But by late afternoon another crowd moves into the Quarter. Most of them are innocuous-college kids, service personnel, Midwestern families trying to see past the spielers into the interiors of the strip houses, blue-suited Japanese businessmen hung with cameras, rednecks from dry counties in Mississippi. But there's another kind, too-grifters, Murphy artists, dips and stalls, coke and skag dealers, stables of hookers who work the hotel trade only, and strippers who hook out of taxicabs after 2 a.m.

They have the franchise on the worm's-eye view of the world. They're usually joyless, indifferent to speculations about mortality, bored with almost all forms of experience. Almost all of them either free-base, mainline, do coke, or smoke crack. Often they straighten out the kinks with black speed.

They view ordinary people as carnival workers do rubes; they look upon their victims with contempt, sometimes with loathing. Most of them cannot think their way out of a paper bag; but the accuracy of their knowledge about various bondsmen, the hierarchy of the local mob, the law as it applies to themselves, and cops and judges on a pad, is awesome.

As the streets began to cool and turn purple with shadow, I went from one low-rent club to the next amid the din of Dixieland and rockabilly bands, black kids with clip-on taps dancing on the sidewalk for the tourists, spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests hollering at college boys, "No cover, no minimum, you studs, come on in and get your battery charged."

Jimmie Ryan's red mustache and florid, good-humored face made you think of a nineteenth-century bartender. But he was also known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you, in one way or another, with any form of illegal activity in New Orleans.

Inside the crook of both his arms his veins were laced with scar tissue, like flattened gray garden snakes.

He tilted his straw boater back on his head and drank from his beer. Above him, a topless girl in a sequined G-string danced barefoot on a runway, her hips moving like water to the music from the jukebox, her skin rippled with neon light, her mouth open in feigned ecstasy.

"How you been, Streak?" he said.

"Pretty good, Jimmie. How's the life?" I said.

"I ain't exactly in it anymore. Since I got off the super-fluid, I more or less went to reg'lar employment, you know what I mean? Being a human doorbell for geeks and dipshits has got some serious negative drawbacks, I'm talking about self-esteem here, this town's full of sick people, Streak, who needs it is what I'm trying to say."

"I see. Look, Jimmie, do you know anybody who might be trying to recruit girls out of the parishes?"

He leaned his elbows back on the bar. His soft stomach swelled out of his striped vest like a water-filled bottom-heavy balloon.

"You mean somebody putting together his own stable?" he asked.

"Maybe."

"A guy who goes out looking for the country girls, the ones who's waiting for a big sugar daddy or is about to get run out of town, anyway?"

"Possibly."

"It don't sound right."

"Why?"

"New Orleans is full of them. Why bring in more and drive the prices down?"

"Maybe this guy does more than just pimp, Jimmie. Maybe he likes to hurt them. You know a guy like that?"

"We're talking about another type guy now, somebody who operates way down on the bottom of the food chain. When I was in the business of dimeing for somebody, making various kinds of social arrangements around the city, I made it a point not to know no guys like that, in fact, maybe I'm a little bit taken aback here you think I associate with them kind of people."

"I respect your knowledge and your judgment, Jimmie. That's why I came to you instead of someone else. My problem is two dead girls in Vermilion and Iberia parishes. The same guy may have killed others."

He removed something from the back of his teeth with his little finger.

"The city ain't like it used to be," he said. "It's turning to shit."

"Okay-"

"Years ago there were certain understandings with New Orleans cops. A guy got caught doing the wrong stuff, I'm talking about sick stuff, molesting a child, robbing and beating up old people, something like that, it didn't go to the jail-house. They stomped the shit out of the guy right there, I mean they left him with his brains running out of his nose.

"Today, what'd you got? Try to take a stroll by the projects and see what happens. Look, Streak, I don't know what you're looking for, but there's one special kind of cocksucker that comes to mind here, a new kind of guy in the city, why somebody don't walk him outside, maybe punch his ticket real hard, maybe permanent, you know what I'm saying, I don't know the answer to that one, but when you go down to the bus depot, you might think about it, I mean you're from out of town, right, and there ain't nobody, I mean nobody, gonna be upset if this kind of guy maybe gets ripped from his liver to his lights."

"The bus depot?"

"You got it. There's three or four of them. One of them stands out like shit in an ice-cream factory. Nothing against colored people."

I had forgotten what a linguistic experience a conversation with Jimmie the Dime could be.

He suppressed a beer belch and stared up at the girl on the runway.

"Could Baby Feet Balboni be involved in this?" I asked.

He rolled a matchstick on his tongue, looked upward at an oblique angle to a spot on the ceiling.

"Take a walk with me, breathe the night air, this place is like the inside of an ashtray. Some nights I think somebody poured battery acid in my lungs," he said.

I walked outside with him. The sidewalks were filled with tourists and revelers drinking beer out of deep paper cups. Jimmie looked up and down the street, blew air out his nose, smoothed his mustache with one knuckle.

"You're using the names of local personalities now," he said.

"It stays with me, Jimmie. Nobody'll know where it came from."

"Anything I might know about this certain man is already public knowledge, so it probably won't do no good for me to be commenting on the issue here."

"There's no action around here that doesn't get pieced off to Julie one way or another. Why should procuring be any different?"

"Wrong. There's fifteen-year-old kids in the projects dealing rock, girls, guns, Mexican brown, crank, you name it, the Italians won't fool with it, it's too uncontrollable. You looking for a guy who kills hookers? It ain't Feet, lieutenant. The guy's got sub-zero feelings about people. I saw him wipe up a barroom in Algiers with three guys from the Giacano family who thought they could come on like wise-asses in front of their broads. He didn't even break a sweat. He even stopped stomping on one guy just so he could blow a long fart."

"Thanks for your time, Jimmie. Get in touch if you hear anything, all right?"

"What do I know? We're living in sick times. You want my opinion? Open up some prison colonies at the North Pole, where those penguins live. Get rid of the dirt bags, bring back some decency, before the whole city becomes a toilet." He rocked on the balls of his feet. His lips looked purple in the neon glow from the bar, his face an electric red, as though it were flaming from sunburn.

I gave him my business card. When I was down the block, under the marquee of a pornographic theater, and looked back at him, he was picking his teeth with it.

I HIT TWO BIKER BARS ACROSS THE RIVER IN ALGIERS, WHERE a few of the mamas hooked so their old men would have the money they needed to deal guns or dope. Why they allowed themselves to be used on that level was anybody's guess. But with some regularity they were chain-whipped, gang-raped, nailed through their hands to trees, and they usually came back for more until sometimes they were murdered and dumped in a swamp. One form of their sad, ongoing victimization probably makes about as much sense as another.