The Neon Rain (20 page)

“Whiplash, how do you think you got in here? Because you’re a brilliant attorney? Most of these people don’t like Jews. They’re paying for your ass right now, but when they don’t need you anymore, you might end up like Bobby Joe or Julio. Think about it. If you were the general, would you keep a lowlife like yourself around?”

“Turn around. Some of your colleagues want to talk with you,” Wineburger said.

Two uniformed street cops stood behind me. They were young, and they had their hats off and were uncomfortable at their situation. One of them tried to smile at me.

“Bad night, huh, Lieutenant?” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m wearing my rock-‘n’-roll cassette, though. Just unbutton my coat and pull it out.”

His hand brushed across my stomach, almost like a caress, and eased the .45 out of my belt holster.

“Walk this way with us. We’ll go out the side door,” he said. “But we’ll have to cuff you in the car.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Hey, Robicheaux, call that colored bondsman on Rampart. He gives credit,” Wineburger said.

I glanced back at the general, whose tanned brow was webbed with wrinkles as he stared intensely into space.

They booked me into the drunk tank downtown. I woke up with the first gray light on an iron bunk whose gray paint was covered with scratched and rusted names and obscenities. I sat up slowly, holding the bunk on each side of me, and smelled the rancid odor of stale sweat, cigarette smoke, alcohol, urine, vomit, and the seatless and caked toilet in the corner. The floor and all the bunks, which were suspended from wall chains, were filled with snoring drunks, demented street people, barroom brawlers still flecked with blood, a few genuine badasses, and anxiety-ridden, middle-class DUIs who later would expect to be treated with the courtesy due good Kiwanians.

I walked in my socks to the toilet and leaned over it. Names had been burned into the yellow paint of the ceiling with cigarette lighters. My eyes watered from the reek of the toilet, and my hangover had already started to tighten the veins in my head like a hatband. Ten minutes later a guard and a trusty in white fatigues opened the barred door and wheeled in a stainless-steel food cart loaded with powdered scrambled eggs, grits, and black coffee that tasted like iodine.

“Hors d’oeuvres time, gentlemen,” the guard said. “Our accommodations are humble, but our hearts are warm. If you’re planning to stay for lunch today, we’re having spaghetti and meatballs. Please do not ask for doggy bags. Also, even though it’s a temptation, don’t try to take the food home in your pockets.”

“Who the fuck is this guy?” asked a soldier sitting on the floor. His tie hung loose around his neck, and the buttons were torn off his shirt.

“He’s a pretty good guy,” I said.

“Some place for a fucking comedian,” he said, and I flipped his cigarette butt off the wall above the toilet.

I waited until the trusty had passed out the paper plates of eggs and grits and he and the guard had gone back out the door, then I went to the bars and clicked my ring against the metal to get the guard’s attention. He looked at me without expression, blinking his eyes to hide either recognition or his embarrassment.

“Is arraignment at eight?” I asked.

“They’ll put you on the wrist-chain then. I don’t know what time they’ll get to you.” He almost said “Lieutenant,” but he clamped his lips tightly.

“Who’s on the bench this morning?”

“Judge Flowers.”

“Oh boy.”

“You want a lawyer with you?”

“No, not just yet. Thanks, anyway, Phil.”

“You bet. Hang tough. It’s going to be all right. Everybody’s got a right to a hard night sometimes.”

An old man with a wild, tobacco-stained beard sat down beside me on the iron bunk. He wore plastic cowboy boots, jeans that fit him like balloons, and a denim shirt cut off at the armpits.

“You ain’t gonna eat your food?” he said.

“No. Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” he said, and began putting the dry eggs in his mouth with a plastic spoon. “The spiders starting to crawl around in your head?”

“Yep.”

“Look down in my boot,” he said. “The hack missed it when they shook me down. Take a snort. It’ll swat them spiders right back into their nest.”

I looked down at the pint bottle of whiskey inside his boot. I breathed deeply and ran my tongue over my cracked lips. My own breath was stronger than the smell of the drunk tank. It wouldn’t be long before I would start sweating and shaking, maybe even going into the dry heaves. I wondered what I would look like in front of Judge Flowers, a notorious morning-court jurist who could put the fear of God into a drunk with his gavel.

