A Morning for Flamingos

CHAPTER 5

If her name is Bootsie Mouton and it sends you back to 1957 and the best summer of your life. It was after my sophomore year at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, and my brother and I worked all summer on an offshore seismograph rig to buy a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible that we waxed and rubbed with rags until it had a glow like soft butter. One night at a dance out on Spanish Lake I saw her standing by herself under the oak trees by the water's edge, the light from Japanese lanterns flickering on her honey-colored hair, her moist brow and olive skin, the lavender dress she wore with a spray of white flowers pinned above the breast. She kept lifting her hair off her neck in the warm breeze that blew across the water, and pulling at the straps of her dress with her thumb.

"Would you like to dance?" I said.

"I can't. I have a fresh sunburn. We went crabbing at Cypremort Point today."

"Do you want a drink or a beer or a Coke or something?"

"Somebody went to get one for me."

"Who?"

"The boy I came with."

"Who's that?"

She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes were dark, her mouth parted and red in the shadows.

"A boy from Lake Charles," she said.

"I don't see anybody from Lake Charles here. What kind of drink do you like?"

"A vodka Collins."

"Don't move. I'll be right back," I said.

She lived on the lake, out by the little town of Burke, which was composed mostly of Negro tenant farmers. I told her that I wanted to come out to her house, that night, after her date dropped her off. I was insistent, aggressive, rude, I suppose, but I didn't care. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever met. Finally her date got angry and petulant and left with a group headed for Slick's Club in St. Martinville, and I drove her home down the blacktop highway between the sugarcane fields, the breeze drowsy with the scent of jasmine and magnolia and blooming four-o'clocks, the moss-hung oaks and cypress etched against the moon out on the lake.

Two weeks later we lost our virginity together. A man always remembers several details about that initial experience, if he has it with someone he loves. I recall the warmness of the evening, the washed-out lilac color of the sky, the rainwater dripping out of the cypress trees onto the motionless surface of the lake, the banks of scarlet clouds in the west that glowed like fire through the cracks in the boathouse wall. But the image that will always remain in my mind was her face in that final heart-twisting moment. Her eyes closed, her lips parted silently, and then she looked up at me like an opening flower and cupped my face in her hands as she would a child's.

It should never have ended. But it did, and for no reason that I could ever explain to her. Nor could I explain it to my father, a priest in whom I trusted, or myself. Even though I was only twenty years old I began to experience bone-grinding periods of depression and guilt that seemed to have no legitimate cause or origin. When they came upon me it was as though the sun had suddenly become a black cinder, and had gone over the rim of the earth for the last time. I hurt her, pushed her away from me, wouldn't return her telephone calls or answer a poignant and self-blaming note she left on our front screen. Even today I'm hard put to explain my behavior. But I felt somehow that I was intrinsically bad, that anyone who could love me didn't know who I really was, and that eventually I would make that person bad, too.

It was not a rational state of mind. A psychologist would probably say that my problem was related to my mother's running off with a bourré dealer from Morgan City when I was a child, or the fact that my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked up in the parish jail. I don't know if theories like that would be correct or not. But at the time there was no way I could think myself out of my own dark thoughts, and I became convinced that the happy times with Bootsie had simply been part of the summer's rain-spangled illusion, as transient and mutable as the season had been warm and fleeting.

When she would not be dissuaded, I took out another girl, a carhop from up north who wore hair rollers in public and always seemed to have sweat rings under her arms. I took her to a lawn party given by Bootsie's aunt and uncle on Bayou Teche, where she got drank and called the waiter a nigger.

Later that night I got into a fistfight at Slick's, tore the fenders off my car on the drawbridge over the Teche, and woke up in the morning handcuffed to the bottom of the iron ladder on the Breaux Bridge water tower, because it was during Crawfish Festival and the small city jail was already full. As I looked up at the white sun, smelled the hot weeds around me, and swallowed the bile in my throat, I didn't realize that I had just made the initial departure on a long alcoholic odyssey.

Then the years passed and I would not see her again until I came home from the war. In the meantime I committed myself totally to charcoal-filtered bourbon in a four-inch glass, with a sweating Jax on the side, and finally I didn't care about anything.

Now she lived on Camp Street in the Garden District. Her married name was Giacano, the same as that of the most notorious Mafia family in New Orleans. I told myself that I should put her note away and save it for another time, when I could afford a futile pursuit of the past. But I seldom listen to my own advice, and that evening I rode the old iron streetcar down St. Charles under the long canopy of spreading oaks, past yards filled with camellias and magnolia trees, sidewalks cracked by oak roots, without having called first, and found myself on Camp in front of a narrow two-story white-painted brick home with twin chimneys, a gallery, and garden walls that enclosed huge clumps of banana trees and dripped with purple bugle vine.

She answered the door in a one-piece orange bathing suit and an open terry cloth robe, and explained with a flush that she had been dipping leaves out of the pool in the back. Her Cajun accent had been softened by the years in New Orleans, and she was heavier now, wider in the hips, larger in the breasts, thicker across the thighs. She brushed the gray straight up in her honey-colored hair, so that it looked as though it had been powdered there. But Bootsie was still good to look at. Her skin was smooth and still tanned from the summer, her hair cut short like a girl's and etched on the neck with a razor. Her smile was as genuine and happy as it had been thirty years before.

