The next morning I telephoned Drew to ask her about the intruder in her kitchen, but there was no answer, and later when I went by her house she wasn't home. I stuck my business card in the corner of her screen door.
As I drove back down East Main under the oaks that arched over the street, I saw her jogging along the sidewalk in a T-shirt and a pair of purple shorts, her tan skin glistening with sweat. She raised her arm and waved at me, her breasts big and round against her shirt, but I didn't stop. She could call me if she wanted to, I told myself.
I drove home for lunch and stopped my pickup at the mailbox on the dirt road at the foot of my property. Among the letters and bills was a heavy brown envelope with no postage and my name written across it with no address. I cut the engine, sorted out the junk mail, then sliced open the brown envelope with my pocket knife. Inside were a typed letter and twenty one-hundred dollar bills. The letter read:
We think this fell out of your pocket in Weldon Sonniers house. We think you should have it back. The cop in the basement was an accident. Nobody wanted it that way. He could have walked out of it but he wanted to be a hard guy. Sonnier is a welsher and a rick. If you want to be his knothole, that's your choice. But we think you should mark off all this bull shit and stay in New Iberia. What you've got here is two letrge with more down the road, maybe some business opportunities too, if we get the right signals. Let Sonnier drown in his own shit. If you don't want the money, blow your nose on it. It's all the same to us. We just wanted to offer you an intelligent alternative to being Sonnier main localfuck.
I replaced the hundred-dollar bills and the letter in the envelope, put the envelope in my back pocket, and walked down to the dock. Batist was squatted down on the boards in the sunlight, scaling a stringer of bluegill with a spoon.
The sun was hot off the water, and sweat coursed down between the shoulder blades of his bare back.
"Did you see someone besides the postman up by the mailbox?" I asked.
He squinted his eyes in the glare and thought for a moment. The backs of his hands were shiny with fish mucus.
"A man pass on a mortorsickle," he said.
"Did he stop?"
"Yeah, I t'ink he stopped. Yeah, he sho' did."
"What did he look like?"
"I ain't real sure. I ain't paid him much mind, Dave. Somet'ing wrong?"
"It's nothing to worry about."
Batist tapped his spoon on the dock.
"I 'member he was dressed funny," he said. "He didn't have no shirt but he wore them Vings on his pants, what you call them t'ings, you see them in the movies."
I tried to visualize what he meant, but I was at a loss, as I often was when I tried to talk with Batist in either English or French.
"What movies?" I said.
"The cowboy movies."
"Chaps? Big leather floppy things that fit over the legs?"
"Yeah, that's it. They was black, and he had tattoos on his back. And he had long hair, too."
"What kind of tattoos?"
"I don't 'member that."
"Okay, partner. That's not bad."
"What ain't bad?"
"Nothing. Don't worry about it."
"Worry about what?"
"Nothing. I'm going up to the house for lunch now. If you see this guy again, call me. But don't mess with him. Okay?"
"This is a bad guy?"
"Maybe."
"This is a bad guy, but Batist ain't suppose to worry, no. You somet'ing else, Dave. Lord, if you ain't."
He went back to scraping the fish with his spoon. I started to speak again, but I had learned long ago to leave Batist alone when I had offended him by underestimating his perception of a situation.
I walked up to the house, and Bootsie and I ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard.
She wore a flowered sundress, and had put on lipstick and earrings, which she seldom did in the middle of the day.
"How do you like the sandwich?" she said.
"It's really good." It was, too. Ham and onion and horseradish, one of my favorites.
"Did something happen today?"
"No, not really."
"Nothing happened?"
"Somebody put some money in our mailbox. It's a bribery attempt. Batist thinks it was a guy on a motorcycle.
Somebody with riding chaps and tattoos on his back. So kind of look out for him, although I doubt he'll be back."
"Is this about Weldon Sonnier?"
"Yeah, I think Clete and I shook up somebody's cookie bag when we went to Bobby Earl's house."
"You think Bobby Earl's trying to bribe you?"
"No, he's slicker than that. It's probably coming from somewhere else, maybe somebody who's connected with him. I'm not sure."
"You got a call from Drew Sonnier."
"Oh?"
"Why did she call here, Dave?"
"I left my card at her house this morning."
"At her house. I see."
"Lyle said somebody broke into her house."
"Doesn't that involve the city police, not the sheriff's department?"
