Dead Man

14

Night — soft, warm, moist, seductive — handcuffed New Orleans to the Vieux Carré’s blocked-off Bourbon Street like a kinky lover. Exotic underwear shops, crowded cheek by jowl with po’boy sandwich stands, displayed teddies and chemises and lace body stockings with open crotch panels for easy access. Traditional jazz poured out into the night from open doorways at the crowds of shirt-sleeve and summer-dress tourists.

Jimmy Zimmer strolled along a side street, stopped outside Carnal Knowledge where two strippers sprawled on straight chairs just outside the open doorway, loose meaty thighs spread wide to catch the cool outside breeze and the eye of passing males. He moved inside, stood near the stage, looking much seedier than he had in Chicago less than three weeks earlier. He seemed jumpy and determined, his eyes almost mean behind their horn-rims, his skin pale as if he spent all his time indoors.

Vangie’s face registered consternation when she saw Jimmy arrive. She was hand-cut crystal in a display of Coke bottles, her body moving to the music by its own volition. Rednecks shrieked obscenities at her, college boys made explicit suggestions, two black-leather lesbians moaned sexual dreams.

Through a gap in the fake plush curtains, Harry the Manager watched her as avidly as any john. He was a short man with a degenerate face; his bald pate, fringed with dandruff-flecked brown hair, gleamed with the urgent sweat of his thoughts.

When the music ended, Vangie came hurriedly through the curtain wearing only the required cache-sexe, her otherwise nude and magnificent body gleaming as if oiled. She had to corral Jimmy and send him hustling back to their room before her next show, and before he...

But Harry was right beside her, his short fat legs trotting to match her long muscular strides. “Baby, you’re terrific! In two weeks you’ve almost doubled the gross!”

“So double my salary, Harry.”

“Funny! Funny! Listen, baby, how about you be nice to me? I got friends. I can do you a lot of good in this town.”

She had just enough time between numbers to do it if... But Harry’s greedy fingers half cupped the ivory cone of one of her naked breasts as she tried to get through the dressing room door. She stepped back with a look of utter revulsion.

“Jesus, what a turd!” she said in a low, despairing voice.

Harry crowded her back against the door frame, grabbed her hand, pressed it against the bulging front of his pants.

“Feel it, baby! C’mon, feel it!”

She bent his little finger back, he squealed and let her go as she darted through the doorway and slammed the door an inch from his nose. She shot the bolt, yelled through the door.

“Go jerk off into a Handi-Wipe!”

Harry smashed the heel of his hand against the wall and turned away with a vicious, congested look. Inside, Vangie put her head down on her arms. Oh God, for just a little release from pressure! She raised her head and looked at her reflection in the mirror. The makeup lights made her look garish and cheap.

“They don’t lie,” she said aloud to her reflection.

She had $2 million in bearer bonds but still had to dance until four in the morning because it wouldn’t be safe to cash them in for another six months. Two million! Freedom. A way out. Worth whatever it took, worth doing damn near anything. The music reverberated through the walls and she stood up.

If only Jimmy didn’t bring the hunters down on them in the meantime.

Dain, backlit for a moment by the lights of a turning automobile, looked hulking and pitiless. It was ten o’clock and San Francisco’s financial district was zipped up for the night except for a few old-style restaurants like Schroeder’s down on Front Street. As he passed the Russ Building’s inset entrance, Moe Wexler fell in beside him to hand over a small flat packet a few inches in diameter.

“Great work, Moe. But why all the cloak-and-dagger?”

Moe’s eyes were constantly shifting, probing the empty street ahead and behind them. “When I went to check the apartment bug tonight, there was another one in place that wasn’t there before.” His roving eyes slid across Dain, were gone again. “Ah... what if we’re talking Maxton here?”

“I thought Maxton didn’t bother you any.”

“Yeah, well, that was talk, this is the real world, like.”

Moe peeled off into Sutter Street. Dain kept going down Montgomery to Market, his face thoughtful.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his loft, a yellow Walkman Sport beside his thigh, listening again to Moe’s tape. Shenzie listened also, head cocked to one side as if waiting at a mouse hole. The voice talked of the bonds with remarkable clarity.

“Nothing wrong with them, is there?” asked Farnsworth in a jocular voice. “Not forged? Counterfeit? Stolen?”

“Good God no!” Zimmer’s voice was high-pitched and full of fear. A voice that looked over its shoulder as it talked.

“Then take them to our Chicago office and—”

“I’m out of town.”

Farnsworth’s voice said, “Out of town where?”

“N... I can’t tell you that.”

Dain hit the stop button.

“Hear it, Shenzie? Hear the ‘N’ he didn’t quite swallow?”

Dain punched EJECT to pop out the cassette. Shenzie reached out a sudden delicate paw and struck the Walkman three times, very quick light blows, then whirled and ran to the far corner of the bed where he crouched, glaring balefully. Dain ignored the histrionics.

“Just what I told you, cat. Hiding in her life, not his.” He tapped the cassette thoughtfully against his open palm. “But just who put the other bug on Farnsworth’s apartment phone?”

Shenzie said meow, then relaxed his baleful stance to wash himself with a delicate pink tongue. Dain picked up the phone. “You’re gonna visit Randy for a few days, cat. He volunteered.”

In the Vieux Carré, Vangie and Zimmer walked away from the far sad dying sounds of Bourbon Street. It was four in the morning. Around them were darkened windows, rumbling garbage trucks, early delivery vans; ahead, a darkened movie theater marquee with light spilling out across the sidewalk beyond it.

“Jimmy, I thought we’d agreed you’d stay off the street until I could get together another traveling stake for us.”

“I’m taking care of the traveling stake,” boasted Jimmy.

Since the bond theft, their original sexual relationship had developed an almost mother/son dimension. Vangie grabbed his arm and hurried him toward the light laid across the sidewalk beyond the darkened theater.

“I don’t want to hear this — but I’ve got to hear it.”

They passed under the sagging marquee. Half its unlit bulbs were broken. It advertised a triple bill: Caught fromBehind, Stiff Lunch, Nympho Queens in Bondage. Beyond was the DELTA HOTEL — DAY — Week — Month — Maid Service, with rooms on the upper floors above the theater.

In the rear of the lobby a sallow-faced clerk dozed behind the check-in desk. A huge slow floor fan was trying to stir around the heat and perhaps shove some of it out the open door. Two shirt-sleeved white men and three black men seeking some illusory coolness not to be found in their rooms sat there despite the hour, wide-kneed and slack. Vangie half dragged Zimmer back toward the elevator. Their eyes followed her across the lobby as most men’s eyes would always follow Vangie.

Zimmer was babbling. “See, Vangie, what I did was—”

“In the room, honey.”

“But you have to understand that—”

“In the room.”

It was a room where love and hope would bleed to death, blessedly dark except for street light leaking around the drawn window curtain. Vangie locked the door, Zimmer switched on the single low-watt overhead. Vangie got a flat brown pint of bourbon from the dresser, at the sink poured some of it into the glass from the toothbrush holder, added tap water. She leaned against the sink to face Jimmy with glass in hand.

“Okay, Jimmy,” she said wearily, “hit me.”

“I called Bobby Farnsworth tonight.”

Despair entered her eyes, but somewhere she found a smile to paste on her mouth. “What’d you call him?”

“You know what I mean, Vangie — on the telephone.”

“Okay, what’d you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything. He told me things. What’s the matter with you anyway?” His voice had a febrile hostility; since he’d found in Vangie the strength he could never possess himself, he had to rebel against it. “I got the bonds for us.”

