The Neon Rain

TEN

That afternoon I repaid Annie the one-thousand-dollar bail fee she had put up for me, then I searched in the Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Bernard parish courthouses for commercial property deeds with Whiplash Larry Wineburger's name on them. I discovered that he was a slumlord of large proportions; but if he owned a warehouse in one of those three parishes, it was deeded under another name.

I went to an AA meeting that evening and later took Annie to dinner at the track. It was hot that night, and I slept on the deck of my houseboat, possibly a careless thing to do, but I felt so discredited by this time that I doubted if my now often-repeated story was a threat to anyone. The wind blew across the lake all night, and I slept so soundly in my hammock that I didn't wake until the sun was hard in my eyes.

I went to an early-morning A A meeting in the Quarter, then bought beignets and coffee from the Café du Monde and sat on a bench in Jackson Square and watched the sidewalk artists paint and sketch the tourists. It was still cool in the shade, and the breeze blew off the river. It smelled of coffee and pastry, shrimp in bins of ice, the trees and flowers in the Square, damp stone, the water sprinklers knocking through the banana leaves that grew over the top of the iron piked fence enclosing the park. I went inside St. Louis Cathedral and bought a small book that narrated the history of the building and read it on the bench while a Negro street musician played a bottleneck guitar a few feet away from me.

I was ready to give up my pursuit. I knew I wasn't a coward or a quitter, but at some point reason had to reestablish itself in my life. I couldn't afford any more attrition. I had already had one slip, had progressed within minutes from one drink to a full-blown bender (as they say at the meetings, you pick it up where you left it off), and if I slipped again I wasn't sure I'd ever get back from it.

After I'd struck out at the courthouse, I'd even thought about creeping Wineburger's house or his law office. I knew people who would help me pull it off, too-thieves who worked in car washes, where they made impressions of the house keys on the automobile key ring; a very slick second-story man who ran a wrecker service and would pull the distributor cap off a car whose owner he wanted to burglarize, then tow the car around the block, cut duplicate keys on a machine he kept in the truck, return the car with a fraudulent bill for repairs, and clean out the house a week later.

But it wasn't worth it. Wineburger, the little Israeli, Philip Murphy, and the general were out there malfunctioning in society because others much more important and powerful than I allowed them to. When these guys ceased to fill a need for somebody else, they would be taken off the board. That sounds like a cynical conclusion for a man to arrive at while sitting on a shady stone bench on a cool morning under banana trees, but most honest, experienced cops will tell you the same thing. It's facile to blame the Supreme Court for the pornographic bookstores and the live sex shows. They usually exist because somebody on the zoning board is getting greased. Kids don't do dope because their parents and teachers are permissive. They do it because adults sell it to them. No psychological complexities, no sociological mysteries.

When people become tired of something, it will end. In the meantime, Dave Robicheaux isn't going to make much difference in the scheme of things. My brother Jimmie knew that. He didn't contend with the world; he dealt in electronic poker machines and off-track betting, and I suspected that he sold whiskey and rum that came in from the Islands without tax stamps. But he was always a gentleman and everybody liked him. Cops ate breakfast free in his restaurant; state legislators got pig-eyed drunk at his bar; judges introduced him to their wives with expansive courtesy. His transgressions had to do with licenses, not ethics, he used to tell me.

"The day these people don't want to gamble and drink, we'll both be out of jobs. In the meantime, go with the flow, bro."

"Sorry," I'd answer. "'Flow' somehow suggests 'effluent' to me. I guess I'm just imaginative."

"No, you just believe in the world that should be, rather than the one that exists. That's why you'll always be the driven guy you are, Dave."

"Is there any charge for that?"

"What do I know? I'm just a restaurateur. You're the guy that fought the wars."

As irony would have its way, my reverie was broken by a maroon Cadillac convertible with an immaculate white top that pulled to the curb twenty feet from my bench. Two of Didi Gee's hoods got out on each side. They were young, lithe, dressed in summer slacks and open-necked shirts with gold medallions around their necks. Their mirror sunglasses and tasseled Nettleton shoes were almost part of a uniform. What always struck me most about lower-level Mafia hoods were the insipid expressions, as though their faces had been glazed with tallow, and the lifeless speech patterns that they believed passed for sophistication. The only political regime that ever dealt with them effectively was Mussolini's. The fascists tore out their hair and fingernails with pliers, shot them, or sent them to fight against the Greeks. The Mafia welcomed the Allied liberation in 1943 with great joy.

"Good morning, Lieutenant. Mr. Giacano would like to invite you out to his house for brunch," the driver said. "You can drive out with us if you want. The road's tore up by Chalmette."

"I'm not sure I place you with the sunglasses on. Is it Joe Milazzo?" I said.

"That's right. I used to run my uncle's pizza place right across from your office."

But that wasn't why I remembered his name. He had been a runner for his uncle's book, and he used to lay off bets at the parimutuel when his uncle took on an overload. But I'd also heard a rumor a year ago that he and his uncle had doped a thoroughbred with a speedball that literally exploded the animal's heart on the far turn at the Fairgrounds.

"What's on Didi Gee's mind?" I said.

"He just said ask you out, Lieutenant."

"I'm kind of tied up today."

"He said if it's too far out for you to drive, he'd like to have you as his guest for lunch at Mama Lido's."

"Thank him for me just the same."

"I think it's about these people that's been giving you all this trouble. If you want, you can use the phone in the car to talk with him."

"I appreciate the help he tried to give me Sunday. But as he probably knows, it didn't do much good. In other words, take the Nicaraguans to the First District."

He looked away toward the Pontalba Apartments on the corner, his face quietly exasperated.

"I'm kind of in a hard spot, Lieutenant," he said. "Mr. Giacano is a nice guy to work for. He paid off my old man's hospital bills, he give my little boy a bicycle for Christmas, he don't let nobody pay for anything when we go to a club. A lot of guys would pay a lot to buy my job. But he don't like to hear words like 'maybe' or 'no' from a guy that waxes his cars and drives people around. If you ain't coming, I'd really appreciate you calling him up and telling him that."

"I'm afraid you'll have to live with it, podna."

