The Neon Rain (24 page)

Didi Gee had saved the seat next to him for me. He wore a white suit and an orange-flowered shirt with the shirt lapels on the outside of his coat. A gold St. Christopher’s medal rested on the black hair that grew up to his throat. His chest and stomach were so huge that he had to keep his chair pressed back almost to the wall.

“You want wine?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I heard you were drinking again. I say that only because it don’t matter to me. Everybody’s got a vice. It’s what makes us human.”

“I’m not drinking today. Put it that way.”

“That’s that one-day-at-a-time stuff, huh? I wish I could do that. I worry about stuff all the time I don’t have control over.”

It was amazing, I thought, how the true indicators of a sudden change in your social status worked. Didi Gee no longer used the deferential “Lieutenant” when he spoke to me, and his hoods were eating as though I were not there.

“I worry all the time about this operation I got to have,” he said. “The longer I wait, the more they got to cut out of my hole. I just can’t bring myself to face it. Maybe there’re some things you’re not suppose to accept. It ain’t natural for a person to be leaking shit into a bag strapped to his side. Look what I got to sit on now. That’s bad enough.”

He rose a little from his chair and exposed an inflated rubber cushion that was shaped like a toilet seat in a public restroom.

“I’m going over to Baylor Hospital in Houston and see what they say. All the best surgeons in New Orleans are Jews. A guy my size walks through the door and they start looking at my parts like they got meat prices stamped on them.”

“Maybe they’ll find another way to help you, Didi.”

“That’s right. Maybe I get the right doctors over there at Baylor and I’ll just retire there. My brother died and left me an office building in San Antonio three blocks from this Alamo place. They got an amusement park there or something?”

“It’s a historical—”

“Because even though I was born and grew up in New Orleans, I’m tired of people dumping on me, and nickel-and-dime legal farts trying to make a name by cutting off my cock.”

His voice had intensified suddenly, like heat building down in a furnace system, and the others at the table stopped talking and moved their knives and forks softly in their plates.

“I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” I said.

“I got subpoenaed by the grand jury. Me and some people I’m associated with.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Businesses I run for thirty years somehow start bothering some people. Their little noses start twitching like there’s a bad smell in the air. I’m talking about people that were at my children’s baptisms, that always come around at election time for donations. Suddenly I’m like some kind of disease.”

“You’re a professional, Didi. It comes with the geography.”

“They’re serious this time. I got it straight from the prosecutor’s office. They want me in Angola.”

“Like you said, maybe it’s time to retire.”

“They’re not cutting no deals on this one. That means I’m gonna have to break my own rules. I’m gonna have to do some stuff I don’t like.” His dark eyes were flecked with black electricity.

“I guess I’m not following you.”

And I didn’t want to follow him, either. The conversation had already grown old. I didn’t care about his troubles with the grand jury, and his vague reference to violating his own ethical system seemed at the time like another manifestation of the self-inflated grandiosity that was characteristic of his kind.

“You’re right. It’s personal,” he said. His glare went from me to the men around the table. They started eating and talking again. “You want this guy Philip Murphy?”

I tapped my fingers on my water glass and looked away from his face.

“No games, partner,” I said.

“You think I play games? A guy that run Orleans and half of St. Bernard Parish when you were a schoolboy? You think I brought you out here for games?”

“How is it you have a string on this guy?”

“He’s an addict. An addict’s one day away anytime you want him. This guy used to be a joy-popper. Now he’s a two-balloon-a-day regular. You want him, try this restaurant.” He dropped a matchbook on the tablecloth. On the cover was a palm tree and the words gulf shores, fine food, biloxi, Mississippi. “His connection’s the guy that runs the valet parking.”

“What do you care about Philip Murphy, Didi?”

“I got my reasons, a bunch of them maybe.”

“He plays in a different ballpark. He’s not a competitor.”

“He’s screwing up some things over in Fort Lauderdale. There’s some people there want him out of the way.”

“I know this guy. He’s not your crowd.”

