Death Will Have Your Eyes (12 page)

“I toldja something
bad was going on over there.”

Square in the doorway, she still looked ahead, at me, but clearly her remark was addressed to someone in the room beyond. She wore stretch pants gone baggy at buttock and knee, a matching loose pullover aglitter with metallic threads and sequins. Her hair, crisped by decades of chemicals, was ambiguously mahogany, black, grayish-green.

A younger man stepped up behind her, drink in hand. High cheekbones of an Indian, Latinate bronze skin. His head rolled along her shoulder as he looked me over. He nodded, possibly in greeting, possibly in confirmation of everything he'd suspected, and withdrew.

“Could you tell me what you saw, Ms.…?”

“Cohen. And it's Mrs. But everyone just calls me Irene.”

I waited, but we seemed to have lost the thread somewhere, the train become derailed.

“What you saw,” I prompted. Then: “Irene.”

It was as though a switch, a relay, had clicked on.

“I was doing dishes. Quite a stack of 'em since Al ain't been feeling too good and I've been working all the hours I could get at the shop and ain't either of us been able to get around to dishes for a while. Window over the sink looks out on them apartments back there. There's all sorts that come and go back there, have for years. Some days it's as good a show as you're gonna find anywhere in town.”

She glanced over my shoulder. At the open door there across the alleyway, the blue curtain waving in the window.

“Two men come to the door. It was open just like it is now. Usually was—no air conditioning, you know? They had on suits, which ain't something you see a lot of 'round here, so naturally I know they got to be law of some kind, right? They knock on the door and when she comes to it the three of them stand there in the doorway talking a little, and then the one doing most of the talking just kind of pushes her on back in the room. The other one looks around him a minute, then he goes in too.”

“You see or hear anything else?”

“Not till they come back out I didn't.”

“How long was that?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes maybe. I'd finished the dishes by then. Al and I was taking the dog over by the park to do his thing. You know. So we're coming around the corner onto Camp and see these guys in suits coming out from behind the house with the woman.”

“This one.”

She looked at the photo.

“Could be her, yeah.”

“Did she appear to be struggling?”

“Not that you could tell. They was holding on to her arms, though, I'm pretty sure. One on each side. They got in a car, her and the guy who done the talking in back, the other guy in front, and drove off.”

“On up Camp? To the bridge ramp?”

She shook her head. “Turned back towards the river.”

“Do you remember what kind of car they were in, Irene?”

“Couldn't tell you. Never drove one, don't know a Ford from a John Deere.”

“Light or dark?”

“Oh, it was dark. Blue, almost black.”

“Was it a compact—a small car—or full size?”

She thought about it.

“Four doors, or just two?” I prompted.

“Oh, it had four. And it was big, like the law drives.”

“Thanks, Irene. You've been a great help.”

I had turned to go when she said, “You don't want to know about the other car, then?”

I looked back at her.

“As they were pulling away, a man stepped out from between houses. He got in a car parked down the street a ways and, near as I could tell, took out after them. Turned that same way, anyhow, and by then he was going a fair clip.”

“Did you get a good look at him?”

“Afraid not. Too far off for me. Don't think he was a
young
man, though, like those others. Moved more like me or Al, you know?”

“Could you tell how he was dressed?”

“Just pants, what they call slacks, I guess, light-colored. And a golf jacket kind of thing, a windbreaker. Dark shirt under it. One of them athletic shirts, I think.”

“And his car?”

“Blue.”

“Dark blue, or light?”

“Light.”

“Size?”

“Not as big as the other one, but not like those little foreign jobs either. The ones that look like lunchboxes.”

“Two doors?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Anything else?”

She thought about it. “Unh-unh.”

I thanked her and turned again to go.

Al's voice came from the room behind her.

“First car was a Continental, royal blue, '90 or '91. Rear axle's bad on it, and the cylinders are dirty. Other guy had him a Plymouth. Reliant, I think they call it. Nothing wrong with that one. Someone took good care of it. Body's some banged up, but hey, who cares? It's solid. Sound.”

