Dino LaStanza had that dream again. The bad dream about the Harmony Street Wharf came to him again. It was a vivid dream and very real. And it was the same as before, in slow motion, and he could not get away fast enough.
The scene was familiar, that black wharf on the Mississippi River in a dark corner of the Sixth Police District. And in the dream he could see himself moving closer and closer to the wharf, like a movie camera closing in, closing in.
And then he saw that face again, that evil face of the man kneeling next to him. Dino placed a pistol in the mouth of the evil face and watched the eyes of that face plead with him as he slowly squeezed the trigger. Dino felt the gun kick and saw the body roll over, .
But then it was no longer night, no longer dark. It was daylight in his dream and he could not get away and there were people everywhere. They could see him, could put him at the scene, they knew what he had done. And then there was another familiar face there, staring at him. It was Sergeant Mason, and he knew. And he smiled.
Dreams have little meaning sometimes. and sometimes they express one’s deepest fantasies or one’s deepest fears. The Harmony Street Wharf was Dino’s deepest fear. It haunted him, visited him late at night when he was most vulnerable. And he could tell no one about it, could reach for no help because it was his secret. it was his tragic flaw, his personal nightmare. And he was safe only because no one else knew. It was his secret, and it would not leave him alone.
•
The phone woke me a few hours after I’d fallen asleep on the morning after the Dauphine Street murder. I was dreaming again, that same damn dream about the wharf. I woke up afraid, like a little kid. I woke to a pair of eyes staring at me, pleading with me. I woke to a vision of Marie’s eyes and they were pleading with me to catch her killer.
The phone kept on ringing until I picked up the receiver.
“Well, Mr. Big Shot Detective,” said the voice on the phone, “you did it again. Front page news!”
I knew the voice well. It was Stan, Stan-The-Man, my old partner from the Bloody Sixth District. He was always one for perfect timing.
“What the fuck are you calling me for?” I grumbled, trying to sit up in bed.
“You asleep?” he asked in a voice that told me he knew very well I was asleep.
“I was.”
“You lazy wops are all alike, sleep, sleep, sleep. I just called to congratulate you. You’re on the front page of the Picayune again. You little publicity-seeking wop.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, still groggy.
“Go get your morning paper,” Stan told me. “I’ll wait.”
I looked at the receiver. I just knew the crazy son of a bitch was smiling at me. He was a stone-fucking nut. “Why are you fuckin’ with me, Stanley?” I asked. “I got two hours sleep.”
“Candy-Ass,” he cut in, “go get your paper. You’re famous. I’ll wait.”
There was no use arguing with him. Ever since he broke me in as a rookie, Stan felt like I was his little duckling. He looked after me, taught me everything he knew, and called me any time he damn well pleased. Years together in the Bloody Sixth taught me there was no use arguing with a crazy man. If I hung up, he’d just call back. If I unplugged the phone, he’s just come over. So I got up, stumbled to my front door and retrieved my paper.
I opened it on the way back to the phone. And there I was, right on the front page of The Times-Picayune. There was a picture of the murder scene on Dauphine Street. I was in the center of the photo, standing at the edge of the street, writing notes on my pad, my side to the camera. Behind me, in the lower portion of the picture, you could see the bottom part of Marie’s spread-eagled legs. That’s the last New Orleans saw of Marie Sumner, a pair of spread-eagled legs. There was a caption beneath the picture. It read:
“New Orleans Homicide Detective Dino LaStanza stands over the nude and bloodied body of a twenty-three-year-old woman who was murdered in the 1300 block of Dauphine Street Friday night.”
There was a story on page two. I didn’t bother to look, I just picked up the phone again.
“Ya’ see,” Stan told me, “so how’s the big shot getting along? You don’t talk to none of us peasants no more, huh?”
It was one of the oldest stories in police work. When you’re in the same district, you and your padnas are so damn close, and the minute you get transferred, it all slips away. I knew it. Stan knew it too. No matter how hard you try to keep in touch, you can’t. You get on different shifts and work at different stations, and time slips by.
So I sat up in my bed, with my Picayune spread out in front of me, and we talked about the case for a while. then we talked about other things, like the usual blood and violence of the bloodiest police district in the entire south, the Blood Sixth of Old New Orleans.
•
Some background information should be provided at this point. I am Italian-American. And there is an old saying that Italians make the best criminals or the best cops. Well, I grew up in a house full of blue uniforms, so that made the choice easy. Besides my father would have broken both my legs if I would have grown up to be anything else. There were times when I thought he had broken something, when I was a kid and getting into trouble. I had a strict upbringing, living under the roof of Captain LaStanza. But I guess I needed it.
I grew up next to City Park, between the park and the Canal Cemeteries. I grew up playing football in the park, and hide-and-seek between the crypts and sepulchers of the old cemeteries. In New Orleans, tombs are built above ground because of the high water table. Most of the city is below sea level, built where no city should have been built, on miles of mush and swamp. So our cemeteries look like small villages of the dead, with walled tombs and crypts and brick paths with sharp turns where you could hid and get lost forever.
