The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (25 page)

“Cops are here to protect us,” Willie said, smirking beneath his Ray-Bans, “not to hurt us.”

“Look, Willie,” Shade said, “I want to know if a cop named Bell broke your fucking leg, so what I’m going to do is, I’m going to ask you, ‘Did a cop named Bell break your fucking leg?’ and that’ll give you the opportunity to answer yes or no and if you do that and I believe you I won’t have to go gorilla on you.”

“I heard that’s your specialty, Shade.” Willie slid his hands up and down the back scratcher like he was strumming chords, and looked to the ceiling, lost in a silent solo.

“That’s right,” Shade said. He leaned over and shoved the cast off the stool. Then he stood and slapped the sunglasses from Willie’s face. “I
have
been accused of being a brute before, son. Several times. I think you should know I lived with the shame of it all just fine.”

Willie rubbed two fingers at the bridge of his nose, a gesture of impatience and disdain.

“You really think I’m goin’ to do a bad-mouth testimony on one cop
to another? Shit, man, you seem to have your mind made up anyhow. Here I am, crippled up ’til practically Halloween, and you’re jerkin’ me ’round ’cause I
might
be a victim.” He retrieved his sunglasses from the floor beside him and slid back under them. “What gets you interested anyhow? He cut you out of your piece of the ice, man?”

Shade, who considered himself to be prey to many of the nasty passions, felt that while he could be brutish or dense, slow or too quick, he could not be bought by any valuable thing that had numbers on it. This quality seemed so mulish for a human to possess that he found perverse pride in the fact that his corruptibility took a form closer to the poetic than the crass.

So he slapped those cheesy shades from the man’s face again.

Willie’s face firmed into a somewhat impotent expression of anger.

“You fucker,” he said and started to rise, crippled or not. “This is my house.”

“Freeze on that,” Shade said softly. “You ain’t got the whiskers and we both know it.” Shade shook his head and picked up the glasses and handed them back to Willie. “I’m tired, son, that’s all. Forgive me.” He sat on the arm of Willie’s chair and patted him on the head. “Could you find it in your little nubbin of a heart to forgive me?” For the first time now the heavy-metal thief seemed scared. “See, Officer Bell was whacked last night, there, superstar, and under the first rock we turned over we found
your
name.”

“Oh, shit, man, you can’t think…”

“You see the spot you’re in now, don’t you?”

The sudden recognition of the spot he was in set Willie squirming, tapping the plastic fingered back scratcher against his cast.

“You know I couldn’t do that,” he said. “Let’s face it, man, I know what I am. I’m a musician who never caught a break so I
find
tape decks in other people’s cars and shit like that. I dig gamblin’, too, and natch I love my tunes, but stealin’s only just my way to platinum—you know I’d never shoot anybody, especially Gerry Bell.”

“Gerry, huh?” Shade said. “So you know him?”

“Hey, lots of us small fry got to know Officer Bell, man.” Willie put
his hand over his mouth and squeezed his lips, then said, “Since he’s dead I’ll tell you, Shade. Yeah, fuckin’ Bell broke my leg all right, right here in this room, in front of Betty, too. He come in here in his fuckin’
uniform
to collect from me and I was tapped for cash so he tosses a quarter at my face and says, ‘That’s for my ticket, punk, I always pay for a good time.’ Then he did it, man. Hurt like a motherfucker.”

“Did his partner, Mouton, come with him?”

“He sat out in the patrol car.”

As Shade pondered the implications of Bell’s brand of civic duty, the front door opened and in came little Mick.

“Can we eat?” he asked. There were scabs on his elbows, bruises on his legs and dirt in his ears. “Papa, I’m hungry.”

“So eat,” Willie said. “Get yourself a hot dog.”

“Mom said I’m not s’posed to touch the stove.”

“Then
don’t
touch it, boy. Eat ’em cold. They’re good that way. Wrap a piece of bread around one and eat it cold.”

Mick padded off toward the kitchen, his head down, the slump of his shoulders giving an advance notice of his opinion on eating hot dogs cold.

“Willie,” Shade said, “aren’t you going to get up off your ass, stump in there and feed the kid?”

“This cast feels like a ball an’ chain, man. Makes my hip hurt to walk on it.”

Shade, who found that all bad fathers reminded him of his own, said, “Dastillon, shit floats and you’re rising fast.”

“He can fend for his ownself,” Willie said defensively. “I always had to. Nobody fed me but my own sticky fingers.”

