take 'em all out. For openers he told Joe to pop that black kid, Tee Bobby Whatever. Throw a pimp off a roof and make his friends watch. And tell Zerelda to stop complicating things by rolling down her panties at every opportunity. First she's pumping it with that animal Purcel, then she's messing around with a door-to-door salesman packs his own lunch into restaurants. It was disgusting.
Frankie shot nine-ball in a back-of-town bar in Lafayette, where the beer was cold, the fried-oyster po'boys good, the green-felt table level, the pockets leather, the competition first-class. It was like the saloons on Magazine he and Joe had shot pool in when they were kids.
Lightning flickered on the banana trees outside the back window and he heard a few drops of rain ping against the tin roof like scattered birdshot. A man with silver hair came in and sat at the bar in front. He had a Roman nose and a broad forehead that caught the light. Frankie had to look at him twice to make sure it wasn't Johnny back from the grave. Frankie speared the cue ball into the rack and ran the string all the way to the nine ball. When he looked at the bar again, the man with silver hair was gone.
Besides the bartender, the only other person in the building was a guy playing a pinball machine in a side room, back in the shadows, a guy with his slacks tucked into red and green hand-tooled cowboy boots that came almost to the knee, his face obscured by a peaked cowboy hat.
Frankie had not heard the front door open or close, had felt no puff of wind or balloon of rain-scented air come into the room. Where had
'Bring me another beer,' Frankie called to the bartender.
'You got a beer.'
'It's flat. Bring me an oyster po'boy, too,' Frankie said.
Ten minutes later Frankie glanced out the side window. The man with silver hair was standing by a black
Caddy, the wind blowing his raincoat. Lightning pulsed across the heavens and the reflection illuminated the parking lot. The man by the Caddy seemed to smile at him.
Frankie told himself he was coming down with something. His stomach was roiling; his bowels were on fire. He went into the rest room and entered the wooden stall and latched the stall door behind him. When he dropped his pants and sat down heavily on the toilet seat, he looked through a clear spot on the painted window glass and saw the silver-haired man enter the back of the tavern.
The door to the rest room opened and Frankie felt the cool rush of air from the outside and heard the rain ticking on the banana trees. Then, for a reason he could not explain, he knew he was going to die.
He had left his gun in his coat on the back of a chair by the pool table. But strangely he felt no fear. In fact, he even wondered if this wasn't the moment that he had always sought, the one that came to you like an old friend showing up unexpectedly at a train station.
'That you, Johnny? What's going on?' Frankie said.
His eyes dropped to a pair of green and red cowboy boots, just before four splintered swatches exploded out of the door into Frankie's face.
An hour later Helen Soileau and I joined a Lafayette Homicide detective and three uniformed cops at the back of the tavern where Frankie Dogs died and waited for the paramedics to load his elephantine weight onto a gurney that was spread with an unzippered black body bag.
The Homicide detective, whose name was Lloyd Dronet, wore a rain-spotted tan suit and a tie with a palm tree and tropical sunset printed on it. He had picked up four nine-millimeter shell casings on the end of a pencil and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. A fifth shell casing lay inside the stall, glued to the floor by Frankie Dogs's blood.
'So this fits with what the bartender told us. Four quick pops, then a pause and another pop. The last round was close-up. The muzzle flash burned the hair above the ear,' Dronet said.
'Meaning?' Helen said.
'The shooter was a pro. This guy Dogs was mobbed up, right? Another greaseball whacked him out,' Dronet said.
The man with silver hair sat at the bar, waiting for us to interview him. He was a local liquor distributor and was watching a baseball game on the television mounted up on the wall.
'Both the bartender and the liquor salesman say the only other person in the building was the guy in cowboy boots. You know any cowboys in the Mob?' I said.
'Greaseballs don't go to western stores?' Dronet said.
'You've got a point,' I said.
We talked to the liquor distributor. He kept looking at his watch and jiggling his car keys in his coat pocket.
'You got somewhere to go?' Helen asked.
'I'm taking my wife out tonight. I'm already late. I'm trying to get home before the storm breaks,' he replied.
'You saw the guy in cowboy boots go out the back door?' I said.
'I didn't say that. I saw a man playing pinball. I didn't pay any attention to him. I heard the shots, then I went into the rest room. I wish I hadn't gotten mixed up in this.'
'You saw no one else?' Dronet asked.
'No. I feel sorry for the man who died. But I don't know anything. The guy with the cowboy boots, they were green and red. I remember that. Like a Mexican might wear. But I didn't see his face. Can't we do this tomorrow?'
'If you didn't bother to look at his face, why'd you look at his boots?' Helen asked.
'Because his pants were tucked inside them. Can I go now?'
'Yeah. You and your wife have a good time,' Dronet said.
'Who's Johnny?' the liquor distributor asked.
'Say again?' I said.
'The man on the floor was still alive when I got to him. He said, 'Hey, Johnny, some guy took me down hard.' It was funny, because my first name is Johnny. My wife's not gonna believe this.'
'Get out of here,' Helen said.
The bartender was an over-the-hill ex-wrestler and competition weight lifter from New Orleans, with a walleye and a polished round head and strands of braided barbed wire tattooed around both his upper arms.
'You got a look at the cowboy?' I asked him.
'It's a dump. I don't concentrate on the faces that come in here. Short version, I failed Braille school. You guys finished back there? I got to mop out the shitter,' he replied.
Helen was thoughtful and quiet on the way back into New Iberia. Rain was falling on Spanish Lake, and fog rolled off the water and hung in the trees and smudged the lit windows in the houses set back from the road.
'You think it was a Mob hit?' she asked.
'Nope. Frankie was a made guy, Joe Zeroski's number one man.'
She yawned and steered the cruiser around a possum that was crossing the road in the headlights, the windshield wipers beating hard against the rain.
'Long day, bwana. You want to hang it up for tonight?' she said.
'How about a visit to our local Bible salesman first?' 'Surprise, surprise,' she said.
Marvin Oates lived downtown on St. Peter Street in a rented shotgun house, one with ventilated shutters, left over from the 1890s. Banana trees were wedged in a cluster against one side of his gallery, and on the other side bougainvillea with stems as thick as broomsticks had tangled itself in the railings so that the front of the house looked like an impacted tooth.
An ancient Buick, one side burned black by a fire, the entire paint job encrusted with soot and rust, sat in the shell drive, the rain pinging on the metal. Helen placed her hand on the hood.
'Still ticking,' she said.
Marvin Oates answered the door in pajama bottoms and a pajama shirt that was unbuttoned on his chest, barefoot, his face full of sleep, his breath sweet with mouthwash through the screen.
'Can we come in?' I asked.
'I was sleeping. I get up early.'
