Elmore Leonard - Bandits

That’s what they did. Roy drove the Chrysler with Jack following behind and left it on Tchoupitoulas near Calliope, where they used to park cars for the World’s Fair. As Roy got in the Scirocco Jack was grinning, waiting to tell him, “It’s too bad we can’t stay and watch. Some guy’s gonna come along and take off with that Chrysler. Be driving down the street and wonder what in the hell that noise is, coming from the trunk. Like somebody pounding to get out. Or he hears a voice calling to him like it’s from far away, ‘Help, señor, help.’ ”

Roy said, “Delaney, you’re a weird fucker, you know it?”

Jack didn’t say anything. He felt pretty good, the way things were going.

THEY PARKED AT A CAB STANDon Bienville. Roy, who would never get over having been a cop, said it was all right; he knew the cabbies and if they didn’t like it, fuck ’em. The St. Louis Hotel was right across the street.

Jack sat at a table in the big center courtyard, ordered vodka and a scotch when the waiter finally appeared. He asked the waiter if it was a slow night. The waiter said it seemed to be. Where was everybody? The waiter said they must be out having a good time.

Out on Bourbon Street bumping into each other, the whole bunch of them aimless, probably thinking, this is it, huh? The street a midway of skin shows and tacky novelty shops. The poor guys at Preservation Hall and the other joints playing that canned Dixieland, doing “When the Saints” over and over for the tourists in the doorways. There was some good music around, if Al Hirt was in town or you found a group with Bill Huntington playing his standup bass or Ellis Marsalis somewhere. His boy Wynton had left town with his horn to play for the world.

It didn’t matter, there was enough to see and you could always eat. Maybe it was because he lived here he didn’t understand why anyone would bother with Bourbon Street. If he came to town from somewhere else he’d sit right here and watch the lights in the fountain as he sipped his drink, soothed, in the shade of magnolias and japonicas at night, the whole courtyard all the way up bathed in a pale orange glow.

If he came from out of town he would look at the upper floors, at the white porch railings that ran all the way around the four sides and see doors to guest rooms and dark shutters decorating the windows, the hallways up there open to the courtyard. He would sit here as he was sitting now and decide you wouldn’t necessarily be seen going into somebody else’s room, but it could give you a funny feeling, being exposed like that, standing with your back to this whole place.

The fundraiser was in 501, top floor, the suite in the alcove there, right off the elevator. The desk clerk said he was out.

Roy was checking to see if he knew any of the help. If he didn’t it would be the only hotel in the Quarter. Roy said it was good to have a lot of friends. Especially if they owed you. He used to have a girl friend who lived on Bienville up just past Arnaud’s, a call girl named Nola Roy said did a better lunch business than the restaurant. He said she was a pretty thing and sweet as could be till her life closed in on her. That was the trouble with broads. On the one hand they made the best snitches, they were born to be informants, especially whores. But on the other hand they became emotional and didn’t know when to shut up.

“Now that I know that,” Roy had said, “what the fuck am I gonna do with it here?” Telling Jack the story after they met at Angola and became friends.

“This was a sweet kid I’m talking about. Didn’t look atall like a whore. She was demure, had this little tiny voice. ‘Oh, Roy, I didn’t have you as my friend I’d be smacked out twenty-four hours a day.’ ”

“That’s all you were?”