"She didn't report it to them."
"I see. So you're investigating?"
I looked at the mallards splashing on the pond at the back of our property.
"I promised Lyle I'd talk to her."
"Lyle made you promise? Is that right? I had the impression that you had a low opinion of Lyle."
"Ease up, Boots. This case is a pain in the butt as it is."
"I'm sure that it is. Why don't we ask Drew over sometime? I haven't seen her in a long time."
"Because I'm not interested in seeing Drew."
"I think she's very nice. I've always been fond of her."
"What should I do, Boots? Pretend she's not part of this case?"
"Why should you do that? I don't think you should do that at all."
I could see the peculiar cast coming into her eyes, as though inside her head she had seen a thought or a conclusion that should have been as obvious to the rest of the world as it was to her.
"Let's go to the track tonight," I said.
"Let's do. Will you call her this afternoon? I think you should."
I tried to read what was in her eyes. The mood swings, the distorted and fearful perception, took place sometimes as quickly as a bird flying in and out of a cage.
"I might talk to her," I said, and put my hand on top of hers, "but I don't think she'll be much help in the case. The Sonniers don't trust other people. But I have to try to do what I can."
"Of course you do, Dave. Nobody said otherwise." And she looked off at the periwinkles blowing in the shade next to the coulee. The light in her eyes was as private as a solcandle burning in a church.
"We'll take Alafair to Possum's for gtoufge before we go to the track," I said. "Or maybe we can just come home and rent a movie."
"That would be wonderful."
"The sandwiches were really good. It's sure nice to come home and have lunch with you, Boots. Maybe after I close the drawer on this case, I might take leave of the department. We're doing pretty well at the dock."
"Don't fool yourself. You'll never stop being a cop, Dave."
I looked into her eyes again, and they were suddenly clear, as though the breeze had blown a dark object away from her line of vision.
I squeezed her hand, rose from the wood bench, and went around behind her and kissed her hair and hugged her against me. I could feel her heart beating under my arms.
At the office I gave the sheriff the envelope containing the two thousand dollars and the unsigned letter.
"It must be a cheap outfit," he said. "You'd think they'd pay a little more to get a cop on the pad."
He had run a dry-cleaning business before he became sheriff. He was also a Boy Scout master and belonged to the Lions Club, not for political reasons but because he thoroughly enjoyed being a Scoutmaster and belonging to the Lions Club. He was a thoughtful and considerate man, and I always hated to correct him or to suggest that his career as an elected police officer would probably always consist of on-the-job training.
"Seduction usually comes a teaspoon at a time," I said. "Sometimes a cop who won't take fifty grand will take two. Then one day you find yourself way down the road and you don't remember where you made a hard left turn."
He wore large rimless glasses, and his stomach swelled over his gunbelt. Through the window behind his desk I could see two black trusties from the parish jail washing patrol cars in the parking lot. He scratched the blue and red veins in his soft cheek with his fingernail.
"Who do you think it came from?" he asked.
"Somebody with long-range plans, somebody who's always looking around to buy a cop. Probably the mob or somebody in it."
"Not from Bobby Earl?"
"His kind only pay out money when you catch them sodomizing sheep. I'm pretty sure we're dealing with the wiseguys now."
"What do you think they'll do next?"
"If I stay out of New Orleans, there will probably be another envelope. Then they'll offer me a job providing security in one of their nightclubs or in a counting room at the track."
He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and rotated it with his fingers.
"I've got a bad feeling about all this," he said. "I surely do."
"Why?"
"Don't underestimate Bobby Earl's potential. I met him a couple of times ten or twelve years ago, when he was still appearing in Klan robes. This guy could make the ovens sing and grin while he was doing it."
"Maybe. But I never met one of those guys who wasn't a physical and moral coward."
"I saw Garrett's body before the autopsy. It was hard to look at, and I was in Korea. Watch your butt, Dave."
His eyes were unblinking over his rimless glasses.
By two Pm. it was ninety-five degrees outside; the sunlight off the cement was as bright as a white flame; the palm trees looked dry and desiccated in the hot wind; and my own day was just warming up.
I called Drew again and this time she answered. I was ready to argue with her, to lecture her about her and Weldon's lack of cooperation in the case, even blame her for my difficulties with Bootsie at lunch. In fact, my opening statement was "Who was this guy in your kitchen, Drew, and why didn't you report it?"
