House of the Rising Sun

CHAPTER TWENTY

“You look like shit,” Charlie “The Rabbit” Liuzza said.

Ray said, “I feel like shit.”

They sat at a back table inside Hobnobber’s, a businessman’s happy-hour bar across Canal Street from the French Quarter. A place Ray hoped mob guys didn’t go.

The Rabbit said that after Ray called him, he had made a few phone calls to guys he trusted, guys who worked for Old Man Carlos directly. “You got yourself in quite a jam.”

Ray knew he was in a jam. He just didn’t know why. “What’s it about?”

“According to what Tony’s saying, Vinnie put a hit out on you.”

“What?”

“He thinks you set up the robbery and got his son killed.”

“That’s bullshit!”

Charlie held up his hand. “Keep your voice down.”

Ray nodded. Speaking more calmly, he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Guy with a tattoo on his hand sticks a gun in my face. That’s the first I knew about it.”

“I believe you. I know you’re a stand-up guy, but what I found out, you got even worse problems than that.”

Confused, Ray said, “Worse than Vinnie and Tony trying to kill me?”

Charlie nodded. “Yep.”

The guy knew how to build suspense, Ray thought. “How much worse can it get?”

“The Old Man is involved.”

Ray felt his stomach doing flip-flops. Jenny had been right. If the Old Man wanted him dead, who better to send than the Rabbit?

His thoughts must have been plastered all over his face because Charlie said, “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’m not here to whack you.”

Ray’s throat was so tight he could barely speak. “Why not?”

“I took my wife shopping at one of those outlet malls in Mississippi. We stopped at a casino on the coast. She likes the slots. I played a little blackjack and walked away with fourteen hundred of the casino’s money. I been gone for two days. Haven’t heard from anybody. Last I knew, you were doing Vinnie a solid, trying to find the crew who robbed us.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But if he tells me something different”-Charlie jerked his finger back and forth between them-“next time we see each other, it’ll be different.”

Ray nodded as Eric Clapton’s version of “I Shot the Sheriff” started playing on the jukebox. The song reminded him of prison. “That song was big on my wing,” Ray said. “Guys with boom boxes used to play it all the time.”

Charlie, shaking his head, said, “Fucking boom boxes in prison, next thing you know they’re gonna open up whorehouses in the yard.”

Ray was listening to the familiar lyrics of the song, wondering the same thing he always wondered when he heard it. He took a sip of Jameson, then said, “You ever wonder who shot the deputy?”

“Huh?”

Ray pointed up toward the ceiling, like he was pointing to the notes as they drifted across the bar. “That song is Clapton’s version of the old Bob Marley tune ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ What I want to know is, who shot the deputy?”

Charlie cocked his head, listening to the words. “What are you talking about?”

“The guy in the song, he says, ‘I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy.’ If that’s true, then who shot the fucking deputy?”

The jukebox played, I shot the sheriff, but I swear it was in self-defense. Freedom came my way one day, and I started out of town. ..

Charlie nodded. “Nobody shot the deputy. I think the guy’s saying he shot the sheriff, and he could have shot the deputy, too, but he didn’t.”

“No,” Ray said, thinking about the arguments he had gotten into at Terre Haute over the same thing. “If you listen to the words, the deputy is definitely dead. The guy says, ‘They want to bring me in guilty, for the killing of a deputy.’ So somebody killed the deputy. It just wasn’t him.”

“Him who?”

“The guy in the song.”

“Eric Clapton?”

“No, he’s just singing the song. I’m talking about the guy in the song, the one whose story it is.”

“So he didn’t kill the deputy, so what?” Charlie asked, looking confused.

“If he admitted to killing the sheriff, why not just admit to killing the deputy, too? I think it was the sheriff who killed him.”

Skeptical, Charlie said, “The sheriff killed his own deputy?”

Ray nodded.

“Why?”

Ray shrugged. “The guy mentions planting seeds. The song was written by Bob Marley. There’s a definite marijuana connection. Guy was probably paying off the sheriff, and the deputy caught them both. Something like that.”