“I’ll go cook the kid a couple of dogs,” Shade said and started toward the kitchen.

“You do that, Shade, but don’t spoil him. The world ain’t no day-care center and I’m teachin’ him that now, while he’s young, so he won’t be all let down when he grows up.”

There it was, Shade thought, the Frogtown ethic in one bumper-slogan line, The World Ain’t No Day-care Center.

The kitchen was orderly and clean, a testimony to Betty’s elbow exercise. Shade found a black skillet in the oven and set it on a burner. He opened the fridge and saw half a dozen short dogs of wine and back behind a container of yogurt he turned up a pack of red dogs of chicken.

“How many you want, tiger?” he asked Mick.

“This many,” Mick said, holding up two fingers.

Shade turned on the gas beneath the skillet and dropped the dogs in. He found a fork in a drawer and used it to shove the links around.

“Hey!” Willie shouted from the front room. “Hey, put me on about three, too, uh? I’m laid up.”

“I can’t hear you,” Shade barked back.

While the chill was grilled from the dogs Mick got out two slices of bread and squeezed mustard onto them. Shade had the heat on high and the dogs were soon sizzling. He turned the flame off and handed the fork to the boy.

“Bon appetit, tiger.”

Shade went back to the living room and stood over Willie.

“Okay, Willie, the domestic shit ain’t free. Who was Bell collecting for?”

“Come on, man, you’re from around here—take a guess.”

“Rudy Regot? Delbert McKechnie? Shuggie Zeck?”

“Yeah, Shuggie,” Willie said. “Am I fuckin’ up major tellin’ you this? I mean, I heard you and him was runnin’ mates back there in yesteryear.”

“You heard that, huh?”

“Everybody has. I’ll bet you were a troublesome pair of playmates.”

“You’re right, Willie, that’s all back there in yesteryear.” Shade once again sat beside Willie. “So what’s his beef with you?”

“You know me, man. I thought I had me a new sevencard system, but, really, I guess what I got is a disease. That’s what Betty says ten or fifty times a day. Nothin’ out of the ordinary, I was tryin’ to work the kinks out of the system and dropped a bunch of dinero I didn’t actually have. Officer Bell encouraged me to come up with it.”

“Did you?”

“You fuckin’ A, I did. Sold the car, I only got two legs. Now Betty hoofs it to work. Lucky her, I’m crippled up ’til the wet season ends.” He edged the scratcher under his cast and pulled it up and down. “The man took some pleasure in it, too. You’d’ve thought he was porkin’ Tina Turner, ’stead of crushin’
my
bones, from the look on his face.”

“You know for sure Shuggie sent him?”

“Well, it was Shuggie’s game where I got the markers, but Shuggie is gettin’ up there, Shade. He’s like this with Mr. B. now I hear.”

“Everybody’s heard that.”

“Gee, sorry to be a borin’ snitch, man.” Willie rocked back and plucked away at the back scratcher. “You find who killed this bad cop Bell tell ’em I’ll play a benefit for their defense fund, huh?”

Mick had come to stand in the doorway of the kitchen, a hot dog in each hand.

“Did Bell work for Shuggie?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know, man. I don’t really know the big answers but what I do know—duh-dun-duh-dun—is the blues. What else can I say?”

“Nothing good,” Shade said. He walked to the door and opened it, and as he stepped out into the hot wet air of another tough day in river country, he heard Willie bark, “Come ’ere, give me one of those!”

6

T
HE POLICE
station was on Second Street, a white-stone building erected along severely square lines, at hand-holding distance from city hall.

When Shade came up the stone steps, steps polished to a fine sheen by the somber gait of the guilty, the light dancing feet of the innocent, and the uncertain shuffle of the uncertain, he turned right toward the squad room just as How Blanchette came down the adjoining hallway from the Captain’s office.

“What’s up, How?” Shade asked. “Bell’s partner here?”

“Yeah,” Blanchette said, “he’s downstairs.” He held his hat in his hand and there was a pinkish flush to his face. “We been split up, Rene. Captain took me away from you and put me with Jesse Pickett.”

“What?” Shade asked. “Am I in trouble?”

“I don’t think so yet,” Blanchette said as he shook his head and wiped sweat from his cheeks. “Officially, me and Pickett are supposed to say we’re in charge of the investigation. Pickett’s okay, I can live with Pickett, but I don’t know why they broke us up.”