I could hear her breathing in the receiver.
"Lyle told you?" she said.
"As well as Lyle can tell me anything, without trying to sell glow-in-the-dark Bibles at the same time. I'll tell you I've pretty well had it with your family's attitude. I don't want to be unkind, but the three of you behave like y'all have been shooting up with liquid Drano."
She was quiet again, then I heard her begin to weep.
"Drew?"
But she continued to cry without answering, the kind of unrelieved and subdued sobbing that comes from deep down in the breast.
"Drew, I apologize. I've had some bad concerns on my mind and I was taking them out on you. I'm truly sorry for what I said. It was thoughtless and stupid."
I squeezed my temples with my thumb and forefinger.
"Drew?"
I heard her swallow and take a deep breath.
"Sometimes I'm not very smart," I said. "You know I've always admired you. You have more political courage than anybody I've ever known."
"I don't know what to do. I've always had choices before. Now I don't. I can't deal with that."
"I don't understand."
"Sometimes you get caught. Sometimes there's no way out. I've never let that happen to me."
"Do you want to come into the office? Do you want me to come out there? Tell me what you want to do."
"I don't know what I want to do."
"I'm going to come over there now. Is that all right?"
"I have to take the maid home, and I promised to stop by the market with her. Can you come out about four?"
"Sure."
"You don't mind?"
"No, of course not."
"It doesn't make you uncomfortable?"
"No, not at all. That's silly. Don't think that way."
After I had hung up the phone, I looked wanly at the damp imprint of my hand on the receiver. Were her tears for her brother or herself, I wondered. But then what right had I to be judgmental?
Oh Lord, I thought.
I was almost out the door when the dispatcher caught me in the hallway.
"Pick up your line," he said. "A sergeant in the First District in New Orleans has been holding for you."
"Take a message. I'll call him back."
"You'd better get it, Dave. He says somebody stomped the shit out of Cletus Purcel."
After I had finished talking with the sergeant in New Orleans, who had not been the investigative officer and who couldn't tell me much other than Clete's room number in the hospital off St. Charles and the fact that Clete wanted to see me, that somebody had worked him over bad with a piece of pipe, I told the dispatcher to send a uniformed deputy out to Drew's house and to call Bootsie and tell her that I would be home late and would call her from New Orleans. The wind was hot through my truck windows as I drove across the causeway over the Atchafalaya marsh. The air tasted like brass, like it was full of ozone, and I could smell dead fish on the banks of the willow islands and the odor of brine off the Gulf. The willows looked wilted in the heat, and the few fishermen who were out had pulled their boats into the warm shade of the oil platforms that dotted the bays.
I thought of an event, a low moment in my life, that had occurred almost fifteen years ago. I had been sent to Las Vegas to pick up a prisoner at the county jail and escort him back to New Orleans. But the paperwork and the court clearance had taken almost two days, and I walked in disgust from the courthouse down a palm-lined boulevard in 115-degree heat to a casino and cool bar, where I began drinking a series of vodka collinses as though they were soda pop. Then I had a blackout and seven hours disappeared from my day. I woke up in a rented car out on the desert about 10 PM., my head and body as numb and devoid of feeling and connection with the day as if stunned from crown to sole with novocaine, the distant neon city blazing in the purple cup of mountains.
There was blood on my shirt and my knuckles, and a woman's compact was on the floor. My wallet was gone, along with my money, traveler's checks, credit cards, identification, and finally my shield and my.38 special. I remembered nothing except walking from the bar to a twenty-one table with my drink in my hand and sitting among a polite group of players from Ocala, Florida.
I drove trembling back to the hotel and tried to drink myself sober with room-service Jim Beam. By midnight I went into the DTs and believed that the red message light on my phone meant that once again I had received a long-distance call from the dead members of my platoon. When I finally became rational enough to pick up the receiver and talk to the desk clerk, I was told that I had a message from Cletus Purcel.
I had to use both hands to dial his number, while the sweat slid out of my hair and down the sides of my face.
Six hours later he was standing in my hotel room in his Budweiser shorts, sandals, porkpie hat, and cutoff LSU T-shirt that looked like a tank top on a hippo.
