Creole Belle

3

I couldn’t sleep that night. Clete had gone off to New Orleans on his own, leaving me with the choice of either dropping the dime on him with my boss or NOPD or letting him founder in the chaos and trail of destruction that had come to be his logo across the entire state. I slipped on my khakis and sat on the back steps and drank a glass of milk in the dark. Tripod, our pet raccoon, was sleeping under a big live oak in a hutch we had recently rain-proofed. His buddy Snuggs, our unneutered warrior cat, lay on his side next to me, his thick white short-haired tail flopping up and down on the wood step. His ears were chewed, his neck thick and hard as a fire hydrant, his body rippling with sinew when he walked. He was fearless in a fight, took no prisoners, and would chase dogs out of the yard if he thought they were a threat to Tripod. It was no accident that he and Clete were great pals.

I’m not being completely honest here. Clete’s problems were not my only concern. I was off the morphine drip, and every cell in my body knew it. Withdrawal from booze and pharmaceuticals is a bit like white-knuckling your way through a rough flight in an electric storm. Unfortunately, there’s another element involved, a type of fear that doesn’t have a name. It’s deep down in the id and produces a sense of anxiety that causes hyperventilation and night sweats. You don’t get to leave your fear on the plane. Your skin becomes your prison, and you take it with you everyplace you go. You walk the floor. You hide your thoughts from others. You eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting. You crosshatch the tops of your teeth in your sleep. Every mistake or misdeed or sin in your life, no matter how many times you’ve owned up to it, re-creates itself and takes a fresh bite out of your heart the moment you wake.

That’s why mainline cons say everybody stacks time; it depends on where you stack it, but you stack it just the same.

When the house finally comes down on your head, you conclude that ice cream is a poor surrogate for that old-time full-throttle-and-fuck-it rock and roll, and there’s nothing like four fingers of Jack in a mug filled with shaved ice and a beer on the side or maybe a little weed or a few yellow jackets to really light up the basement.

For those who don’t want to run up their bar tab or put themselves at the mercies of a drug dealer, there’s another recourse. You can go on what is called a dry drunk. You can stoke your anger the moment you open your eyes in the morning and feed it through the day, in the same way that someone incrementally tosses sticks on a controlled fire. Your anger allows you to mentally type up your own menu, with many choices on it. You can become a moralist and a reformer and make the lives of other people miserable. You can scapegoat others and inflame street mobs or highjack religion and wage wars in the name of a holy cause. You can spit in the soup from morning to night and stay as high as a helium balloon in a windstorm without ever breaking a sweat. When a drunk tells you he doesn’t have a problem anymore because he has quit drinking, flee his presence as quickly as possible.

As I looked out at the reflection of moonlight on the bayou, I thought of Tee Jolie Melton and the music that no one heard except me. Had I become delusional? Maybe. But here’s the rub. I didn’t care. Long ago I had come to believe that the world is not a rational place and that only the most self-destructive of individuals convince themselves that it is. Those who change history are always rejected in their own era. As a revolutionary people, we Americans won an improbable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don’t put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoliers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of howitzers loaded with chain and chopped-up horseshoes.

Somehow I knew with absolute certainty that not only had Tee Jolie visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue but that now, right at this moment, she was out there in the darkness beckoning, her mouth slightly parted, her mahogany tresses flecked with the golden glow of the buttercups that grew along the levees in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Our wetlands were cut by over eight thousand miles of channels that allowed a constant infusion of saline into freshwater marsh; our poorest communities were dumping grounds for chemical sludge trucked in from other states; and the Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie’s famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long. But I believed I could hear Tee Jolie’s voice rising out of the mists, her Acadian French lyrics as mournful as a dirge. Maybe all my perceptions and convictions were the stuff one expects of a dry drunk or, in this instance, a drunkard who had to wet his lips each time he thought about the slow seep of a translucent tube into his veins. No matter how it played out, my vote would always remain with those who’d had their souls shot out of a cannon and who no longer paid much heed to the judgment of the world.

I would like to say that all my cerebral processes gave me a solution to my problems. The opposite was true. At sunrise, when steam rose off the bayou and the tidal current reversed itself and I heard the drawbridge at Burke Street clanking into the air, I still had no answer to two essential questions: What had happened to Tee Jolie Melton, and how had a collection of low-rent gumballs gotten their hands on a bourre marker that Clete Purcel paid off two decades ago?