Charlie kicked back his drink, then said, “You’ve given this a lot of thought, huh?”

“Not much else to do inside, except think.”

“You know, this ain’t the first time you’ve been in a jam with us.”

“You talking about when I got arrested?”

“No, after that.”

“What?”

Charlie, master of suspense that he was, stopped talking and signaled the waitress for a fresh round of drinks. He waited until she delivered them before going on. “It was after you got transferred out of Orleans Parish, and they took you down to the Saint Bernard Parish jail. I was at a meeting where the boss was kicking around the idea of having you clipped on the inside.”

Ray’s heart started racing. “When you say the boss, you’re talking about…”

Charlie nodded. “The Big Boss.” He took a sip of scotch, then went on, “He was afraid of you cutting a deal with the feds, but we didn’t have anybody in Saint Bernard. Getting someone in there to do it, it was very complicated. I told him my advice was to hold off, see what you did.” Charlie shrugged. “Turns out you did the right thing.”

There was something Ray had to know. “Why did you stand up for me? You didn’t even know me?”

Charlie took a deep breath and gulped down some more scotch. “What are you, about forty?”

“Forty-one.”

“My son would be about your age now. Good-looking kid, but stubborn, head hard as a rock. His birth was so rough on Jean, my wife, doctor said she wouldn’t be able to have any more, and he was right.

“Probably because of that we spoiled the boy some. I grew up in Gertown. Back then it was half Italian, half Irish, and for a kid coming up, you really only had two choices, be a cop or be a crook. Most of the Irish kids became cops, most of us became crooks. Where did you go to school?”

“Holy Cross.”

“You finish college?”

Ray shook his head. “Only made it two years.”

“Me and Jean, we wanted our boy to finish college, wanted to give him a better choice than to be either a cop or a crook. No offense.”

Ray smiled. “None taken.”

“He was a smart boy, lot smarter than his old man, so when the time came, I bought him a new car and sent him off to college.”

Charlie stirred his drink with his finger, then took another sip. “Twenty years ago. His senior year at Notre Dame, driving home for Christmas, he hit a patch of black ice, and the car skidded down an embankment. A state trooper said there was only minor damage to the car, and if he had been belted in, he probably would have walked away. But my son didn’t walk away-he died.”

Ray had asked why Charlie had stood up for him, and Charlie had told him about his son, about his lost dreams. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe not. Ray didn’t want to push it.

“Any chance you could talk to the boss again for me, about this jam I’m in?” Ray asked.

Charlie shook his head. “Tony’s got his ear on this. The guy I called said Tony has made some kind of move. Told the Old Man he thinks you and Vinnie worked this thing together.”

“But that’s crazy,” Ray said.

“Doesn’t matter if it’s crazy or not, that’s what he told the boss, and that’s what the boss believes.”

“They’re brothers, for God’s sake.”

“Half-brothers.”

“Huh?”

“Same father, different mothers.”

Ray said, “I never heard that.”

“Their old man was supposed to have been a real gash-hound back in the day. The boss is his legitimate son. Vinnie is from one of his flings.”

“But they have the same last name.”

“I guess their father liked to spread the name around, wanted to make sure his line continued. There was another son, a legitimate one, the oldest, but he died in his thirties. They say it was syphilis.”

“I heard they don’t get along.” Ray said.

“Not at all, but even half-blood is strong. The boss set his brother up to run the House, but from what I hear, Vinnie is up to his ass in debt. That’s one reason why the Old Man isn’t having any trouble believing what Tony told him. Only he knows his brother couldn’t pull it off by himself, and that’s where you come in.”

“Tony has always had a beef with me.”

“You’re an Irish cop,” Charlie Rabbit said. “Of course he’s got a beef with you.”

“I was a cop.”

Charlie shrugged. “Once a cop, always a cop is how he looks at it.”

“How about you, it bother you I was a cop?”

“No. I got nothing against cops. Straight ones or bent ones. They’re just trying to get by like everybody else.”

“That’s Tony’s whole problem with me, I used to be a cop and I’m not Italian?”