As a kid, I grew up in the shadow of my big brother, Joe. He showed me the ropes, how to play football and baseball, and how to hide in the cemeteries so nobody, and I mean nobody, could find me. He also told me about the werewolves of City Park and the vampires that prowled Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery at the corner of City Park Avenue and Canal Street. When I was real little, you could not pry me from the house at night. Joe was pretty smart about that. He was getting into his teen-age years ad there were lots of young girls to hang out with at tight – when little brothers should not be around. and I wasn’t. I was inside.
When I got a little older, Joe gave me a break and let me tag along sometimes. I used to sit up in the bleachers I in the old canteen near the park and watch Joe and the other teen-angels put moves on the girls at the sock hops. I remember how I used to think all those teen-age girls were movie stars. I told them that, and they loved me for it. “He’s so cute.” I learned early about flattering girls. It paid off later.
Looking back now, I could have died at eight and been eternally happy. I guess all childhood days seem better after you grow up. My father was a shining blue knight to me then. Infallible. Invincible. He would have never grown old and gray and gotten to drinking too much. My mother would have never grown so quiet, have never lost that light that used to shine in her eyes when she was a young mother. And my bother would have outlived me, as he should have.
There would have been no Vietnam for me, no dismal housing projects cropping up around the city for me to work in and arrest desperate people. There would have been no Sixth District madness and no funeral for my brother. I would have been spared that agony, spared burying my brother in that blue uniform.
Joe was killed in the line of duty. He was murdered because he wore that blue uniform. But that’s a whole different story. And I took care of all that. I took care of my brother’s murder long before I started taking care of the murders of strangers in Homicide.
I have done a lot in my first twenty-nine years – plenty to be proud of and plenty I’m not proud of. I guess that’s why I have nightmares. I used to have nightmares about Vietnam, now I have them about the wharf. Scenes of death stay with you, in the jungle or on an old streetcar – or mass death when an airliner fell from the sky on a cold New Orleans night when I was a rookie.
New Orleans is dirtier than it was when I was a kid. It’s so much sadder. I can remember when streetcars seemed magical to me, like trolleys to faraway places and how the French Quarter seemed like a trip into a time machine. New Orleans has grown much darker and bleaker. The streets have grown worn with traffic snarls and potholes. There is so much more crime and violence and so many more people.
And then there were love affairs that died, too.
I once knew what it was like to truly love someone. I once loved a girl with blue-on-blue eyes and bright yellow hair. Her name was Guinevere and she was a young Orleanian beauty, and she loved me so. But, as new Orleans beauty goes, she faded.
A poet would say she’s with the angels, or that God took her into his arms. But I’m no poet and I’ve seen what God has allowed to happen in this world and I know better. I know she is gone, forever. One evening she died, and I tell you, New Orleans lost so much for me. New Orleans and I have both lost a great deal.
But there is no place else for me. New Orleans and I are too much alike. Our roots are here, our families, our heritage. I guess we’re just a couple of losers still hanging in there in case there’s a bit of romance left.
•
I managed to get a few more hours sleep after Stan hung up, but Mark called me later and said he’d be by that afternoon to pick me up. It may have been Saturday and my day off, but he was coming to get me.
I took a long shower and got ready, managed to get two strong cups of coffee-and-chicory in me before Mark arrived. I had time to read the newspaper story about the murder and laughed at how many mistakes they managed to put into one story. Mason couldn’t have misled them that much. What a buncha fucking clowns.
When Mark arrived, he was smiling.
“What the fuck you smiling about?” I asked as I let him in.
“I love my work,” he answered. “Don’t you?”
I had another fucking nut for a partner. First there was Stan and now this grizzly-bear idiot. I shook my head and went back in my bedroom to finish getting ready.
“Want some coffee?” I asked.
“No thanks.” He followed me into my bedroom, still smiling. I ignored him and kept looking for the ankle holster for my new snub-nosed, stainless-steel, Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum. Rubber grips that grew tacky when wet so the weapon did not slip in sweaty hands.
“What are you looking for?” Mark finally asked me. “Lost a blonde or something?”
Married men seem to think unmarried men have blondes hiding in various places around their pads. Mark walked to my closet, opened the door and peeked inside. “No blondes here.” He chuckled.
Before he searched anymore, I told him what I was looking for.
“What do you need that for?” he asked, still smiling.
“To carry my gun.” I don’t know whey I bothered to answer, but I did, as I looked under my bed.
“How many times I gotta tell ya,” Mark started in with his senior-partner-instructor voice, “you’re in Homicide now. You don’t need a gun. All you need is an extra ball-point pen.”
I grabbed my shoulder holster and my unneeded Magnum, and an extra pen, and we left. The shoulder holster wasn’t as comfortable as the ankle holster but it was better than listening to Mark while I looked. On our way out the door, Mark asked me if I had a good sleep. He was smiling again.