We walked through her house and onto the patio and sat at a glass-topped table by the pool. She brought out a tray of coffee and milk and pecan pie. The water in the pool was dark and glazed with the evening light, and small islands of oak leaves floated against the tile sides. She had been widowed twice, she told me. Her first husband, an oil-field helicopter pilot, had flown a crew out to a rig south of Morgan City, then hit a guy wire and crashed right on top of the quarter boat. Five years later she had met her second husband, Ralph Giacano, in Biloxi.

"Have you ever heard of him?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, and tried to keep my eyes veiled.

"He told me he had a degree in accounting and owned half of a vending machine company. He didn't have a degree, but he did own part of a company," she said.

I tried to look pleasant and show no recognition.

"I found out some of the other things he was involved in after we were married," she said. "Last year somebody killed him and his girlfriend in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack. Poor Ralph. He always said the Colombians wouldn't bother him, he was just a small-business man."

"I'm sorry, Bootsie."

"Don't be. I spent two years feeling sorry for Ralph while he mortgaged this house, which was mine from my first marriage, and spent the money in Miami and Las Vegas. So now I own his half of the vending machine business. You know who owns the other half?"

"The Giacanos were always a tight family."

"I guess I can't surprise you with very much."

"Ralph's uncle was a guy named Didi Gee. He's dead now, but three years ago he hired a contract killer to shoot my brother. Jimmie's doing okay now, but for a while I thought I was going to lose him."

"I didn't know."

"Maybe it's time to get away from your in-laws."

"When you sell to the Giacanos, it's twenty cents on the dollar, Dave. Nobody else is lining up to buy into their business, either."

"Get away from them, Bootsie."

Her eyes glanced into mine. There was a curious bead of light in them.

"I don't understand this," she said.

"What?"

"You're telling me to get away from them. Then I'm hearing this strange story about you."

I looked away from her.

"You hear a lot of bullshit in the streets," I said.

"This is from my in-laws, Dave. They work for Tony Cardo."

I didn't answer and tried to grin good-naturedly. Her eyes peeled the skin off my face.

"They say you're dirty. Don't they have a wonderful vocabulary?" she said.

I pushed at a piece of piecrust on my plate with my fork.

"They say you want to deal," she said.

"You have to make up your own mind about people."

"I know you, Dave Robicheaux. I don't care what you've done in your life, this stuff isn't you."

"Then ignore what they say, Bootsie, and stay out of it."

"I'm worried about you. I work with these people. You can't believe how they think, what they're capable of doing."

"Oh yes I can."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Be my friend on this. Don't mix in it, and don't worry too much about what you hear."

Her face was lighted with the late sun's glow over the garden wall. She raised her chin slightly, the way she always did when she was angry.

"Dave, you left me. Do you think you should be telling me what to do now?"

"I guess not."

"I survive among these animals because I have to. It isn't fun. I'm on my own, and that isn't fun, either. But I handle it."

"I guess you do."

"Why didn't you marry me?" she said. Her eyes were hot and bright.

"You'd have married a drunk. It wouldn't have been a good life, believe me."

"You don't know that. You don't know that at all."

"Yes, I do. I became a full-blown lush. I tried to kill my first wife's lover at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain."

"Maybe that's what he deserved."

"I tried to kill him because I had become morally insane."

"I don't care what you did later in your life. Why'd you close me out, Dave?"

I let my hands hang between my knees.

"Because I was dumb," I said.

"It's that simple?"

"No, it's not. But how about suffice it to say that I made a terrible mistake, that I've had regret about it all these years."

Her legs were crossed, her arms motionless on the sides of the cushioned iron chair, her face composed now in the tea-colored light. The top of her terry cloth robe was loose, and I could see her breasts rise and fall quietly with her breathing.

"I do have to go," I said.

"Are you coming back?"

"If you'd like to see me again, I'd surely like to see you."

"I'm not moving out of town, cher." Then her face became soft and she said, "But, Dave, I've learned one thing with middle age. I don't try to correct yesterday's mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once."

"No one could ever say they were unsure where you stood on an issue, Boots."

She smiled without answering, then walked me to the front door, put her palms on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek. It was an appropriate and kind gesture and would not have meant much in itself, but then she looked into my face and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as though she were saying goodbye to someone forever, and I felt my loins thicken and my heart turn to water.

It was almost dark when I got off the streetcar at the corner of St. Charles and Canal and went into the Pearl and had a poor-boy sandwich filled with oysters, shrimp, sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and sauce piquante. Then I walked to my apartment and paused momentarily outside my door while I found my key. The people upstairs were partying out on the balcony, and one of them accidentally kicked a coffee can of geraniums into the courtyard. But in spite of the noise I thought I heard someone inside my apartment. I put my hand on the.25-caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, unlocked the door, and let it swing all the way back against the wall on its hinges.

Lionel Comeaux, the man I'd found working under his car on the creeper, was in the kitchen, pulling the pots and pans out of the cabinet and placing them on the table. The jolly fat man who called himself Uncle Ray Fontenot and said he used to play trombone at Sharky's Dream Room had emptied the drawers in the bedroom and had laid all my hangered clothes across the bed. My.45 lay on top of a neatly folded shirt. Both of them looked at me with flat, empty expressions, as though I were the intruder.

The fat man, Fontenot, wore a beige suit and a cream turtleneck shirt. I saw his eyes study my face and my right hand; then he smiled and opened his palms in front of him.

"It's just business, Mr. Robicheaux," he said. "Don't take it personal. We've treated your things with respect."

"How'd you get in?"

"It's a simple lock," he said.

"You've got some damn nerve," I said.

"Close the door. There's people out there," Lionel, the man in the kitchen, said. He wore Adidas running shoes, blue jeans with no belt, a gold pullover sweater with the sleeves pushed up over his thick, sun-browned arms.