At 7:45 A.M. I walked down East Main and up the long driveway past the city library and the shady grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother and entered the side door of the sheriff’s department and knocked on Helen Soileau’s door. Helen had started her career as a meter maid with NOPD and had worked herself up to the level of patrol-woman in a neighborhood that included the Desire Projects. Later, she became a detective with the department in New Iberia, the town where she had grown up. For several years she had been my partner in our homicide unit, overcoming all the prejudices and suspicions that people have toward women in general and lesbians in particular. She had been the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation and brought to task because of her romantic involvement with a female confidential informant. She had received three citations for bravery and meritorious service. She had been Clete Purcel’s lover. Last, there had been occasions when Helen looked at me with an androgynous light in her eyes and I found it necessary to leave the room and devote myself to other duties in the building.

I told her about Clete’s problems with Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly and about Grimes’s invasion of Alice Werenhaus’s home. I also told her about the disappearance of Tee Jolie and her sister, Blue Melton, in St. Martin Parish.

“Dave, no matter what Clete does or does not do, Ms. Werenhaus is going to file charges with NOPD against Grimes,” she said. “Let them do their job.”

“There’s no evidence it was Grimes,” I replied.

“Maybe they’ll create some.”

“Things have changed since you and I worked there.”

She picked up a ballpoint pen and stuck the end between her teeth while she stared flatly into my face. “What Clete does in New Orleans is his business. I don’t want to hear about it again. Got it?”

“No. What do you think happened to Tee Jolie?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her exasperation barely constrained. “You say you saw her at your recovery unit. Why do you think anything happened to her?”

I didn’t have an adequate answer for that one.

“Hello? Are there two of us in the room, or did you just take flight?” she asked.

“Tee Jolie was afraid. She was talking about centralizers.”

“About what?”

“She said she was scared. She said she was around dangerous people.”

“If we’re talking about the same person, she has a promiscuous reputation, Dave. Bad things happen to girls who drop their panties for bad guys.”

“That’s a rotten thing to say.”

“Too bad. It’s the truth. Didn’t she sing in that zydeco dump by Bayou Bijoux?”

“So what?”

“It’s a place where guys in suits and ties hunt on the game farm.”

“What you’re suggesting is that she deserved her fate.”

“It’s a real pleasure to have you back on the job.”

“You’re dead wrong about Tee Jolie.”

She tapped her ballpoint on the desk blotter, her eyelids fluttering, her gaze focused on neutral space. “How should I say this? Tell you what, I won’t even try. Thank you for all this information that has nothing to do with crimes committed in Iberia Parish. In the future, bwana put it in writing so I can look at it and then file it in the trash basket. That way bwana and I can both save loads of time.”

Before I could speak, she jiggled her fingers at me and widened her eyes and silently mouthed, Get out of here.

Bix Golightly didn’t like the way things were going. Not with the squeeze on Purcel, not with this nutcase kid Grimes attacking an ex-nun, not with the general state of cultural collapse in New Orleans. If you asked him, Katrina was a blessing in disguise, hosing out the projects when nothing else worked. This artsy-fartsy renaissance stuff needed to get washed off the streets, too. What did poets and sidewalk painters and guys blowing horns on the corners for pocket change have to do with rebuilding a city? “It’s a publicity scam run by these Hollywood actors whose careers are washed up,” he told his friends. “We shipped out the boons and got hit with half the panhandlers in San Francisco. You ever been to San Fran? I went into a steam room in a part of town named after Fidel Castro, which shows you what kind of neighborhood it is, and there were two dozen guys having a Crisco party. The door was jammed or something, and it took me almost half an hour to fight my way out of there.”

For Bix, the city was a safe and predictable place when it was under the supervision of the Giacanos. Everybody knew the rules: Tourists got what they wanted; any vice was acceptable in the Quarter except narcotics; jackrollers had their sticks broken, by either the Giacanos or NOPD; no bar operator double-billed a drunk’s credit card; the hookers were clean and never rolled a john; pimps didn’t run Murphy scams; street dips or anybody washing Jersey money at a cardhouse or the horse track got their thumbs cut off; no puke from the Iberville Projects would strong-arm a tourist in the St. Louis cemeteries unless he wanted to see the world through one eye; and child molesters became fish chum.

What was wrong with any of that?