He was strange, sometimes. But no more strange than the rest of us, I guess. Police work does that to people. It makes bad comedians of us all. You need humor for a release.
“You gotta admit,” Mark said as he drove, “this is a helluva case, a once-in-a-lifetime caper, and it’s all ours.” He winked at me. “That is,” he went on, “until the administration decides to get involved. Hopefully, we’ll have this wrapped up by then.”
He didn’t have to remind me about how a case can be fucked up once politicians get involved. When I was on the road I saw many a big case go to the dogs after the mayor ordered the police chief to assign a task force to a case.
“You gotta realize,” Mark concluded as we pulled up at Headquarters. “there will never be another time like this again. When we’re old men we’ll be able to tell our grandkids about the way we solved this famous case.”
He sure was an optimist.
The mood in the Homicide squad room was anything but optimistic. Mason was waiting for us with his cigarette, skinny brown tie tonight and maroon sport jacket. Mason owned three sports coats, all with narrow lapels from long ago. One was navy blue, one was bright green and one was maroon. This was his day to wear his favorite maroon coat. Boudreaux was there, looking through his collection of police patches he kept in his lower desk drawer. Snowood was present, in a loud yellow cowboy shirt and blue jeans. He was humming his favorite tune, which was the theme from M*A*S*H, the movie, not the limp-dick TV show, a real upbeat tune entitled – Suicide Is Painless.
There were some Robbery detectives there also. They were a little upset because they had been pulled and told to work with us that day. If you ever want to piss off a Robbery detective, put him in Homicide for a while. He will suddenly have to be in on time, and will have to time to take care of ‘personal business’, such as meeting trampy women and other informants. But worst of all, they have to wear ties.
As the last ones arrived, Mason waited for everyone to settle down before he started in. He spoke in careful sentences and had a way of getting people to do whatever he wanted – by asking them, instead of telling them. And he only asked you to do what he did, which was work hard. He would be there every inch of the way, so how could you argue?
Mason was very tired as he gave out instructions. He would take most of the Robbery men back into the Quarter and give the place a more thorough canvass. He gave Mark a lead and asked if he’d take Boudreaux with him while he gave Snowood and I another lead.
Mark waited until he could get Mason on the side and quickly asked, “Why separate me and Dino?” It was a good question. I had the same one in mind.
Mason rubbed his tired eyes as he cigarette dangled precariously from his lower lip. “You get the best lead,” he told Mark, “and since Boudreaux came up with it, he goes too. I want Dino to handle the other lead because it’s in the Sixth District.” He looked over at me. “Figured Dino knows the Sixth fairly well.”
He made sense, as usual.
The lead Mark had sounded pretty good. It seems a recent parolee from Angola State Penitentiary, who had been sent up for three rapes in which he used a knife to carve his initials on the victims, had been seen in the Quarter the night before by a couple of First District patrolmen, prior to the murder. At least it was something to work on, and you never knew.
Snowood and I got lead number two, which involved a certain black citizen named Latman Whitley. It seems Latman was arrested on Bourbon Street the previous night – after the murder – on a warrant for failing to appear in court on a molesting charge. He was flagged in the police computer as a career criminal, know to be dangerous and always carried a knife. He had previous convictions for carrying concealed knives, rape, and armed robbery. He had just spent seven years in Angola for manslaughter, he had cut up his common-law wife.
And he was already back on the street that morning because some benevolent judge let Latman out on bail again with a quickie bond. Now, Latman had been arrested for failing to show up in court previously, so it makes a lotta fucking sense. One fucking judge puts a warrant out and another lets the asshole back out on bail, again.
“How’d we find out about this?” I asked Snowood as we walked out of the office to the elevator.
“Boudreaux,” he explained. “Seems Mason had him check the arrest register at Central Lockup this morning.”
On our way downstairs, I dropped by the Records Section and got a mug shot of Latman.
“I know this mook,” I told Snowood. “I’ve seen him around Prytania Street before, Euterpe Street, too.” Paul shrugged his shoulders as we climbed into his car. He had spent his uniformed years in Sleepy Hollow, the Seventh District, which was up against Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans East, with miles and miles of undeveloped swamp and some new subdivisions and apartment complexes, as well as the biggest swamp within the city limits of any American City – Bayou Sauvage.
The Seventh had none of the charm of the Sixth District, with its four huge housing projects and enough poor blacks to cast a few hundred Tarzan movies. The Bloody Sixth got its name from those blacks who bloody each other with great regularity on such lovely streets as Felicity (pronounced fell-a-city by the local mooks) and Melpomene (pronounced mell-pom-many) and Terpsichore (tap-si-core) and Euterpe (U-tap) and of course the ever popular C-L-ten. They call it C-L-ten because the street sign reads – CLIO, and so if you’re a snotty-nosed mook growing up in the Melpomene Project and saw a street sign like that, you’d call it C-L-ten.