“Yes, Jimmy.” She took a big gulp of her drink, made a face. “You got the bonds for us.”

“Now I’m going to get us the money for the bonds.”

“Or get us killed.”

“Why do you always have to belittle everything I do?” His face was petulant, his voice whiny. “I told Bobby I was out of town with some bearer bonds, and he told me how to convert them. I didn’t even leave him a phone number or anyplace where—”

“We agreed we didn’t touch the bonds for six months, didn’t we, Jimmy?” Vangie set her glass in the sink. “Here it is less than three weeks, you’re calling a broker already.”

“It’s easy for you. I’m stuck in this cockroach palace staring at the walls, while you...” His voice had been rising, suddenly he was shrieking, his face red, veins standing out along the sides of his neck. “While you get your rocks off shaking your titties for a bunch of fucking rednecks!”

Vangie seized her breasts and squeezed them cruelly. “You think having guys do this to you is fun?” she cried.

Then as fast as it had come, her anger was gone. She shivered and poured the rest of her drink down the sink.

“I know it’s hard for you to be cooped up here, honey, but as soon as I’ve gotten us together a traveling stake, we’ll move on, I’ll get a waitressing job—”

“And make extra money on your back in the private room?”

She sighed and went to look out the window, standing with one knee on the edge of the bed, her other foot on the floor. It was an unconscious pose of great grace, a dancer’s pose. Her voice was harsh and strained.

“Why don’t I just split with the bonds and leave you here for Maxton to find? Who the hell needs you?”

“Vangie, don’t talk that way!” He came up behind her, slid his hands under her arms. “Vangie, please, I... I love you. I want...” His hands cupped her breasts as he kissed the nape of her neck. “I need to make love to you, need to know that...”

She shook him off without turning, irritation in her face.

“Jimmy, Jimmy, there’s somebody coming after us and all you want to do is fuck. Can’t you feel him out there?” “All I feel is your rejection of me.”

He used his chastised-child voice. Vangie wasn’t hearing.

“Once I saw a deer some dogs had been running, Jimmy. They lost its scent, he came down to the bayou to drink.” She paused to lay her forehead against the cool window pane. “Usually deer, they just stay on the bank, sort of nuzzle aside the lily pads and duckweed and dead vegetation to drink. But those hounds, they’d run this one pretty hard, he wanted fresh water. So he waded out toward the channel...”

“Vangie, I’m sorry, honey. Please don’t... shut me out.”

“Only the little regular splashes a deer makes walking are different from those a muskrat makes swimming or a raccoon makes wading, and a gator can tell the difference, every time. Up the channel came ol’ gator, underwater. When the deer waded out to the edge of the channel and put his head down to drink... Snap!”

She slapped both hands, fingers splayed, against the glass.

“Ol’ gator had him by the nose.” Her palms left long wet smears on the glass. “He drug that deer into the water and gave a jerkl” — her hands jerked into fists pressed convulsively against her cheeks — “and the deer’s neck was broke.” She gestured down at the empty dawn street. “Out there somewhere is our gator...”

“Vangie, please...”

She turned to transfix Zimmer with a whisper.

“Waiting to break our neck.”

15

After his 5:30 A.M. workout at World Gym, Dain swung back to Tam Valley to pick up Shenzie. He let himself in through the front door, got the carry case from Albie’s now-deserted bedroom, and went through to the kitchen.

“What?” he exclaimed.

There was a scrabbling of paws as the bandit-faced baby raccoon who was eating Shenzie’s kibble ran to squirm his fat little butt back out through the cat door in a panic. An outraged Shenzie was sitting on the kitchen counter watching the thief eat, his white whiskers standing straight out from the sides of his face like a radical acupuncture treatment gone awry.

Dain, fighting the morning rush across the Golden Gate, laughed at Shenzie all the way into the city. He arrived at Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard just at eight. Mel’s was a deliberate anachronism, an attempt to recapture the fifties feeling of the original Mel’s on south Van Ness, which had been a huge circular barn of a place with roller-skating waitresses.

On the walls of this Mel’s were black-and-white photos — stills from American Graffiti; Marilyn Monroe at the original Mel’s, sucking on a malt; waitresses with beehive hairdos, wearing slacks and IKe jackets, serving hamburgers to grinning boys with duck’s-ass haircuts and packs of Camels rolled up in their sleeves. A lot of the boys would have died in Korea.

Somewhere they had found old booths of cigarette-scarred vinyl with miniature jukebox selectors on the back wall. You could flip through deliberately dated original cuts of Frank Sinatra, the Pretenders, Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine — pick your tunes, drop your quarters, and the Wurlitzer gleaming in pastel yellow and purple and cherry red up by the cash register would play them for you.

Doug Sherman waved a languid hand around when Dain joined him in one of the booths. “How banal of you, dear boy.”

“Not at all,” said Dain. “Lets you rub elbows with the common man.” He had been finding Sherman extraordinarily smug as of late. “Have you ordered?”

“Just coffee. I figured once you’d had your little joke, we’d go somewhere to get—”

“This is a great breakfast place, Dougie. The four basic food groups — salt, fat, cholesterol, carcinogens. And fourteen Elvis selections on the juke, including ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ On Tuesdays you can join the fun with carhop waitresses. I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“My, aren’t we antic this morning,” said Sherman snidely.

A waitress bustled up on thick ankles, wearing a rustling black nylon skirt and white cotton men’s-style shirt with miniature black bow tie. She would have been about twenty when the original Mel’s had opened a few years after the war.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes.” Dain decided to do the entire job on Dougiebaby. “And I’m ready to order. Bacon cheeseburger with fries, order of onion rings, a chocolate shake.” He looked over at Sherman’s ashen face. “You ought to get one, Doug — they’re great!”

“My God!” breathed Sherman. “Do you realize what’s in...”

The waitress chirped at him, “How about you, sir?”

“Nothing, er, ah, a refill on the coffee, and, ah, a glass of orange juice.” She wrote, nodded, started away, Sherman called after her, “Is that O.J. fresh-squeezed?”

“Yessir,” she piped, aged eyes bright, “I squoze it out of the carton myself just this morning.”

Sherman repeated, “My God,” then turned to Dain with a glint of anger in his eyes. “Why did you really bring me here?”

“I’m on my way to the airport, I’ve got something I—”

“Back to Chicago?”

“No.”

“So Mr. Maxton’s problem was resolved quite rapidly.”

“Not resolved. Suspended. I’ve been waiting for the tape of a phone tap to confirm my next move. My man found someone else was tapping the same phone. Maybe Maxton is playing games with me, so...” He shrugged. “I wanted you to hear something, check my assumptions.”

The waitress arrived with their food on a single big platter balanced on one arthritic hand. Sherman took a cautious sip of orange juice; Dain slurped his chocolate shake, began wolfing down golden-brown french-fried onion rings. The look on Sherman’s face was worth it.

Munching away, he took the yellow Walkman out of his pocket and set it on the table, punched PLAY.

“Robert Farnsworth here. How may I—”

“This is Jimmy.”

Sherman’s hand darted out to hit stop.

“Are you crazy?” he hissed at Dain across the table. “Playing an illegal surveillance tape in a public place...”

Dain looked around. In the next booth were a tall trim brown-haired man with glasses and a short white-haired muscular overweight man wearing a red shirt in a Southwest American Indian motif. Whenever the jukebox paused to change tunes, they could be heard taking turns trashing publishers and bemoaning Hollywood agents who never returned their phone calls.

