Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

He changed the subject. “LaPorte was one of the great ones out there, like John Vann and Tim Randall.”

In a flat voice, she said, “People change.”

“And you’re right. I still have trouble believing he made a wrong turn. Or your dad.”

She turned away. “Their whole generation did, yours too.” She faced him and stood up straight and her voice chiseled away her fugue of hormones. “Now it’s up to my generation to square it.”

She wasn’t talking about generations. She was talking about herself. Broker flipped his cigarette past her in an arc of sparks that briefly scouted her profile. Was it a warrior-virgin he saw in those taut, pure features? Could that be the source of her strength?

An hour later he was asleep on the couch and awoke suddenly to find her sitting over him, watching him. She turned on the lamp and he saw a stealthy shadow of intimacy peek from behind her crinkled eyes.

She leaned over and kissed him on the lips, a chaste kiss on the surface, but a little way down he felt the jolt of quiet longing.

“You’re not like a lot of guys, but you really don’t know anything about women, do you?” She winced fondly and rose and went away without finishing the thought.

B roker has stepped across the origin ofMississippi where it trickles out of Lake Itasca and now, from five thousand feet, he sees the other end of the river drape a sluggish coil around Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans squeezes between the lake and the river like a dark sponge soaking up the downhill poison of a continent. Farther out, the Gulf horizon stews in a muddy ultramarine haze that nurses the energy of sharks and hurricanes .

A place where it never freezes can never be clean .

The Northwest flight bumped down its flaps and the wheels jerked for terra firma. Broker sat back and gripped the armrests. Getting older, he had discovered, meant worrying that the Rodneys of the world were overrepresented in the machinist union that serviced jet engines.

While the other passengers deplaned he took some Tylenol. The infection in his thumb smacked festered lips, anticipating the heat and a bumper crop of germs.

He had a thousand dollars in his pocket, room reservations for the night in a French Quarter hotel, and a gold tiger tooth combing the sweat worming through his chest. He felt naked in his muggy clothes. As per airline regulations, his weapon resided in the baggage compartment, unloaded; the ammunition packed separately in a shaving kit bag under the eye of the Detroit Airport Police.

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

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

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

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

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

“Minnesota.”

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

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

Broker laughed and gave the cabby LaPorte’s address.

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

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

“Ain’t hot. Hot come out at night.”

They rode a freeway, turned off and passed acres of white ramshackle tombs. “Cemetery,” said the cabby. “Above ground. This whole fallin’-down motherfucker built in a swamp.”

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

“You going to the wedding?” asked the cabby.

“What?”

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

“Why’s a rich guy like LaPorte rent his house out for weddings?”

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

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

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

“Drive around the block and up the alley,” said Broker.

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

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

“What’s behind the hedges?” asked Broker.

“Swimming pool.”

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

The cabby nodded. “Doniat. On Chartiers. That’s a nice place, too.”

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

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

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