The next morning was bright and clear, and I went to the doctor's office off Jefferson Avenue and had the stitches snipped out of my head and mouth. When I touched the scar tissue above my right eyebrow, the skin around my eye twitched involuntarily. I opened my mouth and worked my jaw several times, touching the rubbery stiffness where the stitches had been removed.
"How does it feel?" the doctor asked. He was a thick-bodied, good-natured man who wore his sleeves rolled up on his big arms.
"Good."
"You heal beautifully, Mr. Robicheaux. But it looks like you've acquired quite a bit of scar tissue over the years. Maybe you should consider giving it up for Lent."
"That's a good idea, Doctor."
"You were lucky on this one. I think if you'd spent another hour or so in the water, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"I think you're right. Well, thank you for your time."
"You bet. Stay out of hospitals."
I went outside into the sunlight and walked toward my truck, which was parked under an oak tree. A man in khaki clothes with a land surveyor's plumb bob on his belt was leaning against my fender, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag.
"How about a lift up to the park?" he asked.
"Who are you?"
"I have a little item here for you. Are you going to give me a ride?"
"Hop in," I said, and we drove up a side street toward Audubon Park and stopped in front of an enormous Victorian house with a wraparound gallery. Out in the park, under the heavy drift of leaves from the oaks, college kids from Tulane and Loyola were playing touch football. The man reached down into the bottom of his lunch sack and removed a miniaturized tape recorder inside a sealed plastic bag. He was thin and wore rimless glasses and work boots, and he had a deep tan and liver spots on his hands.
"It's light and it's flat," he said. He reached back in the sack and took out a roll of adhesive tape. "You can carry it in a coat pocket, or you can tape it anywhere on your body where it feels comfortable. It's quiet and dependable, and it activates with this little button here. Actually, it's a very nice little piece of engineering. When you wear it, try to be natural, try to forget it's on your person. Trust it. It'll pick up whatever it needs to. Don't feel that you have to 'point' it at somebody. That's when a guy invites problems."
"Okay."
"Each cassette has sixty minutes' recording time on it. If you run out of tape and your situation doesn't allow you to change cassettes, don't worry about it. Never overextend yourself, never feel that you have to record more than the situation will allow you. If they don't get dirty on the tape one time, it'll happen the next time. Don't think of yourself as a controller."
"You seem pretty good at this."
"It beats being a shoe salesman, I guess. You have any questions?"
"How many undercover people have been caught with one of these?"
"Believe it or not, it doesn't happen very often. We put taps on telephone lines, bugs in homes and offices, we wire up informants inside the mob, and they still hang themselves. They're not very smart people."
"Tony C. is."
"Yeah, but he's crazy, too."
"That's where you're wrong, partner. The only reason guys like us think he's crazy is because he doesn't behave like the others. Mistake."
"Maybe so. But you'd better talk to Minos. He got some stuff on Cardo from the V.A. this morning. Our man was locked up with the wet brains for a while."
"He's a speed freak."
"Yeah, maybe because of his last few months' service in Vietnam."
"What about it?"
"Talk to Minos," he said, got out of the truck, and looked back at me through the window. "Good luck on this. Remember what I said. Get what you can and let the devil take the rest."
Then he crossed the street and walked through the park toward St. Charles, his attention already focused on the college kids playing football by the lake. The streetcar clattered loudly down the tracks in front of the Tulane campus across the avenue. I went to a small grocery store a few blocks down St. Charles, where the owner provided tables inside for working people to eat their lunch at, and called Minos at his office to see if he had relocated Kim in a safe house. I also wanted to know what he had learned about Tony's history in Vietnam, besides the fact that as an addict Tony had been locked up in a psychiatric unit rather than treated for addiction.
Minos wasn't in. But in a few hours I was to learn Tony's story on my own, almost as though he had sawed a piece of forgotten memory out of my own experience and thrust it into my unwilling hands.
I took Bootsie to lunch at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant on Dauphine before I drove back out to Tony's. She looked wonderful in her white suit, black heels, and lavender blouse, and I think perhaps she had the best posture I had ever seen in a woman. She sat perfectly straight in her chair while she sipped from her wineglass or ate small bites of her seafood enchilada, her chin tilted slightly upward, her face composed and soft.
