"Everything's copacetic. I just talked with your man Twinky Lemoyne."
"Oh?"
"It looks like you put your finger in his eye."
"Why'd you go over there?"
"You never let them think they can make you flinch."
"Hang on a minute. I want to close the door." Then a moment later she scraped the receiver back up and said, "Dave, what happens around here won't affect my job or career to any appreciable degree. But maybe you ought to start thinking about covering your butt for a change."
"I had a bad night last night and I acted foolishly this morning. It's just one of those things," I said.
"That's not what I'm talking about, and I think you know it. When you chase money out of a community, people discover new depths in themselves."
"Have you gotten any feedback on the asphyxiated girl down in Vermilion Parish?"
"I just got back from the coroner's office. She's still Jane Doe."
"You think we're dealing with the same guy?"
"Bondage, humiliation of the victim, a prolonged death, probable sexual violation, it's the same creep, you'd better believe it." I could hear an edge in her voice, like a sliver of glass.
"I've got a couple of theories, too," she said. "He's left his last two victims where we could find them. Maybe he's becoming more compulsive, more desperate, less in control of his technique. Most psychopaths eventually reach a point where they're like sharks in feeding frenzy. They never satisfy the obsession."
"Or he wants to stick it in our faces?"
"You got it."
"Everything you say may be true, Rosie, but I think prostitution is connected with this stuff somewhere. You want to take a ride to New Orleans with me this afternoon?"
"A Vermilion Parish sheriff's detective is taking me out on the levee where you all found the girl last night. Do all these people spit Red Man?"
"A few of the women deputies don't."
I heard her laugh into the telephone.
"Watch out for yourself, slick," she said.
"You, too, Rosie."
Neither Bootsie nor Alafair was home. I left them a note, packed a change of clothes in a canvas bag in case I had to stay overnight, and headed for I-10 and New Orleans as the temperature climbed to one hundred degrees and the willows along the bayou drooped motio
nlessly in the heat as though all the juices had been baked out of their leaves.
I DROVE DOWN THE ELEVATED INTERSTATE AND CROSSED the Atchafalaya Basin and its wind-ruffled bays dotted with oil platforms and dead cypress, networks of canals and bayous, sand bogs, willow islands, stilt houses, flooded woods, and stretches of dry land where the mosquitoes swarmed in gray clouds out of the tangles of brush and intertwined trees. Then I crossed the wide, yellow sweep of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge, and forty-five minutes later I was rolling through Jefferson Parish, along the shores of Lake Pontchar-train, into New Orleans. The lake was slate green and capping, the sky almost white in the heat, and the fronds on the palm trees were lifting and rattling dryly in the hot breeze. The air smelled of salt and stagnant water and dead vegetation among the sand bogs on the west side of the highway; the asphalt looked like it could fry the palm of your hand.
But there were no rain clouds on the horizon, no hint of relief from the scorching white orb in the sky or the humidity that crawled and ran on the skin like angry insects.
I was on the New Orleans police force for fourteen years, first as a beat cop and finally as a lieutenant in Homicide. I never worked Vice, but there are few areas in New Orleans law enforcement that don't eventually lead you back into it. Without its pagan and decadent ambiance, its strip shows, hookers, burlesque spielers, taxi pimps, and brain-damaged street dopers, the city would be as attractive to most tourists as an agrarian theme park in western Nebraska.
The French Quarter has two populations, almost two sensory climates. Early in the morning black children in uniforms line up to enter the Catholic elementary school by the park; parishioners from St. Louis Cathedral have coffee au lait and beignets and read the newspaper at the outdoor tables in the Cafe du Monde; the streets are still cool, the tile roofs and pastel stucco walls of the buildings streaked with moisture, the scrolled ironwork on the balconies bursting with flowers; families have their pictures sketched by the artists who set up their easels along the piked fence in Jackson Square; in the background the breeze off the river blows through the azalea and hibiscus bushes, the magnolia blossoms that are as big as fists, and the clumps of banana trees under the equestrian statue of Andy Jackson; and as soon as you head deeper into the Quarter, under the iron, green-painted colonnades, you can smell the cold, clean odor of fresh fish laid out on ice, of boxed strawberries and plums and rattlesnake watermelons beaded with water from a spray hose.
But by late afternoon another crowd moves into the Quarter. Most of them are innocuous—college kids, service personnel, Midwestern families trying to see past the spielers into the interiors of the strip houses, blue-suited Japanese businessmen hung with cameras, rednecks from dry counties in Mississippi. But there's another kind, too—grifters, Murphy artists, dips and stalls, coke and skag dealers, stables of hookers who work the hotel trade only, and strippers who hook out of taxicabs after 2 a.m.
They have the franchise on the worm's-eye view of the world. They're usually joyless, indifferent to speculations about mortality, bored with almost all forms of experience. Almost all of them either free-base, mainline, do coke, or smoke crack. Often they straighten out the kinks with black speed.
They view ordinary people as carnival workers do rubes; they look upon their victims with contempt, sometimes with loathing. Most of them cannot think their way out of a paper bag; but the accuracy of their knowledge about various bondsmen, the hierarchy of the local mob, the law as it applies to themselves, and cops and judges on a pad, is awesome.