A Morning for Flamingos

CHAPTER 4

I took Alafair to stay at the home of my cousin Tutta, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. It wasn't easy. I carried her suitcase and her paper bag of Curious George and Baby Squanto books and coloring materials up onto the gingerbread porch and sat down with her in the swing. The sun was bright on the lawn. Bumblebees hummed over the hibiscus and the pale blue hydrangeas in the flower beds.

"It's not going to be for long, little guy," I said. "I'm going to call you almost every night, and Tutta will take you out to feed your horse. If I can, I'll come back on a weekend."

She looked out blankly at the dew shining on the grass.

"It's a business trip, Alafair. It's just something I have to do."

"You said we wouldn't leave New Iberia again. You said you didn't like New Orleans anymore, that it was full of dope and bad people."

"That doesn't mean we have to be afraid of those things, does it? Come on, we're not going to let a short trip get us down, are we? Guys like us are too tough for that."

Her face was sullen. I took off her Astros cap and set it sideways on her head, then looked down into her face.

"Trust me on this one, Alf," I said. My cousin came out on the porch. I squeezed Alafair against me. Her body felt hard and unyielding. "Okay, little guy?"

Her eyes were blinking, and I touched her face with my hand.

"Hey, you remember what my father used to do when he had a problem?" I asked. "He'd grin right in its face, then give the old thumbs-up sign. He'd say, 'You mess with us coonass, we gonna spit right in yo' mouth.'"

She looked up at me and smiled faintly. My cousin held the screen for her.

"Dave?" Alafair said.

"Yes?"

"When you come back, it's gonna be like it was?"

"What do you mean?"

"Playing and joking, like we always did. You always coming home full of fun."

"You bet. I just have to clear up some problems, that's all."

"I can go with you. I can cook meals, I can wash clothes in the machine."

"Not this time, Alf."

Tutta took Alafair's hand in her own.

"Dave, those bad people, they're not gonna hurt you again, are they?" Alafair said.

"You remember what Batist did when that gator got inside his fishnet and tore it up?" I said.

She thought, then grinned broadly.

"That's right," I said. "He grabbed the gator by its tail, swung it around in the air, and threw it all the way over the levee. Well, that's the way we handle the bad guys when they give us trouble."

I hugged her again and kissed her forehead.

"Good-bye, little guy," I said.

"'Bye, Dave."

Her eyes were starting to film, and I walked down to the picket gate before I turned and glanced back at her. She stood in the open screen door, one of her hands in Tutta's, her ball cap low on her ears. She looked back at me from under the bill of her cap and raised her thumb in the air.

I left Batist to manage the bait shop and boat dock, and on Halloween I moved into my apartment on Ursulines in the Quarter. Most people identify the Quarter with the antique stores on Royal, the sidewalk artists around Jackson Square, and the strip joints and T-shirt shops on Bourbon Street, but it has a residential and community life of its own: a Catholic elementary school, a city park, small grocery stores with screen doors, wood floors, ceiling fans, display coolers loaded with cheeses, sausages, and skinned catfish, and bins of plums and bananas set out on the sidewalk under the colonnade.

My apartment was inside a walled courtyard that you entered through an iron gate and a domed brick walkway. The flower beds were thick with blooming azalea and camellia and untrimmed banana trees, and the people who lived in the second-story apartments had placed coffee cans of begonias and hung baskets of impatiens along the balcony.

My place was on the first floor, and it had a bed-room, a small kitchen, a bath with a shower, and a living room. Like those of most residences in the Quarter, its walls were marked with all the historical attempts of its owners to adapt to technological change. The gas lamps had been removed and plastered over at the turn of the century; bricks had been torn out of the walls to replumb and rewire the kitchen and the bath; big hand-twist electric switches stuck out of the plaster but turned on no light.