I took another long look at Latman’s mug shot as Snowood drove off in the wrong direction. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “Don’t you know where it’s at?”
“Sure I do,” Paul claimed as he took the long way, the white people’s way to St. Charles Avenue. “This is the Sixth, ain’t it?”
“Take a left here,” I told him. After a few more turns, we pulled up at Freddie’s Blue Note Bar, corner Baronne and Euterpe.
Freddie’s was a social climbing bar, where the young men of society hang out. It occupied the bottom of a two-story wooden building that was painted bright blue. Freddie’s had no front door, ever. It was always open and always dark as hell inside, even in the middle of a bright Saturday. That was because old Freddie painted all the walls black a long time ago. The bar was also know as the ‘No Door Bar’ by some of the street thugs. There was no sign.
I led the way into Freddie’s, with a cautious-stepping, country-assed Snowood following close behind. As I stepped in, I saw three black men playing pool on the only t able in the place. There was a large, fat black whore sitting at the bar but I didn’t see Freddie.
“Freddie,” I called out as I kept moving in. I glanced at the pool players who were checking us real hard. I ignored them as I stepped up to the bar. “Oh, Freddie!” I called out again. “It’s the police.”
An old, bald-headed man with a face that was actually black, instead of dark brown, stepped out of the back room behind the bar. He came and said, “Say what?”
I smiled at Freddie and he took a couple of seconds to recognize me.
“Well, I’ll be,” Freddie said a moment later. “You sure look different.”
“I know,” I agreed as I leaned my hands on the bar. That was the first time Freddie had seen me out of uniform. I glanced over my shoulder at Paul, who was busy keeping an eye on the pool players. I turned back to Freddie and took out the mug shot of Latman and handed it to him. “I’m in Homicide now,” I told Freddie as he looked at the picture. “Know what Homicide means?” My voice was loud enough for the pool players to hear we weren’t narcs – not that narcs ever wore a coat and tie get-up.
“Means killin’,” Freddie answered correctly. He handed the picture back to me and said he never saw the man before. So I thanked Freddie and walked out, with Snowood right behind. On my way out, I waved good-bye to the pool players and winked at the fat whore at the bar. She smiled broadly at me. God, I missed the Sixth District already. Where else were there such nice funkball bars?
“Well, where to next?” Snowood asked as he jumped into his car.
I let him pull away from the curb and down the street before I pointed to the nearest pay phone. “Pull up over there,” I said to him. I stepped out of the car, dialed Freddie’s number and waited for the old man to answer.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Yeah,” Freddie answered. “Dat was Latman. He stays on Tap-si-core by Coliseum. Big green house. He downstairs in front.”
“He come see you much?” I asked.
“Sometimes. But mostly he go to Fade-Out.”
“Thanks, Freddie,” I added, “Means killin’? You got that act down pat.”
“They thinks I’m a chump.” He snickered and hung up.
As I stepped back to the car, I remembered how working with Stan-The-Man paid off. Stan and Freddie went back a long way. Most Sixth District street people wouldn’t piss on a cop if he was on fire, much less talk to one, or ever give information to one of us. But Stan saved Freddie’s ass one time by putting a certain pie-faced dick head in Charity Hospital after the dick head went after Freddie with a pool stick.
And when that same dick head returned to Freddie’s after he was released, Stan put the zap on him again, just for setting foot in Freddie’s. Sometimes one ass-kicking wasn’t enough. But a second one from Psycho Stan usually got people’s attention.
So we get along fine with Freddie. We stayed away and let him gamble, run his whores, deal a little pot from his back room and we got information. It was a bargain.
“Who’d you call?” Snowood asked when I jumped back in the car. He took a fresh dip and put it between his teeth and lip, then let it sit a second before spiting a gob of brown shit out the window.
I told him what Freddie had said about Latman.
“That’s fuckin’ good.” Paul was impressed as he wheeled toward Terpsichore Street. He let out another big gob of shitty-looking spit as we pulled off Baronne Street.
He was easily impressed. But if there was one thing I knew, it was the Sixth. It was the best place to grow up as a cop. Smack in the middle of the city, the Sixth was sandwiched between the rich uptown section and the downtown business district. The Sixth had everything, from the plush, well-manicured lawns of the Garden District to the four big housing projects, known to Orleanians as places to avoid, like the plague. The Melpomene was the biggest housing project in the Sixth, then there was the Magnolia, the St. Thomas, and the unique and world-famous Calliope Housing Project, where the only grass that grew, grew in pots that were hidden from the view of the ‘ma-fuckin’ police.”
Whoever invented housing projects should be fucking hanged. Putting all those poor and uneducated people together had produced one result, more poor and uneducated people. There is nothing more depressing in the whole world than Christmas in the housing project, where runny-nosed little kids play in the streets with no hope in their eyes.
There are no fences around the projects to keep anything in or, and when they’re old enough, the kids can walk out. Only by that time they are already lost in the fleeting pleasures of drugs and sex and the easier way of just stealing.
