Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 9, September 2006

The Heart Has Reasons by O’Neil De Noux

For two days she came and sat under the WPA shelter in Cabrini Playground with her baby, sometimes rocking the infant, sometimes walking between the oaks and magnolias, back and forth. Sometimes she would sing. She came around nine A.M., and around lunchtime she’d reach into the paper bag she’d brought and nibble on a sandwich. After, she would cover her shoulder with a small pink blanket and nurse her baby beneath it. Around five P.M. she would walk away, up Dauphine Street.

On the third morning, the newspaper said to expect showers brought in by an atypical autumn cold front from Canada, which would finally break the heat wave that had lingered through the sizzling summer of 1948. When the rain swept in, it was one of those all-day New Orleans rainstorms that started suddenly and built into monsoon proportions. I grabbed two umbrellas and found her huddled under the shelter.

“Come on,” I told her, “come get out of the rain.” I held out an umbrella. When she didn’t take it immediately, I stood it against the wall and stepped away to give her some room. She looked younger up close, nineteen or eighteen, and stood about five two, a thin girl with short, dark brown hair and darker brown eyes, all saucer wide and blinking at me with genuine fear.

I took another step away from her, not wanting to tower over her with my six-foot frame, and smiled as warmly as I could. “Please. Come take your baby out of the rain.” I opened the second umbrella and handed it to her.

Slowly, a shaky white hand extended for the umbrella, those big eyes still staring at me. I took a step toward the edge of the shelter. A loud thunderclap startled us both to jump and started the baby crying.

I led the way back across the small playground, the umbrellas pretty useless in the deluge, and hurried through the brick and wrought-iron fence to Barracks Street, having to pause a moment to let a yellow cab pass. She moved carefully behind me.

At my building, I held the door open for her. I closed the umbrellas and started up the stairs for my apartment. “I’ll bring towels down,” I called back to her, taking the stairs two at a time.

Moving quickly, I grabbed two large towels from my bathroom, lighting the gas heater while I was in there, and pulled the big terry cloth robe I never wore from the closet, draping it over the bathroom door before leaving my apartment door open on the way out. She was standing next to the smoky glass door of my office, rocking her baby, who had stopped crying. She gave me another frightened look when I came down and extended the towels to her.

“Top of the stairs, take a left. My apartment door’s open.” I reached into my suit coat pocket and pulled out a business card. “That’s my office behind you. The number’s on the card. Go upstairs. The heater’s on in the bathroom. Lock yourself in and take your time. Call me if you need anything.”

I shoved the towels at her and she took them with her free hand. I pressed the business card between her fingers as she moved away from my office door. She took a hesitant step for the stairs, then stopped and watched me with hooded eyes.

Stepping to my office door, I said, “I’m Lucien Caye,” nodding at my name stenciled on the door. “I’m a detective.”

Her lower lip quivered, so I tried my warmest smile again. “Go on upstairs. You’ll be safe up there. Lock yourself in.”

The baby began to whine. She took in a deep breath and backed toward the bottom step. Glancing up the stairs, she said, “First door on the left?”

“It’s open,” I said as I stepped into my office. “I’ll start up some eggs and bacon. I have a stove in here.” I left the door open and returned to the row of windows overlooking Barracks Street where I’d been watching her. A louder thunderclap shook the old building before two flashes of lightning danced over the rooftops of the French Quarter. The street was a mini canal already, the storm washing the dust from my old gray 1940 DeSoto coach parked against the curb.

“Bacon and eggs,” I said aloud and turned back to the small kitchen area at the rear of my office. I had six eggs left in the small refrigerator, a half slab of bacon, and milk for the coffee. I sniffed the milk and it smelled okay.

I telephoned my apartment before going up. She answered after the sixth ring with a hesitant “Yes?”

“It’s Lucien. Downstairs. I’m bringing up some bacon, eggs, and coffee, okay?”

I heard her breathing.

“I’m the guy who got you outta the rain. Remember? Dark hair. Six feet tall. I brought an umbrella.”

“The door’s not locked,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll be right up.” When she didn’t hang up immediately, I told her, “You can hang up now.”

“All right.” I brought up a heaping plate of breakfast and a mug of café au lait. I’d left my coat downstairs, along with my .38 revolver. Didn’t want to spook her any more than she was already.

