A Morning for Flamingos

CHAPTER 6

The next morning was Saturday. I got up early and, after the DEA agent picked up the coke, invited Bootsie for breakfast at a restaurant on St. Charles. When I picked her up at her house on Camp, she had on dark slacks, gray pumps, a white silk blouse that hung over her waist, and a pearl necklace. Her face was fresh and cheerful with the morning, and the dark and light swirls and streaks of gray in her thick hair, which she'd had cut since I had visited her, gave her an elegance that you seldom see in maturing Acadian women.

I opened the door of the pickup and helped her in. The air was balmy, the street full of blowing leaves, the trees in the yards filled with the sounds of blue jays and mockingbirds.

"I hope you don't mind riding down St. Charles in a pickup," I said.

"Darlin', I don't mind riding anywhere with you," she said, with the innocent flirtatious gaiety that's characteristic of New Orleans, and that allows you to never feel awkward or embarrassed with a woman.

"Bootsie, you look absolutely great."

"Thank you," she said, moving her lips without sound, a smile in her eyes.

The restaurant had a domed, glassed-in porch, but it was warm enough to eat at the tables outside. The sunlight looked like bright smoke in the oak trees overhead; the air smelled of green bamboo, gardenias, the camellias that bloomed in yards all along the street, the occasional hot scorch of the old green streetcar that rattled down the esplanade, or what the people in New Orleans call the neutral ground. We ate hot, fresh-baked bread with honey and marmalade, and the Negro waiter poured the coffee and milk from two long-spouted copper pots.

I touched Bootsie on the top of the hand.

"I'm going back to New Iberia for the weekend," I said. "I have an adopted daughter there."

"Yes?"

"Do you ever go home?"

"Not really. My parents are passed away. Sometimes I feel strange back there. New Iberia never changes. But I have, and it hasn't all been for the good."

"Hey, no beating up on ourselves today, Boots."

"It's funny looking back at the past, isn't it? That night you asked me to dance under the trees on Spanish Lake, I remember it like a photograph. My back was on fire with sunburn. You brought me a vodka Collins, then a handful of aspirin. I thought how kind you were, but then you wouldn't go away."

"I see. I was the one who put everything in motion."

"What are you talking about?" Her eyes were smiling again.

"You remember what you did with that vodka Collins? You took the cherry out and bit it between your teeth and kept chewing it while you looked into my eyes. You knew I wasn't going to leave you alone after that."

"I did that? It must have been your imagination."

"Come back with me today. I still live in my father's old house," I said. Then I added, "We have a guest room."

"What are you trying to start, hon?"

"I'm in the one-day-at-a-time club. Tomorrow takes care of itself. I've got three tickets to the LSU-Ole Miss game tonight. We'll take Alafair with us and have crawfish at Mulate's, then go on up to Baton Rouge."

She didn't answer for a moment; then she said, "I'm flattered you want me to meet your daughter, but do you think maybe you're trying to fix yesterday's mistakes?"

"No," I said, and felt my throat color.

"Because if your conscience bothers you, or if you feel that somehow you need to make amends to me, I want you to stop now."

"It's not that way."

"Which way is it, then?"

"It's a beautiful day. It's going to be a fine weekend. Why not take a chance on it?"

"You made a choice for both of us thirty years ago, Dave. I didn't have a chance to participate in it. Since then, most of my choices have turned out to be bad ones."

"Boots, I'll never intentionally hurt you again."

"We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That's what makes it so painful, kiddo."

"At any point you wish, you just say, 'Let's go home, Dave. Let's not try to be kids again.' It'll end right there."

"People make lots of promises in the daylight."

This time I simply looked back across the table at her. Her hair was so thick and lovely I wanted to reach over and touch it.

"Are you sure this is what you want?" she said finally.

"I can't think of anything better in the whole world," I said.

I dropped her off at her house, went back to the apartment and packed, left a message for Minos on his answering machine; then two hours later she and I were on our way across the Atchafalaya Basin, on a perfect blue and gold fall day, the wind blowing across the bays and saw grass and dead cypress, the elevated highway like a long white conduit into the past.

You never forget an LSU-Ole Miss game: the tiers upon tiers of seats filled with people, the haze around the banks of lights in the sky, the thunder of marching bands on the field, cheerleaders tumbling like acrobats, Confederate flags waving wildly in the crowd, Mike the Tiger in his cage riding stiff-legged around the track, the coeds with mums pinned on their sweaters, their breath sweet with bourbon and Coca-Cola-then, suddenly, one hundred thousand people rising to their feet in one deafening roar as LSU's team pours onto the field in their gold and purple and white uniforms that shine with light and seem tighter on their bodies than their very muscles.

