A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"Listen to this guy," Lionel said.

"The money's not mine. I've got to give an accounting to other people."

"I can relate to that. We'll call you," Fontenot said.

"When?"

"About this time tomorrow. Do you have a car?"

"I have a pickup truck."

He nodded reflectively; then his mouth split in a grin and I could see each of his teeth like worn, wide-set pearls in his gums.

"How big a grudge can a man like you carry?" he asked.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said, and shook all over when he laughed, his narrowed eyes twinkling with a liquid glee.

The next morning I was walking down Chartres toward the French Market for breakfast when a black man on a white pizza-delivery scooter went roaring past me. I didn't pay attention to him, but then he came roaring by again. He wore an oversized white uniform, splattered with pizza sauce, sunglasses that were as dark as a welder's, and a white paper hat mashed down to his ears. He turned his scooter at the end of the block and disappeared, and I headed through Jackson Square toward the Café du Monde. I waited for the green light at Decatur; then I heard the scooter come rattling and coughing around the corner. The driver braked to the curb and grinned at me, his thin body jiggling from the engine's vibration. "Tee Beau!" I said.

"Wait for me on the bench. I gotta park my machine, me."

He pulled out into the traffic again, drove past the line of horse-and-carriages in front of the square, and disappeared past the old Jax brewery. Five minutes later I saw him coming on foot back down Decatur, his hat hammered down to the level of his sunglasses. He sat beside me on a sunlit bench next to the pike fence that bordered the park area inside the square.

"You ain't gonna turn me in, are you, Mr. Dave?" he said.

"What are you doing?"

"Working at the pizza place. Looking out for Jimmie Lee Boggs, too. You ain't gonna turn me in, now, are you?"

"You're putting me in a rough spot, Tee Beau."

"I got your promise. Dorothea and Gran'maman done tole me, Mr. Dave."

"I didn't see you. Get out of New Orleans."

"Ain't got no place else to go. Except back to New Iberia. Except to the Red Hat. I got a lot to tell you 'bout Jimmie Lee Boggs. He here."

"In New Orleans?"

"He left but he come back. I seen him. Two nights ago. Right over yonder." He pointed diagonally across the square. "I been watching."

"Wait a minute. You saw him by the Pontabla Apartments?"

"Listen, this what happen, Mr. Dave. After he killed the po-liceman and that white boy, he drove us all the way to Algiers, with lightning jumping all over the sky. He made me sit in back, with chains on, like he a po-liceman and I his prisoner, in case anybody stop us. He had the radio on, and I was 'fraid he gonna find out I didn't shoot you, drive out in that marsh, kill me like he done them poor people in the filling station. All the time he was talking, telling me 'bout what he gonna do, how he got a place in the Glades in Florida, where he say—now this is what he say, I don't use them kinds of words—where he say the hoot owls fucks the jackrabbits, where he gonna hole up, then come back to New Orleans and make them dagos give him a lot of money.

"Just befo' we got to town he called somebody from a filling station. I could hear him talking, and he said something 'bout the Pontabla. I heard him say it. He don't be paying me no mind, no, 'cause he say I just a stupid nigger. That's the way he talk all the time I be chained up there in the backseat."

"Tee Beau, are you sure it was Boggs? It's hard to believe you found him when half the cops in Louisiana can't."

"I found you, ain't I? He don't look the same now, Mr. Dave. But it's him. His hair short and black now, he puts glasses, too. But it's Jimmie Lee Boggs. I followed him in my car to make sure."

"Where'd you get a car?"

"I borrowed it."

"You borrowed it?"