John Raven Beau Read online

  Buck races up to me, licks my hand, then heads back down to the rocks and I remember how easily Mullet’s Harley motored away from us.

  So where does a Harley man hang out? And just as I ask myself that I remember the old Harley-Davidson Shop beneath the Claiborne overpass. I don’t know how many times I’ve passed it and there’s always hogs and bikers there.

  It’s a long shot, but what have I got to lose? I stand and whistle and Buck follows me back to Sad Lisa. Before leaving, I call Sandie to leave a message on her recorder and wind up talking to her.

  “How’d it go last night?” I ask.

  “Nothing. He’s either smarter than I thought or just being cagey.” She yawns. “Then again, I haven’t been pumping him. And don’t go there. I’m not a complete whore, you know.”

  “I never said you were.”

  I hear her breathing on the line.

  “I’m taking a couple nights off,” she finally says. “Going by my mother’s. We have a family reunion across the lake. Fountainbleau State Park. Wanna come?”

  I hesitate before saying, “Sure.”

  She laughs. “I’m kidding. I’m taking Scrumptious.”

  Still laughing, she hangs up and I know she’s pulled my string. She got that hesitation out of me. We men think we’re smart but women are smarter and much more wily. Especially when it comes to the human heart.

  •

  With my Caprice parked at the corner of South Claiborne and Clio, half hidden by an overflowed dumpster and an abandoned sofa, I have a good view of Hog Heaven across Claiborne, two short blocks away. Shaded by the overpass up to the interstate, Hog Heaven is a converted filling station. Looks like it was built in the forties with its rounded corners and stucco walls whose faded paint has peeled away in spots to show at least four different colors. I can still see a faded red Esso sign on the front wall. The words ‘Hog Heaven’ are painted in bright purple just above the door. Nine Harleys are parked there, three men working on one and four others sitting around drinking beer.

  For the last three hours, six bikers have come and gone, but no Mullet. I couldn’t be that lucky. If he does drop by, I’ll have an easier time following him on wide Claiborne, at least I’ve convinced myself of that.

  Wish I could just drive over and talk to them as they guzzle their brews and tinker with their bikes. Even if I went in disguise, they’d make me for the heat. Must be the way I talk. At the grocery last night, I’m in a tee-shirt and cut-offs, I ask a clerk where is the filé and he tells me, “Aisle three, officer.”

  Happens all the time. Jodie says its the way we ask direct questions, the way we look people in the eye with a more than subtle expectation of a quick answer that gives us away. I also think it’s the way we’re always looking around, always noting things around us.

  I fight off a yawn and glance around again, making sure no one’s sneaking up on me in this blighted area. Behind my car is a line of abandoned cars. Next to the dumpster is a one-story red brick building surrounded by a nine foot page fence with razor-wire along its top. Across Clio, to my right, is a junkyard, also surrounded by a nine foot fence. The area smells of rotten bananas and burned tobacco.

  This is the Sixth Police District. The Bloody Sixth has the most murders, robberies, rapes, the most abandoned houses, four housing projects, along with the manicured lawns of the Garden District. Opulence next to poverty makes life interesting. I settle back and watch Hog Heaven.

  At five sharp, they close up and the six remaining bikers drive off up Claiborne. I wait a few minutes before leaving, knowing I’ve just wasted a day. Just as I access the interstate, it hits me and I slap the steering wheel. I didn’t follow them because I didn’t want to get spotted, especially with no Mullet in sight. But they left together in a pack, heading uptown. Sandie says Mullet frequents uptown bars. I knew I should have had more coffee today.

  Maybe they’ll be open Sunday.

  I drop by Flamingo’s and Angie isn’t there.

  “She’s off,” Cecilia says as she leads me to my booth. “Probably on a date.”

  Why do women always seem to know what I’m thinking?

  It’s unnerving.

  You gotta love the ambiance

  Just as I’m heading out the door Sunday morning, my phone rings. Buck barks at the phone and does a quick spin.

  “Hello?”

  “So what are you doing, today?” It’s Jodie.

