I let myself in and stood in the middle of the front hall under a huge chandelier and waited for him to come down the winding staircase that curled back into the second floor. The interior of the house was strange. The floors were blond oak, the mantelpiece carved mahogany, the furnishings French antiques. Obviously an expensive interior decorator had tried to recreate the Creole antebellum period. But somebody else had been at work, too. The cedar baseboards and ceiling boards had been painted with ivy vines; garish oil paintings of swampy sunsets, the kind you buy from sidewalk artists in New Orleans's Pirates Alley, hung over the couch and mantel; an aquarium filled with paddle wheels and plastic castles, even a rubber octopus stoppered to one side, sat in one window, green air bubbles popping from a clown's mouth.
Bubba came down the stairs on the balls of his feet. He wore white slacks and a canary-yellow golf shirt, sandals without socks and a gold neck chain, a gold wristwatch with a diamond-and-ruby face, and his spiked butch hair was bleached on the tips by the sun and his skin was tanned almost olive. He was still built like a fighter—his hips narrow, his stomach as flat as a boiler plate, the shoulders an ax-handle wide, the arms longer than they should be, the knuckles as pronounced as ball bearings. But it was the wide-set, gray-blue eyes above the gap-toothed mouth that leaped at you more than anything else. They didn't focus, adjust, stray, or blink; they locked on your face and they stayed there. He smiled readily, in fact constantly, but you could only guess at whatever emotion the eyes contained.
"What's happening, Dave?" he said. "I'm glad you caught me when you did. I got to go down to New Orleans this afternoon. Come on out on the patio and have a drink. What do you think of my place?"
"It's impressive."
"It's more place than I need. I got a small house on Lake Pontchartrain and a winter house in Bimini. That's more my style. But the wife likes it here, and you're right, it impresses the hell out of people. You remember when you and me and your brother used to set pins in the bowling alley and the colored kids tried to run us off because we were taking their jobs?"
"My brother and I got fired. But I don't think they could have run you off with a shotgun, Bubba."
"Hey, those were hard times, podna. Come out here, I got to show you something."
He led me through some French doors onto a flagstone patio by a screen-enclosed pool. Overhead the sun shone through the spreading branches of an oak and glinted on the turquoise water. On the far side of the pool was a screened breezeway, with a peaked, shingled roof, that contained a universal gym, dumbbells, and a body and timing bag.
He grinned, went into a prizefighter's crouch, and feinted at me.
"You want to slip on the sixteen-ounce pillows and waltz around a little bit?" he said.
"You almost put out my lights the last time I went up against you."
"The hell I did. I got you in the corner and was knocking the sweat out of your hair all over the timekeeper and I still couldn't put you down. You want a highball? Clarence, bring us some shrimp and boudin. Sit down."
"I've got a problem you might be able to help me with."
"Sure. What are you drinking?" He took a pitcher of martinis out of a small icebox behind the wet bar.
"Nothing."
"That's right, I heard you were fighting the hooch for a while. Here, I got some tea. Clarence, bring those goddamn shrimp." He shook his head and poured himself a drink in a chilled martini glass. "He's half senile. Believe it or not, he used to work on the oyster boat with my old man. You remember my old man? He got killed two years ago on the SP tracks. I ain't kidding you. They say he took a nap right on the tracks with a wine bottle on his chest. Well, he always tol
d me he wanted to be a travelling man, poor old bastard."
"A Haitian named Toot and maybe a guy by the name of Eddie Keats came to see me. They left a few stitches in my mouth and head. A bartender in Smiling Jack's on Bourbon told me he sicked them on me by calling one of your clubs."
Bubba sat down across the glass-topped table from me with his drink in his hand. His eyes were looking directly into mine.
"You better explain to me what you're saying."
"I think these guys job out for you. They also hurt a friend of mine," I said. "I'm going to square it, Bubba."
"Is that why you think you're sitting in my house?"
"You tell me."
"No, I'll tell you something else instead. I know Eddie Keats. He's from some toilet up North. He doesn't work for me. From what I hear, he doesn't put stitches in people's heads, he smokes them. The Haitian I never heard of. I'm telling you this because we went to school together. Now we eat some shrimps and boudin and we don't talk about this kind of stuff."
He ate a cold shrimp off a toothpick from the tray the Negro had placed on the table, then sipped from his martini and looked directly into my face while he chewed.
"A federal cop told me Eddie Keats jobs out for you," I said.
"Then he ought to do something about it."
"The feds are funny guys. I never figured them out. One day they're bored to death with a guy, the next day run him through a sausage grinder."
"You're talking about Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, right? You know what his problem is? He's a coonass just like you and me, except he went to college and learned to talk like he didn't grown up down here. I don't like that. I don't like these things you're saying to me, either, Dave."
"You dealt the play, Bubba, when those two guys came out to my house."