Some parts of the Sixth were dark even in the brightest hours of daylight, like alleys in the projects, like dark wharves along the river, and like Freddie’s Bar.
The Sixth had everything you’d want to see as a cop fresh out of the Police Academy, so you grew up fast. And you grew up hard. You went from calling them blacks, to calling them scumbags, to calling them their fit and proper Sixth District name of mook.
A mook was different than a black man. You could tell a mook by the vacant look in his eyes. A mook was hopelessly uneducated and usually poor because it was easier to steal than work steady. Stealing wasn’t steady but it was the fastest way. A mook was usually of the Negro persuasion, but there were many white mooks, too.
A black man may one day go to school and become a doctor. But a mook was nothing more than an animated cadaver, just hanging around until it was his turn to visit THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS at Tulane and Broad.
•
Latman wasn’t at his house. And since he didn’t work, he was either in a bar or leaving a bar or heading for another bar. Paul and I stepped off the front porch of the house in which Latman stayed. Paul spit on the white steps and left his calling card.
He spit again just outside the Fade-Out Bar at the corner of Melpomene and Prytania Street, right next to a famous New Orleans street sign. the street sign, with the words ‘Melpomene’ and ‘Prytania’ printed on it was where a mook named Jeffery Vick died one night long ago.
Jeffery Vick was shot in the Fade-Out Bar on a certain Saturday night. He had stumbled out of the bar and fallen against the street sign. Some college kid happened by and took a quick picture before getting the hell out of there. The picture wound up on the front page of the morning paper, instant fame.
When Stan and I arrived in our neat blue uniforms, the cameraman was gone. Everybody was gone. There wasn’t a soul in or around the Fade-Out, not even a bartender. Ole Jeffery was there by himself, looking stupid as hell, with his tongue hanging out and rigor mortis waiting around the corner for him.
All by himself, Jeffery had been a busy man in the Fade-Out that night. He had six highballs, drank three cans of cold beer, played the juke box, smoked five cigarettes simultaneously and had enough time to shoot himself. He fired his gun and ran around in front of it far enough to leave no powder burns, and dispose of the gun before the police arrived. That was all done before he staggered outside and expired against that street sign that Paul Snowood so rudely spit upon.
Yes, the Fade-out was a very familiar place to anyone who wore little silver sixes on the collars of their blue uniforms. It was familiar – and unlike Freddie’s – dangerous. It was a place where you kept a wary eye out before you even got out of your car. I warned Paul before we stepped in, and he kept both eyes sharp as I tried to get the attention of the bartender.
There were two pool tables in the place and seven black men who stopped playing when we entered. They stared at us, pool cues in hand. A couple other blacks were sitting at a table. They got up slowly and moved to the far end of the bar. Paul and I remained close to the door, just in case.
“Say you,” I called out to the bartender, who was pretending he did not see us. I had my badge and credentials in my left hand and waved them at him. He knew who the fuck we were all right, ID unnecessary. What other white boys in suits, carrying portable radios, would ever walk into the Fade-Out?
“Come here,” I instructed the bartender when he eventually glanced our way. I knew him. His name was Tyrone and I was sure he remembered me. Stan and I had arrested him once for shooting a customer. The customer didn’t die and did not show up in court to press charges, also Tyrone went free. Of course, the court gave Tyrone back his gun and sure enough, not a week later, Tyrone shot another customer.
It so happened that at that exact moment, a certain patrol car was passing outside and heard the shot. Two wild-ass policemen rushed into the Fade-Out and found the customer with a fresh wound in his arm and Tyrone hiding behind the bar. and nobody knew nothin’.
So Stan and I took it upon ourselves and closed down the place, locked the front door and ripped the place apart until we found Tyrone’s gun hidden behind the bar. Stan took the gun outside and destroyed it by beating it to death against Jeffery Vick’s street sign. And of course, Tyrone went free.
So Tyrone knew me when he approached, although he tried to hide behind those large dull eyes of his.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” I ordered him.
Tyrone smiled and put his hands on the bar across from where I stood. He had no front teeth and looked somewhat like night crawler, with those reddish-yellow eyes.
I knew it would be no use, but I asked anyway. “Where’s Latman?” I asked the toothless one.
“Don’t know no Latman,” Tyrone answered, looking down a the bar when he spoke. Lying mook couldn’t look me in the eye.
I showed him the mug shot and asked him again. He shook his head. At that moment, I heard the squeal of brakes outside. I glanced at my watch and smiled at Tyrone as four rather large uniformed officers, with silver sixes on their collars, walked in.
They put everyone against the wall and shook down all of Tyrone’s nice customers, while I shook down Tyrone. The somewhat illegal search surfaced three knives, all sorts of pills, enough tees and blues to knock out the senior class of Nicholls High School, and one .25 automatic. The uniformed men made two arrests and ran everyone else outside.