He sat on the side of the bed and listened to my story again, chewing gum, nodding, looking between his knees at the floor; then he left and didn't come back until three in the afternoon. When he did, he dropped a paper sack on the dresser and said, smiling, "Time to pick up our prisoner and boogie on down the road. The Chinese broad got away with your traveler's checks, but I got your money, credit cards, your shield, and your piece back. The American guy working with her is heading back to the Coast by Greyhound to make some long-range dental plans. He's looking forward to it, he said. There's no paperwork on this one, mon."
"What Chinese? What are you talking about?"
"She and her pimp picked you up in a parking lot outside a bar at the end of the Strip. You were too drunk to start your car. They said they'd drive you back to the hotel.
You're lucky he didn't put a shank in you. I took a gut ripper off him that must have been eight inches long."
"I don't remember any of it." My hands still felt thick and wooden when I tried to open and close them.
"Sometimes you lose. Forget it. Come on, let's eat a steak and blow this shithole. I think they got the architects for this place out of a detox center."
Then he looked at me quietly, and I saw the pity and concern, in his eyes.
"You dropped your brains in a jar of alcohol for a few hours," he said. "Big deal. When I worked Vice I got rolled by one of my own snitches. Plus she gave me the gon. What bothers me is I think I knew she had it when I got in the sack with her."
He grinned and blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the stale refrigerated air.
That was my old partner before whiskey and uppers and shylocks made him a fugitive from his own police department.
His face whitened when he tried to sit farther up in bed and reach the water glass and the glass straw on the nightstand.
"Don't try to move around with broken ribs, Clete," I said, and handed him the glass.
His green eyes were red along the rims, and they blinked like a bird's while he sucked on the straw with the corner of his mouth. Divots of hair had been shaved out of his head, and his scalp was sewn with butterfly stitches in a half-dozen places.
"Man, what a drag," he said. "They say I'm supposed to be in here two more days. I don't think I can cut it. You ought to see my night nurse. She looks like the Beast of Buchenwald. She tried to shove a thermometer up my butt while I was asleep."
"They hit you with pipes?"
"No, the little guy had brass knuckles, and Jack Gates, the guy I made for sure, had a baton."
"The cop I talked to said they beat you up with pipes."
"Then they got it wrong in the report. They sound like the same incompetent guys we used to work with."
"How'd they get into your apartment?"
"Picked the lock, I guess. Anyway, Jack Gates was behind the door when I walked in. He caught me right across the ear with the baton. Damn, those things hurt. I crashed right over my new TV set. Then that little fuck was all over me. The last thing I remember I was falling through the furniture, trying to get my piece untangled from my coat, those brass knuckles bouncing off my head, and Gates trying to get a clear swing to take me off at the neck. That's when I grabbed him around the head and tore the stocking off his face. The first thing I saw was all the metal in his teeth. Then it was lights out for Cletus. That sawed-off little fart caught me right at the base of the skull. "It was just like you said, Gates has a scrap yard for a mouth. I should have made the connection before. He was a button man for Joey Gouza, but I heard he moved to Fort Lauderdale or Hallendale two or three years ago and got ice-picked by a chippy or something. But it was Jack Gates, mon, a real barf bucket. I heard Joey Gouza caught his brother-in-law skimming off his whores, so he told Gates to create an object lesson. The brother-in-law was a big, soft mushy guy who couldn't climb a stairs without pulling himself up the banister with both hands. Gates wined and dined him at Copeland's, got him stinking drunk, and kept telling him about these hot-assed Mexican broads over in Galveston. So the tub got his ovaries fired up, and Gates drove them out to a private airport in Kenner, all the time telling the tub what these broads would do for his sex life. Then ole Jack walked him out to the runway, lit a cigar for him, and pushed him into an airplane propeller."
"You think he's working for Gouza now?"
"He's got to be. You don't resign from Joey Meatballs. It's a lifetime job."
"Where'd he get that name?"
"His old man ran a spaghetti place on Felicity. In fact, Joey still owns three or four Italian restaurants around town. But the story is when he was a kid in the reformatory a redneck guard made Joey cook him meatballs all the time. Except Joey would always spit in them or mash up dead cockroaches in them. Have you ever seen him? His mother must have been knocked up by a street lamp."
"The little guy with the brass knuckles is probably Fluck, right?"
"Maybe. But a nylon stocking makes everybody look like Cream of Wheat. All I can tell you is I think he wanted to take my eyes out… Why are you looking like that?"
"I got you into this, Clete."
