“I kind of lied when I said I was your niece and it
was an emergency.” A pale blue cloth purse embroidered with an Indian design hung from her shoulder. She opened it and removed Clete’s Zippo lighter. “You left this on the bar at the club. It has the globe and anchor on it. I thought you’d want it back.”
“You bet,” he said.
“Why’d you go charging out of the club? You hurt my feelings.”
“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“You’re pretty easy to jerk around. Maybe you should take some happy pills.”
“I used to. That’s why I don’t take them anymore.”
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“On what?”
“Are you gonna invite me to breakfast or not?”
“Let’s go to Café du Monde. I love it there in the morning. It’s entirely different from the crowd you see there at night. The whole Quarter is that way. Do you know why I was in the can?”
“Suspicion of theft or something?”
They were out on the street now, in the freshness of the morning and the noise of the city. “They were looking at me for a homicide,” he said.
She was unlocking the passenger door of her rental Honda, her gaze fixed on the traffic, not seeming to listen. “Yeah?” she said.
“A guy by the name of Frankie Giacano got clipped in the Baton Rouge bus terminal. Somebody came up behind him in a toilet stall and put three rounds in his head,” he said.
When they got in her Honda, she put the keys in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. “Say that again?”
“A safecracker, a guy by the name of Frankie Gee, got shot and killed in Baton Rouge. NOPD wanted to put it on me,” Clete said.
In the silence, he held his eyes on hers, barely breathing, studying every aspect of her face. He could feel his lungs tighten and his heart start to swell, as though no oxygen were reaching his blood, as though a vein might pop in his temple. She moistened her lips and returned his stare. “If we go to breakfast, you won’t run off on me again, will you?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I really wouldn’t like that.”
If there was a second meaning in her words, he couldn’t tell. All the way to Café du Monde, he watched the side of her face as though seeing part of himself, not necessarily a good one, that he had never recognized.
THEY GOT A table under the pavilion with a fine view of Jackson Square and the cathedral and the Pontalba Apartments. The sky was blue, the myrtle bushes and windmill palms and banana plants in the square covered with sunshine. It was the kind of crisp green-gold late-fall day in Louisiana that seems so perfect in its dimensions that winter and even mortality are set at bay. “So you’re a private investigator?” she said.
“I used to be with the NOPD, but I messed up my career. It’s my fault, not theirs. I started over, know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“I worked for some mobbed-up guys in Reno and Montana. But I got clear of them. I have a friend named Dave Robicheaux. He says it’s always the first inning. You get up one morning and say fuck it and start over.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Antiques, collectibles, that kind of stuff. I’ve got a little store in Key West, but most of my sales are on the Internet.”
“You didn’t know my name, but you ran my tag and traced me to the jail and got me back on the street. You even brought me my cigarette lighter. Not many people could pull that off. Maybe you have a gift.”
“My mother said my father was a marine who got killed in the first Iraqi war, so that’s why I brought you your lighter. I was never sure if my mother was telling me the truth. She should have had a turnstile on her bedroom door.”