The Neon Rain (28 page)

“Why did that man tell you those things?”

“He wanted to rattle me, get my mind on something else. He figured he had one play left, and he was going to take it.”

“I feel afraid for you.”

“You shouldn’t. Four of them are dead, and I’m still walking around. When I was in Vietnam I used to try and think everything through. Then one day a friend told me, ‘Forget the complexities. The only thing that counts is that you’re still on top of the ground, sucking air.’”

“Except you don’t believe that.”

“A person has to act and think in the way that works for him. I can’t control all this bullshit in my life. I didn’t deal any of it. In fact, I tried to deal myself out. It didn’t work out that way.”

I saw the sadness in her eyes, and I took her hands in mine.

“The only thing I’m sorry about is having brought problems into your life,” I said. “It’s the cop’s malaise.”

“Any problems I have with you are problems I want.”

“You don’t understand, Annie. When I told you about Biloxi I made you an accessory after the fact. So when I came over here this evening, I guess I did know what I have to do. I’d better go now. I’ll call later.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to set things straight. Don’t worry. Things always work out before the ninth race.”

“Stay.”

She stood up from the table and looked down at me. I got up and put my arms around her, felt her body come against me, felt it become small and close under my hands, felt her head under my chin and her sandaled foot curve around my ankle. I kissed her hair and her eyes, and when she opened them again, all I could see was the electric blueness in them.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. Her voice was a low, thick whisper in my ear, her fingers like the brush of a bird’s wing on my thigh.

Later, in the darkness of her bedroom, the sunset an orange and purple glow beyond the half-closed blinds, she lay against my chest and rubbed her hand over my skin.

“One day you’ll have a quiet heart,” she said.

“It’s quiet now.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re already thinking about the rest of the night. But one day you’ll feel all the heat go out of you.”

“Some people aren’t made like that.”

“Why do you think that?” she asked quietly.

“Because of the years I invested in dismantling myself, I was forced to learn about some things that went on in my head. I don’t like the world the way it is, and I miss the past. It’s a foolish way to be.”

I left Annie’s and drove over toward St. Mary’s Dominican College, where Captain Guidry lived with his mother in a Victorian house not far from the Mississippi levee. It was a yellow house, in need of paint, and the lawn hadn’t been cut and the lower gallery was overgrown with trees and untrimmed shrubs. The windows were all dark, except for the light of a television screen in the living room. I unlatched the picket gate and walked up the cracked walkway to the front porch. The porch swing hung at an angle on rusted chains, and the doorbell was the kind you twisted with a handle. I thought it was about time the captain seriously considered marrying the widow in the water department.

“Dave, what are you doing out here?” he said when he opened the door. He wore a rumpled sports shirt, slippers, and old slacks with paint stains on them. He held a cup with a tea bag in it.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home. I need to talk with you.”

“Sure, come in. My mother just went to bed. I was watching the ball game.”

The living room was dark, smelled of dust and Mentholatum, and was filled with nineteenth-century furniture. The furniture wasn’t antique; it was simply old, like the clutter of clocks, vases, religious pictures, coverless books, tasseled pillows, and stacked magazines that took up every inch of available space in the room. I sat down in a deep, stuffed chair that was threadbare on the arms.

“You want tea or a Dr Pepper?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

“You want anything else?” He looked at me carefully.

“Nope.”

“Thataboy. Jimmie’s still holding his own, isn’t he?”

“He’s the same.”

“Yeah, I checked on him at noon. He’s going to make it, Dave. If they get through the first day, they usually make it all the way. It’s like something down inside of them catches a second breath.”

“I’m in some serious trouble. I thought about just riding it out, then I thought about getting out of town.”

He reached over from where he sat on the couch and clicked off the ball game.

“Instead, I figured I better face it now before it gets worse, if that’s possible,” I said.

“What is it?”

“I had to kill Philip Murphy last night in Biloxi.”

I saw his jaw set and his eyes light angrily.

“I was going to bring him in,” I said. “That’s the truth, Captain. I let him go into the bathroom to take a leak, and he had a Walther taped inside the toilet tank. He called the play.”

