Jolie blonde, gardez done e'est t'as fait.
Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,
Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.
Jolie blonde, pretty girl,
Flower of my heart,
I'll love you forever
My jolie blonde.
But seldom did Annie and I speak directly to each other. Instead we talked brightly to Alafair, walked her to the swing sets and seesaws, bought snowcones, and avoided one another's eyes. That night in the almost anonymous darkness of our bedroom we made love. We did it in need, with our eyes closed, without words, with a kiss only at the end. As I lay on my back, arms across my eyes, I felt her fingers leave the top of my hand, felt her turn on her side toward the opposite wall, and I wondered if her heart was as heavy as mine.
I woke up a half hour later. The room was cool from the wind sucked through the window by the attic fan, but my skin was hot as though I had a sunburn, the stitches in my scalp itched, my palms were damp on my thighs when I sat on the side of the bed.
Without waking Annie, I washed my face, put on a pair of khakis and an old Hawaiian shirt, and went down to the bait shop. The moon was up, and the willows along the bank of the bayou looked silver in the light. I sat in the darkness at the counter and stared out the window at the water and the outboard boats and pirogues knocking gently against the posts on my dock. Then I got up, opened the beer cooler, and took out a handful of partly melted ice and rubbed it on my face and neck. The amber necks of the beer bottles glinted in the moon's glow. The smooth aluminum caps, the wet and shining labels, the brassy beads inside the bottles were like an illuminated nocturnal still life. I closed the box, turned on the lightbulb over the counter, and called Lafayette information for Minos P. Dautrieve's home number.
A moment later I had him on the phone. I looked at the clock. It was midnight.
"What's happening, Dunkenstein?" I said.
"Oh boy," he said.
"Sorry about the hour."
"What do you want, Robicheaux?"
"Where are these clubs that Eddie Keats owns?"
"You called me up to ask me that?"
I didn't answer, and I heard him take a breath.
"The last time we talked, you hung up the phone in my ear," he said. "I didn't appreciate that. I think you have a problem with manners."
"All right, I apologise. Will you tell me where these clubs are?"
"I'll be frank about something else, too. Are you drinking?"
"No. How about the clubs?"
"I guess things never work fast enough for you, do they? So you're going to cowboy our Brooklyn friend?"
"Give me some credit."
"I try to. Believe me," he said.
"There are a dozen people I can call in Lafayette who'll give me the same information."
"Yeah, which makes me wonder why you had to wake me up."
"You ought to know the answer to that."
"I don't. I'm really at a loss. You're truly a mystery to us. You don't hear what you're told, you make up your own rules, you think your past experience as a police officer allows you to mess around in federal business."
"I'm talking to you because you're the only guy around here with the brains and juice to put these people away," I said.
"I'm not flattered."
"So it's no dice, huh?"
He paused.
"Look, Robicheaux, I think you have a cinder block for a head, but basically you're a decent guy," he said. "That means we don't want you hurt anymore. Stay out of it. Have some faith in us. I don't know why you went out to Bubba Rocque's house this afternoon, but I don't think it was smart. You don't-"
"How'd you know I was out there?"
"We have somebody who writes down licence tags for us. You don't flush these guys by flipping lighted matches at them. If you do, they pick the time and the place and you lose. Anyway, go to bed and forget Eddie Keats, at least for tonight."
"Does he have a family?"
"No, he's a gash-hound."
"Thanks, Minos. I'm sorry I woke you up."
"It's all right. By the way, how'd you like Bubba Rocque's wife?"
"I suspect she's ambitious more than anything else."
"What a romantic. She's a switch-hitter, podna. Five years ago she did a three-spot for shanking another dyke. That Bubba can really pick them, can't he?"
I called an old bartender friend in Lafayette. Minos had given me more information than he thought. The bartender told me Keats owned two bars, one in a hotel off Canal in New Orleans, the other on the Breaux Bridge highway outside of Lafayette. If he was at either bar, and if what Minos had said about him was correct, I knew which one he would probably be in.
When I was in college, the Breaux Bridge highway contained a string of all-night lowlife bars, oilfield supply yards, roadhouses, a quarter horse track, gambling joints, and one Negro brothel. You could find the pimps, hoods, whores, ex-cons, and white-knuckle crazies of your choice there every Saturday night. Emergency flares burned next to the wrecked automobiles and shattered glass on the two-lane blacktop, the dance floors roared with electronic noise and fistfights. You could get laid, beat up, shanked, and dosed with clap, all in one night and for less than five dollars.
I parked across the road from the Jungle Room. Eddie Keats had kept up the tradition. His bar was a flat, wide building constructed of cinder blocks that were painted purple and then overprinted with green coconut palms that were illuminated by the floodlights that were hung in the oak trees in front. But I could see two house trailers in the back parking lot, which was kept dark, that were obviously being used by Keat's hot-pillow action. I waited a half hour and did not see the white Corvette.
I had no plan, really, and I knew that I should have listened to Minos's advice. But I still had the same hot flush to my skin, my breath was quicker than it should have been, my back teeth ground together without my being aware of it. At 1:30 a.m. I stuck the.45 down in the front of my khakis, pulled my Hawaiian shirt over the butt, and walked across the road.
The front door, which was painted fingernail-polish red, was partly open to let out the smoke from inside. Only the bar area and a pool table in a side room were lighted, and the dance floor in back that was enclosed by a wooden rail, where a red-headed girl who had powdered her body heavily to cover her freckles was grinning and taking off her clothes while the rockabilly band in the corner pounded it out. The men at the bar were mostly pipeliners and oilfield roughnecks and roustabouts. The white-collar Johns stayed in the darkness at the tables and booths. The waitresses wore black cutoff blouses that exposed the midriff, black high heels, and pink shorts so tight that every anatomical line was etched through the cloth.
A couple of full-time hookers were at the bar, and with a sideways flick of their eyes, in the middle of their conversation with the oilfield workers, they took my inventory as I walked past them to one of the booths. Above the bar a monkey in a small cage sat listlessly on a toy trapeze among a litter of peanut shells and his own droppings.