“It’s that, plus I think he’s mad because Vinnie made him look bad by putting you in charge of finding the robbery crew. You got to understand Tony, he’s not going to let anything get in his way.”

“Get in the way of what?”

“Power. Why do you think he spent the last two years fucking Vinnie’s wife?”

“What!”

Charlie’s face broke into a grin. “She tells Vinnie she’s playing bridge with the girls.”

“I’ve seen Vinnie’s wife… She’s what, like fifteen years older than Tony? And I’ve seen Tony’s wife. She’s a piece of work, but she’s still a knockout.”

“She’s a bitch,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, that about sums her up.”

“Tony’s not fucking Vinnie’s wife because of her looks. He’s fucking her because she’s Vinnie’s wife, and that gives him an edge over Vinnie in case he ever needs it.”

Ray gulped down a mouthful of Jameson. This was too much.

Charlie lowered his voice. “You know what’s funny?”

Ray didn’t think any of it was funny. “What?”

“Tony’s wife…”

“Yeah.”

“Belongs to the same bridge club.”

“Huh?”

“The Old Man is fucking her.”

Ray felt like his jaw had dropped all the way to the floor.

Charlie said, “Show you how smart Tony is, his wife tells him she’s playing bridge, but what she’s really playing is hide the salami out at the Old Man’s fishing camp.”

Ray knew the place. “Out in the Rigolets?”

“You know where his camp is?” Charlie asked, surprised, like he thought it was a big secret.

“I used to work in the Seventh District. Every cop out there knows where his camp is.”

Charlie looked disappointed. “I didn’t know that.”

“It takes almost an hour to get there from downtown. He drives all that way just to screw Tony’s wife?”

“He’s an old man. She a beautiful woman, half his age. And you can bet she’s not a bitch when she’s with him. It’s a big deal for him. Once a week he gets dressed up and drives himself out there. No driver, no guards. He doesn’t want anybody else around. It’s a serious violation of the rules, fucking the wife of an underling.”

“What’s she get out of it?”

Charlie shrugged. “Who knows? When Tony’s not dipping his pole in some strange, he’s at the House till two or three in the morning. Maybe she just wants somebody to pay attention to her. Maybe that’s why she’s such a bitch. Maybe Tony ain’t taking care of his wife like he should.”

Ray rubbed his eyes. “You guys talk about loyalty…”

Charlie shot his hand across the table and grabbed Ray’s wrist. His grip was strong. He pulled Ray’s hand away and looked hard into his eyes. “Jean and me, we’re home every night sitting in front of the TV. Neither one of us plays bridge.”

Ray nodded. “Sounds like you got a good one.”

Charlie let go of Ray’s wrist.

“Maybe you should be running things,” Ray said.

Charlie smiled. “I’m retiring.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Ray figured to be dead soon if he didn’t get out from under this. “I just want you to know, for whatever it’s worth, if Vinnie knocked over the House, he did it without my help or knowledge.”

“I know that, kid,” Charlie said. “But Tony’s not the only one who’s been trash-talking you.”

Ray’s stomach twisted. “What do you mean?”

“Somebody told the Old Man you knew two members of the crew.”

Jimmy LaGrange. That no-good, rotten bastard. “I didn’t know those guys. I arrested them, and that was years ago.”

“Thanks to Tony, the Old Man believes that not only did you know them, but that you used them to hit his place.”

Ray could feel his forehead damp with sweat. He pressed his drink against it. “What the fuck am I going to do?”

“Like I said, you’re in a jam.”

“How do I get out of it?”

“There’s only one thing you can do,” Charlie said.

Ray was in enough suspense. He didn’t need any more. “What?”

“Find out who really did it and get some proof.”

“Then what?”

“The boss is a reasonable man, but it’s like going to court. You’re going to have to plead your case.”

“But how?” Ray asked, hearing the desperation in his own voice.

“Call me when you find some proof,” Charlie said. “Maybe I can help. Just remember, Tony is looking for you.”

“Are you going be looking for me, too?”

Charlie Rabbit shook his head. “Not yet.”