The Waiter from the Royal Sonesta
Legs tired and numb, I slid onto a stool at Lucky Pierre’s S-shaped bar. Mirrored between the bottles were two of my customers from earlier in the night. The two detectives had made my slow shift at the Bourbon Orleans lobby bar worthwhile, telling cop stories and tipping after every round. The inexpensive, gray business suits the two men wore were so similar they looked like uniforms.
Dolores moved slowly to my stool, carefully drying a hurricane glass as she walked. She was the late-night bartender, midnight until eight. Her face betrayed no emotion, her eyes focused on me without interest, lusterless. The late-night shift at Lucky’s had bled her of sentiment. I ordered my drink and bought another round for the two guys at the other end of the bar. Delores pointed my way when she served the drinks and I lifted my cocktail to toast them. They toasted back, smiling and waving me over. Forearms leaning onto the bar, I pushed myself up.
The bar at Lucky’s wasn’t long, but its irregular curves snaked deep into the narrow courtyard turned dining room. I needed to turn sideways several times to negotiate the narrow path between barstools and tables. It was long past midnight, but still beautiful ladies sat poised at the bar, expectant faces aglow with the vermilion light of oil lamps, their hair and makeup perfectly finished. They looked up to me with hopeful, inviting expressions as I rounded the bar toward the two detectives; then one recognized me as a Bourbon Street bartender and they turned their heads away, suddenly disinterested.
I pushed a twenty into Delores’ side of the bar, the narrow gutter from which money never comes back. She took the bill with an upraised eyebrow then turned to another customer, a middle-aged tourist in an expensive Italian suit. He was sitting with a demure-looking, and very young-seeming, lady in a flowing, satiny, white dress. He used his eyes to order them both another drink: wine for him and another Coke for her.
“You shouldn’t have paid for that, man. I don’t pay for anything here. I mean, thanks a lot, but—I don’t have to pay.” John was a New Orleans policeman who moonlighted, “detailed” as the night security detective at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel where I tended bar. I knew him well, the other guy in the uniform-suit was a friend of his from Florida.
“Never turn down a bartender you’ve been tipping all night when he offers to buy.” I tried to make my voice sound light and friendly, directing my reply to John’s friend from St. Petersburg, an ex-cop named Henley who ran a large private investigation business down there. Henley had sat at my bar at The Bourbon Orleans for a couple of hours, drinking Jack Daniel’s while he waited for John to finish up. He left me an extra five dollars when I closed.
“You’re on!” his voice resonated above the muffled voices in the quiet room, “Never enjoyed turning down a freebie anyway. I’ll just get the next ones.” Henley was a likable guy who wore an almost imperceptible hairpiece. He returned to looking up and down the bar at the ladies, his head wagging back and forth as if he were selecting from the many entrées of a smorgasbord. He finally got up and moved to where he could speak quietly with one of them. I turned to John when I spoke again.
“Nice guy.”
“Yeah. We worked together on a case a while back and been close ever since. Had me down to his beach house in St. Pete. Real good people.”
John was a soft-spoken, native New Orleanian who was a homicide detective during the day. His deceptively young features and powerful yet unthreatening self-assurance usually caused females in his vicinity to turn their glances in his direction, unconscious of the act. The ladies sitting in the half-dark under Lucky’s high canvas awning, however, viewed men through eyes of a different aspiration. To them, it appeared, John was invisible. He looked slowly around the room. “Not much going on tonight–Bourbon’s almost empty.”
“Yeah, these ladies are going to get fat sitting around drinking Coke all night.” I lifted my glass to indicate the women seated at the bar.
One corner of John’s mouth pulled into a tiny smile as he leaned close to speak with a conspiratorial whisper, his head cocked slightly so he could see Henley. “I told him to slow down until some more action showed up, but it’s like trying to hold back a bull or something.”
“Sometimes, in this place, patience is a virtue,” I answered over my drink.
A small disturbance at the far end of the bar interrupted our conversation. Dolores cut-off a drunk and he had pushed over one of the oil lamps with a crash. The drunk was about 30, a border of dark hair hemming a disk of pale skin at the crown of his head, a thin and patchy black beard, and drunken red eyes bulging from his insipid face. He wore a white dress shirt open at the neck–a red bow tie clipped to one droopy collar point, and an ill-fitting red dinner jacket. A pair of bulky bouncers appeared in an instant. One on each arm, they pulled him from his stool then pushed and dragged him down the long narrow hallway to the Bourbon Street doorway. They didn’t avoid banging his head into the cigarette machine on the way out.
John shook his head a little as his drink left his lips, “He’s a waiter over at the Royal Sonesta. He comes in here with a lot of money, but no matter how much he drinks, he can never get up the nerve to buy himself a date.” He waved to the bartender. “Hey, Delores. Two more over here.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t want to spend the money,” I said.
“Naw, that guy’s a flake. Even the girls stay away from him anymore.” He twitched his head toward the ladies who could have been cover girls, but were not. The drinks came and no-one paid for them. Our conversation stopped while we drank. I couldn’t help wondering if he and Henley would just “not pay” for the girl Henley was picking up as well. John finished his drink as he stood, glancing at his watch. “Hey, keep an eye on Henley for me, would you? I want to go check on the hotel.”
