'Watch your language, please,' I said.
He smoked with his elbow propped on the table, taking one puff after another, like he was hitting on a reefer, sometimes pressing a yellow thumb anxiously against his bottom lip and teeth.
'They're dangerous people, man,' he said. 'They tied a guy down on a table once and cut thirty pounds of meat out of him while he was still alive.'
'Here's the only deal you're getting today,' Lucinda said. 'We can pull the plug on this interview any time you want. You say the word and we're gone. Then you can have visitors from two to four every Sunday afternoon.'
'What she means, Waylon, is we made a special effort to see you. If this is all a waste of time, tell us now.'
He mashed out his cigarette and began clenching one hand on top of the other.
'Where'd you get the tattoo of the sword?' I said.
'It's a bayonet. I was in the Airborne. Hunnerd and first.'
'Your jacket says you were in the Navy and did time at Portsmouth brig.'
'Then it's wrong.'
'What can you give us on Max and Bobo?' Lucinda said.
'They're dealing.'
'They're going to be at the drop?' I said.
'Are you kidding?' he said.
'Then how are you going to do them, Waylon?' I said.
He began to chew on the flattened corner of his mouth. His eyes jittered as if they were being fed by an electrical current.
'A whack's going down. A big one,' he said.
'Yeah?' I said.
'Yeah.'
'Who's getting clipped, Waylon?'
'A couple of guineas were talking in Mobile when I picked up the dope.'
'You're not being helpful, Waylon,' Lucinda said.
'There's nig… There's black people mixed up in it. New Orleans is a weird fucking town. What do I know?'
'You'd better know something, partner, or your next jolt's going to be in the decades,' I said.
'They're going to clip some guy that ain't supposed to be clipped. That's what these dagos were saying. That's all I know, man.'
'When you think of something else, give us a call,' I said.
He ran his hand through his grizzled hair. His palm was shiny with sweat.
'I'm sick. I got to go to a hospital,' he said.
'What's the sword on your arm mean?' I said.
He put his face in his hands. 'I ain't saying no more,' he said. 'I'm sick. I got to have some medication.'
'How many times a day do you fix, Waylon?' I said.
'I got it down to three. Look, get me into a hospital and maybe I can he'p y'all a whole lot better.'
'It doesn't work that way, partner,' I said, and slipped my business card under the flat of his arm. 'Give us a call when your memory clears up.'
A half hour later Lucinda and I took coffee and pastry from a bakery downtown and sat on a stone bench in a small green park by the capitol building. It was a blue-gold day, with a breeze off the Mississippi, and the grass in the park looked pale green in the sunlight.
'Why'd you keep asking him about a sword?' Lucinda said.
'I think it's the name or the logo of a group of neo-Nazis or Aryan supremacists of some kind.'
'The tattoo looked like a bayonet to me.'
'Maybe. But he's a speed addict, too, just like the guy who electrocuted himself in y'all's custody. Buchalter called me once during what sounded like the downside of a drug bender. Maybe like Hippo Bimstine says, we're talking about speed-fried Nazi zomboids.'
'You think Waylon Rhodes will give us anybody?'
'He'll try to, when he starts to come apart. But by that time you won't be able to trust anything he tells you.'
'I believe him about the hit. When they lie, they're not vague.'
I took a bite out of my pastry and drank from my paper cup.
'Why the silence?' she asked.
'No reason. What were you going to tell me about Nate Baxter?'
'I don't think he has designs on me, that's all.'
I nodded.
'A white supervisor trying to get into a black female officer's pants doesn't make his kind of racial remarks,' she said.
'You don't have to tell me anything about Nate Baxter, Lucinda.'
'He said Ben Motley got where he is by spitting watermelon seeds and giving whitey a lot of 'yas-suhs.' He said I'd never have to do that, because I'm smart and I have a nice ass. How do you like that for charm?'
'Nate's a special kind of guy.'
'I don't think so. Not for a black woman, anyway.'
'Don't underestimate him, Lucinda. He raped and sodomized a hooker in the Quarter. Then he ran her out of town before anybody from Internal Affairs could talk to her.'
She stopped eating and looked across the grass at some children running through the camellia bushes. Then she set the pastry down on a napkin in her lap and brushed the powdered sugar off her fingers.
'I was raised by my aunt,' she said. 'She was a prostitute. A white man tried to rape her behind a bar on Calliope. She shot him to death. What do you think about that?'
'Did she go up the road for it?'
'Yes.'
'So even in death he raped her. Drop the dime on Baxter if he gets near you or makes another off-color remark.'
She stood up and walked cooly to a trash can, dropped her paper cup and unfinished pastry in it, and sat back down on the stone bench. Her flowered blouse puffed with air in the breeze.
'Don't try to stonewall me about this contract stuff,' she said. 'Who is it the greaseballs don't clip?'
'Politicians.'
'Who else?'
'Ordinary people who are on the square. Particularly influential ones.'
'Come on, Robicheaux.'
'Would you not call me by my last name, please? It reminds me of the army.'
'Who else?'
'They don't do made guys without the commission's consent.'
'That's it?'
'Cops,' I said.
She looked me evenly in the eyes, biting down softly on the corner of her lip.
That night I dreamed of a desolate coastline that looked like layered white clay. On it was a solitary tree whose curled, dead leaves were frozen against an electrical blue sky. The ocean should have been teeming with fish, but it, like the land, had been stricken, its chemical green depths empty of all life except the crew of a German submarine, who burst to the surface with emergency air tanks on their backs, their bone-hard, white faces bright with oil. They gathered under the tree on the beach, looking over their new estate, and I realised then that they had the jowls and mucus-clotted snouts of animals.
They waited for their leader, who would come, as they had, from the sea, his visage crackling with salt and
