The Neon Rain Part 5

We walked back to our car and left Segura and his lawyer staring at each other.

We headed back down the lake road toward the Pontchartrain Expressway. The palm trees were beating along the sh.o.r.e, and small waves were whitecapping out on the lake. Several sailboats were tacking hard in the wind.

"You think we stuck a couple of thumbtacks in his head?" Cletus asked. He drove without looking at me.

"We'll see."

"That touch about the IRS was beautiful."

"You want to tell me something, Clete?"

"Am I supposed to go to confession or something?"

"I don't like to see a guy like Segura trying to jerk my partner around."

"It was three years ago. My wife and I had broke up, and I'd been on the shelf for six weeks."

"You let the girl walk?"

"She never got busted. She was a snitch. I liked her."

"That's why you put your fist through that guy's stomach?"

"All right, so I don't feel good about it. But I swear to you, Dave, I never got any free action because of my badge, and I never went on the pad." He looked across at me with his poached, scarred face.

"So I believe you."

"So buy me a beignet and a coffee at the Cafe du Monde."

An afternoon thundershower was building out over Lake Pontchartrain. The sky on the distant horizon had turned green, and waves were scudding all across the lake now. The few sailboats still out were drenched with spray and foam as they pounded into the wind and headed for their docks. It started to rain in large, flat drops when we turned onto the Expressway, then suddenly it poured down on Clete's car in a roar of tackhammers.

The city was soaked and dripping when I went to pick up the social worker, whose name was Annie Ballard, by Audubon Park. The streetlamps lighted the misty trees along the esplanade on St. Charles; the burnished streetcar tracks and the old green streetcar glistened dully in the wet light, and the smoky neon signs, the bright, rain-streaked windows of the restaurants and the drugstore on the corner were like part of a nocturnal painting out of the 1940s. This part of New Orleans never seemed to change, and somehow its confirmation of yesterday on a rainy summer night always dissipated my own fears about time and mortality. And it was this reverie that made me careless, let me ignore the car that parked behind me, and let me walk up her sidewalk with the vain presumption that only people like Julio Segura had things happen to them out of sequence.

THREE.

She lived in an old brick rowhouse that was connected to several others by a common porch and a shrub-filled front yard. I heard footsteps behind me, turned and glanced at three men who were joking about something and carrying a wine bottle wrapped in a paper sack, but I paid no attention to them after they turned toward a lighted house where a party was going on.

She smiled when she opened the door. She wore a blue dress with transparent shoulders, and her blond curls stuck out from under a wide straw hat. She was very pretty with the light behind her, and I didn't care whether we made it to the track or not. Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder, saw her expression break apart, heard the feet on the porch behind me, this time fast and running. Just as I turned, one of the three men shoved me hard into Annie Ballard's living room and aimed a Browning automatic pistol straight into my face.

"Don't try to pull it, biscuit-eater, unless you want your brains running out your nose," he said, and reached inside my sports coat and pulled my .38 from my waist holster.

He was tall and angular, his hair mowed into his scalp like a peeled onion, his stomach as flat as a shingle under the big metal buckle on his blue jeans. The accent was Deep South, genuine p.e.c.k.e.rwood, and on his right arm was a tattoo of a grinning skull in a green beret with crossed bayonets under the jaw and the inscription kill them all... let G.o.d sort them out.

The second man was short and olive-skinned, with elongated Semitic eyes and a hawk nose. He went quickly from room to room, like a ferret. But it was the third man who was obviously in charge. His hands rested comfortably in his raincoat pockets; his face looked impa.s.sively around the room as though he were standing at a bus stop. He was in his early fifties, with a paunch, a round Irish chin, a small mouth with down-turned corners, and cheeks that were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. The vaguely dissolute edges of his face, with his tangled eyebrows and untrimmed gray hair, gave you the impression of a jaded Kiwanian.

"There's n.o.body else," the olive-skinned man said. He spoke with a Middle Eastern accent.

"Do you already know I'm a police officer?" I said quietly.

"We know a lot about you, Lieutenant. You've really spread your name around recently," the man in the raincoat said.

"I thought Segura was smarter than this," I said.

"I don't know. I've never met the man. But you're not smart at all." He took a revolver casually out of his raincoat pocket and nodded to the man with the tattoo, who went into the bathroom, dropped my .38 into the toilet bowl, and started the water in the bathtub. Annie's eyes were wide under her hat, and she was breathing rapidly through her mouth.

"I have friends coming over," she said.

"That's why you got your hat on," the man with the tattoo said, smiling from the bathroom door. His hair was cut so close to his scalp that the light made his head glow with an aura. He held a large roll of adhesive tape in his hand.

"I'm going to walk out my door," she said. Her face was flushed and spotted as though she had a fever, and her voice was filled with strain. "I have friends next door and out in the yard and over on the next block and they can hear everything through these walls and you're not going to do anything to us-"

"Annie," I said quietly.