"All right, I don't know from shit about Mr. Giacano's business dealings. I'm not an ambitious person. I don't care about what don't concern me. But I got ears. I'm human. I can't turn into a potted plant just because people are talking around me. It's about some guy named Murphy. You're not interested, Lieutenant, that's okay. But I done my job."

I closed my book and took a bite of my beignet. I watched a woman sweeping out her storefront under the colonnade on the corner. Rolls of sausage and cheese were hung in the window, and a little black boy was spraying the boxes of grapes and plums along the front wall with a hose.

"Tell Didi Gee I'll meet him at Mama Lido's at noon," I said.

Joe Milazzo smiled behind his sunglasses and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

"Don't get the wrong idea, Joe. I'm just an impulsive guy. Next time save the shuck for a Fuller Brush route," I said.

His face went dead.

Didi Gee had reserved a private dining room at the back of the restaurant. It was hung with pink and lavender curtains that were tied back to give the illusion of windows on the walls, which were painted with wispy Venetian canal scenes, gondolas, boatmen in striped T-shirts with flat hats and mandolins. The baseboards and woodwork around the doors were painted with grapevines that wound their way up the corners to the ceiling, which was hung with clusters of green plastic grapes.

There must have been fifteen people at the long white table that was filled with bottles of red wine in wicker casks, bowls of spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, shrimp cooked in some kind of tomato sauce that made your eyes wince, loaves of Italian bread that people broke apart with their hands and ate loudly with a shower of crumbs on the tablecloth.

What a crew to be seen with, I thought. Some of them were aging soldiers who had survived any number of gang wars and jolts in Angola and Lewisburg since the 1950s, now thick-bodied and flatulent, with cigarette-and-whiskey throats and hair growing out of their ears and nostrils. Then there were the young ones like Joe Milazzo, who might have been raised in a vacant lot. There was always a hidden thought in their eyes that they couldn't quite conceal. They would hit anybody, even their own kind, just to earn a chair closer at the table to Didi Gee. They all ate like troglodytes, made the waitresses take the food back if it wasn't warm, complained about a chipped glass or a fork with dishwater spots on it. The hostess who wandered in every ten minutes to ask if everything was all right looked as though she had swallowed a mouthful of bumblebees.

Didi Gee had saved the seat next to him for me. He wore a white suit and an orange-flowered shirt with the shirt lapels on the outside of his coat. A gold St. Christopher's medal rested on the black hair that grew up to his throat. His chest and stomach were so huge that he had to keep his chair pressed back almost to the wall.

"You want wine?" he asked.

"No, thanks."

"I heard you were drinking again. I say that only because it don't matter to me. Everybody's got a vice. It's what makes us human."

"I'm not drinking today. Put it that way."

"That's that one-day-at-a-time stuff, huh? I wish I could do that. I worry about stuff all the time I don't have control over."

It was amazing, I thought, how the true indicators of a sudden change in your social status worked. Didi Gee no longer used the deferential "Lieutenant" when he spoke to me, and his hoods were eating as though I were not there.

"I worry all the time about this operation I got to have," he said. "The longer I wait, the more they got to cut out of my hole. I just can't bring myself to face it. Maybe there're some things you're not suppose to accept. It ain't natural for a person to be leaking shit into a bag strapped to his side. Look what I got to sit on now. That's bad enough."

He rose a little from his chair and exposed an inflated rubber cushion that was shaped like a toilet seat in a public restroom.

"I'm going over to Baylor Hospital in Houston and see what they say. All the best surgeons in New Orleans are Jews. A guy my size walks through the door and they start looking at my parts like they got meat prices stamped on them."

"Maybe they'll find another way to help you, Didi."

"That's right. Maybe I get the right doctors over there at Baylor and I'll just retire there. My brother died and left me an office building in San Antonio three blocks from this Alamo place. They got an amusement park there or something?"

"It's a historical-"

"Because even though I was born and grew up in New Orleans, I'm tired of people dumping on me, and nickel-and-dime legal farts trying to make a name by cutting off my cock."

His voice had intensified suddenly, like heat building down in a furnace system, and the others at the table stopped talking and moved their knives and forks softly in their plates.

"I'm not sure what we're talking about," I said.

"I got subpoenaed by the grand jury. Me and some people I'm associated with."

"I didn't know that."

"Businesses I run for thirty years somehow start bothering some people. Their little noses start twitching like there's a bad smell in the air. I'm talking about people that were at my children's baptisms, that always come around at election time for donations. Suddenly I'm like some kind of disease."

"You're a professional, Didi. It comes with the geography."

"They're serious this time. I got it straight from the prosecutor's office. They want me in Angola."

"Like you said, maybe it's time to retire."

"They're not cutting no deals on this one. That means I'm gonna have to break my own rules. I'm gonna have to do some stuff I don't like." His dark eyes were flecked with black electricity.

"I guess I'm not following you."

And I didn't want to follow him, either. The conversation had already grown old. I didn't care about his troubles with the grand jury, and his vague reference to violating his own ethical system seemed at the time like another manifestation of the self-inflated grandiosity that was characteristic of his kind.

"You're right. It's personal," he said. His glare went from me to the men around the table. They started eating and talking again. "You want this guy Philip Murphy?"

I tapped my fingers on my water glass and looked away from his face.

"No games, partner," I said.

"You think I play games? A guy that run Orleans and half of St. Bernard Parish when you were a schoolboy? You think I brought you out here for games?"

"How is it you have a string on this guy?"

"He's an addict. An addict's one day away anytime you want him. This guy used to be a joy-popper. Now he's a two-balloon-a-day regular. You want him, try this restaurant." He dropped a matchbook on the tablecloth. On the cover was a palm tree and the words gulf shores, fine food, biloxi, Mississippi. "His connection's the guy that runs the valet parking."

"What do you care about Philip Murphy, Didi?"

"I got my reasons, a bunch of them maybe."

"He plays in a different ballpark. He's not a competitor."

"He's screwing up some things over in Fort Lauderdale. There's some people there want him out of the way."

"I know this guy. He's not your crowd."

