The Neon Rain (30 page)

I knew that I would always be caught in that lens, too, locked inside a frame of film that people would never be able to deal with, because to deal with it would require an admission of responsibility that would numb an entire nation.

That is why the word
obsession
is a convenient one in the analytical vocabulary. We apply it to those who were trapped inside the camera, who can never extricate themselves from those darker periods in history that were written for them by somebody else. But I had a feeling that the general would understand what I meant, that he too had heard the click of the shutter in an unexpected moment, had realized with a quickening of the heart that some of us are meant to be only sojourners in the present.

Then a strange thing happened that afternoon. I drove back to my houseboat, ate a sandwich and drank a glass of iced tea, and suddenly felt very tired. I took a nap, with the fan blowing across me in the hot cabin, and awoke an hour later with the thick heat of the afternoon in my head. I pumped water into the kitchen sink, splashed my face and dried it with a paper towel, and stared abstractedly out the window into the glaring sunlight. Then my eyes focused on a man who stood under a palm tree farther down the beach. His hair was absolutely white, his skin deeply tanned, his posture erect as he smoked a cigarette in a holder and looked out at the shimmering lake from behind pilot’s sunglasses. I rubbed the moisture out of my eyes with my fingers and looked again. I suspected that possibly I was obsessed after all. I went out on my deck and saw him turn and look at me. Cigarette smoke drifted away from his mouth in the wind. I walked quickly across the gangplank onto the dock and headed down the beach toward him. He looked at me a moment longer, removed the cigarette from his holder and dropped it into the sand, then casually walked to a gunmetal gray Chrysler and drove away. The heat was like steam rising from a stove.

I put on my running shoes and shorts, did four miles along the beach, showered in my tin stall, and called Annie and told her I would pick her up for supper after I visited Jimmie at the hospital. But just as I was locking up, Captain Guidry parked his car under the palm trees by my dock and walked down the path through the sand dune toward me. He carried his coat over his shoulder, and he wore his badge on one side of his belt and his clip-on .38 holster on the other. He wore long-sleeved white shirts and a tie even in the summer, and there were huge loops of sweat under his arms.

“Give me a few minutes of your time,” he said.

I unlocked the door, fixed him a rum and Coke, made myself a glass of instant iced coffee, and sat down with him at my deck table under the canvas umbrella. The heat and humidity of the afternoon had started to lift and break apart in the evening breeze, and there were patches of dark blue floating in the green of the lake.

“I shouldn’t drink this,” he said. “I had a couple of belts right after work, and I probably don’t need any more. But… so what? Cheers, Dave.”

“You’re not a man we can accuse of many vices, Captain.”

“Yeah, but my life is pretty boring as a consequence. At least it is until I get hung up on a case. I want to get you back into the department. You’re too valuable to be marking time out here on your boat. I’ll tell you something straight out. You’re probably the best investigative officer I ever had under me. You have honest-to-God talent and ability. There’s nobody else I can depend on like I’ve depended on you.”

“That’s kind of you, Captain.”

“Forget the kindness. I want people in custody for Jimmie’s shooting. I’m ashamed of the number of homicides and attempted homicides we’re not prosecuting. I’m convinced that almost every guy we don’t nail keeps killing people until he finally falls. I’ve never bought this number that a murder is usually a one-time excursion. You remember that hit man from New Jersey we busted about five or six years ago? He’s been a suspect in something like eighteen contract murders. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it? He’d still be out there if one of his own kind hadn’t stuck an icepick in his ear. Anyway, they’re not going to walk on this one. I’m going to tie the ribbon on the package and carry it over to the prosecutor’s office myself, but I might need a little help. Now don’t you bullshit me, Dave. You knew something when you came out of Jimmie’s room the day he was shot. I want to know what it is.”

“I didn’t hold out on you. I just wasn’t sure it meant very much. I’m still not sure it does.”

“What?”

“Jimmie put his fingers on my chest, like he was trying to trace the letters of somebody’s name.”

“Okay.”

“I think he knew he couldn’t spell out an entire name. But what about initials? Whose name sounds like initials?”

“No, you tell me.”

“Didi Gee. He used me. He had me out to lunch with him and his collection of assholes while Jimmie was being hit. I not only gave him an alibi, I allowed him to shoot off his mouth about his ethics and how people were forcing him to break his own rules.”

“Why would he want to hit Jimmie?”