She was sitting on the sofa, her baby sleeping next to her. In the terry cloth robe, a towel wrapped around her wet hair like a turban, she looked like a kid, not a mother. The baby lay on its belly, wrapped in a towel. I went to my kitchen table and put the food down, flipping on the light and telling her I’d be downstairs if she needed anything else.

“Is that a holster?” she asked, staring at my right hip.

“I told you I’m a detective.” I kept moving toward the door, giving her a wide berth, hoping the fear in her eyes would subside.

“Thank you,” she said, standing up, arms folded across her chest now.

I pointed down the hall beyond my bathroom. “There’s a washer back there for your clothes and a clothesline out back, if it ever stops raining.”

She nodded and said, “I’m Kaye Bishop.” She looked down at her baby. “This is Donna.”

I stopped just inside the door. “Nice to meet you, Kaye. If you need to call anyone, you know where the phone is.”

I hesitated in case she wanted to keep talking, and she surprised me with, “You’re not how I would picture a detective.”

“How’s that?”

Her eyes, like chocolate agates, stared back at me. “You seem polite. Maybe too polite.”

“You’ve been out there for three days. You all right?”

“We’ll be fine when Charley comes for us.”

“Charley?”

“Charley Rudabaugh. Donna’s father. We’re not married yet. That’s why I’m staying with the Ursulines.”

Nuns. The Ursuline convent on Chartres Street. Oldest building in the Quarter. Only building that didn’t burn in the two fires that engulfed the city in the eighteenth century, or so the story goes. For an instant, I saw Kaye Bishop in a colonial costume, as a casket girl, labeled because they’d arrived in New Orleans with all their belongings in a single case that looked like a casket. Imported wives from France, daughters of impoverished families sent to the New World to marry the French settlers. The Ursulines took them under wing to make sure they were properly married before taken off by the rough settlers. Looks like they’re still taking care of young girls.

“The church took us in.” Her eyes were wet now. “We’re waiting until Charley can get us a place.”

Donna let out a little cry and Kaye scooped her up. Then she moved to my mother’s old rocking chair next to the French doors, which opened to the wrought-iron balcony that wrapped around my building along the second floor. As she rocked her baby, she reached up and unwrapped the towel on her head, shook out her hair, and rubbed the towel through her hair.

The baby giggled and she giggled back. “You like that?” She shook her hair out again and the baby laughed. Turning to me, she said, “Can you get my purse? It’s in the bathroom.”

I brought it to her and she took out a brush and brushed out her short brown hair. Donna peeked up at me, hands swinging in small circles, legs kicking.

“She’s a beautiful baby,” I said, backing away, not wanting to crowd them.

Kaye smiled at her daughter as she brushed her hair, the rocker moving now. I was about to ask if the eggs and bacon were okay when she started singing in a low voice a song in French, a song that sat me down on the sofa.

My mother sang that song to me. I recognized the refrain... “le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connâit point.” Still don’t know what it means. I wanted to ask Kaye, but I didn’t want to interrupt her as she hummed part of the song and sang part.

I closed my eyes and listened. It was hard because I could hear my heart beating in my ears. When the singing stopped and I opened my eyes, Kaye was staring at me; I could see she wasn’t afraid of me anymore.

Two hours later, just as I was about to call upstairs to suggest I go over and pick up Charley, she called and said, “Could you get a message to Charley for me?”

“Sure.”

“He’s working at the Gulf station, Canal and Claiborne. He’s a mechanic,” she said with pride.

Slipping my blue suit coat back on, I looked out at the rain still falling on my DeSoto. It wasn’t coming down as hard now. I slid my .38 back into its holster and took the umbrella anyway. I started to grab my tan fedora but left it on the coat rack. Hats just mess up my hair.

It took a good half hour to reach the station on a drive that normally took fifteen minutes. Everyone in front of me drove slowly, as if they had never seen rain before in one of the wettest cities in the country. I resisted leaning on my horn for an old man wearing a hat two sizes too large for his pinhead, wondering why he couldn’t get his Cadillac out of first gear.

Forked lightning danced in the sky, right over the tan bricks of Charity Hospital towering a few blocks behind the Gulf station as I pulled in. The station stood out brightly in the rain, illuminated by lights that were normally on only at night. I parked outside the middle bay of the garage with the word “tires” above the doorway. The other bays, marked “lubrication” and “batteries,” were filled with jacked-up vehicles.

