Most outlaw bikers I had known were sexual fascists, and they were always seeking new and defenseless targets for the anger and dark blood that were trapped in their loins like throbbing birds.

But I got virtually nowhere at the bar on Airline Highway or at any of the other bars I cruised until 3 A.M. No one knew Eddy Raintree, had ever heard of him, or even thought his photograph vaguely familiar. But at the last place I visited, a narrow brick poolroom that used to be run by blacks between two warehouses across the river in Algiers, a drunk woman at the bar let me buy her a bowl of chili, and in her sad way she tried to be helpful.

Her hair was platinum, dark at the scalp, and the number 69 was tattooed on her arm. She wore a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with no bra, and a pair of Clorox-faded Levi's that hung as low as a bikini on her hips. (I had never been able to understand the women who hung with outlaw bikers, because with some regularity they were gang-raped, chainwhipped, and had their hands nailed to trees, but they came back for more, obedient, anesthetized, and bored, like spectators at their own dismemberment.)

She kept lifting spoonfuls of chili to her mouth, then forgetting to eat them, her eyes trying to focus on my face and the photograph of Eddy Raintree I held in my palm.

"What do you want with that dumb shit?" she asked. Her words were phlegmatic, like dialogue in a slow-motion film.

"Could you tell me where he is?"

"In jail, probably. Or out fucking goats or something."

"When did you see him last?"

She drew in on her cigarette and held the smoke down like she was taking a hit off a reefer.

"You don't want to waste your time with a dumb shit like that," she said.

"I'd really like to talk with Eddy. I'd really appreciate it if you could help me."

"He's into astronomy or something. He's weird. I've got enough weirdness in my life without a dumb fuck like that."

Then her boyfriend came back from the men's room. He was huge, with a wild beard, and he wore striped overalls with no shirt. His massive shoulders were ridged with hair; his odor was incredible.

"What do you think you're doing, man?" he said.

"Just finishing my conversation with this lady."

"It's finished. Good-bye."

I left two dollars on the bar for the chili and walked back out into the night. The heat of the day had finally lifted from the streets and the cement buildings, the wind was cool blowing from across the river, and I could see the red and green running lights of the oil barges on the water, and the glow of New Orleans against the clouds.

I slept until nine the next morning, had coffee and beignets at a cool table under the pavilion at the Cafe du Monde, and watched the water from the sprinklers click against the piked fence around the park in Jackson Square and drift in a rainbow haze through the myrtle and banana trees. Then I went over to First District headquarters a few blocks away and read Joey Gouza's file. It was another study in institutional failure, the kind of document that makes you doubt your own convictions and conclude that perhaps the rightwing simpletons are correct when they advocate going at social complexities with a chainsaw.

Since age thirteen, he'd had forty-three arrests. He was in the Louisiana reformatory when he was seventeen, he went up the road twice to Angola, and he did a federal three-bit in Lewisburg. He had been arrested for breaking-andentering, auto theft, assault and battery, possession of burglar tools, armed robbery, strong-arm robbery, sale of stolen food stamps, possession of counterfeit money, procuring, tax fraud, and murder. He was one of those career criminals who early on had gone about investigating and participating in every kind of illegal activity that a city offered. But, unlike most petty thieves, pimps, smalltime fences, and smashand-grab artists, Joey had gravitated steadily upward in the New Orleans mob and had developed a skill that was at one time revered in the underworld, that of the safecracker. Evidently he had peeled and cut up safes with burnbars in four states, although he had fallen on only one job, a box in a Baton Rouge pawnshop that netted him eighty-six dollars and a two-year jolt in Angola.

He wasn't hard to find. He owned a small Italian cafd and delicatessen in an old brick, iron-scrolled building shaded by oak trees on Esplanade. The inside smelled of oregano and meat sauce, crab-boil, sautded shrimp, cheese and salami, the fried oysters and sliced tomatoes and onions that went into the poor-boy sandwiches on the counter, the steamed coffee from the espresso machines. The cafe was empty except for a black cook, the counterman, and a couple having breakfast at one of the checkercloth tables.

I asked for Joey Gouza.

"He's back in the office. What's the name?" the counterman said.

"Dave Robicheaux."

"Just a minute." He walked to the end of the counter and spoke through a half-opened door.

"Who's the guy?" a peculiar thick voice inside said.

"I don't know. Just a guy." The counterman looked back at me.

"Then ask him who he is," the voice said, The counterman looked back at me again. I opened up my badge.

"He's a cop, Joey," the counterman said.

"Then tell him to come in, for Christ's sake."

I walked around the counter and through the door. Joey Gouza looked up at me from behind his desk. He was deeply tanned, tall, his face elongated, almost jug-shaped, his salt-and-pepper hair cut military style and brushed up stiffly on his scalp, his eyes as black as wet paint. He wore pleated gray slacks, a lavender polo shirt, oxblood loafers; a cream-colored panama hat sat crown down on the corner of his desk. His neck was unnaturally long, like a swan's, hung with gold chains and medallions, and his open shirt exposed the web of veins and tendons in his shoulders and chest, like those in a long-distance runner or javelin thrower.

But it was the eyes that got your attention; they were absolutely black and they never blinked. And the voice: the accent was Irish Channel, but with a knot tied in it, as though the vocal cords were coated with infected membrane.

His smile was easy, as relaxed as the matchstick he rolled on his tongue. A fat dark man in a green visor, who smoked a cigar, sat at a card table in the corner, adding up receipts on a calculator.

"I got some unpaid parking tickets again?" Gouza said.

I held my badge out for him to see. "No, I'm Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, Mr. Gouza. It's just an informal visit. Do you mind if I sit down?"

If he recognized my name, it didn't show in his eyes or his smile.

"Help yourself, if you don't mind me working. We got to get some stuff ready for the tax man."

"I'm looking for Jack Gates," I said. "Or Eddy Raintree."

"Who?"

"How about Jewel Fluck?"

"Fluck? Is this some kind of put-on?"

"Let's start with Jack Gates again. You never heard of him?"

"Nope."

"That's funny. I heard he fed your brother-in-law into an airplane propeller."

He took the matchstick out of the corner of his mouth and laughed.

"It's a great story. I've heard it for years. But it's bullshit," he said. "My brother-in-law was killed in a plane accident on his way to Disneyland. A great family tragedy."

The man at the other table was grinning and nodding his head up and down without interrupting his count of receipts.

Then Joey Gouza put the matchstick back in his mouth and leaned his chin on his knuckle. His eyes were filled with an amused light as they moved up and down my person.

"You say Iberia Parish?" he said.

"That's right."

"You guys gave up shaving or something?"

"We're casual out in the parishes. Let's cut to it, Joey. You're an old-time pete man. Why do you want to give Weldon Sonnier a lot of grief?"