But it was too crowded for us to talk well, and I was beset with questions that I did not know how to frame or ask. I guess my biggest concern about Bootsie was a selfish one. I wanted her to be just as she had been in the summer of 1957. I didn't want to accept the fact that she had married into the Mafia, that she was business partners with the Giacano family, that financial concern was of such great importance in her life that she would not extricate herself from the Giacanos.
For some reason it was as though she had betrayed me, or betrayed the youth and innocence I'd unfairly demanded she be the vessel of. What an irony, I thought: I'd killed off a large portion of my adult life with alcohol, driven away my first wife, delivered my second wife, Annie, into a nightmare world of drugs and psychotic killers, and had become a professional Judas who was no longer sure himself to whom he owed his loyalties. But I was still willing to tie Bootsie to the moralist's rack.
"What's bothering you?" she asked.
"What if we just give it all up? Your vending machine business, your connection with those clowns, my fooling around with the lowlifes and the crazoids. We just eighty-six it all and go back to New Iberia."
"It's a thought, isn't it?"
"I mean it, Boots. You only get one time on the planet. Why spend any more of it confirming yesterday's mistakes?"
"I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"Not here. Can we be together later tonight?"
"Yeah, sure, but tell me what, Boots?"
"Later," she said. "Can you come for supper at the house?"
"I think I can."
"You think?"
"I'm trying to tie some things up."
"Would you rather another night?" She looked at a distant spot in the restaurant.
"No, I'll do everything I can to be there."
"You'll do everything?"
"What time? I'll be there. I promise."
"They're not easy people to deal with, are they? You don't always get to set your own schedule, do you? You don't have control over everything when you lock into Tony Cardo's world, do you?"
"All right, Bootsie, I was hard on you."
"No, you were hard on both of us. When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself. I loved you so much that summer I thought we had one skin wrapped around us."
I looked back at her helplessly.
"Six-thirty," she said.
"All right," I said. Then I said it again. "And if anything goes wrong, I'll call. That's the best I can do. But I know I'll be there."
And I was the one who'd just suggested we eighty-six it all and go back to Bayou Teche.
Her dark eyes were unreadable in the light of the candle burning inside the little red chimney on the table.
When I got back to Tony's house, I hid the tape recorder in my closet. The house was empty, so quiet that I could hear clocks ticking. I put on my gym shorts and running shoes, jogged for thirty minutes through the neighborhood and along Lakeshore Drive, then tried to do ten push-ups out on the lawn. But the network of muscles in my left shoulder was still weak from the gunshot wound, and after three push-ups I collapsed on my elbow.
I showered, put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved sports shirt, and walked out by the pool with a magazine just as Tony and Jess came through the front gate in the Lincoln, with the white limo behind them.
Tony slammed the car door and walked toward me, pulling off his coat and tie.
"Come inside with me. I got to get a drink," he said. He kept pulling off his clothes as he went deeper into the house, kicking his shoes through a bedroom door, flinging his shirt and trousers into a bathroom, until he stood at the bar in his Jockey undershorts. His body was hard, knotted with muscle, and beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He poured four inches of bourbon into a tumbler with ice and took a big swallow. Then he took another one, his eyes widening above the upended glass.
"I think I'm heading into the screaming meemies," he said. "I feel like somebody's pulling my skin off with pliers."
"What is it?"
"I'm a fucking junkie, that's what it is." He poured from the decanter into his glass again.
"Better ease up on the fluids."
"This stuff's like Kool-Aid compared to what my system's used to. What you're looking at, Dave, is a piece of cracked ceramic. Those guys are weirding me out, too. We're in my real estate office out by Chalmette, and I'm talking to my salespeople at a meet while the guys are milling around out there by the front desks. These salespeople are mostly middle-class broads who pretend they don't know what other kinds of businesses I'm in. So we end the meet and walk out to the front door and everybody is bouncy and laughing until they see the guys comparing different kinds of rubbers they bought at some sex shop. It's like my life is part of a Marx Brothers comedy. Except it ain't funny."
He put his head down on the bar. "Oh man, I ain't fucking gonna make it."
"Yeah, you will."
"Have you ever seen a set-brain ward at the V.A.? They wear Pampers, they drool on themselves, they eat mush with their hands. I've been there, man, and this is worse."
"I've had dead people call me up long-distance. Do you think it gets any worse than that?" I said.
"You think that's a big deal? I'll tell you about a smell-" He stopped and drank out of his glass. The ice clinked against the sides. His eyes were dilated. "Come inside, I want to show you something."
