Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"Get a lot of gone between you and this situation."

"Maybe I don't want to."

"I'm stunned," he said. And for first time that morning he grinned.

He went into the cottage and showered and changed clothes. Out on the Teche a barge heaped with glistening piles of mud dredged from the middle of the bayou was being towed downstream, then a speedboat passed, towing water-skiers who sent waves up into the trees along the bank. Clete came back outside combing his hair, dressed in sharkskin slacks, oxblood loafers with tassels, and a starched sports shirt printed with flowers, the sleeves folded up in one neat turn on each of his huge biceps.

"Let's talk about this guy Lou Kale. You told Chalons it was Kale who called your house and tried to warn you off the Ida Durbin disappearance?"

"More or less."

"How'd you know it was Kale?"

"The guy who called me talked like a pimp. But I wasn't sure it was Kale until I saw Val Chalons's reaction to the name."

"And you got the feeling Ida Durbin was alive?"

"Yep."

"This is the way I see it. Somebody hired Bad Texas Bob to leave both of us dead in my fish camp. That's known as a violation of the Eleventh Commandment, which is, don't screw with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Time to get back on the full-tilt boogie, noble mon. Y'all got a fix on Kale's cell phone?"

"It bounced off a tower down in the Keys."

"Hmmm," Clete said. "One way or another, all this stuff is connected to organized prostitution. Doing anything today?"

Jackson Square, across from the Café du Monde, is a fine place to be on Saturday afternoon, as is the rest of the French Quarter. It's a transitional time of day, caught between the tropical freshness of morning when families are exiting St. Louis Cathedral and sidewalk artists are setting up their easels, and the coming of twilight and the tourists and revelers on Bourbon Street, who in their mind's eye probably see themselves as aloof visitors at the Baths of Caracalla — in control, faintly amused by its pernicious influences.

The truth is that during times of high pedestrian traffic the Quarter is a safe place, its vice illusory, designed to titillate conventioneers from Omaha. The Quarter has always been a cash cow the city is not about to give over to jackrollers, crack dealers, Murphy artists, and indiscreet hookers. But after two in the morning, the glad-at-heart are gone, the nightclub and sidewalk bands have packed up, and the streetlamps seem coated with an iniquitous chemical vapor.

If you're really swacked, and without friends to care for you, you will in all probability have experiences you will not want to take with you into the daylight hours. A black pimp may step out of an alley and catch you by the sleeve, his face split with a lascivious grin, his breath as rife as a garbage can. A cabbie with a hooker in the back of his vehicle may pull to the curb and ask if he can help you find a motel room out on Airline Highway. A gang of kids coming out of Louis Armstrong Park may make you wonder if we all descend from the same tree.

Before leaving New Iberia I tried to reach Molly, but her machine had been turned off. When Clete and I got to New Orleans, I called again and this time she answered. I told her I would probably not be back home until late Sunday afternoon.

"Where are you now?" she said.

"In Jackson Square, trying to get a lead on the man I had to shoot," I replied.

The line was quiet and I could tell Molly's mind was on something else. "Do you feel any regret about last night?" she said.

"Are you serious?" I said.

"Sometimes people think differently in the morning than they do at night."

"Can I see you tomorrow evening?" I said.

"Yes," she replied. Then she said it again. "Yes, we'll go somewhere. We'll take a boat ride maybe. We'll do something good together, won't we? I really want to see you, Dave."

After I closed my cell phone, I sat down on a bench in the square and listened to a street band knock out "The Yellow Dog Blues" while a juggler tossed wood balls in the air and an old man clutching a black umbrella peddled a unicycle in a circle. But the real song I heard were Molly Boyle's words through the cell phone, like an urgent whisper in the ear.

During the next five hours Clete and I covered the Quarter, the lower end of Magazine, a strip of water-bed motels on Airline, and a half dozen bars across the river in Algiers. New Orleans' tradition of vice and outlawry goes back almost two hundred years, when the French used southern Louisiana as a dumping ground for both criminals and prostitutes. It doesn't take much imagination to guess at the kind of offspring they bred.

The pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte and their business partner James Bowie made large sums smuggling slaves from the West Indies through the bayous, in violation of the federal prohibition of 1807, which forbade the importation of slaves into the United States. Brothels and gambling halls thrived, shootings and knifings were commonplace, and stolen goods from the Spanish Main could be found in the best homes along St. John's Bayou. The woman considered the wisest person in old New Orleans was a witch by the name of Marie LeVeau. Outside of Mardi Gras, the most well-attended and festive celebrations in the city were the public hangings, conducted in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

Those hedonistic and pagan traditions are still alive and well in contemporary New Orleans, modernity's influence upon them cosmetic if non-extant. Crack cocaine hit the city like a hydrogen bomb in the 1980s, decimating black communities and the political viability they had gained during the Civil Rights era. Alcoholism is not a disease here but a venerated family heirloom. The Mafia introduced itself in New Orleans in 1890 by murdering the police commissioner and has been here ever since. Upscale brothels with baroque interiors and carriage houses may have become interesting anachronisms, but the industry of prostitution itself is more widespread, uncontrolled, disease-ridden, and dangerous than it has ever been.

Pimps don't have to seek recruits. Crack addicts, runaways, and desperate single mothers are everywhere, many of them glad to have the protection of a pimp who does not physically abuse them. Clete and I talked to a sixteen-year-old girl from Iowa, street name Holly, who had tracks on her arms, doll-like circles of orange rouge on her cheeks, and a black eye a John gave her after he tried to force her to perform oral sex on him without paying. The pimp, who posted bail for his girls regularly through Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, found the John and used a tire iron to extort three hundred dollars from him, half of which he gave to the girl.

"So you think Claude isn't a bad dude?" I said to her.