James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

Tony walked past me out the door, his smile welded on his face, and nudged me in the side with his thumb. We walked side by side back toward our cell. He kept his face straight ahead. He whistled a disjointed tune and then said, "Do you know who that guy was?"

"No, I don't remember him."

"He did a snitch with an ice pick in Angola for twenty bucks. Let's play a lot of checkers today, hang around the cell, talk about books, you get my drift?"

"You're a piece of work, Tony."

"What I am is too old for this shit."

But our worries about the group in the weight room were unnecessary. Tony's lawyer had us sprung by noon, all charges dropped. Nate Baxter had not had probable cause to stop and search us, Tony's lawyer produced the permit for Tony's pistol, and the charge against me-interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty-was a manufactured one that the prosecutor's office wouldn't waste time on. The only loser was Jess, who had his.410 shotgun pistol confiscated.

We picked up the Lincoln at the car pound and Tony treated us to lunch at an outdoor café on St. Charles. It was a lovely fall day, seventy-five degrees, perhaps, with a soft wind out of the south that lifted the moss in the oak trees along the avenue. A Negro was selling snow cones, which people in New Orleans call snowballs, out of a white cart, with a canvas umbrella over it, on the esplanade. The dry fronds of a thick-trunked palm tree covered his white uniform with shifting patterns of etched lines. I heard the streetcar tracks begin to hum, then farther up the avenue I saw the street car wobbling down the esplanade in a smoky cone of light and shadow created by the canopy of oaks.

"When we were kids we used to put pennies on the tracks and flatten them out to the size of half-dollars," Tony said, wiping the tomato sauce from his shrimp off his mouth with a napkin. "They'd still be hot in your hand when you picked them up."

"That's not all you done when you were a kid," Jess said. "You remember when you and your cousins found them arms behind the Tulane medical school?" Jess looked at me. "That's right. They got this whole pile of arms that was supposed to be burned in the incinerator. Except Tony and his cousins put them on crushed ice in a beer cooler and got on the streetcar with them when all the coloreds were just getting off work. They waited until it was wall-to-wall people, then they hung a half dozen of these arms from the hand straps. People were streaming all over the car, trampling each other to get out the door, climbing out the windows at thirty miles an hour. One big fat guy crashed right on top of the snowball stand."

"Hey, don't tell Dave that stuff. He's going to think I'm a ghoul or something," Tony said.

"Tony used to flush M-80s down the commode at the Catholic school," Jess said. "See, the fire would burn down through the center of the fuse. They'd get way back in the plumbing before they'd explode, then anybody taking a dump would get douched with pot water."

People at the other tables turned and stared at us, openmouthed.

"You finished eating, Jess?" Tony said.

"I'm going to get some pecan pie," Jess said.

"How about bringing the car around? I've got to get home," Tony said.

"What'd I do this time?"

"Nothing, Jess. You're fine."

"You make me feel like I ought to be in a plastic bubble or something. I was just telling a story."

"It's okay, Jess. Just get the car," Tony said. Then after Jess was gone, he said to me, "What am I going to do? He's the one loyal guy I got. When it comes down to protecting me, you could bust a chair across his face and he wouldn't blink."

A few minutes later Jess came around the corner in the convertible and waited for us in front of the restaurant. Leaves blew under the wire wheels.

"You guys drop me by my apartment so I can get my truck," I said. "I'll be back out to your house a little later."

Tony grinned. "I bet you're off to see Bootsie. Tell her hello for me," he said.

His presumption that Bootsie should have been uppermost in my mind was right-but she wasn't. After they left me at my apartment on Ursulines I called Minos at the guesthouse.

"I'm sorry you had to spend a night in the bag. How was it?" he said.

"What do you think?" Through the window I could see my neighbor's bluetick dog urinating against a banana tree in the flower bed.

"Look, I've got some news about Boggs, some of which I don't understand. An informant told our Lafayette office that Boggs was in New Iberia two days ago. What would he be doing in New Iberia?"

"Where'd your snitch see him?"

"In a black neighborhood, out in the parish. Why would Boggs be in a black neighborhood?"

"Tony said Boggs told him he was going to blackmail a Negro woman who owned a hot-pillow joint. It had something to do with the murder of a redbone. I think the redbone was a migrant-labor contractor named Hipolyte Broussard. But Boggs told all this to Cardo before he ripped off the coke out on the salt. I don't know why he'd be interested in some minor-league blackmail when he's holding a half-million dollars' worth of cocaine."

"I don't either. Anyway, we have some other information, too. We've got some taps on the greaseballs over in Houston. It's not an open contract on Cardo anymore. Boggs has got the hit. It's fifty grand, a big-money whack even for these guys. But they want it to go down in the next week."

"Why the hurry?"

"They're afraid of him. Tony C. isn't one to take prisoners. One guy on the tape says it might have to be a slop shot. Have you heard that one before?"

"Yes."

"There's no innocent bystanders. His wife, his kid, anybody around him, they're all targets if necessary. Dave, if Boggs was in New Iberia, do you think it has something to do with you?"

"Why?"

"Who has more reason to want you off the board? It's turned around on him. I bet he gets up thinking about you in the morning."

"Maybe."

"Look, I want to push this stuff to a head. Can you get a wire into Cardo's house?"

"I think so."

"Either you can or you can't, Dave."

"I can try, Minos."

"Once again I'm getting a strong impression here of a lack of enthusiasm."

"What do you expect? I'm a hired Judas goat. You want me to tell you I like it?"

He paused a moment; then he said in an even voice, "We hear a big load of coke is going to hit town in three or four days. A lot of it is going to end up as crack in the welfare projects."

I looked out the window into the courtyard, where my neighbor was trying to leash his dog in the flower bed.

"Are you there?"

"Yeah," I said.

"You know the scene. A human life isn't worth a stick of chewing gum in those places. All thanks to Tony C. and his friends."

"How do you want to work it?"

"Find out his connection with the shipment. Then we'll wire you. All we need is a statement that he's in on the buy or the distribution."

"All right."

"You sound like you've got something else on your mind."

"It's Kim Dollinger. I think somebody's got her out there twisting in the wind."

"Why?"

"She was terrified when we got busted yesterday."

"Who's she afraid of?"

"Tony, Nate Baxter, you guys. How should I know?"

"It's not us. You want us to pick her up?"

"She's a hard-nosed girl. She won't cooperate. Baxter let her walk. Why would he let her walk when he rousted the rest of us? It was a good opportunity to squeeze her."

"From what I hear about this guy, he's about as complicated as an empty closet. Save yourself a lot of grief and don't make a mystery out of morons."

"If I only had that clarity of line, Minos."

"Work on it. It'll come with time."

After I hung up, I shaved, showered, and changed into a pair of clean gray slacks, a maroon shirt, combed my hair in the mirror, put a touch of Vaseline on the hard knot of stitches in my lip and head, and buffed my loafers.