Alafair fell asleep between us on the way back home, and I carried her into her bedroom and tucked her in. Then I heated some boudin, and Bootsie and I ate it at the kitchen table. Her face was sleepy with the long day, and she smiled and tried to stay attentive while I talked, but her eyes kept shutting lazily and finally her hand slipped off the side of the table.

"I think it's time you went to sleep," I said.

"I'm sorry. I'm so tired. It's been a wonderful day, Dave."

"It'll be an even better one tomorrow."

"I know," she said.

"Good night."

"Good night. I'm sorry to be so tired."

"It's all right. You're supposed to be tired. I'll see you tomorrow."

She went into the back bedroom, and I could see the light for a few minutes under her door. I turned on the television set in the living room and lay down on the couch. Her light went off, and I stared at a late show starring a famous actor who had been deferred from service during the Vietnam War because he had been the sole support of his mother. I didn't blame the actor for his deferment, but I didn't have to watch him, either. I turned off the set and lay back down on the couch with my arm over my eyes. I heard the scream of a nutria out in the marsh, the sound of night birds out in the bare sugarcane fields behind my property, the occasional thump of pecans falling to the ground in the front yard.

It had been a fine day. Why did I always expect more out of the day than perhaps I had earned?

A few minutes later I heard her click on the bedside lamp; then she opened the door and stood framed against the light. She didn't speak. Her face was dark with shadow, her body outlined against her white nightgown, her short-cropped hair diffused with light.

I went into the room with her, and she closed the door as though it were her house rather than mine. She clicked off the lamp, smoothed the pillows, pulled back the covers, then touched my face with her hand, kissing me on the mouth, lightly at first, then her mouth opening and wet, her face changing the angle, her tongue inside me, her eyes opening and shutting but always focusing on mine as though I might somehow elude the moment she was creating for both of us.

She worked her nightgown over her head and lay down partially on her side with her knees close together, her palm behind her head, and waited for me. When I lay down beside her, she stretched out against me, breathing on my neck and chest, rubbing her hair against my face as though she were a cat. I kissed her eyes and mouth and breasts, and felt the smoothness of her stomach and thighs and the contours of her hips. I brushed her hair with my palm, stroked the stiffness of it where it was tapered at the back of her head, smelled the expensive and delicate perfume behind her ears.

Then she took me in her hand, her thighs widening, and placed me inside her. Her lips parted, her eyes closed and opened, and she slipped her arms low on my back and tucked her face under my chin. She didn't speak while she made love. Her concentration and body heat were so intense, the movement of her hands and thighs and stomach so directed and encompassing, the hoarse, regular sounds in my ear so natural and heart-swelling, that I knew she too was back thirty years before on the float cushions in my father's boat-house, the lavender sky streaked with fire through the cracks, the shrimp boat knocking against the pilings, the raindrops dripping like lead shot out of the cypress into the bay.

But on Monday Alafair was back with my cousin Tutta, Bootsie was at work at her vending machine company, and I was talking with Minos in his room at the guesthouse on St. Charles about New Orleans flake and people who gave you reason to think that toxic waste had been dumped in the human gene pool.

He stood at the ceiling-high window with a coffee cup in his hand, looking down on the courtyard behind the guesthouse. Banana trees and bamboo grew along the back brick wall, and on the other side of the wall there were garbage cans in the alley. Minos had on tan slacks and a yellow golf shirt with an alligator on it. As always, his scalp gleamed through his close-cropped hair and his jaws looked as though he had just shaved.

"I understand, they're dangerous. You don't have to convince me of that," he said. "But it comes with the territory. I don't think the situation will improve because we make Purcel a player."

"You don't have anybody inside. So we bring him in with me. Give the guy a break. He has a lot of qualities."

"He worked for the mob, for Christ's sake."

"I think he took some of them off the board, too."

"That's the last kind of cowboy bullshit we want in this operation."

"What's it going to be, partner?"

"We did some homework over the weekend. Purcel has some bad debts around town. One of them is to a loan company owned by the greaseballs. He's also got a reputation for parking his swizzle stick in anything that looks vaguely female."

"In or out?" I asked.

He bit a corner of his lip and continued to look down into the courtyard. He seemed almost as tall as the window.

"The money comes out of the snitch fund," he said. "You can tell him whatever you want to. But he's not an employee of the DEA. Nor its representative."

"How much?"

"Two hundred a week."

"That's an insult."

"Too bad."

"Listen, Minos, let's stop messing around. You give the guy five hundred a week, treat him with some respect, or I'm going to walk out of this."

"I'll talk to somebody about it later."

"No, make the call now."

I saw him take a breath, his fingers tap on his thigh.

"All right, you've got my word," he said.

"He was a good cop till he had marital trouble and got on the sauce. He'll do fine. You'll see."

"I hope so. Because if he doesn't, somebody's going to feed your butt through the paper shredder an inch at a time."

