“We could do all kinds of doo-dah with these photos, and in all probability none of it would lead anywhere,” I said. I slipped the photos facedown out of the envelope and walked with them into the kitchen. “So I’m making use of a Clete Purcel procedure here, which is, when the rules start working for the lowlifes, get a new set of rules.”
I took a lucifer match from a box on the windowsill above the sink, scratched it on the striker, and held the flame to the corner of the photographs. The fire rippled and curled across the paper like water; I separated each sheet from the others to let the air and heat gather on the underside, the images, whatever they were, shrinking and disappearing into blackened cones while dirty strings of smoke drifted out the screen. Then I turned on the faucet and washed the ashes down the drain, wiped the sink clean with a paper towel and dropped it in the trash.
“You want to have some early lunch, then go to the office?” I said.
“Give me a minute to change.” Then she said, “Thanks for what you did.”
“Forget it.”
“I’ll say this only once,” she said. “Men are kind to women for one of two reasons. Either they want inside the squeeze box or they have genuine balls and don’t have to prove anything. When I said thank you, I meant it.”
There are compliments you don’t forget.
Before I drove away I put the stiffened body of one of the dead coons in a vinyl garbage sack and placed it in the bed of my truck.
The investigation had gone nowhere since the night of Delia Landry’s murder. I had made a mistake and listened to Sonny Boy’s deprecation of the mob and his involvement with them. Sweet Pea Chaisson’s name had surfaced again, and Sweet Pea didn’t change toilet paper rolls without first seeking permission of the Giacano family. If the spaghetti heads had started to crash and burn back in the seventies, it was a secret to everyone except Sonny.
The heir to the old fat boy, Didoni Giacano, also known as Didi Gee, whose logo had been the bloodstained baseball bat that rode in the backseat of his Caddy convertible when he was a loan collector and who sometimes held down the hand of an adversary in an aquarium filled with piranhas, was his nephew, a businessman first, a gangster second, but with a bizarre talent for clicking psychotic episodes on and off at will — John Polycarp Giacano, also known as Johnny Carp and Polly Gee.
Friday morning I found him in his office out by a trash dump in Jefferson Parish. His eyes, nose, and guppy mouth were set unnaturally in the center of his face, compressed into an area the size of your palm. His high forehead was ridged and knurled even though he wasn’t frowning. His hair was liquid black, waved on the top and sides, like plastic that had been melted, molded, and then cooled again.
When I knew him in the First District, he had been a minor soldier in the organization, a fight fixer, and a Shylock with jockies out at Jefferson Downs and the Fairgrounds. Supposedly, as a kid, he had been the wheel man on a couple of hundred-dollar hits with the Calucci brothers; but for all his criminal history, he’d only been down once, a one-year bit for possession of stolen food stamps in the late sixties, and he did the time in a minimum security federal facility, where he had weekend furloughs and golf and tennis privileges.
Johnny Carp was smart; he went with the flow and gave people what they wanted, didn’t contend with the world or argue with the way things were. Celebrities had their picture taken with him. He lent money to cops with no vig and was never known to be rude. Those who saw his other side, his apologists maintained, had broken rules and earned their fate.
“You look great,” he said, tilting back in his swivel chair. Through the window behind him, seagulls were wheeling and dipping over mountains of garbage that were being systematically spread and buried and packed down in the landfill by bulldozers.
“When did you get into the trash business, Johnny?”
“Oh, I’m just out here a couple of days a week to make sure the Johns flush,” he said. He wore a beige suit with thin brown stripes in it, a purple shirt and brown knit tie, and a small rose in his lapel. He winked. “Hey, I know you don’t drink no more. Me, neither. I found a way around the problem. I ain’t putting you on: Watch.”
He opened a small icebox by the wall and took out an unopened quart bottle of milk. There were two inches of cream in the neck. Then he lifted a heavy black bottle of Scotch, with a red wax seal on it, from his bottom desk drawer. He poured four fingers into a thick water glass and added milk to it, smiling all the while. The Scotch ballooned and turned inside the milk and cream like soft licorice.
“I don’t get drunk, I don’t get ulcers, I don’t get hangovers, it’s great, Dave. You want a hit?”
“No thanks. You know why anybody would want to take down Sonny Boy Marsallus?”
“Maybe it’s mental health week. You know, help out your neighborhood, kill your local lunatic. The guy’s head glows in the dark.”
“How about Sweet Pea Chaisson?”
“Clip Sonny? Sweet Pea’s a marshmallow. Why you asking me this stuff, anyway?”
“You’re the man, Johnny.”
“Uncle Didi was the man. That’s the old days we’re talking about.”
“You have a lot of people’s respect, Johnny.”
“Yeah? The day I go broke I start being toe jam again. You want to know about Marsallus? He came out of the womb with a hard-on.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s read enough books to sound like he’s somebody he ain’t, but he’s got sperm on the brain. He uses broads like Kleenex. Don’t let that punk take you over the hurdles. He’d stand in line to fuck his mother... I say something wrong?”
“No,” I said, my face blank.
He folded his hands, his elbows splayed, and leaned forward. “Serious,” he said, “somebody’s trying to whack out Sonny?”
“Maybe.”
He looked sideways out the window, thinking, his coat bunched up on his neck. “It ain’t anybody in the city. Look, Sonny wasn’t never a threat to anybody’s action, you understand what I’m saying? His problem is he thinks his shit don’t stink. He floats above the ground the rest of us got to walk on.”
“Well, it was good seeing you, Johnny.”
“Yeah, always a pleasure.”
I pulled on my earlobe as I got up to go.
“It’s funny you’d tell me Sonny uses women badly. That was never his reputation,” I said.
“People in the projects don’t work. What do you think they do all day, why you think they have all them kids? He’s a nickel-and-dime street mutt. The head he thinks with ain’t on his shoulders. I’m getting through here?”
“See you around, Johnny.”
He cocked one finger at me, drank from his glass of milk and Scotch, his compressed features almost disappearing behind his hand and wrist.
I don’t remember the psychological term for it, but cops and prosecutors know the mechanism well. It involves unintended acknowledgment of guilt through the expression of denial. When Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody after the assassination of President Kennedy, he seemed to answer truthfully many of the questions asked him by cops and newsmen. But he consistently denied ownership of the 6.5 millimeter rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the one piece of physical evidence to which he was unquestionably and inextricably linked.
Della Landry had been murdered, in all probability, because of her association with Sonny. The first remark out of Johnny’s mouth had been a slur about Sonny’s misuse of women, as if to say, perhaps, that the fate of those who involved themselves with him was Sonny’s responsibility and not anyone else’s.
But maybe I was simply in another cul-de-sac, looking for meaning where there was none.