I peered around the door. Al raised his drink to me.

“Man's as fine a mechanic as you'll find anywhere,” the woman said. “Or used to be anyhow, when he was able to work. Had a true gift. Lots of people said it, and they brought their cars to him from all over. I guess cars is the only thing he ever loved.”

She turned briefly away. The smile came back around with her. Her whole face had changed.

“'Cept me, of course.”

Oversexed and ever-ravenous,
nutria are virtually devouring the state's coastline, while both New Orleans and Louisiana politicians do
their
time-honored best to devour the rest.

Huey Long taught people down here a lot of things: every pot ought to have a chicken in it, every man was a king, no man should wear a crown. Probably the most enduring thing he taught (in those pre-Camelot days) was that a strong man could always go
around,
get things done
his
way. And it's been free-style, catch-as-catch-can politics in Louisiana ever since.

All of it confusing as hell, true—a constant, continuous upheaval for residents, absolutely impenetrable to everyone else—but there's no better place for calling in favors. Favors are understood in a big way down around New Orleans. And Johnsson's fifty-odd years in government added up to a hell of a lot of favors.

Networking, they call it now.

Yeah, I know all about fierce American individualism and independence. Natty Bumppo, mountain men, Thoreau, Huck Finn, cowboys, utopian communities, Chandler's dark knight, Holden Caulfield, hippies. Head out on the highway. Do your own thing. Go west till you've used that up, too. Just say no—like Bartleby. Just do it.

And I revere all that.

Nevertheless, half an hour later I had half a dozen parish and state agencies, the state police and every squad car in New Orleans on my dance card.

The Sikhs, for all their spiritualism, may be right: if you're poor, you're stupid. And if information's the currency of the day and you have access to it and don't use it, then
you're
stupid.

A call to Johnsson was all it took. He rang up a few senators and department heads, a committee chairman or two, and it started trickling down fast. Royal-blue Lincolns and Plymouth Reliants were being checked out all over: Algiers, Chalmette, LaPlace, Shreveport, even on into Mississippi and Alabama.

I sat in my hotel room fielding calls. The sixth one from NOPD shut it all down.

A Lincoln answering to my description was known to frequent a strip shopping center on Tchoupitoulas. Area patrols began noticing it after several ticketings for irregular parking; subsequently there'd been a minor collision involving the car, no real damage or injury, the incident dutifully reported by the other car's driver at time of occurrence.

It was like the click Emily Dickinson talked about, when she knew she had a poem. Or like Housman, who'd recite prospective lines while shaving in the morning, and when his beard hairs went on end, then he knew he had it.

That Lincoln felt like the shell my pea was under.

I took St. Charles up to Jefferson, then Jefferson towards the river till it dead-ended into Tchoupitoulas. The Continental was parked around the corner from Alfalfa Video, on a side street, well back from the intersection and from fire hydrants.

I pulled in behind and got out. Squatted for a close look. Both rear tires were worn badly on the inside.

The surrounding houses were shotgun doubles, set a couple of feet off the ground, with roofs that overhung narrow porches—galleries, they call them here. Potted plants crowded the nearest one: that didn't seem likely. Kids played on Big Wheels and plastic bikes before another across the street. An elderly black couple sat in lawn chairs on the gallery adjoining.

But next down, the gallery was bare, floorboards and steps showing little sign of use. Miniblinds lidded both front windows. A band of pink impatiens bordered the brick walkway. Grass in the door-size front yard had been clipped to a uniform half-inch and carefully edged at flowerbed, sidewalk, walkway.

I knocked, and a face canted out from behind the door as it opened. The face's black chevron of a monobrow tensed at its center.

“Yeah?”

“I apologize for disturbing you in your home,” I said.

“Yeah?” Same intonation.

“Mind your manners now,” came a voice from within. “Ask our visitor to step in, why don't you?”

Monobrow backed out of the doorway. I took a couple of steps. Behind him were two enforcers—bone-breakers, as they're called. Six-foot-two, two-forty or so, thighs and necks like tree trunks. Lots of good home cooking Sicilian style. Mind you, they didn't look too dangerous just now, what with the duct tape holding them in their chairs and the socks stuffed in their mouths.