"No, you didn't. It was my idea to go out to Bobby Earl's and pull on his tallywhacker. But I was right about the connection between Earl and Gouza, won't I? I told you that flunky at the gate used to be a mule for Gouza. I think we've got the ultimate daisy chain of Louisiana buttwipes here-Klansmen, Nazis, and wiseguys."
"You took the beating for me."
"Bullshit."
"You haven't heard it all. I received a bribe attempt earlier today. A couple of grand in my mailbox, a letter suggesting I spend a lot of time around New Iberia."
"Ah," he said. The streetcar rattled down the tracks on St. Charles. "The carrot and the stick."
"I think so."
"And I got the stick."
"They don't like to beat up cops."
"They did something else too, Dave, maybe a signal for you about their future potential. After they laid me out, they sprinkled a bagful of rainbows and black beauties all over the room to make it look like a drug deal gone sour. I cleaned them up before I called the First District… Dave, I don't like what I'm seeing on your face."
"What's that?"
"Like you got a piece of barbed wire behind your eyes. You get those thoughts out of your head."
"You're mistaken."
"Like hell I am. Ole Streak turns on the Mixmaster and almost drives himself crazy with his own thoughts, then goes out and strikes a match to their balls. You wait till I'm out of here and we'll 'front these guys together. Are we straight on that, podjo?"
I looked at the square of sunlight on his sheets. The palm trees outside the window lifted and straightened in the breeze.
"I'm not supposed to be a player?" he said.
"You want me to bring you anything?"
"Don't go up against Gouza on your own. An Iberia sheriff's badge is puppy shit to these guys."
"What do you want me to bring you?"
"My piece. It's in a little sock drawer under my bed." He took his keys off the nightstand and dropped them in my palm. "There's also a fifth of vodka and a carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter."
"I'll be back in a little while."
"Dave?"
"Yes?"
"Gouza's a weird combo. He's got an ice cube in the center of his head when it comes to business, but he's also a sadistic paranoid. A lot of the greaseballs in this town are scared shitless of him."
I drove to Clete's apartment on Dumaine in the Quarter, put his.38 revolver and shoulder holster, his vodka and cigarettes in a paper bag and was walking back down the balcony when I saw the apartment manager sweeping dust out his doorway through the railing into the courtyard below.
He was a dark-skinned, black-haired man with bad teeth and turquoise eyes. I opened my badge and asked him if he had seen the men who had beaten Clete.
"Yeah, sho' I seen them. I seen them run down the stairs," he said. He had a heavy Cajun accent.
I asked him what they looked like.
"One man, I didn't see him too good, no, he walked on down Dumaine. I didn't pay him no mind 'cause I didn't know nothing was wrong, me. But there was a little one, a blond-haired fella, he pushed by me on the stair and run out on the street and got on a motorcycle wit' another fella."
"What did this fellow on the motorcycle look like?"
"Big," he said. Then he tapped on his biceps with one finger. "He had a tattoo. A tiger. It was yellow and red. I seen it real good 'cause I didn't like that little fella pushing me on the stair."
"Who'd you tell this to?"
"I ain't said nothing to nobody."
"Why not?"
"Ain't nobody ax me."
After I dropped off the paper sack with Clete's gun, cigarettes, and vodka at the hospital, the sun was low in the sky, red through the oak trees on St. Charles Avenue, and swallows were circling in the dusk. I checked into an inexpensive guesthouse on Prytania, just two blocks off St. Charles, and called Bootsie and told her that I would have to stay over and that I would be home tomorrow afternoon.
"What is it?" she asked.
"I have to run down a couple of things. It's grunt work mostly. Will you be all right?"
"Yes. Of course."
"Are you all right, Boots?"
"Yes. Everything's fine this evening. It was hot today, but it's cooling off this evening. It might rain tonight. There's lightning out over the marsh."
I could feel the day's fatigue in my body. I closed and widened my eyes. The long-distance hum in the telephone receiver was like wet sand in my ear.
"Would you call the dispatcher for me?" I said.
"All right. Don't worry about anything, Dave. We're just fine."
After I hung up I said a prayer to my Higher Power to watch over my home in my absence, then I called Clarise, an elderly mulatto woman who had worked for my family since I was a child, and asked her to look in on Bootsie that evening and to return in the morning to do house chores.
I showered in a tin stall with water that was so cold it left me breathless, put back on the same clothes I had worn all day, ate a plate of rice, red beans, and sausage at Fat Al bert's on St. Charles, then began a neon-lit odyssey through the biker bars of Jefferson and Orleans parishes.
