. Mullet’s maroon Harley is parked nearest Chartres Street.

  Sitting in my Caprice a block up Piety next to the rickety wooden fence of an abandoned house, I can’t see the bar’s door, but Mullet’s hog is in plain view. Which ever way he goes on Chartres, we’ll be able to follow easily. He shouldn’t come back up Piety. It’s a one-way. Of course, that doesn’t mean much in New Orleans, where stop signs are only suggestions and red lights are run with impunity.

  I have a partner now. Orders from Bob Kay, I’m no longer a lone wolf. I asked for Tim Rothman. He gave me Gonzales. Could be worse, a lot worse. Could have been sound-effect wizard Tony Dunn or bore-me-to-death-with-another-long-story Elvis Channard, or worse still – Two-L. At least Gonzales is Homicide. Like me, he was broken in by Jodie Kintyre.

  Gonzales fidgets in his seat next to me.

  “What’s the matter, you got an itch or something?”

  He glares at me. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get a fuckin’ hard-on watching her model.”

  I did earlier, but I’m admitting nothing.

  Gonzales fidgets again, trying to get comfortable.

  So I tell him, “All right, no more suits.”

  “What?”

  “You ride with me, you wear jeans and a dress shirt to cover your weapon.”

  Gonzales is in a double-breasted, navy blue suit with two-tone loafers.

  “We wear ties in Homicide,” he tells me. “Everyone except you, of course.”

  “Exactly.”

  We wait.

  A skinny guy rounds the corner from the Honky Chateau and climbs into the Pacer, which runs, surprising me.

  “Looks like a refugee from a ZZ Top concert,” Gonzales says and then yawns. “So, Kay showed line-ups to the witnesses from both murders but no one could pick out Mullet?”

  I nod. Apparently the witnesses from Cochran’s and Steven’s murders didn’t get a good enough look at the assailants to identify anyone. Mullet fit the general description of the heavy-set man standing over Steven’s body, but barely.

  “And we don’t even know where this fuckin’ Mullet lives,” Gonzales says disgustedly. None of Mullet’s addresses checked out. His driver’s license is listed to an apartment he lived in three years ago. His hog is registered to another former address.

  “No listing with the power company?” Gonzales asks.

  I shake my head. “Or the gas company, phone company, cable TV company. And no one in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, heard of him.”

  “Jesus. He doesn’t have cable?” Gonzales says in an exaggerated voice.

  “Doesn’t need it. He’s got the Honky Chateau.”

  I don’t bother telling him what Fel Jones said, how the Mullets of the world like living outside society. Fel angrily told me, over coffee this morning, that the Intelligence Division has nothing on Mullet. So far only Fel and Kay, Gonzales and I know about Mullet, besides Sandie who wore an extra short, extra tight minidress into the Honky Chateau a half hour ago.

  We wait.

  Gonzales is quiet for a good ten minutes, a record, before he says, “You gone out with that waitress yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? Cops and waitresses go together like beans and rice.”

  I don’t answer.

  “You stupid or something?”

  I don’t answer, but I know that’s no deterrent.

  “She said she’d only go out with a cop if he was half-Sioux. That’s more than a hint, Mister Native American.”

  Like a good plains warrior, I keep my face from revealing anything.

  “If you were Latino, you’d be all over that little number. If you were Latino ... ”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Gonzales shuts up.

  “Keep your fuckin’ advice, all right. I’m as much a Frenchman as I am Sioux. I don’t need any help with women.”

  Gonzales settles back in his seat and mutters, “I think you do.”

  I let him have the last word, otherwise this’ll go on all night.

  Five minutes later, he asks, “If we follow this ass-hole, who’s bringing Sandie home?”

  “She’s to call a cab. She’s got money.”

  “I shoulda brought my car.”

  I squint at him. “You don’t have a car.” He’s too new to Homicide to have a unit assigned to him.

  “I mean my personal car.”

  Jesus.