"That's right, he ain't. But he messes with it. What you don't understand is south Florida's not New Orleans. Miami and Fort Lauderdale are open cities. Nobody's got a lock on the action, nobody gets cowboyed down there. Everybody always respected that. Now there's coloreds, Cubans, and Colombians in everything. They're fucking animals. They'll cowboy you for fifty bucks, they kill each other's children. Then guys like Murphy come around and make political deals with them-plots against Castro or some bullshit down in Central America. People that's cannibals, that was born in a chicken yard, end up working for the government. In the meantime, guys like me are in front of a grand jury."

I picked up the matchbook and put it in my shirt pocket.

"Thanks for the information, Didi. I hope things turn out better for you over at Baylor," I said.

"You ain't eat your lunch. You don't like Italian food?"

"You know how us old-time boozers are, scarred stomach and all that."

"Maybe you don't like eating as my guest, huh?"

"I've appreciated your hospitality. You're always a generous man. We'll see you, Didi."

"Yeah, sure. You're welcome. Keep one thing in mind, though. I never did time. Not in thirty years. You can tell that to any of those farts you know in the prosecutor's office."

It was boiling when I got back to the houseboat. Heat waves bounced off the roof, and every inch of metal and wood on the deck was hot to the touch. I put on my trunks and snorkel mask and swam out into the lake. The surface was warm, but I could feel the layers of coldness below me grow more intense the farther I swam from the shoreline. I watched three pelicans floating in the groundswell in front of me, their pouched beaks swollen with fish, and tried to figure out what Didi Gee was up to. I hadn't accepted his explanation about Murphy creating complications for the mob in southern Florida, and his anger at the government's support of Cuban political gangsters seemed manufactured for the moment. But who was to say? In terms of law enforcement, south Florida was the La Brea Tar Pits East.

The real problem was that nobody knew what went on in the mind of Didi Gee except Didi Gee. Most cops categorize criminals as dimwits and degenerates, or we assume that the intelligent ones think more or less in the same logical patterns as we do. The truth is that absolutely no one knows what goes on in the mind of a psychopath. Didi Gee was a vicious, sentimental fat man who could just as easily tip a waitress fifty dollars as put an icepick in her husband's stomach. When he was a collector for the shy locks across the river in Algiers, his logo had been a bloodstained baseball bat that he kept propped up in the back seat of his convertible.

But somehow he and his kind always had their apologists. Journalists would treat them as honorable men who lived by an arcane private code; television documentaries dwelt on their families, their attendance at Mass, their patriotism-and made only fleeting reference to their connection with semiacceptable forms of organized crime, such as numbers and union takeovers. They were simply businessmen who were no more unethical than large corporations.

Maybe so. But I'd seen their victims: small grocers and dry cleaners who borrowed money from them and who became employees in their own stores; nightclub entertainers, beer and meat distributors, horse jockeys who couldn't move out of town without permission; addicts who were always looking for more mules to pull their wagons; and those who became object lessons, their faces blown all over a car windshield with double-ought buckshot.

Maybe the deeper problem was that the Didi Gees of the world understood us, but we did not understand them. Were they genetically defective, or evil by choice? I took a breath through the snorkel and dove down to the bottom of the lake and glided above the gray, rippling sand while small fish scurried away in the green-yellow light. The salt water I swam in contained the remains of people who symbolized to me the greatest possible extremes in human behavior. They were created by the same Maker. The similarity ended there.

Three years ago a small plane with a family on board from Tampa hit a bad headwind over the Gulf, used up all its gas, and pancaked into the lake ten miles out. They got out with only one life preserver. Both the father and mother were strong swimmers and could have struck out for the shore or the causeway, but they stayed with their three children and kept them afloat for two days. One by one the parents and the two oldest children slipped under the waves. The smallest child survived because his father had strapped him in the life preserver and tied his shirt around the child's head to protect it from the sun.

Some miles to the west and just south of Morgan City was the crushed and barnacle-encrusted hull of a German U-boat that an American destroyer had nailed in 1942, when Nazi submarines used to lie in wait for the oil tankers that sailed from the refineries in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Shrimpers in New Iberia told stories of the orange fires that burned on the southern horizon late at night, and of the charred bodies they pulled up in their nets. I didn't understand then who the Nazis were, but I imagined them as dark-uniformed, slit-eyed creatures who lived beneath the water and who could burn and murder people of goodwill whenever they wished.

Years later, when I was in college, I dove down to that wreck with an air tank and a weight belt. It was in sixty feet of water, lying on its side, the deck railing and forward gun shaggy with moss, the painted identification numbers still visible on the conning tower. The stern was tilted downward into deeper water, and I thought I could see the frenetic, turning movements of sand sharks near the screws. My heart was clicking in my chest, I was breathing oxygen rapidly from my tank, and actually sweating inside my mask. I determined that I wasn't going to be overcome by my childhood fears, and I swam down to the dark, massive outline of the conning tower and knocked against the steel plate with the butt of my bowie knife.

Then the strangest occurrence of my life took place as I hovered above the wreck. I felt a cold current blow across me, a surge from the darkness beyond the submarine's screws, and air bubbles rose from under the hull. I heard the metal plates start to grate against the bottom, then there was a crunching, sliding sound, a dirty cloud of moss and floating sand, and suddenly the sub trembled almost erect and began sliding backwards off the continental shelf. I watched it, horrified, until it disappeared in the blackness. The sand sharks turned like brown minnows in its invisible wake.

I learned that this particular wreck moved several miles up and down the Louisiana coastline, and it was only coincidence that its weight had shifted in a strong current while I was on top of it. But I could not get out of my mind the image of those drowned Nazis still sailing the earth after all these years, their eye sockets and skeletal mouths streaming seaweed, their diabolical plan still at work under the Gulf's tranquil, emerald surface.

A navy destroyer broke the spine of their ship with depth charges in 1942. But I believed that the evil they represented was held in check by the family who sacrificed their lives so their youngest member could live.

The phone was ringing when I climbed the ladder onto my deck. I sat in the hot shade of the umbrella and wiped my face with a towel while I held the receiver to my ear. It was Captain Guidry.

"Dave, is that you?" he said.

"Yes."

"Where've you been? I've been calling you for two hours."

"What is it?"

"I hate to call you with bad news. It's your brother, Jimmie. Somebody shot him twice in the public rest room by the French Market."