I opened the windows and began to hang my clothes in the closet. Maybe I should have felt good to be back in New Orleans, where I had been a policeman for fourteen years in the First District, but it felt strange to be alone in a rented apartment, with the late-afternoon light cold and yellow on the banana trees outside. Or maybe it was simply a matter of age. Solitude and the years did not go well with me, and even though I had lived over a half century, I had concluded that I was one of those people who would never know with any certainty who they were, that my thoughts about myself would always be question marks; my only identity would remain the reflection that I saw in the eyes of others.

I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life. I finished putting my shirts, underwear, and socks in the dresser drawers, stripped down to my skivvies, and did ten one-arm chins on an iron pipe in the kitchen, forty leg lifts, and fifty stomach crunches, and got into the shower and turned water on so hot that my skin turned red and grainy through my suntan.

I dried off and combed my hair in the mirror. I had lost fifteen pounds since Boggs had shot me; my stomach was flat, the love handles around my waist had almost disappeared, the scar tissue where a bouncing Betty had gotten me in Vietnam looked like a spray of small gray arrow points that had been slipped under the skin on my right thigh and side. I still had my father's thick black hair and mustache, except for the white patch above my ear, and if I didn't pay attention to the lines in my neck and around my eyes and the black-peppery flecks of skin cancer on my arms, I could still pretend it was only the bottom of the fifth.

Question: Where do you score a few grams of coke in New Orleans?

Answer: Almost anywhere you want to.

But where do you score a thousand grams, a kilo? The question becomes more complicated. Minos had accused me of being simplistic. Later I would wonder when he had last been on the street with his own clientele.

It was dusk when I got to the address on Esplanade on the edge of the Quarter; the air was crisp, the dry palm fronds on the neutral ground clattered in the breeze, and costumed Negro children with jack-o'-lanterns ran in groups from one high, lighted gallery to the next. The man I was looking for lived in a garage apartment behind a columned one-story wood house on the corner, which like many New Orleans antebellum homes was built up high above the lawn because of floods. But the wood doors on the drive were padlocked, and the iron gate that gave onto the side yard wouldn't open either. I could see a man working under an automobile in the drive, with a mechanic's lamp attached to an extension cord.

I shook the gate against the iron fastenings in the brick wall. The man slid out from under the car on a creeper. A lighted cigar lay on the cement by his head. One eye squinted at me like a fist.

"What do you want?" he said.

"I'm looking for Lionel Comeaux."

"What do you want?"

"Are you Lionel Comeaux?"

"Yeah, what do you want?"

"Can I come in?"

"The latch is inside, at the top of the gate," he said, and picked up a crescent wrench off the cement to begin working under the car again.

I entered the yard and walked through flower beds filled with elephant ears and caladium and waited for him to slide back from under the car again. He didn't, so I had to squat down to talk to him. "I want to make a buy."

"Buy what?" he said, blinking at the rust that fell out of the car frame into his eyes. He wore jeans and a purple and gold LSU jersey with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. His arms were big and covered with tan, and he had a deep red U.S. Navy tattoo on one bicep. His head was square, his dark hair crew cut. He chewed gum, and there were lumps of cartilage behind his ears.

"I want some pure stuff, no cut, a good price," I said. "I hear you're the guy who can help me."

"Pure what? What are you talking about, buddy?"

"What the fuck do you think I'm talking about?"

He stopped working, removed a piece of grit from his eyelashes with his thumb, and looked at me. The backs of his hands were shiny with grease.

"Who sent you here?" he said.

"Some people in Lafayette."

"Who?"

"People I do business with. What do you care?"

"I care, man. What's your name?"

"Dave Robicheaux."

He pushed the creeper out from under the car and raised himself up on one elbow. He was maybe twenty-five and had the neck and shoulder tendons of a weight lifter.

"You're talking about dope, right? Skag, reefer, stuff like that?" he said. He picked up his cigar off the cement and puffed it alight.

"I'm talking about cocaine, podna. Ten thou a key. I can take five keys off you."

