"A Mexican guy tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?"
Jerry Joe scratched the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.
"Number one, Mingo's not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope's gonna be out one day. The smart money is looking for a new home . . . Listen, to that. . . 'La Jolie Blon'. . . Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to it."
"Where'd the hit come from?"
"I don't know. That's the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and watch yourself with Karyn LaRose."
"How did you—"
"You want to ask me where she's got a certain birthmark?" He pressed his hands flat on the tablecloth and looked at them. "Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but some broads ain't any different from men. They like to screw down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?"
He raised his eyes and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was bunched in a knot.
"You want a breadstick?" he asked.
Our jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.
He stared up at me from his cluttered desk.
"So why are we holding the guy here if he's got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin Parish?"
"We're treating the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish," I said. "We're working with St. Martin on the other charge."
"Yeah, shit rolls downhill, too. And I'm always downhill from you, Robicheaux."
"I'm sorry to hear you take that attitude."
"This guy was born for Camp J. He don't belong here. I got enough racial problems as it is."
"How about starting over, Kelso?"
"He complains he's being discriminated against, get this, because he's Jewish and we're making him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty's face. Then he says he wants isolation because maybe there's a black guy coming in here to whack him out.
"I go, 'What black guy?'
"He goes, 'How the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.'
"I go, 'Your brain's been doing too many push-ups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.'
"He goes, 'I come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else would live in a shithole like this.'"
"You've got him in isolation now?" I asked.
"A guy who uses words like cannibal to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard, teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it wasn't for guys like you, Robicheaux."
Five minutes later I checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds of a jailhouse— clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half dozen stations, shouted voices echoing along the ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded in his scalp.
"Kelso says you're being a pain in the ass," I said.
He let a towel dangle between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.
"Did your lawyer tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?" I said.
I expected anger, another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite understood before.
"Did you hear me?" I said.