"Where's all this money coming from?"
"It's confiscated from drug deals. Don't worry, we'll get it back. Anyway, once these guys are convinced you're the real article, you tell them you want to rein-vest your profits. Then we offer them some serious gelt. They don't want the action, you tell them you can make the score in Houston. Tony Cardo hates the guy who runs the action out of Houston. The word is he screwed Tony's wife in a bathroom stall at the Castaways in Miami. We're talking about a real class bunch here. The goal, though, is to get Cardo involved in the deal. He's a weird fucking guy."
I had to laugh.
"What's your idea of normal?" I asked.
"No, this guy's special. He not only looks weird, he's deeply fucked up in the head. Maybe it's his background. His mother used to shampoo corpses for funeral homes."
"What?"
"That's how she made her money. She washed the hair of corpses for a mortician. Finally she bought her own funeral parlor in Algiers. Tony C. must not have liked it, though, because he put it up for sale two days after he inherited it."
"What if I run across Jimmie Lee Boggs?"
"You let us handle him. We'll figure out a way to have him picked up without compromising you."
"There's one other thing. Tee Beau Latiolais, the black kid who escaped with Boggs, he's in New Orleans. He told his girlfriend he's going to try to find Boggs for me."
"Why does he want to do that?"
"I sent word to him that I'd help him if he'd help me. I didn't mean for him to go looking for Boggs, though."
"You worry too much. It's just a sting. Hey, you're going back to New Orleans."
CHAPTER 4
I took Alafair to stay at the home of my cousin Tutta, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. It wasn't easy. I carried her suitcase and her paper bag of Curious George and Baby Squanto books and coloring materials up onto the gingerbread porch and sat down with her in the swing. The sun was bright on the lawn. Bumblebees hummed over the hibiscus and the pale blue hydrangeas in the flower beds.
"It's not going to be for long, little guy," I said. "I'm going to call you almost every night, and Tutta will take you out to feed your horse. If I can, I'll come back on a weekend."
She looked out blankly at the dew shining on the grass.
"It's a business trip, Alafair. It's just something I have to do."
"You said we wouldn't leave New Iberia again. You said you didn't like New Orleans anymore, that it was full of dope and bad people."
"That doesn't mean we have to be afraid of those things, does it? Come on, we're not going to let a short trip get us down, are we? Guys like us are too tough for that."
Her face was sullen. I took off her Astros cap and set it sideways on her head, then looked down into her face.
"Trust me on this one, Alf," I said. My cousin came out on the porch. I squeezed Alafair against me. Her body felt hard and unyielding. "Okay, little guy?"
Her eyes were blinking, and I touched her face with my hand.
"Hey, you remember what my father used to do when he had a problem?" I asked. "He'd grin right in its face, then give the old thumbs-up sign. He'd say, 'You mess with us coonass, we gonna spit right in yo' mouth.'"
She looked up at me and smiled faintly. My cousin held the screen for her.
"Dave?" Alafair said.
"Yes?"
"When you come back, it's gonna be like it was?"
"What do you mean?"
"Playing and joking, like we always did. You always coming home full of fun."
"You bet. I just have to clear up some problems, that's all."
"I can go with you. I can cook meals, I can wash clothes in the machine."
"Not this time, Alf."
Tutta took Alafair's hand in her own.
"Dave, those bad people, they're not gonna hurt you again, are they?" Alafair said.
"You remember what Batist did when that gator got inside his fishnet and tore it up?" I said.
She thought, then grinned broadly.
"That's right," I said. "He grabbed the gator by its tail, swung it around in the air, and threw it all the way over the levee. Well, that's the way we handle the bad guys when they give us trouble."
I hugged her again and kissed her forehead.
"Good-bye, little guy," I said.
"'Bye, Dave."
Her eyes were starting to film, and I walked down to the picket gate before I turned and glanced back at her. She stood in the open screen door, one of her hands in Tutta's, her ball cap low on her ears. She looked back at me from under the bill of her cap and raised her thumb in the air.
I left Batist to manage the bait shop and boat dock, and on Halloween I moved into my apartment on Ursulines in the Quarter. Most people identify the Quarter with the antique stores on Royal, the sidewalk artists around Jackson Square, and the strip joints and T-shirt shops on Bourbon Street, but it has a residential and community life of its own: a Catholic elementary school, a city park, small grocery stores with screen doors, wood floors, ceiling fans, display coolers loaded with cheeses, sausages, and skinned catfish, and bins of plums and bananas set out on the sidewalk under the colonnade.
My apartment was inside a walled courtyard that you entered through an iron gate and a domed brick walkway. The flower beds were thick with blooming azalea and camellia and untrimmed banana trees, and the people who lived in the second-story apartments had placed coffee cans of begonias and hung baskets of impatiens along the balcony.
My place was on the first floor, and it had a bed-room, a small kitchen, a bath with a shower, and a living room. Like those of most residences in the Quarter, its walls were marked with all the historical attempts of its owners to adapt to technological change. The gas lamps had been removed and plastered over at the turn of the century; bricks had been torn out of the walls to replumb and rewire the kitchen and the bath; big hand-twist electric switches stuck out of the plaster but turned on no light.
I opened the windows and began to hang my clothes in the closet. Maybe I should have felt good to be back in New Orleans, where I had been a policeman for fourteen years in the First District, but it felt strange to be alone in a rented apartment, with the late-afternoon light cold and yellow on the banana trees outside. Or maybe it was simply a matter of age. Solitude and the years did not go well with me, and even though I had lived over a half century, I had concluded that I was one of those people who would never know with any certainty who they were, that my thoughts about myself would always be question marks; my only identity would remain the reflection that I saw in the eyes of others.
I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life. I finished putting my shirts, underwear, and socks in the dresser drawers, stripped down to my skivvies, and did ten one-arm chins on an iron pipe in the kitchen, forty leg lifts, and fifty stomach crunches, and got into the shower and turned water on so hot that my skin turned red and grainy through my suntan.
I dried off and combed my hair in the mirror. I had lost fifteen pounds since Boggs had shot me; my stomach was flat, the love handles around my waist had almost disappeared, the scar tissue where a bouncing Betty had gotten me in Vietnam looked like a spray of small gray arrow points that had been slipped under the skin on my right thigh and side. I still had my father's thick black hair and mustache, except for the white patch above my ear, and if I didn't pay attention to the lines in my neck and around my eyes and the black-peppery flecks of skin cancer on my arms, I could still pretend it was only the bottom of the fifth.