"Cocaine?" he said.

"That's right."

"That's interesting. But number one, I'm not your podna, because I don't know who you are. Number two, I don't know where you got my name or this address, but you've got the wrong information, wrong person, wrong house."

"You see Tony Cardo?"

"Who?"

"Look, I don't mean to offend you, but the bozo routine is wearing thin. You tell Cardo there're some oil people in Lafayette with a lot of money to invest. He doesn't want the business, that's fine. You don't want to pass on the information, that's fine. We can get what we need out of Houston. You know where Clete's Club is?"

"No."

"You know where Joe Burda's Golden Star is on Decatur?"

"Yeah."

"It's two doors up from there. If you want to do some business, leave word at the bar."

"Make sure the gate latches on your way out," he said.

The next two people whose names and addresses Minos had given me were equally unproductive. One was a bar owner who was in jail in Baton Rouge, and the other, a wrestling promoter, had died of AIDS.

At eleven that night I walked down Bourbon in the roar of noise from the bars and strip joints, amid the Halloween revelers, the midwestern conventioneers, breathless, red-faced college kids who spilled beer from their paper cups down the front of their clothes, and the Negro street dancers whose clip-on taps rang like horseshoes on the cement. Bourbon is closed to automobile traffic, so that the street itself is like an open-air zoo, but by and large it's a harmless one. The girls still take off their clothes on the runways and hookers work out of taxicabs in the early morning hours. Occasionally a cop will cool out a drunk with a baton in a side-street bar, and the burlesque spielers in candy-striped vests and straw boaters can conjure up visions right out of adolescent masturbation; but ultimately Bourbon offers the appearance of sleaze to the tourists with the implicit understanding that it contains no real threat of injury to them.

In fact, the man I wanted to find ran a T-shirt and souvenir shop, and he was as innocuous in dress and manner as an ice cream salesman. He walked out from behind a curtain in back after his clerk told him I wanted to talk to him, and his oval face was pink and shining, his thin red hair combed back with water, his mouth wide with a grin, his neck powdered with talcum. He wore a white suit and a silver silk shirt, and his appearance gave every indication of a harmless, happy fat man-except that on second glance you noticed that his chest was as broad as his stomach, that he wore gold chains around his neck, that his eyes took your inventory and did not smile with his mouth.

"I know you," he said, and shook his finger playfully at me. "You're a police officer. No, you used to be one, right here in the Quarters."

"That's right."

"You were a lieutenant."

"That's right."

"You probably don't remember me, but I used to see you and your partner over at the Acme. You used to come in at lunch for oysters. What's his name? He's got a club here now."

"Cletus Purcel."

"Yeah. I was in his place the other day. Real nice. I think he's going to make it."

"Could I talk to you in private?"

He looked at the ruby-studded gold watch on his wrist.

"Sure thing," he said, and held back the curtain for me.

His office was a small, cluttered room in the back, with a desk, three chairs, and old jazz posters on the brick walls. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and tapped the bottom of a poster with his finger.

"See that name there?" he said. "You got to look close, but that's me, Uncle Ray Fontenot. I played trombone right down the street at Sharky Bonnano's Dream Room. You remember him?"

"Sure."

"You remember those two colored guys used to tap-dance on the stage there, Pork Chops and Kidney Beans?"

"I want to score five kilos of uncut coke. You deliver good stuff at the right price, we'll be doing more business later."

He peeled the cellophane off a package of Picayune cigarettes.

"Not too many ex-cops come in here with that kind of statement," he said. He had never stopped smiling.

"Forget the ex-cop business. It all spends."

"Oh, don't misunderstand me. I'm not knocking a man trying to make a little money. But your information's dated. That's what I'm trying to say."

"How's that?"

He tilted back in the swivel chair, his silver shirt tight across his broad chest and stomach, his eyes bright and squinted with goodwill.