Before Katrina, Bix owned a corner grocery store on the edge of the Quarter, a seafood business across the river in Algiers, and a car wash in Gentilly. The grocery was looted and vandalized and the car wash buried in mud when the levees burst, but to Bix these were not significant losses. His seafood business was another matter. The gigantic plumes of oil from the blowout in the bottom of the Gulf had fanned through the oyster beds and shrimping grounds all along the Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama coastline. Not only had Bix seen his most lucrative business slide down the bowl, he’d lost his one means to declare his illegal income, such as the two big scores he’d pulled off in Fort Lauderdale and Houston, one jewelry heist alone amounting to eighty grand, less the 40 percent to the fence.

How do you end up with that much money and nowhere to put it besides a hole in your backyard? Now Waylon Grimes had busted into the house of an ex-nun and poured scalding water on her, and the Times-Picayune had put the story on the front page. The more Bix thought about Grimes, the angrier he got. He picked up his cell phone from the coffee table and went out on the balcony of his apartment, dialing Grimes’s number. The evening sky was pink, the wind warm and cool at the same time, the palm trees on the apartment grounds rattling drily. He should be out on the town, dialing up a lady or two, having a dinner in a cafe on St. Charles, not dealing with all this grief. What had he done to deserve it? Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a maroon Caddy with a starch-white top pass through the intersection.

Grimes picked up. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Guess.”

“Who is this?”

“ Who is this? Who do you think, asshole?” Bix said.

“In case it’s escaped your attention, I’m not feeling too good, and I’ve already told you what happened, and I don’t need any more of your bullshit, Bix.”

“Did I hear right? You don’t need my bullshit. If an elephant is sleeping, you don’t take a dump on its head and wipe your ass with its trunk and stroll off down the street.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think I just saw Purcel’s car go through the intersection.”

“It was you who threatened Purcel’s family, not me.”

“The point is, I wasn’t gonna do anything.”

“How is Purcel supposed to know that? Most people around here think you got brain damage.”

“Where are you?” Bix asked.

“What do you care?”

“I want to give you your cut on the Houston job. Are you at that fuck pad you got?”

“You said the fence hadn’t paid you.”

“He just did.”

“It’s true you bit off the nose of the psychiatrist at Angola?”

“No, it’s not true, you little bitch. My cellmate did. You want to know what I’m gonna do if you don’t clean up this mess?”

“Speak slower, will you? I’m taking notes on this so I can send Purcel a kite and tell him what you got planned for his family.”

Bix’s hand was opening and closing on the cell phone, his fingers sticking to the surface. “You got twenty large coming. You want it or not?”

“Change your twenty large into nickels and shove them up your nose. While you’re at it, go fuck yourself, because no broad is gonna do it. I heard some guys in the AB say you were queer bait and on the stroll at Angola. Is that why you never get laid?”

Before Bix could reply, the connection went dead, and he found himself squeezing the cell phone so tightly he almost cracked the screen. There was a pain behind his eyes as if someone had hammered a nail into his temple. He tried to concentrate and rid his head of all the energies that seemed to devour him from dawn to dusk. What was that word people were always using? Focus? Yeah, that was it. Focus. He heard the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the streetcar reversing itself for the return trip up St. Charles Avenue. Music was playing in a cafe over on Carrollton. Then a Hispanic guy who looked like a pile of frijoles came roaring around the side of the building on a mower that didn’t have a bag or muffler on it, the discharge chute firing a steady stream of grass clippings and ground-up palm fronds and dog turds against the walls. Screw focus, Bix thought.

“Hey, you! The greaseball down there! Yeah, you!” Bix shouted. “Hey, I’m talking here!”

The driver, who was wearing ear protectors, smiled stupidly at the balcony and kept going.

“Think that’s funny?” Bix said. He waited until the mower had made a turn and was passing under the balcony again. The flowerpot he picked up was packed with dirt and a root-bound palm and felt as heavy as a cannonball. Bix gripped the pot solidly with both hands, judging distance and trajectory like a bombardier, and lobbed it into space.

He couldn’t believe what happened next. He not only missed the gardener and the mower; just as he let fly, the neighbor’s poodle, whom Bix called the Barking Roach, ran out from the patio below and got knocked senseless by the pot. Then the driver swung the mower in a circle to cut another swath in the opposite direction and crunched over the broken pot and the compacted dirt and the palm plant and its exposed roots and shredded all of them without ever noticing that Bix had just tried to brain him. The only break Bix got was the fact that the Barking Roach ran back into its apartment and, unless it knew Morse code, wouldn’t be able to report him.