We stayed inside with Tyrone. “Now come on,” I chided him as he still stood in the position against the wall. “We’re all alone now,” I reminded him, “so just tell me the truth. I know damn well you know Latman and you know where he’s at. So just tell me and save us all a lot of trouble.”
Tyrone said nothing and scaring him wasn’t about to work, so I tried something else.
“Say, Tyrone, don’t your momma stay over on Dryades Street?”
He said nothing. He’d see his share of Cagney movies and he knew he was a tough guy.
I turned to one of the Sixth district men and told him where Tyrone’s mama lived, “above the cleaners, on Dryades, next door to Snookums Grocery.”
“Know the place,” the uniformed man replied.
“Go get her,” I came right back.
“Say, you leave my mama alone,” Tyrone snapped as the uniformed man started to leave.
“You’re in no position to give orders,” I reminded Tyrone as I pulled out my handcuffs. “We’re all going to your favorite police station,” I told him, “the one on Felicity Street. And if you won’t tell us where Latman is, maybe your mama will.”
“She don’t know nothin’,” Tyrone told me.
“I don’t give a fuck what she knows,” I said calmly. “We’re just gonna fuck with her like we fuck with everybody until you remember where Latman is.” I put the cuffs on Tyrone and started him toward the door. On our way out, Paul spit on the bar and left a large glob of shit behind.
“Say, man,” Tyrone said to me as we started out the door. “Why you doin’ this?”
“Because I’m a prick,” I answered him, ‘and because you’re a lying bastard and we both know it.” I spoke in that very calm voice I reserved for when I wanted to make myself very clear. I stared back into Tyrone’s glaring yellow eyes. “Why don’t you just tell the truth one day, why can’t you just tell the truth, whey do you gotta lie when the police ask you something? The truth just once.”
Tyrone continued to stare at me real hard.
I smiled at him and leaned closer. “What you got going with Latman?” I asked. “Could be Latman’s a punk? You like to fuck each other?”
Tyrone laughed at me. “Latman not a punk. He just stupid.”
“So you do know Latman.” I laughed back at him. “Now you know why we’re bringing you in. That’s a felony. Lying to the police during a criminal investigation.”
Tyrone stopped laughing and stopped walking. He huffed and looked down at the ground and said, “He at eat.”
I looked back at him and asked, “You mean Latman?”
“Yeah, he at eat.”
I took the cuffs off Tyrone and signaled to Paul that it was time for us to be leaving.
“Say,” Tyrone added, “You stop dat an goin’ to my mama’s.”
“He never went,” I told Tyrone over my shoulder. “It’s my turn to lie to you.” I pointed my finger at him, “Now we’re even.” I smiled. “But if you’re lying about Latman, I’ll be right back.”
I thanked the uniformed men before Paul and I drove off. Paul seemed relieved when we left, but he was a little puzzled. “Where to now?”
“We go get Latman.”
“You know where he is?” Paul asked.
“He at eat,” I repeated Tyrone’s statement.
Paul looked at me for a second. “And what the fuck does that mean?”
“It means, he at eat,” I said, unblinking.
“I think you been around these ass-holes too long,” Paul concluded as I told him which way to go. We finally pulled up at the corner of Euterpe and Dryades. I got out and Paul followed. As I stepped around the corner, I turned to Paul and pointed to a sign across Dryades Street. It was a big yellow sign with the word EAT hand-printed in bold black letters.
“He at eat,” I said to Paul.
Paul coughed up some more brown shit and started laughing.
“I told you,” I went on, “he at eat!” I pointed to the sign again. “Don’t you just love the fuckin’ Sixth?”
•
EAT wasn’t a restaurant. It was a soup kitchen of sorts. It had a cafeteria walkway in front and long rows of tables for customers to munch their two-dollar meals and cold drinks. It had a regular clientele of bums and other degenerates. It was a nice place to visit, but I would never eat there.
Latman Whitley was sitting alone at the end of one of the tables. He was finished eating but was still sipping his cold drink when I sat next to him, placing my portable radio on the table next to his plate. Latman looked at me as I showed him my badge and credentials. I asked him a couple quick questions and received some slow, slurred answers. Latman had what was commonly called a ‘slow brain’ in the projects. Which meant that not only was he stupid, he was slow.
Snowood added little to the conversation. He began to hum his suicide song again. And while he hummed and Latman slurred his answers, I fished for a couple simple facts.
“Just tell me where you were last night?” I asked. “About eleven o’clock?” It was the third time I had to ask the question.
And for the third time I got the same answer, “Jail.” The Fuck-head kept insisting he was in jail at eleven.
I turned to Paul and said, “Guess we should bring him in.”
“What if he pukes in my unit?” was Paul’s reply.
I asked Latman again, and again he insisted he was in jail before eleven. He told me he just got out that morning and couldn’t understand why we didn’t know that.
A long time ago I learned that when a mook insists, he just may be right. And it was easy enough to check out. I left Latman with Paul and moved over to the pay phone at the rear of EAT and dialed Central Lockup. After I checked twice, I had all I needed.