It's a strange, atavistic, and tribal world to visit. Individually its members are usually hapless, bumbling creatures who were born out of luck and whose largest successes usually consist of staying out of jail, paying off their bondsmen, and keeping their appointments with their probation officers and welfare workers. It's probably not coincidence that most of them are ugly and stupid. But collectively they are both frightening and a source of fascination for those who wonder what it might be like if they traded off their routine and predictable lives for a real fling out on the ragged edge.
The first bar I hit was one out on Airline Highway. Think of a shale parking lot covered with chopped-down Harleys whose chrome and lacquered-black surfaces seem to glow with a nocturrial iridescence; a leather jackboot stomping down on a starter pedal, the ear-splitting roar of straight exhaust pipes, the tinkle of a beer bottle flung through the limbs of an oak tree, a man urinating loudly on the shale in front of a pickup truck's headlights, his muscular, blue-jeanclad legs spread with the visceral self-satisfaction of a gladiator; the inside of a clapboard building crowded with men in sleeveless Levi jackets, boots sheathed with metal plates, black leather cutouts that etch the genitals and flap on the legs like a gunfighter's chaps; bodies strung with chains and iron crosses, covered with hair and tattoos of swastikas and snakes with human skulls inserted between the fangs; an odor of chewing tobacco, snuff, cigarette smoke rubbed like wet nicotine into the clothes, grease and motor oil, reefer, and a faint hint of testosterone and dried semen.
I was sure that the man with the tiger tattoo who had ridden away from Clete's apartment was Eddy Raintree, but he was not the same biker who had put the bribe money in my mailbox. Which meant that in all probability there was a connection between bikers, the Aryan Brotherhood, exconvicts, and Bobby Earl or Joey Gouza. It made sense.
Most outlaw bikers I had known were sexual fascists, and they were always seeking new and defenseless targets for the anger and dark blood that were trapped in their loins like throbbing birds.
But I got virtually nowhere at the bar on Airline Highway or at any of the other bars I cruised until 3 A.M. No one knew Eddy Raintree, had ever heard of him, or even thought his photograph vaguely familiar. But at the last place I visited, a narrow brick poolroom that used to be run by blacks between two warehouses across the river in Algiers, a drunk woman at the bar let me buy her a bowl of chili, and in her sad way she tried to be helpful.
Her hair was platinum, dark at the scalp, and the number 69 was tattooed on her arm. She wore a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with no bra, and a pair of Clorox-faded Levi's that hung as low as a bikini on her hips. (I had never been able to understand the women who hung with outlaw bikers, because with some regularity they were gang-raped, chainwhipped, and had their hands nailed to trees, but they came back for more, obedient, anesthetized, and bored, like spectators at their own dismemberment.)
She kept lifting spoonfuls of chili to her mouth, then forgetting to eat them, her eyes trying to focus on my face and the photograph of Eddy Raintree I held in my palm.
"What do you want with that dumb shit?" she asked. Her words were phlegmatic, like dialogue in a slow-motion film.
"Could you tell me where he is?"
"In jail, probably. Or out fucking goats or something."
"When did you see him last?"
She drew in on her cigarette and held the smoke down like she was taking a hit off a reefer.
"You don't want to waste your time with a dumb shit like that," she said.
"I'd really like to talk with Eddy. I'd really appreciate it if you could help me."
"He's into astronomy or something. He's weird. I've got enough weirdness in my life without a dumb fuck like that."
Then her boyfriend came back from the men's room. He was huge, with a wild beard, and he wore striped overalls with no shirt. His massive shoulders were ridged with hair; his odor was incredible.
"What do you think you're doing, man?" he said.
"Just finishing my conversation with this lady."
"It's finished. Good-bye."
I left two dollars on the bar for the chili and walked back out into the night. The heat of the day had finally lifted from the streets and the cement buildings, the wind was cool blowing from across the river, and I could see the red and green running lights of the oil barges on the water, and the glow of New Orleans against the clouds.
I slept until nine the next morning, had coffee and beignets at a cool table under the pavilion at the Cafe du Monde, and watched the water from the sprinklers click against the piked fence around the park in Jackson Square and drift in a rainbow haze through the myrtle and banana trees. Then I went over to First District headquarters a few blocks away and read Joey Gouza's file. It was another study in institutional failure, the kind of document that makes you doubt your own convictions and conclude that perhaps the rightwing simpletons are correct when they advocate going at social complexities with a chainsaw.
