The Vieux Carre. Three o’clock of a Tuesday morning. Rivermist wafting through the streets and shaping hazy aureoles around the lamplights. Some of the jazz clubs still at it, some of the speaks and sporting houses, others of them calling it a night. Edward Longstreet Charponne emerges from Miss Daniella’s front door and makes a final adjustment to his cravat as the proprietress herself smoothes the shoulders of his coat. She kisses his cheek, bids him goodnight and a good long sleep, steps inside and closes the door. He lights a thin cigar, exhales smoke and self-satisfaction, feels vestigial but pleasurable ache in his loins from the evening’s ruttish indulgences. He crosses the street to the maroon Packard parked in the shadow of an overhanging balcony, unlocks the door and slides in behind the wheel.
He flinches at the touch of something small and hard against the back of his head as a voice says, Easy does it, counselor. Sharp Eddie is certain that the object at his head is a pistol and he feels a moment’s keen urge to urinate. He peers into the rearview but the man’s face is obscured by shadows and a white widebrimmed hat.
Have a smoke, the man says. Good for the nerves.
Eddie lights a cigarette and the man leans forward so the glow of the match will clarify his face in the mirror. The gray mustache spreads slightly in what might be a smile as Eddie recognizes him. He shakes out the match, certain that no amount of lawyerly outrage at being confronted in such felonious manner will be of effect with this man. Still, he is quick to recoup his self-confidence and invoke a bravado learned from his years of professional association with the rougher trades.
Wouldn’t it be more polite, he says, not to say more productive and less warranting of assault charges, if you’d simply made an appointment to see me in my office?
Who killed Charlton?
Pardon me? His tone affecting a nettled bemusement. Look, deputy, the police have already interrogated me at length about Lionel Buckman’s escape, so—
His left ear abruptly afire. His hand flies up to find there the pincers which snap onto the forefinger as well and he hears a small crack of bone. Before he can scream, the pistol barrel is deep in his mouth, scraping palate, grinding tongue on molars, inciting a surge of vomit to burn the nasal passages and cut off breath and spill over his goatee. He thinks he will drown. Then the barrel withdraws sufficiently to permit him to cough and suck a hard breath. The pincers unloose the torn ear and broken finger. Blood cascades hotly on his neck. Tears blur his vision and stream down his face, mucus floods his mustache. He snorts, chokes, gasps around the gun barrel. Tastes oil and steel and his own ferrous blood.
The beslimed muzzle leaves his mouth and presses into his good ear. The man embracing him from behind like a perverse lover, sliding the open pincers down his chest like a caress. Touching them lightly to his crotch.
I won’t ask again.
Sharp Eddie gives up the names of Sonny LaSalle and his outlaw uncles—and with hardly a pause offers all he knows of last summer’s Verte Rivage bank robbery, volunteers that he recognized the newspaper drawing of the unidentified Bogalusa robber and murder suspect as one of the LaSalle brothers. But he has little else to reveal. The LaSalles have kept him on retainer for nearly two years and occasionally joined him for a drink, but they’ve always been closemouthed about their business and their associates and never yet required his services in court for themselves.
The man jabs the gun hard into Eddie’s ear. I don’t give a rat’s ass about them. Where’s the kid?
Eddie swears he doesn’t know. He’s heard rumor the brothers fled New Orleans following the botched job in Bogalusa. Maybe the kid’s with them. He feels his tender parts constricted small between the ready pincers.
Who else knows them? Other kin? A ladyfriend?
A ladyfriend, yes—a girl!—there was a girl. Eddie tells of an amused reference the brothers once made to a girl their nephew was humping. Last summer. A rich arty girl. Her father was the oil guy who drowned off the coast of Europe a few years back. Matson.
He nearly weeps with relief as the pincers come away from his genitals. Then hears as well as feels the horrifying crunch of them through his throat….
Police investigators speculate that Sharp Eddie’s bloodsoaked demise most likely came at the hands of a client with a grievance.
Kind of lowlifes he did business with, I always expected it, me, a detective tells reporters.
The newspaper’s pious editorial on the checkered career of Edward Longstreet Charponne closes with the observation that every criminal he set at liberty through the immoral and unethical application of his considerable legal acumen was but one more thief turned loose among the honest, one more seed of peril cast into the law-abiding world. We can hardly be faulted, the editorial opines, for perceiving some small measure of divine retribution in Mr. Charponne’s having reaped of the pernicious fruit he sowed.
We pulled into the Guadalupe Motor Camp outside of Kerrville sometime after two in the morning. The hills cast deep shadows under the high oval moon. The air redolent of cedar. The manager wasn’t happy about being wakened at that hour but he shuffled to the office door in robe and slippers and let us in. There were two cabins available. Charlie claimed one of them for herself and the girl and told Russell he had another think coming if he thought he was going to share it with them. She helped the girl out of the car and into the cabin and closed the door.
Russell hadn’t complained about my “rescue” of the girl, as Buck jokingly insisted on calling it, until he realized he’d have to bunk with the two of us, and he berated me for a meddling fool as we finished off the bottle.
“Next time you get a notion to save some chippy from a fate worse than whatever,” he said, “don’t do it—not if it’s gonna get me kicked out of my fluff’s bed.”
Even Buck’s announcement that the San Antonio take came to $290 did little to soothe Russell’s irritation. The cabin had two beds and I didn’t think to argue about which one of us was going to sleep on the floor.
We slept till nearly midmorning but still were ready for breakfast before the girls, so we went to wait for them at the camp’s cafe. When they finally came in and headed for our booth, we saw that Charlie had made a heroic effort with her makeup kit, but there was only so much she could do for the girl. The swollen black eye was a squint. Her other cheek looked embedded with a small wedge of plum, and her nose was lightly blue across the bridge. But she’d had a bath and her hair had been washed and brushed and showed a shine. She wore one of Charlie’s dresses. It rode high on her legs and was tight across the breasts but otherwise seemed to fit okay. Until now I hadn’t realized just how young she was—she didn’t look more than sixteen. And I could tell that under the
