I had known Dana Magelli at NOPD since Clete and I came back from Vietnam and walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter. The three of us had made detective grade at the same time and were close friends, although Dana was a family man and didn’t succumb to the occupational legacy of violence and wasted days and nights the way Clete and I did. Dana was also the bane of the Balangie family, whom he despised for the damage they did to the Italians who were decent and hardworking and paid the price for scum like Adonis.
I called Dana Magelli from my office.
“Hey, Dave, how you doin’?” he said. “Carroll LeBlanc gave you all the information on the taxi driver homicide?”
“More or less,” I said. “You found my address in the wastebasket at the guesthouse?”
“Yeah, but the guy at the guesthouse paid with cash and registered as G. Smith, and we got no idea who the black woman was or why somebody would break the cabbie’s neck, unless he tried to run a Murphy scam on the wrong guy.”
“Murphy artists in the Quarter?”
“No, Adonis Balangie runs New Orleans vice like his old man did. No jackrollers or Murphy scammers are allowed between Esplanade and Canal, Decatur and Rampart.”
“Can you give me a detailed description of the man who tore up the drunks?”
“The victims say he was big and had a head like a snake’s. That’s about all they’ll say. I think they’re afraid they’ll have to identify him.”
“No mention of a harelip or a tiny nose?”
“Negative. You know something about this guy?”
“Clete had some trouble in the Keys.”
“With a guy who looks like this?”
“Clete got abducted. He woke up suspended from a wrecker hook. A guy with a harelip and a bump for a nose was going to light him up.”
There was a long silence. “What are we dealing with here?”
“I don’t like to think about it.”
“I want to talk to Clete.”
“Good luck,” I said.
“Look, I’m working on another lead. We’ve pulled a bunch of surveillance cameras that show our guy leaving the guesthouse in a hooded raincoat and walking with his suitcase up Pirate’s Alley and trying to get in the back door of the cathedral. Then he walks out of the Quarter and shows up on three cameras on St. Claude Avenue and disappears in the Ninth Ward. Get this. Somebody broke into a colored church down there and slept under the altar.”
“You get any prints at the church?”
“Yeah, same as inside the cab, so many we might as well be doing the Superdome. I haven’t slept in over thirty hours.”
“You’re a good cop, Dana.”
“Tell Clete he can get in touch with me or see how he likes one of our new holding cells. I’ve got a question for you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Your colleague LeBlanc says Penelope Balangie came to your department looking for you. He also says she was seen at your house. Please tell me it’s not what I think.”
Dana had brought up a major problem of conscience for me. Celibacy and I had never been very compatible. I tried, certainly, but at best usually ended up with a C-minus. Through my encounter with Penelope Balangie, I had managed to involve myself with people whose thinking powers were probably locked inside the sixteenth century. On top of it, I had trouble keeping her out of my thoughts.
Also, I was worried about Clete Purcel, and the innocence and naïveté and false optimism that often blinded him to the pernicious nature of the people with whom he surrounded himself. And if that sounds like an indictment of myself as well, you’re right.
What are your choices in a situation such as this? What would a great philosopher of ethics such as Jeremy Bentham probably say? I suspect something like “Search me, pal.”
Anyway, I knew where to find Adonis Balangie on midweek nights and Sunday mornings. I checked an unmarked car out of the department Wednesday afternoon and headed for New Orleans.
His tennis club had the best clay courts in the city. At sunset the lights clicked on with a loud swatch, glowing with humidity against a sky that was the color of torn plums, tall palm trees with slender trunks creating an additional ambiance that could have come from The Arabian Nights.
I parked my car in the shadows and wandered over to a court where Adonis was playing doubles with three women, the metal eyelets on the nylon screens clinking softly in the breeze. A woman at the net swung her backhand four feet from his face and almost took off his head. Gentleman that he was, Adonis grinned and said, “Fine shot, Leslie. My God, you could rip off a man’s head.”
She seemed to beam in response, although I wasn’t altogether convinced of her sincerity. I watched them walk off the court and sit at a table under the palms. In the center of the table, a magnum of champagne was nestled in an ice bucket sweating with frost. I knew Adonis had seen me approach, but he gave no sign, instead listening keenly to one of the women. It was hard to tell them apart. They seemed designed the way a brand-name product was, each with coarse bleached yellow hair pulled straight back, each suntanned, each with a lean and hungry look. I walked into the light.
“What’s the haps, Adonis?” I said.
“Didn’t know you were a member, Detective Robicheaux,” he replied, his gaze resting playfully on the three women as though I were part of a humorous script.
“Can we take a walk?” I asked.
