'Whiplash represents other clients, too.'
'Pro bono for a mulatto who works in a rice mill?'
'Why would the Giacanos want to do an inside hit on a guy like Cool Breeze Broussard?'
She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.
'Maybe the Feds are squeezing Breeze to bring pressure on the Giacanos,' I said, in answer to my own question.
'To make them cooperate in an investigation of the Triads?'
'Why not?'
'The other thing I was going to tell you? Last night Lila Terrebonne went into that new zydeco dump on the parish line. She got into it with the bartender, then pulled a.25 automatic on the bouncer. A couple of uniforms were the first guys to respond. They got her purse from her with the gun in it without any problem. Then one of them brushed against her and she went ape shit.
'Dave, I put my arm around her and walked her out the back door, into the parking lot, with nobody else around, and she cried like a kid in my arms… You following me?'
'Yeah, I think so,' I said.
'I don't know who did it, but I know what's been done to her,' she said. She stood up, flexed her back, and inverted the flats of her hands inside the back of her gunbelt. The skin was tight around her mouth, her eyes charged with light. My gaze shifted off her face.
'When I was a young woman and finally told people what my father did to me, nobody believed it,' she said. ''Your dad was a great guy,' they said. 'Your dad was a wonderful parent.''
'Where is she now?'
'Iberia General. Nobody's pressing charges. I think her old man already greased the owner of the bar.'
'You're a good cop, Helen.'
'Better get her some help. The guy who'll pay the bill won't be the one who did it to her. Too bad it works out that way, huh?'
'What do I know?' I said.
Her eyes held on mine. She had killed two perps in the line of duty. I think she took no joy in that fact. But neither did she regret what she had done nor did she grieve over the repressed anger that had rescinded any equivocation she might have had before she shot them. She winked at me and went back to her office.
SIX
WITH REGULARITY POLITICIANS TALK about what they call the war against drugs. I have the sense few of them know anything about it. But the person who suffers the attrition for the drug trade is real, with the same soft marmalade-like system of lungs and heart and viscera inherited from a fish as the rest of us.
In this case her name was Ruby Gravano and she lived in a low-rent hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, between Lee Circle and Canal, not far from the French Quarter. The narrow front entrance was framed by bare lightbulbs, like the entrance to a 1920s movie theater. But quaint similarities ended there. The interior was superheated and breathless, unlighted except for the glare from the airshaft at the end of the hallways. For some reason the walls had been painted firehouse red with black trim, and now, in the semi-darkness, they had the dirty glow of a dying furnace.
Ruby Gravano sat in a stuffed chair surrounded by the litter of her life: splayed tabloid magazines, pizza cartons, used Kleenex, a coffee cup with a dead roach inside, a half-constructed model of a spaceship that had been stuck back in the box and stepped on.
Ruby Gravano's hair was long and black and made her thin face and body look fuller than they were. She wore shorts that were too big for her and exposed her underwear, and foundation on her thighs and forearms, and false fingernails and false eyelashes and a bruise like a fresh tattoo on her left cheek.
'Dave won't jam you up on this, Ruby. We just want a string that'll lead back to these two guys. They're bad dudes, not the kind you want in your life, not the kind you want other girls to get mixed up with. You can help a lot of people here,' Clete said.
'We did them in a motel on Airline Highway. They had a pickup truck with a shell on it. Full of guns and camping gear and shit. They smelled like mosquito repellent. They always wore their hats. I've seen hogs eat with better table manners. They're Johns. What else you want to know?' she said.
'Why'd you think they might be cops?' I asked.
'Who else carries mug shots around?'
'Beg your pardon?' I said.
'The guy I did, he was undressing and he finds these two mug shots in his shirt pocket. So he burns them in an ashtray and that's when his friend says something about capping two brothers.'
'Wait a minute. You were all in the same room?' Clete said.
'They didn't want to pay for two rooms. Besides, they wanted to trade off. Connie does splits, but I wouldn't go along. One of those creeps is sickening enough. Why don't you bug Connie about this stuff?'
'Because she blew town,' Clete said.
She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist. 'Look, I'm not feeling too good. Y'all got what you need?' she said.
'Did they use a credit card to pay for the room?' I asked.
'It's a trick pad. My manager pays the owner. Look, believe it or not, I got another life besides this shit. How about it?'
She tried to look boldly into my face, but her eyes broke and she picked up the crushed model of a spaceship from its box on the floor and held it in her lap and studied it resentfully.
'Who hit you, Ruby?' I asked.
'A guy.'
'You have a kid?'
'A little boy. He's nine. I bought him this, but it got rough in here last night.'
'These cops, duffers, whatever they were, they had to have names,' I said.
'Not real ones.'
'What do you mean?'
'The one who burned the pictures, the other guy called him Harpo. I go, 'Like that guy in old TV movies who's a dummy and is always honking a horn?' The guy called Harpo goes, 'That's right, darlin', and right now I'm gonna honk
She tried to fit the plastic parts of the model back together. Her right cheek was pinched while she tried to focus, and the bruise on it knotted together like a cluster of blue grapes. 'I can't fix this. I should have put it up in the closet. He's coming over with my aunt,' she said. She pushed hard on a plastic part and it slid sharply across the back of her hand.
'How old a man was Harpo?' I asked.
'Like sixty, when they start acting like they're your father and Robert Redford at the same time. He has hair all over his back… I got to go to the bathroom. I'm gonna be in there a while. Look, you want to stay, maybe you can fix this. It's been a deeply fucked-up day.'
'Where'd you buy it?' I asked.
'K amp;B's. Or maybe at the Jackson Brewery, you know, that mall that used to be the Jax brewery… No, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Brewery.' She bit a hangnail.
Clete and I drove to a K amp;B drugstore up St. Charles. It was raining, and the wind blew the mist out of the trees that arched over the streetcar tracks. The green-and-purple neon on the drugstore looked like scrolled candy in the rain.
'Harpo was the name of the cop who took Cool Breeze Broussard's wife away from him,' I said.
'That was twenty years ago. It can't be the same guy, can it?'
'No, it's unlikely.'
'I think all these people deserve each other, Streak.'
