'We've got another dead dealer, a guy named Camel Benoit down on Terpsichore and Baronne.'
The heat went out of her eyes.
'Did you know him?' I said.
She brushed the dirt off her palms. 'He used to work some girls out of this neighborhood,' she said.
'Somebody drove an American flag through his heart.' I saw the question mark in her face. I told her about the man in gloves and a Halloween mask who had torn up the shooting gallery, about the body in the wall and the force that must have been required to drive the brass-winged staff through the heart cavity. All the while she continued to sit with her rump on her heels and look reflectively at the flower bed in front of her.
'Who's in charge of the investigation?' she said.
'Motley.'
'He'll do his best with it.'
'Somebody else won't?'
'The department has its problems.'
'Is Nate Baxter one of them?' I said.
She smoothed the wet dirt around the base of the chrysanthemum plant with her garden trowel.
'Is there another problem, too?' I asked. 'Like this citizens committee that doesn't seem too upset over a bunch of black lowlifes being canceled out?'
'You think the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans is involved with murder?' But her tone did not quite reflect the outrageousness of the idea.
'Some funny people keep showing up on it. Tommy Blue Eyes, Hippo Bimstine… you as the liaison person for NOPD. That's a peculiar combo, don't you think?'
'Lots of people want New Orleans to be like it was thirty years ago. For different reasons, maybe.'
'What's your own feeling? You think maybe the times are such that we should just whack out a few of the bad guys? Create our own free-fire zone and make up the rules later?'
'I don't think I like what you're saying.'
'I heard you went up to Angola to watch a man electrocuted.'
'That bothers you?'
'I had to witness an execution once. I had dreams about it for a long time.'
'Let me clarify something for you. I didn't go once. I do it in every capital conviction I'm involved with. The people who can't be there, the ones these guys sodomize and mutilate and murder, have worse problems than bad dreams.'
'You're a tough-minded lady.'
'Save the hand job for somebody else.'
I stood up and turned off the hose. The iron handle squeaked in my hand.
'The bad thing about vigilantes is that eventually they're not selective,' I said.
'Is that supposed to mean something to me?'
'I'm going to violate a confidence. If Zoot had walked into that crack house a little earlier this morning, he might have had his head opened up with that E-tool like some of the others. He's not a good listener, either, Lucinda.'
Her lips parted silently. I could not look at the recognition of loss spreading through her face.
It was hot that night, with an angry whalebone moon high above the marsh. The rumble of dry thunder woke me at three in the morning. I found Bootsie in the kitchen, sitting in the dark at the breakfast table, her bare feet in a square of moonlight. Her shoulders were rounded; her breasts sagged inside her nightgown.