“Hey, friends can go to bed, can’t they? Two people misunderstood at home. My old woman, Rosemary, all she did was bitch that I was never home. You see her, you’d know why. And Nola was married to a guy was a half-assed bookmaker. You probably knew him, Dickie Duschene, sometime they call him Dudu, had a place upstairs on Dauphine. He’s making book and she’s hooking, so they didn’t have what you call a home life. The deal was, I’d stop by and Nola’d tell me her troubles, or anything she might’ve heard would be of interest to me. You know, stuff she picked up on the street or from Dickie. And my part of the deal, I’d look out for her and wouldn’t hassle ’em none, let ’em go about their business. One day I’m over there she’s sniffling and nervous like she’s strung out or somebody died. I ask her, ‘What’s wrong, precious?’ Nola pulls a trash bag out of the closet has thirty grand in it, all fifties and hundreds. I tell her, ‘My, you been working your cute little tail off, haven’t you?’ She says Dickie gave it to her but she’s afraid to keep it in the apartment. She gets a john every once in a while will go through her things. She says some freak’s liable to rip her off, so would I keep it for her. She says the money’s from Dickie’s bookmaking and card games in that joint he had, place on Dauphine looked like it was boarded up. Okay, but something doesn’t smell right. He’s gonna let her keep thirty grand in a room guys walk in and out of you don’t know? I said, ‘Hey, Nola, bullshit.’ She says he did, honest. But then tells me a little more. She found out Dickie was going out on her with this nurse at Charity and Nola had a fit. Started breaking things over at his place, so he gave her the thirty grand to calm her down. Only it worked the other way, made her nervous.”

“He gave her thirty, the guy must’ve had a lot more.”

“That’s right, and the guy didn’t run that big of a book. But I take the money home and hide it in a good place, ’cause now I have this tremendous idea. Put the money to work, as the occasion arises, in my continuing fight against crime. Like using a confiscated car on surveillance? Use some of the scratch to pay off informants. Get these assholes tripping over each other to tell me stuff.”

“Don’t they lie to you?”

“Sure they do, it’s their nature. You got to jam a snitch, get him against the wall. Fella’s dealing against a third fall, he tells you where this other fella’s gonna be with a load of smack on him, only he ain’t there. So you tell the guy, ‘He ain’t there the next time, asshole, you gonna get triple-billed and go on up to ‘Gola.’ Now, the word’s on the street I’m paying off, shit, I got ’em lined up like I’m hearing confession. Listen, I’d get phone calls in the middle of the night, which Rosemary would answer on account of her sour fucking disposition kept her awake. And if it was a broad on the phone that was cool, ’cause then Rosemary wouldn’t even look at me for about a week. I got mostly shuck, but not all.”

“You have kids, Roy?”

“My babies are grown up and gone, two fine girls, but they come to see me.” Meaning, to Angola.

“Go on with the story.”

“Talking about snitches… there was a case I was working on, a Wells Fargo stickup in Jackson, Mississippi, where some of the money was showing up in New Orleans. The feds already had a lead on four local guys they’re watching. But the feds don’t have any police experience, they use computers, and a computer isn’t worth shit on the street, to get information. You have to get down there in the sewer with the assholes and talk to ’em man to man. One of my ace informants tells me to see a guy at Charity in there with a gunshot wound he says was from a hunting accident. The feds ask him if he hunts with ninety-grain .38s from a Smith and Wesson service revolver. See, they know one of the guys in the Wells Fargo heist was shot on the way out. This guy in the hospital, his wound is through and through, but he doesn’t know that. See, they don’t have a slug, they’re just trying to bullshit him. The day I go see the guy, first thing in the morning, I’m too late. During the night some guy walked in his room, put a pillow over his face, and shot him five times through the pillow. Leaves the gun and walks out. The guy in the next bed saw the whole thing. The nurse tells me they have to change his sheets every time somebody walks in the room now he doesn’t know. I think, hey, this nurse is a cool broad. I begin to wonder about her and a couple days later I meet her for a drink, place there on Gravier, when she gets off her shift. I’m employing now what’s called the swag approach to police work, a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. We sit down, order Manhattans, the drinks arrive, and I say, ‘Say, how’s your friend Dickie Duschene?’ She just about chokes on her cherry, can’t fucking believe it. The cool nurse is no longer cool. We make a deal and by the time she’s on her fourth Manhattan I’ve been apprised of the fact the guy that got whacked in the hospital expected it, saw it coming while, in the meantime, he was falling in love with the nurse and telling her where he stashed a hundred and fifty big ones, in a locker at the airport. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she gave it to her boyfriend, Dickie, for safekeeping. You see what’s coming? Honest to Christ. Dickie gives Nola thirty grand to keep peace in the family. She gives it to me and I’m using part of the take from the same fucking heist I’m in ves tigating.”