"I want some pure stuff, no cut, a good price," I said. "I hear you're the guy who can help me."
"Pure what? What are you talking about, buddy?"
"What the fuck do you think I'm talking about?"
He stopped working, removed a piece of grit from his eyelashes with his thumb, and looked at me. The backs of his hands were shiny with grease.
"Who sent you here?" he said.
"Some people in Lafayette."
"Who?"
"People I do business with. What do you care?"
"I care, man. What's your name?"
"Dave Robicheaux."
He pushed the creeper out from under the car and raised himself up on one elbow. He was maybe twenty-five and had the neck and shoulder tendons of a weight lifter.
"You're talking about dope, right? Skag, reefer, stuff like that?" he said. He picked up his cigar off the cement and puffed it alight.
"I'm talking about cocaine, podna. Ten thou a key. I can take five keys off you."
"Cocaine?" he said.
"That's right."
"That's interesting. But number one, I'm not your podna, because I don't know who you are. Number two, I don't know where you got my name or this address, but you've got the wrong information, wrong person, wrong house."
"You see Tony Cardo?"
"Who?"
"Look, I don't mean to offend you, but the bozo routine is wearing thin. You tell Cardo there're some oil people in Lafayette with a lot of money to invest. He doesn't want the business, that's fine. You don't want to pass on the information, that's fine. We can get what we need out of Houston. You know where Clete's Club is?"
"No."
"You know where Joe Burda's Golden Star is on Decatur?"
"Yeah."
"It's two doors up from there. If you want to do some business, leave word at the bar."
"Make sure the gate latches on your way out," he said.
The next two people whose names and addresses Minos had given me were equally unproductive. One was a bar owner who was in jail in Baton Rouge, and the other, a wrestling promoter, had died of AIDS.
At eleven that night I walked down Bourbon in the roar of noise from the bars and strip joints, amid the Halloween revelers, the midwestern conventioneers, breathless, red-faced college kids who spilled beer from their paper cups down the front of their clothes, and the Negro street dancers whose clip-on taps rang like horseshoes on the cement. Bourbon is closed to automobile traffic, so that the street itself is like an open-air zoo, but by and large it's a harmless one. The girls still take off their clothes on the runways and hookers work out of taxicabs in the early morning hours. Occasionally a cop will cool out a drunk with a baton in a side-street bar, and the burlesque spielers in candy-striped vests and straw boaters can conjure up visions right out of adolescent masturbation; but ultimately Bourbon offers the appearance of sleaze to the tourists with the implicit understanding that it contains no real threat of injury to them.
In fact, the man I wanted to find ran a T-shirt and souvenir shop, and he was as innocuous in dress and manner as an ice cream salesman. He walked out from behind a curtain in back after his clerk told him I wanted to talk to him, and his oval face was pink and shining, his thin red hair combed back with water, his mouth wide with a grin, his neck powdered with talcum. He wore a white suit and a silver silk shirt, and his appearance gave every indication of a harmless, happy fat man-except that on second glance you noticed that his chest was as broad as his stomach, that he wore gold chains around his neck, that his eyes took your inventory and did not smile with his mouth.
"I know you," he said, and shook his finger playfully at me. "You're a police officer. No, you used to be one, right here in the Quarters."
"That's right."
"You were a lieutenant."
"That's right."
"You probably don't remember me, but I used to see you and your partner over at the Acme. You used to come in at lunch for oysters. What's his name? He's got a club here now."
"Cletus Purcel."
"Yeah. I was in his place the other day. Real nice. I think he's going to make it."
"Could I talk to you in private?"
He looked at the ruby-studded gold watch on his wrist.
"Sure thing," he said, and held back the curtain for me.
His office was a small, cluttered room in the back, with a desk, three chairs, and old jazz posters on the brick walls. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and tapped the bottom of a poster with his finger.
"See that name there?" he said. "You got to look close, but that's me, Uncle Ray Fontenot. I played trombone right down the street at Sharky Bonnano's Dream Room. You remember him?"
"Sure."
"You remember those two colored guys used to tap-dance on the stage there, Pork Chops and Kidney Beans?"
"I want to score five kilos of uncut coke. You deliver good stuff at the right price, we'll be doing more business later."
He peeled the cellophane off a package of Picayune cigarettes.
"Not too many ex-cops come in here with that kind of statement," he said. He had never stopped smiling.
"Forget the ex-cop business. It all spends."
"Oh, don't misunderstand me. I'm not knocking a man trying to make a little money. But your information's dated. That's what I'm trying to say."
"How's that?"
He tilted back in the swivel chair, his silver shirt tight across his broad chest and stomach, his eyes bright and squinted with goodwill.
"I always had problems with weight and high blood pressure," he said. "I smoked reefer every night to keep my blood pressure down, then I'd go out and eat a whole pizza by myself. I got on prescription diet pills, then I started using some stuff that was a little more serious. Finally I was in the business myself, you know what I mean? So whoever gave you my name wasn't all wrong. But I bottomed out and went into treatment a year ago. The only problem I've got now is I eat all the time."
"You're in a twelve-step program?"
"What?"
"You're out of the business?"
"That's about it."
"Tell me, when you give a guy like Tony C. the deep six, what do you do? Just drop around one day and say, 'I bottomed out, Tony. I'm out of the business, see you around, you don't like it, fuck you'?"
This time the words bit into some nerve endings behind that pink and smiling face. He lit his cigarette and blew smoke at an upward angle into the air.
"I've never met the gentleman," he said, his eyes crinkling again.
"I see. Sorry to have wasted your time. I'll run along now, Mr. Fontenot. Say, the next time you give somebody that treatment shuck, you might find out what a twelve-step program is."
He tipped his ashes into an ashtray and looked pleasantly into his cigarette smoke without seeing anything.
"Tell Tony C. his distribution in southwestern Louisiana is lousy," I said. "I can double or triple it. But I've got nothing to prove. There're some guys in Texas who want to branch out."
"Then maybe that's who you should deal with."
"They've got a bad reputation. But maybe you're right. If I meet Tony C, I'll tell him what you said."
"Now, wait a minute…"
"I don't blame you for bullshitting me, Mr. Fontenot, but if you get serious, leave a message for me at Clete's Club. I'll be back in touch."
I walked back through the T-shirt shop and out into the neon lights and cacophony of jazz and rock bands on Bourbon Street.
I was tired, unshaved, weary of the people I had been with, my ears thick with the sound of trumpets and trombones and electric guitars, yet I did not want to return to the apartment and be alone. I walked to the Café du Monde for coffee and beignets, but it had already closed. So I sat on an iron bench in front of the cathedral in Jackson Square and watched the moon rise in the sky. The air was heavy with the smell of camellias, and the magnolia and banana trees that grew along the piked fence behind me made shifting patterns of shadow and light on the cement. A wind came up off the river, and it started to mist; then a shower clattered across the banana leaves in the square and blew in a spray under the lighted colonnades. I walked home on a quiet street, away from the noise of the tourists, keeping close under the scrolled iron balconies to avoid the rain.