Before Bix could reload for a second shot, he saw the maroon Caddy come around the corner and park in front of a refurbished double-shotgun house called the Maple Street Bookstore. Maybe it wasn’t Purcel, Bix thought. What would an albino ape be doing in a bookstore, particularly one named Purcel, unless it sold porn or bananas? Time to stop messing around and get to the bottom of things. He Velcro-strapped a. 25 auto on his ankle, pulled his trouser cuff over the grips, and headed downstairs.

He crossed the street and took up a position in front of the bookstore, leaning back on the Caddy’s fender, his arms folded comfortably on his chest. Five minutes later, Purcel came out with a couple of books in a plastic sack, wearing cream-colored pleated slacks and oxblood loafers and a pale blue long-sleeve shirt and a straw hat that had a black band around the crown, like he was some kind of planter in the islands instead of an alcoholic bail-skip chaser for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. “You dogging me?” Bix said.

“Get off my car.”

“I asked you a question.”

“If I was following you around, would I park my car next to your crib?”

“It ain’t a crib. It’s a condo. You want Waylon Grimes, or do you just want to look through people’s windows?”

“What I want is your germs off my fender.”

“Relax. We go back, right? Old school. I didn’t sic Grimes on your secretary.”

“Who said it was Grimes?” Clete asked.

“Maybe it wasn’t. What I’m saying is I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Clete unlocked the driver’s door and threw his books on the seat. “You threatened to harm my sister and niece. You think you’re going to walk off from that?”

Bix stepped up on the curb, away from the car, flexing his neck the way he used to before he came out of his corner in the first round, both gloves flying into his opponent’s face. “You’re a bum and your word don’t mean anything, Purcel. Sorry your secretary got hurt, but it’s on you, not me.” He squeezed his penis and pulled it taut against his slacks. “You don’t like that, bite my stick.”

“Here’s what doesn’t make sense, Bix. Why is it that after all these years you guys end up with an old marker you think you can use to steal my home and my office? Who could think up a harebrained scheme like that?”

“I told you. Frankie Giacano opened up Didi Gee’s safe as a favor for somebody.”

“For who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where was the safe?”

“At the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. How would I know? Ask Frankie Gee.”

“I think you’re lying. Didi Gee kept a two-thousand-pound safe right by his aquarium, the one that was full of piranhas. I don’t think that safe went anywhere. I did some checking on the ownership of Didi’s old building. It’s owned by a guy named Pierre Dupree. Is that the guy y’all got the marker from?”

“This is all over my head.”

“You look a little uncomfortable, Bix. You don’t have a meth problem, do you?”

“I don’t have any kind of problem,” Bix said, leaning forward, pointing his stiffened fingers into his own chest. “It’s you who’s got the problem, Purcel. You were a dirty cop. Everybody laughed at you behind your back. Why do you think our whores slept with you? It’s because Didi Gee told them to. I put you in a cab once outside the Dos Marinos. You had puke on your clothes and cooze on your face. Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I think you’re scared.”

“Of you?”

“No, of somebody else. I think you and your lamebrain friends went out on your own and ended up stepping in your own shit. Now you’ve gotten somebody else jammed up, and they’re about to clamp jumper cables on your ears. That’s it, isn’t it, or something close to it?”

“What gave you this brilliant idea?”

“All this time you haven’t said anything about money. Every one of you guys has got only one thing on the brain, and it’s money. Y’all never talk about anything else. Not sex, not sports, not politics, not your families. You talk about money from morning to night. You never get enough of it, you don’t give five cents of it away, and you don’t tip in restaurants unless you can make a production out of it. For you guys, greed is a virtue. But there hasn’t been one peep out of you about the money you say I owe you. Are you hooked up with some kind of new action in the city? Something besides smash-and-grab scores on old people?”

“Maybe I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. You want Grimes, I’ll give you Grimes.”

“I didn’t think AB guys did that.”

“So I’m making an exception. Grimes deserves anything that happens to him. Also, I’m tearing up your marker.”

“You already missed your opportunity. I’ll find Grimes on my own. If I discover you told him to hurt Miss Alice, I’m going to cancel your whole ticket. In the meantime, you might start thinking about giving back your ink.”

“Say again?”

Clete Purcel pulled a small recorder from his pants pocket and rewound it until he isolated the moment when Bix had said he was making an exception to the code of the Aryan Brotherhood and was willing to rat out Waylon Grimes. “By tomorrow this will be on several Aryan-supremacist message boards.”