I squeezed my hand on my forehead and looked out at the heat waves hammering on the lake's surface.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"I won't kid you. It's touch-and-go. It looks like the guy put two.22 rounds in the side of his head. Look, Jimmie's a tough guy. If anybody can make it, he will. You want me to send a car for you?"

"No, I have a rental. Where is he?"

"I'm here with him at Hotel Dieu Sisters. You drive careful, hear?"

The traffic was bad all the way across town. It was a half hour before I got to the hospital and found a place to park. I walked hurriedly up the tree-shaded walkway into the building, my sandals clacking on the tiles, my sweaty, unbuttoned print shirt hanging outside my slacks. I had to swallow and breathe quietly for a moment before I could ask the receptionist where Jimmie's room was. Then I turned and saw Captain Guidry standing behind me.

"He's in recovery on the fifth floor, Dave. They got the bullets out," he said.

"What's it look like for him?"

"Better than it did when I talked with you. Let's walk down to the elevator."

"What happened?"

"I'm going to tell you everything we know. But slow down now. There're some real good docs taking care of him. We're going to ride this one out all right."

"Tell me what happened."

The elevator door opened, and a nurse pushed out a wheelchair in which sat a pretty woman in a pink nightgown. She was smiling and she held a spray of flowers in her lap. We stepped inside and the doors closed behind us.

"He walked down to the Café du Monde for beignets, then stopped at the public restroom next door. The one that's under the levee. A black kid that was taking a piss in the wall urinal said Jimmie went into one of the stalls and closed the door. A minute later a guy came in, kicked open the door, and fired twice, point-blank. The kid says the gun had something on the barrel and it made a spitting sound. It sounds like a professional hit."

"What'd the guy look like?"

"The kid was scared shitless. He still is. We got him looking in mug books, but don't expect anything."

I clenched and unclenched my fists. The elevator was a slow one, and it kept stopping at floors where no one was waiting.

"Maybe this is the wrong time to tell you this, but some people are starting to think twice about your story," the captain said.

"How's that?"

"Maybe they were after you instead. Jimmie looks like your twin. There might be other explanations, but the local talent tends toward shotguns and car bombs."

"It's damn poor consolation to be believed because your brother was shot."

"People are human. Give an inch."

"I don't have that kind of charity. That's my whole family up there."

"I can't blame you. But for what it's worth, we've got uniforms all over the floor. Nobody'll get to him here."

"If he doesn't make it, you might be arresting me, Captain."

"I hate to hear you talk like that, Dave. It brings me great worry," he said.

Jimmie remained three more hours in the recovery room before they brought him into intensive care on a gurney. I wanted to go inside, but the surgeon wouldn't let me. He said both rounds had hit Jimmie at an angle, which was the only factor that saved his life. One had caromed off the skull and exited the scalp at the back of the head, but the second round had fractured the skull and put lead and bone splinters into the brain tissue. The surgeon's concern was about paralysis and loss of sight in one eye.

Captain Guidry had already gone back to the office, and I spent the rest of the afternoon alone in the waiting room. I read magazines, drank endless cups of bad coffee from a machine, and watched the light fade outside the window and the shadows of the oak trees fall on the brick-paved street down below. At eight o'clock I went downstairs and ate a sandwich in the cafeteria. I wanted to call Annie, but I thought I had already caused her enough traumatic moments and should spare her this one. Upstairs again, I talked with nurses, made friends with an elderly Cajun lady from Thibodaux who spoke English poorly and was afraid for her husband who was in surgery, and finally I watched the late news on television and went to sleep in a fetal position on a short couch.

In the morning a Catholic sister woke me up and gave me a glass of orange juice and told me it was all right to see my brother for a few minutes. Jimmie's jaws and head were wrapped thickly with bandages, almost like a plaster cast. His face was white and sunken, and both eyes were hollow and blackened as though he had been beaten with fists. An IV needle was taped down to the blue vein inside his right arm; an oxygen tube was attached to his nose; his bare chest was crisscrossed with curlicues of electronic monitoring wires. He looked as though all the life had been sucked out of him through a straw and the lighted machines around him had more future and viability than he.

I wondered what my father would think of this. My father brawled in bars, but he always fought for fun and he never bore a grudge. He wouldn't carry a gun for any reason, even when he played bourée with gamblers who were known as dangerous and violent men. But this was a different world from the New Iberia of the 1940s. Here people with the moral instincts of piranha would pump two bullets into the brain of a man they didn't know and spend the contract money on cocaine and whores.

There were small lights in Jimmie's dark eyes when he looked at me. His eyelids looked like they were made of paper, stained with purple dye.

"How you doing, boy?" I said. I rubbed the back of his arm and squeezed his palm. It was lifeless and felt like Johnny Massina's had when I shook hands with him the night of his execution.

"Did you see who it was?"

His throat swallowed and his tongue made small saliva bubbles on his lower lip.

"Was it this guy Philip Murphy?" I asked. "A late-middle-aged, frumpy-looking guy with glasses? Like somebody who'd be selling dirty postcards around a schoolyard?"

His eyes looked away from me, the lids fluttering.

"How about a dark little guy?"

Jimmie started to whisper, then choked on the fluids in his throat.

"All right, don't worry about it now," I said. "You're safe here. There's three uniformed cops with you, and I'll be in and out of here all the time. But while you get well, I'm going to find out who did this to us. You remember what the old man used to say-'You pull on dat 'gator's tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.'"

I smiled at him, then I saw his eyes flicker with an urgent light. His mouth opened and clicked dryly.

"Not now, Jim. There'll be time later," I said.

He worked his hand off the bed onto my chest. Then his fingers began to trace lines against my skin, but he was so weak that the frail pattern he made was like a cobweb spread across my breastbone. I nodded as though I understood, and placed his hand back on the bed. The energy and effort in his eyes were now used up, and he looked at the ceiling with the expression of those who are suddenly forced to deal in a very different and dark dimension.

"I've bent your ear too long. You sack out now. I'll be back a little later," I said.

But he was already disconnected from our conversation. I left the room quietly, with the sense of both guilt and relief that we feel when we're allowed to walk away from the bedside of someone who reminds us of our mortality.

The two uniformed cops on the door nodded to me. At the end of the corridor I saw Captain Guidry walking toward me with a potted geranium wrapped in green and silver foil. The implants in his scalp had grown, and his head looked as though a badly made wig had been grafted to it.

