Heaven's Prisoners (31 page)

“Were these black people you’ve been robbing?”

“I didn’t rob nobody man. I was up here visiting my relatives.”

“Cut the dogshit, Jerry.”

“Come on, man. You think I’m gonna rob somebody, I’m gonna rob niggers in a welfare project? Some old lady got thrown down a stairs or something. She was already senile, now she’s got a fractured skull, and she says I done it. The night screw is her nephew. So guess what he tells all the boons upstairs?”

“Sounds like a bad situation, all right.”

“Yeah, you’re all heart.”

I looked at him a moment before I spoke again.

“You haven’t hit the shower in a while, Jerry.”

He turned his face away from me, and a small circle of color formed in one cheek.

“They got you made for stuff, partner?” I said.

“Look, man, I tried to get along. It didn’t matter to me if they were colored or not. I tried to make a stinger, you know, a hot plate for these guys so we could warm up the macaroni in the evening. Then this big black bastard walks dripping wet out of the shower and picks up the pot, with his bare feet on the concrete floor. It popped him so hard he looked like somebody shoved a cattle prod up his butt. So he blames me for it. First, he starts throwing shit at me—macaroni and plates and tin cups. Then he starts grinning and tells me his cock is all charged up now. He says he’s gonna take a white boy’s cherry the next time I come into the shower. And then the other boons are gonna get seconds.”

His face was flushed now, his eyes narrow and glistening.

I walked over to a rust-streaked sink against one wall and filled a paper cup from the tap. I set the water in front of him and sat back down.

“Is your mother going to go bond?” I said.

“She’s gotta put up ten grand for the bondsman. She ain’t got that kind of gelt, man.”

“How about a property bond?”

“She ain’t got it. I told you.” His eyes avoided mine.

“I see.”

“Look, man, I did five years in Angola. I did it with guys that’d cut your face up with a razor for twenty dollars. I seen a snitch burned up in his cell with a Molotov cocktail. I seen a kid drowned in a toilet because he wouldn’t suck some guy off. I’m not gonna get broke by a nigger jail in some backwater shithole.”

“You want out of here?”

“Yeah. You got connections with Jesse Jackson?”

“Save the hard-guy routine for another day, Jerry. Do you want out of here?”

“What do you think?”

“You robbed the mails, which is a federal offense. They’ll file against you eventually, but I know somebody who can probably hurry it up. We’ll get you into federal custody, and you can forget this place.”

“When?”

“Maybe this week. In the meantime I’ll call the FBI in Shreveport and tell them there’s a serious civil rights violation going on here. That ought to get you into isolation until you’re transferred to federal custody.”

“What do you want?”

“Victor Romero.”

“I told you everything I know about the guy. You got a fucking obsession, man.”

“I need a name, Jerry. Somebody who can turn him.”

“I ain’t got any. I’m telling you the truth. I got no reason to cover for this cat.”

“I believe that. But you’re plugged into a lot of people. You’re a knowledgeable man. You sell information. If you remember, you sold me and Robin for a hundred dollars.”

His eyes looked out the barred window at the shade trees on the lawn. He brushed at the dried blood in his nostril with one knuckle.

“I’m floating round on an ice cube that’s melting in a toilet,” he said. “What can I tell you? I got nothing to deal with. You wasted your drive up here. Why don’t you get those vice cops to help you? They think they know everything.”

“They have the same problem I do. A guy with no family and no girlfriend is hard to find.”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean no family?”

“That’s the information at the First District.”

I saw a confident mean light come back into his eyes.

“That’s why they don’t never catch anybody. He’s got a first cousin. I don’t know the cat’s name, but Romero brought him into the bar six or seven years ago. The guy pulled a scam that everybody in the Quarter was laughing about. Some guys robbed Maison Blanche of about ten thousand dollars in Bottany 500 suits. Of course, there’s a big write-up about it in the
Picayune
. So Romero’s cousin gets ahold of a bunch of these Hong Kong specials, you know, these twenty-buck suits that turn into lint and threads the first time you dry-clean them. He stops business guys up and down Canal and says, ‘I got a nice suit for you. A hundred bucks. No labels. Know what I mean?’ I heard he made two or three grand off these stupid shits. After they found out they got burned, they couldn’t do anything about it, either.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I only saw him once or twice. He’s the kind of guy that only makes a move once in a while. I think he ran a laundry or something.”

