"Yeah, but Passion and Connie Deshotel just don't connect for me," I said.
"You still want to go to the Big Sleazy?"
"With you, always," I said.
"Hey, bwana?"
"What?"
"Connie Deshotel's dirty."
The next morning, Saturday, I drove out to Passion Labiche's house. She unlatched the front door and asked me to follow her into the kitchen, where she was canning tomatoes. She lifted a boiling cauldron off the stove with hot pads, pouring into the preserve jars on the drainboard while the steam rose into her face. She had placed a spoon into each of the jars to prevent the glass from cracking, but one of them suddenly popped and stewed tomatoes burst in a pattern like a broken artery on her arm and the front of her dress.
She dropped the cauldron into the sink, her face bright with pain.
"You okay?" I said.
"Sure," she said, wiping at her arm and dress with a dishrag.
She continued to wash her arm and scrub at her dress, rubbing the stain deeper into the fabric, spreading a huge damp area under her breasts.
"I have to change. Fix yourself something, or do whatever you feel like," she said, her face sweating, her eyes dilated.
She ran up the stairs. When she came back down she had washed her face and tied her hair up on her head and put on a yellow dress. She cleaned off the drain-board with the heavy-breathing, self-enforced detachment of someone who might have just stepped back from a car wreck.
"I went over the breaking-and-entering report on your house. The intruder took nothing but a box of photos?" I said.
"That's all I'm missing so far. I wouldn't have known they were gone, except some shoes fell down from the shelf," she said.
"You told Connie Deshotel you'd seen her in an old photo. Is there any reason she wouldn't want you to have a photograph of her?"
"It was probably kids. Who cares? Why you spending time on this, anyway? None of this got anything to do with my sister."
"Was there a picture of Connie in the box that was stolen?"
"I don't know and I don't care. You stop bothering me with this." She rubbed butter on the place where she had scalded herself with stewed tomatoes.
"Why'd that stain on your dress disturb you, Passion?"
She looked out the window at her garden and barn and the pecan trees down by the bayou, the skin twitching at the corner of her mouth.
"You better go about your business, Dave. I don't make good company some days. Funny how a policeman gives the grief to the person he can get his hands on, huh?" she said.
Monday morning Helen and I took an unmarked car to New Orleans and parked behind the old U.S. Mint on the river and cut through the open-air market on Decatur. The pavilion was crowded with people, and farther up the street a Dixieland band was playing in a courtyard and a man was selling snowballs from an umbrella-shaded cart on the sidewalk. We crossed Decatur to the cafe where Johnny Remeta had dropped off the number of his post office box.
It was not a place for the conventional tourist, particularly not someone with a history of coronary or vascular trouble. It had screen doors, electric fans instead of air-conditioning, an interior that looked painted with fingernail polish, and cuisine that featured sausage, bacon, cob corn glistening with butter, deep-fried pork chops, greens cooked in ham fat, potatoes floating in grease, and mounds of scrambled eggs that lay in bubbling heaps on a grill that probably hadn't been scraped clean since World War II.
"Does Maggie Glick come in here?" I asked the black woman who sat behind the counter, fanning herself with a magazine.
"Who want to know, darlin'?" she said. I opened my shield.
"She eat breakfast here on the weekend," the woman said.
"Do you remember somebody leaving a note for her a while back, one with the initials M.G. on the envelope?" I said.
"Could be. Don't remember."
"I think it's a good time to focus on your memory skills," Helen said.
The black woman kept flapping the magazine in her face. Her hair was threaded with gray and it rose and fell in the current of warm air generated by the magazine. She did not look at us when she spoke again.
"You see, Maggie comes over here to eat breakfast on the weekend 'cause she don't like the place where she lives or the work she do. When she was a li'l girl, she belonged to the same church as me over in Algiers. I still remember the li'l girl. Every time Maggie comes in here, I still remember that same li'l girl, I surely do. That enough for you, ma'am?"
We drove across the river into Algiers and parked on a narrow street lined with ancient buildings that looked like impacted teeth. The foundations had settled and the upper stories leaned into the sidewalks, the rooftops tipping downward against the light like the brim of a man's fedora. The hotels were walk-ups with stained sacks of garbage propped by the entrances, the taverns joyless, dark places where fortified wine was sold by the glass and where a person, if he truly wanted to slip loose his moorings, could create for himself the most violent denouement imaginable with a casual flick of the eyes at the bikers rubbing talcum into their pool cues.
But the real business on this street was to provide a sanctuary that precluded comparisons, in the same way that prisons provide a safe place for recidivists for whom setting time in abeyance is not a punishment but an end. The mulatto and black girls inside Maggie Glick's bar rejected no one. No behavior was too shameful, no level of physical or hygienic impairment unacceptable at the door. The Christmas tinsel and wreaths and paper bells wrapped with gold and silver foil stayed up year round. Inside Maggie Glick's, every day was New Year's morning, sunless, refrigerated, the red neon clock indicating either the a.m. or the P.M., as you wished, the future as meaningless and unthreatening as the past.
Maggie’s father had been a Lithuanian peddler who sold shoestrings from door to door and her mother a washerwoman in an Algiers brothel. The tops of Maggie's gold breasts were tattooed with roses and her hair was the same shiny black as the satin blouse she wore with her flesh-tight jeans and purple heels. She was lean and hard-edged, and like most longtime prostitutes, withdrawn, solipsistic, bored with others and with what she did, and curiously asexual in her manner and behavior, particularly around Johns.
Maggie sat at the far corner of the bar, a cup of tea on a napkin in front of her. She glanced at me, then at Helen, her eyes neutral, then picked up her cup and blew on her tea.
"You don't have to show me your badge. I know who you are," she said.
"I thought you were in St. Gabriel," I said.
"Those cops who got fired or went to jail themselves? One of them was the narc who planted crystal in my apartment. He's in Seagoville, I'm outside. Everybody feeling good about the system now."
"The word is you set up the drop for the contract on Zipper Clum. When'd you start fronting points for button men?" I said.
"Johnny Remeta told you that?"
"How do you know about Johnny Remeta?" Helen asked.
" 'Cause I read y'all had him in y'all's jail. 'Cause everybody on the street knows he did Zipper Clum. 'Cause he used to come in here. The boy has some serious sexual problems. But who want to go into details about that kind of thing?"
"That's so good of you," Helen said, stepping close-in to the elbow of the bar, her forearm pressed flat on the wood. "Is there something wrong about the words we use you don't understand? We're talking about conspiracy to commit murder for hire. There's a woman on death row right now. Would you like to join her there?"
Maggie picked up her cup again and drank from it. She watched her bartender break open a roll of quarters and spill the coins into the drawer of the cash register, then watched a man redeem a marker by counting out a stack of one-dollar bills one at a time on the bar. A young black woman sitting next to a white man in a suit quietly picked up her purse and went out the front door. Maggie Glick looked at the clock on the wall.