He picked up the decanter and walked out the side door onto the lawn. Jess looked up from dipping leaves out of the pool.
"Hey, Tony, you forgot your pants," he said, then saw the expression on Tony's face and said, "So it's a good day to get some sun."
I followed Tony across the lawn, through the trees, and past the goldfish ponds and birdbaths and tennis court to the back wall of his property. A hooded air vent protruded from the ground close to the base of the wall.
"Find it," he said.
"What?"
"The trapdoor."
"I don't see one."
He bent over and pulled on an iron ring set next to a sprinkler head, and a door covered with grass sod raised up out of the lawn and exposed a short, subterranean stairwell.
"It's an atom bomb shelter," he said. "But I heard the guy who built it used to pump the maid down here."
We went down inside, and he clicked on a light and pulled the door shut with a hanging rope. The walls and floor were concrete, the roof steel plate. There were two bunk beds inside the room, a pile of moldy K rations in one corner, and a stack of paperback novels and a disassembled AR-15 rifle on top of a bridge table.
"I come down here when things are bugging me," he said. "Sometimes I make up a picnic basket and Paul and me spend the night down here, like we're camping. It's got a chemical toilet, I can hook up a portable TV, nobody knows where I am unless I want them to know."
He sat down on the bunk bed and leaned back against the concrete wall. A dark line of hair grew up the center of his stomach from the elastic band of his underwear. He stirred the ice in his drink with his finger. Then he was quiet for what seemed a long time.
"After I got hit they didn't send me back to my old platoon," he said. "Instead I got reassigned to a bunch of losers. Or maybe they'd just been out too long. One guy had a scalp lock from a woman on his rifle, another guy gave a little boy a heat tab and told him it was candy. Anyway, I didn't like any of them. Which was all right, because they didn't like me, either, and they kept treating me like a newbie.
"So one night the lieutenant tells us to set up an ambush about four klicks up this trail, so we pass a real small ville by a stream after one klick and we go on another klick, and finally everybody says, 'Fuck it, we sandbag it, let the loot set his own ambush.'
"But while we're sitting out there in the dark it's like everybody's got something else on his mind. It's hot and quiet, and water's dripping out of the trees and we're slapping mosquitoes and smelling ourselves and looking at our watches and thinking we got six more hours out here. Then the guy with the scalp lock on his rifle-his name was Elvis Doolittle, that's right, I'm not making it up-Elvis rubs his whiskers with his hand and keeps looking back down the trail and finally he puts a cigarette in his mouth. The doc says, 'What the fuck you doing, Elvis?'
"He says, 'I'm going back to the ville.'
"Then nobody says anything. But everybody had seen these two teenage sisters with their mama-san in front of the hooch. And they know what Elvis is thinking. Then he says, 'We'll leave Mouse and the new guy. Nobody'll know. That ville's got something coming anyway. That booby trap that got Brown. They set it.'
"'You don't know that,' Mouse says.
"'If they didn't set it, they know who did,' Elvis says.
"Then they all talked it over and my heart started beating. Not because of what they were going to do, either, but because I was afraid to be left on the trail with just one guy.
"Elvis turns to me and says, 'You ever say anything about this, you ain't getting back home, man.' Then they were gone. The trees were so thick all those guys just melted away into the blackness. You could hear monkeys clattering around in the canopy and night birds and sounds like sticks breaking out there in the jungle. Sweat was running out of my pot and my breath started catching in my throat. Then we hear something clank.
"Mouse whispers, 'It's up the trail. It's up the fucking trail.'
"I tell him to be quiet and listen, and he says, 'It's NVA, man.'
"I tell him to shut up again, but he says, 'They dideed out on us, man. It ain't right. I ain't staying.'
"His eyes look big as half-dollars under his pot, and I'm trying to act cool, like I got it under control, but the sweat keeps burning my eyes and my hands are shaking so bad it's like I got malaria. Then I hear something up the trail again.
"'That's it,' Mouse says. 'Let's get out of here.'
"I put my hand on his arm. 'All right, man, we go back to the ville,' I say. 'But what are you gonna do with what you see back there?'
"'I ain't gonna see nothing,' he says. 'It ain't my business. I got eighteen more days, then it's back to the world. I ain't gonna get pulled into no court-martial, either. You do what you want to, Cardo.'
