That afternoon I walked downtown and across the drawbridge and into the park and sat by myself at a picnic table next to the softball diamond. The park was empty, the grass blown with tiny pieces of leaves chopped up by the mower, a plastic tarp stretched across the swimming pool. At dusk I walked back home and passed people on the bridge whom I did not know and who did not respond to my greeting. Clete would not return from Arizona until the next day, and Alafair was staying on with Desmond until the weekend. I fed Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon, then showered and shaved and dressed in a pair of pressed slacks and a Hawaiian shirt I let hang over my belt. Rain was falling out of the sky, which seemed turned upside down, like a barrel of dark water with stars inside it. I put on a rain hat and drove to the club on the bayou where the blues weren’t just music but a way of life.
Bella Delahoussaye was singing a song by a Lafayette musician named Lazy Lester. Inside the din, the only line I could make out was Don’t ever write your name on the jailhouse wall. I sat at the end of the bar in the shadows and ordered a chicken barbecue sandwich and a 7Up with a lime slice. Ten minutes later, a heavyset man spun the stool next to me as though announcing his presence, then sat on it, a cloud of nicotine and dried sweat whooshing out of his clothes. “I think they fucked you, Robicheaux.”
His head had the dimensions of a football, swollen in the center and tapered at the top and the chin. His small mouth was circled with salt-and-pepper whiskers he clipped daily. When he spoke, his mouth looked both bovine and feral. His name was Frenchie Lautrec. He ordered a shot and a water back. Before joining the department, he was a brig chaser in the Crotch and a bondsman. He was also a longtime friend of Axel Devereaux.
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “So who fucked me?”
“The Queen Bitch, Helen Soileau. Who else?”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“No problem. I still think she stuck it to you. What are you drinking?”
My glass was half empty. “Nothing.”
“You staying off the hooch?”
“What are you after, Frenchie?”
“I hear IA has got you by the short hairs. You been over the line too many times. I heard the prick running your case say it.”
“Who’s the prick running my case?”
“I’m trying to cut you a break, Robicheaux. You need some help, maybe a job, a little income, I’m here. That’s what old school is about. We take care of each other.”
“I’ll get by.”
“I admire that. But if you need a gig, let me know.”
“Doing what?”
“Greasing the wheels.”
“What kind of wheels?”
“This is the Cajun Riviera, right? Use your imagination.”
“Maybe I’ll get back to you.”
“That’s the spirit.” He hit me on the back and got up from the stool. “If you want a little action, it’s on the house. Know what I’m saying?”
I watched him walk away, his shoulders humped, his hands knotting and unknotting. I finished my sandwich and ordered another 7Up. After her set, Bella Delahoussaye sat down next to me. “That guy who was here, you hang around wit’ him?” she said.
“I worked with him.”
Her gaze went away from me, then came back. “What do you mean, you did?”
“I’m suspended without pay. That means canned.”
“What for?”
“Screwing up,” I said. “You want a drink?”
“You shouldn’t be here, baby.”
“How am I going to listen to you sing?”
“You know what I mean. You ain’t supposed to be around the wrong kind of liquids.”
“What do you know about Frenchie Lautrec?”
She twisted a strand of hair around her finger. She touched the scar that circumscribed half her neck and looked down the row of faces at the bar. “Walls got ears.”
“What time you get off?” I said.
“Like you don’t know. I ain’t giving you an excuse to sit at a bar. Go home. Don’t get yourself in no trouble.”
I smiled at her. She squeezed my thigh and went back on the stage. She hung her guitar on her neck and gazed into the shadows. “Mean and lean, down and dirty, y’all. I’m talking about the blues.”
I knocked on her door in St. Martinville at ten the next morning. She opened the door, a bandana on her head. “My favorite boogie-woogie man from la Louisiane.”
“Thought I’d take you to breakfast,” I said.
She looked out at the street. “Ain’t nobody followed you?”
“Why would anybody follow me?”
She pulled me inside and closed the door. “Frenchie Lautrec and Axel Devereaux was running the working girls. Now Devereaux is dead, and Frenchie got it all.”
“Prostitution?”
“Boy, you right on it.”
“It can’t be that big.”
“They got girls get five hundred a night, some up to a thousand. Most of the johns are in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Frenchie’s got a plane.”
Her living room was tiny, the doorways hung with beads, an ancient Victrola against a wall, the couch and stuffed chairs maroon and purple and tasseled, incense burning in a cup on the coffee table. Bella wore sandals and jeans and an oversize Ragin’ Cajuns T-shirt and a gold chain around one ankle, a charm balanced on the top of her foot. I could smell ham and eggs cooking in the kitchen.
“Sit down. I got something to ax you,” she said.
“Sure.”
“I got a son in Angola. He’s just a li’l-bitty boy. One of the wolves put him on the stroll.”
“What’s he down for?”
“Murder. During a robbery, him and another guy. The other guy pulled the trigger, but it didn’t matter. I went to see Harold two days ago. He cain’t hardly walk. That what the wolves are doing to him. They don’t use no grease, nothing.”
“I can make a call.”
She nodded and put a Kleenex to her nose as though she had a cold. She went into the kitchen. I followed her and sat at a table by the window.
“I got enough for two here,” she said.
There was a live oak in the backyard, a broken swing hanging from a limb, an alleyway strewn with trash and spiked with banana plants. “I already ate,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to go to breakfast.”
“Not really.”
“You just wanted to pump me about Frenchie Lautrec.”
“No. You’re nice to talk to.”
There was a beat. She worked the spatula in the frying pan, her back to me. “How long your wife been dead?”
“Three years.”
“Ain’t been nobody else?”
“No.”
She put a piece of browned toast and a cup of coffee in front of me. She filled her own plate and sat down across from me. “I got to say this: I was raised up to believe a redbird don’t sit on a blackbird’s nest.”
“That’s what white people taught your ancestors, then forgot their own admonition. I saw the chain on your ankle. What kind of charm is that?”
“A cross.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“From Hilary Bienville.”
“Where’d she get it?”
“Don’t know, didn’t ax. No matter what you say, you ain’t here about me, are you?”
“I like you and admire you, Miss Bella. Believe what you want.”
She got up and raked her food into a trash can, then washed the plate in the sink and set it in a drying rack. She leaned on the counter, her face covered with shadow. I stood up and spread my hand on her back. I could feel her breath rising and falling, her heat through the T-shirt, her blood humming.