  I tell her and she says, “Mind if I come along?”

  Forty-five minutes later we’re sitting next to the dumpster with fresh cups of coffee-and-chicory from PJ.’s. The strong smell of coffee momentarily overpowers the scents from the street, a mix of rotten bananas and motor oil.

  Jodie glances around. “Jesus. Where do you find these places?”

  “Nice, isn’t it?”

  Over night someone deposited a door-less refrigerator and a broken bathtub along the curb just outside the junk yard across the street. Jodie and I are both in jeans. She wears a tan blouse over a tank-top and I wear a dark brown dress shirt over a gold LSU tee-shirt. Although I’m sweating, Jodie’s hair looks perfectly blow-dried, not a strand out of place. The woman doesn’t perspire.

  “So who told you about Mullet?” I ask, knowing the answer.

  “Kay. He told Merten and me, swearing us to secrecy.” She nods toward Hog Heaven, which has only two men working today. “You think he’s going to drop by or something?”

  I give her a Lakota saying. “The patient coyote will catch the rabbit when it comes out of its hole.”

  Jodie squints as she looks over at the filling station. “You didn’t bring binoculars, did you?” She shakes her head. “I know. You don’t need them. You and those Sioux eyes.”

  I’ve never told her my secret Lakota name but she’s knows all about how well I can see. At eleven o’clock five bikers pull up and beers are distributed.

  “Any of them Mullet?” Jodie asks.

  I shake my head. She settles back in her seat and lets out a long sigh. “So, what district did you choose?”

  A man pulls up on a reddish Harley and I look closely, but it’s not Mullet.

  “District?” I ask.

  “If you’d bother to read the memos in your In box, you’d know the new chief is breaking up the Detective Bureau.”

  “What!?”

  “We’re going back to the districts. All plainclothes. Burglary. Robbery. Sex Crimes and even Homicide.”

  “That’s stupid. How are we going to pick up trends? How’re we going to know who’s robbing people two districts away, who’s raping uptown women, then getting in his car and driving downtown to rape a few? He expects us to read dailies and memos?”

  Our new chief, a transplanted assistant chief from New York, is long on honesty but short on street smarts. Then again, he’s new. He’ll learn.

  “The idea is to make us more visible on the streets, more accessible to the public.”

  I leave that idea floating in the heat. A few minutes later Jodie tells me she put in for the Second District. The uptown police.

  “What about your old district?” she says as she looks around disgustedly at this typical Sixth District street. “You could work here again.”

  “That was LaStanza. I never worked the Sixth.”

  “Oh.” It’s not like her. She’s embarrassed by the slip.

  I keep watching Hog Heaven.

  “Well, you better put in for something or they’ll just stick you some place like the Fourth.”

  Jesus! The Across The River Police. Algiers. I’ve only been there a handful of times, always at night, always working a murder.

  “You can put in for the Third. You live there.”

  I live in Jefferson Parish, but that’s close. A blue-gum dog races past us and I see it’s chasing a rat.

  “Now that you mention it, the Sixth might be the place. It’s got the most murders, the most action.” I wave at the abandoned appliances. “You gotta love the ambiance.”

>   Jodie goes on about a Homicide Power Watch. Working out of headquarters, a small unit will handle big cases, heater cases. Maybe cold cases. She’s pushing hard for it.

  “Interested?” she asks me.

  “Abso-fuckin-lutely.”

  At exactly noon, Hog Heaven closes. We follow the four remaining bikers who dart off to Claiborne, cross three lanes to take a quick left on Martin Luther King Boulevard. The bikers spread out a little in the light traffic but come together at the corner of Simon Bolivar and park along the street outside a low-life bar with a hand painted sign out front that reads: Raton.

  We drive by and make a u-turn and park facing them. About a dozen white-boy bikers are assembled outside, in this all-black neighborhood. They guzzle beer in the bright sunlight. Jodie and I draw curious looks from several women sitting out on the front stoops of their houses. They probably have us pegged as the police.

  “Know what raton means in French?”

  “Raton?”