"You really know how to say it, Minos."

He picked up a towel from the bathroom floor and started buffing one of his loafers on top of a wood chair.

"Where'd this broad, Kim, the one at the score, tell you she was from?"

"She didn't."

"Hmmm."

"What is it?"

"We checked her out. Her last name's Dollinger. She's an assistant manager at one of Cardo's clubs on the Airline Highway. She hit town about six months ago. She tells people she worked at a lounge in North Houston, some dump on Jensen Drive. We made a couple of calls. They never heard of her."

"She said something. About everything down here smelling like mold and leaking sewage. I don't think she's from Houston."

"Those kinds of broads make up their own dossiers. I've got something else on my mind that's giving me the start of a migraine, Dave."

I waited for him to go on.

"Bootsie Giacano," he said.

"I had a feeling you'd say that. Do you have a tail on me?"

"It wouldn't be a bad idea, but we don't."

"A tap on her phone?"

"What do you think? She was married to Ralph Giacano. Her business partners are mainline greaseballs."

"She can't get out from under them."

"Always the humanist. Look, Dave, what you do with your private life is your business. But if you compromise the operation, it's ours." He sat on the wood chair and threw the towel back onto the bathroom floor. "Look, I'm your friend. I got you into this stuff. You think I want to see you hurt?"

"I won't get hurt because of her."

"You don't know that. Are you sleeping with her?"

"I'm going to be on my way now."

"She'll know you're running a sting. She tips the greaseballs, it doesn't matter how, in some innocent way, we're going to pull you out of Lake Pontchartrain."

"It's not going to happen."

His eyes were level, unblinking, and they stared straight into mine.

"It did two years ago," he said. "To a local narc N.O.P.D. got inside. They threw his body off the causeway. A.22 magnum through the mouth, one under the chin, one through the temple. They didn't weight him down, either. They wanted to send a floating telegram."

"You can get the five hundred thou?"

"Yep."

"I'm going to try to set up a meet with Cardo. I'll call you."

"Let some time go by, Dave. Let them feel more confident about you."

"You said it yourself, these guys love money. How do they put it, 'Money talks and bullshit walks'? I'm going to play out the hand. If they buy it, fine. If not, I'm going back home."

He pulled on his ear and made a snuffing sound in his nose.

"What I'm saying is we don't know everything we'd like to about Cardo. He messes around in politics, sends money to right-wing crazies, stuff like that. He was shooting off his mouth around town about bringing Oliver North to New Orleans. He thinks he's a big intellectual because he's got a degree from a junior college in Miami."

"So?"

"So he's hard to read. We know there're some guys in Miami and Chicago who think maybe he shouldn't be running things here, that maybe he's crazy or he keeps his brains in that schlong he's so proud of. Figure it out, Dave. What kind of guy would keep Jimmie Lee Boggs around?"

"You're worrying too much, Minos."

"Because I've been doing this stuff a long time. I told you it was a simple sting. That's what it should be. But you don't hear me when I say things to you, and I'm bothered by that."

I left by the back entrance and walked down the alley to the side street where my truck was parked. I could hear the streetcar clattering down the tracks on St. Charles. The sky was a hard blue, the noon sun bright overhead, and gray squirrels raced each other around the trunks of the oak trees on the street. Now all I had to do was find a way inside the insular and peculiar world of Anthony Cardo.

"You just fucking do it, mon," Clete said that same day as we ate lunch at the bar in the Golden Star on Decatur. "The guy lives in a house, right, not the Vatican. We're talking about a bucket of shit, mon, not the pope. You don't get a number and wait when you deal with a bucket of shit, do you?"

He took an enormous bite of his oyster loaf sandwich. His face was ruddy and cheerful, his crushed porkpie hat down low over his eyes, his sports coat as tight as a sausage skin on his broad back. His cigarette burned in an ashtray, and by his elbow was a Bloody Mary with a celery stalk in it.

"Call up the cocksucker and tell him we're coming out," he said.

"It's not that easy, Cletus."

"I don't see the problem." His cheek was as big as a baseball with unchewed food. We were alone at the bar. The walls were covered with the framed and autographed photos of movie stars.

"He has an unlisted number. Minos gave it to me, but I don't have a way to explain to Cardo how I got it. I asked Fontenot for it, and he wouldn't give it to me. He said he had to clear it with Cardo first."

"Fontenot's the tub, the one with the T-shirt shop on Bourbon?"

"That's the man."

"He wants to control access to the piggy bank, huh?"

"Something like that."

"Stay here."

"Where are you going?"

"Remain cool and copacetic, my mellow man. I'll be back before you finish your gumbo."

"Wait a minute, Clete."

But he was out the door. Fifteen minutes later he was back, his green eyes smiling under the short brim of his hat. He dropped a slip of paper with Cardo's phone number on it next to my plate.