Since age thirteen, he'd had forty-three arrests. He was in the Louisiana reformatory when he was seventeen, he went up the road twice to Angola, and he did a federal three-bit in Lewisburg. He had been arrested for breaking-andentering, auto theft, assault and battery, possession of burglar tools, armed robbery, strong-arm robbery, sale of stolen food stamps, possession of counterfeit money, procuring, tax fraud, and murder. He was one of those career criminals who early on had gone about investigating and participating in every kind of illegal activity that a city offered. But, unlike most petty thieves, pimps, smalltime fences, and smashand-grab artists, Joey had gravitated steadily upward in the New Orleans mob and had developed a skill that was at one time revered in the underworld, that of the safecracker. Evidently he had peeled and cut up safes with burnbars in four states, although he had fallen on only one job, a box in a Baton Rouge pawnshop that netted him eighty-six dollars and a two-year jolt in Angola.
He wasn't hard to find. He owned a small Italian cafd and delicatessen in an old brick, iron-scrolled building shaded by oak trees on Esplanade. The inside smelled of oregano and meat sauce, crab-boil, sautded shrimp, cheese and salami, the fried oysters and sliced tomatoes and onions that went into the poor-boy sandwiches on the counter, the steamed coffee from the espresso machines. The cafe was empty except for a black cook, the counterman, and a couple having breakfast at one of the checkercloth tables.
I asked for Joey Gouza.
"He's back in the office. What's the name?" the counterman said.
"Dave Robicheaux."
"Just a minute." He walked to the end of the counter and spoke through a half-opened door.
"Who's the guy?" a peculiar thick voice inside said.
"I don't know. Just a guy." The counterman looked back at me.
"Then ask him who he is," the voice said, The counterman looked back at me again. I opened up my badge.
"He's a cop, Joey," the counterman said.
"Then tell him to come in, for Christ's sake."
I walked around the counter and through the door. Joey Gouza looked up at me from behind his desk. He was deeply tanned, tall, his face elongated, almost jug-shaped, his salt-and-pepper hair cut military style and brushed up stiffly on his scalp, his eyes as black as wet paint. He wore pleated gray slacks, a lavender polo shirt, oxblood loafers; a cream-colored panama hat sat crown down on the corner of his desk. His neck was unnaturally long, like a swan's, hung with gold chains and medallions, and his open shirt exposed the web of veins and tendons in his shoulders and chest, like those in a long-distance runner or javelin thrower.
But it was the eyes that got your attention; they were absolutely black and they never blinked. And the voice: the accent was Irish Channel, but with a knot tied in it, as though the vocal cords were coated with infected membrane.
His smile was easy, as relaxed as the matchstick he rolled on his tongue. A fat dark man in a green visor, who smoked a cigar, sat at a card table in the corner, adding up receipts on a calculator.
"I got some unpaid parking tickets again?" Gouza said.
I held my badge out for him to see. "No, I'm Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, Mr. Gouza. It's just an informal visit. Do you mind if I sit down?"
If he recognized my name, it didn't show in his eyes or his smile.
"Help yourself, if you don't mind me working. We got to get some stuff ready for the tax man."
"I'm looking for Jack Gates," I said. "Or Eddy Raintree."
"Who?"
"How about Jewel Fluck?"
"Fluck? Is this some kind of put-on?"
"Let's start with Jack Gates again. You never heard of him?"
"Nope."
"That's funny. I heard he fed your brother-in-law into an airplane propeller."
He took the matchstick out of the corner of his mouth and laughed.
"It's a great story. I've heard it for years. But it's bullshit," he said. "My brother-in-law was killed in a plane accident on his way to Disneyland. A great family tragedy."
The man at the other table was grinning and nodding his head up and down without interrupting his count of receipts.
Then Joey Gouza put the matchstick back in his mouth and leaned his chin on his knuckle. His eyes were filled with an amused light as they moved up and down my person.
"You say Iberia Parish?" he said.
"That's right."
"You guys gave up shaving or something?"
"We're casual out in the parishes. Let's cut to it, Joey. You're an old-time pete man. Why do you want to give Weldon Sonnier a lot of grief?"
"Weldon Sonnier?"