Blaise sat on a straight-back chair with ovals of quilted padding at seat and back. Beside him on a spindly oval-topped table sat a cup and saucer and, as though it were just another common tea utensil, a small pistol, a Glock.

“David,” Blaise said. “I had a feeling you might be along shortly. If I'd been certain, I might have saved myself the trip.
Not
that I had anything better to do, you understand.”

He glanced at Monobrow, and nodded towards an armchair. Monobrow, who looked like a larval version of the other two, pale and somehow unformed, quickly sat. Vinyl creaked beneath him.

“Thank you,” Blaise said. He nodded at the enforcers. “I've never much cared for gagging a man. But these two insisted upon raising such a ruckus when they came around, they left me no choice.”

He smiled.

“Good to see you again, David.” He sipped tea from the cup beside him and set it precisely back into the saucer's concavity. “Outstanding tea, young man.
Mes compliments
.”

“Name's Donny,” Monobrow said. “And fuck you, you old fart.”

Blaise sighed. “They never get it, do they? The new generation. Remember when you only ran into professionals out here? Now you got kids who learned their trade from cop shows on TV. I still remember something you once told me. ‘In America, each new generation is a new people.'”

“Gertrude Stein: I remember. I also remember that the last time I saw you, you couldn't talk.”

“Yes. Well: things change, don't they?”

He glanced again at the two bone-breakers, at Monobrow.

“You have any idea who these jokers are?”

I shook my head. “Seem to be an awful lot of chickens loose in the yard. All of them pecking away at all the others.”

“The night I left, I woke up thinking you shouldn't be out here alone. And before I knew it, I'd said it out loud there in the room. Sound of my own voice scared the hell out of me. Also made me realize I was right, and I started packing.” He laughed. “Now I see I needn't have worried: you weren't alone at all. All
kinds
of company. These three aren't players, though. Strictly subcontractors, work for hire. We've talked things over, and they assure me they're off the case.”

Blaise nodded to a door at his left.

“She's in there. Sleeping. She's fine.
That's
what I was most concerned about.”

Once New Orleans
(Blaise told me as I saw Gabrielle and him off to their plane) had been a walled city. In place almost from the beginning, walls and forts endured for over a hundred years, though never in all that time were they of use in repelling attackers.

French maps as early as 1725 show a surrounding wall with small forts. Four years later following the Natchez Massacre, with New Orleanians thinking they might well be the next target of Indian attacks, a palisade flanked by a moat and small blockhouses with artillery went up. French Governor Luis Billouart de Kerlerec reported his restoration of these fortifications to the king; though when Louisiana passed into Spanish hands in 1762 and Governor Bernardo de Gálvez (who would become a hero of the Revolutionary War, driving the British summarily from the state) evaluated the fortifications, he found them laughable.

It was Governor Carondelet who, in 1794, consolidated these walls and forts. His predecessor had been run out of Louisiana by citizens who, though under Spanish rule, still considered themselves Frenchmen
au coeur,
and Carondelet was determined not to let things get out of hand. The fact that heads were rolling back in France, literally, helped support his resolve. That sort of thing might easily spread to the new world.

And so each of Governor Carondelet's days began with a tour of the fifteen-foot wall of mud going up at the city's perimeter, soon to be topped with palisades and fronted by a forty-foot moat. At the river, twenty feet high and studded with cannon, two pentagonal forts were erected: Fort St. Louis (at Canal Street) and Fort St. Charles (at Esplanade). Three additional forts protected the city's rear.

Facing the river, Forts St. Louis and St. Charles were far the most formidable. Yet from the first, walls and forts alike had been built as much to keep the French in, to keep them in every sense contained, as to repel outside forces.

By the time of Louisiana's sale to America in 1803, wall and forts were again crumbling. William Claiborne, the first American governor, reported that final demolition was made easier when on a dark night one of the rear forts was stolen in its entirety, presumably for use as firewood.