“A laundry? Where?”

“In New Orleans.”

“Come on, where in New Orleans?”

“I don’t know, man. What the fuck I care about a laundry?”

“And you’re sure you don’t know this guy’s name?”

“Hell, no. I told you, it was a long time ago. I been straight with you. You gonna deliver or not?”

“Okay, Jerry. I’ll make some phone calls. In the meantime, you try to remember this laundry man’s name.”

“Yeah, yeah. Y’all always got to go one inch deeper in a guy’s hole, don’t you?”

I walked to the iron door and rattled it against the jamb for the deputy to let me out.

“Hey, Robicheaux, I don’t have any cigarettes. How about a deck of Luckies?” Jerry said.

“All right.”

“Put a piece of paper with how many packs are in the carton, too. That trusty helps himself.”

“You got it, partner.”

The deputy let me out, and I walked back into the breezy area between the jail and the courthouse. I could smell the pines on the lawn, the hydrangeas blooming against a sunny patch of wall, hot dogs that a Negro kid was selling out of a cart on the streetcorner. I looked back through the jail window at Jerry, who sat alone at the wooden table, waiting or the trusty to take him back upstairs, his face now empty and dull and as lifeless as tallow.

10

I WAITED UNTIL Monday, when business would be open, and drove to New Orleans in the pink light of dawn and began looking up and down the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line for laundries and dry cleaners. At one time New Orleans was covered with streetcar tracks, but now only the St. Charles streetcar remains in service. It runs a short distance down Canal, the full length of St. Charles through the Garden District, past Loyola and Tulane and Audubon Park, then goes up South Carrollton and turns around on Claiborne. This particular line has been left in service because it travels along what is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the world. St. Charles and the esplanade in its center are covered by a canopy of enormous oak trees and lined on each side by old, iron-scrolled brick homes and antebellum mansions with columned porches and pike-fenced yards filled with hibiscus, blooming myrtle and oleander, bamboo, and giant philodendron. So most of the area along the streetcar line is residential, and I had to look only in a few commercially zoned neighborhoods for a laundry or dry cleaner’s that might be operated by Victor Romero’s cousin.

I found only four. One was run by black people, another by Vietnamese. The third one was run by a white couple on Carrollton, but I believed it was set too far back from the street for me to have heard the streetcar bell over the telephone. However, the fourth one, a few blocks southwest of Lee Circle, was only a short distance from the tracks, and its front doors were open to let out the heat from inside, and through the big glass window I could see a telephone on the service counter and behind it a white man thumping down a clothes press in a hiss of steam.

The laundry was on the corner, with an alley behind it, and by the garbage cans a wooden stairway led up to a living area on the second floor. I parked my pickup across the street under an oak tree in the parking lot of a small take-out café that sold fried shrimp and dirty rice. It was a hot, languid day, and the grass on the esplanade was still wet with dew in the shade, the bark on the palm trees was stained darkly with the water that had leaked from the palm fronds during the night, and the streetcar tracks looked burnished and hot in the sunlight. I went inside the café, called the city clerk’s office, and found out the laundry was operated by a man named Martinez. So there was no help by way of connection with family names, except for the fact that the laundry operator was obviously Latin. It was going to be a long wait.

I opened both doors of the truck to let in the breeze and spent the morning watching the front door and back entrance and stairway of the laundry. At noon I bought a paper-plate lunch of shrimp and rice from the café and ate it in the truck while a sudden shower beat down on the street and the oak tree above my head.

I was never good at surveillance, in part because I didn’t have the patience for it. But more important was the fact that my own mind always became my worst enemy during any period of passivity or inactivity in life, no matter how short the duration. Old grievances, fears, and unrelieved feelings of guilt and black depression would surface from the unconscious without cause and nibble on the soul’s edges like iron teeth. If I didn’t
do
something, if I didn’t take my focus outside myself, those emotions would control me as quickly and completely as whiskey did when it raced through my blood and into my heart like a dark electrical current.

