Then Jimmie was silent. Didi Gee stopped eating, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burnt match into his empty plate.
“There’s a couple of guys that used to work for me. They don’t work for me now,” he said. “But they hang around my places of business sometimes. They like to talk about what’s going on around town. As Jimmie will tell you, I’m not interested in listening to gossip. Also, these are guys that follow their cocks. I don’t spend no time thinking of what these kind of young guys got to say. To tell you the truth, Lieutenant, I’ve been changing my attitudes about people a great deal lately. I think it’s my age and this awful disease in my colon. There are classes of people I don’t want to have no association with anymore. Like these guys. If you was to ask me their names later, I’d have to honestly tell you I don’t remember. I think it’s a mental block when it comes to some trashy people that I’ve been forced to hire in my business.”
“I’m not big on names these days, Didi,” I said.
“Because this story, if it’s true, is a horrible one and shows what kind of scum the country has been letting across its border,” he said. “This colored girl was a parlor chippie for this spick that lives out by the lake. The spick—and I use that word only because he’s a genuine lowlife—has got broads on the brain and is always moving them in and out of his mansion, primarily because he’s a fucking geek that no normal woman would touch unless she was blind. So the colored girl moved in and the geek really had the hots for her. The girl thought it was going to be hump city from there on out. The spick lets his pet dwarf drive her shopping around town, gives her all the coke she wants, introduces her to a lot of important greasers like she wasn’t just another broad with a ten-dollar ass and a five-cent brain. But the girl didn’t know this guy went through his own chippies like Jimmy Durante went through Kleenex. One morning after she got drunk and threw up in his pool he told the dwarf to drive her back to the parlor. What the spick didn’t figure on was ambition in a colored girl that grew up pulling sweet potatoes out of the ground with her toes.
“Because this broad had ears and a memory like flypaper. All the time she was poking plastic straws up her nose or balling the geek, she was also getting onto some heavy shit, and I’m talking government, military shit, Lieutenant, that the geek and the other spicks are playing around with.”
“What do you mean ‘government’?” I said.
“I’m repeating the gossip, I don’t analyze. It don’t interest me. I think Immigration ought to take these people to a factory and turn them into bars of soap. The girl tried to put his tit through a wringer. That got her out of the parlor, all right. They took her fishing out on the bayou and let her shoot up until her eyes crossed. When she didn’t pull it off on her own, they loaded her a hotshot that blew her heart out her mouth.”
“I appreciate the story you’ve told me, Didi, but I’d be offended if I thought you believed we were in the business of running your competition out of town.”
“You hurt my feelings,” he answered.
“Because we already knew just about everything you told me, except the mention about the government and the military. You’re very vague on that. I think we’re being selective here. I don’t believe that’s good for a man of your background who enjoys the respect of many people in the department.”
“I have been candid, Lieutenant. I do not pretend to understand the meaning of everything I hear from people that sometimes lie.”
“You’re a mature man, Didi. You shouldn’t treat me as less.”
He blew smoke out his nose and mashed out his cigarette in his plate. His black eyes became temporarily unmasked.
“I don’t know what he’s into. It’s not like the regular business around the city,” he said. He paused before he spoke again. “A guy said the girl was giggling about elephants before they dumped her in the water. You figure that one out.”
A few minutes later Didi Gee picked up his check and the two hoods who waited for him at the bar, and left. The red leather upholstery he had sat on looked like it had been crushed with a wrecking ball.
“He tips everybody in the place on his way out. Under it all he’s a bit insecure,” Jimmie said.
“He’s a psychopath,” I said.
“There’s worse people around.”
“You think it’s cute to mess around with characters like that? You better give it some serious thought if you’re fronting points for him. Guys like Didi Gee don’t have fall partners. Somebody else always takes the whole jolt for them.”
He grinned at me.
“You’re a good brother,” he said. “But you worry too much about me. Remember, it was always me that got us out of trouble.”
“That’s because you always got us into it.”
“I’m not the one that almost got drowned in a bathtub last night. You threw a bucket of shit into a cage full of hyenas, bro.”