"He takes off, and a minute later I follow him, tagging along like a punk to something I don't even want to know about, all because I'm scared.
"When we get back to the ville, Elvis has put all the zips in their hooches and has sent the doc with a flashlight into the hooch that's got the two teenage sisters. The doc comes out and says, 'They're clean,' and then Elvis and this big black dude go in. About ten minutes later Elvis comes out fixing his fly and sees me and Mouse squatting by the trail.
"'You dumb shits,' he says. 'You get the fuck back up that trail.'
"'I ain't gonna do it, Elvis,' Mouse says.
"He grabs Mouse by the back of his shirt and pulls him up out of the dirt, just like you pick up a dirty clothes bag.
"'Fuck you, man. We're not going back up there by ourselves,' I say. 'We heard something clank up there. You dideed out on us. They get through, your ass is in a sling.'
"He's frozen there, with Mouse hanging from his fist. He says, 'What d'you mean, something clanked?'
"Before I can answer an old man runs across the clearing out of nowhere and tries to get in the hooch, where a couple of other guys are taking their turn inside. He's yelling in gook, and the big black dude is holding him by the wrists, and everybody's laughing. Then one of the sisters starts screaming inside, and more zips are coming out of their hooches, and it's all starting to deteriorate in a hurry. Elvis lets loose of Mouse and walks fast across the clearing just as the two guys come back out of the hooch.
"One of them is the guy who gave the kid a heat tab. He and Elvis look at each other, then the guy says, 'The shit's already in the fire, man.'
"The old man goes in the hooch, and there's more yelling inside, and Elvis says, 'What'd you do to her?'
"The guy, the heat-tab guy, says, 'Nothing you didn't.'
"But the guy who was in there with him says, 'He told her he'd kill her baby if she didn't blow him.'
"By that time I just wanted to get out of there, so I don't know who threw the grenade. I was already headed down the trail when I heard it go off. But somebody threw it right in the door of the hooch, with the two sisters and the old man and maybe a baby inside. Then I started running. When I looked back I could see the sparks above the trees from the burning hooch. I don't know if they killed anybody else there or not. I never asked, and I never told anybody about it. The next day I volunteered to work in the mortuary at Chu Lai. "
"The mortuary?" I said.
"That's right, man. I peeled them out of the body bags, cleaned the jelly out of their mouths and ears, washed them down, embalmed them, and boxed them. Because I'd had it with the war. And I'd lost my guts, too. I just wasn't going out again. I didn't care if I was a public coward or not."
He drank from the bourbon, then leaned forward on his thighs. He rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck and looked at his hand.
"Maybe it took courage to do that, Tony," I said.
"No, I was afraid. There's no way around that fact." His voice was tired.
"You could have gotten out of the bush in other ways. You could have given yourself a minor wound. A second Heart would have put you in a safe area. You think maybe it's possible you volunteered for the mortuary to punish yourself?"
He looked up at my face. The skin around his left eye was puckered with thought.
"You can beat up on yourself the rest of your life if you want to. But no matter how you cut it, you're no coward. I'll give you something else to think about, too. On your worst day over there, you probably proved yourself in ways that an average person couldn't even imagine. It was our war, Tony. People who weren't there don't understand it. Most of them never wanted to understand it. But you ask yourself this question: would any grunt who was, in the meat grinder judge you harshly? In fact, is there anyone at all who can say you didn't do your share?"
He widened his eyes and looked between his legs at the concrete floor. He pinched the bridge of his nose and made a snuffling sound. He started to speak, then cleared his throat and looked at the floor again.
"Better get some clothes on," I said. "You'll catch cold down here."
"Yeah, I'll do that."
"I guess I'll see you at the house," I said.
"I lied about something. I don't use this place for Paul and me to camp. You see that AR-15? I used to come down here and sit in the dark with it and think about doing myself. When you turn off the light it's just like a black box, like the inside of a grave. I'd put the front sight under my teeth and let it touch the roof of my mouth and my mind would go completely empty. It felt good."
I pushed on the trapdoor, which was made of steel and overlaid with concrete and swung up and down on thick black springs, and walked up the steps into the balmy November afternoon. The moss-hung oaks by the back wall were loud with blue jays and mockingbirds. I looked back down into the shelter and saw Tony still seated on the side of the bunk, his face pointed downward, the skin of his back as tight as a lampshade, bright with sweat.
