The Price of Blood Part 15

A few minutes later, slick with sweat, he stood at the baggage conveyer and grimaced when he spotted his AWOL bag trundle down the line, shaving kit attached. The floppy, blaze orange, steal-me tag brayed: FIREARM ENCLOSED.

In a men's room, past the metal detectors, he slipped in a toilet stall, unpacked the bag, and put on the shoulder rig. With the .45 slung like an overdeveloped steel muscle in leather tendons under his left armpit, he felt better.

He smiled, despite his thumb and the close heat, and savored his independence as he strolled through baggage into the southern afternoon. The Louisiana air was wet gauze tented on spiked palms. In three seconds he was mummy-wrapped in the temperature of jaded blood. The barrier of his skin dissolved in a bath of sweat, and Broker, a lonely white corpuscle, floated into the gaudy fever stream of New Orleans.

On the street travelers cued up for cabs and a black woman in an airport uniform directed him to the next available car. The driver was a black man in his sixties with a neck and shoulders like a pliant fireplug. He turned in his seat with tourist maps in his hand and a relaxed smile on his broad lips.

His eyes a.s.sumed a familiarity, warm and alive and immediate, that would shock people up north. They sized up Broker's shoulders, the ponytail, the bandaged hand. They noted the sag under the lapel of his light sports coat. The cabby laughed. A patois of gristly inflection that rode a high-pitched chuckle. "Po-leese. Where from?"

"Minnesota."

"Get you a baggy shirt to cover all that iron. You gonna die wearing that jacket down here."

Beads dangled from the rear-view mirror, family pictures and some pendants of suspicious origin twined with a cameo of the Virgin Mary.

Broker laughed and gave the cabby LaPorte's address.

"Uh-huh. Gen. Cyrus LaPorte lives in that big house on St. Charles in the Garden District. The Tourrine Mansion. Now that belonged originally to a Confederate general. The LaPorte family acquired it back in 1909. He pretty big too, get his picture in the paper a lot."

Broker rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. "It always this hot?"

"Ain't hot. Hot come out at night."

They rode a freeway, turned off and pa.s.sed acres of white ramshackle tombs. "Cemetery," said the cabby. "Above ground. This whole fallin'-down motherf.u.c.ker built in a swamp."

Broker, from bedrock country, nodded. It was a pushed-around moraine and delta city built on debris the glaciers had kicked down the length of North America. Then they were on St. Charles, and there were mule-drawn carriages and a green street car. But Broker noticed the fences. Friendly people but lots of tall iron fences.

"You going to the wedding?" asked the cabby.

"What?"

"You my second airport ride to the Tourrine. Wedding this afternoon. They rent it out for weddings."

"Why's a rich guy like LaPorte rent his house out for weddings?"

"Rich man never quit findin' ways to make money. Why he rich," said the cabby. "That's it, that white monster on the right, takes most of the block."

The three-story house wore a crisp petticoat of new white paint, but it was Mansard-gabled, gargoyled and turreted with enough sinister energy to inspire Edgar Allan Poe. The seven-foot fence that surrounded the grounds was stylized black wrought iron. Curved spears articulated as thickly cl.u.s.tered blooming lilacs.

A uniformed New Orleans cop lounged at the entrance. Banquet tables were being set up on the broad lawn by black men in short-waisted white coats and dark slacks who sleepwalked in the drowsy heat.

"Drive around the block and up the alley," said Broker.

The cabby chuckled. "You planning to rob the place, huh, you casing it now."

Absolutely, thought Broker. The back of the house was walled off from the rest of the lawn and the alley by thick hedges. A second-story balcony ran the length of the back of the house and was supported by grillwork and hung with showers of geraniums and impatiens. An oak tree, draped in Spanish moss, grew conveniently close to a corner.

"What's behind the hedges?" asked Broker.

"Swimming pool."

"Okay. Now take me here." He handed the cabby the address of the hotel Larson had squeezed him into.

The cabby nodded. "Doniat. On Chartiers. That's a nice place, too."