“How’d you hear about last night?”
“Forget about how I hear things or what I’m doing with Didi Gee. You worry about your own butt for a change, or those greasers are going to hang it out to dry.”
“What do you think this elephant stuff is?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“You ever hear of a guy named Fitzpatrick?”
“No. What about him?”
“Nothing. Thanks for the lunch. By the way, Johnny Massina told me about you smashing up Didi’s rubber machines. The old man would have enjoyed that one.”
“Like they say, you hear a lot of bullshit in the street, Dave.”
I sat out on the deck of my houseboat that evening in the green-yellow twilight with a glass of iced tea and mint leaves, and disassembled my three pistols—my departmental .38 revolver, a hideaway Beretta .25, and a U.S. Army-issue .45 automatic. As I reamed out the barrel of the .45 with a bore brush, I thought about some of the mythology that Southern boys of my generation had grown up with. And like all myth, it was a more or less accurate metaphorical reflection of what was actually going on inside us, namely our dark fascination with man’s iniquity. In moments like these I suspected that John Calvin was much more the inventor of our Southern homeland than Sir Walter Scott.
Southern Myths to Contemplate While Cleaning One’s Guns—Substitute Other Biographical Names or Geographical Designations to Suit the Particular State in the Old Confederacy in Which You Grew Up:
1. A town in east Texas used to have a sign on the main street that read, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on your head in this county.”
2. Johnny Cash did time in Folsom Prison.
3. Warren Harding was part Negro.
4. Spanish fly and Coca-Cola will turn a girl into an instant drive-in-movie nymphomaniac.
5. The crushed hull of a Nazi submarine, depth-charged off Grand Island in 1942, still drifts up and down the continental shelf. At a certain spot on a calm night, shrimpers out of Morgan City can hear the cries of drowning men in the fog.
6. A Negro rapist was lynched outside of Lafayette and his body put inside a red wooden box and nailed up in a pecan tree as a warning to others. The desiccated wood, the strips of rag, the rat’s nest of bones hang there to this day.
7. The .45 automatic was designed as a result of a Filipino insurrection. The insurrectionists would bind up their genitals with leather thongs, which would send them into a maniacal agony that would allow them to charge through the American wire while the bullets from our Springfields and .30-40 Kraigs passed through their bodies with no more effect than hot needles. The .45, however, blew holes in people the size of croquet balls.
There is usually a vague element of truth in all mythology, and the basic objective truth about the .45 automatic is simply that it is an absolutely murderous weapon. I had bought mine in Saigon’s Bring-Cash Alley, out by the airport. I kept it loaded with steel-jacketed ammunition that could blow up a car engine, reduce a cinder-block wall to rubble, or, at rapid fire, shred an armored vest off someone’s chest.
The darkness of my own meditation disturbed me. My years of drinking had taught me not to trust my unconscious, because it planned things for me in a cunning fashion that was usually a disaster for me, or for the people around me, or for all of us. But by this time I also knew that I was involved with players who were far more intelligent, brutal, and politically connected than the kind of psychotics and losers I usually dealt with.
If I had any doubts about my last conclusion, they were dispelled when a gray, U. S. government motor-pool car stopped on the dock and a redheaded, freckle-faced man in a seersucker suit who could have been anywhere from fifteen to thirty years old walked down the gangplank onto my houseboat.
He flipped open his identification and smiled.
“Sam Fitzpatrick, U. S. Treasury,” he said. “You expecting a war or something?”
FOUR
“It doesn’t look like you believe me,” he said. “Do you think I boosted the ID and a government car, too?” He wouldn’t stop grinning.
“No, I believe you. It’s just that you look like you might have escaped from ‘The Howdy Doody Show.’”
“I get lots of compliments like that. You New Orleans people are full of fun. I hear you’ve been taking a little heat for me.”
“You tell me.”
“Are you going to offer me some iced tea?”
“You want some?”