“You can’t do that, man.”

“Get on the Internet in the morning. You’re going to be a celebrity. Maybe I can get some pics from your jacket and post them on there.” Clete Purcel got in the Caddy and turned the ignition, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. “Look, go to a psychiatrist. Get some help. Getting over on you is like cruelty to animals. It’s really depressing.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, man. Hey, come back here. Come on, Purcel, we always got along. Hey, man, you don’t know what you’re doing. We’re old school, right?”

It was almost ten P.M. when Clete called me at the house. “I creeped Bix Golightly’s crib. His toilet seat is inlaid with silver dollars. His interior decorator must do the decor for cathouses.”

“You broke into Golightly’s apartment?”

“I got into his phone records and listened to all the messages on his machine. I also got into his computer. He’s a degenerate gambler. He must have half a dozen bookies and shylocks after him. That’s why he was trying to squeeze me. I think he’s been trying to fence some stolen paintings, too. Or forgeries. He had written some e-mails about an Italian painter. What does a guy like Golightly know about art?”

“Where are you now?”

“Over in Algiers. Golightly is parked by an old brick apartment building. I think that’s where Grimes is holed up.”

“Get out of there.”

“No, I’m going to take the pair of them down.”

“That’s really dumb, Clete.”

“So is letting one of them pour scalding water on my secretary.”

“Why’d you call me?”

“In case it doesn’t go right, I want you to know what happened. This is what I think is going on. Golightly is working for somebody he’s afraid of. He and Frankie Giacano got ahold of my marker and decided to score a few easy bucks, then somebody else came down on their case. Now Golightly is sweating marbles on several fronts. The old-time Giacanos always behaved like family men and lived in the suburbs and didn’t draw attention to themselves. Golightly and Frankie and Grimes broke the rule.”

“Are you carrying a drop?”

“I always carry one.”

“Don’t do what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t let myself know what I’m thinking. So how can I do what I’m thinking if I don’t know what I’m thinking? Lighten up, big mon.”

Try arguing with a mind-set like that.

Clete folded his cell phone and set it on the passenger seat of the Caddy. He was parked behind a truck on a tree-lined street in an old residential neighborhood of Algiers that had gone to seed and been rezoned for commercial development. Across the Mississippi, he could see the lights of the French Quarter and the black outline of the docks on the Algiers side and a greasy shine on the surface of the river. Bix Golightly’s van was parked just beyond the streetlamp at the corner, in the lee of a two-story purple brick building, Bix puffing on a cigarette behind the wheel, the window half down, smoke drifting in the wind.

Why didn’t Bix go in? Clete wondered. Was he waiting for Grimes to go to bed? Was he planning to pop him? It was possible. Bix usually hired button men, homicidal morons like Grimes, to do payback for him, but now his voice was on tape blowing off the AB, and in the meantime he’d probably brought some extra heat down on himself for queering somebody else’s action. Would Bix cap a guy like Grimes to wipe at least part of the slate clean?

Would anybody who knew Bix Golightly even ask the question?

Clete reached into his glove box and removed a. 32 auto that was one cut above junk. The numbers were acid-burned, the wood grips wrapped with electrician’s tape, the sight filed off. He dropped it in his coat pocket and got out of the Caddy and walked up the street in the shadows of the buildings. He saw Bix take a final hit off his cigarette and flick it sparking onto the asphalt. Showtime, Clete thought.

Then he realized why Bix had remained in his van. Two city cops came out of a corner cafe on the side street and got in their cruiser and drove through the intersection and on down toward the river. Ironically, they paid no attention to the van, but the cop in the passenger seat looked directly at Clete. The cruiser’s brake lights went on briefly, then it turned at the next intersection, and Clete knew he had not only been made, but by cops who considered him an adversary.

He reversed direction, got in the Caddy, throwing the drop in the glove box, and backed all way through an alley until he popped out on the next street, one block away, his mouth dry, his heart beating. He turned off his engine, his breath coming hard in his chest, and knew with no doubt what he had been planning for Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes.

Just rein it in, he thought. You can still take them down. It doesn’t have to be for the whole ride.

Right?

Right, he answered himself.

He waited until he was sure the cruiser had left the neighborhood, then he got out of the Caddy and began walking up the alley toward the street where Golightly’s van was parked.

