Heaven's Prisoners (14 page)

“Except I discovered there was another reason why Dock stayed on the street. He not only knew every hustler and thief in downtown New Orleans, but he’d been a locksmith before he melted his head with Thunderbird, and he could get into a place faster than a professional house creep. So there were a couple of detectives in robbery and homicide who would use him when things weren’t working right in a case. One time they knew a hit man from Miami was in town to take out a labor union agent. They told Dock they were making him a special agent with the New Orleans police department and got him to open up the guy’s motel room, steal his gun, his suitcase, all his clothes and traveler’s checks, then they picked up the guy on suspicion—it was a Friday, so they could hold him until Monday morning—and kept him in a small cell for two days with three drag queens.”

“What’s the point?” Annie said. Her voice was flat, and her eyes looked at the sunlight in the trees when she spoke.

“Cops leave certain things and people in place for a reason.”

“I know these people you talk about are funny and unusual and interesting and all that, Dave, but why not leave them in the past?”

“You remember that guy from Immigration that came around here? He’s never been back to the house, has he? He could make a lot of trouble for us if he wanted to, but he hasn’t. I told myself that was because I’d given him reason to avoid us.”

“Maybe he has other things to do. I just don’t think the government is going to be interested in one little girl.” She wore a pair of wash-faded Levi’s and a white sun halter, and I could see the brown spray of sun freckles on her back. Her hips creased softly above her belt line while she filled the picnic hamper at the drainboard.

“The government is interested in what they choose to be interested in,” I said. “Right now I think they’ve got us on hold. They sent me a signal, but I didn’t see it.”

“To tell you honestly, this sounds like something of your own creation.”

“That guy from Immigration, Monroe, was asking questions about us at the sheriff’s office. He didn’t need to do that. He could have cut a warrant, come out here, and done anything he wanted. Instead, he or somebody above him wanted me to know their potential in case I thought I could make problems for them about Johnny Dartez.”

“Who cares what they do?” Annie said.

“I don’t think you appreciate the nature of bureaucratic machinery once it’s set in motion.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just not going to invest my life in speculating about what people can do to me.”

Alafair was looking back and forth between the two of us, her face clouded with the tone of our voices. Annie had dressed her in pink shorts, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and pink tennis shoes with the words left and right stamped boldly on the rubber tip of each shoe. Annie rubbed her hand over Alafair’s head and gave her the plastic draw bag in which we kept the old bread.

“Go feed the ducks,” she said. “We’ll leave in a minute.”

“Feed ducks?”

“Yes.”

“Feed ducks now?”

“That’s right.”

“Dave viene al parque?”

“Sure, he’s coming,” Annie said.

Alafair grinned at me and went out the back screen to the pond. The sunlight through the trees made patterns on her brown legs.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Dave. No matter what those people from Immigration do, they’re not going to take her away. She’s ours, just as if we had conceived her.”

“I didn’t tell you the rest of the story about Dock Stratton. After he finished blowing out his wiring with synthetic wine and wasn’t any good to anybody, they shipped him off to the asylum at Mandeville.”

“So what does this mean? Are you going to become the knight-errant, tilting with the U.S. government?”

“No.”

“Do you still want to go to the park?”

“That’s the reason I came home, kiddo.”

“I wonder. I really do,” she said.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d explain that.”

“Don’t you see it, Dave? It’s like you want to taint every moment in our lives with this conspiratorial vision of yours. It’s become an obsession. We don’t talk about anything else. Either that or you stare into space. How do you think I feel?”

“I’ll try to be different.”

“I know.”

“I really will.”

Her eyes were wet. She sat down across the table from me.

“We haven’t been able to have our own child. Now one’s been given to us,” she said. “That should make us the happiest people in the world. Instead, we fight and worry about what hasn’t happened yet. Our conversation at home is filled with the names of people who shouldn’t have anything to do with our lives. It’s like deliberately inviting an obscene presence into your home. Dave, you say at AA they teach you to give it all up to your Higher Power. Can’t you try that? Just give it up, cut it out of your life? There’s not a problem in the world that time can’t help in some way.”

“That’s like saying a black tumor on your brain will get better if you don’t think about it.”

