"Where you going, Dave?" Helen asked.
"To get a haircut," I said, and gave her the thumbs-up sign.
Late that night, after Joe Zeroski and all of his men were released from jail, a car pulled into the motor court and stopped in front of Zerelda Calucci's cottage. A young man in a white straw hat and pale blue cowboy shirt with flowers stitched on it got out of the car and walked to the cottage door, bending down briefly, then got back in the car and drove away.
The next morning, when Zerelda Calucci opened her door, she found a dozen red roses, wrapped in green tissue paper, lying across a gold-embossed copy of the Bible.
CHAPTER 12
Friday night I experienced what recovering alcoholics refer to as drunk dreams, nocturnal excursions into the past that represent either a desire to get back on the dirty boogie or a fear of it. In my dream I visited a saloon on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where I stood at a mirrored bar with two inches of Beam in a glass and a long-necked Jax on the side. I drank as I did before I entered Alcoholics Anonymous, knocking back doubles with the careless disregard of a man eating a razor blade, confident that this time I would not wake trembling in the morning, filled with rage and self-hatred and an insatiable desire for more drink.
Then I was in another saloon, this one located in an old colonial hotel in Saigon, one with wood-bladed ceiling fans and ventilated shutters on the windows and marble columns and potted palms set between tables that were covered with white linen. I wore a freshly pressed uniform and sat in a tall chair at a teakwood bar next to a friend, an Englishman who owned an export-import company there and who had been an intelligence agent in Hanoi when the Viet Minh, later named the Viet Cong, were America's allies. He wore a white suit and a Panama hat and a trimmed white mustache, and was always kind and deferential toward those who thought they could succeed as colonials where he could not. Aside from his flushed complexion, the enormous quantities of scotch he drank seemed to have little influence on him.
He tapped my glass with his, his blue eyes sorrowful, and said, "You're such a nice young officer. A shame you and your chaps have to die here. Oh, well, give the little buggers hell."
Then it was night and I was looking out on a sea of windswept elephant grass lit by the phosphorous halos of pistol flares. Inside the grass toy men in conical straw hats and black pajamas, armed with captured American ordnance and French and Japanese junk, tripped a wire strung with C-rat cans. The Zippo-tracks cut loose, with a mewing sound like a kitten's, arcing liquid flame over the grass, filling the sky with voices and a smell that no amount of whiskey ever rinses from the soul.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and pushed the sleep out of my eyes. The window curtains were blowing in the wind, and the clouds above the swamp were as black as soot, heat lightning ballooning inside them, and I could smell a trash fire in a coulee and hear the hysterical shrieking sound of a nutria calling to its mate.
I went into the bathroom and opened a bottle of aspirin and poured eight into my hand, then ate them off my palm, biting down on the acidic taste of each, cupping water into my mouth, taking the rush just as if I had eaten a handful of white speed.
I lay back down on top of the sheets, a pillow over my face, but did not sleep again until dawn.
It was Saturday morning and I drove to Morgan City and searched the city newspaper's morgue for an account of a homicide involving the man some called Legion Guidry. It wasn't hard to find. On a weekday night in December of 1966 a freelance writer named William O'Reilly, age thirty-nine, of New York City, had acted belligerent in a bar down by the shrimp docks. When asked to leave, he had pulled a pistol on the bartender. The bartender, one Legion Guidry, had tried to disarm him. William O'Reilly was shot twice, then had staggered into the parking lot, where he died.
The story did not run until two days after the death of the victim and appeared on the second page of the newspaper. The story stated that William O'Reilly had been unemployed for several years and had been dismissed from both a newspaper and a university teaching job for alcohol-related problems.
I turned off the microfilm scanner and looked out the window at the palm trees and rooftops of Morgan City. I could see the bridges over the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya River and the shrimp boats and bust-head saloons down by the waterfront and the dead cypresses in the chain of bays that formed a deep-water channel into the Gulf of Mexico. But to the denizens of America's criminal subculture, Morgan City was more than a piece of Jamaica sawed loose from the Caribbean. It had always been the place to go to if you were on the run and needed a new identity, access to dope, whores, foreign ports, and money that was not on the record. What better place to murder a worrisome alcoholic writer from New York and get away with it, I thought.
That afternoon Clete Purcel came into the bait shop and rented a boat. I had not seen him since he had been released from jail.
"You want to talk about anything?" I asked. "About getting put in the bag with psychopaths like Frankie Dogs? Not really," he said.
"I was going to ask you if you'd had any contact with Legion Guidry."
His face became vague, then he yawned and looked at his watch. "Wow, the fish are waiting," he said.
He loaded his tackle box and cooler and spinning rod and himself into a narrow aluminum outboard and roared down the bayou, splitting the water in a yellow trough behind him. He returned just before dark, sunburned, his face dilated from drinking beer all afternoon, an eleven-pound large-mouth bass iced down in the cooler, the treble hooks of the Rapala still buried deep in its throat.
I heard him scaling and scraping out his fish under a faucet on the dock, then he entered the bait shop and washed his hands and face with soap at a sink in back and helped himself to a sandwich off the shelf and a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter, his eyes clear now. He counted the money out of his wallet for the sandwich and coffee, then lost his concentration and knitted his fingers in front of him.
"I need to put my schlong in a lockbox," he said.
"You're talking about your involvement with Zerelda?"
"I can't believe I was in a cell with Frankie Dogs. He was a bodyguard for one of the guys who probably killed John Kennedy. It's like standing next to a disease."
"Go back to New Orleans for a while."
"That's where all these guys live."
"So pull the plug with Zerelda."
"Yeah," he said vaguely, looking into space, puffing out the air in one cheek, then the other. "I think she's still got the hots for Perry LaSalle, anyway. I guess he poked her a few times, then decided to zip up his equipment. Zerelda says he did the same thing with Barbara Shanahan."
I busied myself at the cash register, then carried out a bucket of water that had drained from the pop cooler and threw it across one of the bait tables. When I came back inside, Clete was looking at me, his face flat.
"You don't want to hear about other people's sex lives?" he said.
"Not particularly."
"Well, you'd better hear this, because this guy LaSalle has thumbtacks in his head and makes a full-time career of finding reasons to jam boards up everybody's ass except his own.
"Barbara and Zerelda used to know each other when Barbara and LaSalle were at Tulane together. Barbara wouldn't have anything to do with LaSalle, because LaSalle's family let Barbara's grandfather do time that should have been theirs. Then one night outside a law-school party on St. Charles, LaSalle saw these gang-bangers tearing up two Vietnamese kids. LaSalle waded into about six of them, so they stomped him into marmalade instead of the Vietnamese.