The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (11 page)

“Hunh, I guess it can’t be helped.”

“Not much.”

The brothers then got down, down to business. Shade soon found himself adrift, floating on a mirage of family interests, brotherly love, and sheer admiration of drive. He ended up agreeing to follow the burglary hope for one full day, so long as nothing solid developed along other avenues.

When they parted Francois said, “Think of the long run.”

“I try to,” Shade said. “I really do. But I can’t quite feature it.”

10

L
ESTER
M
OELLER
, an unambitious ham-and-egger of a thief, with an eye for the backdoor possibilities but with such a spineless style of loose-change larceny that he seemed able only to lift enough to break even, shook his shaggy-haired head and raised his arms in a gesture of innocence.

“Really,” he said in his sissy tone, looking first at Shade, then How Blanchette, “I mean, I ain’t hardly been out of the house, let alone Pan Fry.”

“Of course. Why would anyone want to leave this here castle?” asked Blanchette, his sweeping hand wave drawing attention to the hamburger wrappers on the floor, the shaky table nailed to the wall, and the windows that were gray-taped into their frames.

“All right,” Lester said with an agreeing bob of his head. “I gotta leave to pee, sure. I’m not the sort who’ll use the sink. And to pooh. The john here, it don’t flush.”

“Maybe you should get you one that does,” Shade suggested. “Next time you go out, I mean.”

Lester shook his head. He was young but he had come to know himself.

“I wouldn’t have the exper-tise,” he said. “That ain’t shopliftin’, you know. You gotta know how to go about it. I can unplug electric sockets, but I don’t know shit about plumbing.”

“That’s a shame,” Shade said.

“Anyway, how would you stiff-leg a toilet down the street? A fella has to think about things like that, you know.”

Years earlier, when Shade had still been slinging leather for a living, he’d come out of Brouilliard’s Gym into the dirt alley parking lot in back and caught young Lester trying to liberate the contents of the glove compartment of his Nova. Shade, having never found much pleasure in battering obvious inferiors, refrained from striking Lester. He put an elbow around the bird-bone neck of the eighteen-year-old, then used his free hand to unbuckle his trousers. Then he shoved him down and pantsed him. As the fledgling thief scrambled in the sunlight for the cover of a nearby fire hydrant, Shade said, “I’ll leave them in the mystery section of the library for you.” When he drove away, Lester was kneeling behind the hydrant in a fitting pose.

“You have some serious defects as a thief, Lester.”

“Well,” Lester replied with a shrug of his thin, soft shoulders, “I’m not
too
good at anything.”

Blanchette laughed.

“Your rap sheet’ll back you up on that.”

“At least I try,” Lester said sullenly. “I could be on welfare, prob’ly.”

Shade stood and unbuttoned another button of his shirt. His clothes felt like fresh paint, and sweat was beading on his forehead. He looked at Blanchette, who was amazingly still in his slenderizing trench coat. Was vanity more powerful than heat? he wondered.

“Well, shit, Lester,” Shade said. “You’re not tellin’ me anything I want to hear. What’s the point of us bein’ friends if you can’t tell me what I want to hear?”

“Come on, don’t tease me,” Lester said. “You don’t like me. We never was friends.” He raised his round brown eyes and looked Shade square in the face. “Nobody likes me and I always been knowin’ that, so cut the mean shit.”

“If you hear anything, though.”

“Right. But nobody I know does much over in Pan Fry, man. They catch us over there, man, they got some stick-and-ball games they play with you. Guess who’s the ball?”

“I’m convinced,” Shade said. “You sold me. But don’t let me find out you’re lyin’.”

It was Lester’s turn to laugh.

“I guess you’d bust me then, huh? Send me to some terrible place.”

Shade and Blanchette joined in on the chuckle as well, for Lester was of the self-mutated breed that was at least as happy locked up as free. Slamming steel doors were home cooking, mama’s milk and cookies, to him.

“Uh-uh, you’d like that too much,” Shade said. “Next time we pop you we’re goin’ to pass the hat, take up a collection, and send you to vocational-technical so you can learn just enough about power tools to kill your fool self.”

“I’ve lived through worse,” Lester said as he followed the detectives to the door.

Once outside on the lean, hard-bricked street, Shade and Blanchette paused to decide what pointless visit to make next.