“No, you called the play when you started acting on your own authority, when you refused to accept the terms of your suspension, when you went as a vigilante into another state. I asked you at the hospital to have a little patience, a little trust. I guess those were wasted words.”

“I respect you, Captain, but how much trust have people had in me?”

“Listen to what you’re saying. Can you imagine making a statement like that in a courtroom?”

I felt my face flush, and I had to look away from his eyes.

“You still haven’t told me everything, though, have you?” he said. “No.”

“You left the scene and you didn’t report it?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“I think Purcel killed Bobby Joe Starkweather.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he was just riding around in St. Charles Parish one morning and decided he wanted to blow away a redneck,” the Captain said.

“There was a witness. I have her name and where she works.”

“But you didn’t bother telling this to anyone before?”

“She’s a doper and a hooker, Captain. Her brains are as soft as yesterday’s ice cream. I didn’t know what would happen to her if they kept her as a material witness, either.”

“I’m having a hard time assimilating all this, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but this Purcel business sounds like it came out of a bottle. Maybe his personal problems are about to screw up his career with the department, but he’s not an assassin, for God’s sakes.”

I felt tired, empty, my options all spent, and all of it for no purpose whatsoever. The captain was a good man. I didn’t know what I had expected of him, actually. In going to his house with my strange stories, I had given him even fewer alternatives than I had myself.

“Give me the address,” he said. “I’m going to call the Biloxi police department. Then we need to go down to the station, and I think you should call an attorney.”

He made the long-distance call, and I listened glumly while he talked with someone in their homicide division. I felt like a child whose errant behavior would now have to be taken over by a group of bemused authority figures. The captain finished and hung up the phone.

“They’re sending a car out there and they’ll call me back,” he said.

I sat in the silence. “Did that black kid ever find anything in the mug books?”

“No, he was too scared, poor kid. We found out he’s a little bit retarded, too. You don’t think Murphy pulled the trigger?”

“No.”

The captain blew air out of his nose. His fingers made a design on the arm of the couch as we sat in the gloom.

“Captain, did you hear anything about Didi Gee being indicted?”

“No, but you know how they are in the prosecutor’s office. They dummy up on us sometimes, particularly when they’re thinking about a roll of drums on the six-o’clock news. What did you hear?”

“He thinks he’s going to be indicted.”

“He told you this? You’ve been talking with Didi Gee?”

“He asked me out to Mama Lido’s. He gave me the line on Murphy.”

“Dave, I’m advising you at this point that you should be careful of what you tell me.”

“I believe he thinks he might actually go to Angola.”

“If the prosecutor’s office is taking Didi Gee before the grand jury, it doesn’t have anything to do with homicide. We had two cases I thought we could tie to his tail, and the prosecutor sat on his hands until one witness blew town and another time a clerk threw away a signed confession. You remember two years ago when somebody cut up a bookie named Joe Roth and stuffed him into the trash compactor in his own house? The next-door neighbor heard a Skilsaw whining in the middle of the night, and saw two guys leave the house at dawn, carrying a bloody paper sack. We found out later it contained the overalls they wore while they sawed up Roth’s body. The neighbor picked out one of Didi Gee’s hoods from a lineup, the guy had no alibi, his car had blood on the seat, he was a two-time loser and psychotic who would have sold Didi Gee’s ass at a garage sale to stay out of the electric chair. But the prosecutor’s office messed around for five months, and our witness sold his house at a loss and moved to Canada. So I can’t take their current efforts too seriously. If they want to put the fat boy away, they should be talking to us, and they’re not.

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Dave, but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s our territory now, not yours, even though we’re talking about your brother. What’s that word they use when they’re talking about characters in Shakespeare’s plays?”

“Hubris?”

“Yeah, that’s the word. Pride, a guy not knowing when he should sit one out. I think maybe that’s the origin of our problem here.”

Captain Guidry turned the ball game on and pretended to watch it while we waited for the call. He was clearly uncomfortable. I suppose he was thinking he might actually have to arrest me. Finally he got up, went into the kitchen, and brought us back two bottles of Dr Pepper.