"You don't know him, either?"
"Everybody in New Orleans knows him. He's a bum and a welsher."
"Who told you that?"
"That's the word. He borrows big dough, but he doesn't come up with the vig. That'll get you into trouble in this town. You saying I'm connected with him or something?"
"You tell me."
"I know your name from a long time ago. You were at the First District, weren't you?"
"That's right."
"So I think maybe you heard stories about me. You probably read my rap sheet before you came here this morning, right? You know I've been up the road a couple of times, you know I burned a box or two. You heard that old bullshit story about how I got this voice, how a yard bitch put a capful of Sani-Flush in my coffee cup. How the yard bitch got his cherry split open in the shower two days later? You heard that one, didn't you?"
"Sure."
He smiled and said, "No, you didn't, but I'll give it to you free, anyway. The point is it's not true. I was never a big stripe, I did easy time, I made full trusty in every joint I was in. But the big word there is did. Past tense. I did my time. I've been straight seven years. Look-"
He bounced his palm on top of a paper spindle and gazed reflectively out the window at some black children skateboarding by under the oaks.
"I'm a businessman," he continued. "I own a bunch of restaurants, a linen service, a movie theater, a plumbing business, and half a vending-machine company. Are we on the same wavelength here?"
He flexed his nostrils as though there were an obstruction in them and rubbed the grained skin of his jaw with one finger.
"I'll try again," he said. "You said it a minute ago, I was a pete man. I punc down for it twice, too. But safecracking became a historical art a long time ago. Today it's all narcotics."
"Bad stuff?" I smiled back at him.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms up.
"Who am I to judge?" he said. "But go out to the welfare projects and see who's running the action. They're all colored kids. They scrape out crack pipes, they call it bazooka or something, and sell it for a buck a hit. Nobody who could think his way out of a wet paper bag is gonna try to compete with that."
"Maybe my information isn't very good. Or maybe I'm a little bit out of touch. But it's my understanding that you've got connections with Bobby Earl, that Jack Gates is a button man for you."
He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. He took the matchstick out of his mouth and dropped it in the waste can.
"I've tried to be polite," he said. "You're from out of town, you had some questions, I tried to answer them. You think maybe you're abusing the situation here?"
"I came here to pass on a couple of observations, Joey. When you try to get a cop on a pad and you don't know anything about him, get somebody to lend him money, don't leave it in his mailbox."
"What are you talking about?"
"The two thousand is in the Iberia Parish sheriff's desk drawer. At the end of the year it'll probably be donated to the city park program."
He was grinning again.
"You're saying I tried to bribe you? You drove all the way over here to tell me somebody's two thou is wasted on you? That's the big message?"
"Read it like you want."
"It's been a lot of fun talking to you. Hey, I didn't tell you I own a couple of goony golf courses. You like goony golf? It's catching on here in New Orleans. Hey, Louis, give him a couple of tickets."
The man with the cigar and green visor was grinning broadly, nodding his head up and down. He took a thick pack of tickets from his shirt pocket, popped two out from under the rubber band, and placed them on the desk in front of me.
Joey Gouza made a pyramid out of his hands and tapped the end of his fingers together.
"I heard you were an intelligent man, Joey. But it's my opinion you're a stupid shit," I said.
His eyes went flat, and his face glazed over.
"You fucked with Cletus Purcel. That's probably the worst mistake you ever made in your insignificant life," I said. "If you don't believe me, check out what happened to Julio Garcia and his bodyguard a few years back. I think they wished they had stayed in Managua and taken their chances with the Sandinistas."
"That's supposed to make me rattle? You come in here like you fell out of a dirty-clothes bag, making noise like you got gas or something, and I'm supposed to rattle?" He pointed into his breastbone with four stiff fingers. "You think I give a fuck about what some pissant PI's gonna do? Tell me serious, I'm supposed to get on the rag because he whacked out a spick nobody in New Orleans would spit on?"
"Clete didn't kill Garcia. His partner did."
I saw the recognition grow in his eyes.
"Tell those three clowns they're going down for the murder of a sheriff's deputy," I said. "Stay out of Iberia Parish. Stay away from Purcel. If you fall again, Joey, I'm going to make sure you go down for the bitch. Four-time loser, mandatory life."
I flipped the goony golf passes on his shirt front. The man in the green visor sat absolutely still with his cigar dead in his mouth.