Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"The manager called earlier. The grease balls have hookers in their rooms and are scaring the shit out of the staff. I was about to tell you about it but I got a call from a guy at the chamber of commerce. He says you and Clete Purcel had a conversation in Victor's Cafeteria that made a third of the room move their tables."

"I'm sorry."

"Dave, I've told you before, we have enough problems of our own. What does it take to make you understand that?"

The room was silent. I heard a warning bell clanging at the railroad crossing and a freight train clattering down the tracks. "You want the wiseguys out of town?" I said.

"I hate to tell you what I want," she said.

"Just say it, Helen."

She spit a hangnail off her tongue. "Meet you outside," she said.

We arrived in four cruisers at the Holiday Inn out by the four-lane. My experience with the Mob or its members had never been one that possessed any degree of romance. In fact, my encounters with them always made me feel as though I had walked inside the drabness and urban desperation of an Edward Hopper painting. Although it was Monday and the motel was almost empty, Frank Dellacroce and his two friends had taken a row of rooms in back, facing the highway, where road noise echoed off the windows and doors of their building. Their cars were brand new, waxed and shining, but were parked by an overflowing Dumpster, out of which trash feathered in the wind and scudded across the asphalt. The sun was barely distinguishable in the sky, the air close with an odor like fish roe that has dried on a beach; the only sign of life in the scene was a palm tree whose yellowed fronds rattled dryly in the wind.

Helen got out of her cruiser, her arms pumped, her shield hanging from a black cord around her neck. A cleaning woman was passing on the walkway, a plastic bucket filled with detergent bottles on her arm. "You smell marijuana coming from that room?" Helen asked.

"Ma'am?" the cleaning woman said.

"That's what I thought," Helen said. She banged her left fist on the door of the room registered to Frank Dellacroce, her right hand resting on the butt of her holstered nine-millimeter. "Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department! Open the door!" she shouted.

With few exceptions, television and motion pictures portray members of the Mafia or the Mob or the Outfit as dapperly dressed, Plo-tin ian emanations from an ancient ethnic mythos. They are not only charismatic they take on the proportions of protagonists in Elizabethan tragedy, with accents from Hell's Kitchen.

The truth is most of them are stupid and at best capable of holding only menial jobs. They use dog-pack intimidation to get what they want, whether it involves preferential seating in a restaurant or taking over a labor union. On a personal level their sexual habits are adolescent or misogynistic, their social behavior inept and laughable.

In terms of health, they're walking nightmares. Listen to any surveillance tape: After age fifty, they complain constantly about clap, AIDS, obesity, impotence, emphysema, clogged arteries, ulcers, psoriasis, swollen prostates, the big C, and incontinence.

The room door opened and a man with black, freshly barbered hair and pale features and dark eyes stepped outside. He was barefoot and wore slacks without a shirt. His chest was triangular in shape and covered with a fine patina of hair, his upper arms well developed. He started to pull the door shut behind him.

Helen pushed the door back on the hinges. "Your name Della-croce?" she said.

"Frank Dellacroce, yeah. Why the roust?" he said.

"We have a complaint you're soliciting prostitution and-using narcotics in the motel. Place both your hands against the building and spread your legs, please," she said. She crooked a finger at a figure inside the room. "You need to come out here, Miss. Bring your purse with you."

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; The girl who emerged from the room was probably not over nineteen, dressed in sandals; skintight, cut-off jeans; and a Donald Duck T-shirt that hung on the points of her breasts. She wore no makeup and her hair was bunched on the back of her head with a rubber band. "I didn't do anything," she said.

"Get out your ID," Helen said.

The girl's hands were shaking as she removed her driver's license from her billfold and handed it to Helen.

Helen looked at the photo and the birth date on the card, then gave it back to her. "Beat it."

"Ma'am?"

"Your trick is a guy who put his infant child inside a refrigerator. You want a fuckhead like that in your life?" Helen said.

The girl walked hurriedly across the parking lot toward the street. The uniformed deputies had pulled Dellacroce's two friends out of the adjoining rooms and were shaking them down against a cruiser. But they found no weapons or dope on them and none in their rooms.

Dellacroce was still leaning against the wall, his feet spread. "We done with this?" he said.

Helen didn't answer. I could see the frustration building in her face.

"Hey, we're here for the tarpon rodeo. We ain't broke any laws. You get off squeezing my sack, fine. But I want a lawyer," Dellacroce said.

"Better shut up," I said.