“I think not,” he said. He removed the foil from the champagne bottle and twisted the key on the wire cage and dropped it on the table, then gripped the cork and twisted the bottle from it without spilling a drop. “Like to join us? Here, I’ll pour you a glass.”
I pulled up an iron chair and sat down. I was pretty sure Adonis knew I was in the program, and I believed he was taunting me. My feelings were strange, though. I wasn’t angry with him; I felt disappointed.
Then I saw a thought swim into his eyes. He tapped himself on the forehead. “Sorry, Dave. I forgot you have a problem with sugar or something. You want some hot tea?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “How are you ladies tonight?”
They smiled but didn’t speak. Their eyes didn’t seem to match their faces, as though each was wearing tinted contact lenses.
“Y’all don’t mind giving me five minutes, do you?” Adonis said.
As the women walked toward the clubhouse, the one named Leslie turned and looked at me and put one finger in her mouth and sucked it while crossing her eyes. There was a scar on her cheek she had covered with makeup. I had seen her before, but I couldn’t remember where. Adonis followed my line of sight. “Leslie has a rough edge or two, but live and let live, right?” he said. “What brings you to my club?”
“Know a guy with a harelip and no nose who likes to hurt people?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure.” He poured into a champagne glass and drank from it. The tips of his hair were sun-bleached and glistening with moisture. “He’s somebody I should be concerned about?”
“You tell me. I hear Johnny Shondell is in a treatment center in Baton Rouge.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“How about your stepdaughter? Where is she?”
“With Mark Shondell.”
“That’s a fucking disgrace,” I said.
I had taken it to the edge. It wasn’t wise. His eyes drifted onto my face. “This is my club. We don’t use that kind of language here. We don’t speak about family matters, either.”
“I don’t get you,” I said. “You were in the airborne. You’re educated and smart. Cops may not like you, but they respect you.”
“So?”
“You’re playing tennis while your stepdaughter is in the hands of a molester.”
He watched the shadows of the palm trees swaying on the clay courts, which were a soft pink and seemed to have absorbed the afterglow of the sun. “You know who Bill Tilden was?”
“A national tennis champion during the twenties?”
“He made two famous statements about tennis: ‘Doubles is a game of angles’ and ‘Women emasculate genius.’ I like the former more than the latter.”
“What does that have to do with criminality?” I said.
“It has to do with everything. And ‘criminality’ is a relative term.”
I knew the argument and the rhetoric. The Mafia was no different than corporations. Prostitutes were sex workers and prostitution was a consensual and victimless activity. Marijuana was harmless. Sado-porn was protected by the First Amendment. Legalized gambling helped the poor. Blah-blah-blah.
“Sell your lies to someone else, Adonis.”
“I think you’re here for another reason.”
I felt my stomach clench. I cleared my throat. I held my eyes on his. “Ms. Balangie came to New Iberia because she was terrified about her daughter.”
“And you helped her out at your office?”
Then I knew he knew. “She had a flat in front of my house. I changed her tire and asked her inside. I talked to her a long time. Then she left.”
My mouth was dry, the wind cold on my face. A black man wearing a white jacket and white gloves put a tray of stuffed shrimp on the table. Adonis thanked him. The sprinkler system for the grounds came on. I could hear a jet of water striking the trunk of a palm tree.
“Are you listening?” I said.
“She told me. I’m not sure what I should do with you.”
“Say that again?”
“You may not have done anything wrong, but you thought about it. And the next time out, you will. It’s a matter of time, isn’t it?”
I stood up. I wanted to pull him out of his chair. He bit into a shrimp and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “You’ve come uninvited to my table,” he said. “You’ve tried to embarrass me in front of my friends, and you’ve sullied my wife’s name in public. I’m going to let these things pass. But only once.”
I could feel a tremble in my right hand, sense a flicker behind my eyes, a sound like a hummingbird in my ear. “The guy with the harelip tried to burn Clete Purcel to death, in his skivvies, hanging upside down from a steel hook. That same guy was carrying my address. I think you know who he is.”
“You look a little tense. You’re not going to do something you’ll regret, are you?”
“If I told you what I want to do, you’d be on your way home.”
“Should I call security?”
“Penelope is a nice lady. She did nothing wrong. That’s what I came here to say.”
“You refer to my wife by her first name?”
“She’s not your wife,” I said.
The redness of the sun seemed to dance on his face, then he looked at me in the way a man does when he knows that one day he will have his revenge and that his victim in the meantime will be powerless to defend himself or to guess the moment when the blade will fall. This was what I had done to myself.
The women returned from the clubhouse. Adonis picked up his racquet and walked onto the court. “Sorry to have kept you, ladies,” he said. “Let’s have at it, shall we? What a beautiful evening it is.”