"I'm going to leave this at the nurse's station. How's he doing?" he asked.

"He's a tough little brother."

"You look like hell. Go home and get some sleep."

"I slept all right on the couch last night. I just need a shower and a change of clothes."

Captain Guidry's eyes stared into mine. "What did he tell you in there?"

"Nothing."

"Don't jerk me around, Dave."

"He didn't say anything."

"I've worked with you a long time. You don't hide things well."

"Ask the nurse. He can't talk. I'm not sure he even knows how he got here."

"Listen, I think you're about to get out of all this trouble you've been in. Don't blow it now with an obstruction charge."

"Do I get my badge back?"

His lips pinched together, and he looked down the corridor.

"You shouldn't have hit Baxter," he said.

"So nothing is changed."

"We do it one step at a time. Have some patience, will you? Trust people a little bit."

"I'm out on ten thousand dollars' bond. I'm going to have to go to trial unless I can negotiate a misdemeanor plea."

"You're a reader. You know about Saint John of the Cross and the long night of the soul. So this is your long night. Why make it longer?"

At the houseboat I took my Remington twelve-gauge pump out of its sheepskin-lined case. The blueing shone with the thin layer of oil that I kept on it. My father had given me the twelve-gauge when I went away to college in Lafayette, and I had knocked down mallards and geese with it from Cypremont Point to Whiskey Bay almost every year since. I rubbed my fingers along the polished, inlaid stock, then wrapped the barrel with a rag and locked it in the machinist's vise that I kept anchored to one end of the drainboard. I made a pencil mark three inches in front of the pump, then sawed through the barrel with a hacksaw. The end of the barrel clanged to the floor. I picked it up and started to drop it in the garbage but, instead, ran a piece of Christmas ribbon through it and hung it on the wall over what was left of my historical jazz collection.

I sat at the kitchen table and rubbed the sawed edges of the gun's muzzle smooth with emery paper and removed the sportsman's plug from the magazine so that it would now hold five shells instead of three. I went to the closet and took out my duffel bag of decoys, my army field jacket, and the old army-surplus bandolier I used when the hunting weather was too warm for a coat. I emptied everything out on the table and stood all my shells up in an erect row like toy soldiers. Then I selected out the street cop's buffet-deer slugs and double-ought buckshot-slipped them one at a time into the magazine with my thumb until the spring came tight, slid the breech shut, and clicked on the safety.

In my mind were images that I didn't want to recognize. I looked out the window and saw a man turning a raw steak on a barbecue fire, saw two kids trying to burn each other out in a pitch-and-catch game, their faces sweaty and narrow, saw a waxed red car parked next to a sand dune under the murderous white sun.

Annie ate lunch every day in a delicatessen by Canal and Exchange, not far from where she worked at the social welfare agency. I sat in a wooden chair across the street and read the Times-Picayune and waited for her. Just after noon I saw her coming down the sidewalk in the lunchtime crowd, wearing sunglasses, her wide straw hat, and a pale yellow dress. She could live in New Orleans the rest of her life, I thought, but she would always be from Kansas. She had the tan of a farm girl, the kind that never seemed to change tone, and even though her legs were beautiful and her hips a genuine pleasure to look at, she walked in high heels as though she were on board a rocking ship.

I watched her sit by herself at a table, her back to me, remove her sunglasses, and give her order to the waiter while she moved both her hands in the air. He looked perplexed, and I could almost hear her ordering something that wasn't on the menu, which was her habit, or telling him about some "weirdness" that she had seen on the street.

Then I heard the metal-rimmed wheels of a huge handcart on the pavement and an elderly black man's voice crying out, "I got melons, I got 'loupes, I got plums, I got sweet red strawberries." His cart was loaded with tiers of fruit and also with boxes of pralines, roses wrapped in green tissue paper, and small bottles of grape juice shoved down in an ice bucket.

"How you doing, Cappie?" I said.

"Good afternoon, Lieutenant," he said, and grinned. His head was bald and brown, and he wore a gray apron. He had grown up in Laplace, next door to Louis Armstrong's family, but he had sold produce in the Quarter for years and was so old that neither he nor anyone else knew his age.

"Is your wife still in the hospital?" I asked.

"No suh, she fit and fine and out do'-popping again."

"I beg your pardon."

"She do'-popping. She pop in dis do', she pop out dat do'.You want your grape drink today?"

"No, I tell you what instead. You see that pretty lady in the yellow dress eating across the street?"

"Yes suh, I think so."

"Give her some of these roses and a box of pralines. Here, you keep the change, Cappie."

"What you want me to tell her?"

"Just tell her it's from a good-looking Cajun fellow," I said, and winked at him.

I looked once more in Annie's direction. Then I turned and walked back to where I had left my rented car parked on Decatur Street.

The beach outside of Biloxi was white and hot-looking in the afternoon sun. The palm trees along the boulevard beat in the wind, and the green surface of the Gulf was streaked with light and filled with dark patches of blue, like floating ink. A squall was blowing up in the south, and waves were already breaking against the ends of the jetties, the foam leaping high into the air before you heard the sound of the wave, and in the groundswell I could see the flicker of bait fish and the dark, triangular outlines of stingrays, almost like oil slicks, that had been pushed in toward shore by the approaching storm.

I found the Gulf Shores restaurant, but the man who ran the valet parking service wasn't there. I walked a short way down the beach, bought a paper plate of fried catfish and hush puppies from a food stand, and sat on a wooden bench under a palm tree and ate it. Then I read a paperback copy of A Passage to India, watched some South American teenagers play soccer in the sand, and finally walked out on the jetty and skipped oyster shells across the water's surface. The wind was stiffer now, with a sandy bite in it, and as the sun seemed to descend into an enormous flame across the western sky, I could see thin white streaks of lightning in the row of black clouds that hovered low on the watery horizon in the south. When the sun's afterglow began to shrink from the sky, and the neon lights of the amusement rides and beer joints along the beach began to come on, I walked back to my car and drove to the restaurant.

