Heaven's Prisoners (Dave Robicheaux 2)

His green eyes looked at me carefully. He took a Lucky Strike from a pack on the liquor counter behind him and lit it. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue with his fingernails. He blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

"What's the game?" he said.

"No game. I'm just going to see if I can get you closed up."

"You had some kind of deal with Eddie?"

"No, I didn't like Eddie. I'm the guy who busted a pool cue across his face. What do you think of that?"

He looked away and took another puff off his cigarette. Then he focused again on my face, a wrinkled wedge of concern between his eyes.

"Look, you didn't like my brother, that's your problem. But I ain't Eddie. You got no reason to be down on me, man. I'm a cooperative guy. If I got to piece off a little action, that's cool. I ran a nigger bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I got along with everybody. That ain't easy to do in Bed-Stuy. I want to get along here, too."

"No. I don't have the problem. You do. You're a pimp and you're cruel to animals. Cecil, come over here," I said.

Cecil was leaning against the wall by the cue rack, with his arms folded in front of him, a dark light in his face. Like many people of color, he didn't like the class of white people that Keat's brother and the two prostitutes represented to him. He walked toward us with his massive weight, his mouth a tight line, a lump of Red Man as taut as a golf ball inside his jaw. He opened and closed his hands at his sides.

The bartender stepped backwards.

"Now wait a minute," he said.

"Mr Keats wants us to take down that monkey cage," I said.

"I was't'inking that same't'ing myself," Cecil said, and used the barstool to climb up on the bar. Then he stepped with one foot over onto the liquor counter and shook the monkey cage loose from a hook screwed into the ceiling. His huge shoe knocked over a half-dozen bottles of whiskey that rolled off the counter and crashed on the duckboards. The monkey's eyes were wide with fright, his leathery paws enmeshed in the wire screen. Cecil held the cage out stiffly with one arm and dropped to the floor again.

"The lady has my office card. You can file a complaint if you don't like it. Welcome to south Louisiana, podjo," I said.

Cecil and I went outside into the white glare of sunlight on the shale parking lot. Then we walked into the shady grove of live oaks behind the bar and set the cage down in the grass. I unfastened the wire on the door and pulled it open. The monkey sat in his wet tangle of newspaper, too frightened to move, his tail pressed up one side of the cage. Then I tilted the cage forward and he toppled out on the grass, chattered and squeaked once, and climbed high into the fork of an oak, where he looked back at us with his wide eyes. The wind blew the moss in the trees.

"I like working wit' you, Dave," Cecil said.

But sometimes when an investigation seems to go nowhere, when the street people stonewall you and lowlife like Victor Romero seems to have Vaseline all over him, a door quietly drifts open on the edge of your vision. It was Saturday, the day after Cecil and I had gone to Keats's bar, and I was reading the Times-Picayune under the canvas umbrella on the dock. Even in the shade, the light was bright on the newsprint and hurt my eyes. Then the sun went behind clouds and the day was suddenly gray and the breeze came up and ruffled the water and bent the cattails and reeds along the bank. I pinched my eyes with my fingers, and glanced again at the state wrap-up column in the second section. At the bottom of the column was a five-line wire service story about the arrest in north eastern Louisiana of a man who was suspected of robbing apartment mailboxes in a welfare project and assaulting elderly people for their social security checks. His name was Jerry Falgout.

I went inside the bait shop and called the sheriff's office there. The sheriff wasn't in, and the deputy I spoke to, who sounded black, wasn't cooperative.

"Is this guy a bartender in New Orleans?" I said.

"I don't know."

"What did you get on him from Baton Rouge?"

"You gotta ask the sheriff that."

"Come on, he's in your custody. You must know something about him. Has he been in Angola?"

"I don't know. He don't say."

"What's his bond?"

"A hundred thousand."

"Why so high?"

"He pushed an old woman down the stairs at the project. She's got a fractured skull."

I was about to give up talking to the deputy and call the sheriff at his home. I tried one more question.

"What does he tell you?"