Broker missed the romance of the French Quarter. He keyed on the cramped pa.s.sageways gated with more spear-tipped wrought iron. The iron was topped with tangles of barbed wire. The wire was pulled serpentine in a tangle-foot pattern that he a.s.sociated with Developing World wars. A billboard poster emblazoned with the astronomical New Orleans homicide statistics shouted on a store window. MORE THAN BOSTON, MORE THAN DETROIT. Letters large enough for Broker to read from a pa.s.sing car.

The cabby demanded his attention. "Now listen up, Minnesota. This here's Rampart Street we crossin' now, just don't be wandering round north of here drunk with money hanging out of your pocket and you just might make it."

Broker thanked him, tipped him generously with Nina's money and checked into the Doniat. He took a bottle of mineral water from the honor bar and let a young porter carry his small athletic bag up the stairs and to a room at the end of the hall with windows that opened on a gallery that overlooked the street.

After tipping the kid for his exertion he called Nina's.

"I'm two hours from meeting the great man. How's your end?"

"I'll be at the bank tomorrow morning as soon as it opens. Watch yourself, Broker."

"You too."

Broker tucked the Xerox copy of LaPorte's map and the sonar graphic in the inner lapel pocket of his jacket, called a cab, and went to the Civic Center to visit the main library. He spent an hour and a half skimming every reference to the LaPorte family that a harried librarian could locate. Then he grabbed another cab and headed for the Garden District. This time he drew a short, bald white firecracker for a driver.

"Guadalca.n.a.l, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo. I made all those G.o.dd.a.m.n landings. And now I'm seventy-two years old and I have to take s.h.i.t from these f.u.c.king trash-talking jungle bunnies in my own hometown. Threw three of the s.h.i.tbirds out of my cab just the other day."

The man's neck was the color of angina, veins ridged his cranium.

"d.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.rs are taking over the G.o.dd.a.m.n streets. h.e.l.l if I'm going to ride any more those sonsab.i.t.c.hes-"

"Hey, man, just drive the f.u.c.kin' car, okay?"

Finally the apoplectic cabby dropped him off. He didn't get a tip. Broker stood on the street and watched men in suits and women in formal dresses roam the lawn with plastic gla.s.ses of champagne. Maybe no one could afford to live in a house like this anymore, even in Louisiana, where you didn't have to foot the heating bill. So even Cyrus LaPorte had to accommodate and peddle his living s.p.a.ce.

Broker went through the stockade of iron lilacs and the uniform was alert enough in the heat to come out of his lounging posture in the shade and challenge the tall, serious-moving man in the ponytail. Broker flashed his badge. The cop nodded and stepped back. Broker went in.

The lower level was a gleam of varnished wood floors and intricately carved antebellum woodwork. Servants glided with silver trays or arranged platters of finger food. The gay mountains of floral arrangements smelled damp...like funerals. He asked one of the waiters where to find Mr. LaPorte.

The waiter rolled his eyes to a spiral oak staircase. At the top a snake-boned young man with strawberry hair, who n.o.body would want at their wedding, leaned against a railing. His feral handsome face and hot hazel eyes suggested that he and Bevode Fret had hatched out of the same stagnant malarial pool and had grown up fighting the gators for their supper. But his anemic complexion and the sniffles suggested that he was on a Colombian diet. Broker mounted the stairs and said, "Phillip Broker. I have a three o'clock appointment with LaPorte."

"That's General LaPorte. What you got under the coat?" The punk a.s.sumed a blocking stance. Broker showed his badge again. "Give me the badge, your ID, and the piece," said the guy.

"f.u.c.k you," said Broker. He eyed the cocaine pathology squirming in the punk's sinuses and in his dilated pupils. The current American nightmare-armed, popcorn tough, ready to blow at a moment's notice, and not much underneath to back it up after he'd touched off a magazine of nine millimeter. "Go announce me."

He stared the punk down. The punk went.

Broker looked around. He didn't know much about real money. So he didn't really register the magnitude of the furnishings and art objects and the Persian carpets strewn all around him. He knew that the air became smoother, taking a subtle bounce along the pigment of paintings and the scarred volcanic faces of pre-Columbian art. He rubbed the sweaty stubble on his chin and felt like a Goth who'd slipped into Rome. And planned to be back with a lot of his pals.

