'But you still think I'm chickenshit, don't you?'
'I know you're not feeling well, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't use profanity in front of my daughter.'
'Excuse me. Did you have a reason for not returning my phone calls?'
'When I called back, you were already gone. Look, Sergeant, I appreciate your coming down here, particularly when you're sick. But you don't owe me anything.'
'You've decided that?'
I let out my breath. 'What can I say? It's not my intention to have an argument with you.'
'You sell gas? I ran out down the road. My gauge is broken.' She clanked the gasoline can on the counter.
'Yeah, I've got a pump for the boats at the end of the dock.'
'Your friend, the black man, Batist Perry, they're sticking it to him. Nate Baxter held some information back from you.'
'Alafair, how about telling Bootsie we'll go to Mulate's for supper tonight?'
She made an exasperated face, climbed down from the stool, unhitched Tripod, her three-legged pet raccoon, from his chain by the door, and went up the dock toward the house with Tripod looking back at me over her shoulder.
'The murdered man had his heart cut out,' Lucinda Bergeron said. 'But so did three other homicide victims in the last four months. Even one who was pitched off a roof. He didn't tell you that, did he?'
'No, he didn't.'
'The press doesn't know about it, either. The city's trying to sit on it so they don't scare all the tourists out of town. Baxter thinks it's Satanists. Your friend just happened to stumble into the middle of the investigation.'
'Satanists?'
'You don't buy it?'
'It seems they always turn out to be meltdowns who end up on right-wing religious shows. Maybe it's just coincidence.'
'If I were you, I'd start proving my friend was nowhere near New Orleans when those other homicides were committed. I've got to sit down. I think I'm going to be sick again.'
I came around from behind the counter and walked her to a chair and table. Her back felt like iron under my hands. She took her revolver out of her back pocket, clunked it on the table, and leaned forward with her forearms propped on her thighs. Her hair was thick and white on the ends, her neck oily with sweat. Two white fishermen whom I didn't know started through the door, then turned and went back outside.
'I'll be right with y'all,' I called through the screen.
'Like hell you will,' I heard one of them say as they walked back toward their cars.
'I'll drive you back to New Orleans. I think maybe you've got a bad case of stomach flu,' I said to Lucinda.
'Just fill my gas can for me. I'll be all right in a little bit.' She took a crumpled five-dollar bill from her Levi's and put it on the tabletop.
'I have to go back for my truck, anyway. It's at a dock down by Barataria Bay. Let's don't argue about it.'
But she wasn't capable of arguing about anything. Her breath was rife with bile, her elongated turquoise eyes rheumy and listless, the back of her white T-shirt glued against her black skin. When I patted her on the shoulder, I could feel the bone like coat hanger wire against the cloth. I could only guess at what it had been like for her at the NOPD training academy when a peckerwood drill instructor decided to turn up the butane.
I carried the gas can down to her Toyota, got it started, filled the tank up at the dock, and drove her to New Orleans. She lived right off Magazine in a one-story white frame house with a green roof, a small yard, and a gallery that was hung with potted plants and overgrown with purple trumpet vine. Around the corner, on Magazine, was a two-story bar with a colonnade and neon Dixie beer signs in the windows; you could hear the jukebox roaring through the open front door.
'I should drive you out to the boatyard,' she said.
'I can take a cab.'
She saw my eyes look up and down her street and linger on the intersection.
'You know this neighborhood?'
'Sure. I worked it when I was a patrolman. Years ago that bar on the corner was a hot-pillow joint.'
'I know. My auntie used to hook there. It's a shooting gallery now,' she said, and walked inside to call me a cab.
Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
It was late evening after I picked up my truck down in Barataria and drove back into the city. I called Clete at his apartment in the Quarter.
'Hey, noble mon,' he said. 'I called you at your house this afternoon.'
'What's up?'
'Oh, it probably doesn't amount to much. What are you doing back in the Big Sleazy, mon?'
'I need some help on these vigilante killings. I'm not going to get it from NOPD.'
'Lose this vigilante stuff, Dave. It's a shuck, believe me.'
'Have you heard about some guys having their hearts cut out?'
He laughed. 'That's a new one. Where'd you get that?' he said.
'Lucinda Bergeron.'
'You've been out of Homicide too long, Streak. When they cancel them out, it's for money, sex, or power. This vampire or ghoul bullshit is out of comic books. Hey, I got another revelation for you. I think that Bergeron broad has got a few frayed wires in her head. Did she tell you she went up to Angola to watch a guy fry?'
'No.'
'It probably just slipped her mind. Most of your normals like to watch a guy ride the bolt once in a while.'
'Why'd you call the house?'
'I'm hearing this weird story about you and a Nazi submarine.'
'From where?'
'Look, Martina's over here. I promised to take her to this blues joint up on Napoleon. Join us, then we'll get some etouffee at Monroe's. You've got to do it, mon, it's not up for discussion. Then I'll fill you in on how you've become a subject of conversation with Tommy Blue Eyes.'
'Tommy Lonighan?'
'You got it, Tommy Bobalouba himself, the only mick I ever met who says his own kind are niggers turned inside out.'
'The Tommy Lonighan I remember drowned a guy with a fire hose, Clete.'
'So who's perfect? Let me give you directions up on Napoleon. By the way, Bootsie seemed a little remote when I called. Did I spit in the soup or something?'
The nightclub up on Napoleon was crowded, the noise deafening, and I couldn't see Clete at any of the tables. Then I realized that an exceptional event had just taken place up on the bandstand. The Fat Man, the most famous rhythm and blues musician ever produced by New Orleans, had pulled up in front in his pink Cadillac limo, and like a messiah returning to his followers, his sequined white coat and coal black skin almost glowing with an electric purple sheen, had walked straight through the parting crowd to the piano, grinning and nodding, his walrus face beaming with goodwill and an innocent self-satisfaction, and had started hammering out 'When the Saints Go Marching In.'
The place went wild.
Then I realized that another event was taking place simultaneously on the dance floor, one that probably not even New Orleans was prepared for-Clete Purcel and his girlfriend doing the dirty boogie.
While the Fat Man's ringed, sausage fingers danced up and down on the piano keys and the saxophones and trumpets blared behind him, Clete was bopping in the middle of the hardwood floor, his porkpie hat slanted forward on his head, his face pointed between his girlfriend's breasts, his buttocks swinging like an elephant's; then a moment later his shoulders were erect while he bumped and ground his loins, his belly jiggling, his balled fists churning the air, his face turned sideways as though he were in the midst of orgasm.
His girlfriend was over six feet tall and wore a flowered sundress that fit her tanned body like sealskin. She