“I’ll pass right now, but I appreciate it, partner,” I said.

“Suit yourself. Don’t let them shake you up, though, son. I been up in front of this court so many times they don’t even mess with me. The judge gives me thirty days and tells me to get out. That ain’t nothing. We got them by the short hairs.”

A half hour later, Sergeant Motley stood at the tank door with the guard. He smoked a cigar and looked on quietly while the guard turned the key in the lock. He wore his shirt lapels pressed back so the hair on his black barrel of a chest stuck out like wire.

“Come with us, Robicheaux,” he said.

“Zoo visitors aren’t allowed in until this afternoon,” I said.

“Just come along,” he said.

I walked between him and the guard to the far end of the jail corridor. A trusty was damp-mopping the floor, and our shoes left wet imprints where he had cleaned. Sunlight came through the windows high up on the corridor wall, and I could hear traffic out on the street. The guard turned the lock on an individual cell. Motley’s weight made him breathe as though he had emphysema.

“I got you transferred to a holding cell,” he said.

“What for?”

“You want somebody in that tank to make you?”

I stepped inside the cell, and the guard locked me in. Motley remained at the door, his cannonball head beaded with perspiration from the heat outside.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“I’ve been in your shoes. I think they’re putting a RotoRooter up your hole, and all you’ve got going for you is your own balls. That’s okay, but after a while they get ground down to the size of marbles.”

“I have a hard time buying this.”

“Who asked you to? We never got along. But I’ll tell you a story, Robicheaux. Everybody thinks I let those seven guys die in that elevator to save my own buns. I was responsible, all right, but not because I was afraid. I didn’t have the key to the chain. I didn’t have the fucking key. I climbed up out of the shaft to find somebody with a master. When we pried the doors open, they looked like smoked oysters in there. Whether you believe me or not, that’s some hard shit to live with.”

“Why don’t you tell that to somebody?”

“You know why I didn’t have the key? I got a freebie that morning from one of Julio Segura’s broads and she rolled me. The key was in my billfold.”

“You tried to get them out, Motley.”

“Tell that to everybody in the courthouse and the First District. Tell it to Purcel. He’s always got clever things to say to a black man.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“I don’t like those guys in Internal Affairs any more than you do. In my opinion, Purcel is operating in their area. I don’t drop the dime on other cops, not even racists, so I don’t comment on Purcel.”

“He’s not a racist.”

“Wake up, Robicheaux. You got to get hit in the face with it? The guy’s got a hard-on all the time. Quit the Little Orphan Annie routine.”

“You’re determined to make people love you, aren’t you?”

“Read it like you want. I hope you get out of this crap. I don’t think you will.”

“You’re a breath of fresh air, buddy.”

“They stiffed you on the charge. I’d get out of town if I were you. I think they’re going to put you away.”

I touched the side of my face to the bar and looked at him silently. I could feel the pulse working fearfully in my throat.

“They charged you with carrying a concealed firearm,” he said, and looked back at me with his knowing, hard brown eyes. It was a lowball morning. I went to court on a chain with four other drunks, a street dealer, a psychotic exhibitionist, and a black kid who had murdered a filling-station attendant for sixty-five dollars. Judge Flowers was what we called at AA a white-knuckler. He had gotten off the booze on his own, but he’d stayed dry only by redirecting his intense inner misery into the lives of others, particularly those who stood before him blowing alcohol in his face. He set my bond on the concealed-firearm charge at ten thousand dollars.

I didn’t even have the thousand I would need to pay the bondsman’s ten-percent fee. I sat on the bunk of the holding cell and stared at the scatological words scratched all over the opposite wall. It was the lowest morning of my life, except perhaps for the day my wife left me for the Houston oilman. We had gone to an evening lawn party out by the lake, and he had been there and did not even make a pretense about the affair they were having. He touched shoulders with her at the drink table, brushed his palm across the down on top of her arm, smiled good-naturedly at me with his rugged good looks, as though we enjoyed an intelligent understanding of our situation. Then a lesion snapped open somewhere behind my eyes; I felt color rise into my vision, the way a glass might fill with red water, then a woman screamed and I felt men’s arms lifting me up from the lawn, pulling me away from his stunned, terrified face.