Leaving the umbrella in my DeSoto, I jogged into the open bay and came face up with a hulking man holding a tire iron.

“Hi, I’m looking for Charley Rudabaugh.”

He lifted the tire iron and took a menacing step toward me. I stumbled back, turning to my right as I reached under my coat for my revolver.

“Sam!” a voice boomed behind the man, and he stopped, but kept leering at me with angry eyes.

I kept the .38 against my leg as I took another step back to the edge of the open bay doors so he’d have to take two steps to get to me. I’d have to run or shoot him. Neither choice was a good one. A second man, even bigger, came around the man with the tire iron. Both wore dark green coveralls with the orange Gulf Oil logos over their hearts.

The bigger man growled, “Who the hell are you?”

“Kaye Bishop sent me with a message for Charley.”

“Kaye? Where is she?” He took a step toward me, and I showed him my Smith and Wesson but didn’t point it at him.

“I’m a private detective. You wanna tell me what’s goin’ on?”

“You got an ID?”

I don’t remember ever seeing Bogart, as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, showing his ID to anyone, but I had to do it — a lot. I reached into my coat pocket with my left hand, opened my credentials pouch for him, and asked, “Where’s Charley?”

The bigger man looked hard at my ID. “I’m Malone,” he said. “Charley works for me. Where’s Kaye?”

“At my office.” I slipped my creds back into my coat pocket.

Malone turned his face to the side and spoke to his buddy with the tire iron. “He’s too skinny to work for Joe. And his nose ain’t been broke. Yet.”

The man with the tire iron backed away, leaning against the fender of a Ford with its rear jacked up.

“I told you where Kaye is. Where’s Charley?” I reholstered my revolver but kept my distance.

“Don’t trust the bastard,” said the man with the tire iron.

I could see, in both sets of eyes, that there was no way they were telling me anything. Maybe they’d tell Kaye. I suggested we get her on the phone. I stayed in the garage as Malone called my apartment from the office area. When he signaled for me to come in and get the phone, the first hulk finally put the tire iron down.

“Kaye?”

“Charley’s in the hospital,” she said excitedly. “Can you bring me to him?”

“I’ll be right there.” I hung up and looked at Malone. “You wanna tell me what happened now?”

Charley Rudabaugh was a good kid, a hard worker, Malone explained, but he borrowed money from the wrong man. Malone learned that tidbit that very morning when a goon came by with a sawed-off baseball bat and broke Charley’s right arm.

“I was under a Buick and couldn’t get out before the goon got away.”

“Was he this Joe you thought I was working for?”

“No. The goon works for Joe Grosetto.”

Malone explained Grosetto was a local loan shark. I asked where I could locate this shark but neither knew for sure. Charley would.

Kaye and Donna were waiting for me in the foyer of my building. I brought them out to the DeSoto under the umbrella and drove straight to Charity Hospital, parking at an empty meter outside the emergency room.

Charley Rudabaugh was about five ten, thin, with curly light brown hair and green eyes. He smiled at Kaye and kissed Donna before finally noticing me standing behind them. His right arm in a fresh cast, Charley blinked and said, “Who are you?”

I let Kaye explain as she held his left hand, bouncing a gurgling Donna cradled in her free arm. He looked at me suspiciously, sizing me up, giving me that look a man gives another when he has just showed up with his woman. When Kaye finished, more nervous now, she asked Charley what had happened to him.

He turned to her and his eyes softened. He took in a deep breath and said, “Haney.” She became pale, and I pulled a chair over for her to sit, then went back to the doorway.

“He didn’t ask where I was?” asked Kaye.

Charley shook his head. “He just wanted the money.”

Kaye’s eyes teared up, and she pressed her face against his left arm and cried. Charley’s eyes filled too and he closed them, but the tears leaked out, down his lean face. Donna’s arms swung around in circles as she lay cradled. I waited until one of the adults looked at me.

It was Charley. I asked, “How much money are we talking about?”

“This doesn’t concern you.”

Kaye stopped crying now and wiped her face on the sheet before sitting up.

I tried a different tack. “What school didya’ go to?” The old New Orleans handshake. This was no public school kid. He told me he went to Jesuit. I told him I went to Holy Cross. Two Catholic school boys who’d gone to rival schools.