Back in the open kitchen the cooks, just out of their teens and wearing tall white chefs’ hats on top of too-long hair, bopped and jinked to Buddy Holly’s stuttery “Peggy Sue.” The air was heavy with the smell of frying bacon, sizzling eggs, french fries bubbling in hot grease. The place was jammed, the din atrocious.

“With the music going, you’d need a shotgun mike in here to hear what those guys are saying at the next table.”

He turned on the Walkman again.

“Jimmy! I’ve been calling your office long-distance, they keep saying you’re out of town. I want to know if you have any phone numbers out here in San Francisco for me. Girls like—”

Zimmer’s voice interrupted. “Bobby, that... ah, client who has the...” he cleared his throat, “bearer bonds...”

Farnsworth was immediately all business. “These are the bonds you were telling me about in Chicago, Jimmy?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Nothing wrong with them, is there?” asked Farnsworth in a jocular voice. “Not forged? Counterfeit? Stolen?”

Zimmer exclaimed in a near panic, “Good God no!”

“Then take them to our Chicago office and—”

“I’m out of town.”

Farnsworth’s voice said, “Out of town where?”

“N... I can’t tell you that.”

“Attorneys!” He sighed. “Okay, look in your local phone book and see if Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth has an office in whatever city—”

“I already did. They do.”

“Bravo! Take in the bonds and...”

Dain punched off the Walkman. “The rest is just verbiage.”

“What’s it all about?” said Sherman. “Who’re the players?”

“Jimmy Zimmer stole two million bucks in stolen bearer bonds from our friend Maxton. Bobby is his stockbroker buddy temporarily in San Francisco. It was Bobby’s phone I bugged.”

“So the bonds were stolen twice.”

“Technically, embezzled the first time. Anyway, Jimmy-baby is running around with a woman named Vangie Broussard. By her Chicago arrest record, her first busts were in New Orleans for dancing nude on barroom tables at the age of sixteen. So...”

“You’re off to New Orleans?” demanded Sherman in surprise. He gestured at the Walkman. “On the basis of that?”

“That — and the second bug on Farnsworth’s phone.”

“But why New Orleans? Because a woman dances on tables when she’s a teenybopper—”

“It’s on the tape — didn’t you catch it?” His food had gotten cold while they listened to the recording. Maybe he wouldn’t have to eat it. “When Jimmy was asked where he was calling from, he voiced the letter ‘N’ before he caught himself. ‘N.’ New Orleans. The brokerage firm has a New Orleans office, Broussard’s first arrest was in New Orleans, it’s home territory for her. Plus her name — Broussard. That’s a Cajun name.”

“I suppose it fits.” Sherman was staring at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Have you ever considered what a very strange man you are, Dain?”

“I doubt Nielsen would choose you as a test viewer, Doug.”

Sherman chuckled and nodded. “Touché” He leaned forward across the table. “But even if by some strange event they should be there, how do you plan to—”

“She’s too smart to let Jimmy cash any of the bonds this soon, so she’ll be dancing in some topless joint in the Old Quarter to raise them a travel stake.”

Sherman hesitated, spoke as if with difficulty. “Dain, I have a bad feeling about this one because of that second bug...”

Dain stood up, scooping up the check and leaving a too-large tip in its place. “And I have a good feeling about it — because of that second bug.” He stuck out his hand; Sherman shook it. “I’ve got Shenzie in the car, I’ve got to drop him off at Randy Solomon’s place before I go to the airport.”

“I’m surprised you’d leave your cat with that Gestapo thug. Will there by anyplace I can reach you if—”

“I’ll reach you. If.” He grinned again, pointed at the Walkman with the Farnsworth tape still inside it. “Keep that for me until I get back. Just in case.”

He left his car in his rented parking place across the Embarcadero from the loft, caught the shuttle bus to the airport, and was in New Orleans in time to watch the sunset.

16

Here the Mississippi was the classical Mark Twain river — lazy brown water, green banks, a churning paddle wheeler angled upstream to fight the current. On the landing dock was insomniac Dain, one of the few early passengers waiting to catch the deliberately anachronistic paddle wheeler’s first trip of the day. His only lead was Vangie; he could only look for her at night. So he rode in a clopping horse-drawn carriage through genteel upper-crust neighborhoods, watched the Vieux Carré street life through wrought-iron filigreed balconies, listened to the music starting to strut from some of the clubs.

Dain went through the open passageway to the hotel court where the fountain burbled and brightly clad tourists sipped tall pastel drinks. From the courtyard, he went along Chartres to Conti, turned left toward the rising sounds of Bourbon Street. Wandered, pausing to look in windows, peering through open club doorways at the entertainment inside. Stood on a corner to watch black boys tap-dance for thrown coins.

A topless joint, the music not very good, leave without even making it to the bar for a drink. Stand on the sidewalk eating a po’boy and drinking beer from a paper cup. Then plunge back into the night world.

Better music, the hornman a Muggsy Spanier clone, nurse a beer through a whole round of floor shows, leave the bottle half-full behind him. Just another single male alone on his own in the big city. To bed at dawn, to not sleep worth a damn.

Another day to kill. He rode a streetcar named Desire out to the end of the line, rode it back in again, spent a half hour admiring the stations of the cross and the stained glass at St. Louis Cathedral, sat in a pew, feet on the kneeler... his eyelids drooped...

The black hole between Marie’s breasts blossomed red. Her eyes were wild, her hair was wild, from her mouth, strained impossibly wide, came a hoarse masculine SCREAM, quickly muffled

Dain jerked erect, mouth-breathing, looked around quickly. A nun in a habit was staring at him from across the aisle. A little child was crying, pointing a finger. He almost fled.

At the oyster bar of Houlihan’s, he watched a man commit murder on fresh dripping bivalves with great skill and a sharp knife. Couldn’t eat, found a karate dojo, exhausted himself with two hours of the basic “forms” of his second-degree black belt — two taikyoku drills, five pinans, and the other “open hand” drills — saifa, kanku, tensho and sanchin.

Back at his room he lay nude on the bed, tried to justify his life. Whatever he did was meaningless. Lassitude gripped him. He was surprised to realize that he hoped Broussard would outwit him, but he knew she wouldn’t. He was too good at the precise geometry of manhunting, she was a prey animal that

Between Marie’s beautiful breasts the black hole blossomed red. Her eyes were wild, her hair was wild

Dain woke with a yell, bathed in sweat. He was falling to pieces. He took another shower, when he emerged, wet hair slicked back, towel around his waist, another night had fallen and the old-fashioned streetlights glowed from their cast-iron poles. Music drifted up from Bourbon Street to his small outside balcony, along with the clip-clop of a horse-drawn buggy in Rue Chartres. He leaned on the filigreed railing. Jasmine and mock orange filled the air with heavy fragrance.

He had to find her soon or abandon the search.

Midnight again. Dain leaned in the doorway of yet another exotic dance club on one of the side streets of the Quarter — for the moment he had exhausted Bourbon Street. How many had he hit tonight, how many more would he have to hit before he scored or admitted that his logic had been faulty — or was driven away by his now incessant nightmares?

Another hour, another joint. Different faces, different voices, different music, all the same. The gyrating woman was past her prime, like pheasant hung so long that the skin had a greenish tinge and when you shook it all the feathers fell out. When he left the mostly empty joint, he set his untouched beer on an empty table in passing. Somebody was gulping it down from the bottle before he cleared the doorway.

