I hadn't been able to find the living, so I thought I might have better luck investigating the dead. The next afternoon Cecil and I drove to the Jungle Room on the Breaux Bridge road to see what we could learn, if anything, about Eddie Keats's connection to Victor Romero. In the blazing sunlight, the white shale parking lot and the purple cinder-block front wall with its painted coconut trees and fingernail-polish-red front door were like a slap across the eyes. But the inside was as dark as a cave, except for the soft lights behind the bar, and it smelled of the insecticide that an Orkin man was spraying with a tank in the corners of the building. Two weary and hung-over-looking women were smoking cigarettes and drinking Bloody Marys at the bar. The bartender was putting long-necked beer bottles in the cooler, his wide back ridging with muscle each time he bent over. He had platinum hair and bronze arms and he wore no shirt and a flowered silver vest that shone like dull tin. High up on the wall was the wire cage where the monkey sat among his peanut hulls and soiled newspapers.
I showed my badge to the two women and asked them when was the last time they had seen Eddie. Their eyes looked at nothing; they blew smoke up in the air, flipped their ashes into ashtrays, and were as unknowledgeable and lifeless as cardboard cutouts.
Had they seen Victor Romero lately?
Their eyes were vague and empty, and their cigarettes moved back into their mouths in slow motion and then back out into the exhaled smoke.
"I understand the funeral was this morning. Did Eddie get a nice service?" I said.
"They cremated him and put him in a vase or something. I got up too late to go," one of the women said. Her hair was dyed red and tied back tight against her head like wire. Her skin was white and shiny, tight as a lampshade over the bone, and there was a knot of blue veins in her temple.
"I bet he was a great guy to work for," I said.
She turned on the barstool and looked me full in the face. Her brown eyes were liquid and malevolent.
"I'm supposed to talk to people that buy me a drink," she said. "Then I'll put my hand in your lap and we'll talk about your rising expectations. You want somebody to help you with your rising expectations, officer?"
I put my office card in front of her.
"If you ever get tired of comic-book routines, call this number," I said.
The bartender put the last beer bottle in the cooler and walked toward me on the dockboards behind the bar, pressing a stick of Num-Zit against his tooth and gum.
"I'm Eddie's brother. You want something?" he said. His tan was almost gold, the kind that comes from applying chemicals to the skin in the sun, and the exposed hair sticking out from under his arms was bleached on the tips. He had the same thick, veined neck, powerful shoulders and adenoidal Brooklyn accent that his brother had had. I asked him when he had seen Eddie Keats last.
"Two years ago, when he come up to visit in Canarsie," he said.
"You know Victor Romero?"
"No."
"How about Bubba Rocque?"
"I don't think I know the name."
"Did you know a Haitian named Toot?"
"I don't know none of these people. I just come down to take care of Eddie's business affairs. It's a big tragedy."
"I think you're violating the law, Mr. Keats."
"What?"
"I think you're contributing to prostitution."
His green eyes looked at me carefully. He took a Lucky Strike from a pack on the liquor counter behind him and lit it. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue with his fingernails. He blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.
"What's the game?" he said.
"No game. I'm just going to see if I can get you closed up."
"You had some kind of deal with Eddie?"
"No, I didn't like Eddie. I'm the guy who busted a pool cue across his face. What do you think of that?"
He looked away and took another puff off his cigarette. Then he focused again on my face, a wrinkled wedge of concern between his eyes.
"Look, you didn't like my brother, that's your problem. But I ain't Eddie. You got no reason to be down on me, man. I'm a cooperative guy. If I got to piece off a little action, that's cool. I ran a nigger bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I got along with everybody. That ain't easy to do in Bed-Stuy. I want to get along here, too."
"No. I don't have the problem. You do. You're a pimp and you're cruel to animals. Cecil, come over here," I said.
Cecil was leaning against the wall by the cue rack, with his arms folded in front of him, a dark light in his face. Like many people of color, he didn't like the class of white people that Keat's brother and the two prostitutes represented to him. He walked toward us with his massive weight, his mouth a tight line, a lump of Red Man as taut as a golf ball inside his jaw. He opened and closed his hands at his sides.
The bartender stepped backwards.
"Now wait a minute," he said.
"Mr Keats wants us to take down that monkey cage," I said.
"I was't'inking that same't'ing myself," Cecil said, and used the barstool to climb up on the bar. Then he stepped with one foot over onto the liquor counter and shook the monkey cage loose from a hook screwed into the ceiling. His huge shoe knocked over a half-dozen bottles of whiskey that rolled off the counter and crashed on the duckboards. The monkey's eyes were wide with fright, his leathery paws enmeshed in the wire screen. Cecil held the cage out stiffly with one arm and dropped to the floor again.
"The lady has my office card. You can file a complaint if you don't like it. Welcome to south Louisiana, podjo," I said.
Cecil and I went outside into the white glare of sunlight on the shale parking lot. Then we walked into the shady grove of live oaks behind the bar and set the cage down in the grass. I unfastened the wire on the door and pulled it open. The monkey sat in his wet tangle of newspaper, too frightened to move, his tail pressed up one side of the cage. Then I tilted the cage forward and he toppled out on the grass, chattered and squeaked once, and climbed high into the fork of an oak, where he looked back at us with his wide eyes. The wind blew the moss in the trees.
"I like working wit' you, Dave," Cecil said.
But sometimes when an investigation seems to go nowhere, when the street people stonewall you and lowlife like Victor Romero seems to have Vaseline all over him, a door quietly drifts open on the edge of your vision. It was Saturday, the day after Cecil and I had gone to Keats's bar, and I was reading the Times-Picayune under the canvas umbrella on the dock. Even in the shade, the light was bright on the newsprint and hurt my eyes. Then the sun went behind clouds and the day was suddenly gray and the breeze came up and ruffled the water and bent the cattails and reeds along the bank. I pinched my eyes with my fingers, and glanced again at the state wrap-up column in the second section. At the bottom of the column was a five-line wire service story about the arrest in north eastern Louisiana of a man who was suspected of robbing apartment mailboxes in a welfare project and assaulting elderly people for their social security checks. His name was Jerry Falgout.