I could hear my own breathing in the silence.

"Lionel's right," Fontenot said. "We don't need an audience here, do we? Getting mad isn't going to make us any money, either, is it?"

I took my hand out of my coat pocket and opened and closed it at my side.

"Come in, come in," Fontenot said. "Look, we're putting your things back. There's no harm done."

"You toss my place and call it no harm?" I said. I pushed the door shut behind me.

"You knew somebody would check you out. Don't make it a big deal," the younger man said in the kitchen. He lit a dead cigar in his mouth and squatted down and started replacing the pots and pans in the cabinets next to the stove.

"I don't like people smoking in my apartment," I said.

He turned his head at me and paused in his work. The red Navy tattoo on his flexed bicep was ringed with blue stars. He was balanced on the ball of one foot, the cigar between his fingers, a tooth working on a bloodless spot on his lower lip. Fontenot walked out of the other room.

"Put out the smoke, Lionel," he said quietly, His eyes crinkled at the corners. "Go on, put it out. We're in the man's home."

"I don't think it's smart dealing with him. I said it then, I'll say it in front of him," Lionel said. He wet the cigar under the tap and dropped it in a garbage bag.

"The man's money is as good as the next person's," Fontenot said.

"You were a cop," Lionel said to me. "That's a problem for me. No insult meant."

"You creeped my apartment. That's a problem for me."

"Lionel had a bad experience a few years back," Fontenot said. "His name doesn't make campus bells ring for you?"

"No."

"Second-string quarterback for LSU," Fontenot said. "Until he sold some whites on the half shell to the wrong people. I think if Lionel had been first-string, he wouldn't have had to spend a year in Angola. It's made him distrustful."

"Get off of it, Ray."

"The man needs to understand," Fontenot said. "Look, Mr. Robicheaux, we're short on protocol, but we don't rip each other off. We establish some rules, some trust, then we all make money. Get his bank, Lionel."

Lionel opened a cabinet next to the stove, squatted down, and reached his hand deep inside. I heard the adhesive tape tear loose from the top of the cabinet behind the drawer. He threw the brown envelope, with tape hanging off each end, for me to catch.

"We want you to understand something else, too,"

Fontenot said. "We're not here because of some fifty-thou deal. That's toilet paper in this town. But the gentleman we work for is interested in you. You're a lucky man."

"Tony C. is interested?"

"Who?" He smiled.

"Five keys, ten thou a key, no laxative, no vitamin B twelve," I said.

"Twelve thou, my friend," Fontenot said.

"Bullshit. New Orleans is white with it."

"Ten thou is the discount price. You get that down the line," Fontenot said.

"Then go fuck yourself."

"Who do you think you are, man?" Lionel said.

"The guy whose place you just creeped."

"Let's split," he said.

I looked at Fontenot.

"What I can't seem to convey is that you guys are not the only market around. Ask Cardo who he wants running the action in Southwest Louisiana. Ask him who punched his wife in a bathroom stall in the Castaways in Miami."

"There're some people I wouldn't try to turn dials on, Mr. Robicheaux," Fontenot said.

"You're the one holding up the deal. Give me what I want and we're in business."

"You can come in at eleven thou," he said.

"It's got to be ten."

"Listen to this guy," Lionel said.

"The money's not mine. I've got to give an accounting to other people."

"I can relate to that. We'll call you," Fontenot said.

"When?"

"About this time tomorrow. Do you have a car?"

"I have a pickup truck."

He nodded reflectively; then his mouth split in a grin and I could see each of his teeth like worn, wide-set pearls in his gums.

"How big a grudge can a man like you carry?" he asked.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said, and shook all over when he laughed, his narrowed eyes twinkling with a liquid glee.

The next morning I was walking down Chartres toward the French Market for breakfast when a black man on a white pizza-delivery scooter went roaring past me. I didn't pay attention to him, but then he came roaring by again. He wore an oversized white uniform, splattered with pizza sauce, sunglasses that were as dark as a welder's, and a white paper hat mashed down to his ears. He turned his scooter at the end of the block and disappeared, and I headed through Jackson Square toward the Café du Monde. I waited for the green light at Decatur; then I heard the scooter come rattling and coughing around the corner. The driver braked to the curb and grinned at me, his thin body jiggling from the engine's vibration. "Tee Beau!" I said.

"Wait for me on the bench. I gotta park my machine, me."

He pulled out into the traffic again, drove past the line of horse-and-carriages in front of the square, and disappeared past the old Jax brewery. Five minutes later I saw him coming on foot back down Decatur, his hat hammered down to the level of his sunglasses. He sat beside me on a sunlit bench next to the pike fence that bordered the park area inside the square.

"You ain't gonna turn me in, are you, Mr. Dave?" he said.

"What are you doing?"

"Working at the pizza place. Looking out for Jimmie Lee Boggs, too. You ain't gonna turn me in, now, are you?"

"You're putting me in a rough spot, Tee Beau."

"I got your promise. Dorothea and Gran'maman done tole me, Mr. Dave."

"I didn't see you. Get out of New Orleans."

"Ain't got no place else to go. Except back to New Iberia. Except to the Red Hat. I got a lot to tell you 'bout Jimmie Lee Boggs. He here."

"In New Orleans?"

"He left but he come back. I seen him. Two nights ago. Right over yonder." He pointed diagonally across the square. "I been watching."

"Wait a minute. You saw him by the Pontabla Apartments?"

