“Could I help you, Julia?”
“I have a complaint,” she said, smiling prettily, her back erect, her hands uncertain.
“What might that be?”
“It’s prostitution, if you ask me. Out by Cade, I’m talking about.”
One hand fluttered on her thigh, then remained motionless.
“By Cade?”
“I drove our maid home yesterday. She lives on the dirt road by this bar. You know the one I’m talking about.”
“I think I do, Julia.”
“There were white men walking with these black women back to these trailers.”
When I didn’t respond, she said, “Dave, I’m not a prude. But this is our community.”
“Two doors down, there’re a couple of guys inside you can talk to.”
“I suspect one of them is the same gentleman I spoke to earlier. He could hardly contain his yawn.”
“Some people believe it’s better to know where the players are rather than spread them all over the community,” I said.
“The maid told me a black woman named Ruthie Jean Fontenot brings the prostitutes to that nightclub, or whatever you want to call it.”
I looked at her, at the manic, pinched energy in her face and the bleached hair spiked on the ends, the eyes bright with either residual booze or black speed, and I didn’t doubt that the Furies waited for Julia each morning inside her dresser mirror.
“I’ll ask someone to look into it,” I said.
“How kind.”
“Have I done something to offend you?”
“Of course not. You’re a sweetie, Dave. I just wish I’d had a chance with you before Bootsie came along.”
“It’s always good to see you, Julia.”
A few minutes later I watched through the window as she got into her yellow convertible and roared out into the traffic, her morning temporarily in place, as though reporting a crippled black woman to a rural sheriff’s office had purged the earth of a great evil.
I had a cup of coffee, opened my mail, and went to the lockup. Kelso was chewing on a soda straw and reading from a folder opened on his desk. At the top of a page I could see Sonny’s name.
“Robicheaux, my man, work out something, get his bail reduced, go the bail yourself, let him box up worms out at your dock, he don’t belong here,” Kelso said.
“That’s the way it shakes out sometimes, Kelso.”
“I got him in isolation like you asked, I’m even taking his food from my house to his cell. So what’s he tell me? He wants to go back in main pop.”
“Bad idea.”
“He says it don’t matter where I put him, his ticket’s run out, he don’t like small places. He wants to go back into main pop or he ain’t gonna eat his food.”
“You’ve dealt with problem inmates before.”
“Here’s the rest of it. My night man, he didn’t make this cat Pogue, right, but now he says maybe he saw him around the jail earlier, maybe with some other guys. I go, “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this?” So now he says he don’t remember anything, and besides that, his wife calls him in sick. I never had a hit in my jail, Robicheaux. You get this cocksucker out of here.”
I checked my weapon with Kelso, and a uniformed guard pulled the levers on a sliding barred door that gave onto a corridor of individual cells. The guard walked me past three empty cells to the last one on the row and let me in.
Sonny sat on the edge of his bunk in his skivvies, one bare foot pulled up on the thin mattress. His body looked hard and white, the scars on his rib cage and chest like a network of dried purple lesions.
I lowered the bunk from the opposite wall on its chain and sat down.
“You want to square with me?” I said.
“If you’re here for absolution, I don’t have the right collar for it,” he said.
“Who says I need it?”
“You work for the Man, Dave. You know how things really are, but you still work for the Man.”
“I’m going to be hard on you, Sonny. I think that girl in St. Martinville is dead because of you, so how about getting your nose out of the air for a while?”
He put both his feet on the concrete floor and picked up an apple from a paper plate that contained two uneaten sandwiches and a scoop of potato salad.
“You want it? Kelso brought it from his house,” he said.
“You’re really going on a hunger strike?”
He shrugged, let his eyes rove over the graffiti on the walls, looked at a cross somebody had scorched on the ceiling with a cigarette lighter. “You’re not a bad guy, Streak,” he said.
“Help us. Maybe I can get you some slack.”
“Hey, how about some prune-o? The sweep-up slipped me some.”
He looked at the expression on my face. “I got nothing I can help you with. That’s what you don’t hear.”
“What’s in the notebook?”
He looked at me for a beat, considering his words, perhaps already dismissing their value. “How close are the next-door neighbors?” he said.
“The next three cells are empty.”
“I did a gig with the DEA, not because they liked me, they just thought my city library card meant I probably had two or three brain cells more than the pipe heads and rag-noses they usually hire for their scut work. Anyway, considering the environment, it’s not the kind of press I need, know what I’m saying?”
“Come on, Sonny.”
“Down in the tropics, the cocaine trail always leads back to guns. I met guys who’d been in Laos, the Golden Triangle, guys who’d helped process opium into heroin in Hong Kong. Then I started hearing stories about POWs who’d gotten written off by the government.
“I was carrying this shitload of guilt, so I thought I could trade it off by involving myself with these MIA-POW families. I helped put together this telephone tree, with all kinds of people on it who I didn’t even know. I didn’t realize some of them were probably ex-intelligence guys who’d been mixed up with these opium growers in Laos. You with me?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“Their consciences bothered them and they started telling the families about what went on over there. I was making out a death list and didn’t know it. At least that’s the best I can figure it. I burned the Xerox copy. Do the same with the original, Dave, before more people get hurt.”
“Guilt about what?” I said.
“I used people — Indians, peasant girls, people who’d always gotten the dirty end of the stick, anyway.”
He brushed at the top of his bare thigh.
“We walked into an ambush. I had a flak vest on. Everybody around me got chewed up,” he said. “Sometimes a guy feels guilt when the guy next to him catches the bus. That’s just the way it is, Sonny.”
“I was hit twice. When I went down, a half dozen other guys got shredded into horse meat right on top of me. Later, the Indians thought I had religious powers or I was an archangel or something. 11 played it for all it was worth, Streak. Look, my whole life I peddled my ass and ran games on people. Guys like me don’t see a burst of light and change their hustle.”
He reached under the top of the mattress and took out a jar and unscrewed the cap. The smell was like soft fruit that had been mixed with lighter fluid and left in a sealed container on a radiator. After he drank from the jar the skin of his face seemed to flex against his skull.
“You called me a Judas goat. I have a hard time accepting that, Sonny.”
“Yeah, I don’t like this cell too much, either.”
“You think I led you down the slaughter chute?”
“No, not really,” he said.
I nodded, but I couldn’t look at his face. We both knew that had he not phoned me at the house to warn me about Patsy Dap, he might be riding on a breezy streetcar down St. Charles Avenue.