"I always had problems with weight and high blood pressure," he said. "I smoked reefer every night to keep my blood pressure down, then I'd go out and eat a whole pizza by myself. I got on prescription diet pills, then I started using some stuff that was a little more serious. Finally I was in the business myself, you know what I mean? So whoever gave you my name wasn't all wrong. But I bottomed out and went into treatment a year ago. The only problem I've got now is I eat all the time."

"You're in a twelve-step program?"

"What?"

"You're out of the business?"

"That's about it."

"Tell me, when you give a guy like Tony C. the deep six, what do you do? Just drop around one day and say, 'I bottomed out, Tony. I'm out of the business, see you around, you don't like it, fuck you'?"

This time the words bit into some nerve endings behind that pink and smiling face. He lit his cigarette and blew smoke at an upward angle into the air.

"I've never met the gentleman," he said, his eyes crinkling again.

"I see. Sorry to have wasted your time. I'll run along now, Mr. Fontenot. Say, the next time you give somebody that treatment shuck, you might find out what a twelve-step program is."

He tipped his ashes into an ashtray and looked pleasantly into his cigarette smoke without seeing anything.

"Tell Tony C. his distribution in southwestern Louisiana is lousy," I said. "I can double or triple it. But I've got nothing to prove. There're some guys in Texas who want to branch out."

"Then maybe that's who you should deal with."

"They've got a bad reputation. But maybe you're right. If I meet Tony C, I'll tell him what you said."

"Now, wait a minute…"

"I don't blame you for bullshitting me, Mr. Fontenot, but if you get serious, leave a message for me at Clete's Club. I'll be back in touch."

I walked back through the T-shirt shop and out into the neon lights and cacophony of jazz and rock bands on Bourbon Street.

I was tired, unshaved, weary of the people I had been with, my ears thick with the sound of trumpets and trombones and electric guitars, yet I did not want to return to the apartment and be alone. I walked to the Café du Monde for coffee and beignets, but it had already closed. So I sat on an iron bench in front of the cathedral in Jackson Square and watched the moon rise in the sky. The air was heavy with the smell of camellias, and the magnolia and banana trees that grew along the piked fence behind me made shifting patterns of shadow and light on the cement. A wind came up off the river, and it started to mist; then a shower clattered across the banana leaves in the square and blew in a spray under the lighted colonnades. I walked home on a quiet street, away from the noise of the tourists, keeping close under the scrolled iron balconies to avoid the rain.

It was warm and muggy the next morning, as it can be in southern Louisiana well into the Christmas season, and I had breakfast and read the Times-Picayune at the Café du Monde before the crowds of tourists came in, then walked across the square past the sidewalk artists and went inside the cathedral briefly because it was All Saints' Day. Later, I found two more of the contacts Minos had given me. One was a bail bondsman who told me to get out of his office, and the other was a woman who ran an occult bookstore that smelled of soiled cat litter. Her face was white with makeup, her eyes stenciled with purple eyeliner, her cigarette breath devastating. For fifteen minutes I pretended to examine her racks of books while she carried on a conversation with her customers about telepathic communication with UFOs and a hole in the dimension that exists in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle and operates like a drain in an enormous sink. Finally I bought a book on cats and left.

I called New Iberia that night to check on Alafair, and the next morning I walked over to Clete's Club on Decatur, across from the French Market. For years Clete had been my partner in the First District. He'd learned his law enforcement methods from an uncle who had walked a beat in the Irish Channel-"Bust 'em or smoke 'em," Clete always said-and had literally terrorized the lowlifes in the First. All you had to do was mention to a pimp or house creep or jackroller that Cletus Purcel would like to interview him, and he would be on the next bus or plane to Miami. Then Clete got into debt to the shylocks, ruined his marriage with whores and his stomach with booze and aspirin, and finally went on a pad and took ten thousand dollars from some drug dealers and right-wing crazies to get rid of a federal witness.