"What did you do to him?" I asked.

"Hey, come on, Fontenot's a reasonable guy. I just explained that you and I are in partnership now. He liked the idea. That's right, I ain't putting you on."

"Clete, if we get into Cardo's, you've got to take your transmission out of overdrive."

"Trust me, mon." The fingers of his big hands were spread out like banana peels on top of the bar. He grinned at me, squinted his eyes, and clicked his teeth together. "You're looking at a model of restraint. I worked Vice, remember. I know these fuckers. They'll love having me on board."

It was easier than I thought. I called Cardo's house, a maid answered, then Cardo was on the line. He was polite, even expansive. The accent was typical New Orleans Italian, which sounded like both Flatbush and the Irish Channel.

"I've heard a lot about you," he said. "I've been looking forward to meeting you. You play tennis?"

"I'm afraid not."

"You like to watch tennis?"

"Sure."

"Where are you now?"

"At the Golden Star, across from the French Market."

"Can you come out in an hour? We'll have some drinks, I'll hit the ball a little bit, we'll talk."

"Sure. I'd like that. Can you give me your address?"

He gave me directions to a neighborhood out by Lake Pontchartrain.

"How'd you get this number?" he asked.

"It came from Ray."

"That's strange. Ray usually doesn't give it out."

The receiver was quiet a moment.

"You haven't been bouncing my help around, have you?" he said; then he laughed. "Don't worry about it. Ray needs a little excitement. Cleans the fat out of his veins. You didn't hurt him, though, did you?"

"I didn't do anything to him. I'd like to bring along a friend of mine. He's going into business with me."

"That's fine with me. We'll be expecting you. Say, you know that newsstand a few doors down from you? Pick me up a copy of the Atlantic, will you? My subscription didn't come."

"Sure thing, Mr. Cardo."

"Hey, it's Tony or Tony C. or Tony some-other-things, but nobody calls me Mr. Cardo. Do I sound like a Mr. Cardo to you?"

"I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you in an hour," I said.

I hung up the phone and looked at Clete at the bar.

"The Atlantic?" I said.

"What?"

"This guy's a beaut."

His home was a short distance from the lake. The immense, sloping lawn was shaded by live oaks, and the one-story house was long and white with a wide marble porch, a three-car garage, and a gingerbread gazebo in a side yard that was planted with blooming citrus trees and camellias. The swimming pool had a colonnade built onto one side, like a Roman porch, and behind the pool was a screened-in clay tennis court, and I could see a trim, suntanned man in white shorts and a polo shirt whocking balls back at a machine that fired them automatically over the net.

"The mustaches know how to live, don't they?" Clete said, his tie askew, one arm back on the seat, flipping ashes out the window of the truck.

"Play it cool on the remarks."

"Ease up. There're only two rules when you deal with these guys: Don't mess with their broads and don't steal from them. These guys just aren't that complicated. What would a guy like Tony Cardo do if he couldn't deal dope? He'd probably be running a fruit stand. You think a greaseball like that could honestly earn a joint like this?"

"I'll do most of the talking today, all right, Clete?"

"You've got a lot of anxiety over nothing, mon. But it's your gig. What do I know?" He flipped his cigarette in an arc into a flower bed.

A Negro man in a white jacket and black pants walked out the side door of the house and stood on the edge of the drive while we got out of the truck.

"Mr. Cardo want y'all come out by the pool," he said. "He be with y'all in a minute." He couldn't keep his eyes from glancing sideways at the truck.

"You like it? Dave might part with it for the right price," Clete said.

"Mr. Cardo ax you gentlemens if you want a drink," the Negro said.

"Give me a double Black Jack on ice," Clete said. "What do you want, Dave?"

"Nothing."

"You got a bathroom?" Clete said to the Negro.

"Yes suh, follow me inside."

I sat in a beach chair under the colonnade by the side of the pool. The bottom of the pool was inset with a mosaic mermaid that glittered with chips of light. The suntanned man on the court was hitting the ball with his back to me, but I felt that he was aware I was watching him through the myrtle trees that grew along the screens. He stayed on the balls of his feet, the muscles in his brown calves and thighs taut and glazed with perspiration, his forehand shot a white blur across the net.

Clete came out of the side of the house with a highball glass in his hand and sat down heavily in a beach chair next to me.

"You ought to see the can," he said. "It looks like a pink whorehouse. Erotic art all over the wallpaper, a toilet seat inlaid with silver dollars. The colored guy went in after me and started cleaning the toilet with a brush. Should I take that personally?"

"Probably."

"Thanks."

The man on the tennis court turned off the ball machine and walked across the close-clipped lawn toward us, zipping up the case on his racket. He was truly a strange-looking man. His head was long and narrow, his ears tiny and pressed tightly against the scalp as though part of them had been surgically pared away. His hair grew in gray and black ringlets that were tapered on the back of his neck like the flange of a helmet. His smile exposed his long white teeth, and his chest hair was black and slick with perspiration.