I went up to the shopping center and called Minos at his office to find out about Kim, but he still hadn't returned. When I got back to Tony's house, the school bus had just dropped off Paul, and Jess was wheeling him inside.
"How you doing, Paul?" I said.
"Great. Special class got to go on the Amtrak train today." He wore a striped trainman's hat, a checked shirt, and blue jeans with a cowboy belt.
"I bet that was fun, wasn't it? Where's your old man?"
"Getting dressed." He grinned broadly. "Dad was exercising on the lawn in his underwear."
"Why not? It's good weather for it," I said, and winked at him.
"You got a phone message," Jess said. "From that friend of yours who runs the bar, what's his name?"
"Clete?"
"Yeah, he says to call him at the bar."
"Thank you."
"Dad said we all might go to a movie tonight," Paul said.
"Well, I'm supposed to have dinner with a friend tonight."
"Oh."
"How about tomorrow night, maybe?" I said.
"Sure," he said, but I could see the disappointment in his face.
Jess wheeled him up the ramp into the house, and I used the phone in the kitchen to call Clete.
"Where are you?" Clete said.
"At Tony's."
"Can you talk, or do you want to call me back from somewhere else?"
"What is it?"
"Nate Baxter's in the bar."
"I see."
"He says he's here if you want to talk to him."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know Nate. Always looking inside his pants to make sure of his gender."
"If it makes him happy, tell him I'll be looking him up one of these days."
"He said one thing, though, that's a little bothersome. He said, 'Tell Robicheaux I know he's got the broad stashed.'"
The house was quiet except for the sound of shower water in the bathroom that adjoined Tony's bedroom.
"You there, Dave?" Clete said.
"Yes."
"It sounds like our man knows a little more than he should."
"What's he doing now?"
"Drinking at the bar."
"I'll be there in a half hour."
I told Tony that I had to run a couple of errands downtown, then I was going to Bootsie's for supper.
"Was that Bootsie on the phone?" he asked. He stood in his bedroom door, with a towel wrapped around his waist, raking the water out of his hair with a comb.
"No, it was Clete. He knows a guy who might give me a good deal on a boat."
"I feel a lot better after a shower." He stopped combing his hair. "Hey, tell me straight about something. Down there in the shelter, you weren't just playing with my head? I mean… we're not talking about a loss of respect here?"
"No."
"Because I don't push myself on people."
"You didn't push yourself on me."
"You wanted to know what happened, I told you."
I nodded without replying.
"But if a guy thinks less of me because of it, I don't hold it against him. We're clear on this?" he said.
"You're not the only guy who brought back a problem from there, Tony. I've got my own. Maybe they're worse than yours."
"Yeah?"
"I got four of my men killed on a trail because I did something reckless and stupid. Everybody has his own basket of snakes to deal with."
"Your voice has a little edge to it, Dave."
"I think pride's a pile of shit."
He laughed. "You sure don't hide your thoughts, do you?" he said. "How about bringing Bootsie out here for supper, then we'll all go to a movie."
"It's kind of a private evening, Tony."
"Paul was looking forward to it."
"Then you should have told me earlier, podna,"
He nodded silently, then began dressing in front of a full-length mirror as though I were not there.
I didn't have time to worry any more about Tony's mood changes and his addict's propensity for trying to control everyone and everything in his environment. In fact, maybe we were too much alike in that regard, and for that reason I not only got along better with him than I should have as a policeman, I also saw my own menagerie of snapping dogs at work inside him. When I got to Clete's Club, Nate Baxter was by himself at the far end of the bar, one shined brown loafer propped on the brass footrail. He wore sharply creased tan slacks, an open-necked yellow shirt, and a herringbone sports coat. His gold watch and gold identification bracelet gleamed softly in the light.
"You're looking sharp, Nate," I said.
He tipped his cigarette ashes neatly into an ashtray and took a sip from his highball glass, his eyes looking at me in the bar mirror.
"You know a DEA agent by the name of Minos Dautrieve?" he asked.
"He's out of Lafayette. Yeah, I know him."
"He's in New Orleans now. He's running a sting."
"Why tell the family secrets to me?"
"I underestimated you," he said.
"I have to be somewhere in a few minutes. What did you want to say to me, Nate?"
"She's my snitch. You shouldn't have messed with her."
"What are we talking about here?"
"You know what I'm talking about. You were in her place out in Metairie. You got her stashed. But it's not going to do you any good. She's our witness, and she's going to testify for us. You can tell that to Dautrieve for me if you want to."