"Listen, this what happen, Mr. Dave. After he killed the po-liceman and that white boy, he drove us all the way to Algiers, with lightning jumping all over the sky. He made me sit in back, with chains on, like he a po-liceman and I his prisoner, in case anybody stop us. He had the radio on, and I was 'fraid he gonna find out I didn't shoot you, drive out in that marsh, kill me like he done them poor people in the filling station. All the time he was talking, telling me 'bout what he gonna do, how he got a place in the Glades in Florida, where he say-now this is what he say, I don't use them kinds of words-where he say the hoot owls fucks the jackrabbits, where he gonna hole up, then come back to New Orleans and make them dagos give him a lot of money.

"Just befo' we got to town he called somebody from a filling station. I could hear him talking, and he said something 'bout the Pontabla. I heard him say it. He don't be paying me no mind, no, 'cause he say I just a stupid nigger. That's the way he talk all the time I be chained up there in the backseat."

"Tee Beau, are you sure it was Boggs? It's hard to believe you found him when half the cops in Louisiana can't."

"I found you, ain't I? He don't look the same now, Mr. Dave. But it's him. His hair short and black now, he puts glasses, too. But it's Jimmie Lee Boggs. I followed him in my car to make sure."

"Where'd you get a car?"

"I borrowed it."

"You borrowed it?"

"Then I put it back."

"I see."

"I followed him out to the Airline Highway. To a boxing place. No, it ain't that. They put on gloves, but they kick with they feet, too. What they call that?"

"Full-contact karate."

"I looked inside, me. Phew, it stink in there. Jimmie Lee Boggs in long sweatpants kicking at some man in the ring. His skin white and hard, shining with sweat. I got to swallow when I look at him, Mr. Dave. That man make me that afraid."

"You did fine, Tee Beau. But I want to ask something of you. You leave Jimmie Lee Boggs for other people. Don't have anything more to do with this."

"You gonna get me a new trial?"

"I'll try. But we have to do it a step at a time, partner."

His hands were folded in his lap, and he was bent forward on the bench. His small face looked like a squirrel's with sunglasses on it. Wiry rings of hair grew across the back of his neck.

"I got bad dreams at night. 'Bout the Red Hat, 'bout they be strapping me down in that chair with that black hood on my face," he said.

"You killed Hipolyte Broussard, though, didn't you, Tee Beau?"

His breath clicked in his throat.

"I done part of it. But the part I done was an accident. I swear it, 'fore God, Mr. Dave. Hipolyte kept cussing me, tole me all the bad things he gonna do to me, do to Dorothea, tole me I got jelly in my ears, me, that I cain't do nothing right, that I better stomp on the brake when he say, take my foot off when he say. He under there clanking and banging and calling me mo' names, saying 'Stomp now, stomp now.'

"So that what I done. I close my eyes and hit on that brake, and I hit on it and hit on it and pretend it be Hipolyte's face, that I smashing it like a big eggshell, me. Then I feel the bus rock and that jack break like a stick, and I know Hipolyte under the wheel now, I hear him screaming and flopping around in the mud. But I scared, Mr. Dave, I be running, run past the shed, down the road past Hipolyte's house, down past the cane field. When I turn round he look like a turtle on its back, caught under that big iron wheel. But I keep on going, I run plumb back to Gran'maman's house, she be shucking crawfish, say, 'You go wash, Tee Beau, put on your clean clothes, you, sit down with your gran'maman and don't tell them policemens nothing, you.'"

"Why was Hipolyte always deviling you?" I said.

He didn't answer.

"What it because he wanted you to pimp for him? Or make Dorothea get on the bus when he drove the girls out to the camp?"

"Yes suh."

"But Dorothea said Gros Mama Goula wouldn't let men bother her."

"Yes suh, that's right."

"That Hipolyte was afraid of Gros Mama, that she could put a gris-gris on him."

"Yes suh."

"Then Dorothea was safe, really?"

"What you saying, Mr. Dave?"

"Dorothea wasn't your main problem with Hipolyte."

He looked out at the shadows of the palm fronds on the pavement.

"It was something else," I said. "Maybe not just the pimping. Maybe something even worse than that, Tee Beau."

I could not see his eyes behind the dark glasses, but I saw him swallow.

"What was it?" I said.

"For why you want to study on that?" he said. "It gonna get me a new trial? It gonna make all them white people believe I ain't knock that bus on top of Hipolyte, I ain't stuff a dirty rag down his mouth? I ain't talking about it no mo', Mr. Dave."

"You'll need to at some point."

He looked small inside his white delivery uniform. The sleeves almost covered his folded hands.

"Hipolyte was selling dope for Jimmie Lee Boggs. That ain't all they was doing, either. They send some of them girls to Florida, to Arizona, anywhere Hipolyte take the bus. Them girls never come back. They families ain't ever find out where they at. All I ever done was taken Mr. Dore car, taken an old junk fan out his yard, but people be wanting to kill me. I tired of it, Mr. Dave. I tired of feeling bad about myself all the time, too."

I took a piece of paper from my wallet and wrote on it.

"Here's my address and phone number, Tee Beau," I said. "Here's the address and number of a bar where you can leave messages, too. Call me if I can help you with anything. Do you have enough money?"

"Yes suh."

"Don't look for Boggs anymore. You've done enough. Okay?"

"Yes suh. You want to know where I'm staying at?"

"I don't want to know. Give me your word you won't borrow any more cars."

He didn't bother to reply. He looked down between his knees and tapped the soles of his shoes on the pavement. Then he said, "You think I ever gonna get out of this?"

"I don't know."