"Tony Cardo," he said, his hand outstretched like a greeter's in a restaurant.

"It's nice to see you, Tony," I said. "This is a friend of mine, Clete Purcel."

"What's happening, Tony?" Clete said, rising up enough from the beach chair to shake hands.

"I remember you from somewhere," Cardo said to him.

"You drink vodka Collins," Clete said.

Cardo pursed his lips together in the shape of a tiny butterfly.

"You're a bartender in the Quarter," he said.

"I own the bar."

"You were in the corps."

"That's right."

"We had some words or something."

"No, I don't have words with people."

"Yeah, we did. Something about the corps. No, something about 'the crotch,' right?"

"You got me. I don't argue with people."

"Who's arguing? But you said something, almost like getting in a guy's face. Then you walked away. I was buying a drink for the gunny."

Clete shrugged his shoulders.

"It must be somebody else. I just remember you drink vodka Collins, that's all," he said.

"Hey, don't sweat it. You're a diplomat. That's good. It means you're a good businessman."

"I got no beef with anybody, Tony."

"I like that," Cardo said.

"Clete was my Homicide partner a few years ago," I said. I watched Cardo's face.

"What made you change careers?" His eyes smiled as though he were looking at a private conclusion inside himself. The black houseman brought out a tray with a Collins and a bowl of chilled shrimp on it and set it on a circular redwood table next to Cardo's chair.

"A little trouble in the department, nothing big," Clete said. "I went down to the tropics for a while to get my priorities straight. Then I got into casino security out in Vegas and Tahoe for Sally Dio."

"Yeah, Sally Dee out of Galveston," Cardo said. "His plane smacked into a mountain out in Montana or somewhere."

"Yeah, it was too bad. He was a great guy to work for," Clete said.

"I always heard he was a prick," Cardo said.

"Well, some people had that opinion, too," Clete said.

"You're not drinking anything, Dave?"

"No thanks. Can we talk some business, Tony?"

"Put on some swimsuits. Let's take a dip," he said.

"It's a little cool, isn't it?" I said.

"I keep the water at eighty-two degrees. You'll love it. There're some suits over there in the cottage," he insisted.

He went into his own house to change, and Clete and I walked across the lawn to a small white stucco cottage that was surrounded with palm and banana trees.

"He's one slick motherfucker. You won't get a wire into this place, partner," Clete said.

Inside the cottage we found a cardboard box full of men's and women's bathing suits on top of the bar. Clete started rooting through them and found only one pair that wasn't too small for him, an enormous pair of red boxer trunks with a white elastic band.

"I bet these belong to that blimp who runs the T-shirt shop," he said. He looked at my face. "It's not funny, Dave. These guys pass around VD like a family heirloom." He went into the bedroom, found a safety pin in a drawer, and began undressing by the bar.

"He really put you under the microscope," I said.

"They're all the same, mon. They love to peel back your skin."

"What do you think all that Marine Corps stuff is about?"

"Who cares? Figuring out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet."

I laid my clothes across the back of a couch and slipped on a pair of trunks. Clete poured a glass of Jack Daniel's at the bar and looked at my chest.

"That's where Boggs popped you, huh?" he said. "Does it give you much trouble?"

"I'm still weak on the left side. Sometimes it throbs a little in the morning."

"What else?"

"What do you mean 'what else'?"

"Don't try to put on your old partner. You remember when that kid planted a couple of.22 rounds in me? I had the nightly sweats for a long time, mon."

"It comes and goes."

"Like hell it does." Then he took a drink and smiled at me. His face looked as big and hard-ribbed as a grinning pumpkin under his porkpie hat. "But don't worry. Before this is over, we're going to cook Jimmie Lee Boggs's hash, I mean sling some serious shit on the walls. You wait and see, ole Streak."

He winked at me and walked duck-footed to the door, with his drink in his hand, his red trunks askew on his hips, lighting a cigarette.

"You think he's got any broads around?" he said.

I took the copy of the Atlantic out of my coat pocket and followed him to the pool.

Tony Cardo hit the water in a long, flat dive and swam with deep strokes to the diving board, blowing water out his nose, then made an underwater turn and pushed off the tiled side and swam into the shallow end. He raked the water out of his eyes and curly hair and spit into the trough that surrounded the pool.

"That's a nasty scar on your chest, Dave," he said.

"A nasty guy put it there."

"Yeah, I heard about that."

"He works for you."

"That's not exactly true, Dave. He used to work for some people I do business with. He doesn't now. I don't know where he is. I heard Florida."

"I wouldn't want a guy like that to blindside me, Tony."