The kitchen was silent. I could hear the blue jays in the mimosa tree and the wings of the ducks beating across the pond as Alafair showered bread crumbs down on their heads. Annie turned away, finished wrapping the fried chicken, closed the picnic hamper, and walked out to the pond. The screen door banged on the jamb after her.

That evening there was a big crowd in the park for the baseball game, and the firemen were having a crawfish boil in the open-air pavilion. The twilight sky was streaked with lilac and pink, and the wind was cool out of the south with the promise of rain. We ate our picnic supper on a wooden table under the oak trees and watched the American Legion game and the groups of high school and college kids who drifted back and forth between the bleachers and the tailgates of pickup trucks where they kept beer in washtubs of ice. Out on the bayou the paddle-wheel pleasure boat with its lighted decks slid by against the dark outline of cypress and the antebellum homes on the far bank. The trees were full of barbecue smoke, and you could smell the crawfish from the pavilion and the hot
boudin
that a Negro sold from a handcart. Then I heard a French string band play “Jolie Blonde” in the pavilion, and I felt as though once again I were looking through a hole in the dimension at the south Louisiana in which I had grown up.

Jolie blonde, gardez done e’est t’as fait.
Ta m’as quit-té pour t’en aller,
Pour t’en aller avec un autre que moi.
Jolie blonde, pretty girl,
Flower of my heart,
I’ll love you forever
My jolie blonde.

But seldom did Annie and I speak directly to each other. Instead we talked brightly to Alafair, walked her to the swing sets and seesaws, bought snowcones, and avoided one another’s eyes. That night in the almost anonymous darkness of our bedroom we made love. We did it in need, with our eyes closed, without words, with a kiss only at the end. As I lay on my back, arms across my eyes, I felt her fingers leave the top of my hand, felt her turn on her side toward the opposite wall, and I wondered if her heart was as heavy as mine.

I woke up a half hour later. The room was cool from the wind sucked through the window by the attic fan, but my skin was hot as though I had a sunburn, the stitches in my scalp itched, my palms were damp on my thighs when I sat on the side of the bed.

Without waking Annie, I washed my face, put on a pair of khakis and an old Hawaiian shirt, and went down to the bait shop. The moon was up, and the willows along the bank of the bayou looked silver in the light. I sat in the darkness at the counter and stared out the window at the water and the outboard boats and pirogues knocking gently against the posts on my dock. Then I got up, opened the beer cooler, and took out a handful of partly melted ice and rubbed it on my face and neck. The amber necks of the beer bottles glinted in the moon’s glow. The smooth aluminum caps, the wet and shining labels, the brassy beads inside the bottles were like an illuminated nocturnal still life. I closed the box, turned on the lightbulb over the counter, and called Lafayette information for Minos P. Dautrieve’s home number.

A moment later I had him on the phone. I looked at the clock. It was midnight.

“What’s happening, Dunkenstein?” I said.

“Oh boy,” he said.

“Sorry about the hour.”

“What do you want, Robicheaux?”

“Where are these clubs that Eddie Keats owns?”

“You called me up to ask me that?”

I didn’t answer, and I heard him take a breath.

“The last time we talked, you hung up the phone in my ear,” he said. “I didn’t appreciate that. I think you have a problem with manners.”

“All right, I apologise. Will you tell me where these clubs are?”

“I’ll be frank about something else, too. Are you drinking?”

“No. How about the clubs?”

“I guess things never work fast enough for you, do they? So you’re going to cowboy our Brooklyn friend?”

“Give me some credit.”

“I try to. Believe me,” he said.

“There are a dozen people I can call in Lafayette who’ll give me the same information.”

“Yeah, which makes me wonder why you had to wake me up.”

“You ought to know the answer to that.”

“I don’t. I’m really at a loss. You’re truly a mystery to us. You don’t hear what you’re told, you make up your own rules, you think your past experience as a police officer allows you to mess around in federal business.”

“I’m talking to you because you’re the only guy around here with the brains and juice to put these people away,” I said.

“I’m not flattered.”

“So it’s no dice, huh?”

He paused.

“Look, Robicheaux, I think you have a cinder block for a head, but basically you’re a decent guy,” he said. “That means we don’t want you hurt anymore. Stay out of it. Have some faith in us. I don’t know why you went out to Bubba Rocque’s house this afternoon, but I don’t think it was smart. You don’t—”

“How’d you know I was out there?”