“Your parents can’t help?” Jesuit was expensive.

“They don’t live here anymore. And don’t even ask about Kaye’s parents. This is our problem.”

“Everyone needs help sometimes.”

“That’s what you do? Some kinda guardian angel?”

I shook my head, thought about it a second, and said, “Actually, it’s what I do most of the time. Help people figure things out.”

“We can’t afford a private eye.”

I tried still another tack. “How do I find this Grosetto? This Haney?”

Charley shook his head. Kaye wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I left them alone, went out into the waiting area. Ten minutes later a blond-headed doctor went in, then a nurse. I caught the doctor on the way out. It was a simple fracture of both bones, the radius and ulna between wrist and elbow.

“It was a blunt instrument, officer,” the doctor said. “Says he fell, but something struck that arm.”

I thanked the doc without correcting him that I wasn’t a cop. The nurse was finishing up, telling them how Charley had to move on soon as the cast was hard. Kaye turned her red eyes to me, and I took in a deep breath. “I’ll take you to the Ursulines, okay?”

Her shoulders sank. I turned to Charley. “So where have you been staying?”

“He’s been sleeping at the Gulf station,” Kaye said.

He shot her a worried look.

“They don’t know,” Kaye added. “He stays late to lock up and sleeps inside, opens in the morning.”

I put my proposition to them to use my apartment and stepped out for them to discuss it, gave them another ten minutes before walking back in. Kaye shot me a nervous smile, holding Donna up now, the baby smiling too as her mother jiggled her.

I looked at Charley, who asked, “I just wanna know why you’re doing this.”

“How old are you, Charley?”

“Twenty. And Kaye’s eighteen. We’re both adults now.”

I nodded slowly and said, “I watched a young mother and her baby spend three days in that playground, avoiding the kids when they came, keeping to themselves until the rain blew in. I’ve got two apartments, one converted into an office downstairs with a sofa bed, kitchen, and bath. I’ve slept down there before. You got a better offer?”

Charley and Kaye wouldn’t volunteer any information about Grosetto and Haney, and there was no way Malone and his tire-iron friend were going to be much help. But I knew who would. He was sitting behind a worn government-issue gray metal desk, in a government-issue gray desk chair, in a small office with gray walls lined with mug shots, wanted posters, and an electric clock that surprisingly had the correct time.

Detective Eddie Sullivan had lost more of his red hair, making up for it with an old-fashioned handlebar mustache. Grinning at me as I stepped up to his desk, he said, “I was about to get a bite.”

“Me too.”

So I bought him lunch around the corner from the First Precinct house on South Saratoga Street at Jilly’s Grill. Hamburgers, french fries, coffee, and a wedge of apple pie for my large friend. Sullivan was my height exactly, but he outweighed me by a hundred pounds, mostly flab.

Eddie Sullivan was the Bunco Squad for the First Precinct, since his partner retired without a replacement in sight. He handled con artists, forgers, loan sharks, and the pawn shop detail, checking lists of pawned items against the master list of stolen articles reported to police. I waited until he’d wolfed down his burger and fries and was starting in on his slab of pie before bringing up Grosetto and Haney. He nodded and told me he knew both.

“Grosetto’s a typical Guinea — short, olive-skinned, pencil-thin mustache, weighs about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Haney is black Irish — big, goofy-looking. Typical bully.” He stuffed another chunk of pie into his mouth.

“Grosetto? He mobbed up?”

Sullivan shook his head. “He wishes, but he ain’t Sicilian. I think he’s Napolitano or just some ordinary wop. You got someone willin’ to file charges against these bums?”

“Maybe. I need to know where they hang out.”

“Easy. Rooms above the Blue Gym. Canal and Galvez.”

I knew the place and hurried to finish my meal as Sullivan ordered a second wedge of pie. He managed to say, between mouthfuls, “I’d go with you but I gotta be in court at one o’clock. Drop me by the courthouse?”

As he climbed out of my DeSoto in front of the hulking, gray Criminal Courts Building at Tulane and Broad Avenues, he thanked me for lunch, adding, “See if you can talk your friend into pressing charges. I could use a good collar.”

“I’ll try.”