“You remember a drink called Dr. Nut when we were kids?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Boy, those were good, weren’t they? The closest thing to it is a Dr Pepper. I guess that’s why Southerners drink Dr Pepper all the time.” He paused in the silence and brushed the tops of his fingers with his palms. “Look, I know you think the bottom’s dropped out of everything, but try to look at what you got. You’ve put the cork in the jug, you’ve still got good friends, and you have a hell of a fine record as a police officer behind you.”

“I appreciate it, Captain.”

The phone rang, and he answered it with obvious relief. He listened for almost a full minute, his eyes blinking occasionally, then he said, “That’s what he said—on Azalea Drive, the last pink stucco duplex. Next to a vacant lot.” He looked at me. “That’s right, isn’t it, Dave? It’s the last place on the street, and the apartment next door has newspapers on the lawn?”

I nodded.

“You got the right house,” he said into the phone. “Did you find the landlord?… I see… No, sir, I don’t understand it, either. I’d appreciate it, though, if you’d keep us informed, and we’ll do the same… Yes, sir, thank you for your time and courtesy.”

He hung up the phone and touched the hair implants in his scalp.

“The place is empty,” he said.

“What?”

“There’s no Philip Murphy, no body in the shower, no clothes in the closets, nothing in the cabinets or drawers. The next-door neighbor says a couple of guys were there this morning with a U-Haul trailer. The only thing that checks out is that the glass is gone from the shower doors, and it looks like somebody sawed a piece out of the bathroom doorjamb. Did it have some lead in it?”

“Yeah, I caught the edge of it with the first round.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Dave.”

“What about the landlord?”

“He lives in Mobile. They haven’t talked with him yet.”

“What about blood?”

“The place is clean. You’re off the hook, at least for now.”

“This means there’s more of them out there. They’re like army ants that trundle off their dead.”

“I have thirty-two years in the department. Only once before have I run into something like this, and to tell you the truth it unnerved me for a long time. About twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, a car with three soldiers in it got hit by a train on Tchoupitoulas. They were all killed, and I mean really ground up under the engine. What bothered me was that all three of them were wearing seat belts. What are the odds of three fatalities all wearing their seat belts? Also, guys that are that careful don’t put themselves in front of trains. Anyway, it was winter and they were supposed to be on leave from Fort Dix, New Jersey, but they had suntans like they’d been lying on the beach for six months. I think they were dead before that train ever hit them. Somebody belted them in their car and put them on the track at three in the morning.

“But I’ll never know for sure, because the army claimed their bodies, bagged them up, and that’s the last I heard of it. We’d better talk to the Treasury people tomorrow morning.”

“They have a way of becoming comatose when they hear my voice on the phone.”

“I’ll call them. You did the right thing, coming here tonight. Things look a little better than they did a while ago, don’t they?”

“Yes, sir, they do.”

“There’s something else I want to tell you. It looks like the prosecutor’s office is going to drop the concealed-weapon charge against you.”

“Why?”

“Elections are coming around again. It’s law-and-order time. They’re going to make a lot of newsprint about gambling and narcotics, and they don’t want people accusing them of wasting taxpayers’ money while they try a cop on a chickenshit weapons charge.”

“Are you sure?”

“That’s what I heard. Don’t take it to the bank yet. But those guys over there are on their way up to higher things, and they don’t care about our little problems in the department. Anyway, coast awhile, will you, Dave?”

But scared money never wins. You don’t ease up on the batter in the ninth, you don’t give up the rail on the far turn.

The next day it rained just before dawn, and when the sun came up, the trees along Carondelet were green and dripping, and the air was so thick with moisture it was almost foglike, suffused with a pink light the color of cotton candy. I parked down the street from Clete’s house in a working-class neighborhood that would eventually be all black. His lawn had been recently mowed, but it had been cut in uneven strips, with ragged tufts of grass sticking up between the mower’s tracks, and the cracks in the sidewalk and driveway were thick with weeds. His garbage cans had been emptied yesterday, but they still lay out front, their battered sides glistening with dew. At seven-thirty he came out the front door, dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt, a striped tie, and seersucker pants, his coat over his arm. His belt was hitched under his navel, the way a retired football player might wear it, and his big shoulders made him look as if he had put on a boy’s shirt by mistake.