Directly across the narrow street was something called Carnal Knowledge. For some reason it was jumping, blaring, spilling customers out the open doors. Raucous rebel yells, groans, screamed sexual obscenities. If the two scantily clad women sprawled spread-legged in chairs outside the joint were typical, its success was undeserved.

Dain slid inside. Very good music pounded a wicked beat for the topless girl writhing onstage. Being tall, he could just see her over the silhouetted heads of shouting, arm-waving tourists and drunks. The dancer was Vangie Broussard.

She was magnificent, of body, face, movement. He felt an irrational flash of sympathy for this bright wood duck among the mud hens as he turned away, edged back out of the crowd again. He felt an equally irrational flash of caution. Why? There was no reason anybody should be tailing him. But what reason had there been for that extra bug on Farnsworth’s phone?

One of the resting dancers blocked his way with a meaty white thigh. “Don’t like girls, baby? That one’s hot stuff.”

Dain patted her cheek. “So are you, darlin’, so are you.”

He went on, feeling the little momentary fierce joy he’d always felt the rare times he’d beaten Marie at chess. Nothing to do with winning: rather with the implacable beauty of

Marie, her eyes wild, her hair wild as her feet came up off the floor with the force of her death

Dain growled aloud, thrust the image away. No, goddammit, don’t rob yourself of this triumph, minuscule though it might be. Make it pay off. Then maybe Marie could stop haunting his dreaming and — now — even his waking hours.

Deserted 2:00 A.M. street, the nightlife behind him, its raucous sounds dim on the air. He’d come this way deliberately, still wary, the same wariness that will make a leopard lay up on its own backtrail to ambush the white hunter he doesn’t even know is tracking him.

Okay, deserted enough here. Dain took out the little pocket guide to the French Quarter he had gotten at the hotel desk, used it as an excuse to stop abruptly and gawp up at the next pair of street signs. Yes! An echo of sound scraped from the pavement — only it was not an echo because he had stopped moving. He squinted up at the signs, down at the guide, nodded and turned down Ursulines.

When he was out of sight, a tall spare man in excellent condition, with the coloring and weathered look of the outdoors, cut across Burgundy at an angle toward the corner where Dain had disappeared. His shock of sandy hair had natural curl and was shot with gray, he wore glasses with a half-moon of bifocal on the lower curve of lens. Like Dain, he was sauntering.

Moving through the bright lights and thinning crowds, Dain got fragmentary images of the tall spare weathered figure before it could slip off the edges of reflecting store windows. So, he’d been picked up on the street sometime during the evening. Dain felt totally alive for the first time since his snake dance in the desert. Hunting, he had become prey. Wonderful!

He turned off on Conti, went in through the archway to the hotel courtyard, in the tiny taproom was served by a black-haired girl in leather shorts and halter who dispensed drinks with a smile and a lot of cleavage. Leather-bound book clipped under one arm, he crossed the courtyard to a small round white wrought-iron table near the splashing fountain. At this time of the morning, he was the only person in the court. A gecko hung in sideways patience against the curved side of the fountain.

He set down the icy opened imported beer on the table, seated himself with his glass of ice water, the pastel lights from the fountain playing across his face. A chair scraped being drawn out Dain spoke without glancing over.

“Pauli Girl. I took the chance you were a beer drinker.”

The stalker tipped the glass to pour beer without getting too much of a head. His hands were big, strong, angular. He had a soft inviting Louisiana accent.

“You make me feel lacking in southern hospitality, Mr. Dain, buying for me in my own town.”

Dain looked at him. He was a big man, big as Dain but without Dain’s weight of muscle. His hard-bitten face had an inner calm behind the hardness. Dain matched his courtly tone.

“You have the advantage of me, sir.”

“Keith Inverness.”

Neither man offered to shake hands. There was not so much antagonism as wariness between them, mutual recognition by hunting animals whose territories happened to overlap.

“You still have the advantage of me, sir.”

“Because I know who you are? A man in my line of work hears things from time to time, Mr. Dain.”

“Your line of work.” Dain made it a statement, not a question. Inverness smiled slightly.

“I guess you could say it’s the same line of work as yours — except mine has a pension at the end of it.”

Dain said pleasantly, “What if I told you that my line of work is rare books?”

“Like this?”

Unexpectedly, Inverness reached across the table to snatch up Dain’s leather-bound volume. His big hands were remarkably quick. He riffled through it, allowed himself a small smile at its harmlessness as he laid it on the table.

“The things people keep in cutout books might surprise you, Mr. Dain.”

“I doubt that.”

With what seemed like genuine regret, but without any sudden moves, Inverness took a badge in a leather case from his pocket and laid it on the table.

“I guess you’d better make that Lieutenant of Detectives Inverness, Mr. Dain.” He drank beer, wiped his lips almost daintily with one of the paper napkins on the table. “Like you, I track people down. But inside the law.”

“That’s okay with me,” said Dain.

“I’m also New Orleans police liaison with the Louisiana State Commission on Organized Crime.” Dain was silent. “We’d kind of like to know who you’re looking for in New Orleans, and for whom.”

“Not who — what,” said Dain, suddenly misty-eyed. “And for me. New Orleans jazz. Dixieland. Storyville. The heart — the soul — of the blues. My heart and soul are transported back to those halcyon days when the Nigras all had rhythm and clapped hands and knew their place...”

Inverness nodded, unhurriedly stood and put his badge away. He said in an almost apologetic voice, “You’re too good at finding people, for all the wrong people. You couldn’t expect to remain anonymous forever. Enjoy your stay in New Orleans.”

Dain sat unmoving, watching Inverness depart, his left thumb scraping idly down through the label of the empty beer bottle to tear it in half. The dancing colored water jet beyond his head made his profile very sharp and clear.

To hell with it. He already knew where Vangie worked; just tag her to find out where she lived, make sure she was still with Zimmer, give Maxton the information, fade out...

But what would happen to Vangie then?

Goddammit, why should he care what happened to her?

Also, someone with a lot of clout had gotten the Louisiana Organized Crime Commission to send around a very good man to tell Dain, in essence, to get out of town. It couldn’t be Maxton, checking up on him. Maxton didn’t know he was here...

Wait a minute. Could Maxton be under investigation? Couldn’t that explain Inverness? Organized-crime people in Chicago had Maxton under surveillance, they identified Dain, tagged him to New Orleans, notified Inverness...

That didn’t work. Inverness would have known Dain had been hired by Maxton, wouldn’t have asked. All right, what if Dain’s presence was muddying the water so his superiors told Inverness to get Dain out of the picture...

But then Inverness would have known where he was staying, would have tagged him at his hotel rather than on the street...

No. Somebody knew he was in New Orleans, knew what he looked like or had pictures to send — Inverness had been able to pick him up cold — but was unable to tell Inverness where he was staying. Jesus, could he actually somehow have crossed the tracks of the killers who

Marie was smashed back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide... Albie’s legs were blasted back down the hall out of sight...

The bottle in Dain’s hand exploded. He looked at it in surprise, opened his fingers slowly. It was shattered where he had been gripping it, the bottom and neck were intact. The glass had not cut his callused palm. He shook his head to rid it of the shards.

Nonsense. But it had decided him. He checked his watch. Three-thirty A.M. He would keep on with Maxton’s investigation, because something connected with it had stirred something up. So just keep going until he found out what and who and why. He’d checked for tails leaving the hotel before, had gotten careless through the long night, but he’d had that flash of apprehension and so had shown no reaction at all when he’d spotted Vangie.

So Inverness wouldn’t be expecting him to go back out tonight, thus wouldn’t still be tailing him.