Later he would run house security at a casino in Nevada and become the bodyguard for a midlevel Mafia character and ex-con by the name of Sally Dio. But eventually what I thought of as Clete's most essential characteristics-his courage and his loyalty to an old friend-had their way, and he managed to walk away reasonably intact from all the wreckage in his life.

He was at the back of the bar, loading the stainless steel cooler with bottles of long-necked Jax. He looked up and smiled when he saw me. His body always looked too big for his clothes. He loved pizza, poor-boy sandwiches, deep-fried shrimp and oysters, dirty rice, beignets, ice cream, which he would eat with a tablespoon by the half gallon. He was convinced that he could control his weight by pumping iron every other night in his garage, and limit his ulcer damage by smoking Lucky Strikes through a cigarette filter and drinking his scotch with milk.

"What's happening, Streak?" he said. "I had a feeling you'd be by."

"How's that?"

"I'm hearing weird stuff about you, mon."

"Did somebody leave a message for me?"

"Nope."

"Then what did you hear?"

He stood erect from his work, flexed the stiffness out of his back, and grinned at me. His skin was ruddy, his hair sandy and combed straight back on his head, his green eyes intelligent and full of humor. A scar that was the color and texture of a bicycle tire patch ran down through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose.

"How about you spring for some oysters and I'll fix you a drink?" he said.

"I don't have time."

"Yeah, you do." Then he turned to a Negro who was sweeping between the tables by the dance floor. "Emory, go down to Joe Burda's and get us a couple of dozen on the half shell."

The Negro went out, and Clete fixed me a tall glass of shaved ice, 7-Up, Collins mix, candied cherries, and orange slices. He poured a cup of coffee for himself behind the bar, then came around and sat down beside me. The club was empty, the front door open; the light outside was bright under the colonnade.

"What the fuck are you up to, Streak?" he said.

"I've got an apartment over on Ursulines. I haven't bounced back too well since that guy put a hole in me."

"You like listening to drunks break bottles out in the street all night?"

"It's not bad."

"I bet. How many queers are in your building?"

"Lay off it,Clete."

"Then tell me why I'm hearing these weird stories."

"I don't know what you've heard."

"That an ex-Homicide roach is trying to score five keys of coke. That he got canned from the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department because he was taking juice. That he's floating Tony C.'s name around town."

"Word spreads."

"Among some people I'd stay away from, the kind we used to mash into the cement."

"The kind you used to mash."

"I'm not kidding you, partner. I heard this bullshit from three different guys."

"Who?"

"I can't control who drinks at my bar. There're some connected guys come in here. They know I used to work for the Dio family out in Vegas and Tahoe, so they're always inviting me back to their booth. You've got to see it, Dave, to appreciate it. About six of them, all guys, cram into the vinyl booth back there on Saturday night. They always sit so all of them can look out at the dance floor and flash their bucks and shake hands with everybody like they're celebrities. I'm talking about guys who couldn't put spaghetti on a plate without a diagram."

"These are Cardo's people?"

"One way or another. He pieces off a lot of his action so all the greaseballs stay happy. You ever meet him?"

"No."

"One of his broads lives in the Pontabla. He brings her in sometimes for a drink. He looks like somebody slammed a door on his head."

"When does he come in?"

"He's not a regular."

"What's the woman's name?"

"Who knows? I got a proposition for you, though."

Emory, the black barman, brought in a tin tray loaded with oysters on the half shell, slices of lemon, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce. I gave him six dollars for the restaurant bill and a dollar for himself. He went into the back of the club and began stacking cartons of empty beer bottles in a storage room.

"Let me in on it," Clete said. There was a bead of light in his green eyes.

"On what?"

"The sting, mon." He seasoned one of the oysters, squeezed lemon on it, cupped the shell in his hand, and let the muscle slide down his throat. He smiled and the juice ran down the corner of his mouth. "I figure it's probably a DEA gig. They've got the gelt, they can afford another player."