“Sure thing. We’ll be here.”
He walked over to his partner, and as they spoke, Henley’s wig-covered head bobbed up and down like a fur-wrapped fishing float. I waited for John to pass down the hallway and out onto Bourbon before slipping a five-dollar bill into Dolores’ part of the bar. She noticed the money immediately and came back over.
“He’s a security cop at the hotel where I work,” I said, feeling as if I owed her an explanation of how I knew him.
“The Bourbon Orleans–I know all about him.” Her voice was tight, eyes suddenly fierce.
“You probably see as much of him as I do.” I knew the cops hung out at Lucky’s, it was the only quiet bar on Bourbon after the tourist places closed.
“He comes around.” She picked up the bill and snapped it between her fingers before reaching around to her tip glass on the back bar. “Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.” Delores had spent a lot of time behind a plank on Bourbon and knew locals paid her rent. She moved to the sink, seemingly more to avoid a conversation with me than to continue her work on the dirty glasses.
I sipped my drink as I studied the menu, but the food at Lucky’s was like the ladies who spent their time there; just a little rich for my budget. Sitting alone, watching the reflected room in the mirrored back bar, the night felt suddenly late. I’d almost decided to order a “To Go” nightcap when John came back; he said “Hey” as he passed by me on his way to Henley.
The two detectives joked and laughed with one graceful beauty. Her thick, wavy, scarlet hair bounced and her giant, shining, cobalt eyes enticed as she laughed and joked right back at them. I watched the appraisal process with interest, a simple business transaction, and didn’t at first notice that Dolores had returned to my spot at the bar. When I glanced back to her she seemed angry, a deep frown pulling her pretty face ugly. My first thought was that I had somehow broken the rules, that she was upset with me, but her eyes were focused over my shoulder. A thin, shaky voice rattled behind my ear but I couldn’t understand a word. When I turned to the sound, I found the same red-jacketed waiter Dolores had cut-off earlier.
“Triple schnapps,” he slurred more clearly. I realized he was repeating his first mumbled request. He sounded angry and afraid at the same time.
“I told you no more tonight. Come back some other time, okay?” Her voice was cold and firm, but not rude.
“You’re gonna to serve me, ya hear?” His voice rose an octave at the end of the sentence. Dolores shook her head stubbornly. “You’re gonna serve me or I’m gonna break up your damned bar. No gorillas here now.” She had told the doormen to clock-out and go home not ten minutes earlier. The drunk was standing back straight with shoulders back, but his voice was weak, a dry trembling stage whisper.
“No you’re not. You’re not because there are two cops right over there.” She gestured with her chin to where John and Henley were flirting with the redhead. The waiter retreated from my barstool, his backside coming to rest on the edge of a table, only a few feet away in the narrow room. He stared sullenly over to John and Henley for a moment then pushed both of his hands down the front of his pants. Dolores walked over to where the detectives were negotiating with the working girl. She leaned over the bar to talk to them, glancing back to the drunk as she spoke.
Her interruption had an immediate and sobering impact. In unison the detectives turned their heads and stood from the bar. John leading the way, they rushed the waiter sitting behind me. His hands were still wrist deep below his beltline, so each grabbed an elbow. They jerked him up from the table and yanked him toward the Bourbon Street door. Then, just as John smirked at Delores, as if to say, “See, we were worth the free drinks,” the waiter lurched away and ran toward the door, passing the bulky cigarette machine on the way, his gait awkward until he pulled his hands out from his pants.
“He has a gun,” Dolores screamed.
“Halt,” the command was clear above the quiet music and the low conversation that was just starting to change tone in response to the commotion. “Drop the gun,” John sounded strong and loud. I turned to his voice to find both detectives holding pistols, outstretched in two hands, aiming from the no-frills policeman’s crouch. Their eyes and weapons pointed down the hallway to the running target. My head snapped back down the line of their aim to the waiter, still far from the door. He was running hard as his head and right arm came back around in what seemed like slow motion. I was surprised to see that he also held a pistol. It never came more than half the way around.
I couldn’t count the shots. They came too fast. The waiter seemed to leap off his feet. Flying timeless moments, landing face down, sliding forward on the waxed floor, he finally came to rest with his hairless spot pressed against the door.
Uniformed police soon controlled the scene. They took names and a few statements, but mostly they listened to John and Henley as they explained their version of the shooting. Dolores closed the bar and the patrons filed out passed the body, now covered with a pale blue sheet. When I got to the cigarette machine I was shaky. John grasped my right hand and forearm, his firm two-handed grip reassuring, his eyes sad with cynical regret.
“I might want you to make a statement in the morning. Probably won’t need it, but you never know. You can go now if you want.”
“Thanks, John. I’m ready to go home.” My stomach felt inverted and sour; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. He walked me past the uniformed police hovering over the motionless form under the sheet. When we got out to the sidewalk on Bourbon he lit a cigarette, took a deep drag from it and smiled as he blew the smoke from the corner of his mouth.
“Well, that sure spoiled a good time. Looks like Henley won’t get laid tonight.”
“No, I guess not…not tonight.”
If you like what you just read, please hit the green ‘Recommend’ button below so that others might stumble upon this essay. For more essays like this, scroll down and follow the Human Parts collection.