"You're going a little fast for me."
"The girl she was staying with works in the same club out on the Airline Highway. She told us you and Purcel were in her place. She said later some feds picked up the Dollinger broad. So I underestimated you. You've still got your badge, haven't you? But that doesn't mean you get to screw up our operation."
"This is what you had to tell me?"
He tipped his cigarette ashes into the ashtray again. He still had not looked directly at me. He took a puff off his cigarette, then scratched his beard with one fingernail.
"You can tell Kim Dollinger she either comes in or we send her brother up the road," he said. "Don't let that broad jerk you around, Robicheaux. I could have charged her when we busted her brother. She was as dirty as he was."
"Do you know that Jimmie Lee Boggs almost killed her?"
"You got a vested interest or something? We're talking about a snitch who was setting Tony C. up for a fall while she was banging him cross-eyed over in a beach house in Biloxi."
"Listen-"
"No, you've got it wrong. You listen. We've worked on this case eight months. You guys come along and think you're going to wrap up Tony C. in a few weeks. In the meantime you don't inform us that you're working undercover, and then you've got the balls to grab my snitch."
"You coerced her into prostituting herself."
He turned his head and looked at me. The neon bar lights made the neatly trimmed edge of his beard glow with a reddish tinge.
"She was working at Tony C.'s club before she ever came to our attention," he said. "He probably had to tie a board across his ass to keep from falling inside."
I saw Clete walk out of his office in back and begin changing a light bulb over the bandstand. The back of the club was empty.
"You're a bad cop, Baxter. But worse, you don't have any feelings about people," I said. "There's a word for that-pathological."
"Take somebody else's inventory, Robicheaux. I'm not interested. Here's what it comes down to. You fuck up this investigation, you keep getting in my face, causing me problems, I wouldn't count on the department protecting your cover. Anyway, I've had my say. Just stay away from me."
He turned back to his drink and ran his tongue along his gums. I opened and closed my hands at my sides.
"You gonna have something, suh?" the black barman said.
"No, thank you," I said.
I continued to stare at the side of Baxter's face, the grained skin on the back of his neck. I could hear my breath in my nostrils. Then I turned and walked toward the open front door. My body felt wooden, my arms and legs disjointed. The sun reflecting off a windshield outside was like a sliver of glass in the eye. I stopped, looked back, and saw Baxter go into the rest room by the bandstand.
When I pushed open the rest room door he was combing his hair in front of the mirror.
"If you do anything to hurt that girl again, or if you compromise my situation here in New Orleans, I'm going down to your office, in front of people, and give you the worst day in your insignificant life," I said.
He turned from the mirror, slipped his leather comb case out of his shirt pocket, blew in it before he replaced the comb; his breath reflected into my face. He used the back of his left hand to push me aside.
I heard a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping behind my eyes and saw a rush of color in my mind, like amorphous red and black clouds turning in dark water, and as though it had a life of its own my right fist hooked into his face and caught him squarely in the eye socket. His head snapped sideways, and I saw the white imprints of my knuckles on his skin and the watery electric shock in his eye.
But I had stepped into it. His right hand came out of his coat pocket with a leather-covered blackjack, an old-fashioned one that was shaped like a darning egg, with a spring built into the braided grip. I tried to raise my forearm in front of me, but the blackjack whopped across the top of my left shoulder and I felt the blow sink deep into the bone. The muscles in my chest and side quivered and then seemed to collapse, as if someone had run a heated metal rod through the trajectory of Jimmie Lee Boggs's bullet.
I was bent forward, my palm pressed hard against the throbbing pain below my collarbone, my eyes watering uncontrollably, the lip of the washbasin a wet presence across my buttocks. The expression in Baxter's eyes was unmistakable.
"Just one more for the road," he said softly.
But Clete pushed the door back on its springs and stepped into the room like an elephant entering a phone booth. His unblinking eyes went from me to the blackjack; then his huge fist crashed against the side of Baxter's head. Baxter's face went out of round, his automatic flew from his shoulder holster, and he tripped sideways over the toilet bowl and fell on top of the trash can in a litter of crumpled paper towels.
Clete grimaced and shook his hand in the air, then rubbed his knuckles.
"Are you all right?" he said.
"I don't know."
"What happened?"
"He threatened to blow my cover."