The inside of the apartment building was poorly lighted and smelled of old wallpaper and carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in months. Bix climbed the stairs to the second floor, taking them three at a time, pulling on the banister with the elasticity of a simian swinging through the trees. He felt a sense of anticipation he hadn’t experienced in years. The blood-pounding rush of a big score had long ago faded into a memory, like the joys of sex or flashing money at the track. Intravenous drugs once were a great source of pleasure and secret comfort, but they no longer got him high and he shot up only to maintain, as they said in the trade. Which meant he was a zero plugged into the end of a needle. The vices he could easily afford had become bland and uninteresting, and there were days when Bix felt that someone had done a smash-and-grab on his life.

He walked down a hallway that was lit by low-wattage bulbs inside fluted shades gray with dust, the wallpaper stiff from water seepage, the fire escape framed against the glow of the Quarter across the river. He paused in front of a door that had a metal number seven on it and slipped a credit card from his wallet and started to wedge it between the lock and the doorjamb, then realized the door was unlocked. He replaced the card in his wallet and put his wallet in his side pocket and peeled the Velcro strap off the. 25 auto strapped to his ankle. He twisted the knob a second time and stepped quickly inside the room.

It was almost totally dark. A digital clock glowed on top of a stereo; a television set was playing in the bedroom, the sounds of a woman in orgasm bleating from the speakers. Bix held the. 25 behind him, staring into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. “Waylon?” he said.

There was no response.

“It’s Bix. I got a little hotheaded on the phone. I’m getting too old and don’t know how to hold my water sometimes.”

The only sound in the room came from the porn film.

“Hey, Waylon, what’s going on?”

Bix felt on the wall for the light switch, the. 25 flat against his thigh. Then his hand froze on the switch. He stared at the silhouette of a man sitting in a cloth-covered chair, the red glow of the clock reflecting a nickel-plated revolver the man was holding casually in his lap.

“Jesus Christ, Waylon!” Bix said. “You trying to give me a coronary?”

He eased the. 25 into his back pocket, successfully concealing it from Grimes. He wiped his palm on his trousers. “This is your fuck pad? Where do you pick up your broads? At the Lighthouse for the Blind?”

Bix waited for Waylon to speak. Then he said, “You want to put your piece away? Let’s have a drink, then we’ll go down to my van and I’ll give you the twenty large you got coming. We’ll forget about Purcel and the nun. Are you listening? Somebody slip you a hot shot?”

Bix hooked his thumb under the light switch, paused briefly, then flicked it on.

Waylon Grimes did not move, not an inch. His right hand rested on the frame and cylinder of a Vaquero. 357. His head was tilted back slightly into the upholstery, his mouth partly open. One eye seemed to be fixed on Bix, as though he had been taking a nap and been disturbed by an unwelcome visitor. The other eye had been blown back into the socket, the lid hanging halfway down.

Bix let out his breath. “Hey, who screwed the pooch?” he said, turning in a circle, his piece held out in front of him. “Is there anybody else here? If there is, I got no beef with you. I was here to pay a debt, that’s all. You heard me say it.”

He felt like a fool. Was he losing his guts? He went into the bedroom and the bath and the kitchen, but there was no sign of a burglary. He replaced the. 25 in its holster and pulled a hand towel from the rack in the kitchen and wiped the inside doorknob, then stepped out in the hallway and wiped the outside doorknob and stuck the towel in his pocket. Had he missed anything? He couldn’t think. He had touched the doorknobs and nothing else. He was sure of that. Time to boogie and think through complexities after he was clear of Grimes’s pad.

He went back down the stairs and exited the building without being seen, the wind cool on his face and hair, the smell of the river balm to his soul. How lucky can a guy get? he thought. Somebody else had snuffed Grimes, and now Bix was home free, not only on the Purcel scam but on the invasion of the nun’s house and the twenty grand he owed Grimes. He could use the money to square his debts and maybe get into a program for his addiction. Thanks, Waylon. I never thought you could do me so many favors. I hope you enjoy your ride in a body bag to the mortuary.

But who had popped him? That one was up for grabs. Plenty of people hated the punk, including Purcel and the parents of the kid Grimes had killed. Yeah, it could have been Purcel, Bix thought. Grimes must have known the killer, because there was no forced entry. Grimes always had two or three guns stashed around his crib and must have tried to make a play with his. 357. It was probably hidden under the chair cushion; he had gone for it, and Purcel had parked one in his eyeball. If that was true, maybe Bix could squeeze a few bucks out of Purcel after all, or see him go down on a murder beef. How sweet could it get?