The punk returned wearing an obsequious sneer and yanked his head for Broker to follow him. He was admitted to a s.p.a.cious room with high ceilings and walls festooned with trophies and mementos. The room took up the right rear corner of the house. The foliage from the oak tree on the lawn shaded the windows that over-looked the wedding party.

The general would be with him in a moment and would he like a refreshment.

Broker ran his eyes over the decor and said, "Rum." Then he eased into an upholstered leather chair that faced a heavy carved teak desk elevated on a two-step dais so that the man sitting behind the desk could look down on his visitors.

An elderly black man in a shiny black suitcoat and trousers, with a bulbous hearing aid growing in his left ear and his back bent by scoliosis, or the pressure of place, shuffled in. Eyes downcast, he carried a tray on which sat a bottle of rum, a gla.s.s, and a decanter of ice cubes. His tempo was geared to the listlessly turning ceiling fans, which slowly stirred the languid air. Time definitely slowed down here. Broker wondered if there was a plan to turn it back.

He poured a shot of rum and lit a Spirit and squirmed slightly in the studded leather upholstery. His thumb throbbed and sweat itched on his chin. The room made his bones glow like an X-ray machine.

It had never occurred to him that he could have things. He'd accepted the fact that the most he could hope for was to do things.

Three of the walls held the bric-a-brac of the stillborn greatness of LaPorte's life. Broker perused the athletic, academic, and military mementos. There was the gla.s.s case with eight rows of combat decorations, including two Distinguished Service Crosses and five Silver Stars. There were pictures of LaPorte with William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams.

Another wall was an abattoir of trophy antlers and skulls mounted in the European style. The configuration of the horns was exotic to Broker's Northwoods eyes. Things that died in Africa and Asia.

The last wall was a true museum, hung with plantation implements arranged in an almost votive pattern around an imposing, larger-than-life, full-length portrait.

Broker recognized the set of that intense furrowed brow and gimlet eyes staring down from the oil. The thin slash mouth and the stingy lips projected a cold Creole profile of power.

Royale LaPorte, a hero of the Battle of New Orleans, was portrayed in a gentleman's ruffled shirt and a brocaded greatcoat. His left sleeve was empty and pinned to the shoulder. His right hand was inserted in his lapel, Napoleon fashion, and the buckled shoe on his stockinged right foot rested on a globe of the world.

Broker raised his gla.s.s to the painting and drank his shot of rum. He set the gla.s.s aside and continued his inspection. Directly underneath the painting a shiny braided bullwhip coiled on a wooden peg. Below the whip, its filigree all but melted by time from the steel, squatted a square antique safe. The safe took a key. The keyhole was nicked and bright from use.

French doors made up the fourth wall and opened out onto the gallery that overlooked the swimming pool. Broker's eyes drifted back to the desk. Not one cubic inch of off-white computer plastic in the whole d.a.m.n place. The phone was a 1940s ashtray style, obstinate black ceramic and heavy enough to crack a coconut. So LaPorte, like Broker, was still a wood-and-steel kind of guy.

An energetic beam of minty aftershave cut the bouillabaisse air.

"Broker. It's been a long time, son."

The voice was a generous muddy baritone, vigorous and amused. Broker turned his head and his skin p.r.i.c.kled. Gen. Cyrus LaPorte ambled into the room with the alien grace and vigor of a six-foot-tall, two-legged spider.

28.

LAPORTE WORE SNOWY TOPSIDERS, A TAN SHORT-SLEEVED shirt, and casual pleated trousers. His bare, corded arms had shriveled but not weakened, and his neck compressed toward his shoulders, which added to the sidling insect gait. His eyes were pale blue, pitted and shiny as two musket b.a.l.l.s, but seemed darker because of the pressure ridge of his brow. Salt-and-pepper short-cropped hair capped his bony head and the hand he extended was hard as tanned hide.

LaPorte pointed to the bandaged thumb. Broker did not respond. LaPorte's smile effortlessly glossed over twenty years. "Appreciate you taking the time to come."

