The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

ays dressed formally when he went to the shop, and he always stood while he worked and only sat down at lunchtime or when he had to use his desk. He believed a good salesman was a good listener, and usually it did not take him long to divine what his customers needed. Few seemed to care about his reputation outside the shop. When a customer wrote a check, Sidney never asked for ID. His product and his prices were good, and so were his customers. Sidney was a gentleman.

Sidney also loved his wife, Eunice. When they first began dating, he showed her his home in Metairie, his yacht at Des Allemands, and his fishing camp in the Florida Keys. He told her he was in the life, but he didn’t deal in dope or pornography. When Eunice asked what he did deal in, he replied, “Anything that’s consensual and that makes money. End of story.” Eunice had grown up in a culture of corruption. Sidney’s explanation about his business affairs was enough.

Then their little boy was run over and killed by a drunken neighbor. Through use of an attorney, the neighbor managed to avoid a sobriety test until the next day. He pleaded no contest to reckless endangerment and was required to drive with a restricted license for one year. He did not attend the little boy’s funeral and he did not apologize for running over and killing him. Some said he was afraid; others said he believed the problem was legal in nature and had been resolved in the court. But everyone agreed that the neighbor’s decision to do nothing was a bad choice.

When the neighbor disappeared six months later, his wife put her house on the market and moved to Omaha. She had not been a person of means, but she bought a condo with cash and lived comfortably on the money she realized from the sale of her house in Metairie. She never complained to either the FBI or local authorities about their inability to find her husband.

Eunice never asked Sidney if the rumors about the neighbor’s fate were true. But sometimes when they were alone in the darkness, after making love in their upstairs bedroom, she would raise herself up on one elbow and look directly into his eyes.

“What is it?” he would say.

“Tell me,” she would say.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me you’re the good man I know you are.”

“I’m a good man at the shop. Other times maybe I’m not so good. It’s just the way I am, Eunice.”

But maybe she should not ask for more, she told herself, her arm resting on the broadness of his chest, his big heart beating under the palm of her hand.

She helped him at the store and took as much pleasure and pride as he in the quality of flowers they sold. On Saturday morning she fixed coffee and put out cups and saucers and chocolates wrapped in gold foil for their customers. Eunice’s smile lit up the day and the shop, and hardly a customer came in who was not made better by it. Sidney Kovick was not big on theology, but if ever there was proof of God’s existence, to Sidney it was the presence of Eunice in his life.

BERTRAND HAD STASHED the .38 from Sidney Kovick’s house behind the Rite Aid where they had holed up to do a few lines of flake before returning to finish the takedown at the house. The car he drove was a new Toyota a friend had boosted from a Winn-Dixie parking lot in Houma. The interior still smelled of coconut-scented air freshener from a car wash. The friend had even given Bertrand a tape of three 6 Mafia to play for the drive into New Orleans. “Just drop my ’sheen at my brother’s house when you’re done wit’ it,” the friend said. But the friend did not know the nature of Bertrand’s mission nor did he know Bertrand’s larger plan, namely, to murder the man who had brought him all this grief and then blow Dodge with a bagful of blood diamonds, whatever blood diamonds were, which Bertrand had still not figured out.

As he drove into New Orleans, he was amazed at how much of the city was still without power and how many buildings were without roofs and windows, the yards covered with ruined furniture the owners had piled outside. An NOPD cruiser passed him, the cop behind the wheel glancing once in the rearview mirror. Bertrand turned off the avenue and parked behind a pile of downed tree limbs, his ulcers kicking into operatic mode.

When he was sure the cruiser was gone, he circled the block and slowed his car next to a fat black woman who was pushing a shopping cart across the intersection. The cart was packed solid with mounds of moldy clothes that protruded through the wire basket. “Know where the Rite Aid is at?” he asked.

“It’s probably under that sign yonder that say ‘Rite Aid,’” she replied.

“Sure ’nuff, it is. You want to make five dollars?”

The woman released the cart and fitted her big hands on top of the windowsill. The skin of her forearms was dark and shiny, notched with pink scars, as thick as elephant hide. “What you after, boy?” she asked.

“Hurt my leg and cain’t walk too good. Maybe you can pick up something for me behind the Rite Aid, there.”

She looked in the direction of the drugstore. Her breasts were like watermelons hung in cloth sacks, her neck beaded with dirt rings. “You know you ain’t got no license plate on your car?”

“Sure ’nuff, again. You got a good eye. Must have bounced off.”

“Load my clothes in the back. Then drive me where it’s at. Then you pay me fifty dol’ars and drive me home,” she said.

“I can work wit’ that,” he said.

“You scared shitless, boy. You smell like it, too. Whatever you doin’, you better start doin’ less of it,” she said.

He drove the woman to a spot fifty yards from the parking lot behind the Rite Aid. He left the engine running as she waddled to a section of sidewalk that had been wedged up by the roots of an enormous oak tree. The tree had been split by either lightning or its own weight, and the crack in the trunk filled with concrete. But the concrete had deteriorated and created an opening behind which Bertrand had stashed the .38 and the bag of blow inside a wadded-up shirt. The fat woman was wheezing for breath and sweating heavily when she got back inside the car. She set the wadded-up shirt on the seat.

“There’s a gun in there,” she said.

“That’s just tools for my car.”

“Give me my fifty dol’ars and take me back to the basket. I don’t need no ride home,” she said.

She got out at the intersection, the bills crimped in her palm, and pushed her cart down the street, the wheels twisting on the asphalt, fighting against one another. As Bertrand watched her struggling with the balance and weight of the basket, her rear end as big as a washtub inside her green stretch pants, he felt diminished, alone, like someone left behind on a beach, but he did not know why.

He stuck the blow down in his pants and the .38 under the seat, and headed for Algiers, across the wide sweep of the Mississippi. The windows were down, the wind blowing as he crossed the river, but sweat ran down his chest and a stench rose from his armpits. He pulled the bag of blow from his pants, dipped a finger inside, and rubbed the crystals in his nostrils and on his gums.