"You're an up-front guy. But you got no worries on that. Not in this town."

"The people I represent like the quality of your product, they like the way you do business. They've given me a half million to work with. I want the same quality goods, same price on the key. Can we do some business today?"

"You cut right to it, don't you?"

"You're a serious man, you have a serious reputation."

"You're talking a big score."

"That's why I'm dealing with you. The word is that the Houston people are undependable."

"The problem I got sometimes is access, Dave. Or what you might call transportation. The product's out there, but there're a lot of nautical factors involved here, you know what I mean? Something happens to the product out on the salt, a lot of people lose money, a lot of people get real mad."

"That's the other thing I want to talk to you about. I grew up in the wetlands. I know every bayou and channel from Sabine Pass over to Barataria. I can get it through for you, and on a regular basis."

"I bet you can," he said.

But his attention was no longer on me. His arms were folded on top of the trough, and he was looking across the blue-green expanse of lawn and trees at the front porch of his house, where a blond woman in a red dress and a hat was counting the suitcases the houseman was bringing outside. A moment later one of the gatemen walked up the drive and backed a restored 1940s Lincoln Continental convertible out of the garage. It had wire wheels, a deep maroon finish, and an immaculate white top. The gateman and the Negro put the woman's luggage in the trunk. She never glanced in our direction.

"What do you think of my car?" he said finally.

"It looks great."

"Yeah. That's what I think." But his eyes were still concentrated on the woman. "You married?"

"Not now."

He continued to stare as she got into the Lincoln and the gateman drove her down the long driveway toward the street. Then his eyes clicked back onto mine.

"Hey, let me ask you something else. Because I like you. I like the way you talk," he said. "What's your attitude about dealing in the product?"

"I don't understand."

"You're an educated man. I want to know what an educated man thinks about dealing in the product."

"I never saw anybody chop up lines because somebody forced him to."

"I think that's an intelligent attitude. But I want you to understand something else, Dave. I got lots of businesses. Vending and video machines, a restaurant, nightclubs, half of a trucking company, real estate development out by Chalmette, some investments in Miami. This other stuff comes and goes. Five years from now the in thing might be huffing used cat litter. There's always a bunch of bozos around with money. Why fight the fashion?"

His eyes looked at the empty drive and the front gate that was closed once again.

"Excuse me," he said, and raised himself out of the pool, walked dripping to the redwood table, and punched one button on the phone. He put his little finger in one of his tiny ears and shook water out of it. At the end of the drive I saw the other gateman walk to a box that was inset in the stucco wall.

"Tommy, get some people over here, call up the catering service," he said. "I got some guests here, I want to entertain them right… Don't ask me who, I don't give a shit, get them over here."

He hung up the phone and looked at me.

"I live in a place that costs a million bucks, and half the time it's like being the only guy in the fucking Superdome," he said.

"Before your friends get here, can we agree on a deal of some kind, Tony?" I said.

"There's some people I bring out here like I order lawn furniture. There's other people I invite because I respect their experience and what's in their heads. Don't hurt my feelings," he said.

His guests arrived like actors who played only one role, their smiles welded in place, their eyes aglitter with the moment. They were people without accents or origins, as though they had lived on the edge of a party all their lives. But besides their good looks and their late-season suntans, their most singular common denominator was their carefree trust in the walled-in tropical opulence that surrounded them. They smoked dope by the pool, snorted lines off a mirror in the guest cottage, ate chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches from the caterer's tray, with never a sideways glance at gatemen who wore shoulder holsters or a thick-bodied, silent man in cutoffs who waxed an Oldsmobile in the driveway with such a mean energy that his jailhouse tattoos danced like snakes on his naked back.

Even Clete quickly fell into the ambience, his arms spread out on the tile trough in the deep end, his pale blue canvas hat low on his brow, a twenty-year-old girl hovering within the crook of his arm. Her mouth was red and cold from the whiskey sour she sipped from a glass in one hand, and she laughed at everything he said and balanced herself by cupping his shoulder whenever she started to float away from the pool's edge. I could see her knee rake against his thigh.

The air was becoming cooler now, and I treaded water to stay warm. It was impossible to get Cardo alone. He sat at the redwood table in a white terry cloth robe, one leg crossed on his knee, smoking a Pall Mall in a gold cigarette holder, while four of his guests sat around him and smiled brightly into his words. I hung from the diving board by one arm and began to think it was better to mark the day off.

"How do you like being in the life?" a voice said behind me.

She sat on the diving board that in a light green dress covered with tiny pink flowers. She had tucked her red hair up into a green beret, but one side of it had fallen down on her neck. Her lipstick was bright red, and she wore too much of it, but when she parted her mouth and looked directly at me, she disturbed me and made me keenly aware that there is no safety for the male in either age or pride.

"What's happening, Kim?" I said.