“It’s almost four,” Blanchette said. “We’re losin’ the day. None of these twerps is goin’ to break into a councilman’s house, then get confused about what they’re there for, and decide to whack a guy for free, you know. Since they’re already there.”

“You know that and I know that, but nobody else gives a fuck.”

Blanchette held his trench coat open and fanned himself with the flaps. In the following silence he walked to a parked car and sat on the hood. His short legs dangled over the fender and he scrutinized the goo-coated sidewalk as if it were a mirror. He humphed from time to time and sweat ran down his face like cracks in a porcelain Buddha.

“I just don’t like it,” Shade said. “If we don’t do what we know we should someone else is goin’ to get it.”

“It won’t be our fault.”

“Nothing’s our fault.”

“Should have that on our badges, you ask me.”

“Everything’s our fault.”

“Oh, boy. Don’t start with that schoolboy bullshit again, Rene. Today ain’t the day for it.”

The sun rebounded off nearby windows, and heat rose from the concrete walk, giving agony extra angles to work.

“Sundown Phillips,” Shade said.

Blanchette pursed his lips, then began to nod.

“That’s true,” he said. “If anybody knows what’s happenin’ in Pan Fry, he’s it.”

“Yeah. What say let’s be sociable and go visiting, huh?”

“Okay, partner,” Blanchette said in a strangely soft tone. “I was wonderin’ how long we were goin’ to humor that cashmere brother of yours. I was goin’ to lose faith if it was more than another ten minutes, to tell you the truth.”

Nodding, Shade said, “You and me both.”

In the aspiring self-mythology of Saint Bruno, a town that liked to refer to itself as a baby Chicago, there were grapevine Roykos and street-corner Sandburgs who found odd connections between the Windy City on the Lake and the Wheezing Town on the River.

The pecking order of the homegrown juice merchants and trigger jerkers, green-felt Caesars, and snow-shoveling cowboys was likened to a vivid Chicago of the memory. And in this urban simile, if Auguste Beaurain, a force so devious, potent, and dangerous that he’d never even been hooked for a parking ticket, was a scaled-down Capone, and Steve Roque an irritating Spike O’Donnell, then surely Sundown Phillips of Pan Fry was perfectly Bugs Moran.

The detectives pulled into the graveled space in front of the wood-frame house that served as an office for Phillips Construction. There were two green pickup trucks and a motorcycle parked outside. A large dog with long strands of mud for hair, and a disturbingly narrow head, relaxed on the porch.

The dog rose as the detectives approached and Shade dropped a hand to scratch around where the ears should be. The dog sighed, then lay back down and Shade opened the door.

There was a small front room with a somber gang of gray filing
cabinets spread around against the walls, and a receptionist’s desk that was unattended.

The detectives stepped into the middle of the room and stopped. There was a picture of Martin Luther King on one wall, high up and centered, with signed photos of Satchel Paige, Itzhak Perlman, and Tina Turner on display beneath.

Shade stepped over to a white door in the corner of the room and knocked.

After a long pause the door drawled open to reveal a table circled by curious faces. A thin, butterscotch man with a Vandyke beard and a taste for clothes that were tropical in theme blocked Shade’s entrance.

“This is business hours,” the man said. “You got business?”

At the table in the background one of the curious faces suddenly became less so, and shoved away from the table, then stood. From topknot to toe there was a length of body that could’ve maintained a decent rushing average by consistently collapsing forward. Sundown Phillips was a grade or two above large, with a leonine process of hair, and dark skin.

As he approached the door he began to smile.

“Well, well, if it’s not Tomatuh Can Shade,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “The Con-tend-uh!”

Shade made the Vandyke beard as Powers Jones, an occasional carpenter and full-time suspect, who worked for Phillips. He couldn’t see the other faces well enough to identify them.

Sundown filled the doorway and blocked his view. His smile was as friendly as a holding cell. He backed Shade up, stepped into the main room, and pulled the white door closed.

“What’s this?” Blanchette asked, leaning forward conspiratorially. “A little early in the day for a Tupperware party, ain’t it?”

Sundown responded by looking down on Blanchette with an amused curl to his lips.

“See the sign outside?” Sundown asked. “This
is
a business.”

“Look, Phillips,” Shade said. “I want to ask you a few things.”