Or maybe one of Grimes’s broads did it. There were stories that he liked to hang them up on a hook and work them over with leather gloves or make them play Russian roulette. Grimes was definitely not into long-term female relationships. Who cared, anyway? It was a great night. Time to celebrate, have a few champagne cocktails with a lady friend or two, maybe shoot craps at Harrah’s. This was still his city. Then he had a thought. What would make this whole caper perfect? What if he planted evidence implicating Purcel? He had plenty of time. Nobody would find Grimes until he started rotting into the chair. Bix knew a house creep who would steal something out of Purcel’s office and plant it in the apartment for a few lines of unstepped-on blow.

Bix walked down to the van, tossing his keys in the air and catching them, a song in his heart. He opened the door and got in and peeled the Velcro-strapped holster off his ankle and locked it in the glove box. It was no time to get stopped and frisked in Algiers. He inserted the key in the ignition, lighting a cigarette, blowing the smoke at an upward angle out the window, like a dragon that could breathe fire.

He had paid no attention to a figure standing in a doorway across the street. The figure stepped into the light and walked toward the van, wearing a red windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and tight-fitting jeans tucked inside suede boots. The figure’s hands were in plain view. Bix started the engine but did not shift into gear, his cigarette hanging from his mouth, his grin stretched as tight as rubber.

“Is that you, Caruso?” he said. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

The figure did not speak.

“I took a wrong turn off the bridge,” Bix said. “I ought to know better, growing up here and all. You want to get coffee or something? I’m supposed to close a couple of deals tonight. It’s part of a charity drive with the chamber of commerce, can you believe that?”

The figure leaned down as though determining if anyone else was in the van, then stepped back, glancing up and down the street.

“You can come along if you like,” Bix said. “I belong to an all-night health club. We can play some handball. I’m trying to get off of cigarettes and lose some other bad habits I got. Funny seeing you in Algiers. I always lived in the Quarter or uptown and never really dug the lifestyle over here. If it’s not in the Quarter or up St. Charles, it’s not New Orleans. It’s like Muskogee, Oklahoma, you know, downtown Bum Fuck with Merle Haggard singing songs about it. Jump in and we’ll take a spin across the bridge. From the bridge, the lights of the city are beautiful. When you visit New Orleans, you ought to call me. I know all the famous places you won’t find on any map. You want to see the house where that vampire novelist used to live? I can show you the rooftop where the sniper killed all those people in the Quarter. I was born and bred in this city. I’m your man. Believe me, Caruso, Algiers sucks. Why the fuck would you want to hang out here?”

Bix stuck another cigarette in his mouth without ever missing a beat, forgetting he had left one in the ashtray, the cigarette in his mouth bouncing on his bottom lip while he talked on and on, his dignity draining through the soles of his shoes.

Then he felt an engine inside him wind down and stop. He looked at the glove box where he had locked his. 25 auto and became silent. He lifted his eyes to the figure standing by the window and removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth. He started to speak, but the words would not come out right. He sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed and tried again. When he heard his own words, he was surprised at the level of calm in them: “You ought to come here during Mardi Gras. Like Wolfman Jack used to say, it’s a toe-curlin’ blast,” he said.

The figure lifted a silenced. 22 auto and pointed it with both hands and fired three times into Bix Golightly’s face, hitting him twice in the forehead and once in the mouth, clipping his cigarette in half, the ejected casings tinkling like tiny bells on the asphalt.

The shooter bent over and picked up the ejected rounds as dispassionately and diligently as someone recovering coins dropped on a beach. From the edge of the alleyway, Clete watched the figure walk down the street through a cone of light under a streetlamp and disappear inside the darkness. The shooter’s windbreaker reminded him of the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then the shooter reversed direction and came back toward the streetlamp and seemed to stare momentarily at the alleyway, uncertain or bemused. Clete edged deeper into the alley. His. 38 was clenched in his right hand, the grips biting into his palm, his pulse jumping in his neck. He pressed himself into the brick wall, his own body odor climbing into his nostrils, a vaporlike coldness wrapping itself around his heart. His blood was pounding so loudly in his ears that he couldn’t be sure if the shooter spoke or not. Then he heard the shooter walk away, whistling a tune. Was it “The San Antonio Rose”? Or was he losing his mind?