A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"No."

"You know where Joe Burda's Golden Star is on Decatur?"

"Yeah."

"It's two doors up from there. If you want to do some business, leave word at the bar."

"Make sure the gate latches on your way out," he said.

The next two people whose names and addresses Minos had given me were equally unproductive. One was a bar owner who was in jail in Baton Rouge, and the other, a wrestling promoter, had died of AIDS.

At eleven that night I walked down Bourbon in the roar of noise from the bars and strip joints, amid the Halloween revelers, the midwestern conventioneers, breathless

, red-faced college kids who spilled beer from their paper cups down the front of their clothes, and the Negro street dancers whose clip-on taps rang like horseshoes on the cement. Bourbon is closed to automobile traffic, so that the street itself is like an open-air zoo, but by and large it's a harmless one. The girls still take off their clothes on the runways and hookers work out of taxicabs in the early morning hours. Occasionally a cop will cool out a drunk with a baton in a side-street bar, and the burlesque spielers in candy-striped vests and straw boaters can conjure up visions right out of adolescent masturbation; but ultimately Bourbon offers the appearance of sleaze to the tourists with the implicit understanding that it contains no real threat of injury to them.

In fact, the man I wanted to find ran a T-shirt and souvenir shop, and he was as innocuous in dress and manner as an ice cream salesman. He walked out from behind a curtain in back after his clerk told him I wanted to talk to him, and his oval face was pink and shining, his thin red hair combed back with water, his mouth wide with a grin, his neck powdered with talcum. He wore a white suit and a silver silk shirt, and his appearance gave every indication of a harmless, happy fat man—except that on second glance you noticed that his chest was as broad as his stomach, that he wore gold chains around his neck, that his eyes took your inventory and did not smile with his mouth.

"I know you," he said, and shook his finger playfully at me. "You're a police officer. No, you used to be one, right here in the Quarters."

"That's right."

"You were a lieutenant."

"That's right."

"You probably don't remember me, but I used to see you and your partner over at the Acme. You used to come in at lunch for oysters. What's his name? He's got a club here now."

"Cletus Purcel."

"Yeah. I was in his place the other day. Real nice. I think he's going to make it."

"Could I talk to you in private?"

He looked at the ruby-studded gold watch on his wrist.

"Sure thing," he said, and held back the curtain for me.

His office was a small, cluttered room in the back, with a desk, three chairs, and old jazz posters on the brick walls. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and tapped the bottom of a poster with his finger.

"See that name there?" he said. "You got to look close, but that's me, Uncle Ray Fontenot. I played trombone right down the street at Sharky Bonnano's Dream Room. You remember him?"

"Sure."

"You remember those two colored guys used to tap-dance on the stage there, Pork Chops and Kidney Beans?"

"I want to score five kilos of uncut coke. You deliver good stuff at the right price, we'll be doing more business later."

He peeled the cellophane off a package of Picayune cigarettes.

"Not too many ex-cops come in here with that kind of statement," he said. He had never stopped smiling.

"Forget the ex-cop business. It all spends."

"Oh, don't misunderstand me. I'm not knocking a man trying to make a little money. But your information's dated. That's what I'm trying to say."

"How's that?"

He tilted back in the swivel chair, his silver shirt tight across his broad chest and stomach, his eyes bright and squinted with goodwill.