I didn't say anything.

"Here's what you tell them," he said. "I can cover your back, I know most of the dealers on a first-name basis. I can open doors. Right now you've probably got a couple of street snitches doing your p.r."

"You don't buy my cover?"

"Are you kidding?" He started laughing.

"I thought it was pretty good."

"It is, for anybody who doesn't know you. But you're talking to ole Cletus here, so save the shuck for the lowlifes and the melt-downs. I ain't putting you on, mon, I'd love to get back in it. I'm thinking of opening up a P.I. office in the Quarter. A lot of it is running down bond jumpers and doing bullshit for attorneys, but so what? I can keep my hand in, carry a piece again, make life more interesting for some of the shit-bags."

"Call up the DEA in Lafayette. Tell them what you told me."

"Wouldn't that be something, me and you working together again? You remember when we blew up Julio Segura's shit in the back of his Caddy?"

I looked out at the sunlight under the colonnade.

"Hey, I don't feel bad about smoking a pimp and drug dealer," he said. "I think it's a mainline perk of the business. There's nothing like the smell of cordite to clear up your sinuses."

"You almost got us killed."

"Who's perfect? But let's be serious a minute, mon." He pushed at an oyster with his fork. There were deep acne scars on the back of his red neck. His big shoulders were bent, and his shirt was stretched tight across the wide expanse of his back. "I don't know what kind of info you're operating on, but this is what I hear. Cardo's out for the big score. Florida 's already locked up, so is Texas. So he wants to control the Louisiana coast. He's got some nasty types working for him, too, guys who paint the ceiling when they do a job on somebody. You don't want him to think you're a competitor. Look, Dave, they say he's different from the other greaseballs. He's not predictable, he does strange stuff that nobody can figure out.

"The last time he brought his broad in here, a Marine gunnery sergeant sat on the stool next to him. Cardo says, 'Give me and the lady another Collins and give the gunny what he wants.' Then they start talking about Vietnam and Cherry Alley in Tokyo. This is in front of his broad, can you dig it? All the time I'm washing glasses about two feet away, so Cardo stops talking and says to me, 'You got a question about something?'

"'What?' I say.

"'You look like you're getting an earful. You got a question?' he says.

"'You're only in the crotch once,' I say.

"'You cracking wise or something?' he says.

"'I'm not doing anything. It's a Marine Corps expression. I was in the corps myself,' I say.

"He starts grinning and points both fingers to his chest and says, 'You think you got to tell me what it means?' and his broad starts making these clicking, no-no sounds with her mouth. 'Come on, you explaining to me what the fuck that means?' he says. 'Somebody appointed you to explain these things to other people?'

"So I said, 'No, I'm just telling you to enjoy your drink,' and I walked back to my office. It was about that time I started thinking about changing my line of work."

"Have you heard of a guy named Jimmie Lee Boggs?"

"A contract man, out of Florida?"

"That's the one."

"What about him?"

"He's the guy who put a hole in me. Somebody told me he might be back in New Orleans."

Clete smiled.

"That's the bait they used to get you into the sting, huh?" he said. "They saw you coming, Streak. That guy's long gone now."

"Maybe."

"Get me in on it, mon."

"I don't call the shots on this one, Cletus. Here's my telephone number and address. But don't give them to anyone, okay? Just keep any messages I get and I'll check back with you."

"You need somebody to watch your back. Don't trust the feds to do it. You heard it first from ole Clete."

"I don't know if any of this is going anywhere, anyway," I said. "A few more days of this and I might be back in New Iberia."

He put a matchstick in his mouth. His hands were big and square and callused around the edges, the nails chewed back to the quick.

"Don't underestimate their potential," he said. "Most of them wouldn't make good bars of soap. But turn your back on them and they'll take your eyes out."