“They?”

“Mayor Crawford’s in there, too, baby. He’s got a new look. When you go in there you’ll notice it.”

“I’m supposed to go in there, huh? When?”

“Now, comrade,” Blanchette said. “And I think you better have an open mind.”

*     *     *

The heavy wooden door to Captain Karl Bauer’s office was open, so Shade looked in and said, “You wanted to see me?”

“That’s right, Shade. Come in here and close that thing behind you.” Bauer pointed at a chair directly in front of his desk. “Give your dogs a rest, Detective, we have a thing or two to discuss.”

Shade sat in the chair, a bit tentatively since a vast range of unpleasant possible topics for discussion wisped through his mind like paranoid vapors.

“What’s the deal, Captain? I already talked to Blanchette.”

“Uh-huh. Good.” Bauer was a large, flat-topped man, with pale skin that had been acned and pitted so that it resembled a cob cleaned of corn, eyes the color of snuff, and the general expression of a natural-born straw boss. “Officer Bell’s murder is going to require a kind of unique approach, Shade, and you’ve been picked to make it.”

From the far corner of his left eye Shade became aware of another presence in the room. He turned that way, and back there in a shadowy part of the office, seated on a straight-backed chair, he saw a gargoyle in silk watching him closely. Mayor Gene Crawford’s silver hair was, as usual, combed just so, and his suit had that sheer and costly look, but his face was interestingly made over. His eyes were swollen nearly closed, with black half-moons below the slits, and a piece of aluminum had been taped over an obviously smashed nose.

“Look at me, Shade,” Bauer said. “I’m the one talking to you.”

Shade faced him across the polished mahogany.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hear what I said? I said we’re going to try a unique approach using you. How’s that sound?”

“I’m listening, Captain.”

“Fine. What do you know about Officer Bell?”

“I heard he moonlighted as a collector for a loan shark, and that he did the collecting in uniform with a nonregulation fungo bat.”

“That’s what you heard, huh?” Bauer leaned back in his chair, then rocked squeakingly back and forth. “Anything else?”

“Not yet.”

“I see.” Bauer leaned forward suddenly and put his elbows on his desk, making dramatic eye contact with Shade. “Here and now I’m going to tell you how Bell got his dumb-ass self greased, Shade. I’m telling you ’cause you’ll need to know, and it’s all true, what I’ll tell you, but none of it’s official.”

This brought a nod from Shade, then he glanced back to where the Mayor sat, his legs sedately crossed, his hands clasped in his lap, and his face swollen and colored like a hoodoo mask that kept children in line.

“I’m your man, Captain,” he said and looked back at his superior. “What went down?”

“What went down is this.” Bauer began to do some vaguely threatening theatrical business involving his squeezing rubber balls in both hands, on the desk top, so that his forearms twisted with cords of muscle. “Some of the finest money in this region was on one of the finest tables in this region and several gentlemen of the first rank were seated around that table along with a couple of ramblin’, gamblin’ colorful types who were there to add to the adventure and…”

“No sarcasm,” the Mayor said in an atonal basso wheeze.

Bauer nodded grimly and went on.

“… long about the witching hour three tough guys in ski masks come through the door. Can you fill in the rest yourself?”

Shade said, “The tough guys wanted that fine money and they had guns to take it with and Bell was the guard. Is that close?”

“Close enough. Bell was the guard, only he was also a bust-out gambler and pretty soon he was sittin’ in on the game instead of watchin’ the door for tough guys.” Bauer really began to mash away at the rubber balls, his teeth grinding behind an open mouth. “See, Mr. B. has not been fucked with like this for a while, and everybody was gettin’ lax. Now this has happened and everybody is pissed off and in kind of a spot.”

“When Bell got shot,” Shade said, “these pillar-of-the-community types who were there didn’t want to be splattered by any shit, so they dumped the body at the hospital and called it a night, huh, Captain?”

“You got it,” Bauer said.

“Who were they?” Shade asked. “I’d like to talk with them.”

“I’m afraid that won’t happen, Shade. I’m tellin’ you all there is to tell, and it’s all off the record.” Bauer looked hard at Shade. “For the record Officer Bell died while off duty, probably in an attempt to halt a burglary.”

“You think anybody’ll buy that?”

From the shadowed corner came a flat, gasping answer. “It doesn’t matter if it’s believed or not,” Mayor Crawford said. “It will wash.”