He motioned for Broker to resume his seat, mounted the steps and sat, elevated behind his wide desk. The platform bothered Broker. It was a conceit that the LaPorte of twenty years ago would have had contempt for. He flipped open a manila folder and shot his lead eyes at Broker. "You were a lieutenant during that s.h.i.tstorm back in seventy-five." LaPorte let the folder fall shut. "Still a lieutenant, I see. Does policework agree with you, Phil?"

It was the first time that LaPorte had ever called him by his given name. Even prepared to discover that this man had arranged to leave him to die in Hue City, the small gesture affected Broker. He graced LaPorte with the most exhausted of cynical smiles.

"So," said LaPorte, "you're still mixed up with the Pryce family."

"And now I'm mixed up with you."

"You'll recall, when we were at Benning for that witch hunt, I cautioned you to walk away. But you had to go over and help Marian move off the base."

"Marian died and Nina doesn't need any extra ha.s.sle. She has enough ha.s.sle inside her own head."

"I hear you." LaPorte squinted philosophically.

Broker withdrew the folded map from his inside jacket pocket and tossed it on LaPorte's desk, knocking over a collection of terra cotta figurines. LaPorte pursed his lips and set the bundle aside.

"There's your maps and sonar pictures. And I'll let your friend Bevode go..." Broker p.r.o.nounced Fret's name Bee-voo-dee.

LaPorte corrected, with a dry smile, "Bevode. Rhymes with commode."

"Whatever. I want your word that he leaves Nina Pryce alone."

LaPorte grinned, revealing a half-inch of root on his molars. "My word."

"I was thinking more along the lines that if you break it you and me will have a personal problem."

LaPorte responded with a pompous tic, shooting the nonexistent cuffs on his thick wrists. "I can understand how you'd be upset. This came on sort of sudden."

Broker rose slowly from his chair, letting his coat fall open to reveal the holster and his voice growled, intimate with menace. "Don't think so. It's been coming on for twenty years. And if you and I don't reach an agreement, financial and otherwise, in the next few minutes I'm going to flat kick the slats out of your whole corncrib. I already stove in that p.u.s.s.y you sent up north."

LaPorte shrugged his shoulders. "Bevode tends to be...overzealous."

"He's a punk. He had a f.u.c.king hickey on his neck." Broker made a face and resumed his seat.

LaPorte leaned back and ma.s.saged a liver spot on his hand. "Would it surprise you to know that Bevode Fret was once a very dedicated cop, lavishly commended, and known throughout the parish as a man who couldn't be bought?"

"Point being?"

LaPorte shrugged. The lead eyes probed. "Perhaps the work got to him. Does the work ever get to you?"

"You mean protecting the rich rats from the poor rats?"

"I mean too many rats in the cage. A man can start looking for options."

Broker exhaled and inspected his hands. "Yeah, right. Crime's supposed to be deviant behavior. Now there's nothing to deviate from. Folks are choosing up sides. Some kind of cultural street challenge that's going on."

LaPorte smiled faintly. "Down here the rabble a.s.sociate that dilemma with skin pigmentation."

Broker flicked ashes into his turned-up Levi's cuff. "It's the climate. Encourages one-crop agriculture and simple-mindedness."

LaPorte laughed and opened a drawer and stood up. He came around the desk and handed an ashtray to Broker. "Mind the ashes, Phil; that rug cost more than you earned last year."

Broker took the ashtray and slowly rolled the ash into it. LaPorte leaned back on the desk and smiled. "Now, if we can get past the macho tantrums, I have a proposition for you."

"Just like that," said Broker. "After all this time. And your goon kicks down my door..."

LaPorte clasped his hands behind his back and walked to the window that overlooked the wedding party. He squinted down at the lawn then turned and picked up a pair of binoculars from a shelf on the wall. He bent, focused the gla.s.ses, then shook his head. He came back to his desk and pressed a b.u.t.ton. He grinned at Broker and chuckled. "The minimum wage. They just can't get it right."

The elderly black man who had brought Broker his drink crab-walked into the room. LaPorte spoke with elaborate politeness.