I hoped I would not hear from Betsy for a while. She rang back three minutes later. “How do you know about these bills?” she asked.
“Confidential informant,” I replied.
“Right.”
Then I broached the subject that had preyed on my mind since Natalia Ramos had first told me of Jude LeBlanc’s probable fate. “You hear anything about a priest drowning in the Lower Nine?”
“No.”
“His name is Father Jude LeBlanc. He was trying to chop a hole in the attic of a church when his boat was stolen from him. Maybe the Melancon brothers and the two Rochons were the guys who took the boat.”
“A lot of people were washed out to sea,” she said. “I think there’re still hundreds of people under the debris. Some state troopers believe there’re over thirty-five people buried under one building alone. The smell is awful.”
“There’s more to the story, Betsy. Bertrand Melancon says he saw luminescent bodies under the water in the Lower Nine. You hear of anything like that?”
“I’d better let you go.”
“Don’t blow me off. Melancon said Jude LeBlanc caused the bodies to glow. The guy’s got the Furies after him. He saw or did something out there. Maybe he committed a homicide.”
“These are bad times. Why carry a load that will break your back and not make the load lighter for anybody else? Take care of yourself, Dave.”
MANY YEARS AGO, United States Senator Huey P. Long, also known as the Kingfish, made a gift of our state to Frank Costello. In turn, Costello subcontracted the vice in Louisiana to a crime family in New Orleans. NOPD and the Mob coexisted in much the same way the Mob had coexisted with legal authority in Chicago and New York. The French Quarter was Elsie the cash cow, and no one was allowed to mess with her. The model was the Baths of Caracalla. Conventioneers from Omaha and Meridian could watch bottomless strip shows on Bourbon. They could spit whiskey and soda on each other in hotel bedrooms and get laid by hookers who looked like movie stars. At Mardi Gras they could frolic with transvestites and twirl their phalluses on the balcony of Tony Bacino’s gay nightclub. If the bill was a little high, few complained. The operational rule was simple: Everyone had a grand time and went home happy. Sin City was safe and all sins committed there were forgiven, courtesy of NOPD and the local chapter of the New Orleans Mafia.
“Law and order” and “family values” were not abstractions. Murphy artists got thrown off roofs, and jack-rollers and street dips got escorted to the parish line and had their bone structure remodeled. Anyone who stuck up a restaurant or bar frequented either by New Orleans cops or wiseguys got smoked on the spot. No one was sure what happened to child molesters. I always suspected some of them started new incarnations as fish chum.
Cultural symbiosis was a way of life. The Mob’s leadership was amoral and ruthless, but they always operated in pragmatic fashion. They were family men and adhered to certain rules, one of which was not to attract attention. As businessmen, they understood the importance of public church attendance, ceremonial patriotism, and the appearance of decency. Most of them kept their word, particularly when they dealt with NOPD. In fact, it was the only currency that allowed them to remain functional.
This all changed when crack cocaine hit the City. Within two or three years’ time, the walking dead were all over the downtown area. Black teenagers who looked like they had baked their mush in the microwave that morning were wandering around with nine-millimeters, totally disconnected from the suffering and death they sometimes inflicted. New Orleans ’s long and happy relationship with the Great Whore of Babylon was over. A kid with the IQ of tapioca pudding might rob you of your money in the St. Louis Cemetery and as an afterthought, for no reason he would ever be able to explain, splatter your brains all over a brick crypt.
John Dillinger, while being booked at the Crown Point, Indiana, jail, was asked by a newsman what he thought of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. He grinned lopsidedly and replied, “They’re a pair of punks. They’re giving bank robbery a bad name.” In New Orleans the respectable criminal infrastructure of the city was being replaced by pipeheads and street pukes. They were the new “punks” and they were ruining the fun for everyone.
But some members of the old order clung to the old ways and refused to accept the fact they were dinosaurs. One of these was a 585-pound pile of whale sperm by the name of Fat Tommy Whalen, also know as Tommy Orca and Tommy Fins. He wore ice-cream linen suits and had slits for eyes. His neighborhood country club revoked his membership after he cannonballed off the diving board and sent a tidal wave into a wedding party and knocked the bride into a flower bed. His family vehicle was an SUV whose undercarriage was supported by tank springs. The youngest of his five children, his daughter, weighed over three hundred pounds. Years ago, every Wednesday and Saturday night, Tommy took the entire Whalen family to an all-you-can-eat, six-dollar buffet in Metairie and drove the owner out of business. He was a Damon Runyon character I had shared a box with at the racetrack, a gelatinous cartoon of a human being who smelled of baby power and lilac water and mouth spray. But the dope culture had been the bane of respectable illegal enterprise in New Orleans, and Tommy’s personal code had gone down the toilet with the city’s.
The shorter version? Clete Purcel had managed to walk into an airplane propeller.
The general story made the Times-Picayune; the particulars came to me from a New Iberia paramedic who had gone to work in New Orleans right after the storm.
Tommy Fins arrived at Sidney Kovick’s flower store in Algiers in fine style, resplendent in white slacks that would fit a rhino and sky-blue silk shirt and flowing polka-dot necktie. One of Sidney ’s hired help, Marco Scarlotti, opened the door of the SUV for him, as though royalty were arriving, and walked with him to the entrance of the store. The morning was still cool, the green-and-white-striped canopy above the display window filling with the breeze off the river. Marco opened the door wide for Fat Tommy to enter. “ Sidney is running a few minutes late. Have some coffee and chocolate doughnuts. We got a shitpile of them,” he said.
“Yeah, I could use a snack. Thanks, Marco.”
“You got it, Tommy. You’re looking good. Looks like you lost a few pounds.”
But while Tommy Orca had been talking to Marco, he had not kept his attention focused on the width of the doorway. Before he realized it, he had wedged himself inside the door frame, his buttocks splayed on one jamb, his stomach and scrotum crushed into the other. “You got to give me a push, Marco,” he wheezed.
Marco began shoving from behind, squatting down, pushing with his shoulder as though loading a horse onto a trailer. Then his fellow bodyguard Charlie Weiss came from the back of the shop and began pulling on Tommy’s arm, twisting it in the socket.
“Your face don’t look too good. You okay?” Marco said. “Get him a glass of water, Charlie.”
“He weighs enough as it is. Christ, his legs are giving out. Stand up, Tommy. This is not the place to sit down. Oh shit,” Charlie said.
By the time the paramedics arrived at the store, Tommy’s enormous girth had settled into the door frame like a partially deflated blimp. His lips were filmed with spittle, his breath an agonized gasp.
“Hang on, buddy. We’re going to knock out the wall,” a paramedic said.
But Tommy wasn’t listening. His face was pouring sweat, his eyes focused on Marco’s. “I’m fucked,” he said.
“No, we’re getting you out, Tommy. Just hang on, man,” Marco said.
Tommy breathed in and out, as though deliberately oxygenating his blood. “Listen, tell Sidney that Clete Purcel has got his queer. Tell Sidney to take care of my family.”