"So long, hotcakes. Don't think too bad of me," she said.
She left me on the dance floor, picked up her purse from the bar, and walked through the brilliant square of light at the front onto Decatur Street. Clete parted the window blinds with his fingers and squinted out onto the street.
"Yep, there he goes," he said.
"Who?"
"Nate Baxter, my man."
"Nate Baxter?"
"Yeah, I didn't think you'd forget him. The one genuine sonofabitch from the First District. I saw him watching her from under the colonnade across the street when she came in. A car just picked him up when she left."
"Why's a guy from Internal Affairs interested in Kim Dollinger?"
"He's not in Internal Affairs anymore. He's Vice. The perfect guy for it, too. A prick from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. What's going on, Dave?"
"I don't know."
"Some sting. Half the city of New Orleans seems to be in on it. Listen, get out of that gig at Cocodrie. I've got a real bad feeling on this one."
"Those are the ones you skate through. You buy it when you've got your pot off and you're reading a newspaper. You know that." I winked at him.
"Save the Little Orphan Annie routine for somebody else, Streak. When my ovaries start tingling, I listen to them. Anytime you see that buttwipe Baxter, it's bad news. You can count on it."
Back at the apartment I called the commercial dock at Cocodrie to check on my jugboat, then called Minos at his office to confirm the pickup of the half million.
"Our special-delivery man will be there with your bus locker key in about two hours," he said. "Did you know a half-million dollars in hundred-dollar bills weighs exactly eleven pounds?"
"No, I didn't know that."
"Don't drop it overboard. As I mentioned before, some of my colleagues are a little anxious about this one."
"I'm tired of hearing about your colleagues' problems."
"Your voice sounds funny."
"I've been doing push-ups. I'm still out of breath."
"Yeah?"
"Sure. I'm all right."
"When I was undercover I'd wake up with my heart racing. I'd smoke a pack of cigarettes before noon sometimes."
"My ears keep popping, like I've been on an airplane."
"Dave, you can throw it in anytime you want, and nobody will think less of you for it."
"I'm copacetic. Don't sweat it."
"Remember, we're never going to be too far away."
Then I told him about Nate Baxter's surveillance of Kim Dollinger.
"They're interested in Cardo, too," he said. "They're probably keeping some strings on his entourage."
"Why her? She's no dealer."
"I'll check. They're supposed to coordinate with us, anyway. Have you got some kind of personal involvement with this guy Baxter?"
"He tried to get me fired from the department when he was in Internal Affairs."
"So?"
"It didn't end there. I split his lip in the squad room, in front of about twenty-five cops."
"Dave, you never disappoint me," he said.
I rode the streetcar down St. Charles to Bootsie's house that evening, and the wind through the open window was cool and smelled of old brick, wet moss, and moldy pecan husks. But I couldn't concentrate on anything except my anxieties about the buy out on the salt and my questions, which I could not successfully bury, about Bootsie's involvement with the mob. How did an intelligent and educated woman from a small Bayou Teche town like New Iberia marry a member of the Giacano family? I tried to imagine what he must have looked like. Most of the Giacanos were built like piano movers, notorious for their animal energies, their enormous appetites and bovine behavior in restaurants, their emotionalism and violence. Their weddings and funerals were covered by local television stations with the same sense of mirth and expectation that people might have when visiting an amusement park.
The image just wouldn't fit.
But the image of her first husband sure did. He was a helicopter and pontoon plane pilot for Sinclair Oil Company, and I remembered him most for his suntanned, blond good looks and the confident, unblinking light in his blue eyes. In fact, I could never quite forget the night I met him, at a dance at the Frederic Hotel in New Iberia, right after I had been released from an army hospital. I was on a cane then. It was 1965, when the war was just heating up for other people, and it felt funny to go to a dance by myself and to discover that I was alone in more ways than one, that I was already used up and discarded by a war that waited in a vague piece of neocolonial geography for other boys whose French names could have belonged to Legionnaires.
Then through the potted palm fronds and marble columns, I saw her in a pink organdy dress, dancing with him in her stocking feet. Her face was flushed from the champagne punch, and strands of her hair stuck damply to her skin like wisps of honey. They walked toward the punch table, where I was standing, and I saw her gaze focusing on me as though I had stepped unexpectedly off a bus into the middle of her life. Then I realized she was drunk.
She started blowing air up into her face to get her hair out of her eyes.
"Well!" she said.
"Hello, Boots," I said.
"Well!" she repeated, and blew a web of hair out of her eyes again. "John, this is Dave Robicheaux. It looks like Dave has come back to visit New Iberia. What a wonderful event. Maybe he can come to our wedding."
He smiled with his white teeth when he shook hands. His eyes went back and forth between us, and I could see the recognition grow in them.
"It's nice to meet you, Dave. The wedding is Saturday at St. Peter's," he said. "Please come if you feel like it."
"Thank you," I said. And I cleared my throat so they wouldn't see me swallow.
Bootsie blew more gusts of air up into her face and her eyes became brighter, as though a generator were gaining momentum inside her.
"I could have told you I was pregnant. That would have blown your mind, wouldn't it?" she said.
"What?" I felt my mouth hang open, because in New Iberia at that time it was unthinkable to talk like that in a public place.
"But that would have seriously screwed you up," she said. "You would have ended up a family guy with kiddies and you couldn't go off to war, then come home and stand around on a cane like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. The pose is perfect, Dave. You look so absolutely sad and wounded. We wouldn't rob you of it for anything."
"I think you're being pretty rotten," I said.
"Hold on, now," her fiancé said.
"No, rotten is when you put it in without a rubber because you're really promising that person you're going to marry her, then you leave her like she's yesterday's backseat hand job."
The band had stopped playing, and her words carried out to the edge of the dance floor. People stared at us with their smiles suddenly frozen on their faces. Bootsie's eyes were watery and shining, and there were beads of perspiration on her upper lip. In the silence I could feel the skin of my face tighten and flex against the bone.
When I woke in the morning a note folded inside an envelope was stuck in my screen door. It read:
I'm sick and trembling with a hangover this morning, and I guess I deserve it. I'm sorry for what I was to you last night. I shouldn't apologize to you, but I do anyway. But tell me this, Dave, please please please tell me this, why did you push me away, why did you destroy it for both of us, why did you ruin everything we'd shared together that summer, tell me in the name of suffering God why you did it, Dave.
Love,
Bootsie
P.S. On second thought it's probably better that you don't answer this note. I'm going to be married to John, and the past is the past, right? If I say that enough it'll finally be true. I hope you have a good life. I really mean that even though I think you were a bastard.