"We're going to leave now and they're not going to hurt us," she said.

"Annie, don't talk," I said. "These men have business with me, then they're going to leave. You mustn't do anything now."

"Listen to the voice of experience," the man in the raincoat said.

"No," she said. "They're not going to do this. I'm walking outside now. These are weak people or they wouldn't have guns."

"You dumb c.u.n.t," the man with the tattoo said, and swung his fist into the back of Annie's head. Her hat pitched into the air, and she fell forward on her knees, her face white with shock. She remained bent over and started to cry. It was the kind of crying that came from genuine, deep-seated pain.

"You sonofab.i.t.c.h," I said.

"Put her in back," the man in the raincoat said. The other two men pulled Annie's arms behind her and taped her wrists, then her mouth. Her curly hair hung in her eyes, and there were tears on her cheeks. The two men started to walk her to the bedroom.

"Bobby Joe, nothing except what we have to do here," the man in the raincoat said.

"You wanted her to walk out on the front porch?" said Bobby Joe, the man with the tattoo.

"That's not what I mean. Nothing except what we have to do. Do you understand?"

"There's better broads for two bucks in Guatemala City," Bobby Joe said.

"Shut your mouth, tape her ankles, and get back out here," the man with the raincoat said.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"You're in way over your head, Lieutenant. I'm just not quite sure of your own degree of awareness. That's the problem we have to resolve tonight."

"I'll give you something else to resolve. I'm going to square everything that happens in here."

"You're presuming a lot."

"Yeah? We can make New Orleans an uncomfortable place for crackers that beat up on women. Or for over-the-hill spooks."

He looked amused.

"You think you've made me?" he said.

"You have a strong federal smell."

"Who knows, these days, employment being what it is? But at least you're a professional and you recognize characteristics in people. So you know that Bobby Joe and Erik in there are hired help, not professional at all. They get carried away sometimes. Do you know what I mean? Bobby Joe, in particular. Bad army life, doesn't like authority, certainly doesn't like women. A bad combination for your situation. Tell me where Fitzpatrick is and we'll walk out of here."

"Who?"

"I was afraid we'd hear that from you."

The other two men, Bobby Joe and Erik, came out of the bedroom, crossed my wrists behind me, and wound the adhesive tape deep into my flesh. I could feel the blood swelling in my veins. Then the man in the raincoat nodded to Bobby Joe, who jerked my head down with both hands and brought his knee up into my face. I crashed against the coffee table, my nose ringing with pain, my eyes watering uncontrollably. Bobby Joe and Erik picked me up by each arm. Their hands were like Vise-Grips on me. Then Bobby Joe hit me twice in the stomach, and I doubled over and gagged a long string of saliva on the rug.

"Now you're a cooperative biscuit-eater," Bobby Joe said, and they led me into the bathroom.

The tub was running over now. Erik turned off the taps, and the man in the raincoat lowered the toilet-seat cover, sat on it, and lighted a Camel cigarette.

"In 'Nam we wrapped a towel around Charlie's face and soaked it in water," he said. "It was kind of like a portable river to drown in. But it always worked. Even better than calling him up on the telephone crank. Let's have it, Lieutenant, so we don't have to go through this bulls.h.i.t."

They had me on my knees, bent over the tub now. My nose was dripping blood into the water. They waited a moment in the silence, then shoved my head under.

I fought to get up, but it didn't do any good. My knees felt like they were greased with Vaseline; my stomach was pressed hard over the tub's rim, and Bobby Joe was leaning all his weight on the back of my neck. My breath bubbled out my nose and mouth, I shook my head violently from side to side with my eyes open, my teeth gritted, then the closure apparatus in my throat broke and I sucked water inside my head and lungs like a series of doors slamming forever.

They pulled me up roaring with water and air, and threw me against the metal legs on the sink.

"This isn't so bad. There's no permanent damage done," the man in the raincoat said. "It'd be a lot worse if Segura's people handled it. It has something to do with the Latin tradition. I think they got it from the Romans. Did you know that Nero killed himself because the Senate sent word to him that he was to be executed in 'the old way,' which meant being whipped to death with his head locked in a wooden fork? If you don't want to say where Fitzpatrick is, you can write it on a piece of paper. It's funny how that makes a difference for people sometimes."

My heart was thundering, my breath laboring in my throat.

"I never heard of the c.o.c.ksucker," I said.

I felt Bobby Joe begin to lift me by one arm.

"Wait a minute," the man in the raincoat said. "The lieutenant's not a bad fellow. He just doesn't know what's involved. If he did, he might be on our team. Fitzpatrick probably gave you a patriotic shuck and you thought you were helping out the good guys."

"I don't know what the f.u.c.k you're talking about."

"You're probably a good cop, but don't tell us you're shaking the bushes all over New Orleans and Cataouatche Parish because of a drowned colored girl," he said.

"Two minutes this time. He'll tell," Erik said.