“Come on,” I told Paul when I stepped back. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.
“What about Stupid here?” Paul asked as I started away.
“Leave him, just fuckin’ leave him.”
Paul waited until we were in the care before he asked the obvious.
I answered him with a question, “Boudreaux was the one who came up with this, huh?”
“Yeah, he went to Central Lockup and checked it out,” Snowood answered and started to laugh. “What’s the matter, old Boudreaux fuck up again?”
“Well, somebody did,” I said in disgust. “We just spent three hours tracking down a man who was arrested at nine fifty-five last night. At nine fifty-five, our victim was still in Pierre’s Bar.”
Paul continued laughing, spit out the window. “That fuckin’ Boudreaux will fuck up anything.” He started laughing louder. “Did you hear about the time Boudreaux put out a warrant on a dead man?”
“No.” I shut my eyes and leaned back in the seat while Paul told me the delightful story of how a warrant was issued on a dead man.
“Seems ole Boudreaux was so bent on solving a particular murder case, “ Paul began. he told me how Boudreaux always believed the first thing he was told about anything.
“He never checked up on anything either,” Paul went on, “so it was easy for him to put out a warrant on a dead man. Boudreaux was told that a certain man named Tom Quick was the killer. So Boudreaux secured an arrest warrant for a man who had been dead two years.
“Then the ass-hole contacted the Picayune reporter in the press room, on his own, and gave the reporter an old mug shot and the story on Tom Quick. And sure enough, it hit the papers the next day that we were looking for Tom Quick and had an arrest warrant for committing a recent murder.
“Well, the Quick family was quick enough to call the paper right away to tell them that Tom could be found in St. Vincent De Paul Cemetery. And when the reporter gave the information to Boudreaux, he refused to believe it until Mason took him to the cemetery and introduced him to Tom Quick’s headstone.”
That was the story.
“And how does he last?” I asked.
“Civil Service.” Paul Laughed so hard he almost swallowed his Skoal.
“What a fuckin’ waste,” I added.
Paul composed himself a moment and chuckled. “I don’t think it was a waste of time, we got to meet a few interesting people, didn’t we?”
I opened my left eye. “The big whore in Freddie’s right?”
He laughed even harder.
•
Paul Snowood and Mark Land seemed to enjoy their work. That was something I had to learn from them. They each had another quality I had to pick up on quickly. They could talk to people. Not like the way I talked to people – like a street cop – but with patience.
Snowood was very laid back and that helped him. On our first suicide case I watched as Paul talked to the family in a patient and comfortable way. I had to learn that. In Homicide, you talked a lot differently to people than you did in the Sixth.
You had to almost pamper them in Homicide. Anything to get the right information, you eased it out of them. Paul was good at that. Mart was even better. Surprising as hell watching that grizzly bear morph into a teddy bear.
I sat with Mark one evening after a typical mook-barroom killing and watched as he coaxed and pampered and convince the killer to give a statement in full detail. Mark also got the killer to give us the murder weapon and the names of two witnesses. Sometimes you have to build a case against someone with their own help.
“There’s nothing better than a confession,” Mark said to me that evening. “Especially a confession on tape. Because our D.A.’s office ain’t the brightest in the world and you gotta tell them a story before they’ll listen. All the circumstantial evidence in the world don’t make the D.A. listen like a confession.
“You gotta get down to the criminal’s level,” Mark added. “To get a good confession, you gotta get close to them, almost become friends with them, and maybe they’ll tell you enough for you to send them to Angola forever. Or the electric chair.”
I had a lot to learn.
•
When Paul and I got back to the office, I found Mark sipping coffee with a disgusted look on his face. Boudreaux was already gone. Mark told me how Cal had sent him on a wild goose chase also. Mark had found the parolee who was in the Quarter, but the man was on crutches with a cast from his ankle to his crotch.
“Fuckin’ Boudreaux,” Mark muttered between sips.
“You’re fuckin’ right,” Paul agreed.
“So,” I said, “where to from here?”
Mark took a deep breath and noted we had to handle the registrations of the cars parked in the area, to check the list of known deviants, and of course we could run down the residents in the area of the murder who had criminal records. We’d start in the morning.
The fuckin’ killer was out there. All we had to do was find him.
It was Saturday night and I was tired as hell but there was no way I was not going to keep my date with Jessica. I had been spending less and less time with her lately and being tired wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t about to let another Saturday night slip away from us.
I took a long shower but even that didn’t revive me. I was that tired. All I felt like doing was curling up and sleeping. But instead, I splashed cologne on my face, put on the light gray shirt and black pleated pants she had given me for my birthday. Then I gave myself a good look in the mirror. I looked tired. I also needed a haircut. In that mirror, my very Italian face stared back at me, looking older by the day. My Mediterranean shade of skin kept me from looking as pale as I felt. but there were gray hairs peeking out from between my dark hair.
