"I think you're in. The operative word there, mon, is in. Bootsie Giacano wasn't dangerous enough. You had to get in the sack with Cardo's main punch."
"That's not the way it is. Don't talk about her that way, either, Clete."
"Excuse me. It's my lack of couth. We're talking the parochial school sodality here. Dave, you'd better get your head on straight. You live among these people, you start to believe they're like us. They're not, mon. When it comes down to saving their own ass, they'd sell their mothers to a puppy farm."
"Boggs has been in New Iberia. I think he's got me on his dance card. I'd rather deal with him in New Orleans than around Alafair."
"I think you're being used. I think you should forget Cardo and these DEA jerk-offs and you and I should go after Boggs and blow out his candle. What do you care if Cardo sells dope? You shut him down, the price on the street goes up. The dealers come out ahead any way you cut it. Look, most of the dope has gone back to the slums, anyway. That's where it started, that's where it's going to stay. Then one day the poor dumb bastards will get tired of watching their own kind get hauled away in body bags."
"I was in jail last night. Nate Baxter rousted Tony and me and his driver. Can you get to somebody in the First District, find out what Baxter's doing?"
"In jail?"
"That's right."
"You remind me of these kids with their crack pipes. It takes a guy like me twenty years to go to hell. They can do it in six months. But, Streak, you've got a talent for fucking up your life in weeks."
"Will you see what you can find out about Baxter?"
"A cop who blew the country with a murder warrant on him? I'm your liaison person?"
He put the rest of the beignet in his mouth and laughed while he rubbed his palm clean with his napkin.
I walked back to my truck in the cooling shadows and drove down Canal to the corner of St. Charles, where Clete had seen Tee Beau Latiolais working in a pizza place. Young black men lounged in front of the liquor stores and arcades, their bodies striped with the purple and pink neon glow from the windows. I found Tee Beau in the back of a long, narrow café, his white paper hat pulled down to his eyebrows, so that he seemed to be staring at me from under a visor.
"Take a break. I need to talk with you, Tee Beau," I said.
His eyes were peculiar, melancholy, as though he were witnessing a bad fate for a friend that the friend was not aware of.
"What is it?" I said.
He didn't answer. He wiped his hands on his apron and put on a pair of sunglasses. We walked around the corner to the Pearl and sat at the bar. A white man farther down the bar was shucking oysters with a fierce energy on a sideboard. Tee Beau ordered a Falstaff and kept looking at me out of the side of his eye.
"You know, Tee Beau, I don't think sunglasses in the evening are the best kind of disguise."
"Why you want to see me, Mr. Dave?"
"I heard Jimmie Lee Boggs has been in New Iberia. I'd like to find out why. Can you talk to Dorothea?"
"I ain't got to. Talked to her last night. She didn't say nothing about seeing Jimmie Lee. But she tole me what Gros Mama Goula say about you, Mr. Dave."
"Oh?"
"You got the gris-gris. She say you been messin' where you ain't suppose to be messin'. You ain't listen to nobody."
"Listen, Tee Beau, Gros Mama is a big black gasbag. She jerks your people around with a lot of superstition that goes back to the islands, back to the slave days."
But my words meant nothing to him.
"I made you this, Mr. Dave. I was gonna come find you."
"I appreciate it but—"
"You put it on your ankle, you."
I made no offer to take the perforated dime and the piece of red string looped through it from his hand. He dropped them in my shirt pocket.
"You white, you been to colletch, you don't believe," he said. "But I seen things. A man that had snakes crawl all over his grave. They was fat as my wrist. Couldn't keep them off the grave with poison or a shotgun. You stick a hayfork in them, shake them off in a fire, they be back the next morning, smelling like they been lying in hot ash.