Carnal Knowledge was dark and silent, closed. From down the street came the rattle-clash of garbage pails being put out. The door opened and Vangie and the dancer who had stopped Dain earlier that night emerged.

She said wearily to Vangie, “Another buck, another fuck. Wanna go get coffee, kiddo, or—”

“Home and to bed,” said Vangie. “See you tonight, Noreen.”

Vangie turned and started up the street, her heels loud on the sidewalk. Down the block ahead of her, on the other side of the street, a large muscular drunk shambled from a recessed storefront and staggered in the direction she was going with a too-much-to-drink pace unremarkable in the Vieux Carré at four in the morning.

17

It was midafternoon and the pitiless New Orleans sun struck blinding light from the chrome of passing cars, baked the sidewalks, softened the blacktop: a sweltering, shirtsleeves kind of day. A clerk dozed behind the check-in desk at the Delta Hotel. The huge slow floor fan stirred around the heat. The same five old codgers in shirt sleeves were again — or still — sitting around with their faces and bodies slack. A sixth was sprawled with a newspaper over his face, gently snoring.

Across from the dozing clerk the elevator doors opened. Vangie came out wearing a light summer dress that showed little but suggested much, subtly touching and caressing her body as she crossed the lobby with her long dancer’s stride. Half a minute after she had gone out into the street, the old codger under the newspaper harrumphed and hawked and sat up, crumpling the paper aside. He stood up, rubbing his eyes, and shambled out apparently still unsteady from his nap.

Vangie went into the cathedral where Dain had wakened screaming in his pew the day before. The old man waited outside on a bench in Jackson Square. Vangie emerged from the cathedral, bought a sandwich and a soft drink from one of the portable wheeled po’boy stands set up to catch the tourist trade. She went down St. Anne past the street artists and hawkers, bought two pralines in opaque paper slips from the store on the corner, crossed Decatur with the light, heading for the waterfront.

On the far side of the walkway across the railroad tracks, Vangie went down rough wooden steps to the brown Mississippi lapping over tumbled black rocks. She sat two steps up from the water, put her pralines and soft drink down beside her, in no hurry to eat. Instead, she watched the river traffic for nearly ten minutes, her unwrapped sandwich open on its waxed paper in her lap. At this hour she was alone on the steps.

When she finally took a big bite of po’boy, chewing without inhibition, a shadow fell across her. She didn’t look up, not even when a man sat down on the same step five feet away.

“Think those prayers in the cathedral are going to do the trick?” he asked in a conversational tone.

She looked over at him hard with cold eyes, but he was not looking at her, was looking instead at a tow of barges being shoved up-current by a river steamer. He looked almost sad. Vangie was suddenly strident around her mouthful of sandwich.

“Blow it out your flutter-valve, Jack.”

A big black Labrador that had been lapping water and scaring the fingerling rock bass around the half-submerged stones came up to thrust his dripping muzzle into Dain’s hand. Dain fondled him behind the ears, still not looking at Vangie.

“Dain. Edgar Dain.” He reached over, broke an edge off one of Vangie’s pralines, told the dog, “No teeth!” as a warning against snapping at it, then offered the morsel to him. The dog wolfed it, ecstatic. Dain said, “Maxton sent me to find you. I’ve found you.”

The girl gradually stopped chewing, like an engine running down. Suddenly the rich mix of spicy meats and cheeses was cardboard in her mouth. She looked surreptitiously about, fearful of seeing bulky men in Chicago overcoats coming down the steps after her. No one was close to them, no one at all.

The man who had said his name was Edgar Dain was still watching the water. His face was still sad. His hands had given the rest of her praline to the dog, who lay down at his feet, panting with his tongue out and a silly look on his face.

“Sorry. I fed one of your pralines to the dog.”

Vangie shuddered as if the scorching sunlight had a wind-chill factor. “Jesus, you’re a cold-blooded bastard.” No answer. “It was that goddam phone call of Jimmy’s, wasn’t it?”

“That confirmed it, yes.”

The river looked very peaceful. Downstream the same side-wheeler full of tourists that Dain had ridden two mornings before bellowed raucously with its steam whistle. Dain chose his words carefully, as if they were brittle and might break.

“Maxton is screaming for blood, but I think if he had his bonds back he’d not go looking too hard for you or Zimmer.”

She began shrilly, “That fucker’s screaming for blood? What about...” She stopped, controlled herself. “Yeah, we give you the bonds and they don’t get to Maxton, and we end up—”

“I don’t want the bonds, Vangie.”

“Oh sure, I believe you.”

Dain scratched the black Lab behind the ears, stared out over the slow brown water, shook his head, said patiently, “You came in by bus, you’re too smart to leave a locker key with Zimmer, so if I searched you right now...”

Vangie had sprung to her feet at mention of a bus depot locker key. This jerked the Labrador’s head up, but she was just standing there. He chuffed and put his head down again. Slowly, uncertainly, Vangie sat back down.

“Maxton doesn’t know where you are — yet.” He turned to look at her. “I stirred somebody up by coming here to look for you — for my own reasons I want to find out who and why.”

“Maybe that I’d believe. Good old self-interest.”

Dain was stroking the dog’s back absently. “But I’m going to have to give him something pretty soon.”

She said despairingly, “If I fuck you will you—”

“No.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that we might be killed?”

“I stopped worrying five years ago about what happens to people.” Smothered anger entered his voice. “Especially people who ask for it.” He stood up. “If you don’t give them back to Maxton I won’t be able to help you, Vangie.”

“Jimmy won’t do that,” she said regretfully.

“Then you give them back.” He was suddenly, harshly angry. “You stole two million dollars from a guy who said he loved you and then offered you to his friends—”

“Yeah, so I stole his fucking bonds. And you know what? I’m glad I did if it gives that pig one sleepless...”

She ran down again, a startled look on her face as if she hadn’t known she was capable of so much hatred. Dain nodded.

“That’s terrific, Vangie. Some great revenge you’re getting on him. Think about what can happen, for Chrissake! Keep the room you have, but have a friend rent you another room in your hotel under another name and sleep in that one. And keep Zimmer off the street — I might not be the only one looking.”

Vangie started to speak, stopped. Her spirit was gone.

“How do I get hold of you?”

“Call me at the De La Poste Motel in Chartres Street by this time tomorrow. I can give you that long.”

“Edgar Dain. De La Poste Motel. Tomorrow afternoon.” As he nodded and turned to start off up the steps, she added almost wistfully, “We almost made it, didn’t we?”

Dain looked down at her bowed head for a long moment.

“You weren’t even close,” he said.

It was dusk, the huge high piles of cumulus on the western horizon were shot with pink, Bourbon Street was opening its doors and tuning up its music. Vangie sat on the edge of their bed in the Delta Hotel regarding Zimmer with resigned eyes. Between the edges of the curtains on the window behind her was the pornhouse marquee, the scattered lights on it still unbroken flashing intermittently.

“It’s the only way, Jimmy. You know that when Dain tells Maxton where we are...”

Jimmy, a weak man scared, kicked over a chair. “No, goddammit, no!”

Vangie sighed, got to her feet, went to him. She put her arms around his neck, her face close to his. “Jimmy-honey, listen to me! You know we have to—”

He shook her off angrily.

“All I know is that I lose the bonds, I lose you!”

“Maybe, maybe not — but you won’t lose your life.”

“According to Dain.”