Two black kids and a white man in his thirties were taking cars from under the porch at the entrance and parking them in back. The white man had crewcut brown hair and small moles all over his face, as though they had been touched there with a paintbrush. I drove up to the entrance, and one of the black kids took my car. I went inside and ate a five-dollar club sandwich that I didn't want. When I came back out, the white man walked up to me for my parking ticket.

"I can get it. Just show me where it is," I said.

He stepped out of the light from the porch and pointed toward the lot.

"The second-to-last row," he said.

"Where?"

He walked farther into the dark and pointed again.

"Almost to the end of the row," he said.

"My girlfriend said you can sell me some sneeze," I said.

"Sell you what?" He looked me up and down for the first time. The neon light from a liquor store next door made his lips look purple.

"A little nose candy for the sinuses."

"You got the wrong guy, buddy."

"Do I look like a cop or something?"

"You want me to get your car, sir?"

"I've got a hundred bucks for you. Meet me someplace else."

"Maybe you should talk to the manager. I run the valet service here. You're looking for somebody else."

"She must have told me about the wrong place. No offense," I said, and I walked to the back of the lot and drove out onto the boulevard. The palm trees on the esplanade were crashing in the wind.

I drove through a residential neighborhood away from the beach, then circled back and parked on a dark street a block inland from the restaurant. I took my World War II Japanese field glasses from the glove compartment and focused them on the lighted porch where the man with the moles was parking cars.

In the next three hours I watched him go twice to the trunk of his own automobile before he delivered a car to a customer out front. At midnight the restaurant closed, and I followed him across town to an unpaved neighborhood of clapboard houses, open drainage ditches, and dirt yards littered with rusted engine parts and washing machines.

Most of the houses on the street were dark, and I left my car a block away and walked to a sandy driveway that led up to the lighted side door of a boxlike wooden house surrounded by unwatered and dying hedges. Through the screen I could see him in his undershirt, with a beer in his hand, changing the channels on his television set. His shoulders were as white as a frog's belly and speckled with the same brown moles that covered his face. He sat back in a stuffed chair, a window fan blowing in his face, salted his beer can, and sipped at it while he watched television. The first raindrops clicked flatly on the roof.

I slipped my hand through the screen-door handle, then jerked it backward and tore the latch loose from the jamb. He sat erect, his eyes wide, the beer can rolling across the floor in a trail of foam.

"Some customers are persistent as hell," I said, stepping inside.

But I should have come in holding the.25 Beretta that was in my pocket. He reached behind him on a workbench, grabbed a ball-peen hammer, and flung it into my chest. The steel head hit me just to the right of my breastbone, and I felt a pain, a breathlessness, shoot through my heart cavity as though I had been stunned with a high-voltage wire. Then he charged me, his arms flailing like a kid fighting on a school ground, and he caught me once on the eye and again on the ear before I could get my guard up. But I had been a good boxer at New Iberia High, and I had learned long ago that either in the ring or in a street fight there was nothing to equal setting your feet square, tucking your chin into your shoulder, raising your left to guard your face, and coming across with a right hook aimed somewhere between the mouth and the eyes. I got him right across the bridge of the nose. His eyes snapped straight with shock, the light glazed in them, and I hit him again, this time on the jaw, and knocked him over his chair into the television set. He looked up at me, his face white, his nose bleeding on his upper lip.

"You want to do it some more?" I said.

"Who are you, man?"

"What do you care, as long as you come out of this all right?"

"Come out of what? What you want with me? I never saw you before tonight."

He started to get up. I pushed him down on the floor.

"You come here to rip me off, you're going to deal later with a couple of bad dudes. That's no joke, buddy," he said.

"You see this in my hand? I'm not going to point it at you, because I don't think you're up to it. But we're upping the stakes now."

"You come in my goddamn house and attack me and wave a gun around, and I'm in trouble? You're unbelievable, man."

"Get up," I said, and pulled him erect by his arm. I walked him into the bedroom.

"Turn on the light," I said.

He flicked the light switch. The bed was unmade, and dirty clothes were piled on the wood floor. A jigsaw puzzle of Elvis Presley's face was half completed on a card table. I pushed him through the hallway into the tiny kitchen at the back of the house.

"You forget where the light switch is?" I said.

"Look, man, I just work for some people. You got a problem with the action around here, you take it up with them. I'm just a small guy."

I felt the wall with my hand and clicked on the overhead light. The kitchen was the only clean room in the house. The drainboards were washed down, the dishes put away in a drying rack, the linoleum floor waxed and polished. A solitary chair was placed at the large Formica-topped table in the center of the room, and on the table were three black plastic bags closed with masking tape, an ether bottle, and boxes of powdered milk and powdered sugar.

He wiped his nose on his hand. The moles on his face looked like dead bugs. Beyond the drawn window shades I could hear the rain falling in the trees.

"It looks like you've been watering down the stock," I said.

"What do you want? You're looking at everything I got."

"Where's Philip Murphy?"

He looked at me curiously, his brow furrowed.

"I don't know the guy," he said.

"Yes, you do. He's a two-poke-a-day regular."

"That's lots of people. Look, if I could give you the dude and get you out of my life, you'd have him."

"He's in his fifties, wears glasses, tangled gray hair and eyebrows, talks a little bit like an Englishman sometimes."

"Oh, that fucker. He told me his name was Eddy. You out to pop him or something?"

"Where is he?"

"Look, this dude has a lot of money. Around here we piece off the score. Everybody gets along that way."

"Last chance," I said, and moved toward him. His back bumped against the sink and he raised his hands up in front of his chest.

"All right," he said. "The last stucco duplex on Azalea Drive. It's straight north of Jefferson Davis's house. Now get the fuck out of here, man."

"Do you rent or own this place?"

"I own it. Why?"

"Bad answer," I said, and I unscrewed the cap from the ether bottle and poured it over the black plastic bags on the kitchen table.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Better get moving, partner," I said, and folded back the cover on a book of matches.

"Are you crazy? That stuff's like napalm. Don't do it, man."

He stared at me wild-eyed, frozen, waiting until the last second to see if I was serious. I lighted the whole book, and he broke for the window, put one foot through the shade, balanced for a moment on the sill like a clothespin while he stared back at me incredulously a last time, and then crashed to the ground outside with the torn shade dangling behind him.

