I stood against a building on the opposite corner from Smiling Jack's and watched Jerry through the door for a half hour. He wore his fedora and an apron over an open-necked sports shirt that was cover
ed with small whiskey bottles. Against the glow of stage lights on the burlesque stage behind him, the angular profile of his face looked as though it were snipped out of tin.
The weight of the .45 was heavy in my raincoat pocket. I had a permit to carry it, but I never had occasion to, and actually I had fired it only once since leaving the department, and that was at an alligator who attacked a child on the bayou. But I had used it as a police officer when the bodyguard of New Orleans's number-one pimp and drug dealer threw down on my partner and me. It had kicked in my hand like a jackhammer, as though it had a life of its own; when I had stopped shooting into the back of the Cadillac, my ears were roaring with a sound like the sea, my face was stiff with the smell of the cordite, and later my dreams would be peopled by two men whose bodies danced disjointedly in a red haze.
This district had been my turf for fourteen years, first as a patrolman, then as a sergeant in robbery investigation, and finally as a lieutenant in homicide. In that time I got to see them all: male and female prostitutes, Murphy artists, psychotic snipers, check writers, pete men, car boosters, street dealers, and child molesters. I was punched out, shot at, cut with an ice pick, stuffed unconscious behind the wheel of a car and shoved off the third level of a parking garage. I witnessed an electrocution in Angola penitentiary, helped take the remains of a bookie out of a garbage compactor, drew chalk outlines on an alley floor where a woman had jumped with her child from the roof of a welfare hotel.
I turned the key on hundreds of people. A lot of them did hard time in Angola; four of them went to the electric chair. But I don't think my participation in what politicians call "the war on crime" ever made much difference. New Orleans is no safer a town now than it was then. Why? Narcotics is one answer. Maybe another is the fact that in fourteen years I never turned the key on a slumlord or on a zoning board member who owned interests in pornographic theaters and massage parlors.
I saw Jerry take off his apron and walk toward the back of the bar. I crossed the street in the slanting rain and entered the bar just as Jerry disappeared through a curtained doorway in back. On the lighted stage in front of a full-wall mirror, two topless girls in sequined G-strings with gold chains around their ankles danced barefoot to a 1950s rock 'n' roll record. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the turning strobe light that danced across the walls and floor and the bodies of the men staring up at the girls from the bar, then I headed toward the curtained doorway in back.
"Can I help you, sir?" the other bartender said. He was blond and wore a black string tie on a white sports shirt.
"I have an appointment with Jerry."
"Jerry Falgout?"
"The other bartender."
"Yeah. Have a seat. I'll tell him you're here."
"Don't bother."
"Hey, you can't go back there."
"It's a private conversation, podna. Don't mess in it."
I went through the curtain into a storage area that was filled with cases of beer and liquor bottles. The room was lit by a solitary bulb in a tin shade, and a huge ventilator fan set in the far window sucked the air out into a brick alley. The door to a small office was partly ajar, and inside the office Jerry was bent on one knee in front of a desk, almost as if he were genuflecting, while he snorted a line of white powder off a mirror with a rolled five-dollar bill. Then he rose to his feet, closed each nostril with a finger, and sniffed, blinked, and widened his eyes, then licked his finger and wiped the residue off on a small square of white paper and rubbed it on his gums.
He didn't see me until he was out the door. I caught both of his arms behind him, put one hand behind his head and ran him straight into the window fan. His fedora clattered in the tin blades, and then I heard them thunk and whang against his scalp and I pulled his head up the way you would a drowning man's and shoved him back inside the small office and shut the door behind us. His face was white with shock, and blood ran out of his hairline like pieces of string. His eyes were wild with fright. I pushed him down in a chair.
"Goddamn, goddamn, man, you're out of your fucking mind," he said, his voice almost hiccupping.
"How much did you get for dropping the dime on Robin?"
"What? I didn't get nothing. What are you talking about?"
"You listen to me, Jerry. It's just you and me. No Miranda, no lawyer, no bondsman, no safe cell to be a tough guy in. It all gets taken care of right here. Do you understand that?"
He pressed his palm against the blood in his hair and then looked at his palm stupidly.
"Say you understand."
"What?"
"Last chance, Jerry."
"I don't understand nothing. What the fuck's with you? You come on like a crazy person."
I took the .45 out of my coat pocket, pulled back the receiver so he could see the loaded magazine, and slid a round into the chamber. I sighted between his eyes.
His face twitched with fear, his mouth trembled, his hair glistened with sweat. His hands were gripped on both his thighs as though there were a terrible pain in his bowels.
"Come on, man, put it away," he said. "I told you I ain't no swinging dick. I'm just a guy getting by. I tend bar, I live off tips, I mop up bathrooms. I'm no heavy dude you got to come down on like King Kong. No shit, man. Put away the piece."
"What did they pay you?"
"A hunnerd bucks. I didn't know they were going to hurt her. That's the truth. I thought they'd just tell her not to be talking to no ex-cops. They don't beat up whores. It costs them money. I don't know why they broke her finger. They didn't have to do it. She don't know anything anyway. Come on, man, put it away."