"What's happening with you, hotshot?"

"Like you say, enjoying the life. You don't want to swim?"

"I think I'll pass. Two nights ago they were screwing in here."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me. On a rubber raft, with the lights on. What a bunch."

I lifted myself out of the pool and walked to the guest cottage to shower and dress. I heard her laugh behind me. When I came back out she was sitting on a cushioned, scrolled iron chair with her legs crossed. I sat down on the dry mat on the back edge of the diving board.

"You're a case," she said.

"How's that?" I said, looking toward the shallow end, where Tony was tapping a beach ball back and forth with two girls.

"You make me think of a cat that's trying to like sitting on a hot stove," she said.

"Where did you say you're from?"

"I didn't."

"I need to talk to Tony alone. It's hard to do."

"You're still out for the big score, huh, hotshot?"

"How about cutting me a little slack?"

"All you want, babe."

"Are you his girl?"

She looked away from me at the trees in the yard, her face cool and sculpted, her hair thick and dark red where it was pinned up on the back of her neck. She touched at an area between her teeth with her little fingernail, then glanced back into my face. Her eyes looked directly into mine, but they were impossible to read.

"What?" I asked her.

Still she didn't answer, and instead continued to stare into my face. I took a breath.

"I think I need to get something to eat," I said.

"If you want to see Tony alone, he'll be going up to the house soon to check on his little boy. He always does."

"His little boy?"

"It's the reason his wife's always taking off. She can't handle it."

"What are you talking about?"

"Do yourself a favor and go home, Robicheaux."

She stood up, tucked her hair under her beret, and walked off alone toward the tennis court. A moment later I saw her leaning on her arms against the wire mesh, looking at nothing, her face wan and empty in the shadow of the myrtle bushes.

She was right about Tony Cardo, though. Ten minutes later, when I was about to signal Clete that it was time to hang it up, Cardo excused himself from his guests and walked across his lawn to a glassed-in sun porch at the back of his house. I went to the side door of the house and knocked. The Negro houseman answered, a polishing cloth in his hand.

"I'd like to see Mr. Cardo," I said.

"He be out directly."

"I'd like to see him inside, please."

"Just a moment, suh," he said, and walked into the back of the house. Then he returned and unlatched the screen. "Mr. Cardo want you to wait in the library."

I followed the houseman through a huge, gleaming kitchen, a living room furnished with French antiques and hung with a chandelier the size of a beach umbrella, into a pine-paneled study whose shelves were filled with encyclopedias, sets of science and popular history books, novels from book clubs, and plastic-bound collections of classics, the kind that are printed on low-grade paper and advertised on cable TV stations. The chairs and couch were red leather, the big glass-topped mahogany desk one that would perhaps befit Leo Tolstoy.

Tony slid open the far door and stepped inside in his terry cloth robe and sandals. Before he closed the door again, I looked out on the sun porch and saw the back of a wheelchair framed against a lighted television screen. The floor around the chair was strewn with toys and stuffed animals.

"I didn't give you your magazine," I said, and took the copy of the Atlantic out of my pocket and handed it to him.

"Hey, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it."

"I have to go, too. I just wanted to tell you I'd like to do business with you, but I have to have something firm. Like this afternoon, Tony."

"I want you to understand something, and I don't want you to take offense. The house is a family place, I don't do business in it. Call Ray Fontenot tomorrow. We'll work something out. You got my word on it."

"All right."

"Your face looks a little cloudy."

"I don't trust Fontenot. I don't know that you should, either."

"Serious charge. What'd he do?"

"He's an addict and he looks after his own butt."

"They all do."

"Thanks for having us out."

"Wait a minute, don't run off. I heard you were in ' Nam."

"Ten months, before it got real hot."

"Those scars on your thigh, you got hit?"

"A bouncing Betty on a trail. It was a dumb place to be at night."

"Sit down a second. Come on, you're not in that big a hurry. Then you got to go back to the States?"

"Sure. A million-dollar wound."

"In the corps, unless you get the big one, you got to earn two Hearts before you skate."

"You were hit?"

"Right in the butt. A zip up in a tree, maybe three hundred yards out."

I looked at my watch. I didn't want to talk more about the war, but it was obvious that he did. His eyes wandered over my face, as though he were searching for a piece of knowledge there that had eluded him in his own life. Then because I had to say something, I asked him a question that produced a strange consequence.

"What was your outfit?"

"Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division," he said, and smiled.

"Oh yeah, you guys were around Chu Lai. "

The skin of his face tightened.

"How do you know that?" he said.

"I was there," I said, confused.

"You were in Chu Lai?" The skin around his eyes and nostrils was white.

"No, I mean I was in Vietnam. I knew some Marines who were around Chu Lai, that's all."

"Who were these guys?"

"I don't even remember their names, Tony."

