we can play.”
“Play what?” Teddy said, leaning back into his chair. His arms spread across his chest. Full Marlon Brando mode. “You ain’t had no business interruptin’ Malcolm’s thing.”
“You burned my Rolls,” he said.
Cash tucked four shrimp into the pockets of his right fingers. He gnawed off each one as if eating parts of his own flesh and laughed with shit stuck in his teeth.
The woman with big boobs next to us sucked in her cheeks and turned her head away. Cash smelled her action and got up out of his chair.
He leaned down to her and said something to her that made her clutch her chest and then run to the bathroom. He sat back down at the table and wiped his mouth as if his dirty words had spilled on him.
“The kid?”
Teddy hadn’t moved from the Brando pose. He stroked under his chin with the tops of his fingers. “ALIAS is my company.”
Teddy stood.
All of his boys stood and for a moment I felt like a kid who didn’t attend church enough to know the rules. I stood too, a few seconds later.
“I appreciate the dinner,” Teddy said. “I look forward to concluding our business in the future. You’ll get your money but you ain’t never gettin’ ALIAS.”
Just as he turned his back, there was a mammoth crash. Cash had flipped the table, splattering the champagne and shrimp cocktail and sending my beer into a foaming skitter across the floor.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” he screamed. “Goddammit, you’re dead.”
35
For two days, I didn’t see or hear from Teddy. I worked on my long-delayed book on Guitar Slim, planned another trip to Mississippi, replaced the radiator in the Ghost, and took Annie down to this place on the levee called Dog Park. I’d taught her to sit and stay, her reward some pepperonis off a pizza from Port of Call. I finally called Teddy on his cell Tuesday night and asked him on his voice mail when I could come by and look through Malcolm’s papers. He didn’t call back and I was beginning to think I was done. I figured he’d worked out his deal with Cash, maybe had accepted the idea of his brother being a thief and a killer, and wanted to mourn in peace.
I reached into my pocket and found the pack of Newports that Malcolm had handed me a million years ago.
I crumpled them into my hand and dumped the mess into the sink.
Before I knew it, the rains would be here and then that first little fall chill and I’d be back trapped in a Tulane classroom teaching nineteen-year-olds about singers who’d been dead for fifty years. On Thursday, I was ready to go. Duffel bag packed with clean jeans, T-shirts, shit-kickin’ boots, and enough underwear in case that bad accident ever happened. I just needed some good CDs – fill up my case of fifty – when the phone rang.
I should have ignored it. I wanted very badly to see Maggie. Check out ALIAS’s progress with JoJo and Loretta. Heard he’d actually followed through with JoJo’s deal. Loretta had bought him some kids’ books and he’d been working on the words. On the phone, she called him a genius.
I packed up Big Jack Johnson, Tyler Keith and the Preacher’s Kids, Robert Bilbo Walker. The phone rang more.
I grabbed it.
“Man, Nick,” Teddy said. “Where are you?”
“Home.”
“No, you ain’t,” he said. “You in Hawaii.”
“How’s that?”
“Twenty minutes from the Paris abode,” he said. “We havin’ a luau.”
“I can’t.”
“Just stop by.”
“I’m on my way out.”
“It’s about JoJo.”
He hung up.
From the porch in back of his Mediterranean Revival mansion – all creamy pink stucco and red barrel tile – I could smell the hog meat roasting in a spit and plantains frying in a blackened skillet. Teddy had hired a local reggae band to set up near his dollar-shaped swimming pool and a crew of women to give free massages. I pulled a Red Stripe from a galvanized tin bucket filled with ice and sat down on the diving board. Women in string bikinis and men in thousand-dollar suits roamed the patio. On the driveway sat a car lot full of Escalades and Bentleys, with those chrome rims shining like silver dollars in the afternoon sun.
The patio was a jungle of palm trees, banana plants, and fat magnolias filled with white Christmas lights. Pounding rap filled the backyard from some speakers inside his living room and a rottweiler and a pit bull – someone told me had belonged to ALIAS – roamed the backyard, eating barbecue pork from unsuspecting partyers’ plates.
Trey Brill held court at a dock on the lake, teaching some former Calliope and Magnolia kids the perfect swing. He let them take turns hitting golf balls over the levee while he sipped on a Heineken from a little chair.
He caught me watching and gave me the two-finger salute and turned back to his pupils.
Teddy walked by and handed me a paper plate laden with black beans and rice topped with shaved onion. He settled onto the base side of the board and began to eat too.
About ten people suddenly rushed the pool and splattered us. But Teddy didn’t break stride with the fork. He stared into an empty field beside the house where a contractor’s bulldozers sat idle.
The men in the pool had plucked a couple of women up on their shoulders and were chicken-fighting. A young kid had a circle of men around while he freestyle-rapped about the women he’d slept with and the cars he owned.
I tried to find what Teddy saw in the open field.
I think he was just numb.
“Sold Malcolm’s car today,” he said to himself.
“Jay Medeaux said you still believe he killed himself.”
He nodded. “I don’t hate him, Nick. I don’t. Even after what coulda happen to me with Cash when that money disappeared. Still don’t change nothin’.”
“I’m leaving town,” I said.
Teddy shook his head and drank down the rest of the Red Stripe in one gulp. He smoothly shifted from the diving board, stood, and disappeared back into the house. I followed.
The inside of his mansion was all slate and tile, all big chunks the size of flagstones in the Quarter. He had a couple of paintings of jazz scenes on the walls, a USS Enterprise -sized entertainment center with four big screens. Only one couch and a couple of chairs. Half of a furniture store display.
Teddy handed me a Dixie. “That’s your brand, right?”
I nodded.
“I need you, Nick.”
“Teddy,” I said. “You’re all right now. Talk to the police.”
“Naw, man. Not for that. I need you to hang. You know? Like we did back at camp. Remember how we used to watch them soap operas and shit, laughin’ at them women with those big titties who couldn’t act? Remember that dude who had that eyebrow and shit? You would turn the sound off and make up his voice. Man, that was hilarious.”
“I need to get back to ALIAS. JoJo can’t handle him on his own.”
He reached inside his bulky pants pocket and then pressed a brass key into my palm. He gripped my hand inside his meaty fingers and held me there, looking into my eyes. “There you go.”
