CHAPTER 11

After I left Kim's, I drove into the French Quarter and tried to find a place to park close by Clete's nightclub. But it was Saturday afternoon, the Quarter was crowded with tourists, and I had to park off Elysian Fields and walk back down Decatur to the club. A noisy crowd was at the bar, and a five-piece band was blaring out "Rampart Street Parade" by the dance floor.

"Take a walk with me," I said to Clete, who was behind the bar in a pair of gray slacks and a green Tulane sweatshirt.

"It's a little busy right now, Streak."

"It's important."

We crossed the street and walked down to the du Monde, where I ordered beignets through the takeout window.

"Beautiful day," I said.

"I'm not kidding, Dave, I've got a bar to run. What is it?"

"Come on," I said. We walked over the top of the levee and out onto the gentle green slope that led down to the river. On the far side of the water was the shabby outline of Algiers. "I need a cover story."

His eyes went up and down my shirt.

"What are you talking about?" he said.

"Minos is going to put a wire on me. I need to make Tony talk about a big drug delivery that's about to go down. I have to have some way of bringing it up."

"You might need a cover story about something else," he said, and reached out and removed a long strand of red hair from my shirtfront. "Brush up against somebody on the streetcar, did you?"

"Let's keep to the subject."

"Have you lost your mind?"

"Lay off it,Clete."

"I told you one of the cardinal rules when you get involved with the greaseballs: Don't mess with their broads."

"Have you heard anything about a big delivery?"

"I bet she's one hot item, though, isn't she?"

"I need your help. Will you cut out the bullshit?"

He took a beignet out of the napkin in my hand and bit off half of it. His green eyes were thoughtful as he looked out at the river.

"I hear crack prices are up in the Iberville welfare project, which means the supply is down," he said. "But next week everybody is going to have all the rock they can smoke. That's the word, anyway. What's the DEA say?"

"Same thing."

"That crack is some mean shit. You ever watch them huff that stuff? They remind me of somebody having a seizure."

"You know I'm staying out at Cardo's?"

"I called Dautrieve. He told me. Why is it that guy makes me feel like anthrax?"

"Boggs has been given a contract on Cardo."

"And you're living with him? That's great, Streak. Maybe you ought to look into some real estate buys on the San Andreas fault."

"I'm going to play it one more week, then I'm out."

"I think you're in. The operative word there, mon, is in. Bootsie Giacano wasn't dangerous enough. You had to get in the sack with Cardo's main punch."

"That's not the way it is. Don't talk about her that way, either, Clete."

"Excuse me. It's my lack of couth. We're talking the parochial school sodality here. Dave, you'd better get your head on straight. You live among these people, you start to believe they're like us. They're not, mon. When it comes down to saving their own ass, they'd sell their mothers to a puppy farm."

"Boggs has been in New Iberia. I think he's got me on his dance card. I'd rather deal with him in New Orleans than around Alafair."

"I think you're being used. I think you should forget Cardo and these DEA jerk-offs and you and I should go after Boggs and blow out his candle. What do you care if Cardo sells dope? You shut him down, the price on the street goes up. The dealers come out ahead any way you cut it. Look, most of the dope has gone back to the slums, anyway. That's where it started, that's where it's going to stay. Then one day the poor dumb bastards will get tired of watching their own kind get hauled away in body bags."

"I was in jail last night. Nate Baxter rousted Tony and me and his driver. Can you get to somebody in the First District, find out what Baxter's doing?"

"In jail?"

"That's right."

"You remind me of these kids with their crack pipes. It takes a guy like me twenty years to go to hell. They can do it in six months. But, Streak, you've got a talent for fucking up your life in weeks."

"Will you see what you can find out about Baxter?"

"A cop who blew the country with a murder warrant on him? I'm your liaison person?"

He put the rest of the beignet in his mouth and laughed while he rubbed his palm clean with his napkin.

I walked back to my truck in the cooling shadows and drove down Canal to the corner of St. Charles, where Clete had seen Tee Beau Latiolais working in a pizza place. Young black men lounged in front of the liquor stores and arcades, their bodies striped with the purple and pink neon glow from the windows. I found Tee Beau in the back of a long, narrow café, his white paper hat pulled down to his eyebrows, so that he seemed to be staring at me from under a visor.

"Take a break. I need to talk with you, Tee Beau," I said.

His eyes were peculiar, melancholy, as though he were witnessing a bad fate for a friend that the friend was not aware of.

"What is it?" I said.

He didn't answer. He wiped his hands on his apron and put on a pair of sunglasses. We walked around the corner to the Pearl and sat at the bar. A white man farther down the bar was shucking oysters with a fierce energy on a sideboard. Tee Beau ordered a Falstaff and kept looking at me out of the side of his eye.

"You know, Tee Beau, I don't think sunglasses in the evening are the best kind of disguise."

"Why you want to see me, Mr. Dave?"

"I heard Jimmie Lee Boggs has been in New Iberia. I'd like to find out why. Can you talk to Dorothea?"

"I ain't got to. Talked to her last night. She didn't say nothing about seeing Jimmie Lee. But she tole me what Gros Mama Goula say about you, Mr. Dave."

"Oh?"

"You got the gris-gris. She say you been messin' where you ain't suppose to be messin'. You ain't listen to nobody."

"Listen, Tee Beau, Gros Mama is a big black gasbag. She jerks your people around with a lot of superstition that goes back to the islands, back to the slave days."

But my words meant nothing to him.

"I made you this, Mr. Dave. I was gonna come find you."

"I appreciate it but-"

"You put it on your ankle, you."

I made no offer to take the perforated dime and the piece of red string looped through it from his hand. He dropped them in my shirt pocket.

"You white, you been to colletch, you don't believe," he said. "But I seen things. A man that had snakes crawl all over his grave. They was fat as my wrist. Couldn't keep them off the grave with poison or a shotgun. You stick a hayfork in them, shake them off in a fire, they be back the next morning, smelling like they been lying in hot ash.

"A woman name Miz Gold, 'cause her skin was gold, she taken a man away from Gros Mama, then come in Gros Mama's juke with him, wearing a pink silk dress, carrying a pink umbrella, laughing about Gros Mama's tattoos saying she ain't nothing but a nigger putain that does what white mens tells her. The next day Miz Gold woke up with hair all over her face. Just like a monkey. She do everything to get rid of it, Mr. Dave, pull it out of her skin with pliers till blood run down her neck. But it didn't do no good. That woman so ugly nobody go near her, no white peoples hire her. She use to go up and down the alley, picking rags out of my gran 'ma-man's trash can."

"Okay, Tee Beau, I'll keep it all in mind."

"No, you ain't. In one way you like most white folks, Mr. Dave. You don't hear what a black man saying to you."

He upended his bottle of Falstaff and looked at me over the top of his glasses.