“She wasn't in the office when Pogue called,” he said.
“You're sure?” I said.
“She was across the street at the doughnut place.”
“You didn't tell her about it?” I asked.
“No .. .” His eyes looked into space. “No, I'm sure of it. I never mentioned Pogue's name, never mentioned a place.”
Helen looked at me and made a sucking sound with her teeth. “Okay,”
she said. “Maybe the hit was already on him. There's Marsal-his to think about, too.”
“Not with a knife. We're talking about one of Pogue's buddies from the Phoenix Program,” Clete said. He leaned over in his chair and clicked on a floor fan, clamped his hand on top of a yellow legal pad by his telephone. The pages blew and rattled in the gust of air.
“Why would anyone try to take a guy like Pogue with a knife? Unless the killer knew we were in the vicinity?” I said.
Clete scratched at the scar that ran through his eyebrow, rested his chin on his knuckles.
“I guess you're right, you got a leak. How about that butt wipe who was in the Crotch?” he said.
“Rufus Arceneaux?” Helen said.
Clete and I drove to New Orleans at dawn, turned off I-io onto St.
Charles Avenue, and went uptown toward th
e Garden District, past the lovely old Pontchartrain Hotel and rows of antebellum and early Victorian homes with their narrow pillared galleries and oak-canopied yards that stayed black with shadow even in summer. We turned left across the neutral ground and the streetcar tracks and crossed Prytania, the street where Lillian Hellman grew up, then headed up Magazine, the old line of disembarkation into the Irish Channel, toward the levee and a different New Orleans, one of late-nineteenth-century paint less frame houses with ventilated shutters and hardpan dirt yards and tiny galleries propped up on bricks, clapboard corner bars that never closed or took down their Christmas lights, matchbox barbecue joints that smelled of hickory and ribs by 9 A.M.“ and graffiti-scrolled liquor stores whose windows were barred like jails.
I parked in front of the address Luke Fontenot had given me. A thundershower had just passed through the neighborhood and the air was gray and wet and steam rose from the roofs like smoke in winter. Clete rolled down the window and squinted at the rows of almost identical, weathered, coffee-colored houses, a ramshackle tin-roofed juke joint overgrown with banana trees on the corner, an elderly black man in a frayed suit and sneakers and baseball cap riding a bicycle with fat tires aimlessly up and down the street. I could see shadows and lights in Clete's face, like reflections that cling inside frost on a window.
”They say if you're ever black on Saturday night, you'll never want to be white again,“ he said.
”You usually hear white people say that after they shortchange the yardman,“ I said.
”Our house was one block over.“
I waited for him to go on, but he didn't.
”You want to come in?“ I said.
”No, it's your show. I'm going to get a cup of coffee.“
”Something on your mind?“
He laughed down in his chest, rubbed a knuckle against his nose. ”My old man knocked me into next week because I dropped his bucket of beer in front of that juke joint. He was quite a guy. I was never big on nostalgia, Streak.“
I watched him walk toward the levee, his porkpie hat slanted on the crown of his head, his face lifted into the breeze off the river, his feelings walled up inside a private place where I never transgressed.
Ruthie Jean's address was a two-story house with a fire escape for an upstairs entrance and wash strung across the veranda and a single paint-blistered trellis that was spoked with red roses.
A police cruiser with the NOPD crescent on the door and a white cop in a sky blue shirt behind the wheel slowed by my pickup as I was locking the door behind me.
”Can I help you?“ he said.
I opened my badge holder in my palm.
”On the job,“ I said, and smiled.