Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"Thought you were a put-on, boy, but I guess you're for real. She lives and works in the same place. On Post Office Street. You figured it out by now?"

The paint on the two-story houses was blistered, the dirt yards weedless and hard-packed, the bedsheets on the clotheslines flapping in a hot wind. Jimmie parked the convertible and looked uncertainly at the houses, the neck of the mandolin clutched in one hand. A city police car passed by, with two uniformed officers in the front seat. They were talking to one another and neither paid attention to his presence on the street. "I'm looking for Ida Durbin," Jimmie said to a black girl who was hanging wash in a side yard.

The girl was frail and wore a dusty yellow blouse with loops of sweat in the armpits. Her forearms were wrapped with a mottled pink and white discoloration, as though her natural color had been leached out of the skin. She shook her head.

"She has freckles and sandy red hair. Her name is Ida," Jimmie said.

"This is a colored house. White mens don't come in the daytime," she said. The wind flapped a sheet that was gray from washing across her face, but she seemed not to notice.

Jimmie stepped closer to her. "Listen, if this girl works in a place for white people, where would I —" he began.

Then Jimmie felt rather than saw a presence at the window behind him. The black girl picked up her basket of wash and walked quickly away. "You don't look like the gas man," the man in the window said.

He was white, with small ears, sunken cheeks, and hair that was as black and shiny as patent leather, oiled and combed into a slight curl on the neck.

"I'm looking for Ida Durbin," Jimmie said.

The man leaned on the sill and thought about it. He wore a creamy cowboy shirt with stitched pockets and chains of roses sewn on the shoulders. "Four doors down. Ask for Connie. Tell you what, I'll walk you there." he said.

"That's all right," Jimmie said.

"I'm here to serve," the man said.

On the way down the street, the man extended his hand. It was small and hard, the knuckles pronounced. "I'm Lou Kale. Connie's your heartthrob?" he said.

"The girl I'm looking for is named Ida."

"On this street, nobody uses their own name. That is, except me," Lou Kale said, and winked. "I was gonna call her Ida Red, after the girl in the song. Except she didn't think that was respectful, so she made up her own name. What's your name?"

Jimmie hesitated, touching his bottom lip with his tongue.

"See what I mean?" Lou Kale said. "Soon as people set foot on Post Office Street, their names fly away."

Lou Kale escorted Jimmie through the front door of a two-story Victorian house with hollow wood pillars on the gallery and a veranda on the second floor. The shades were drawn in the living room to keep out the dust, and the air inside the heated walls was stifling. The couches and straight-back chairs were empty; the only color in the room came from the plastic casing of a Wurlitzer jukebox plugged into the far wall. Lou Kale told a heavyset white woman in the kitchen that Connie had a caller.

The woman labored up a stairs that groaned with her weight and shouted down a hallway.

"Look at me, kid," Lou Kale said. He seemed to lose his train of thought. He touched at his nostril with one knuckle, then huffed air out his nose, perhaps reorganizing his words. He was shorter than Jimmie, firmly built, flat-stomached, with thick veins in his arms, his dark jeans belted high on his hips. His face seemed full of play now. "You're not here to get your ashes hauled, are you?"

"Who cares why I'm here. It's a free country, ain't it?" Jimmie replied. Then wondered why he had just used bad grammar.

Lou Kale made a sucking sound with his teeth, his eyelids fluttering as he watched a fly buzzing on the wall. Then he jiggled his fingers in the air, as though surrendering to a situation beyond his control. "You give your present to Connie, then you beat feet. This place is off limits for you and so is Connie. That means you find your own girlfriend and you don't try to get a punch on somebody else's tab. We connecting here?"

"No."

"That's what I thought!" Lou Kale said. "Connie, get down here!"

When Ida Durbin came down the stairs she was wearing a pair of tight, blue-jean shorts and a blouse that looked made of cheesecloth that outlined the black bra she wore underneath. She had been asleep, and her face was flushed from the stored-up heat in the upper levels of the building and marked with lines from the pillow she had been sleeping upon. Even in the gloom Jimmie could see the injury in her eyes when she realized who her visitor was.

"Let's have a quick exchange of pleasantries, then your friend is gonna be on his way," Lou Kale said to her.

Jimmie stepped toward her, his arm brushing Lou Kale's shoulder. "I paid off your loan on the mandolin," he said.

"Jimmie, you shouldn't be here," she said.

"I just thought I'd drop the mandolin by, that's all!" he said. He handed it to her, his movements stiff, his voice tangled in his throat. Lou Kale clicked a fingernail on the glass cover of his wristwatch.

"Thank you. You better go now," she said.