“Not here. You’re too hot, Lieutenant. In fact, almost on fire. We need to get you back on the sidelines somehow. I’m afraid it’s not going to be easy. The other team is unteachable in some ways.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They have fixations. Something’s wrong with their operation and they target some schmoe that’s wandered into the middle of it. It usually doesn’t do them any good, but they think it does.”
“I’m the schmoe?”
“No, you’re a bright guy with stainless steel balls, evidently. But we don’t want to see you a casualty. Let’s take a ride.”
“I’m taking a lady to the track tonight.”
“Another time.”
“No, not another time. And let’s stop this business of Uncle Sam talking in his omniscience to the uninformed local flatfoot. If the shit’s burning on the stove, I suspect it’s yours and it’s because you federal boys have screwed things up again.”
He stopped grinning. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then wet his lips. He suddenly seemed older.
“You have to have faith in what I tell you, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’re a good man, you’ve got courage, you’ve never been on a pad, you go to Mass on Sundays, you treat the street people decently, and you put away a lot of the bad guys. We know these things about you because we don’t want you hurt. But believe me, it’s dumb for the two of us to be out here in the open talking to each other.”
“Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?”
“Uh, actually the ‘we’ is more or less just me, at least right now. Come on, I’ll explain it. Trust me. Somebody who looks like Howdy Doody has got to be a straight shooter. Besides, I’ll buy you a poor-boy sandwich on my expense account.”
So this was the state of the art down at the Federal Building, I thought. We didn’t see much of the federal boys, primarily because they operated on their own as a rule, and even though they said otherwise, they looked down upon us as inept and uneducated. On the other hand, we didn’t have much liking for them, either. Any number of television serials portray the feds as manicured, dapper altruists dressed in Botany 500 suits, who dispassionately hunt down the oily representatives of the Mafia and weld the cell door shut on them. The reality is otherwise. As Didi Gee would probably point out, syndicate gangsters have little fear of any police agency or court system. They own judges, cops, and prosecutors, and they can always get to a witness or a juror.
The Treasury Department is another matter. Law enforcement people everywhere, as well as criminals, consider Treasury agents incorruptible. Within the federal government they are to law enforcement what Smokey the Bear and the U. S. Forest Service are to environmental integrity. Even Joe Valachi, the Brooklyn mob’s celebrity snitch, had nothing but admiration for the T-men.
Fitzpatrick drove us across town to a Latin American restaurant on Louisiana Avenue. We sat at an outdoor table in the small courtyard under the oak and willow trees. There were electric lights in the trees and we could see the traffic on the avenue through the scrolled iron gate. The banana trees along the stone wall rattled in the wind. He ordered shrimp and oyster poor-boy sandwiches for us and poured himself a glass of Jax while I sipped my iced tea.
“You don’t drink, do you?” he said.
“Not anymore.”
“Heavy sauce problem?”
“You not only look like a kid, you’re as subtle as a shithouse, aren’t you?” I said.
“Why do you think I brought us to this restaurant?”
“I don’t know.”
“Almost everybody working here is a product of our fun-in-the-sun policies south of the border. Some of them are legals, some bought their papers from coyotes.”
“That’s only true of about five thousand restaurants in Orleans and Jefferson parishes.”
“You see the owner over by the cash register? If his face looks out of round, it’s because Somoza’s national guardsmen broke all the bones in it.”
He waited, but I didn’t say anything.
“The man running the bar is an interesting guy too,” he said. “He’s from a little village in Guatemala. One day the army came to the village and without provocation killed sixteen Indians and an American priest from Oklahoma named Father Stan Rother. For kicks they put the bodies of the Indians in a U.S. Army helicopter and threw them out at high altitudes.”
He watched my face. His eyes were a washed-out blue. I’d never seen a grown man with so many freckles.
“I’m not big on causes anymore,” I said.
“I guess that’s why you went out to Julio Segura’s and put a hot plate under his nuts.”
“This dinner is getting expensive.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been boring you,” he said, and broke up a bread stick in three pieces and stood each piece upright. “Let’s talk about your immediate concerns. Let’s talk about the three guys who gave you gargling lessons in the bathtub last night. I bet that’ll hold your interest.”