It was fortunate that my VW knew the way to Jessica’s house by itself, because I must have yawned twenty times on the way. It was a route my car and I had taken hundreds of times in the last two years, to that one-story brick house in the Lakeshore subdivision. it wasn’t a fancy neighborhood, regular middle-class houses built new in the fifties and sixties, about a mile from Lake Pontchartrain. It was a nice quiet house that Jessica lived in with her father.
My car parked itself in its usual parking spot in front and I slowly moved to the door. I was only a half hour late which wasn’t bad, considering.
She opened the door before I even knocked and greeted me with those very green eyes of hers. She had a way of looking at me that made me feel like I had just returned from doing something I should not have. She took a long look at me, shook her head and sighed before turning around to get her purse from the couch. She was telling me I was late, again.
I watched her move to the couch, watched her hips move beneath her tight red skirt. There was a long slit up the front of the skirt that reached halfway up her thigh. And I could see that smooth thigh plainly when she turned back to me. She wore a silky white top that was cut low around her nice round breasts. She looked great beneath all that long dark hair.
I looked into her eyes as she moved back to me. I looked for something in her eyes, and it was still there. It had been there for a while, even before I transferred to Homicide, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. But it was there all right, a look of fear, a foreboding, a sadness in her eyes because she felt it was slipping away. We didn’t talk about it. Maybe we should have.
We had a quiet dinner at a Chinese Restaurant and then went to a movie at the Robert E. Lee Theater, which had the most comfortable seats of any theater in the city, which was all I needed. she woke me with a nudge after the movie was over.
“Come on,” she said, “it’s over.”
“Thanks,” I answered as I stretched and yawned.
“You just want to take me home?” she asked with those disappointed eyes.
“No,” I answered as we stepped from the theater into the warm night air. There was a nice breeze coming off the lake. The breeze was warm and wet and it felt fresh on my face, so I left the windows down as I drove back downtown to my apartment next to City Park.
I made some coffee for myself and some hot chocolate for Jessica while she kicked of her high heels and turned on the television. When I stepped back into my living room she was curled up on the couch.
I curled up next to her and it did not take long before I was running my fingers through her hair and kissing her softly on her neck. Then I kissed her mouth not so softly as we both slowly reclined on the couch. I ran my and over the tightness of her skirt and the smooth silkiness of her stockinged legs. My hands traced the familiar curves of her body until I reached her breasts. I rolled my fingers gently over them and began to unbutton her blouse.
She rolled beneath me as I removed her bra and began to kiss, then gently suck, the small nipples of her full breasts. I cupped my hands around each and squeezed gently as my mouth moved from one nipple to the other. I kissed her up and down from breast to mouth to breast again.
I worked her skirt up until it was above her waist and looked down at the length of her legs and her thin white panties beneath the pantyhose. She spread her legs as I climbed on top of her and began to slowly move against her.
I could feel the tightness growing between us as we rubbed, as she moved against me – at first gently and then harder and harder until there was no use in clothes. Her breath was deep and hard in my ears and I kissed her hard before sitting up. I pulled her up to me and unbuttoned her skirt and tossed it across the room, then I tossed her blouse and bra after it. I ran my mouth down to her navel as I pulled her pantyhose and panties down all in one. And as she stepped from them and we moved to my bedroom, I threw my clothes off on the way.
Jessica lay down on my bed, on her back, the light from the living room falling on her body, illuminating her from the waist down while the rest of her remained in semi-darkness. I moved to her and kissed her lips as my hand began to run over her body – from her neck to each breast, to her thighs. Slowly, I kissed my way down to those breasts and then traced my hand down past her thighs to her knees, and then up again, deliberately skirting her soft pubic hair.
I took her thighs and spread them as I kissed each leg again and again, moved my fingers up between her legs and began to rub them into her gently, in and out very slowly as I kissed my way up then down the length of her body. I looked at the dark hair between her legs and then up at her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth half open. I quickly moved up to her mouth and plunged my tongue inside as I climbed onto her.
I took my time, moving within her, moving slowly and firmly. I took the time to hold myself back, to hold it all in until her movements grew into quick rhythms and she gasped in my ear, “Come on, babe, come on.”
It had been a while and it felt so good.
I thought I would fall asleep right away. But I did not. I think Jessica did because I could feel her soft easy breath on my neck as she lay snuggled in my arms. But I could not sleep. Not right away.
•
Jessica and I were very much alike, maybe too much alike. We were of the same clay, the same mold, the same city, same police families, same Italian upbringing – Catholic schools, po-boys, and Barq’s root beer-with-seafood summers.
We even looked a little alike with the dark Italian looks and small bodies. We liked the same things and seemed to dislike the same things. And yet it was slipping. I could feel it and could not understand it. Not really. There were strains at the edges.
I remember when we first started out together, she told me she didn’t want to lead her mother’s life of loving and then leaving a man who was forever a cop. And maybe that was it. She was leading her mother’s life. And I was leading my father’s life. so where did that leave us?