In the morning I found her note on the table under the big umbrella where we ate breakfast while the sun rose across Lake Pontchartrain.

Dear Dave,

I don’t know what it is you’re looking for, but three years of marriage to you have convinced me I don’t want to be there when you find it. Sorry about that. As your pitcher-bartender friend says, Keep it high and hard, podjo. 

Nicole

“What are you doing with your clothes off?” the guard asked through the bars of the holding cell.

“It’s hot.”

“There’s people that walk through here.”

“Don’t let them.”

“Jesus Christ, Dave, get your act together.”

“I got it solidly together. I’m very copacetic at the moment.” I opened and closed my palms. I watched the way the veins in my forearms filled with blood.

“Unless you bond out, I got to move you. You got to go into the main population unless you want lockdown.”

“Do what you need to do, Phil.”

“I can’t put you in lockdown if you don’t request it. Dave, there’s some real badasses upstairs.”

I fingered the
pungi-stick
scar on my stomach. Somebody was shouting hysterically in a cell down the corridor, then a cop’s baton rang on the bars.

“I’m going to get the doctor. You’re going into lock-down whether you like it or not,” he said.

I heard him walk away. My head felt as if piano wire were twisted around it. I closed my eyes and saw balloons of orange flame erupt out of a rain forest, GIs locked up to their knees in a muddy shimmering rice field while the shards of Claymores sang through the air with the edges of boiler plate, the souls of children rising like gunsmoke from the ditch where they lay, Sam Fitzpatrick’s boyish face lighted in the purgatorial fire of a holy card. The sweat leaked out from under my palms and ran down my naked thighs.

At three o’clock that afternoon, another guard walked down the corridor of the isolation unit, called “Queens’ Row,” where I was in lockdown with the snitches, psychotics, and roaring homosexuals. The door of my small cell was made of metal grillwork, with a slit and an iron apron for the trusty to pass in the food tray. The guard was having trouble with the key in the lock, and the light behind him made his body seem to jerk and disconnect itself through the squares in the door.

“Pack it up. You’re going all the way,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Somebody went bail for you. Strip your sheets and throw them into the corridor. Pick up that plastic spoon off the floor and drop your soap in the toilet.”

“What?”

“You still drunk or something? Clean out your cell if you want to leave here today.”

We walked down the corridor to the hydraulically operated double-barred doors that gave onto the booking room, where two black women were being fingerprinted. I signed at the possessions desk for the large brown envelope tied with string that contained my wallet, car keys, pocket knife, and belt.

“Happy motoring,” the trusty clerk said.

Out in the visitors’ area I saw Annie sitting on a wooden bench with her hands pinched together in her lap. She wore blue tennis shoes, Clorox-faded jeans, and a print shirt covered with purple flowers. The tables in the room were filled with inmates and their families who had come to visit them, and each group tried to isolate themselves in their intimate moment by bending their heads forward, never focusing their eyes beyond their own table, holding one another’s forearms tightly in their hands. Annie tried to smile at me, but I saw the nervousness in her face.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“My car’s right at the curb. We can go now.”

“Sure, let’s get out of here.”

“Dave, what’s wrong?”

“The bastards took my piece. I ought to get a receipt fork.”

“Are you crazy?” she whispered.

“Forget it. Let’s go.”

We went through the glass doors onto the street, and the afternoon heat hit me like somebody opening a furnace door next to my skin. We got into her car and she started the engine, then looked across at me with a cloud in her face. My arm jerked when it touched the burning metal on the window.

“Dave, are you okay? Your face is white,” she said.

“I’m running on some weird fluids. Just consider the source and don’t take everything I say to heart today. How did you know I was in jail?”

“Your partner, what’s his name, Clete, called. He said something strange, but he told me to tell it to you just like he said it—‘You still own yourself, Streak. That’s a big victory. Disconnect from this dogshit while there’s time.’ What’s he talking about?”