There were shards of color in his cheeks and throat.
“I can’t believe you’re talking to me like that. Who did this to us, Alafair?” he said.
“You did. Go away, Johnny.”
She could not see his eyes through his dark glasses, but his head protruded on his neck toward her, and his breath seemed to reach out and touch her cheek like a dirty finger.
Then he drew his hand back off the table, his skin squeaking on the surface.
“The vase I gave you? I want you to break it. You’re not one of the people in that painting anymore, Alafair,” he said.
He got up from his seat and stared down at her, his silhouette motionless against the late sun. She could see her reflection in his glasses. She looked small and diminished, her image distorted, as though it were she who was morally impaired and not he.
After a long moment, as though he had reviewed his judgment, he said, “You’re just a little traitor. That’s all you ever were.”
She waited until he had driven out of the parking lot, then went to the pay phone and dialed 911.
Two days later Wally, the dispatcher, buzzed my office phone.
“There’s a guy out here says he’s Goldie Bierbaum from New Orleans,” he said.
“Send him back.”
“Didn’t he fight Cleveland Williams?”
“Goldie fought everybody.”
A minute later I saw Goldie at my door. Even though he was almost seventy, his chest was still flat-plated, his muscular thighs wider than his waist. Before he had opened his saloon on Magazine back in the 1960s, he had fought in three weight divisions and had been a contender in two.
Goldie sat down and put a gumball in his mouth and offered the remaining one in his palm to me.
“Not right now,” I said.
“That button man you were looking for, the one who did Zipper Clum, you still after him?” he asked. His few strands of hair were coated with gel and looked like copper wire stretched across his scalp.
“Yeah, he’s a real headache,” I said.
“I hear he’s been living on Camp Street. He boosts cars all over the neighborhood, like the Garden District is the Hertz company.”
“Thanks, anyway, Goldie. That place burned down last week. Our man has moved on.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Why didn’t you report him to NOPD?”
“I don’t have a good history with those guys.”
“Tell me, you remember a cop named Jim Gable, from back in the sixties?”
“Sure. He was a bum.”
“In what way?”
“He did scut work for the Giacanos.”
“You positive about that?”
“Hey, Dave, I got into Didoni Giacano for ten large. The vig was four hundred a week. You know how it works. The principal don’t ever go down. I was late a couple of times and Gable came by and picked it up. He’d leave the woman in the cruiser and drink a cup of coffee in back and talk about the weather like we were old friends. But he was a bum.”