Clete looked down at Baxter in the corner. Baxter's eyes were half-closed, his mouth hung open, and one hand twitched on his stomach.
"You hit him first?" Clete said.
"Yep."
Clete chewed his lip.
"He'll use it, then. That's not good, not good," he said, and began making clicking sounds with his tongue. He reached down and patted Baxter on the cheek. "Wake-up time, Nate."
Baxter widened his eyes, then started to sit up among the wet towels and fell back down again. Clete lifted him by the back of his herringbone jacket and folded him over the rim of the toilet bowl.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"Freshen up, Nate. That's it, my man. Splash a little on your face and it's a brand-new day," Clete said.
He flushed the toilet and pushed Baxter's head farther down into the bowl.
"That's enough, Clete," I said.
Someone tried to open the door.
"This toilet is occupied right now," Clete said. He lifted Baxter off the bowl and propped him against the wall, then squatted down and blotted his face with paper towels. "Hey, you're looking all right, Nate. How many fingers am I holding up? Three. Look, three fingers. That's it, take a deep breath. You're going to be fine. Look, I'm putting your piece back in your holster. Here's your sap. Come on, look up at me, now."
Clete patted Baxter's cheek again. The back of Clete's thick neck was red from the effort of squatting down. His stomach and love handles hung over his belt.
"Here's the way I see this deal," he said. "We write the whole thing off. It was just a bad day at Black Rock, not even worth talking about later. You had a beef, Dave had a beef, it's over now. Right?"
Baxter blinked his eyes and flexed his jaw as though he had a toothache. Water dripped out of his beard.
"Or you could go back to the First District and get into a lot of paperwork," Clete said. "Or you might want to cause Dave some grief with Tony C. But I don't think you're that kind of guy. Because if you were, it'd create some nasty problems for everybody. See, here's the serious part in all this. There's a hooker who comes into the bar. I usually don't let them in because they're bad for business. But I've known this broad since I was in Vice myself, and she's basically a nice girl and she respects my place and doesn't come on to the Johns while she's in here. Anyway, she tells a funny story. She says you're getting freebies in the Quarter, and you made her ex-room-o cop your joint. I don't know, maybe she made it up. But you know how those broads are, they carry a grudge a long time. I don't think it'd take a lot to get one of them to drop the dime on you, Nate."
Clete crimped his lips together and looked Baxter steadily in the eyes. Baxter's face looked as though he were experiencing the first stages of recognition after an earthquake. Clete closed the lid on the toilet and sat Baxter on top of it. His head hung forward. Clete touched him gently on the shoulder with two fingers.
"It ends here, Nate," he said quietly. "We're understood on that, aren't we?"
Baxter moved his lips but no sound came out.
"You don't have to say anything, as long as we have an understanding," Clete said. "Get yourself a couple of free doubles at the bar, if you want. I'm going to walk Dave outside now. It's a nice day. We're all going back outside into a nice day."
Clete looked over the top of Baxter's head at me and made a motion toward the door with his thumb. I walked back out through the bar onto the sidewalk under the colonnade. Clete followed me. The French Market and the tables in the du Monde were crowded with tourists now, and the street was heavy with afternoon traffic. Clete adjusted his tie, lit a cigarette with the lighter cupped in his big hands, and looked up the street as though he had nothing in his mind except a pleasant expectation of the next event in his life.
I rubbed my collarbone and the puckered scar over the.38 wound and straightened my back.
"How's it feel?"
"Like it's packed in dry ice."
He felt along my shoulder with his thumb and forefinger. He saw me flinch.
"That's where he got you?"
"Yes."
"There's no break. When your collarbone's broken, there's a knot like a baseball."
"Who's the hooker?"
"You got me. The ones I knew five years ago are probably hags now. Actually, they were hags then."
"You're pretty slick, Clete."
"What can I say?" He grinned at me. "But one word of advice, noble mon. Think about going back to Bayou Teche and let New Orleans go down the drain by itself. For some reason, Dave, having you in town makes me think of a man walking into a clock shop with a baseball bat."
She had always loved roses and four-o'clocks. The flower beds in her lawn and the shaded areas around the coulee at her home on Spanish Lake had been bursting with them. Now she grew purple and gold four-o'clocks along the wall of her patio on Camp Street. They had already dropped their winter seeds like big black pepper grains on the worn bricks, but her yellow and hybrid blue roses still bloomed as big as fists. The western sky was streaked with magenta through the oak trees, and leaves floated across the tunnels of underwater light in the swimming pool. The air was heavy with the smoky taste of the meat fire in the hibachi, cool and bittersweet with the smell of fall, like the odor of burning sugarcane stubble, of pecans when they mold inside their husks under the tree.