"Gros Mama tell Dorothea that Jimmie Lee Boggs gonna die in a black box full of sparks. She say you go in there with him, you gonna die, too."

"Gros Mama's a juju con woman."

"She put the gris-gris on Hipolyte. When he in the coffin, his mouth snap open and a black worm thick as my thumb crawl out on his chin. It ain't not lie, Mr. Dave."

I had breakfast at the Café du Monde, then walked back to the apartment to call Minos at the DEA office. Before I could, the phone rang. It was Ray Fontenot.

"Your offer's accepted," he said.

"Ten thou a key, no cut?"

"What I just said, Mr. Robicheaux." Then he told me to meet him that afternoon in the parking lot of a bar just the other side of the Huey Long Bridge.

"You want me to make the buy in the parking lot of a bar?" I asked.

"We start it from there. Quit sweating it. You're gonna be rich," he said, and hung up.

I called Minos.

"It's on at five today," I said.

"Where?"

I told him about the bar.

"We'll have somebody inside, somebody outside taking pictures with a telephoto lens," he said. "But you won't know who they are, so you won't need to look at them. This is what's going to happen, Dave. They'll take you somewhere in their car, or you'll follow them in your truck. At some point they'll probably check you for a wire. We'll have a loose tail on you, but we're not going to get too close and blow it. So when you make the buy, you're pretty much on your own. Are you nervous?"

"A little."

"Carry your piece. They'll expect that. Look, you've handled it fine so far. The deal's not going to sour. They want you in."

"This morning I heard that Jimmie Lee Boggs is in town."

"Where?"

"Somebody saw him around the Pontabla Apartments two nights ago. It makes sense. Tony Cardo's girlfriend lives there. The same night, he was at a full-contact karate place out on the Airline."

"Who told you all this?"

"A guy I know."

"Which guy?"

"Just a guy in the street."

"What are you hiding here, Dave?"

"Are you going to check out the karate club, or do you want me to do it?"

"We'll handle it."

"His hair's dyed black and cut short now, and he may be wearing glasses."

"Who's the guy in the street?"

"Forget it, Minos."

"You never change."

"What if the deal goes sour today?"

"Then get the fuck out of there."

"You don't want me to bust them?"

"You walk out of it. We don't borrow people from other agencies to get them hurt."

"One other thing I didn't mention to you. This guy Fontenot knows I've got a grudge against Boggs. I get the feeling he'd like to see me go up against him."

"You know what a yard bitch is in the joint? That's Uncle Ray Fontenot, a fat dipshit who gets off watching the swinging dicks carve on each other. Call me after the score and we'll take the dope off you."

I was nervous. My palms were moist, I walked about aimlessly in the apartment, I burned a pan on the stove. Finally I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a sweatshirt, jogged along the levee by the river, and circled back on Esplanade. I showered, changed into a fresh pair of khakis and a long-sleeved denim shirt. Then I fastened the holster of the Beretta to my ankle, dropped the.45 automatic in the right-hand pocket of my army field jacket, slipped the brown envelope with the fifty one-thousand bills in it into the left pocket, buttoned the flap, and backed my pickup out of the garage. The sky had turned a solid gray from horizon to horizon, the wind was blowing hard off the Gulf, and I could smell rain in the air. My palms left damp prints on the steering wheel.

Rain began to tumble out of the dome of sky through the girders when I crossed the Mississippi on the Huey Long. The river was wide and yellow far below, and froth was blowing off the bows of the oil barges. The willows along the banks were bent in the wind. As my tires whirred down the long metal-grid incline on the far side, I saw the low, flat-topped brick nightclub set back among oak trees on the left-hand side of old Highway 90. Jax and Dixie neon signs glowed in the rain-streaked windows, and when I crunched onto the oyster shells in the parking lot I saw Ray Fontenot, Lionel Comeaux, and a redheaded woman in a new blue Buick.

The woman was in back, and Fontenot was in the passenger seat and had the door partly open and one leg extended out on the shells in the light rain.

"Park your truck and get in," he said.

"Where we going?"

"Not far. You'll see. Get in."

I turned off the ignition, locked my truck, and got into the backseat next to the woman. She wore Levi's, an open leather jacket, and a yellow T-shirt without a bra, so that you could see her nipples against the cloth. The air inside the car was heavy and close with the drowsy smell of reefer.

"Great place to be toking up," I said.

"What do you care?" Lionel said.

"I care when I'm in your car," I said.

"Don't worry about it. You won't be long," he said.

"What?"

He started the engine, drove the Buick behind the nightclub, and parked it under a spreading oak.

"What's the game?" I said.

"Show-and-tell," he said, got out of the car, walked around, and opened my door. "Step outside, please."

"We do the same thing with everybody. Then everybody's comfortable, everybody's relaxed with everybody else," Fontenot said.

"I'm not relaxed. Who's the girl?" I asked.

"Do I look like a girl to you?" she said. Her eyes were green, the whites tinged red from the reefer hits.

"Who is she?" I said to Fontenot.

"This is Kim. She's a friend, a nice person," he said.

"I'm not fond of standing out here in the rain. You want to step outside, please," Lionel said. He spoke with his face turned at an angle from me, as though he were addressing a lamppost.

"What's she doing here?" I said.

"Certain people like her. She goes where she wants. Let's get on with the business at hand, sir," Fontenot said.

"Boy, talk about a personality problem. Who's he been doing business with?" Kim said. Her red hair was looped over one ear. When she saw me looking at her, she pointed her chin up in the air and lifted her hair off the back of her neck.

"He's just a careful man. He doesn't mean anything by it," Fontenot said. "But let's not delay any longer, Mr. Robicheaux."

