“I wouldn’t say that at all,” I replied.
“Oh?”
“That tall white kid is the son of a Miami bookie by the name of Whitey Bruxal. I think Whitey Bruxal is the guy who got a friend of mine killed in an armored car robbery twenty years ago. It’s no accident my dead friend’s daughter, Trish Klein, is in this area.”
I saw the connections start to come together in Helen’s eyes. “Whatever the Klein woman’s issues are, they’re federal. Unless she manages to kill somebody in our jurisdiction, I don’t want to hear that name again,” she said.
“One other thing. I got the impression Monarch wanted to get a lot of gone between you and him.”
“His mother was a washerwoman who worked for my father. She also turned tricks at the Boom Boom Room. I used to take him for sno-balls in City Park,” she said. “Funny how it shakes out sometimes, huh, bwana?”
I’D HAD A SLIP from my A.A. program the previous year. The causes aren’t important now, but the consequence was the worst bender I ever went on-a two-day blackout that left me on the edges of delirium tremens and with the very real conviction I had committed a homicide. The damage I did to myself was of the kind that alcoholics sometimes do not recover from-the kind when you burn the cables on your elevator and punch a hole in the basement and keep right on going.
But I went back to meetings and pumped iron and ran in the park, and relearned one of the basic tenets of A.A.-that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably not have it.
Unfortunately the nocturnal hours were never good to me. In my dreams I would be drunk again, loathsome even unto myself, a public spectacle whom people treated with either pity or contempt. I would wake from the dream, my throat parched, and walk off balance into the kitchen for a glass of water, unable to extract myself from memories about people and places that I had thought no longer belonged to my life. But the feelings released from my unconscious by the dream would not leave me. It’s like blood splatter on the soul. You don’t rinse it off easily. My hand would tremble on the faucet.
The dawn always came as a form of release. The gargoyles and the polka-dotted giraffes disappeared in the light of day, and my nightmares burned into a soft and harmless glow, like a pistol flare dying inside a mist.
But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past.
The warning call from Wally, our dispatcher, came in the next day on my cell while I was having midmorning coffee at Victor’s Cafeteria. “Some guy named Whitey Bruxal and a geek wit’ him was just in here to see Helen. I told them Helen was in Baton Rouge. You know these guys?” he said.
“Bruxal is the father of the white kid we busted in the beef at McDonald’s yesterday,” I replied.
“He was seriously out of joint. When I tole him Helen wasn’t here, he wanted to talk to you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you wasn’t here, that he needed to lower his voice, that this ain’t New Orleans.”
“Why New Orleans?”
“He talks like he comes from there.”
I suspected Wally had confused Bruxal’s accent, which was probably eastern seaboard, with the Irish-Italian inflections that are characteristic of blue-collar people born in New Orleans. “Why’d you call me, Wally?” I said.
“He’s on his way to Victor’s.”
“You told him I was here?”
“The janitor did. Want me to chew him out? He was seventy-t’ree last week.”
I paid my check and was about to go out the door when I saw a waxed black Humvee, wrapped with chrome, pull up to the curb. A muscular man in a powder-blue suit, with peroxided blond hair and cords in his neck and tiny pits in his cheeks, cut the engine and got out on the sidewalk. He saw me about to push open the glass door. “He’s here,” he said to a man in the passenger seat.
I did not recognize the passenger in the Humvee, but the driver had the familiarity of someone you have met in a dream, or perhaps at a time in your life when you saw the world through a glass darkly and went about making a religion out of your own dismemberment, inviting as many people as possible to bring saws and tongs to the task. The blond man pulled open the door and came inside, bringing the hot smell of the street with him.
“I told Whitey it was you. Same name, same guy, just a little older,” he said. “Remember me?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied.
“Elmer Fudd, from that bar in Opa-Locka, the one looked like a French Foreign Legion fort in the Sahara. Last time we saw each other, I gave you some breath mints.”
“If you want to talk to me, you need to come into my office at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk to you. But he does,” the blond man said, glancing toward his friend.
Whitey Bruxal wasn’t what I expected. Miami has always been an open city for the Mafia, which means that no one is allowed a lock on the action and no one gets clipped while he’s there on R amp; R. Consequently, during the winter season the city is filled with the lower echelons of the New York crime families. The ones I used to see on the beach had the anatomical proportions of upended tadpoles, with barrel chests, no hips, and legs that looked like tendrils, their phalluses as pronounced as bananas inside their Speedos.
But Bruxal was not a run-of-the-mill South Florida bookie. His physique reminded me of a gymnast or a man who plays tennis singles with a mean eye, under a white sun, never thinking of it as just a game. “You the guy who busted my kid?” he said, smiling at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m the detective who hooked him up and took him in. The charges are up to the prosecutor’s office,” I replied.
“I’ll fill you in. The D.A. is talking about felony assault.”
“I doubt that,” I said, and walked past him, out onto the sidewalk.
He followed me. His hair was white and thick, clipped G.I., as stiff as a brush, his skin tanned, his shirt tight on his chest and shoulders. “Doubt it why?” he said.
“Monarch Little is a dealer and general lowlife, but he usually takes his own bounce. I doubt he’ll press charges.”
“I got a problem here. Those black kids pointed a gun at my son,” he said, still smiling at the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t heard anything about charges against the blacks. Way I see it, my son and his friend Tony Lujan are the wronged parties. I’m supposed to feel good the head gangbanger isn’t trying to send my boy to prison?”
“They may take a hit on a firearms charge. Why not wait and see?”
“That’s what you do when a concrete truck is coming down the center stripe at you?”
He was not an unpleasant man, and his beef with the prosecutor’s office not without foundation. But I could not get rid of the image of my friend Dallas Klein, kneeling in the shade of an Opa-Locka bank, just before a shotgun was fired directly into his face.
“I’ve got a problem of my own, Mr. Bruxal,” I said.
The blond man, who had been listening quietly, couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“That’s funny?” I said to him.
His eyes were bright green, his mouth spread open on one side out of his teeth. “You got boons pulling guns on people and you’re telling the victim’s father you got a problem?” he replied.
“What’s your name?”
“Lefty Raguza.” When he spoke his name, his face was charged with energy, his eyes dancing, his chin lifted.
“Thanks,” I said, writing his name in a notebook.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“We like to research who’s in town, who’s not. You know how it is. Got to keep the down-home folks happy,” I replied, winking at him.
“You need to finish your statement to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” Bruxal said, a tanker truck loaded with gasoline