“He’s going up in front of the grand jury, and I’ll bet you Jimmie’s going to be subpoenaed, too. He knew Jimmie wouldn’t perjure himself. He’d take his own fall, and Didi would end up falling with him.”

Captain Guidry drank from his rum and Coke and took his pipe and pouch out of his coat pocket.

“I’m going to tell you a few things, but I need to extract your word of honor about something first,” he said.

“I’ve stopped dealing in those terms, Captain. That’s not meant to be cynical. Considering the kind of mileage I have on my odometer, I just have a hard time thinking about personal honor.”

“That’s because you’ve convinced yourself you’re one of the world’s great sinners. Let me tell you something. Real honor means you’re still intact and functioning after your soul’s been shot out of a cannon.”

“What do you want?”

“A promise you won’t try to take down Didi Gee.”

“I didn’t plan to.”

“You didn’t plan that situation over in Biloxi, but it happened anyway, didn’t it?”

“As a police officer I’ve shot four people, and I won’t tell you about my record in Vietnam, except that I’m sick of all of it. There’s always somebody there to convince you we got to blow ‘em away, just this one more time, and the world will be a safer place. If Didi Gee deals the play, that’s another matter. But I’m off of rock-‘n’-roll, Captain.”

He fiddled with his pipe for a while, then stuck it inside the tobacco pouch and put the pouch on the table.

“I got a call from the Fort Lauderdale police department,” he said. “They try to monitor their local talent, but one of them slipped off the leash and left town for a couple of days. They think he might have been over here.”

“Who is he?”

“A hit man that works for the mob in New Jersey and south Florida. They sent me a picture on the wire, and I showed it to the black kid with five others. He said that’s our man.”

“Where’s this guy now?”

“Eating lobster on the beach, but we’re going to jerk him up short. We’ll cut the warrant on the kid’s make, they’ll pick him up for us, and we’ll extradite back to New Orleans. By that time maybe Jimmie can identify him, too. The important thing is we don’t let this guy fly.”

“You’d better get a damn high bond, then.”

“It will be. Also, the word’s going to be on the street that this guy is a traveling man, a very bad risk. There’s one thing you got to remember, though, Dave. We’ll need Jimmie for a solid case. I don’t think the kid will hold up too well by himself.”

“What about Didi Gee?”

“We’ll take it a step at a time. We won’t have any trouble showing motive—the prosecutor was going to indict Jimmie and use him as a witness against Didi Gee. I think it comes down to how much time our contract man wants to spend chopping sugar cane in Angola. Fort Lauderdale says he’s never had to do any hard time. The possibility of a thirty-year jolt in the Louisiana prison system might really increase his instinct for negotiation.”

“Don’t send Purcel after him.”

“Purcel’s
my
problem. Don’t worry about him.”

“He got ten thousand for Starkweather. He’ll take money again. It’s never a one-time thing. If you don’t believe me, run his nine-millimeter through ballistics. But I bet his house will be robbed by then. Maybe you can get a match off the slugs from the Segura shooting, if they’re not too beat up.”

“I hope you have my job one day, Dave. Then you can be responsible for everything that’s wrong in the First District. It’s something to look forward to.”

“I’m just squaring with you.”

“Yeah, but give me some credit. I’m the one that warned you about protecting Purcel’s butt in the first place. Right?”

I didn’t answer. The wind was cool now, and it flapped the canvas umbrella over our heads. Twenty yards out, a half-dozen pelicans sailed low over the water, their shadows racing ahead of them on the green surface.

“Right or wrong?” he said, and grinned at me.

“You’re right.”

Then his face became serious again.

“But no Didi Gee, no cowboy stuff, no bullshit of any kind,” he said. “The fat boy’s going away, you can count on it, but it’s going to be by the numbers. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

But even as I spoke, I thought,
If we break promises to God, shouldn’t we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors
?

Monday morning I had to go through another interview with Internal Affairs, this time concerning my last encounter with Internal Affairs. The three of us sat in a closed, immaculate white room that was furnished with a wooden table and three chairs. My interviewers were takers of notes. The yellow legal pads they wrote on were covered with swirls of calligraphy from their black felt pens. I didn’t know either of them.

“Why did you strike Lieutenant Baxter?”

“He provoked me.”

“How’s that?”

“What do you care?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said why are you asking me these questions? You work with the man every day. You know him better than I do.”