Vangie controlled her anger. “Not just according to Dain. You know what Maxton is capable of—”

“I never knew Maxton as intimately as you did.” He had worked himself up into a fine, nasty, self-justifying anger. “You’ll end right side up, though — or should I say backside up? I bet you slept with Dain this afternoon and made plans to—”

“Jimmy, I have to go to work. I get paid tonight, we need the money. We’ll talk about it when I get home, okay?” Zimmer was petulantly silent, refusing to meet her eyes.

“At least think about giving them back. And please let’s get another room like he suggested.”

Zimmer replied in his childishly defiant way, “I’ll do whatever the fuck I please.”

At Carnal Knowledge, the musicians were just arriving, having a drink, looking to their instruments. A few local guys on their way home after work were having a quiet beer before the entertainment drove the prices out of reach. Two bulky men, Nicky and Trask, entered like matched, mobile, very heavy bookends. They moved in on the bartender in unison.

“Harry?”

The bartender jerked an indifferent thumb toward a dark corner by the end of the bar. Bulky guys asking questions were no novelty to him, and Harry was a pain in the ass.

“Him.”

In the dark corner, Harry had Noreen crowded up against the wall, trying to caress her breast while talking earnestly about sexual matters. Noreen looked bored. The bookends closed in on Harry as if he were an encyclopedia of slime molds. Seeing them over Harry’s shoulder, Noreen did a quick and grateful fade, then found something to talk about with the bartender, out of earshot but able to watch obliquely in the backbar mirror.

The one named Nicky, who had a whole lot of blond hair, said to Harry, “You phoned about a girl named Vangie.” He tossed a photo of her on the bar. “Yes or no?”

Harry picked up the picture, studied it with a show of concentration. He had gotten a sly, money look on his face.

“Well-l-l... I can’t be certain.”

Trask, the one with short black hair, said, “Get certain.”

“I ain’t gonna get in trouble over this, am I?” asked Harry with belated caution. “I mean... how heavy is it? I mean... what’d she do?”

“Asked questions,” said Trask.

Harry said hurriedly, “Ah, yeah, yeah, she’s the one, all right, fellas, she dances here.” He added in a smaller voice, “Stuck-up fuckin’ bitch.”

Nicky rolled two $100 bills into a cigarette-like cylinder and stuck the cylinder into Harry’s shirt pocket.

“See, pal?” he said. “Easy money. Now just tell us where she parks her pasties and we’ll be on our way.”

Harry told them. As they started out of the place, Trask paused to finger Harry’s shirt collar regretfully.

“Ring around the collar, Harry,” he said. “Mention us around town, you got no collar. Maybe even you got no neck to go into the collar you ain’t got. Capisce?“

He guffawed loudly and swaggered out after Nicky. He had really liked that TV series, Crime Story, about the old days in Vegas, and had patterned himself after the show’s mob characters.

18

Noreen, in pasties and spangles, was doing an exaggerated and prolonged grind in front of the dressing room mirror. She added an exaggerated bump! to the grind that made everything jiggle, and winked at her own overmascaraed eyes in the mirror.

“So why ain’t you rich, kiddo?”

A mile away in the porn palace next to the Delta Hotel, a couple of dozen male patrons of three races — white, black, Asian — sparsely studded the theater like chocolate chips on a store-bought cookie. Management didn’t mind the nearly empty theater; it was only a money-washing operation anyway.

Zimmer, absorbing the raw sex and grunts and four-letter exhortations from the screen, fondling his own half-hard-on furtively like everyone else, jerked his hand away abruptly. Why was he here with these freaks and weirdos who couldn’t afford a VCR, when he had something like Vangie waiting in his bed?

She wasn’t waiting in his bed, that was the answer. She was out shaking it in a Vieux Carré sleaze joint, or maybe right now fucking the guy who was after them to rob Jimmy Zimmer of the bonds. For her own good, he’d force Vangie to give him the locker key, he’d control their destiny...

Zimmer emerged into the polyglot, swarming street crowd, no tourists, all local. When he turned in at the Delta Hotel, a bulky man sauntered in ahead of him. A bodybuilder, mirror athlete, all muscle and no guts, deep tan and a great shock of almost straw-yellow hair.

Another bulky man, equally large but with black hair cut Marine Corps short, turned away from the check-in desk to meet the blond man in front of the elevator. They shook hands noisily as Zimmer reached around them to punch the button. Cream puffs — these hulking overinflated guys were all fag for each other.

“Hey, man, what about this nightlife, huh?” black-hair asked blond as the elevator door opened.

“Yeah! Thompson’s got the broads up at the room already!”

The three men got on. Zimmer, closest to the panel of floor buttons, pushed 6 just as the blond man said, “Hey, punch six for us, will you, buddy? Thanks.”

Zimmer turned right, toward his room. The two big guys paused, debating which way their room was. They ended up following Zimmer down the corridor.

Heavy applause, rebel yells followed the distant music. Down the corridor from the backstage area came the approaching click of high heels; Vangie came in wearing only an exhausted expression, spangles, and sweat. She sprawled in one of the straight-backed chairs with her arms hanging limply at her sides. Through the half-open door came Harry’s voice from backstage.

“Noreen, get out here! You’re on next!”

“Her master’s voice,” said Noreen, but she made no move whatsoever to get out of her chair in front of the makeup mirror.

Nicky and Trask were coming up the hall behind him with their loose drunken conventioneer laughs when Zimmer opened his door. Trask shoved him hard between the shoulder blades. Jimmy ran across the room, arms flailing, to smash into the dresser. Nicky shut the door as Trask pulled a blackjack from his pocket. Zimmer turned to protest, but Trask waved the sap in front of his startled eyes.

“Make a sound I splinter your nose.”

Zimmer pressed himself back against the dresser, terribly pale, his terror-filled eyes darting from one hulk to the other. Nicky was at the phone, dialing 9 for an outside line. When he had it, he dialed a local seven-digit number.

“Six forty-seven,” he said into the phone, and hung up.

“Noreen! Get your fucking ass out here!“

Noreen went languidly to the door. She caught the frames on either side of it to do a high kick out into the hall. She stuck her head back in.

“I almost forgot, kid,” she said over her shoulder, “couple creeps laid two C-notes on shithead earlier — both looked like that Arny Schwartzynigger guy, y’know? Had a picture that from fifteen feet away in bad light looked like you.”

She was gone, leaving Vangie gasping like a netted fish.

“Noreen! Wait...” Noreen was still gone. “But... but he can’t... we can’t...”

She ran almost blindly at the door, slamming it shut and bolting it. Panting, she reached down the front of her cache-sexe and took out a flat old-fashioned tin aspirin box. She dropped it into her purse as she crossed on wobbly legs to the pay phone beside the door. She dropped her quarter into the slot and began tapping out a number, leaving the receiver hang on the end of its silvery flex so she could be pulling on her street clothes with the other hand. She was almost crying.

“He... he promised me, tomorrow afternoon... it isn’t fair...”

Zimmer’s eyes darted toward the door at the discreet knock. His face looked flayed down to the bone. Maxton came in wearing an elegant summer-weight suit and open-throat raw-silk sport shirt. He looked a question at Nicky, who shook his head. Trask came out of the bathroom. Like Nicky, he wore thin surgical gloves. He also shook his head.

“Indeed.” Maxton dragged a straight chair in front of the door, sat down in it backward so he faced the room with his arms on the back, said to Zimmer, “James, take off your clothes.”

“No!” cried Zimmer in a terrified voice.

The phone rang. Zimmer jerked galvanically toward it. Maxton shook his head and said soothingly, “Just to make sure you aren’t hiding some significant other in your shorts, James.”