  “Yeah, the sign outside the bar. Raton is rat in French.”

  Jodie nods. “Fits.”

  The sun is brutal now and there’s not even a hint of breeze. “Well,” I say as I crank up the engine and turn the AC on high. “At least I have another biker bar for my informant to check out.”

  Just as I reach to shift the car into drive, a feeling comes over me. I hesitate and look back up M. L. King. A Harley slows and turns on Simon Bolivar, a maroon Harley. I watch as Mullet pulls his bike up next to the men outside the bar and stops to talk with them.

  “What is it?” Jodie asks.

  I point to the goose-bumps on my arm, then repeat another homicide cliché. “It’s good to be good. But it’s better to be lucky.”

  “It’s him?”

  I nod as Mullet starts to drive away. He stops again and continues talking. “You always bring me luck,” I tell Jodie.

  Still sitting on his bike, Mullet takes a beer from a compadre and drains it. He tosses the can in the gutter and stretches. Looking up momentarily at the sun, he yawns. The men in the street back away as Mullet turns his bike around in the street and heads away from us, back up M. L. King.

  I try not to follow too closely, but as we near Claiborne I close the gap so he doesn’t get through the light without us. He makes a leisurely illegal left turn on Claiborne and we follow. Staying in the center lane, he’s not going very fast and I hope he’s going home after an all-niter, instead of just starting out for the day.

  Mullet slips into the right lane as we pass Jackson Avenue. He increases speed slightly, then slows and takes a right on Third Street. I take the corner slowly, just in time to see him hang a left on the next street. When we get to the corner of Third and South Derbigny, I look to my left and see Mullet climb off his hog and cross a tiny front yard to the front porch of the third house from the corner. A playground is in front of us. I cross Derbigny and drive next to the playground while Jodie looks back.

  “He went inside the third house.”

  I pull up against the curb and look through the six foot page fence, what we call a hurricane fence, surrounding the playground. Mullet’s Harley is parked next to two others in front of an unpainted shotgun camelback. Several junked motorcycles rest on either side of the small front porch. The house is sandwiched in a line of other shotgun houses, many of them boarded up. The neighborhood is semi-blighted with about a third of the houses abandoned. Some are downright shanties.

  Four black women and two older black men are out on the front stoops of the houses across the street from where we sit to check out Jodie and me. A group of boys shooting baskets at the covered basketball court in the playground, a few feet up from where we sit, stop playing to look at us.

  “We stay, we’re going to get burned,” Jodie says.

  I nod and pull away to circle the block and get a layout of the area. The playground is Taylor Playground, running along So. Derbigny from Third Street all the way to Washington Avenue. Behind the playground is an elementary school. As we drive around to Washington Avenue, I hang a left on South Roman, which runs a half-block through the playground. I stop momentarily next to a huge oak tree.

  “We can watch him from here,” I tell Jodie, nodding across the playground to Mullet’s house. He’ll have to be sharp to spot us through two page fences, across a wide, block-long playground and through an oak tree.

  “We’ll gonna stay today?” Jodie asks.

  “Naw. I think he’s just come home from an all-nighter. No need to push our luck. How about some lunch?” I ask Jodie as I pull away.

  “Sure.”

  “You name it. The Camellia Grill? The Columns? How about some Chinese?”

  Jodie pulls her hair back with both hands and says, “Wendy’s.”

  I give her a screwed-up face look.

  “I think I’m addicted to their double-stacks with cheese,” she says and smiles for the first time today.

  Who am I to argue?

  •

  I look out the porthole at the moon as I lay in bed. It’s large and yellow in the distant sky. I hear Buck moving around downstairs. He can’t sleep either.

  Jodie called it a Homicide Power Watch. I’d like that, to work with her again regularly and not as her junior partner either. Guess that’s why she called this morning, that and to get out together on something. I miss working with her. Guess she feels the same way.