“We have somebody who writes down licence tags for us. You don’t flush these guys by flipping lighted matches at them. If you do, they pick the time and the place and you lose. Anyway, go to bed and forget Eddie Keats, at least for tonight.”

“Does he have a family?”

“No, he’s a gash-hound.”

“Thanks, Minos. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“It’s all right. By the way, how’d you like Bubba Rocque’s wife?”

“I suspect she’s ambitious more than anything else.”

“What a romantic. She’s a switch-hitter, podna. Five years ago she did a three-spot for shanking another dyke. That Bubba can really pick them, can’t he?”

I called an old bartender friend in Lafayette. Minos had given me more information than he thought. The bartender told me Keats owned two bars, one in a hotel off Canal in New Orleans, the other on the Breaux Bridge highway outside of Lafayette. If he was at either bar, and if what Minos had said about him was correct, I knew which one he would probably be in.

When I was in college, the Breaux Bridge highway contained a string of all-night lowlife bars, oilfield supply yards, roadhouses, a quarter horse track, gambling joints, and one Negro brothel. You could find the pimps, hoods, whores, ex-cons, and white-knuckle crazies of your choice there every Saturday night. Emergency flares burned next to the wrecked automobiles and shattered glass on the two-lane blacktop, the dance floors roared with electronic noise and fistfights. You could get laid, beat up, shanked, and dosed with clap, all in one night and for less than five dollars.

I parked across the road from the Jungle Room. Eddie Keats had kept up the tradition. His bar was a flat, wide building constructed of cinder blocks that were painted purple and then overprinted with green coconut palms that were illuminated by the floodlights that were hung in the oak trees in front. But I could see two house trailers in the back parking lot, which was kept dark, that were obviously being used by Keat’s hot-pillow action. I waited a half hour and did not see the white Corvette.

I had no plan, really, and I knew that I should have listened to Minos’s advice. But I still had the same hot flush to my skin, my breath was quicker than it should have been, my back teeth ground together without my being aware of it. At 1:30 a.m. I stuck the .45 down in the front of my khakis, pulled my Hawaiian shirt over the butt, and walked across the road.

The front door, which was painted fingernail-polish red, was partly open to let out the smoke from inside. Only the bar area and a pool table in a side room were lighted, and the dance floor in back that was enclosed by a wooden rail, where a red-headed girl who had powdered her body heavily to cover her freckles was grinning and taking off her clothes while the rockabilly band in the corner pounded it out. The men at the bar were mostly pipeliners and oilfield roughnecks and roustabouts. The white-collar Johns stayed in the darkness at the tables and booths. The waitresses wore black cutoff blouses that exposed the midriff, black high heels, and pink shorts so tight that every anatomical line was etched through the cloth.

A couple of full-time hookers were at the bar, and with a sideways flick of their eyes, in the middle of their conversation with the oilfield workers, they took my inventory as I walked past them to one of the booths. Above the bar a monkey in a small cage sat listlessly on a toy trapeze among a litter of peanut shells and his own droppings.

I knew I was going to have to order a drink. This wasn’t a place where I could order a 7-Up without either telling them I was a cop or some other kind of bad news. I just wasn’t going to drink it. I wasn’t going to drink it. The waitress brought me a Jax that cost three dollars. She was pretty, and she smiled at me and poured from the bottle into my glass.

“There’s a two-drink minimum for the floor show,” she said. “I’ll come back when you’re ready for your second.”

“Has Toot been in?” I said.

“Who?”

“Eddie’s friend, the black guy.”

“I’m new. I don’t guess I know him,” she said, and went away.

A few minutes later three of the oilfield workers went out and left one of the hookers alone at the bar. She finished her drink, picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, and walked toward my booth. She wore white shorts with a dark blue blouse, and her black hair was tied off her neck with a blue bandanna. Her face was round and she was slightly overweight, and when she sat next to me I could smell her hair spray, her perfume, and a nicotine odor that went deep into the lungs. In the glow of the light from the bar, her facial hair was stiff with makeup. Her eyes, which never quite focused on my face, were glazed with alcohol, and her lips seemed to constantly suppress a smile that had nothing to do with either of us.