“That’s right, he ain’t. But he messes with it. What you don’t understand is south Florida’s not New Orleans. Miami and Fort Lauderdale are open cities. Nobody’s got a lock on the action, nobody gets cowboyed down there. Everybody always respected that. Now there’s coloreds, Cubans, and Colombians in everything. They’re fucking animals. They’ll cowboy you for fifty bucks, they kill each other’s children. Then guys like Murphy come around and make political deals with them—plots against Castro or some bullshit down in Central America. People that’s cannibals, that was born in a chicken yard, end up working for the government. In the meantime, guys like me are in front of a grand jury.”

I picked up the matchbook and put it in my shirt pocket.

“Thanks for the information, Didi. I hope things turn out better for you over at Baylor,” I said.

“You ain’t eat your lunch. You don’t like Italian food?”

“You know how us old-time boozers are, scarred stomach and all that.”

“Maybe you don’t like eating as my guest, huh?”

“I’ve appreciated your hospitality. You’re always a generous man. We’ll see you, Didi.”

“Yeah, sure. You’re welcome. Keep one thing in mind, though. I never did time. Not in thirty years. You can tell that to any of those farts you know in the prosecutor’s office.”

It was boiling when I got back to the houseboat. Heat waves bounced off the roof, and every inch of metal and wood on the deck was hot to the touch. I put on my trunks and snorkel mask and swam out into the lake. The surface was warm, but I could feel the layers of coldness below me grow more intense the farther I swam from the shoreline. I watched three pelicans floating in the groundswell in front of me, their pouched beaks swollen with fish, and tried to figure out what Didi Gee was up to. I hadn’t accepted his explanation about Murphy creating complications for the mob in southern Florida, and his anger at the government’s support of Cuban political gangsters seemed manufactured for the moment. But who was to say? In terms of law enforcement, south Florida was the La Brea Tar Pits East.

The real problem was that nobody knew what went on in the mind of Didi Gee except Didi Gee. Most cops categorize criminals as dimwits and degenerates, or we assume that the intelligent ones think more or less in the same logical patterns as we do. The truth is that absolutely no one knows what goes on in the mind of a psychopath. Didi Gee was a vicious, sentimental fat man who could just as easily tip a waitress fifty dollars as put an icepick in her husband’s stomach. When he was a collector for the shy locks across the river in Algiers, his logo had been a bloodstained baseball bat that he kept propped up in the back seat of his convertible.

But somehow he and his kind always had their apologists. Journalists would treat them as honorable men who lived by an arcane private code; television documentaries dwelt on their families, their attendance at Mass, their patriotism—and made only fleeting reference to their connection with semiacceptable forms of organized crime, such as numbers and union takeovers. They were simply businessmen who were no more unethical than large corporations.

Maybe so. But I’d seen their victims: small grocers and dry cleaners who borrowed money from them and who became employees in their own stores; nightclub entertainers, beer and meat distributors, horse jockeys who couldn’t move out of town without permission; addicts who were always looking for more mules to pull their wagons; and those who became object lessons, their faces blown all over a car windshield with double-ought buckshot.

Maybe the deeper problem was that the Didi Gees of the world understood us, but we did not understand them. Were they genetically defective, or evil by choice? I took a breath through the snorkel and dove down to the bottom of the lake and glided above the gray, rippling sand while small fish scurried away in the green-yellow light. The salt water I swam in contained the remains of people who symbolized to me the greatest possible extremes in human behavior. They were created by the same Maker. The similarity ended there.

Three years ago a small plane with a family on board from Tampa hit a bad headwind over the Gulf, used up all its gas, and pancaked into the lake ten miles out. They got out with only one life preserver. Both the father and mother were strong swimmers and could have struck out for the shore or the causeway, but they stayed with their three children and kept them afloat for two days. One by one the parents and the two oldest children slipped under the waves. The smallest child survived because his father had strapped him in the life preserver and tied his shirt around the child’s head to protect it from the sun.

