Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, she called me on my cell phone. “You visited the Klein woman in jail?” she said.

“Briefly. But I didn’t learn a whole lot.”

“What’d she tell you?”

“A story about her father and swimming with clown fish.”

“Clown fish?”

“I guess they’re a symbol of childhood innocence for her. Anyway, I think she deliberately got herself arrested.”

“We have the same impression at the Bureau. Some of her griffins have been showing up at three or four casinos where Whitey Bruxal is a part owner. It seems they make a point of standing in front of security cameras and getting themselves escorted off the premises.”

I waited for her to go on.

“Did I catch you on the john?” she said.

“No,” I lied. “I didn’t know you had finished. You think they’re planning to take down a casino?”

“I’d say it’s a diversion of some kind. But my supervisor says I always overestimate people’s intelligence.”

“You guys deal with higher-quality perps,” I said.

“Actually, he was talking about you and Purcel.”

Two uniformed deputies entered the restroom, talking loudly. One of them slammed down the seat in the stall next to me. “Hey, there’s no toilet paper on the roller. Get some out of the supply closet, will you?” he called out to his friend.

space

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of New Orleans. Not the New Orleans of today but the city where Clete and I had been young patrolmen, in a cruiser, sometimes even walking a beat with nightsticks, at a time when the city in its provincial innocence actually feared Black Panthers and long-haired kids who wore love beads and Roman sandals.

This was before crack cocaine hit New Orleans like a hydrogen bomb in the early eighties and the administration in Washington, D.C., cut federal aid to the city by half. Oddly, prior to the eighties, New Orleans enjoyed a kind of sybaritic tranquillity that involved a contract between the devil and the forces of justice. The Giacano family ran the vice and maintained implicit understandings with NOPD about the operation of the city. The Quarter was the cash cow. Anyone who jackrolled a tourist got his wheels broken. Anyone who jackrolled an old person anywhere or stuck up a bar or café frequented by cops or who molested a child got his wheels broken and got thrown from a police car at high speed on the parish line, that is, if he was lucky.

The Giacanos were stone killers and corrupt to the core, but they were pragmatists as well as family men and they realized no society remains functional if it doesn’t maintain the appearances of morality.

New Orleans was a Petrarchan sonnet rather than an Elizabethan one, its mind-set more like the medieval world, in the best sense, than the Renaissance. In the spring of 1971 I lived in a cottage by the convent school on Ursulines, and every Sunday morning I would attend Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, then stroll across Jackson Square in the coolness of the shadows while sidewalk artists were setting up their easels along a pike fence that was overhung by palm fronds and oak boughs. At an outdoor table in the Café du Monde, over beignets and coffee with hot milk, I would watch the pinkness of the morning spread across the Quarter, the unicyclists pirouetting in front of the cathedral, jugglers tossing wood balls in the air, street bands who played for tips knocking out “Tin Roof Blues” and “Rampart Street Parade.” The balconies along the streets groaned with the weight of potted plants, and bougainvillea hung in huge clumps from the iron grillwork and bloomed as brightly as drops of blood in the sunlight. Corner grocery stores, run by Italian families, still had wood-bladed fans on the ceilings and sold boudin and po’boy sandwiches to working people. Out front, in the shade of the colonnade, were bins of cantaloupe, bananas, strawberries, and rattlesnake watermelons. Often, on the same corner, in the same wonderful smell that was like a breath of old Europe, a black man sold sno-balls from a pushcart, the ice hand-shaved off a frosted blue block he kept wrapped in a tarp.

Traditional New Orleans was like a piece of South America that had been sawed loose from its moorings and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean, until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States. The streetcars, the palms along the neutral grounds, the shotgun cottages with ventilated shutters, the Katz and Betz drugstores whose neon lighting looked like purple and green smoke in the mist, the Irish and Italian dialectical influences that produced an accent mistaken for Brooklyn or the Bronx, the collective eccentricity that drew Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and William Burroughs to its breast, all these things in one way or another were impaired or changed forever by the arrival of crack cocaine.

Or at least that is the perception of one police officer who was there when it happened.

But in my dream I didn’t see the deleterious effects of the drug trade on the city I loved. I saw only Clete and me, neither of us very long out of Vietnam, walking down Canal in patrolmen’s blues, past the old Pearl Restaurant, where the St. Charles streetcar stopped for passengers under a green-painted iron colonnade, the breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain, the evening sky ribbed with strips of pink cloud, the air pulsing with music, black men shooting craps in an alley, kids tap-dancing for change, the kind of moment whose perfection you vainly hope will never be subject to time and decay.

When I woke in the early dawn, with Molly beside me, I didn’t know where I was. It was misting and gray in the trees, and out on the bayou I could hear the heavy droning sound of a tug pushing a barge down toward Morgan City. The ventilated shutters on the front windows were closed, and the light was slitted and green, the way it had been in the cottage where I lived on Ursulines.

“You okay, Dave?” Molly asked, curled on her side under the sheet.

“I thought I was in New Orleans,” I replied.

She rolled on her back and looked up at me, her hair spread on the pillow like points of fire. She cupped her hand around the back of my neck. “You’re not,” she said.

“It was a funny dream, like I was saying good-bye to something.”

“Come here,” she said.

She kissed me on the mouth, then touched me under the sheet.

Later, after I had showered and dressed, Molly made coffee and heated a pan of milk and poured our orange juice while I filled our bowls with Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas. Both Tripod and Snuggs came inside, and I split a can of cat food between the two of them and gave each his own water bowl (Tripod, like all coons, washed his food before he ate it) and spread newspaper on the linoleum to preempt problems with Tripod’s incontinence. The mist outside had become as thick and gray in the trees as fog, and I couldn’t see the green of the park on the far side of the bayou.