Dixie City Jam

instead of swallowing it, he lowered his head, emptied his mouth into a napkin.

'I can't eat no more. I feel sick,' he said. His eyes wandered to the table where the three men from his crew were eating.

'Maybe in New Orleans you're lucky if you get to die from cancer these days,' he said.

'Is there a contract on you, too, Tommy?'

'You're a lot like Purcel. You think the Caluccis are clowns because you busted them up with a shovel and they didn't try to do anything about it. I got news for you, Dave. These guys eat their pain and wait. One time a button guy from the Cardo family was porking Bobo's broad. They waited three years, till everything was forgotten, till the broad had disappeared, till Bobo had a half dozen other bimbos hanging around him, then they asked the button guy out on their boat. They wined and dined him, made fun about the broad, like they were all great buddies and she was just some pork chops they passed around, then they held a gun to the guy's head and made him cut off his own cock.'

He ran his hand through his hair, wiped the perspiration on his shirt, blew out his breath, and ordered a double Scotch straight up. The corners of his mouth looked as gray as fish scale.

By five that afternoon I still had not heard back from the monsignor in Lafayette. Before signing out of the office, I called again.

'His mother's been quite ill. Can he call you at home, Detective Robicheaux? I know he'll want to,' the secretary said.

'Yes, I'd appreciate it if he would,' I said, and gave her our number.

Bootsie and I had planned to go to a seven o'clock AA step meeting in town, and I had told her not to prepare supper. On the way home I picked up some po'-boy sandwiches and dirty rice at a take-out place by City Park. As I drove down the dirt road along the bayou, smoke was drifting across the sun from a scorched sugarcane field, and the air smelled like burning leaves and late-blooming flowers. It was raining in the south, and you could see a gray squall line, splintered with lightning, moving inland from the gulf. The wind was already up, straightening the moss in the cypress trees out in the marsh, and most of the fishermen who had been out for saca-lait had turned their boats toward the dock.

The deputy who still guarded the house during the day waved at me and headed for town. I parked in the drive and went inside with the paper sack of po'-boys and dirty rice. The windows were all open, and the curtains were billowing with wind.

'Who's home?' I said.

But the house was quiet. I walked into the kitchen and set the sack of sandwiches on the table. Then I saw the empty sherry bottle and three beer cans half buried in a tangle of wet newspapers and coffee grounds in the plastic trash container. I rubbed my hand in my face, then opened the icebox to get a Dr Pepper, changed my mind for no reason, and slammed the door, rattling everything inside.

The phone rang on the counter.

'Detective Robicheaux?'

'Yes.'

'This is Monsignor DeBlanc. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. You called about Sister Marie?'

'Yes, Marie Guilbeaux.'

'Right. Is something wrong?'

'I'm not sure, really. I'm working a strange case now… Sister Guilbeaux keeps showing up around here at odd times.'

'I'm sorry, I'm confused. What do you mean 'showing up'?'

'Just that. She seems to take an inordinate interest in things that aren't her affair.'

'You mean she's been in New Iberia recently?'

'Yes.'

'I don't understand. Marie went back home to Napoleonville three months ago. She's had some severe problems with her health.'

I paused a moment. 'What does this lady look like, Monsignor?'

'Good for her age, I guess, but, well, time has its way with all of us.'

'Her age?'

'She's almost seventy years old. How old do you think she is?'

After I hung up I sat at the kitchen table and stared out the back screen at the orange wafer of sun descending into the smoke from the smoldering cane stubble. Why hadn't I seen it? She had been outside the intensive care unit when Clete and I had interviewed Charles Arthur Sitwell, who later was launched into the next world with an injection of water and roach paste. Even Alafair had felt there was something wrong about her, that she was a harbinger of trouble and discord.

I looked again at the empty sherry bottle and cans in the trash. When the bedroom door opened in the hallway I didn't even bother to turn around. There was no point in trying to go to a step meeting tonight. Bootsie's fears and anxieties had obviously sent her into a relapse; maybe tomorrow we'd give it another try. Or maybe I simply had to let go of her for a while, turn her over to my Higher Power, and let her bottom out. How could I demand more of her than had ever been demanded of me? But regardless of what I chose to do, anger would serve no purpose, and would only reinforce her determination to stay drunk.

I smelled the alcohol and the odor of cigarettes even before I felt the warm breath against my cheek, the touch of fingernails in my hair and on my scalp, the soft caress of a woman's breasts against the back of my neck. Then I felt the mouth and tongue in my ear, the tapered hand that slid down my chest toward my loins, and I turned and looked up into the face of the woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux.

chapter twenty-three

'Tough day when they take the scales from your eyes?' she said. Her hand reached out to touch my hair. I pushed it away.

'Where are Bootsie and Alafair?' I said.

'The wifey's passed out. Doesn't she send your daughter off with the black man when she decides to go on the grog?'

I walked into the hall and opened the bedroom door. Bootsie was asleep, half undressed, on top of the sheets, her face twisted into the pillow. The curtains popped in the silence.

The woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux stood in the center of the kitchen, putting lipstick on in front of her compact mirror. She wore sun-faded jeans, sandals, a beige terry-cloth pullover with a dipping neckline, and a gold chain with a pearl around her throat.

'Did you know the little wife has something of a pill problem?' she said, her eyes still fastened on the mirror.

'Who are you?'

She crimped her lips together in the mirror and clicked the compact closed.

'Want to find out?' she said. She smiled. Her eyes seemed to darken, like charcoal-colored smoke gathering inside green glass. She unsnapped the top of her jeans, exposing the pink edge of her panties, then reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. 'Sit down in the chair, Dave. It's time someone does something nice for you.'

I dumped her purse on the breakfast table. In it were car keys, an empty aspirin tin, a roll of breath mints, a perfume spray bottle, and a doeskin wallet. In the wallet was over six hundred dollars, and a Social Security card and driver's license with the name Marie Guilbeaux on them. The address on the license was in uptown New Orleans, back toward the levee. There were no credit cards.

'Do you like everything to be so hard?' she said, and moved her tongue in a circle inside her lips.

She worked her bra out from under her pullover and laid it over the chair top, then clasped her hands around the back of my neck and pressed her stomach against me. 'I have a feeling the wifey hasn't been treating you