The Blue Gym was hard to miss, sitting on the downtown side of Canal and Galvez Streets. Painted bright blue, it stood three stories high, the bottom two stories an open gym with six boxing rings inside, smelling of sweat, blood, and cigar smoke. I weaved my way through a haze of smoke to the back stairs and went up to a narrow hall that smelled like cooked fish. A thin man in boxing shorts came rushing out of a door and almost bumped into me.

“Oh, ’scuse me,” he said.

“I’m looking for Grosetto.”

He pointed to the door he’d just exited and rushed off. I reached back and unsnapped the trigger guard on the holster of my Smith and Wesson, then stepped through the open door to spot a man behind a beat-up wooden desk. He glared at me with hard brown eyes, trying to look tough — hard to do when he stood up and topped off at maybe five three and was skinny as a stick man. He wore a sharkskin lime green suit.

“Who the hell are you?” he snarled from the right side of his tiny mouth.

I stepped up, keeping an eye on his hands in case he tried something stupid, and said, “How much does Charley Rudabaugh owe you?”

“Huh?”

“How much?” I kept my voice even, without a hint of emotion.

The beady eyes examined me up and down, then he sat and said, “You ain’t Italian. What are you? Some kinda Mexican?”

I wasn’t about to tell this jerk I’m half French, half Spanish, so I told him, “I’m the man with the money. You want your money, tell me how much Charley owes you.”

“Three hundred and fifty. Tomorrow it’s gonna be four hundred.”

“I’ll be right back.” And I didn’t look back as I strolled out, making it to the nearest branch of the Whitney Bank before it closed. My bank accounts, I have a savings account now, were both in good shape after the Duponçeau case. As I stood in the teller line, I remembered the salient facts that brought such money into my possession—

It was a probate matter. When it got slow, I’d go over to civil court, pick up an inheritance case. This one was a search for descendants of a recently deceased uptown matron. Flat fee for my work. If I found any, they got the inheritance; if not, the state got it. I’d worked a dozen before and never found anyone until I found Peter Duponçeau, a fellow vet, in a VA Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

Not long after I had caught a bullet from a Nazi sniper at Monte Cassino, he collected a chest full of shrapnel from a Japanese bombardment on a small island called Saipan. Peter was the grandson of the recently deceased uptown matron. His mother was also deceased. When I met him to confirm his inheritance, he was back in the hospital for yet another operation. At least the last months of his life were lived in luxury in a mansion overlooking Audubon Park. He left most of his estate to several local VFW chapters and ten percent to Lucien Caye, Esquire. When the certified check arrived, I contemplated getting an armored car to drive me to the bank. I couldn’t make that much money in five years, unless I robbed a bank or two.

Grosetto was back behind his desk, but there was an addition to the room, a large man standing six four, outweighing me by a good hundred pounds of what looked like gristle, with thick, unruly black hair and a ruddy complexion. He wore a rumpled brown suit, and he stared at me with dull brown eyes, Mississippi River water brown. My Irish friend Sullivan described Haney as black Irish, that is, probably descended from the Spanish of the Great Armada, the ones who weren’t drowned by the English. The ones who took the prevailing winds, beaching their ships along the Irish coast to be taken in by fellow Catholics to later breed with the locals. I would have given Haney only a cursory look, except I didn’t expect he’d be so young, early twenties maybe.

Stepping up to the desk, I dropped the bank envelope in front of Grosetto. “Rudabaugh sign anything? Promissory note? IOU?” I knew better but asked anyway.

Grosetto picked up the envelope and counted the money, nodding when he was finished. I turned to Haney. “You still have that baseball bat?”

He looked at Grosetto for an answer and then looked back. I could see he wasn’t all there.

“Try that stunt again and I’ll put two in your head. And I’ll get away with it,” I said.

“Alls I want is the girl,” Haney said.

“What?”

He looked down at his feet, all shy-like, and said, “I seen her,” looking up now with those dull eyes, “Real pretty.” He followed with a childlike chuckle.

I turned back to Grosetto, “Better let him in on the real world.”

Grosetto was smiling now, or trying to with that crooked mouth. “He usually gets what he wants.”

“Not this time,” I said.

No use arguing with idiots. When I got back to my office, I located my blackjack, a chunk of lead attached to a thick spring, covered with black leather, brand-named the Bighorn because, allegedly, it could coldcock a charging bighorn ram. I only used it twice back when I was a patrolman, and it worked well enough to incapacitate bigger, combative men. Then I put away my .38 and brought out my army issue Colt .45 caliber automatic and loaded it, switching holsters now. I needed something with stopping power.