I backed out the door and threw the flaming matchbook at the table. The air seemed to snap apart with a yellow-blue flash like lightning arching back on itself. Then the Formica tabletop erupted into a cone of flame that was absolutely white at the center. Within seconds the paint on the ceiling burned outward in a spreading black blister that touched all four walls.

When I walked away from the house, the fire had already cracked through the shingles of the kitchen roof and I could see the rain turning in the red light.

I drove along the beach boulevard next to the sea wall in the dark. The surf was loud, the waves crashing hard on the sand, and the shrimp boats that were moored in their slips were knocking against the pilings. I passed Beauvoir, the rambling, one-story home of Jefferson Davis, set back on a dark lawn under spreading oak trees. The wide veranda was lighted, and in the darkness and the sweep of rain through the trees, the building seemed like an inverted telescopic vision into that spring of 1865 when Davis watched his failed medieval romance collapse around him. If the grass in that same lawn was a darker green than it should have been, perhaps it was because of the two hundred Confederate soldiers who were anonymously buried there. The road to Roncevaux lures the poet and the visionary like a drug, but the soldier pays for the real estate.

I turned north and followed the road to a pink stucco duplex at the end of an unfinished subdivision. There was no moon, the sky was totally black now, and I parked my car down the street under a dripping oak tree. Murphy wasn't going to be easy, and I had to make some decisions. My father used to say that an old armadillo is old because he's smart, and he doesn't leave his hole unless you give him an acceptable reason. I had packed a change of clothes and a raincoat and a rain hat in a small suitcase before I had left New Orleans. I put on the hat and coat, slipped the shotgun out of its sheep-lined cover, and hung it through the trigger guard from under my armpit with a coat hanger. I buttoned the coat over the shotgun and walked to the duplex, which was set apart from the other houses by a vacant lot filled with construction rubble.

Both sides of the duplex were dark, but the driveway on the far side was empty and newspapers moldered on the lawn. I went behind the apartment closest to me, cut the telephone wire at the box with my Puma knife, and unscrewed the lightbulb on the porch. The rain beat against my hat and coat, and the shotgun knocked against my side and knee like a two-by-four. I pulled my hat low on my eyes, put a pencil between my teeth, then hammered on the door with my fist and stepped back out into the rain.

A light went on in back, and a moment later I saw the curtain move behind the door glass.

"Who is it?" a voice called.

"Gulf Coast Gas and Electric. We got a busted main. Turn off your pilot."

"What?" the voice asked from behind the door.

"The main's busted. We can't get it shut down at the pump station. If you smell gas, go to the National Guard armory. Don't light no matches, either," I said, and walked into the darkness as though I were headed toward another house.

But instead I cut behind a pile of bulldozed fiberboard in the vacant lot next door, circled through a stand of pines along a coulee, and came out in back of the duplex. I suspected that Murphy had stayed at the window until he gave up trying to locate me in the darkness and rain, then had gone to the telephone. I was right. As I eased under the window I heard him dialing, a pause, then the receiver rattling in the cradle. I stooped and walked quickly along the side wall toward the front porch, trying to keep the barrel of the shotgun out of the mud. At the corner I stopped and listened. He unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door on the chain.

Come on, you've got to prove you have cojones, I thought. Big boys wear them on the outside of their pants. You kicked gook ass with the Legionnaires, crouched in the bottom of an LST at the Bay of Pigs, hung parts of Sandinista farmers in trees like Christmas-tree ornaments. What good is life if you're not willing to risk it?

Then I heard him slide the chain and let it swing back against the door. I raised the shotgun in front of me, my body pressed tightly against the stucco wall. He stepped out into the slanting rain, his pajama top unbuttoned over his white pot belly, a flashlight in one hand and a blue two-inch.38 in the other.

I clicked off the safety and came around the corner and aimed the twelve-gauge's barrel at the side of his head in one motion.

"Throw it away! Don't think about it! Do it!" I said.

He was frozen, the flashlight's glow illuminating his face like a piece of dead wax. But I could see thought working in his eyes.

"I'll cut you in half, Murphy."

"I suspect you would, Lieutenant," he said, and he bent his knees, almost as though he were going to genuflect, and set the revolver on the porch slab.

I pushed him inside, turned on the light switch, and kicked the door closed behind me.

"Facedown on the floor, arms straight out," I said.

"We don't need all this street theater, do we?" He looked again at my face in the light. "All right, I don't argue. But there's nobody else here. It looks like you've won the day."

The inside of the duplex looked like a motel room. An air-conditioning unit hummed in one window and dripped water on the shag carpet; the wallpaper had been roller-painted a pale green; the furniture was either plastic or made of composite wood; the air smelled of chemical deodorizer. I looked quickly in the bedroom, the bath, the small kitchen and dinette.

"It's a simple place," he said. He had to turn his head sideways on the rug to talk. The pink fat around his hips was striped with gray hair. "No women, no guns, no mysteries. This might be a disappointing bust for you, Lieutenant."

"Take off your shirt and sit in that chair."

"All right," he said, and a smile flickered around the corner of his lips.

"Do I amuse you for some reason?"

"Not you. Just your attitude. I told you once before you had puritan sympathies. At some point in your career, you need to realize that nobody cares about these things. Oh, they say they do. But they really don't, and I think you know it."

He dropped his pajama top on the arm of a stuffed chair and sat down. His chest was small and gray, and his stomach pushed up high on his breastbone.

"Turn them up," I said.

He shrugged his shoulders and turned up his forearms so I could see the flat, gray scar tissue along the veins. The scars were so thick they could have been traced there with a barber's razor.

"I heard you were just a two-pop-a-day man. I think you've worked up to the full-tilt boogie," I said.

"Does that somehow make you feel better?" The smile was gone, and I could see the contempt, the cynicism, the glint of evil in his eyes.

"If I allowed myself to have feelings about you, I would have blown you up on the porch."

"And we thought you were a professional."

"I hope you shot up a lot of dope tonight. You're going on a long dry. Figure what it's going to be like after two days in lockdown."

"I'm trembling already. See the cold sweat on my face. Oh Lawsie, what's I going to do?"

At that moment I felt a genuine rush of hatred in my chest.

"If my brother dies and you somehow get back on the street, God help you," I said.

"Your brother?"

I watched his face carefully.