I stepped outside and let Lionel work his hands up and down my body. He pulled my shirt out of my trousers, patted under my arms, slipped his hand down my spine, felt my pockets and along my legs.

"You think you're going to need all that firepower?" he asked.

"It's an old habit," I said.

Fontenot was looking at Lionel's face.

"He's cool," Lionel said.

"Time to open the candy store," Fontenot said.

Lionel got back in the Buick and backed it up to where my truck was parked. I glanced again at the girl. She wore no makeup, and her face was hard and shiny. Pretty but hard. She looked like she had a hard body. Her hands were big and knuckled like those on a cannery worker.

"You got something on your mind?" she asked.

"Not a thing," I said.

"Good, because I'm not into eye fucking," she said.

"Eye fucking?" I said.

Fontenot was grinning from the front seat. He was always grinning, his teeth set like pieces of corn in his gums.

"I have to end our fun now," he said. "I'll hop in your truck with you, Mr. Robicheaux, and we'll be on our way."

He headed south of the city into St. Charles Parish. Gray clouds tumbled across the sky in the fading light, and white streaks of lightning trembled on the horizon beyond Lake Salvador. The Buick was a quarter mile ahead of us on the tar-surfaced road.

"I need to take a leak," Fontenot said.

I stopped next to an irrigation ditch between two dry rice fields, and he got out and urinated into the weeds. I could hear him passing gas softly. His beige sports jacket, with brown suede pockets, was spotted with rain. He smiled at me in the wind as he zipped up his pants, then got back in the truck, took a woman's compact from his coat pocket, and gingerly scraped some white powder from it with the blade of his penknife. He lifted the knife to one nostril, then the other, snorting as though he were clearing his nasal passages, widening his eyes, crimping his lips as though they were chapped. Then he licked the flat of the blade with his tongue.

"You want a taste?" he said.

"I never took it up."

"You think you could take up Kim?"

"I just wonder what she's doing here, that's all."

"She works in one of Tony's clubs. I suspect he probes her recesses. I know that's what Lionel would like to do."

"You know Tony now?"

"You're in the business now, my friend. It's a nice one to be in. Lots of good things to be had. You want to meet him?"

"It doesn't matter to me, as long as I get what I want."

"What is it you want?" There were tiny saliva bubbles between his teeth when he grinned.

"One big score, then maybe I piece off the action and buy a couple of businesses in Lafayette and Lake Charles."

"Ah, you're a Rotary man at heart. But in the meantime, how about all the broads you want, your own plane to fly down to the islands in, lobster and steak every night at the track? You don't think about those things?"

"I have simple tastes."

"How about squaring a debt?" he asked.

"With who?"

"Everybody's got a debt to square. Winning's a lot more fun when you get to watch somebody else lose."

"I never gave it much thought."

"Oh, I bet."

"Fontenot, that's the second time you've given me the impression you know something about me that I don't."

"You used to be a cop. That's not the best recommendation. We had to do some homework, stick our finger into a nasty place or two."

"Okay…"

"I'd be mad at somebody who put a hole in me and left me to die in a ditch."

"You're right. Do you know where he is?"

"I stay away from some people."

"Then you don't need to be worrying about it anymore."

"Of course."

We crossed a bayou on a wooden bridge and drove across a flooded area of saw grass and dead cypress. Blue herons stood in the shallows, and mud hens were nesting up against the reeds out of the wind. In the distance I could see the hard tin outline of a sugar mill. Fontenot opened the compact, balanced some coke on the tip of his knife blade, and took another hit. His face was an oval pie of satisfaction.

"Are you interested in politics?" he asked.

"Not particularly."

"Tony is. He writes letters to newspapers. He's a patriot." He smiled to himself, and his eyes were bright as he looked out at the rain through the front window.

"I thought the mustaches stayed out of politics," I said.

"Bad word for our friends."

"Why does he write letters?"

"He was a Marine in Vietnam. He likes to talk about 'nape.'" Then Fontenot changed his voice, his eyes glittering happily. "'Five acres of fucking nape climbing up a hill. They smelled like cats burned up in an incinerator. Fucking nape, man.'" He started giggling.

"I think you'd better not put any more shit up your nose."

"Indeed you are a Rotary man."

We passed a gray, paintless general store under a spreading oak tree at a four-corners, then drove through a harvested sugarcane field that was covered with stubble and followed a bayou through a wooded area. The bayou was dented with rain, and I could see lights in fishing shacks set back on stilts in the trees. We came out into open fields, and it began to rain harder. It was almost completely dark now.

"There." Fontenot pointed at a small wood house with a gallery at the end of a dirt road in the middle of a field.

"This is it?"

"This is it."

"You guys can really pick them."

"You should be impressed. It's a historic place. You remember when a union man from up north tried to organize the plantation workers around here back in the fifties? He was crucified on the barn wall behind that little house. The barn's not there anymore, but that's where it happened. For some reason the state chamber of commerce hasn't put that on any of its brochures."

"Look, I want to get my goods and get out of here. How much longer is this going to take?"

"Kim'll fix some sandwiches. We'll have some supper."

"Forget the supper, Fontenot. I'm tired."

"You're an intense man."

"You're making things too complicated."

"It's your first time out. We make the rules."

"Fuck your rules. On any kind of score, you get in and out of it as fast as you can. The more people in on it, the more chance you take a fall. You went out on a score holding. That's affected my confidence level here."

