'Probably go down okay, you put enough horseradish on it.'
'Yeah.'
Don stalked off towards the phone booth.
'Ready for menus?' Tony asked.
'Remains to be seen.'
'As usual. I'll just leave them here on the table then, check back with you.'
'Sounds good.'
'Today's soup is cream of artichoke. Specials are trout in garlic sauce and penne pasta alfredo with grilled shrimp. Either one's guaranteed to leave you drooling into next Tuesday.'
'Thanks, Tony. I'm drooling already.'
'No problem. Need an extra napkin?'
'Not yet. But some more tea would be great, when you get a chance.'
'You got it.'
Don came back and sank heavily into the booth across from me.
'Guess you have a big night planned, right, Lew? With your new girl and all.'
'Not really.'
'You mind coming with me, then? I could use the company.'
He stood and tucked a five under the saltshaker.
'Sure. Where we going?'
'It's Danny, Lew. They just found him. Place down on Dryades. Apparent suicide.'
25
Danny was half afloat, half submerged, in a tubful of tepid water. One of those old tubs, heavy as a kettle, up off the ground on a platfonu, with clawed feet. A garbage bag around his head was tied at the neck. His tongue, swollen and purple, protruded. Blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making them look like road maps with nothing but interstates. Bladder and bowels had let go in the water.
DeSalle stepped up behind Don. He didn't speak till Don turned around.
'Looks like an overdose, with the bag for insurance. One of the uniforms told me there's a society recommends this route.'
'Who took the call?' Don said.
'Patrolman you mean?'
'Yeah.'
'Martinez. Young guy. Pretty new, I guess, taking it hard the way we all do thefirst few times.'
'He out there?' Don gestured towards the front room.
'Yeah. Thought you might want to talk to him yourself.'
'Anybody else around?'
DeSalle shook his head. 'Have been, though. Two, three people at least living here, looks like. Maybe more.'
'Note?'
DeSalle handed it to him. Sheathed in a sleeve of clear plastic with DeSalle's initials scrawled across the seal. There was only one light in the room, a bare bulb above the sink. Don stood under it as he read the note. Then he passed the note to me. It all comes down to choice, doesn't it? The ones we have, the ones we don't have. Those we make and those we're never able to make. Temporary choices, inadvertent choices, final choices. Fuck them all. While I'm at it, fuck your goddamn houses out in Metairie and your kids in private schools, fuck your minimum-wage jobs, your sorry-ass unions. Fuck your cops most of all. Am I making myself clear here? Everything's water if you look long enough, right? 'It's a strange one,' DeSalle said.
I handed the note back to Don. 'No heading or salutation.'
'Right.'
'Left side's ragged. Tom out of a notebook, diary, something like that.'
DeSalle looked from Don to me and back.
'Something I missed?'
'Lew's just saying the note's not addressed to anyone.'
'Hell it's not.'
'Yeah,' Don said after a moment. 'Yeah, you're right Guess any list would have been too long. Boy had a lot of anger in him. Always thought it was other people fucked up his life.'
Don stepped into the front room to speak with Martinez.
'You guys go back a way, huh?'
I told DeSalle how Don and I met. Both of us little more than kids, each with his own reason to be searching for the sniper that killed all those people back in the sixties.
'Damn, Griffin. That was you?'
Don had been shot by the sniper. I'd come upon them in a downtown cul-de-sac and probably saved Don's life-at least he insisted I had. Since then he'd saved mine more times than I could count.
'Not many like him on the force,' DeSalle said.
'Not many like him anywhere.'
'You know it. Has to be tough,' looking at Danny there in the tub, 'all this.'
'Can't imagine anything tougher. But I think he'd been getting ready for it, something like this.'
'Yeah. Lives with it every day. Has to know.'
'For a long time now.'
Then forensics was upon us.
Tape measures chirred, whisk brooms and tiny vacuums whispered, bits of debris tumbled into baggies. Again and again our shadows struck huge on the walls as flashes went off.
Don stood at the edge of it all, just outside the doorway, watching.
Also there, wheezing like a bad accordion, sucking alternately at metered-dose inhalers of Atrovent or Albuterol and oxygen from the portable compressor hung like an oversize binocular case under one arm, directing auteurlike this too-real dramatic moment, stood Dr. Bijur.
'Your boy, I understand.'
'Yeah.'
She shook her head. Squeezed off two hits of Ventolin then wheezed a long exhale.
'Sure it's top of the list for you. For me it's just one more, pick a number, twelve, thirteen, in there. Wait your turn.'
'I say anything?'
'You will.'
Her shoulders lifted with the effort to drag more air into faltering lungs.
'Do the same myself in your position, Walsh. No way I wouldn't. King's horses couldn't stop me.'
'Special favors aren't an option here, Sonja. Okay. But I would appreciate anything you can give me quick.'
What she gave him was a fit of coughing. Sounded as though nails and planks were l›cing ripped out of her body's floor.
Don waited for her to recover.
'City lets me have half the personnel I need with twice the workload I can handle. Not a good match, Walsh.'
'I know something about that myself.'
'My department's response time is half that of LA., beats out New York, Boston, Baltimore, and D.C. by several wide miles. Our reports hit your desk within twenty-four hours. Thirty-six at the outside. You ever got your head out of this city's ass long enough to look around, you could probably work up some pride in that.'
Again, coughs racked her. She cranked up the O's from 2 L/M to 4.
