A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"I always had problems with weight and high blood pressure," he said. "I smoked reefer every night to keep my blood pressure down, then I'd go out and eat a whole pizza by myself. I got on prescription diet pills, then I started using some stuff that was a little more serious. Finally I was in the business myself, you know what I mean? So whoever gave you my name wasn't all wrong. But I bottomed out and went into treatment a year ago. The only problem I've got now is I eat all the time."

"You're in a twelve-step program?"

"What?"

"You're out of the business?"

"That's about it."

"Tell me, when you give a guy like Tony C. the deep six, what do you do? Just drop around one day and say, 'I bottomed out, Tony. I'm out of the business, see you around, you don't like it, fuck you'?"

This time the words bit into some nerve endings behind that pink and smiling face. He lit his cigarette and blew smoke at an upward angle into the air.

"I've never met the gentleman," he said, his eyes crinkling again.

"I see. Sorry to have wasted your time. I'll run along now, Mr. Fontenot. Say, the next time you give somebody that treatment shuck, you might find out what a twelve-step program is."

He tipped his ashes into an ashtray and looked pleasantly into his cigarette smoke without seeing anything.

"Tell Tony C. his distribution in southwestern Louisiana is lousy," I said. "I can double or triple it. But I've got nothing to prove. There're some guys in Texas who want to branch out."

"Then maybe that's who you should deal with."

"They've got a bad reputation. But maybe you're right. If I meet Tony C, I'll tell him what you said."

"Now, wait a minute…"

"I don't blame you for bullshitting me, Mr. Fontenot, but if you get serious, leave a message for me at Clete's Club. I'll be back in touch."

I walked back through the T-shirt shop and out into the neon lights and cacophony of jazz and rock bands on Bourbon Street.

I was tired, unshaved, weary of the people I had been with, my ears thick with the sound of trumpets and trombones and electric guitars, yet I did not want to return to the apartment and be alone. I walked to the Café du Monde for coffee and beignets, but it had already closed. So I sat on an iron bench in front of the cathedral in Jackson Square and watched the moon rise in the sky. The air was heavy with the smell of camellias, and the magnolia and banana trees that grew along the piked fence behind me made shifting patterns of shadow and light on the cement. A wind came up off the river, and it started to mist; then a shower clattered across the banana leaves in the square and blew in a spray under the lighted colonnades. I walked home on a quiet street, away from the noise of the tourists, keeping close under the scrolled iron balconies to avoid the rain.

It was warm and muggy the next morning, as it can be in southern Louisiana well into the Christmas season, and I had breakfast and read the Times-Picayune at the Café du Monde before the crowds of tourists came in, then walked across the square past the sidewalk artists and went inside the cathedral briefly because it was All Saints' Day. Later, I found two more of the contacts Minos had given me. One was a bail bondsman who told me to get out of his office, and the other was a woman who ran an occult bookstore that smelled of soiled cat litter. Her face was white with makeup, her eyes stenciled with purple eyeliner, her cigarette breath devastating. For fifteen minutes I pretended to examine her racks of books while she carried on a conversation with her customers about telepathic communication with UFOs and a hole in the dimension that exists in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle and operates like a drain in an enormous sink. Finally I bought a book on cats and left.

I called New Iberia that night to check on Alafair, and the next morning I walked over to Clete's Club on Decatur, across from the French Market. For years Clete had been my partner in the First District. He'd learned his law enforcement methods from an uncle who had walked a beat in the Irish Channel—"Bust 'em or smoke 'em," Clete always said—and had literally terrorized the lowlifes in the First. All you had to do was mention to a pimp or house creep or jackroller that Cletus Purcel would like to interview him, and he would be on the next bus or plane to Miami. Then Clete got into debt to the shylocks, ruined his marriage with whores and his stomach with booze and aspirin, and finally went on a pad and took ten thousand dollars from some drug dealers and right-wing crazies to get rid of a federal witness.

Later he would run house security at a casino in Nevada and become the bodyguard for a midlevel Mafia character and ex-con by the name of Sally Dio. But eventually what I thought of as Clete's most essential characteristics—his courage and his loyalty to an old friend—had their way, and he managed to walk away reasonably intact from all the wreckage in his life.

He was at the back of the bar, loading the stainless steel cooler with bottles of long-necked Jax. He looked up and smiled when he saw me. His body always looked too big for his clothes. He loved pizza, poor-boy sandwiches, deep-fried shrimp and oysters, dirty rice, beignets, ice cream, which he would eat with a tablespoon by the half gallon. He was convinced that he could control his weight by pumping iron every other night in his garage, and limit his ulcer damage by smoking Lucky Strikes through a cigarette filter and drinking his scotch with milk.

"What's happening, Streak?" he said. "I had a feeling you'd be by."

"How's that?"

"I'm hearing weird stuff about you, mon."

"Did somebody leave a message for me?"

"Nope."

"Then what did you hear?"

He stood erect from his work, flexed the stiffness out of his back, and grinned at me. His skin was ruddy, his hair sandy and combed straight back on his head, his green eyes intelligent and full of humor. A scar that was the color and texture of a bicycle tire patch ran down through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose.

"How about you spring for some oysters and I'll fix you a drink?" he said.

"I don't have time."