The phone kept on ringing, but it was now much too late for anything outside this room to affect events inside it. Zimmer began to unbutton his shirt with leaden fingers.

Vangie was buttoning her last button with one hand while slamming the receiver back on the hook with the other. She grabbed her purse from the dressing table, her high heels clattered down the hallway on her way to the alley door.

Maxton was out of his chair, leaning against the inside of the door with his arms folded on his chest, staring at Zimmer nude and shivering in the middle of the floor. Zimmer had thin arms and a sunken chest with a single scraggly tuft of brown hair growing over the breastbone. Nicky dropped the last of Zimmer’s clothes on the floor.

“Nothing significant, Mr. Maxton.” He snapped Zimmer’s flaccid organ with a finger, chuckled, “Especially not in his shorts.”

“So she does have the bonds. Dain was right.” Maxton spoke almost to himself. He turned an icy eye on Zimmer. “James? Talk to me.”

“A key,” said Zimmer eagerly. “Vangie has it. It was all her idea to take the bonds, Mr. Maxton. I... I didn’t think until... until it was too late...” Maxton was silent. Zimmer cried, “Dain! Dain knows she has the key!”

Maxton’s voice was a whip. “You spoke with Dain?”

“Vangie did.”

“Key to what?”

“To a locker. At the bus depot.”

Maxton was silent, then smiled and nodded. “Yes. I see. Thank you, James. You’ve been a great help.”

“Can... can I get dressed now, Mr. Maxton?”

Maxton gestured to his men. “Goodbye, James,” he said.

He turned away as Nicky and Trask began crowding Jimmy back toward the open bathroom door like driving a steer into the slaughterhouse chute. He clung to the door frame with despairing strength; their big athletes’ hands tore his soft deskman’s hands free like wet blotting paper. They shut the bathroom door behind them. Maxton could hear the muffled sound of water being run into the tub as he departed the hotel room.

Vangie came through the open street door at almost a run, slowed abruptly to a walk, trying to look casual and not making it. As she put out a finger to press the elevator button, it started down from the sixth floor. She ducked into the doorway of the emergency stairwell beside the elevator. Nicky and Trask left the elevator glancing around the lobby, seeing nothing of interest, strutting toward the street. Trask was telling Nicky a dirty joke, and they were guffawing.

Vangie cautiously opened the stairwell door to peek out into the hallway. Empty. She shut the door behind her, trying to stifle her panting from the six-floor all-out stair climb. The elevator descending from this floor didn’t have to have anything to do with her and Jimmy. He probably had gone out just to bug her, and hadn’t come back yet. That was all.

Still she hesitated before keying the lock with exaggerated caution. She let the door drift open on its own. The dim overhead was on, the bed still looked freshly made.

“Jimmy?” It was little more than a whisper. She moved in, shut the door behind her. “Jimmy?”

The closet was empty except for their clothes; she edged toward the bathroom door, cautious as a doe at the edge of a clearing. Turned the knob, feathered the door open, stuck her head in. The very narrow wedge of light let her see Jimmy’s bent knees rising above the water in the nearly full tub. One arm, resting against the edge of the tub, was also above-water.

Vangie pushed the door wider and fumbled along the wall for the light switch. Relief made her voice buoyant.

“Why in heaven’s name are you taking a bath in the dark?”

The room sprang into view. The water filling the tub was rosy with diluted blood, with Zimmer’s bent knees islands above this pastel surface. Brighter, richer red had run down the forearm above the water from his slashed wrist.

Vangie reeled against the sink, gripping the sides with her hands, face contorted, mouth working. Somehow she kept from screaming, though she clapped a hand over her mouth as if to physically hold in the sound. She ran from the room.

The Delta’s only bellboy, an aged man in his seventies with little hair and one cloudy lens in his eyeglasses, was leading an equally aged couple down the hallway outside with their suitcase in his hand. Vangie erupted from her room and knocked him down, bounced off the wall, eyes vague and unfocused, a hand still across her mouth. She lowered it to speak.

“Ex... excuseme...”

She ran away down the hall, careening from side to side like a car driven by a drunk. The bellboy braced one hand on the wall and with the help of the couple got shakily to his feet. He stared after Vangie, then turned and looked at the open door of the room. Back down the hall. To the room.

He started shakily through the open doorway.

19

The gypsy cab driver lit his cigarette, shook the match out and dropped it into the street. Vangie, after being handed a wig box by the woman behind the counter, came out of the exotic underwear shop in her very short skintight skirt and blouse with the top four buttons undone. She opened the rear door of the cab but the cabbie patted the seat beside him insinuatingly.

“Plenty of room up here, baby.”

“Bus depot,” she said, getting in the back.

He slammed the cab into gear, left rubber pulling away from the curb. He found her face in the rearview mirror. She had her head back against the seat with her eyes closed, Jimmy dead in their bathtub vivid against her eyelids.

“Stuck-up bitch,” the cabbie muttered to himself.

The cabin door crashed back against the wall. Two bulky men, silhouetted by moonlight, charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands. Heavy boots grated on bare plank floor. Silver ring glinted on a finger. One, sunglasses, curly hair. The other, ski mask.

“Doesn’t it bother you... that we might be killed?”

Vangie went back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motionswirl...

A fist pounded on the door. Coming up out of nightmare, he thought, Vangie?

Zimmer’s tub was only half-filled with pink water because his corpse had been removed and laid beside it. Inverness crouched beside him, jerked back the wet-grayed sheet to let Dain, crowded into the doorway behind him, see the face.

“The murderer, confronted with evidence of his crimes, broke down and confessed,” said Dain in a toneless voice.

“No, nothing like that,” protested Inverness.

“I never saw the gentleman before, dead or alive.”

“I never said you did. It looks like suicide, but a couple of things bother us, that’s all.”

In the bedroom, they stood facing the window so their voices could not be heard by the busy crime-scene team; fingerprint powder covered most surfaces. Outside, the porn-house lights winked on and off in sequence.

“No note, no hesitation marks,” said Inverness. “Usually a suicide with a razor, you’ll have a couple of dozen nicks where he’s making up his mind.”

“Make up your mind. Was it suicide or not?”

“He killed himself, close as we can tell. He was shacking with a topless dancer name of Evangeline Broussard. Loud argument earlier in the evening, Broussard ran from the room just before the body was discovered. She has a juvenile package here in New Orleans. Kid stuff. She’s Cajun, from the bayou country — St. Martin’s Parish a few miles out of Breaux Bridge.”

“Why couldn’t this Broussard woman have killed him?”

Inverness gave him a quick slanting look, then looked away.

“If he’d been unconscious when he went in the tub, maybe. But he wasn’t. With him awake, no woman could have held him down while she slashed both his wrists. Damn few men could do it.”

“If it wasn’t murder, what am I doing here?”

Inverness was looking out the window again. He seemed to address the glass pane. “Chicago labels in their clothes.”

Dain cast a quick glance around the room. The aged bellboy was sitting in one of the room’s two straight-backed chairs, talking with a plainclothesman, his bony shoulder slumped, his gnarled hands clasped between his thighs.

“That’s supposed to mean something to me?” asked Dain.

Inverness nodded, moved fractionally closer to Dain. “I think it does. I think you were looking for him for a client from Chicago.”

Did Inverness know Maxton was his client and was just baiting him? That thing about Chicago labels in their clothes... But what did it matter? As organized-crime liaison, Inverness certainly would hear all the rumors flying around.

“I told you why I was here—”

“Yeah, yeah, the heart and soul of New Orleans. Get serious.”