"If you'll look around you, you'll notice that you can see for a mile in any direction. You can hear a car or a plane long before they get here. I think we'll keep doing things our way. Kim's sandwiches are a treat. Kim's a treat. Think about it. You didn't see her flex her stuff when you looked at her? Maybe she'd like you to probe her recesses."

His lips were purple and moist in the glow of the dashboard.

I followed the Buick down the dirt road to the house.

We all went inside, and Lionel turned on the lights. Kim carried a grocery bag into the kitchen, and Lionel started a fire of sticks and wadded-up newspaper in the fireplace.

"Where are my goods?" I said.

"They're being delivered. Be patient," Fontenot said.

"Delivered? What is this?" I said.

"A guy can always find another store if he doesn't like the way we do it," Lionel said. He was squatted down in front of the fireplace, and he waved a newspaper back and forth on the flames.

"You've got too many people involved in this," I said.

"He's an expert all right," Lionel said without turning his head.

"When's the delivery going to be here?" I said.

"In minutes, in minutes," Fontenot said.

I sat by myself at the window while the three of them ate ham and cheese sandwiches at a table in the center of the room. The house had no insulation, except the water-streaked and cracked wallpaper, and the yellow flames crawling up the stone chimney did little to break the chill in the room. The sky was black outside, and the rain slanted across the window. When they finished eating, Kim cleaned up the table and Lionel went into the back of the house. Fontenot opened the compact and took another hit on the blade of his penknife.

"I have to use the bathroom," I said.

He wet his lips and smiled at me.

I walked down a short hallway, opened a closet door, passed a bedroom that was stacked with hay bales, and opened the last door in the hall. Lionel sat on the side of a brass bed, his left arm tied off with his belt, the syringe mounted on a thick purple vein. A lighted candle and a cook spoon with a curled handle lay on a nightstand next to the bed. He had just taken the hit, and his head was tilted back, his mouth open, his jaws slack as though he were in the midst of orgasm. The flame from the candle flickered on the muscular contours of his body. His breath went in and out with the rush, his eyes trying to focus on me and gain control of his situation again.

He set the syringe down, popped loose the belt on his arm, and straightened his back.

"What the fuck you want, man?" he said hoarsely.

"I was looking for the bathroom."

"It's a privy. Out back, where a privy is."

I closed the door on him, went out into the rain, then walked back through the kitchen. Kim was leaning against the drainboard, looking down at the floor. She had taken off her leather jacket to make the sandwiches, and her breasts were stiff against her T-shirt.

"Is it always this much fun?" I said.

"Always," she said.

Fifteen minutes later came in the form of a Latin man with a black bandanna tied down on his head, beige zoot pants, a canary-yellow shirt unbuttoned to his navel, a soft pad of chest hair on which a gold St. Christopher's medal rested, a leather sports coat that folded and creased as smoothly as warm tallow. He carried a cardboard box wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. He set the box on the table and removed five individual packages wrapped in butcher paper, opened a single-bladed knife, and handed it to me. I cut through the butcher paper on one of the packages and punched through the clear plastic bag inside. I rubbed the white granules between my fingers, then wiped my fingers clean on the paper.

"You don't want a taste?" he said.

"I trust you."

"You trust me?" he said.

"Yeah."

He looked at Fontenot.

"Mr. Robicheaux doesn't have certain vices," Fontenot said.

"It's good shit, man. Like Ray ordered, no cut," the Latin man said. The hollows of both his cheeks were sprayed with tiny acne scars like needle marks. "Where's Lionel at?"

"He's a little noddy right now. Must be the weather," Fontenot said.

I took the brown envelope with the money out of my left pocket and put it in Fontenot's hand. He counted the bills out on his thigh.

"All stiff and green. It can make the ashes in an old man's furnace glow anew," he said.

The Latin man looked furtively toward the kitchen, where Kim sat at the table, a cup of coffee balanced on her fingers, her eyes staring listlessly out the window into the darkness.

"Jennifer and Carmen are at the bar on the blacktop," he said.

"I don't see why they should be left alone," Fontenot said.

The Latin nodded his head at the kitchen, his face a question mark.

"She's an understanding girl. Maybe she can ride back with Mr. Robicheaux," Fontenot said.

I put the five kilos of cocaine back in the cardboard box and wrapped the black garbage bag tightly around it. I lifted it onto my shoulder.

"The next time you guys cut a deal, why not do it in the Greyhound bus depot?" I said.

"Oh, that's good," Fontenot said.

I walked outside to my truck, set the box on the floor, and started the engine. The Latin man came out the front door, got in a TransAm, turned around in a circle, his headlights bouncing up into my face, and headed down the dirt road in the rain. Through the living room window I could see the girl speaking heatedly to Fontenot.

I went back up on the gallery and opened the door.

"You want to go with me, Red?" I said.

"Red?" she said.

"Kim."

"Why not?" she said.

She was quiet for a long time in the truck. The rain slackened, and the moon rose among the strips of black cloud. When we crossed the flooded section of saw grass and dead cypress the light reflected off the canals and small bays like quicksilver. I cracked my window, and the wind smelled of rain and moss and wet leaves.

"You were really a cop?" she said.

"Off and on."

"Why'd you give it up?"

"It gave me up."

"They say you were taking juice."

"Sometimes you get some bad press."

"What do you think about that back there?" she said.

"I think they're going to do time."

"Have you?"

"What?"

"Done time."

"I was in the bag a little while in Lafayette," I said.

"What for?"

"Murder."

She turned her head and looked at me directly for the first time since she had gotten in the truck.

"I was cleared. I didn't have anything to do with it," I said.

"You don't add up."