I called upstairs and Kaye answered, telling me the baby and Charley were asleep.

“I need to get a couple things, okay?”

She let me in, and I quickly packed a suitcase with essentials and grabbed a couple suits and fresh shirts. Before stepping out, I waved her over and we whispered in the hall. I told her they owed Grosetto nothing. How? she wanted to know. I told her someone had given me a lot of money, and now I was giving them some.

“Charley won’t stand for it. We’ll pay you back.”

I shrugged, then watched her eyes as I told her I’d met Haney. She blanched, so I followed it with, “Back at Charity, why did you ask Charley if Haney asked where you were?”

She took a step back, crossed her arms, and said, “He’s my half brother.”

Sitting at my desk in my dark office, I watched the rain finally taper off.

“What about your parents?” I’d asked Kaye up in the hall. She told me her father was dead and her mother had abandoned her when she was five and wouldn’t say anything else about the matter, not even who had raised her.

I was thinking that at least they were safe for now, just as I spotted Haney standing next to the playground fence across the street. Didn’t take him long to find us. He stood there for a good ten minutes before coming across the street.

I expected the baseball bat, not the revolver stuck in the waistband of his suit pants as he stepped in the foyer of my building. I’d moved into the shadows next to the stairs, blackjack in my left hand. Slowly, I eased my right hand back to my .45 as he saw me and said softly, “Where is she?”

The sound of squealing tires behind him made him look over his shoulder. When he looked back I had my .45 pointed at his face and said, “That’ll be the cavalry.”

Two uniforms alighted from the black prowl car and came into the building with their guns out. It was Williams and Jeanfreau, both rookies when I was at the Third Precinct.

I lowered my weapon. “He’s got a gun in his waistband.”

Williams snatched Haney’s revolver, and Jeanfreau cuffed him and dragged him out.

“Aggravated assault, right?” Williams checked with me for the charge.

“Yeah. Hopefully he’s a convicted felon.” A felon with a firearm would hold Haney for quite a while.

“Thanks,” I called out to my old compadres. Williams called back, “Your call broke up the sergeant’s poker game. But only for a while.”

Charley sat shirtless at my kitchen table holding Donna with his good arm, Kaye in my terry cloth robe again, getting us coffee, them looking like a family now, and I had to tell them about Haney.

Kaye blanched at the news; Charley just nodded while Donna gurgled.

“How close are you?” I asked.

“I’m not even sure he is my half brother,” Kaye answered. “He claims to be. Claims my dad was his father. I never met him until he showed up at the hospital when Donna was born.”

She didn’t volunteer any more, and I didn’t want to cross-examine her, sitting at my table, all three adults sipping coffee, which wasn’t bad, and I’m picky about my coffee.

I turned to Charley and said, “We need to press charges against Grosetto. I’ll back you, and we’ll put the slimeball away. My buddy Detective Sullivan is chomping at the bit to nail him.”

Charley shook his head and told me, in careful, low tones, how he wanted Grosetto and Haney and all of it behind him, how he was going to pay me back whatever it cost me. I tried for the next half hour, but there was no changing his mind. He said he didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. God, he was so young.

The coffee kept me up a little while, but the rain came back that night, slapping against my office windows as I lay on my sofa bed. Why was I lying there? Why wasn’t I out on the town, dancing with a long tall blonde in a slinky dress? Maybe bringing her here or going to her place and helping her slip into something more comfortable, like my arms.

I knew the answer; it was upstairs with those kids. So I lay waiting for trouble to return, knowing it would.

Arriving at the Criminal Courts Building early, I searched the docket for Haney’s name, wanting to get a word in with the judge before his arraignment. When I couldn’t find his name, the acid in my stomach churned. I snatched up a pay phone in the lobby and called Parish Prison, speaking to the shift lieutenant who took his time but looked up the name for me.

“Haney. Yeah. Bonded out four thirty A.M.”

I asked more questions and got the obvious answers — a friendly judge and an even friendlier bail bondsman had Haney out before sunrise. The only surprise was that Haney had only two previous arrests, both misdemeanors, no convictions.

