Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

The waitress set a loaf of hot sourdough bread wrapped in a napkin on the table and went away. Alicia removed her glasses and put them in a case and snapped the case shut. For some reason, the indentations where the glasses fitted on the bridge of her nose made her look disarmed and vulnerable, as if she had chosen to look that way.

“You like West Coast living? Starbucks and jogging on the beach and surf fishing with old guys, that kind of stuff?” she said.

“Yeah, I can dig that. Any place where it’s warm and there’s water and a few palm trees. I spend most of my time now in New Iberia, where Dave lives.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Because New Orleans isn’t New Orleans anymore.”

“It’s being rebuilt, isn’t it?”

“They won’t rebuild the place I grew up in. They don’t know how to. They weren’t there. Back then every day was a party. I don’t mean horns blo

wing and people getting drunk on their balconies. It was the way you woke up in the morning. Everything was green and gold, and the oaks were full of birds. Every afternoon it rained at three o’clock, and the whole sky would turn pink and purple and you could smell the salt in the wind. No matter where you went, you’d hear music — from radios and cafés and dance orchestras on the rooftops downtown. You could have all of it for the price of the ride on the St. Charles streetcar.”

“You’re going back there, aren’t you?”

“No, I like the idea of the West Coast,” he said. “See, I remember the way New Orleans used to be. If I didn’t remember the way it used to be, I could go back and live there. Sometimes good memories mess you up. What I mean is I dig the coast. A guy like me can always adjust.”

She looked at him a long time, as though staring at a man through a pane of thick glass she would never be able to penetrate. When their food was served, she barely spoke. If prescience was a gift, it did not show as such on her face.

Later that night, after he left her motel room, he thought he smelled flowers and the smell of salt spray on the wind. Then he realized it was her perfume and the smell of her skin and not a night-blooming garden in the neighborhood where he had grown up, or waves crashing on a beach in a place where he might live in the future, and he felt more alone and lost than he had ever felt in his life.

TWO HOURS LATER, while Clete was trying to go to sleep, his cell phone vibrated under his pillow. The caller ID was blocked. “Clete?” a woman’s voice said.

It was not a voice he wanted to hear. “What’s the haps, Jamie Sue?” he said.

“We’ve got to get a message to this man Troyce Nix,” she said.

We?

He sat up in bed and adjusted the cell phone to his ear, wondering at the lack of judgment that seemed to characterize everything he did. “Why don’t you call Nix up? I’ll give you the name of his motel,” Clete said.

“I don’t have credibility with him. Neither does Jimmy Dale.”

“Jimmy Dale doesn’t have credibility with me, either. He hauled ass and left me to explain why I parked a round in Quince Whitley’s head. I may end up on a homicide beef because of Jimmy Dale, or J.D., or whatever his name is.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Clete. Jimmy Dale called the sheriff yesterday and told him what happened at the nightclub. He told the sheriff you saved the girl’s life and probably his own, too.”

She knew how to set the hook. “Yeah, but he didn’t make a formal statement, and he’s not going to, is he?” Clete said. “So my witness has the legal value of an anonymous phone caller.”

“You’ve got to help us. Jimmy Dale made a big mistake, and he doesn’t know how to correct it.”

Don’t bite, he told himself. It’s their problem, their karma, their bullshit. “What mistake?” he asked.

“Jimmy Dale thought Nix was here to kill him. So he decided to do it to him first.”

“Do what?”

“Shoot Nix. It was in the park. He couldn’t go through with it. But Nix saw him and doesn’t understand what happened. Can’t you help us?”

“Are you running off with Jimmy Dale?”

“I can’t live with Leslie any longer. I can’t take his hate and his sickness and his cruelty. He’s not going to poison my little boy with it.”

“Is Sally Dio alive?”

“The gangster? Why should I know about him?”