“About what?”

“About yourself.”

“Why, how nice,” Sundown said. “Six-seven, two seventy, black nappy over brown, a long jagged liverish-looking one under the left armpit, and, well, like a donkey. I believe that covers the vitals.”

Blanchette, who stood nose to nipple on Sundown, said, “Most people don’t like wiseasses.”

“Is that so? I’d like to see the dem-o-graphic breakdown on that poll.”

There were certain situations in which Blanchette was of little use. Shade quickly assessed this to be one of them and asked How to wait in the car. Blanchette, however, was in need of his self-image as a ruggedly chubby, knockaround cop who had yet to encounter humanity in dimensions that could back him down.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. But if it don’t work your way, Shade, then it’ll be time for mine.”

As the door clinked shut behind Blanchette, Sundown sat on the receptionist’s desk. He opened a button on his yellow summer cotton shirt, and buffed his boot tips on the back of his slacks.

“What is it, Shade?”

“That meeting in there,” Shade flicked his head toward the white door, “it’s about Rankin, right? You guys already carvin’ up the leftovers or what?”

“Man, you got a lot of nerve, you know that? Why the fuck shouldn’t we be talkin’ about Alvin? We all knew him, you see. He was our man, and on the upswing, too. You think of anything more important that’s gone down lately?”

“I was wonderin’ if you might know who remodeled his head, or anything like that.”

Sundown held his arms out, then quickly glanced down the length of both limbs.

“I don’t see any feathers,” he said. “And my voice ain’t turned into no coo-coo sort of thing.” He dropped his enormous arms back to his sides. “So what makes you think I got any statements to make?”

“I don’t know. Some people feel grief, you know, Phillips, when someone they care about gets whacked.”

“Grief? Grief gets action in my world, honey, not any of them fuckin’ useless tears and God-hollers and such shit.”

The white door opened and Powers Jones stuck his head out.

“Are we waitin’ or what?” he asked.

“Or what,” Sundown said. He paced about the room, then checked his watch. “It’s Rochelle time, anyhow.” He pointed at Jones. “Just sit tight.” His long legs two-stepped to the door. “You want to talk to me, Shade, then you follow along. Otherwise, au revoir, tadpole.”

They went outside and Shade gestured to Blanchette to stay put. The two men did not speak as they traveled down the sidewalk, a sidewalk that disappeared at times, and then reappeared, roller-coasted by the roots of timeless trees that would not be diverted by mere concrete.

“I got to pick up my daughter,” Sundown said. “I don’t like her walkin’ around alone out here. You know. She takes piano after school. She’s goin’ to be a Keith Jarrett someday, only prettier.”

“Hey, hey, hey.”

This was the same man, Shade reflected, who’d played high school football like a Greek god with a score to settle, a personal vendetta that encompassed all who would dare suit up against him. He was famous for his grudge clobberings of opponents he decided he liked least, whether they carried the ball or stood on the sidelines. His style kept many an anemic offensive drive alive with penalties, but he also stopped plenty with bone-fracturing hits. He’d had the speed of a tailback, despite his size, but the dementia of his play caused even Wishbone coaches to shy away from him. The word on the street was that he ran his new enterprises of loan-sharking, gambling, and miscellaneous larceny with the same brutal logic.

Despite an odd respect for the talented evilness of the man, Shade wanted to be the guy who dropped the flag on him for a long penalty.

Several young boys in rags wheeled spider bikes from out of alleys and began to flit around the men. The boys popped wheelies that landed very near the men, then exercised their audacity by requesting
quarters to stop. “I could scuff your shoes for nothin’,” they said, “but when a quarter’s in my hand I miss them clean.” When it became clear that no protection money would be forthcoming the pint-sized entrepreneurs drifted back into the familiar alleys they’d come out of.

“Trash,” Sundown said. “They can’t help it. They’ll never know Bartók from Bootsy’s Rubber Band.”

“Right,” Shade said with a nod. “There’s plenty to be sad about in this life.”

The school was of Depression-era vintage, with the high craftsmanship and charming fine points that grateful artisans had willingly, and cheaply, rendered. The bricks were darkened by generations of soot and smoke, but the character of the James Audubon School was still formidable.

“Maybe you could peddle some dope to the kids while we’re here,” Shade said.