A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"What you want, man?" he asked, without looking up.

"I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff's department," I said, and opened my badge in my p

alm.

"What you want?" His eyes looked at me for the first time. They were sullen and flecked with tiny red veins.

"I'd like to talk to Dorothea."

"She's working the tables. She's real busy now."

"I only want a couple of minutes of her time. Call her over, please."

"Look, man, this ain't the place. You understand what I'm talking about?"

"Not really."

He raised up from his work and put his hands flat on the bar.

"That's her out yonder by the band," he said. "You want to go out there and get her? That what you want?"

"Ask her to come over here, please."

"Listen, I ain't did you nothing. Why you giving me this truck?"

The men next to me had stopped talking now and were smoking their cigarettes casually and looking at their own reflections in the bar mirror. One man wore a lavender porkpie hat with a feather in the brim. His sports coat hung heavy on one side.

"Look, man, you got a car outside?" the bartender asked.

"Yes."

"Go sit in it. I'll be sending her," he said, then his voice changed. "Why you be bothering that girl? She ain't did nothing."

"I know she hasn't."

"Then why you bothering her?" he asked.

Before I turned to go outside, I saw a big black woman in a purple dress looking at me from the far end of the duckboards. Her hands were on her hips, her chin pointed upward; she took the cigarette out of her mouth and blew smoke in my direction, her eyes never leaving my face. In the dim light I thought I saw blue tattoos scrolled on the tops of her breasts.

The rain clattered on the roof of my car and streamed down the windows. At the back of the juke joint, beyond the oyster-shell parking lot covered with flattened beer cans, were two battered house trailers. Two men who looked like Latins, in denim work clothes and straw hats, drove up in a pickup truck and knocked at one of the trailers, their bodies pressed up against the door to stay out of the rain. A black woman opened the inside door and spoke to them through the screen. They got back in their truck and left. I saw one of them look back through the rear window as they pulled onto the dirt road.

Five minutes later the bartender appeared in the front door of the juke joint with a small Negro girl at his side and pointed at my car. She ran across the parking lot toward me, with a newspaper spread over her head. When I pushed open the passenger door she jumped inside. She wore black fishnet stockings, a short black waitress's skirt, and a loose white blouse that exposed her lace bra, but she looked both too young and too small for the job she did, and the type of clothes that she wore. It was her hair that caught your attention, black and thick and brushed in soft swirls around her head, almost like a helmet that made her toy face seem even smaller than it was. She was frightened and would not look at me directly.

"You know I'm a police officer?" I said.

"Yes suh."

"Tee Beau saved my life, so I don't want to see him hurt. The man I'm after is named Jimmie Lee Boggs. He killed two people and took Tee Beau with him when he escaped. You know all that, don't you?"

"Yes suh, I knows that."

"You don't have to call me sir. If Tee Beau can help me find this man Boggs, maybe I can help Tee Beau."

She nodded her head. Her hands were motionless on top of the wet newspaper in her lap.

"Did he tell you where Boggs dropped him off?" I said.

"Suh?" Her eyes cut sideways at me, then looked straight ahead again.