She pushed the heel of her hand along her hairline.
"What does Tony know?" she said.
"I couldn't guess. Do you sleep with him?" My eyes shifted away from her face, and I didn't want to hear her answer.
"I used to. When he wanted me to, anyway. He doesn't want to anymore. It's the speed. It's messed him up."
I glanced back at her face again. Her eyes met mine, then they looked away. There was a tingling in my throat, like a heated wire trembling against a nerve.
"Did somebody make you sleep with him?" I said.
"You don't have the right to ask me these things."
"If Nate Baxter is behind this, he's going to have the worst experience of his life."
"There's nothing you can do. It involves somebody else. Oh God, where's my stash?" she said.
She got up from the table, took a clear, sealed plastic bag of reefer from a kitchen drawer, sat back down, and began to roll a joint from a sheaf of ZigZag cigarette papers. Her eyes were narrowed with concentration, but her fingers began to shake and strands of reefer fell from both sides of the paper. Then she gave it up, rested her elbows on the table, and pressed a knuckle from each hand against her temples.
I picked up the plastic bag, splayed it open, dropped the papers inside, raked the loose strands of reefer into it, and walked down a short hallway to the bathroom.
"What are you doing?" she said.
I emptied the bag into the toilet and flushed it. Then I dropped the bag into a kitchen garbage sack. When I turned around she was standing a foot from me. Her hair hung on her forehead, and she had accidentally smeared her lipstick.
"Why did you do that?" she said.
"You don't need it."
"I don't need it?"
"No."
"Tony says it's all a cluster fuck."
"He's wrong."
Her eyes were green and moist and they looked directly into mine. I could hear the wetness in her throat when she swallowed. The top of her pink-ribboned peasant blouse was crooked on her shoulders.
"There's always a way out of trouble," I said. "You just have to trust your friends once in a while."
I touched her on the upper arm with my palm. I meant it in a protective and friendly way. Yes, I know that was the way I meant it. I could see the freckles on her shoulders, feel her breath on my face. She stepped close to me, and my arms were on her back, my hands lightly touching the coolness of her skin, the thickness of her hair. She rubbed her face under my chin, and I felt a shudder go through her body like tension leaving a metal spring.
Then she remained motionless in my arms, her breath small and regular against my chest. In the distance, I could see the hard, stiff outline of the Huey Long Bridge against a bank of purple rain clouds.
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.