“Okay, if I had been looking for Zimmer, his suicide would have ended any interest I might have had in either him or Broussard. If I had a client, I would not have reported to him that I was coming to New Orleans and I would not have reported to him since coming to New Orleans. That serious enough?”

“You haven’t really told me anything,” Inverness objected.

The bellhop was on his feet, about to head for the door.

“You really didn’t expect me to,” said Dain. “I’ll be in San Francisco if you have any more bright ideas about confronting me with evidence of my crimes.”

He nodded and walked out, inevitable leather-bound book under his arm. Inverness stared after him, frowning.

Through the thin walls of the bus depot ladies’ room came the echoing voice of a dispatcher calling a destination in what might as well have been Swahili. At this time of night the place was empty except for Vangie, in front of the vanity table mirror breaking the dark lenses out of a pair of cheap rhinestone-rimmed slanty sunglasses to leave just the rims. Next, from her aspirin tin she took a long-shanked locker key. Finally, she opened her wig box and reached inside.

The bellhop went arthritically down the hall. Mortality had come calling; finding the body had aged him. Dain caught up with him just after a turn in the corridor hid them from the eyes of the police guard on the door of Zimmer’s room.

“The lieutenant said you might be able to tell me where St. Martin’s Parish and a town called Breaux Bridge might be.”

The old man’s good eye gleamed at him shrewdly. “Now why would a city feller like you want to be going to a damn fool place like that?”

“Damned if I know,” admitted Dain.

Trask was lounging against a pillar a short distance from the coin lockers in the walkway to the bus loading area. He was trying unsuccessfully to look like a bored husband.

In the waiting room, a fat black woman with two kids was just stepping away from the ticket window, to be replaced by a gum-chewing hip-swinging floozie with slanty rhinestone-rimmed glasses. Straw-blonde hair was piled high on her head. She set a hatbox on the floor by her feet.

“Ah want a ticket to Lafayette? One way?”

She had a rather hoarse voice with a backcountry accent unremarkable in any southern bus depot. The clerk took her money, gave her a ticket and some change.

“Just made it,” he said. “That bus is loading in three minutes at Gate Three.”

“Ah need someone paged, too?” The blonde Vangie set the empty wig box on the counter. “She’s supposed to pick up this here hatbox? Evangeline Broussard.”

“Will do,” said the clerk.

The peroxide blonde started down the walkway to the buses, chewing her gum and swinging her hips, then sat down on a bench opposite the bank of coin lockers and directly across from Trask. She sprawled so her legs would catch his eye, then crossed them first one way and then the other, each time giving him just a tantalizing glimpse of the shadowed delights between then. Trask actually licked his lips.

The loudspeaker boomed, “Will Evangeline Broussard report to the ticket window? Ms. Evangeline Broussard to the ticket window, please. We are holding a package for you...”

Trask, electrified, forgot the peroxide blonde’s sexual endowments, lumbered some ten feet up the walkway to scan the waiting room. Vangie ran quickly and silently across the deserted walkway. In her terror she fumbled her long-shanked key, dropped it, caught it before it could hit the vinyl floor, shoved it into the correct lock with shaking hands.

Trask started to turn back toward her, but the loudspeaker boomed again.

“Ms. Evangeline Broussard to the ticket window, please.”

This swung Trask away again. Vangie jerked Zimmer’s attaché case out of the locker, eased the door shut, turned quickly away. Trask, with a snort of disgust, wheeled from the waiting room to look at the lockers he was there to guard.

The floozie blonde who’d tried to show him her snatch was walking down the sloping walkway toward the bus loading area; no one else was around. He turned regretfully away, dropping her from his mind as he leaned against his pillar again.

Dain pushed a wedge of hallway light ahead of him into his darkened hotel room, went between the beds to switch on the lamp. As he began to strip off his clothes, the balcony door opened and Maxton came through it just as Nicky, who’d been hiding in the bathroom, came around the partition beside the bed with a gun in his hand. Dain sat down on the edge of his bed.

“Terrific,” he said in a disgusted voice. “You rented the room next door just so you could get in through the balcony and wave guns around at three in the morning. Just brilliant.”

Maxton demanded, “Where is the little bitch?”

“On the run, I suppose. Zimmer killed himself tonight. She’d know that would bring you to town, so she’d run.”

“Where are the bonds?”

“Last I heard, in a bus depot coin locker.”

“I have a man at the bus depot.”

Dain gave a short, harsh laugh. “He won’t stop her.” Sudden anger entered his eyes. “A man at the bus depot, huh? You killed Zimmer, made it look like a suicide!” He stood up so abruptly that Nicky’s arm jerked up the gun. “You asshole! You had to come sucking around. Who tipped you off anyway? I’d have had your goddam bonds for you this afternoon, with nobody dead.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Maxton. “Zimmer told me that you and Vangie—”

Dain scooped up the leather-covered Tibetan Book of the Dead from the bedside table and tossed it at Maxton. Maxton caught it, leafed through it, nonplussed.

“There’s nothing in here. What—”

“Exactly.”

Dain was throwing back the covers to show the empty bed. He lifted the mattress to show nothing was under it. Jerked the slips off the pillows to show only pillows were inside. Ran his fingers around the pillow stitching to show they were untouched. Maxton was spluttering.

“What are you...”

But Dain was undressing with the same maniacal speed, throwing each item of clothing in the direction of Nicky. When he was nude, he jumped into the bed and pulled up the sheet.

“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “You do what you want.”

Maxton’s face had suffused with rage. There was also anticipation in his gaze. “Nicky, teach him some manners.”

Dain sat up abruptly under the sheet when Nicky started forward. Dain’s eyes were very cold and very steady.

“Not unless you want one of us dead.”

Their eyes locked, Maxton suddenly realized that Dain’s bone-deep despair was more dangerous than any bluster by men trying to mask their fears. He spoke in a strangled voice.

“That’s all right, Nicky. Just search the room.”

Dain lay back down, turned his back, pulled up the sheet. Maxton moved up between the beds and sat down heavily on the one still made. He had already realized the search was going to turn up nothing.

“You should have told me you were so close.”

“I knew if I did, you’d come busting down and fuck it up. Which you did anyway. How did you know where they were?”

The second bug on Farnsworth’s phone? Dain wanted to lay that question to rest. But Maxton ignored it again.

“My goddamned wife isn’t going to wait much longer, you know!” he said aggrievedly.

“Kill her, you’re good at that.”

“She left a letter with her lawyer.”

A half hour after Maxton had departed, empty-handed, Dain sat up again.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed aloud.

Vangie was in trouble. He was leaving her hanging out there, slowing twisting in the wind. If Maxton found her, he’d kill her. Kill her because nobody stole from Theodore Maxton, by God, and got away with it. And after doing Jimmy earlier tonight, it would be easier for him to kill again.

Or to have his goons do it, same thing.

Marie was dead because he’d been a fool, and now Vangie was popping up in Marie’s place in Dain’s nightmares. If he deliberately walked away from her, and she was killed...

He was scared, he realized. Hadn’t been when Maxton and Nicky had been in the room, but he was scared of them now, sort of in retrospect. A week ago he would have said he didn’t care if he lived or died. Now...

Maybe he still didn’t, but something was changing in him. He was involved in life somehow. Maybe just in Vangie’s life? Maybe he just wanted to see what was going to happen next? No, it was stronger than that. If only he was the man they thought he was, the stainless-steel image he projected, it would all be a hell of a lot easier.

Maybe he would have to be that image somehow.

He sighed, and got out of bed, and started to get dressed.