That afternoon I talked to another of Minos's contacts, a Negro bartender on Magazine. His head was bald and waxed, and he wore gray muttonchop sideburns that looked as though they were artificially affixed to his face. He was as passive, docile, and uncurious about me as if I had been selling burial insurance. His eyelids were leaded, and his head kept nodding up and down while I talked. He told me: "See, I ain't in the bidness no more myself. I had a bunch of trouble 'cause of it, had to go out of town for a little while, know what I mean? But somebody come in want the action, I'll tell them you in town. You want another 7-Up?"

"No, this is fine."

"How about some hard-boiled eggs?"

"No, I'm fine."

"I got to go in the kitchen and start my stove now."

"Thanks for your time. You were up at Angola?"

"Where's that at?" he said. His eyes looked speculatively out into space.

The next morning I walked over to the Café du Monde again and had coffee at one of the outside tables. Across the street the spires of the cathedral looked brilliant in the sunlight, and the wind off the river ruffled the banana trees and palm fronds along the black iron piked fence that bordered the park inside Jackson Square. I finished reading the paper, then walked back to the apartment and called Clete's bar for messages. There were none. I called Minos's office in Lafayette.

"Don't be discouraged," he said.

"I think maybe I'm not cut out for this."

"Why?"

"I was a Homicide cop. I never worked Vice or Narcotics."

"It's a different kind of gig, isn't it?"

"Look, busting them is one thing. Pretending to be like them is another."

"Have a few laughs with it."

"It's not funny, Minos. You got me into this stuff, and it's not paying off. I've got another problem, too-the reliability of your information."

"Oh?"

"I find out that people are either dead, or in jail, or they're crazy and run bookstores that smell like cat shit."

"If our information was perfect, these guys wouldn't be on the street. We get it from snitches and cons cutting deals and wiretaps on pathological liars. You know that."

"I struck out."

"You don't think any of these people are dealing now?"

"Maybe a couple of them. But they didn't buy my act."

"It's like throwing chum overboard to a school of barracuda. They just have to smell the blood."

"How about another metaphor?"

"Just hang in there. It takes time."

"I'm ready to pull the plug."

"Give it two more days."

"All right. Then that's it, Minos."

"Now, I want to pick a bone with you about this guy Purcel." I had to wince a little on that one.

"He called you?" I asked.

"He called the office. The call finally got referred to me. He said he was calling at your suggestion."

"He figured out the scam. I didn't tell him anything he didn't already know."

"He's got some idea he should go undercover for the DEA."

"Maybe it's not a bad idea," I said.

"Are you serious? He's got a rap sheet that's longer than some cons'. He was charged with a murder, he worked for the mob, the National Transportation Safety Board thinks maybe he caused a plane crash that killed a bunch of greaseballs."

"Clete's had a checkered career."

"It's not going to include working for the DEA."

"What do you hear on Boggs?"

"Nothing. Look, I'm coming over to New Orleans for the next three weeks. After today call me at the office there. I'll be staying at the Orleans Guest House on St. Charles."

"Think about putting Purcel on the payroll. He knows more about the lowlifes than any cop in New Orleans."

"Yeah, not many ex-cops can produce letters of reference from the Mafia. You really come up with some good ones, Dave."

That afternoon a message was left for me at Clete's bar. But it was not what I was expecting. It was written in ballpoint in a careful hand on a flattened paper napkin, and it read:

Dear Dave,

I was surprised to learn that you were back in New Orleans. I had heard that you had returned to New Iberia to live. I was surprised to hear some other things, too. But maybe life has changed a lot for both of us. I'd love to see you again. I've thought about you many times over the years. Call or come by if you feel like it. I live in the Garden District. It's a long way from Bayou Teche, huh, cher?

Your old friend,

Bootsie Mouton Giacano

Her telephone number and street address were written at the bottom.

Sometimes the heart can sink with a sense of mortality and loss as abrupt as opening a door to a shop filled with whirring clocks.