Now Let's Talk of Graves (25 page)

That same table had been the site of many a meeting. There, over ziti with rapini, the decision had been made to do Mickey Boy Gambino. Over braciola, Ralphie “the Ear” Zambolini's fate had been sealed. And it had been a first course of bruschetta the boys were enjoying on that night when Joey's uncle Carlos decided it would be just the ticket to help D.A. Jim Garrison implicate Clay Shaw, the director of the Trade Mart who'd renovated the apartments next door, in the Kennedy imbroglio.

But that was all way before Lavert's time, and even before that the oak table had sat in Carlos's mother's kitchen, and her mother's before her in Messina.

It wasn't just fancy Uptown citizens who furnished their houses with antiques, who knew about keeping things in the family.

“Hey, Gino, you tasted my man's gravy?” Joey was saying now.

“Sure, I tasted his fucking gravy. Lotsa times.”

Joey's heavy glass tumbler of Valpolicella hit the table with a thud. Gino's shirtfront looked like Ralphie the Ear's when they'd finished with him.

“Hey!”

“Hey your fucking self, talking 'bout my man's fucking gravy. It's my
mother's
gravy. You treat it with respect.”

Gino knew when to stand up for himself and when to sit down. Speaking about Joey's mother, even inadvertently, it was best to do the latter.

“Sorry, Joey. I didn't mean nothing.”

“Okay, you apologized to me, now apologize to my man.”

Lavert looked up across the top of the counter, steady gaze, nothing on it. He knew how hard this was for Gino, didn't want to have to pay the price for it sometime down the road, when Gino, with a fresh round in his Uzi, might mistake him for some other nigger, as he'd later explain.

“Sorry,” Gino muttered.

“Right.” Lavert gave him a little smile. No teeth.

“That's more like it.” Joey was in good spirits again, rubbing his hands together, pouring more wine, grinning like somebody'd just given him a G-man for Christmas. Happier than when Lavert had figured out the recipe for the spaghetti sauce from tasting Joey's mom's. Pretending that the penciled scribbles she'd sent along would do the trick, when they both knew she wouldn't give him ice in hell. Presuming to cook for
her
Joey. She'd show him.

She'd left out half the ingredients.
All
the secrets.

But she didn't know what a palate she was up against with Lavert.

Joey was telling the story now. Of course, it was
his
mama. He was allowed.

“And she couldn't believe it. He'd even got the cloves.”

“Stuck in the onion.” Lavert nodded.

“Right!” boomed Joey. “He figured out you don't chop up the onion. Let it sit whole stuck with cloves in the gravy while it's cooking, then take it out. She liked to have, Holy Mother of Jesus”—Joey crossed himself—“died.”

“But after that—” Lavert added.

“After that”—Joey was pounding on the table with his fist now, jostling glasses—“she made him an honorary member of the family. She comes over and sits right here”—he pointed at a stool near the range—“and tells my man secrets.”

“We trade,” Lavert said. “Together we are one mean team.”

The boys knew what they were supposed to do.

They howled.

Then wine flowed all around.

“So, Joey,” said his little brother, Pasquale, “you pleased with the way things going down?”

“I hate to say it.” Joey knocked on the wood table. “I'm happy. We moving more product than ever, squashed those flicking gamooshes over in Miami, showed 'em how to
do
business.”

“He's happy,” said Frankie Zito.

“Happy,” echoed Jilly Mirra.

Lavert, chopping garlic with a swift motion of his chef's knife against the cutting board, whap, whap, whap, thought, everybody's so damned happy, this was the perfect time to run his little blond guy from the airport up the flagpole. See if any of them could ID him.

“We got another load coming in from La Guajira tonight,” said Jilly.

“Here's to the spics.” Pasquale raised his glass.

“God love 'em.” Joey laughed.

“Listen,” Lavert began, “any of you know—”

“There is one thing, though,” Frankie said.

Lavert went back to chopping.

“What?” Joey turned to Frankie. Fast.

“It's nothing, really. I mean, nothing I can't take care of. Nothing.”

“What?” Joey asked again.

“Really, I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“Fucking what? You brought it up, you brought it up. Now what?”

“Somebody's asking questions about one of my troops.”

“One of
us
?”

“Naaah. One of my punks. Little asshole name of Joyner. Billy Jack Joyner.”

“So? Who's doing the asking? Heat?”

“Not unless he's under. Guy asking's a local. Used to do some process work. Now he's dicking around for some insurance company.

“And?”

“He's just been asking around about this Joyner is all I'm saying.”

“But you don't think guy asking's working for nobody else?”

“What do I know, Joey? Joyner kid could have a shitload of parking tickets. Smashed his car up on the I-10. I'm just telling you what I know.”

“Sounds to me like you don't know dick.”

“I know I'm about up to here with this Joyner anyhow. He's not moving what he used to move, whining about the Carnival season—”

That got a big laugh.

“He wanta be queen didn't make it?” Pasquale asked. “Probably what you stuck us with, Frankie. Some twinkie small-time punk street dealer wants to wear a dress.”

“Shit, I'm sorry I brought it up.”

“Well, I'm not,” said Joey. “I don't like it somebody's asking something about somebody we do business with.” He thumped the table for emphasis. “You know what I mean?”

Everybody nodded, even Lavert, who was chopping meat with a cleaver now.

“What you say this guy's name is?”

“Billy Jack Joyner.”

“No, asshole. The gamoosh is asking the questions.”

“Harry Zack.”

Lavert dropped his cleaver.
Whap!