  Curiously she didn’t mention her latest boyfriend, the podiatrist. She’s been seeing the guy for about a year, told me his name more than once, but for the life of me I can’t remember it. He’s older. Pushing fifty, I think. Met him once. He’s prematurely gray, hair more white. Quiet and nice, the perfect man for someone like Jodie. Dependable. Solid. There when you need him. Not many foot emergencies, at least that’s what Jodie tells me.

  I roll over and face the dark side of the room and close my eyes. I take in deep, measured breaths, steady breaths and slowly feel myself slipping away. Sad Lisa seems to drift beneath me ...

  And I dream again.

  Of my Dad.

  Of one lazy Saturday afternoon.

  In the swamp, autumn lasts one day, two at the most. The stifling heat gives way to one perfect day, a bright day with cool air. It is the day before the first cold front reaches down from Canada and turns south Louisiana into a damp, cold, miserable land of winter rains and chilly winds blowing across the flat land all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

  I dream of the autumn day of my twelfth year, sitting on thick grass next to a coulee off Vermilion River. My father knows this permanent coulee well, this deep gully fishing hole next to a huge weeping willow, whose branches reached over the coulee. I sit on one side of the tree, my father on the other side. Holding my slaughter pole, that extra long bamboo fishing pole my father cut and shaped for me, I watch my cork rest in the smooth, brown water. A worm impaled on the new stainless-steel fishing hook my father bought in Abbeville, I held the nylon string taught, just as my daddy instructs. His face beams at me when my cork bounced slightly.

  Slowly, I move the tip of the pole to my right, keeping the string tight and fell the fish strike, the cork going straight down, the tip of the pole bending. I pull up firmly and the fish is hooked. It yanks back and nearly pulls the pole from my hand.

  “Stand up,” my father calls out, putting his pole down.

  I stand and pull up as hard as I can. The fish darts away and my foot slips and I go down on one knee. My father heads my way, but I stand quickly and start backing away, still holding the pole high. My father told me, more than once, to just walk backwards. “No fish ‘round here gon’ pull a eighty-pound boy in de water.”

  The fish feels like a gator in its struggling. The pole dips and looks like it’ll break, but doesn’t. I continue backing until the cork comes out of the water. The fish yanks again and I hold firm until it comes out of the water, sailing and flapping to land on the bank. I jerk the pole again and pull it higher up the bank and see it’s a yellow cat, the best eating
catfish, thick and round. We weigh it later at Burke’s Fish Hut and it’s over thirteen pounds.

  That night we cook it, along with the six channel cats my father caught and the two sac-a-lait I managed to catch. My mother made cornbread. My father’s face beams at me as we eat our fish. My mother, so quiet, sits and smiles at me, telling me that was the biggest catfish she’s ever seen. For years, my father bragged about that yellow cat. I see his face clearly, the slight stubble of beard on his chin, the dark creases along his cheeks, his bright eyes.

  I wake suddenly to the smell of my father’s tobacco-laced breath. A deep pain in my chest, I sit up and try to catch my breath and discover I’m crying. I settle back down and wipe my eyes. Buck yips once downstairs and I take in a deep breath. Even after all these years, it’s hard to believe my father’s really gone. Still hard to fathom a world without him.

  I close my eyes and envision a woman, a silken-legged beauty with full breasts and nice round hips. The face I give her is from a woman I saw once, as she crossed St. Charles Avenue by Audubon Park. She wore all-gray, a smart business suit with a skirt short enough to show the smooth lines of her sleek legs. Dark haired, she had a round face and full lips colored a deep red.

  I was stopped in heavy traffic as she crossed in from of my police car. She turned and looked at me for a long moment. I don’t think a week has passed when I didn’t think of that dark haired, alluring, New Orleans beauty.

  •

  Parking my Caprice against the curb next to the large oak on South Roman, I point across Taylor Playground to the unpainted wooden shotgun house. “That, my friend, is where Mullet lives.”

  Gonzales pulls off his sunglasses and squints.

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “How’d you find it?” Gonzales puts his sunglasses back on. He’s wearing black jeans today, a gray dress shirt unbuttoned over a black Saints tee-shirt. He gleeks me, peeking over the top of his sunglasses.