"I just wondered."

"Are you all right, partner?"

He widened his eyes and breathed air up through his nose.

"It was a fucking meat grinder, man," he said.

"Maybe it's time to give it the deep six."

"What?"

"We didn't ask to get sent over there. A time comes when we stop dragging the monsters around."

"You saying I did something over there?"

"If you didn't, you saw it done."

He looked at me a long moment, his mouth a tight line.

"You're an unusual man," he said.

"I don't think so."

"One day just kick the door shut on Shitsville?"

"You already lived it. Why watch the replay the rest of your life?"

"Some guys say the war's never over."

"It is for me."

"No dreams?"

I didn't answer.

"That's what I thought," he said. His body was deep in a leather chair. He smiled crookedly at me.

But my strange afternoon at Tony C.'s was not over. When Clete and I walked out to my truck, I noticed that my wallet was gone. I looked in the guest cottage and out by the pool, then realized that it had probably fallen out of my pocket when I was sitting in the library. The black man let me in the side of the house again. This time the sliding door of the library that gave onto the sun porch was open, and I saw Tony dressing a little boy in the wheelchair surrounded by a litter of toys. He did not see me, not at first. The little boy might have been seven or eight. His face was handsome and bright, but his head rested on his shoulders as though he had no neck, his legs were too short for his truncated body, and his back was deformed terribly. His hair was brown and wet, and Tony Cardo parted and combed it and leaned over and kissed him on the brow. Then his eyes glanced up into my face.

"I'm sorry. I dropped my wallet in the chair," I said.

He walked to the door and slid it shut.

That night it rained. It ran off the roof, the gutters, the balconies, clattered on the palm fronds and banana trees, spun like a vortex of wet light inside the courtyard. Lightning cracked across the sky and rattled the windows, and I slept with a pillow crimped across my head. I did not hear the lock pick in the door nor the handle turn when the bolt clicked free of the jamb. Instead, I felt a drop in the room's temperature, and smelled leaves and rain. I raised up on one elbow and looked into the face of Tony Cardo, who leaned forward on a straight-backed chair by the side of my bed. One of his gatemen stood behind him, dripping water on the floor.

"How scared you ever been?" he said. His narrow, elongated face looked white in the glow of the electric light that shone through the window from the courtyard.

"What?" My hand went toward the drawer of the nightstand.

"No," he said, took my wrist, and pushed my arm back on the bed.

"What are you-"

"How scared you ever been?" he repeated. His eyes were absolutely black and glazed with light, as though they had no pupils.

I was sitting straight up now. The front door was halfway open, and leaves and mist were blowing inside the living room.

"Listen, Tony-"

"It was after you got hit, wasn't it? When you had to lie in the dark by yourself and think about it."

I couldn't smell alcohol on him. Then I looked again at his eyes, the lidless intensity, the heat that was like a match burning inside of black glass.

"Admit it," he said.

"I was scared every minute I was over there. Who cares? You're speeding, Tony."

Then I saw him raise the revolver from between his tights.

"You know how you overcome it?" he said.

I looked at the gateman. His face was empty of expression, beaded with raindrops.

"You confront the dragon," Tony said.

"Ease up, partner. This isn't your style."

"What the fuck you know about my style?"

"I didn't do it to you. I don't have anything to do with your life. You're taking it to the wrong guy."

"You're the right guy. You know you're the right guy."

"Everybody was afraid over there. It's just human. What's the matter with you?"

"You buy that? I say fuck you. You stare it in the face. Can you stare it in the face?"

His mouth looked purple in the glow from the window. His ears were like tiny white cauliflowers pressed against his scalp.

"I think you're loaded, Tony. I think we're talking black beauties here. I'm not going to help you with this bullshit. Go fuck yourself."

I could see his thin nostrils quiver as he breathed. He rested the revolver on the top of his right thigh. Then he said, "This is how you do it, my man."

He flipped out the cylinder from the frame and ejected six.38 cartridges into his palm. He clinked them all into his coat pocket except one. He fitted it into a chamber and snapped the cylinder back into place.

"Tony, pull the plug on this before it goes any further. It's not worth it," I said.

He set the hammer on half cock, spun the cylinder twice, then brought the hammer all the way back with his thumb and fitted the barrel's opening under his chin. The skin of his face became as stiff and gray as cardboard, his eyes focused on a distant thought somewhere behind my ear. Then he pulled the trigger.

"Jesus Christ, Tony," I heard the gateman say, his breath rushing out of his chest.

Tony put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, opened the cylinder again, and fitted the five rounds from his pocket back into the chambers.

"It wasn't even close, two chambers away from the firing pin," he said. "Don't ever let me see pity in your face when you look at me and my little boy again."

A solitary drop of water fell out of his hair and spotted the unlit cigarette in his mouth.