"He's still alive, and he saw the guy you sent to do it," I said.

"You think we tried to kill your brother?"

I watched the bead of light in his eyes, the curve of his palms on the arm of the chair.

"That's what all this bullshit is about? Somebody hit your brother and you think we were behind it?" he said.

He widened his eyes, pursed his lips with his own question. He started to smile but glanced at my face and thought better of it.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, old boy. It wasn't us," he said. "Why would we want to hurt your brother?"

"He looks like my twin."

"Ah yes, I heard something like that. Give us our innings, though. We don't make those kinds of mistakes, at least not as a rule. Actually, we'd marked you off, thought you'd be working on some of your own problems for a while."

"Get back on the floor."

"What are we doing now, Lieutenant?"

"You go well with the rug."

I cut the light cord, tied his wrists behind him, pulled his bare feet up in the air, and wrapped the cord tightly around his ankles. Then I emptied all the drawers on the floor, went through all the clothes in his closets, dumped his suitcases on the bed, looked in his mailbox, went through everything in his wallet, and poured his garbage can out on the kitchen table. There was nothing in the duplex that would indicate that he had any life at all outside of Biloxi, Mississippi. There wasn't a matchbook cover, a canceled check, a credit-card receipt, an unpaid bill that would indicate he had even been out of the duplex. Almost everything in the apartment could have been purchased yesterday at K-Mart. The exception was a box of Trojan rubbers in the drawer of his nightstand, and his works-a very clean syringe, two shining hypodermic needles, a spoon with a bent and tape-wrapped handle, and three packets of high-grade scag, all kept lovingly in a velvet-lined, zippered leather case.

"My, my, we do like to probe after a man's vices, don't we?" he said. He was on his side in the middle of the living room rug. "Gives you a little rush, doesn't it, like watching a dirty movie? Your secret sins aren't so bad after all."

I closed the leather case and tapped my fingers on it a moment.

"What to do, what to do, he thinks," Murphy said. "He can drop the dime with the locals and have the depraved old junkie locked up in a county slam. But then there's the problem of breaking into a man's house with a shotgun, isn't there?

"Or maybe a trip back to New Orleans. But, zounds, that's kidnapping. The worries of our chivalric detective seem endless. It's a great burden, being one of the good guys, isn't it? There are so many lofty standards to uphold. Your little piece of tail from Kansas isn't so discriminating."

"What?"

"We checked her out. She has a file."

"You are CIA, then."

"Are you so dumb you think the government is one group of people? Like the U. S. Forest Service in their Smokey Bear suits? Even your regular punch knows better than that. Ask her. She's had some interesting experiences as a peace groupie back in the land of Oz. Except she was so committed she balled everything in sight and got herself knocked up. So she took a little horseback ride across the prairie and bounced the little fellow right out of there. Almost as messy as a coat hanger. But fortunately for you they have good doctors in Wichita, and they took out the baby carriage and left the playpen intact."

I flipped the leather case through the kitchen door onto the pile of garbage I had poured over the table, then I went into the bedroom and picked up a shirt and a pair of slacks and shoes from the closet floor. Lightning splintered the sky outside, and thunder reverberated through the house. The rain was hitting hard against the windowpanes. I dropped the clothes next to him, untied his hands, and picked up the shotgun again.

"Put them on," I said.

"Travel time?" he said, and smiled.

"Get dressed, Murphy."

"I don't think this is going to be a pleasant trip."

"Think of your alternatives. This is Mississippi."

"I suspect I'll be riding in the trunk." He sat on the floor and put on his shirt. "Do you mind if I use the bathroom? I was headed there when you knocked."

"Leave the door open," I said.

He walked flatfooted to the toilet, like an old man, in his pajama bottoms and unbuttoned shirt. He looked back at me while he took out his penis and urinated loudly in the water. His face was composed, pink in the fluorescent light, as though he had surrendered both to the situation and the release in his kidneys. Out of decency or revulsion, I suppose, I looked away from him. The trees were thrashing against the windows, and through the edge of the shades I could see the lawn flicker whitely as lightning leaped across the sky. I was very tired, my hands thick with fatigue so that they didn't want to curve around the stock and pump of the shotgun.

He might have pulled it off if he hadn't scraped the ceramic top of the toilet tank when he lifted it up to get the Walther 7.65 millimeter that was taped inside. But he had gotten his hand securely around the handle just as I snapped off the safety on the trigger guard, lifted the sawed-off barrel from the hip, and fired at his chest. The angle was bad, and the explosion of buckshot blew the side of the doorjamb away in a shower of white splinters and tore the shirt off his shoulder and streaked a long pattern of blood on the wallpaper, as though it had been slung there by a paintbrush. Later, I would never be able to decide whether the second shot was necessary. But the Walther was in his hand, the black electrician's tape hanging loose from the barrel, the broken ceramic top lying in the toilet bowl. I ejected the spent shell from the magazine, pumped the next round into the chamber, smelled the smoke and cordite in the air, and almost simultaneously pulled the trigger. It was a deer slug, and it caught him just below the heart and blew him backwards, his arms outspread, his face filled with disbelief, through the glass shower doors into the bathtub.

I picked up the warm shells off the rug and put them in my pocket. I looked down at Murphy in the tub. The deer slug had flattened inside him and had made an exit hole in his back the size of a half-dollar. His eyes were open and staring, and his face was absolutely white, as though the wound had drained every drop of his blood out of him. One hand still twitched convulsively on his pot belly.

But I took no joy in it.

I hung the shotgun on the hanger under my arm, buttoned my raincoat, and walked back out in the storm. The air was cool and smelled of wet trees and torn leaves blowing in the wind and the sulfurous odor of lightning that licked across the black sky over the Gulf. The rain sluiced off my hatbrim and blew in my face, and I walked through the dark puddles of water on the sidewalk as though they were not there. In a few more hours it would be dawn, the eastern sky would be pink with the new day, the palm trees and the beach and the fingers of surf sliding up on the sand would light slowly as the sun climbed in the sky, and I would be back in New Orleans with this night in my life somehow arranged in the proper compartment.

But my thought processes of convenience and my attempts at magic were seldom successful. The storm blew all night and well into the next day, and back on my houseboat I didn't feel better about anything.