  I spend the next few minutes telling him how LaStanza used to drive around in his personal car. His rich wife bought him a Maserati. Jodie was self-conscious riding in it. One day, in broad daylight, they parked it on the street, walked around the corner and came back four minutes later to find the car gone.

  Everyone ribbed LaStanza for months, even made up a song about inner-city thugs tooling around in his nice Italian sports car. Went to the tune from “Dead Man’s Curve.”

  It went something like –

  I parked my car in the city one sunny day

  When some urbanites came and took it away

  Had to call a cab to get out of there

  Had to pretend to my wife that I didn’t care

  So she bought me a new car with an alarm

  Made me promise to always leave it at home ...

  I forget the rest, but it got funnier, something about driving to Dead Man’s Curve via the Garden District and getting lost in the projects. For a moment, a vision of Sharon comes to my mind and our rainy afternoon in bed. I take in a deep breath.

  “What is it?” Gonzales asks. “Angie, huh? You thinking about her, ain’t ya?”

  The hair suddenly stands on the back of my neck when I remember how Angie had asked about her ex-boyfriend and how I was wearing the Jekyll & Hyde shirt, the one Sharon gave me. Of course, I’d heard her – ‘I prefer the slower, quieter type. Especially if they’re part Sioux.’

  Why do I hesitate? I want to, but something in my gut tells me to hold back. Not now. Not while we’re in the middle of all this. Then I remember Gonzales saying, “He who hesitates is lost.”

  I look at him and he’s so bored he’s glassy-eyed.

  “He who hesitates is lost,” I say. “Is that Shakespeare or the Bible?”

  He shakes his head. “J. Robert Oppenheimer. The guy who built the atom bomb.”

  Cute. Real fuckin’ cute.

  Mullet comes around the corner and cl
imbs on his bike. He cranks it up and drives off up Chartres. I follow, letting him have a good half block lead. A dump truck cuts in between us. I spot Mullet make a quick right. The dump truck stops at the stop sign and waits for oncoming traffic, like a good citizen. By the time I’ve made the corner, Mullet’s bike’s nowhere in sight. I head uptown, as if that’ll do any good and spend the next hour cruising bars, but no maroon Harley. Just as I give up, Gonzales has to say it.

  “I told you the only way to keep up with a bike is on a bike.”

  I say nothing until I pull back up at Headquarters. As Gonzales climbs out, I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he says, leaning back in. “Are you that spaced-out? Tomorrow’s Saturday.” He shakes his head. “I’ll see you Monday.”

  I drive to Flamingo’s and discover Angie’s off. Probably out on a date. Thankfully Cecilia senses I’m in no mood to talk and leaves me alone. I order chili and sit quietly. I’ll take Buck for a walk when I’m done, then pop an Abita beer and sit in front of the T.V.

  Some Friday night I have planned.

  •

  Wearing my darkest sunglasses, I sit on the levee the following morning, the summer sun hot on my face. A surprising coolness is in the air. I look westward, in the general direction of Lake Maurepas and see thick cumulus clouds, like cotton, high in the sky. To the north, a line of cumulonimbus clouds with their flat gray bottoms, hover over the distant water. The rain’s a good ten, fifteen miles away.

  Buck’s been sniffing around the rocks below for the last half hour. To my right, the lake is postcard pretty, its water shaded a blue-green tint from the bright sky. Sailboats and yachts cruise the unusually still water. The air smells fresh like Vermilion Bay after a rainstorm, salty but not stale and humid like the marsh.

  The Choctaw called this lake – Okwata, which meant ‘wide water’. The French re-named it for their Minister of Marine, Compte de Pontchartrain. When my Dad first told me about the lake bigger than Vermilion Bay, I thought Pontchartrain was a Choctaw or Cherokee name. After all, Pontiac was an Ottawa name. My father corrected me before I said something dumb in school, thankfully.

  So how do I find out where Mullet lives? If he’s our man or not, he knows about the badges. Maybe he lives with other bikers and they’re involved. I have a bad feeling about this ass-hole. He knows about the badges. But how do I find out where he lives? Follow him, right?