I should have gotten a speeding ticket on the way home, but no one was paying attention. Catching my breath when I reached the top of the stairs, I tapped lightly on the door. Even a bachelor knows better than to ring a doorbell with a baby inside. Kaye answered and I let out a relieved sigh, which disappeared immediately when she told me Charley wasn’t there.

“Where’d he go?”

“To work. Malone picked him up.” Her eyebrows furrowed when she saw the worried look in my eyes. I pointed to the phone, and she opened the door wider, telling me, “Malone said a one-armed Charley was better than any of his other mechanics.”

She knew the number by heart and I dialed. Malone answered after the fifth ring, and I warned him about Haney being out of jail.

“Didn’t know he was in jail.”

“Well, he had a gun last night, so be on the lookout.”

Then I called Sullivan to make sure the patrol boys did a drive-by at the Gulf Station before I went to see Grosetto.

He was behind the desk wearing the same lime green suit, sporting that same crooked, slimy grin when I walked in on him. The place still reeked of fish.

“Where’s Haney?”

Grosetto tried growling, which only made him look like a randy terrier instead of a gangster. His hands dropped below the desktop, and I turned my left shoulder to him, pulling out my .45, letting him get a look at it.

“Put your hands back on your desk, and they better be empty.”

“Who da’ heller you comin’ in here, tellin’ me what to do?”

“Where’s Haney?”

He tried smiling, but it looked more like a grimace. “I’m glad you come by. You needa tell Charley he owes another fifty. I, how you put it, miscalculated the amount.” This time it was a sickly smile, showing off yellowed teeth.

I shot his telephone, watched it bounce high, slam against the back wall, the loud report of my .45 echoing in my ears. Pointing it at his face now, I said. “Put your hands back on your desk.”

He did, his eyes bulging now. I backed up and locked the door behind me and came back to the desk as I holstered my weapon, slammed both hands against the desk, shoving it across the linoleum floor with him and his chair behind, pinning him against the wall.

“Tell Haney I’m looking for him.”

Three boxers and two trainers were in the narrow hall. They backed away cautiously when I opened my coat and showed them the .45, none of them saying anything until I started through the gym. A couple of brave ones cursed me behind my back but kept their distance.

I figured Haney was loony enough to come by, but it was Grosetto, just before midnight. He wore a gray dress shirt and black pants, and held his hands high as he stepped into the foyer. I was sitting in darkness, halfway up the stairs, in my shirt and pants, with my .45 in my right hand.

“That you?” he called out when I told him to freeze. I’d unscrewed the hall light.

“What do you want?”

“I come to tell you somethin’.”

I went and patted him down, closed and locked the building door, then shoved him into my office, leaving the door open. He smelled like cigarette smoke and stale beer. I made him stand still as I moved to my desk and leaned against it.

“All right, what is it?”

“I made a mistake. Charley don’t owe me nothin’.”

“Good.”

He tried smiling again, but it still didn’t work. “I checked on you. You got some rep. You know. War hero. Ex-cop. Bad when you gotta be bad.” He looked around my office for a second. “You check up on me?”

“In the dictionary. Under scumbag.”

“You funny. You owe me a phone, you know.”

Maybe it was the twitch in his eye or the way he sucked in a breath when I heard it, a thump upstairs. Grosetto should never play poker. It was in his eyes, and I was on him in three long strides, slamming the .45 against his pointed head, tumbling him out of my way.

I took the stairs three at a time, reaching the top as a gunshot rang out. My apartment door was open and a woman’s screaming voice echoed as I ran in, scene registering as I swung my .45 to the right toward the figure standing with a gun in hand. The gun turned toward me, and I fired twice. Haney bounced on his toes as the rounds punched his chest. The gun dropped, and he fell straight back, head ricocheting off an end table.

Kaye, with Donna in her arms, moved for Charley as he lay on the kitchen floor, a circle of bright red blood under him. Holstering my weapon, I leaped toward them as Kaye cradled his head in her lap.

He was conscious, a neat hole in his lower abdomen, blood oozing through his white undershirt. I jumped back to the phone and called for an ambulance. When I turned back, Charley was trying to sit up.

“Don’t!” I jumped into the kitchen, snatched an ice tray from the freezer, broke up the ice, wrapped it in a dishcloth, and got Kaye out of the way. Donna was screeching now. I pressed the ice against the wound and told Charley to keep calm, the ambulance would be right there. Then I remembered I’d locked the foyer door and had to go down for it.

