“Mr. Baylor said this??
?
“Earlier in the evening, when some guys were breaking into houses on the other side of the street.”
“Did others hear him say this?”
“A couple of friends were in the yard with me. Otis had been outside with his rifle. Listen, I don’t blame him. We offered to help him, in fact.”
“Would you write down the names of your friends and their addresses, please?”
“I hope I’m not getting anybody in trouble. I just want to do the right thing,” he said, taking my pen and notepad from my hand.
With neighbors like Tom Claggart, Otis Baylor didn’t need enemies.
BUT THERE WAS an ancillary player not far away I could not resist interviewing. Sidney Kovick was an enigmatic man whose personality was that of either a sociopath or a master thespian. He was tall, well built, with dark hair, close-set eyes, and a knurled forehead, and he wore fine clothes and shined oxblood loafers with tassels on them. When he walked he seemed to jingle with the invisible sound of money and power. When he entered a room, most people, even those who did not know who he was, automatically dialed down their voices.
He had grown up on North Villere Street and worked as a UPS driver before he joined the Airborne and went to Vietnam. He came home with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart but seemed to have no interest in his own heroism. Sidney had liked the army because he understood it and appreciated its consistency and predictability. He also appreciated the number of rackets it afforded him. He lent money at twenty percent interest to fellow enlisted men, had ties with pimps in Saigon’s Bring-Cash Alley, and sold truckloads of PX goods on the Vietnamese black market. Sidney didn’t believe in setting geographical limits on his talents.
Whenever someone asked Sidney’s advice about a problem of any kind, his admonition was always the same: “Don’t never let people know what you’re thinking.”
He owned a flower shop, loved movies, and always wore a carnation in his lapel. His favorite quote was a paraphrase of a line spoken by Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind: “Great fortunes are made during the rise and fall of nations.” Sidney was invited to the governor’s inauguration ball, rode on the floats during Mardi Gras, and performed once on the wing of a biplane at an aerial show over Lake Pontchartrain. Longtime cops looked upon him as a refreshing change from the street detritus they normally dealt with. The only problem with romanticizing Sidney Kovick was the fact he could snuff your wick and sip a glass of burgundy while he did it.
Workmen were going in and out of his front door. I stepped inside without knocking. The interior looked like an army of Norsemen had marched through it. Sidney stood in his dining room, looking up at a chandelier that someone had shredded into tangled strips with an iron garden rake.
“They hit you pretty hard, huh?” I said.
He stared at me as though he were sorting through faces on a rolodex wheel. “Yeah, the puke population is definitely out of control. I think we need a massive airdrop of birth-control devices on two thirds of the city. What are you doing here, Dave?”
“Investigating the shooting of the guys who creeped your house.”
“House creeps don’t piss in your oven and refrigerator.”
“You’re right,” I said, plaster crunching under my shoes. “Looks like they tore out all your walls and part of your ceilings. Think they were after anything in particular?”
“Yeah, the secrets to the Da Vinci Code. You still off the sauce?”
“I’m still in AA, if that’s what you mean.”
“Get your nose out of the stratosphere. I was going to offer you a couple of fingers of Beam, because that’s all I’ve got. But I didn’t want to offend you. I hear one of those black guys was turned into an earth slug.”
“That’s the word. I haven’t interviewed him yet.”
“Yeah?”
I wasn’t sure if he was listening or if he was asking me to repeat what I had just said. He told a workman to get a ladder and pull down the wrecked chandelier. Then he touched the ruined surface of his dining table and brushed off his fingers. “Which hospital is the human slug in?” he said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I feel sorry for him. Anybody who could do this to people’s homes must have a mother who was inseminated by leakage from a colostomy bag.”
“You always knew how to say it, Sidney.”
“Hey, I was born in New Orleans. This used to be a fine city. Remember the music and the amusement park out at Lake Pontchartrain? How about the sno’ball carts on the street corners and families sitting on their porches? When’s the last time you walked down a street at night in New Orleans and felt safe?”
When I didn’t answer, he cocked a finger at me. “Got you,” he said.
On my way out I saw Sidney’s wife in the yard. She came from a fishing hamlet down in Plaquemines Parish, a geological aberration that extends like an umbilical cord into the Gulf of Mexico. She was as tall as her husband and had a lantern face, cavernous eyes, and shoulders like a man. For decades her family had been the political allies of a notorious racist judge who had run Plaquemines Parish as a personal fiefdom, even padlocking a Catholic church when the bishop appointed a black priest to serve as its pastor.