Some miles to the west and just south of Morgan City was the crushed and barnacle-encrusted hull of a German U-boat that an American destroyer had nailed in 1942, when Nazi submarines used to lie in wait for the oil tankers that sailed from the refineries in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Shrimpers in New Iberia told stories of the orange fires that burned on the southern horizon late at night, and of the charred bodies they pulled up in their nets. I didn’t understand then who the Nazis were, but I imagined them as dark-uniformed, slit-eyed creatures who lived beneath the water and who could burn and murder people of goodwill whenever they wished.

Years later, when I was in college, I dove down to that wreck with an air tank and a weight belt. It was in sixty feet of water, lying on its side, the deck railing and forward gun shaggy with moss, the painted identification numbers still visible on the conning tower. The stern was tilted downward into deeper water, and I thought I could see the frenetic, turning movements of sand sharks near the screws. My heart was clicking in my chest, I was breathing oxygen rapidly from my tank, and actually sweating inside my mask. I determined that I wasn’t going to be overcome by my childhood fears, and I swam down to the dark, massive outline of the conning tower and knocked against the steel plate with the butt of my bowie knife.

Then the strangest occurrence of my life took place as I hovered above the wreck. I felt a cold current blow across me, a surge from the darkness beyond the submarine’s screws, and air bubbles rose from under the hull. I heard the metal plates start to grate against the bottom, then there was a crunching, sliding sound, a dirty cloud of moss and floating sand, and suddenly the sub trembled almost erect and began sliding backwards off the continental shelf. I watched it, horrified, until it disappeared in the blackness. The sand sharks turned like brown minnows in its invisible wake.

I learned that this particular wreck moved several miles up and down the Louisiana coastline, and it was only coincidence that its weight had shifted in a strong current while I was on top of it. But I could not get out of my mind the image of those drowned Nazis still sailing the earth after all these years, their eye sockets and skeletal mouths streaming seaweed, their diabolical plan still at work under the Gulf’s tranquil, emerald surface.

A navy destroyer broke the spine of their ship with depth charges in 1942. But I believed that the evil they represented was held in check by the family who sacrificed their lives so their youngest member could live.

The phone was ringing when I climbed the ladder onto my deck. I sat in the hot shade of the umbrella and wiped my face with a towel while I held the receiver to my ear. It was Captain Guidry.

“Dave, is that you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling you for two hours.”

“What is it?”

“I hate to call you with bad news. It’s your brother, Jimmie. Somebody shot him twice in the public rest room by the French Market.”

I squeezed my hand on my forehead and looked out at the heat waves hammering on the lake’s surface.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“I won’t kid you. It’s touch-and-go. It looks like the guy put two .22 rounds in the side of his head. Look, Jimmie’s a tough guy. If anybody can make it, he will. You want me to send a car for you?”

“No, I have a rental. Where is he?”

“I’m here with him at Hotel Dieu Sisters. You drive careful, hear?”

The traffic was bad all the way across town. It was a half hour before I got to the hospital and found a place to park. I walked hurriedly up the tree-shaded walkway into the building, my sandals clacking on the tiles, my sweaty, unbuttoned print shirt hanging outside my slacks. I had to swallow and breathe quietly for a moment before I could ask the receptionist where Jimmie’s room was. Then I turned and saw Captain Guidry standing behind me.

“He’s in recovery on the fifth floor, Dave. They got the bullets out,” he said.

“What’s it look like for him?”

“Better than it did when I talked with you. Let’s walk down to the elevator.”

“What happened?”

“I’m going to tell you everything we know. But slow down now. There’re some real good docs taking care of him. We’re going to ride this one out all right.”

“Tell me what happened.”

The elevator door opened, and a nurse pushed out a wheelchair in which sat a pretty woman in a pink nightgown. She was smiling and she held a spray of flowers in her lap. We stepped inside and the doors closed behind us.

“He walked down to the Café du Monde for
beignets
, then stopped at the public restroom next door. The one that’s under the levee. A black kid that was taking a piss in the wall urinal said Jimmie went into one of the stalls and closed the door. A minute later a guy came in, kicked open the door, and fired twice, point-blank. The kid says the gun had something on the barrel and it made a spitting sound. It sounds like a professional hit.”