I watched the rain drip out of the oak branches and hit on the windshield and hood of my truck. The sky was still dark, and low black clouds floated out of the south like cannon smoke. Annie’s death haunted me. No matter who had fired the shotguns in our bedroom, no matter who had ordered and paid for it, the inalterable fact remained that her life had been made forfeit because of my pride.

Now I had to wonder what it was I really planned if I caught Victor Romero and learned that he had killed Annie. In my mind I saw myself spread-eagling him against a wall, kicking his feet apart, ripping a pistol loose from under his shirt, cuffing him so tightly that the skin around his wrists bunched like putty, and forcing him down into the backseat of a New Orleans police car.

I saw those images because they were what I knew I should see. But they did not represent what I felt. They did not represent what I felt at all.

It stopped raining around three, and then, with the sun still shining, it showered again around five and the trees along the avenue were dark green in the soft yellow light. I went inside the café and ate supper, then went back out to the truck and watched the traffic thin, the laundry close, the shadows lengthen on the street, the washed-out sky become pink and lavender and then streaked with bands of crimson in the west. The neon signs came on along the avenue and reflected off the pools of water in the gutters and on the esplanade. A Negro who ran a shoeshine stand in front of a package store had turned on a radio in a window, and I could hear a ball game being broadcast from Fenway Park. The heat had gone out of the day, lifting gradually out of the baked brick and concrete streets, and now a breeze was blowing through the open doors of my truck. The big olive-green streetcar, its windows now lighted, rattled down the tracks under the trees. Then, just as the twilight faded, an electric light went on in the apartment above the laundry.

Five minutes later, Victor Romero came down the wooden back stairs. He wore a pair of Marine Corps utilities, an oversized Hawaiian print shirt with purple flowers on it, a beret on his black curls. He stepped quickly over the puddles in the brick alley and entered the side door of a small grocery store. I took my .45 from the glove box, stuck it inside my belt, pulled my shirt over the butt, and got out of the truck.

I had three ways I could go, I thought. I could take him inside the store, but if he was armed (and he probably was, because his shirt was pulled outside his utilities) an innocent person could be hurt or be taken hostage. I could wait for him at the side entrance to the store and nail him in the alley, but that way I would lose sight of the front door, and if he didn’t go directly back to the apartment and instead left by the front, I could lose him altogether. The third alternative was to wait in the shadows by my truck, the angular lines of the .45 hard against my stomach, my pulse racing in my neck.

I opened and closed my hands, wiped them on my trousers, breathed deeply and slowly through my mouth. Then the screen door opened into the alley, and Romero stepped out into the neon light with a sack of groceries in his arm and looked blankly toward the street. His black curls hung down from under his beret, and his skin looked purple in the neon reflection off the bricks. He hitched his belt up with his thumb, looked down toward the other end of the alley, and jumped across a puddle. When he did, he pressed his hand against the small of his back. I watched him climb the stairs, go inside the apartment, close the screen, and walk in broken silhouette past a window fan.

I crossed the street, paused at the bottom of the stairs, pulled back the receiver on the .45, and slid a hollow-point round into the chamber. The pistol felt heavy and warm in my hand. Upstairs I could hear Romero pulling groceries out of his sack, pouring tap water in a pan, clattering pans on a stove. I held on to the bannister for balance and eased up the stairs two at a time while the streetcar rattled down the tracks out on St. Charles. I ducked under the window at the top of the stairs and then flattened myself against the wall between the screen door and the window. Romero’s shadow moved back and forth against the screen. Swallows glided above the trees across the street in the sun’s last red light.

I heard him set something heavy and metal on a tabletop, then walk past the screen again and into another room. I took a deep breath, tore open the door, and went in after him. In the hard electric light, he and I both seemed caught as though in the sudden flash of a photographer’s camera. I saw the stiff spaghetti noodles protruding from a pot of steaming water on the stove, a loaf of French bread and a block of cheese and a dark bottle of Chianti on the drain-board, an army .45 like mine, except chrome-plated, where he had placed it on a breakfast table. I saw the animal fear and anger in his face as he stood motionless in the bedroom doorway, the tight mouth, the white quiver around his pinched nostrils, his hot black eyes that stared both at me and at the pistol that he had left beyond his grasp.