Twenty

SAM WAS SITTING with Zoe in the candy-striped bedroom the young girl had claimed at Ma Elise and Kitty's house after her daddy died. Peeking from under the bed's flouncy dust ruffle was an empty package of pork rinds. Sam wondered how many of those Zoe had stuffed down before she'd made her pilgrimage into the bathroom to the Great God Ralph.

But Sam wasn't there to talk with Zoe about that. “Cocaine,” she was saying to the young girl with the big dark circles under her eyes.

Zoe shrugged, Yeah?

“Talk to me about your dealing. How'd that come about?”

If you insist, Zoe's eyebrows signaled. Then she spread her thin hands and took Sam back to that primo importante conversation she'd had with Dr. Cecil Little when he'd walked in on her in the bathroom at Chloe Biedenham's grandmother's house the afternoon of Chloe's first tea. His trying to sneak a peek, then realizing she was doing something even more interesting than lifting the skirt of her blue party dress, slipping her a C-note for a little toot. Laughing his there's-lots-more-where-that-came-from-little-girl laugh.

“So I said,” she continued, “‘Most of the time, you must go to parties, Dr. Cecil, and not luck out. You can't always count on finding someone like me in the ladies' room. So it would be convenient for you if there was someone else holding for you. I mean, someone you could count on seeing, say, maybe once or twice a week. Someone who knew all the same people. Who went to the same parties.'

“‘Why, Miss Zoe Lee!'”

“I had to give myself a pat on the back for that one,” she said to Sam, “for my plan. It was a natural, a simple, brilliant natural. But then, the best things are.”

She and Dr. Cecil Little did see each other at
least
once a week. Because, as she explained, in New Orleans society you had your country clubs, New Orleans and Metairie, your Southern Yacht Club, your men's lunch clubs, Boston and Pickwick, your ladies' Orleans Club, your old-line carnival organizations, Comus, Rex, Momus, your members of the board over at the Ochsner Foundation and Tulane, your United Way, your kids in McGehee and Sacred Heart, your Little Lakes Duck Club when you felt like doing some shooting.

But it was all the same people, numbered about two-fifty, three hundred all told, that you saw over and over. Never anybody new, at least not socially. You either had Old New Orleans blood or you didn't.

There was nothing more pathetic, Zoe had heard her daddy say more than once, than to watch a big-deal corporate executive move into New Orleans and buy his huge house and furnish it all new and shiny and settle down with his little wife to wait for the creamy engraved invitations which would never come except from other miserable parvenus.

Whereas if you were born into it, New Orleans was one long party—starting with the Twelfth Night, Carnival, Easter, followed by the Jazz and Heritage Festival, then Spring Fiesta, and Halloween. November was All Saints Day, when you visited your dead and made a picnic on the grass between the graves. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump to Turkey Day and Christmas and then, count your fingers and two toes, you were back at Twelfth Night again. Life was one Big Easy round of slapping the same backs and brushing the same cheeks and shaking the same hands your whole life over.

Now, why couldn't one of those little hands pass a small package, a prettily wrapped present, a
petit cadeau
in the never-ending crush of kissy-face? It could. No problem.

So Dr. Cecil Little fronted Zoe a couple grand to make the first buy for him from Billy Jack, whom she'd met hanging out at Patrissy's. Zoe doled out the stash like a schoolmistress giving stars for good behavior.

And it was awfully good blow.

It was so good, in fact, that Dr. Cecil couldn't keep it to himself.

Zoe knew he wouldn't be able to. That's what she was counting on, expansion.

Before long, Dr. Cecil had provided her with a whole network of august customers, pillars of the medical profession with very greedy noses, who didn't want to be caught holding.

Pretty soon, there wasn't a social gathering in town where you didn't hear the cry, “Where's Zoe? Is Zoe here yet? Where is that sweet thing?”

It made her feel like a star, she said to Sam. A princess. It didn't even matter to her anymore that she was as big as the side of a house—even if everybody said different—that her mother had run off and left her, that her father was a lush whose personal habits were getting sloppier and sloppier.

It didn't matter, because everywhere she went people were calling her name. She was like a light at the tippytop of one of those towers of silver she used to build in her room.

And
if they missed connections at a party, Zoe made house calls.

Which was more than she could say for her clients, the last home visit by a New Orleans physician having been made in 1963, right after JFK was shot over in Dallas. Which was before Zoe was born, of course.

She teased her docs about that, about how lazy they were, how they couldn't get off their duffs even if someone was dying. Yes, they all said Zoe was a great tease. Laughter was good for business.

And business had been super supremo excelente until—here Zoe blinked back tears—until that awful night on St. Charles.

She took a deep breath. Stiff upper lip. On with it.

In fact, business was so good that through a broker/client she'd developed a fairly high-risk portfolio.

No flies on this child, thought Sam.

She held a mix of precious metals, moderately leveraged real estate partnerships, developmental oil and gas, aggressive growth stocks, and long-term high-grade bonds. All doing very well, thank you.

In addition, she was no piker at the Fairgrounds, betting on winners more often than not. She chose them by their jockeys' colors and the horses' names.

All
very
interesting, Sam nodded. “But let's get back to your supplier, this Billy Jack. What I really want to know is if he might have any connection with your father's death. Did he have any reason to hurt you? Had you—double-crossed him in some way? Done something—I don't know—”

“I can't think what. I've made him lots of money. But, on the other hand, he's nuts. Crazy. A psycho.”

“Great, Zoe.”

“But nothing I can't handle,” she rushed to reassure Sam. “He has an awful temper, but I know how to stay on his good side—except at the track. When I win and he loses, it weirds him out.”