Williams and Jeanfreau accompanied the ambulance, and they used my phone to call the detectives, while Charley was rolled out with Kaye and Donna in tow. He was still conscious.

“What’d you shoot him with?” Williams asked, pointing to the two large holes around Haney’s heart. I pointed to my .45, which I’d put on the kitchen counter before they came in.

It was then I remembered Grosetto and took Williams down to my office. The little man was just coming around. Williams slapped his cuffs on him and brought him up to have a look at Haney. He looked even younger in death. He was wearing a yellow shirt and dungarees, his eyes duller now, his face flaccid. His shoes were tied in double knots as if his mom had made sure they wouldn’t come undone.

It took the detectives forty minutes to arrive. I made coffee for all and was on my second cup when Lieutenant Frenchy Capdeville strolled in, trailing cigarette smoke, with a rookie dick at his heels. Frenchy needed a haircut badly, his black hair hung in loose curls over the collar of his brown suit.

His rookie partner had tried a pencil-thin mustache like Frenchy’s, but his was lopsided. “Joe Sparks,” Frenchy introduced him to me. Sparks, also in a brown suit, was sharp enough to keep quiet and let Frenchy run the show, which he did, quickly and efficiently.

After the coroner’s men took Haney away, they took me and Grosetto to the Detective Bureau, Frenchy calling in Eddie Sullivan. While they booked Grosetto, I gave a formal statement about the first man I’d shot since the war. Self-defense, defined in Louisiana’s Napoleonic Code Law, was justifiable homicide.

It didn’t take a detective to discover how Haney had come in the back way — through the broken fence of the building next door, across the back courtyard, and up the rear fire escape to break the hallway window.

“How’d he get in the apartment?” I asked Kaye as we sat in the hall at Charity Hospital the following morning, while Charley slept in the recovery ward. Dark circles around her eyes, she looked pale as she rocked Donna slowly. Thankfully, the baby was asleep.

“I heard scratching against the door and thought it was the cat, the black one that’s always around.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. He just shoved past me and shot Charley. Then he stood there looking at me.”

A nurse came out of Charley’s room and said, “He’s awake now.”

I didn’t go in. I went back home to look up my landlord.

Charley Rudabaugh spent six days in the hospital. When I brought him home and walked him past my apartment door to the rear apartment, he balked until Kaye opened the door and smiled at him.

“What’s going on?”

Kaye pulled him in and I stood in the doorway, amazed at what she’d done with the place in a few days. It came furnished, but she’d brightened up the place, replacing the dark curtains with yellow ones. Donna, lying on her back in a playpen in the center of the living room, was trying to play with a rubber duck, slapping at it and gurgling.

It took Charley a good minute to take in the scene as Kaye eased up and hugged him.

“Here’s the deal,” I told them over coffee at their kitchen table. “The landlord gave us a break on the place. I’m fronting y’all the money. You don’t have to pay me back, but if you insist, you can, but get on your feet first.” I’d just put any money they gave me in a bank account for Donna’s education.

Then I explained about how it really wasn’t my money. It had been a gift, and I was sharing it. “Everyone needs help sometimes. And you two have had a bad time recently.”

I could see Charley was still confused but not Kaye, beaming at him, paying little if any attention to me. I thanked her for the coffee and stood up to leave. Charley’s eyes narrowed as he asked, “I understand what you say, but it’s just hard to figure you ain’t got some kinda motive. Everybody does.”

I started for the door, turned, and said, “Sometimes things are exactly as they appear to be.”

Kaye moved to her daughter and began humming that same song, repeating the line in French again, “le coeur a...”

“What is that?” I had to ask.

“It’s the reason you’re doing all this.” She smiled at me, looking like a schoolkid in her white shirt and jeans. “An old French saying that goes, ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing’.” She smiled down at her baby.

It wasn’t until later, as I sat in my mother’s rocker looking out the open French doors of my apartment, out at the dark roofs of the Quarter with the moon beaming overhead, that I heard my mother’s voice back when she was young, a voice I haven’t heard for so long, as she sang, “le coeur a...”

Then it hit me.

The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing. Kaye hadn’t meant just me. It cut both ways. She’d also meant Haney, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing up.