The man in the raincoat leaned down and looked intently in my face.

"He means it," he said. "Two minutes under water. Maybe you'll make it. Sometimes they don't. It happens."

"All he's got to do is nod his head up and down, then he can have all the air he wants," Bobby Joe said.

He jerked me up half-erect by my arm and started to slide me across the wet tiles to the tub's rim again. But this time I was dripping with water and sweat and I slipped loose from him, fell on my b.u.t.tocks, and shot one leather-soled shoe like a hammer into his ribcage. He wasn't ready for it, and I felt a bone go like a stick. The blood drained out of his face, his tongue lay pink on his teeth, his skin tightened on his skull as though he were silently absorbing an intolerable pain and rage.

"Oh my, you shouldn't have done that," the man in the raincoat said.

Erik grabbed my hair and slammed my head against the side of the tub. I kicked at all of them blindly, but my feet struck at empty air. Then Bobby Joe locked his powerful arms around my neck and took me over the rim again, his body trembling rigidly with a cruel and murderous energy, and I knew that all my past fears of being shotgunned by a psychotic, of being shanked by an addict, of stepping on a Claymore mine in Vietnam, were just the foolish preoccupations of youth; that my real nemesis had always been a redneck lover who would hold me upside down against his chest while my soul slipped through a green, watery porcelain hole in the earth, down through the depths of the Mekong River, where floated the bodies of other fatigue-clad men and whole families of civilians, their faces still filled with disbelief and the shock of an artillery burst, and farther still to the mossy base of an offsh.o.r.e oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, where my father waited for me in his hardhat, coveralls, and steeltipped drilling boots after having drowned there twenty years ago.

Then Bobby Joe's arms let go of my neck, as though he had tired of me, and I collapsed in a gasping, embryonic heap on the floor. I lay with one eye pressed against the wet tile.

"Get out there and see what it is!" the man in the raincoat said.

Bobby Joe stood erect, stepped over me, and was gone.

"Had a mind-change about Fitzpatrick?" the man in the raincoat said.

I couldn't answer. In fact, at that point I didn't even remember the name. Then I heard Bobby Joe in the doorway.

"His b.i.t.c.h got her feet loose from the bedstead and kicked a lamp through the window. The whole G.o.dd.a.m.n backyard is full of people from a party," he said.

"Travel time," the man in the raincoat said. He stood up and combed his hair as he walked past me. "You're a big winner tonight, Lieutenant. But let the experience work for you. Don't try to play in the major leagues. It's a s.h.i.tty life, believe me. Big risks, lots of crazy people running around, few side benefits like the piece you've got in the next room. You've got cojones, but the next time around, Bobby Joe and Erik will cut them off."

Then they went out the front door into the dark like three macabre harlequins who on impulse visited the quiet world of ordinary people with baseball bats.

Three patrol cars from the Second District, an ambulance, and a fire truck answered the neighbor's emergency call. Revolving red and blue lights reflected off the trees and houses; the lawn and house were filled with patrolmen, paramedics, firemen in yellow slickers, neighbors drinking beer and sangria, people writing on clipboards and talking into static-filled radios, and all of it signified absolutely nothing. Any candid policeman will tell you that we seldom catch people as a result of investigation or detective work; in other words, if we don't grab them during the commission of the crime, there's a good chance we won't catch them at all. When we do nail them, it's often through informers or because they trip over their own shoestrings and turn the key on themselves (drunk driving, expired license plates, a barroom beef). We're not smart; they're just dumb.

That's why the feds were made to look so bad back in the late sixties and early seventies when they couldn't nail a bunch of middle-cla.s.s college kids who ended up on the "Ten Most Wanted" list. Instead of dealing with predictable psychopaths like Alvin Karpis and Charles Arthur Floyd, the FBI had to second-guess Brandeis and Wisconsin English majors who dynamited research labs and boosted banks and Brinks' trucks and then faded back into the quiet life of the suburbs. For a time, the amateurs ruined crime for everybody.

The last one to leave was the scene investigator whom I'd requested. He dusted the doors, the bedroom, the bath, looked at me with a shrug, and walked out the door without speaking, which was his way of telling me what he thought of the fruitless work I had just created for him.

"Did he find something?" Annie said. She sat at the dining room table with a tumbler of whiskey between her fingers. Her face was wan, her voice and blue eyes listless.

"Everything was probably smeared. Fingerprints never do us much good anyway, not unless we have a body or someone in custody. Even if an examiner has a whole handprint set in blood, he still has to compare it with tens of thousands of file prints, and it's as much fun as threading a needle with your eyes closed. That's why he looked so happy when he left here. Look, I'm sorry I brought all this stuff into your house. I got careless tonight. I should have made those guys when they stepped out of their car."

"It wasn't your fault." Her voice was flat, distant.

"I think you should have gone in the ambulance. A concussion can fool you sometimes."

"It doesn't have anything to do with a concussion."

I looked at her colorless, depleted face.