She turned the steaks on the grill with a fork, her eyes watering in the smoke, and smiled at me. She wore leather sandals, faded designer jeans, and a black shirt with red flowers sewn into it. Her honey-colored hair was full of lights, and where it was trimmed on her neck it looked thick and stiff and soft and lovely to the touch, all at the same time.
She saw me press my hand to my shoulder again.
"Is there something wrong, Dave?" she said.
"No, I just have a little flare-up when the weather is about to change. I think it's going to rain. You know how it is this time of year. The leaves turn, then we have a real hard rain and we sort of click into winter."
"It's too early for that," she said. "Besides, winter is never that bad here, anyway."
"No, it's not. Boots, can I use your phone to call New Iberia? I need to check in on Alafair."
"Sure, hon."
Alafair's voice made me want to leave New Orleans that night. Or maybe it made me want to escape even more the brooding premonition that seemed to hang between me and Bootsie like a secret both of us knew, but neither of us would broach.
She didn't have to tell me about the Baylor medical center in Houston: I had seen it in her eyes. It's a detached look, as if the person has stepped briefly around a corner and seen to the end of a long, gray street on which there are no other people. I'd flown in a dustoff loaded with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochrome M's to indicate morphine injections, and the two who died before we reached battalion aid had had that look in their eyes, as though the hot wind through the doors, the steely blat-blat of the propeller blades, the racing green landscape below, were now all part of somebody else's filmstrip.
"It's bad, isn't it, Boots?" I said. I sat in the scrolled-iron patio chair by the pool and looked at the tops of my hands when I said it.
"Yes," she said quietly.
"What's the name for it?"
"Lupus," she said. Then she said. "Systemic lupus. The full Latin name means 'red wolf.' Sometimes people get a butterfly mask on their face. I don't have that kind, though. It just lives inside me."
I felt myself swallow, and I looked away from her eyes.
"You know what it is, then?" she said. She pushed the meat to the side of the grill and sat down across from me. Her hair was wreathed in smoke and the lighted turquoise shimmer off the pool.
"I've heard about it. I don't know a lot," I said.
"It attacks the connective tissue. It starts in the hands sometimes and spreads through the joints. In the worst cases, when it's untreated, people look like they're wrapped in strips of plastic."
I started to speak, but I couldn't.
"I didn't have medical insurance, no savings, nothing but the vending machine business," she said. "I couldn't just walk out on the business at twenty cents on the dollar."
I saw a flicker of anger in her eyes, a spark, a recrimination that wanted to have its way. But it was only momentary.
Then she reached forward and touched me on the knee as though it were I who should be consoled.
"Dave, there're probably a hundred different degrees of lupus. Today it can be controlled. This new doctor I have in Houston has started me on a different kind of medication, with steroids and some other things. My problem is I ignored some warning signs, some swelling in my fingers in cold weather and stiffness in the joints, and I have some kidney damage. But I'm going to pull it off."
"How long have you known?" I said. My voice sounded weak, as though I had borrowed it from someone else.
"For the last year."
Her eyes moved over my face. She took my hand and held it on her knee.
"You shouldn't look like that," she said.
"I've been getting on your case, Bootsie, criticizing you, telling you that you're mixed up with the grease-balls-"
"You didn't have any way of knowing, cher."
"Boots-"
"Yes?"
"Bootsie, I don't know what to say to you." I pressed my thumb and forefinger against my eyelids, but it didn't do any good. The wilted four-o'clocks, the black silhouettes of floating leaves, the flames in the grill, all became watery and bright like splinters of light shot through crystal. "I majored in being a dumb shit. It's the one constant in my life."
"I know you better than anybody else on earth, Dave. And no matter what you say, or what you believe, you never deliberately hurt anybody in your life."
Then she stood up, her face smiling down at me, and sat in my lap. She held my head against her breast and kissed my hair and stroked her fingers along my cheek.
"You remember when we used to go to Deer's Drive-In and do this?" she said. "I think yesterday is always only a minute away."
I could feel the softness of her breast against my ear and hear the beating of her heart like a clock that told time for both of us.