“Should we just indicate that you do not choose to answer the question?”

“I punched Nate Baxter because he’s a bad cop. He tries to bully and degrade people. In my case, he tried to ignore evidence in the torture and murder of a federal law officer. Those things aren’t demonstrable, but they’re true, and both of you guys know it.”

Both of them looked at me blankly across the table. I could hear the air-conditioning humming through a duct in the white silence.

On the way out I got a clerk to pull the computer sheet they had gotten on the hit man from the National Crime Information Center in Washington. It was brief, almost hazy, in its description, in the way that a facial image burned into rock with acid would be hazy and brutal at the same time.

B. 1957, CAMDEN, NJ, GRADUATED H.S. 1975, ATTENDED MIAMI-DADE C.C. 2 YRS. VOC: DRY CLEANER, APT. MANAGER, SALESMAN. SUSPECTED INVOLVEMENT IN 6 HOMICIDES ORDERED BY ORGANIZED CRIME FIGURES. 1 CONTEMPT CITATION RESULTING IN 3 MONTHS’ CONFINEMENT BROWARD COUNTY STOCKADE. CURRENT ADDRESS: CASA DEL MAR, GALT OCEAN MILE, FT. LAUDERDALE, FL.

I tried to envision the man. The face remained an empty, dark oval, like the pitted center of a rotten piece of fruit, but I could see the simian hands. They were strong, ridged with knuckles, thick across the palm, but they were not made for work or for touching a woman’s breast or even for tossing a ball back and forth with boys. Instead, they curved readily around certain tools that in themselves were only discardable means to an end: the .22 Magnum revolver, the .410 pistol, the barber’s razor, the cork-tipped icepick, the Uzi. He loosed the souls from their bodies, the grief and terror from their eyes; he unstuck them from their mortal fastenings, sawed the sky loose from the earth’s rim, eased them as a lover might into the wheeling of the stars. Sometimes at night he watched his deeds on the ten-o’clock news, ate ice cream out of a carton with a spoon, and felt a strange sexual arousal at the simplicity of it all, the purity, the strobelike glow where their bodies had been outlined with chalk, the remembered smell of death that was also like the smell of the sea, like copulation, like birth.

He had been busted at nine-thirty that morning and was now being held in the deadlock of the Fort Lauderdale jail, with no bond, while he awaited extradition to Louisiana. With good luck Jimmie would identify him, and with the right turn of the screw he would be willing to feed Didi Gee into an airplane propeller.

It should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

I went back to the houseboat and found an old canvas money bag that I used to collect pennies in. The canvas had been cut out of a sail and sewn with a thick double stitch, and it closed and tied at the top with a leather drawstring. Then I sorted through my toolbox and found a half-dozen tire lugs, three ball bearings, and a huge iron nut that I used as a weight on my crab traps.

Rain clouds drifted by overhead, and my houseboat and the lake were suddenly covered with shadow, and the waves were capping on the slate-green surface. The air was cool and smelled of trees and salt and wet sand that was alive with shellfish. I could feel caution lights start to flash in my head, the way you do when you watch the amber light shimmer in a whiskey glass; you raise the glass to your lip and you’re almost eyeball to eyeball with that protean and dancing balloon of yellow light, then its heated energy hits your stomach, surges through your chest, and rips open sealed places in your brain that you did not know existed. But the marriage is made, the hyena will have its way, the caution light is locked on red, and you can’t even have the pleasure of loathing yourself because the metamorphosis to which you’ve committed yourself is now the only self you have.

No, I wasn’t out of control. It wasn’t whiskey or an adrenaline surge like it that was loose in my system. I simply had to set some things right. And sometimes you don’t set things right by being reasonable.
Reason
is a word I always associated with bureaucrats, paper shufflers, and people who formed committees that were never intended to solve anything. I don’t mean to be hard. Maybe I’m just saying that what works for other people never worked very well for me, and that’s probably because I shorted out a lot of my wiring a long time ago. I was never good at complexities, usually made a mess of them when I tried to cope with them, and for that reason I was always fond of a remark that Robert Frost made when he was talking about his lifetime commitment to his art. He said the fear of God asks the question, Is my sacrifice acceptable, is it worthy, in His sight? When it’s all over and done with, does the good outweigh the bad, did I pitch the best game I could, even though it was a flawed one, right through die bottom of the ninth?