"Why's that?"

"They could have taken you off tonight. You should have known that."

"I don't figure them for it."

"What a laugh. You sure you were a cop?"

"They work for Tony Cardo, right? They're not going to burn his customers. Are they?"

I could feel her eyes roving on the side of my face.

"The raghead who brought your kilos…"

"Yes?"

"He and Lionel did a guy with a piece of piano wire. Stop up there at the filling station. I have to pee."

I parked under a dripping oak tree while she went inside. She came back out and got in the truck, and I drove back onto the blacktop. It had stopped raining completely now; the moon was bright in the sky, and when the wind blew through the flooded saw grass and cypress, the light clicked on the water like silvery dimes.

"Why does everything down here smell like mold and leaking sewage?"

"Maybe because there's a lot of mold and leaking sewage here."

For the first time she smiled.

"Who'd they do?" I said.

"Did I say that? I talk funny when my bladder's full."

She tied up her hair with a bandanna and looked out the window.

"You know Jimmie Lee Boggs?" I asked.

"The television minister in Baton Rouge?"

"A guy like Lionel doesn't bother me, but Boggs is special."

"What's it to me?"

"Nothing. I gave you a ride."

"Expensive ride."

"You're a tough lady."

"You look like a nice guy. I don't know what the fuck you're doing dealing dope, but you're an amateur. Do you know where South Carrollton runs into the levee?"

"Yes."

"That's where I live. If that's out of your way, I can take the streetcar."

"I'll drive you home. Do you live with someone?"

"You mean do I live with a guy. Sure, Tony C. is interested in broads who live with guys. You're something else."

She closed her eyes and went to sleep with the nape of her neck against the back of the seat, her calves resting across the box of cocaine. Her nose had a bump on the bridge like a Roman's. Her face shone with the luminescence of bone in the moon glow.

Later, I drove down South Carrollton to the river and woke her up at the end of the street.

"You're home," I said.

She rubbed her face with her hand and opened and closed her mouth.

"I'd invite you in for a drink, but I have to be at the club at seven in the morning. The liquor man comes tomorrow. He screws Tony on the bottle count if I'm not there."

"It's all right."

She popped open the door and put one leg out on the street. She was poised against the streetlight, her bandanna tied across the crown of her head as in a photograph of a 1940s aircraft worker.

"Watch your buns, hotshot. Or go back on the bayou where you belong," she said.

Then she was gone.

When I got back to the apartment I called Minos at the guesthouse on St. Charles. I told him the buy had gone all right.

"We were only about a mile away. You didn't see us?" he said.

"No."

"You stopped at a filling station on the way back. You had a girl with you."

"You guys are pretty good. You know anything about the girl? Her first name is Kim."

"No. What about her?"

"She seems too smart for the company she keeps."

"If she's with Tony C.'s crowd, she's somebody's punch."

"I don't read her like that."

"A broad's a broad to those guys. They don't keep them around because they have Phi Beta Kappa keys."

"She said Lionel and the Latin guy who made the delivery killed somebody with a piece of piano wire."

"I haven't heard that one. But Lionel's got the potential. He was on the boxing team in Angola. They say he did some real damage to a couple of guys."

"Thanks for telling me, Minos."

"An agent'll pick up the coke about eight-thirty in the morning. He'll look like a geek, but he's one of ours."

"I don't want to make this a permanent job. Let's up the ante now."

"It went well tonight. Be patient. Let things take their own course."

"Those guys are dipshits and addicts. The mule talked like a pimp. We're not going to get anywhere dealing with them. Let me take a deal straight to Cardo, something that'll make him hungry."

"Like what?"

"Can you shake loose five hundred thou?"

"Maybe. But you may still end up dealing with the dipshits."

"No, I'm going to offer him something he doesn't have. But you've got to give me some more help. Get Purcel in on the sting."

"No."

"He's a good man."

"It's out of the question."

"Minos, I'm by myself in this thing. I want somebody covering my back."

"What are you going to offer Cardo besides the buy?"

"Deal Purcel in and we'll talk about it."

"We don't negotiate at this phase of the operation, Dave."

"We do."

"I think you're beat," he said. "I think you need to get some sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

"It's not going to change. Clete backs my play or it's up the spout."

"Good night," he said. His voice was tired. I didn't answer, and he hung up.

Sleep. It was the most natural and inevitable condition of the human metabolism, I thought as I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark that night. We can abstain from sex and thrive on the thorns of our desire, deny ourselves water in the desert, keep silent on the torturer's rack, and fast unto the death; but eventually sleep has its way with us.

But if you are a drunk, or a recovering drunk, or what some people innocently called a recovered drunk, that most natural of human states seldom comes to you on your terms. And you cannot explain why one night you will sleep until morning without dreaming while the next you will sit alone in a square of moonlight, your palms damp on your thighs, your breath loud in your chest. No more than you can explain why one day you're anointed with magic. You get high on the weather, you have a lock on the perfecta in the ninth race; then the next morning you're on a dry drunk that fills the day with monstrous shapes prized out of memory with a dung fork.

I could hear revelers out in the street, glass breaking, a beer can rolling across the cement. What was my real fear, or theirs? I suspected mortality more than anything else. You do not wish to go gently into that good night. You rage against it, leave your shining bits of anger for a street sweeper to find in the early morning light, kneel by your bed in the moon glow, the scarlet beads of your rosary twisted around your fist.

But as always, just before dawn, the tiger goes back in his cage and sleeps, and something hot and awful rises from your body and blows away like ash in the wind. And maybe the next day is not so bad after all.