white rose opening to black light, made women turn and stare at him on the street. His rendition of 'My Funny Valentine' took you into a consideration about mutability and death that left you numb.
But he was a junky and jammed up with LAPD, and when he gave up the names of his suppliers, he had no idea that he was about to deal with Ricky Scarlotti.
Ricky had run a casino in Las Vegas, then a race track in Tijuana, before the Chicago Commission moved him to Los Angeles. Ricky didn't believe in simply killing people. He created living object lessons. He sent two black men to the musician's apartment in Malibu, where they pulled his teeth with pliers and mutilated his mouth. Later, the musician became a pharmaceutical derelict, went to prison in Germany, and died a suicide.
Helen and I drove through the Garden District, past the columned nineteenth-century homes shadowed by oaks whose root systems humped under sidewalks and cracked them upward like baked clay, past the iron green-painted streetcars with red-bordered windows clanging on the neutral ground, past Loyola University and Audubon Park, then to the levee where St. Charles ended and Ricky kept the restaurant, bookstore, and flower shop that supposedly brought him his income.
His second-story office was carpeted with a snow-white rug and filled with glass artworks and polished steel- and-glass furniture. A huge picture window gave onto the river and an enormous palm tree that brushed with the wind against the side of the building.
Ricky's beige pinstripe suit coat hung on the back of his chair. He wore a soft white shirt with a plum-colored tie and suspenders, and even though he was nearing sixty, his large frame still had the powerful muscle structure of a much younger man.
But it was the shape of his head and the appearance of his face that drew your attention. His ears were too large, cupped outward, the face unnaturally rotund, the eyes pouched with permanent dark bags, the eyebrows half-mooned, the black hair like a carefully scissored pelt glued to the skull.
'It's been a long time, Robicheaux. You still off the bottle?' he said.
'We're hearing some stuff that's probably all gas, Ricky. You know a mechanic, a freelancer, by the name of Harpo Scruggs?' I said.
'A guy fixes cars?' he said, and grinned.
'He's supposed to be a serious button man out of New Mexico,' I said.
'Who's she? I've seen you around New Orleans someplace, right?' He was looking at Helen now.
'I was a patrolwoman here years ago. I still go to the Jazz and Heritage Festival in the spring. You like jazz?' Helen said.
'No.'
'You ought to check it out. Wynton Marsalis is there. Great horn man. You don't like cornet?' she said.
'What is this, Robicheaux?'
'I told you, Ricky. Harpo Scruggs. He tried to kill Willie Broussard, then a priest. My boss is seriously pissed off.'
'Tell him that makes two of us, 'cause I don't like out-of-town cops 'fronting me in my own office. I particularly don't like no bride of Frankenstein making an implication about a rumor that was put to rest a long time ago.'
'Nobody has shown you any personal disrespect here, Ricky. You need to show the same courtesy to others,' I said.
'That's all right. I'll wait outside,' Helen said, then paused by the door. She let her eyes drift onto Ricky Scarlotti's face. 'Say, come on over to New Iberia sometime. I've got a calico cat that just won't believe you.'
She winked, then closed the door behind her.
'I don't provoke no more, Robicheaux. Look, I know about you and Purcel visiting Jimmy Figorelli. What kind of behavior is that? Purcel smashes the guy in the mouth for no reason. Now you're laying off some hillbilly
'I didn't say he was a hillbilly.'
'I've heard of him. But I don't put out contracts on priests. What d'you think I am?'
'A vicious, sadistic piece of shit, Ricky.'
He opened his desk drawer and removed a stick of gum and peeled it and placed it in his mouth. Then he brushed at the tip of one nostril with his knuckle, huffing air out of his breathing passage. He pushed a button on his desk and turned his back on me and stared out the picture window at the river until I had left the room.
THAT EVENING I DROVE to the city library on East Main. The spreading oaks on the lawn were filled with birds and I could hear the clumps of bamboo rattling in the wind, and fireflies were lighting in the dusk out on the bayou. I went inside the library and found the hardback collection of Megan's photography that had been published three years ago by a New York publishing house.
What could I learn from it? Maybe nothing. Maybe I only wanted to put off seeing her that evening, which I knew I had to do, even though I knew I was breaking an AA tenet by injecting myself into other people's relationships. But you don't let a friend like Clete Purcel swing in the gibbet.
The photographs in her collection were stunning. Her great talent was her ability to isolate the humanity and suffering of individuals who lived in our midst but who nevertheless remained invisible to most passersby. Native Americans on reservations, migrant farmworkers, mentally impaired people who sought heat from steam grates, they looked at the camera with the hollow eyes of Holocaust victims and made the viewer wonder what country or era the photograph had been taken in, because surely it could not have been our own.
Then I turned a page and looked at a black-and-white photo taken on a reservation in South Dakota. It showed four FBI agents in windbreakers taking two Indian men into custody. The Indians were on their knees, their fingers laced behind their heads. An AR-15 rifle lay in the dust by an automobile whose windows and doors were perforated with bullet holes.
The cutline said the men were members of the American Indian Movement. No explanation was given for their arrest. One of the agents was a woman whose face was turned angrily toward the camera. The face was that of the New Orleans agent Adrien Glazier.
I drove out to Cisco's place on the Loreauville road and parked by the gallery. No one answered the bell, and I walked down by the bayou and saw her writing a letter under the light in the gazebo, the late sun burning like a flare beyond the willow trees across the water. She didn't see or hear me, and in her solitude she seemed to possess all the self-contained and tranquil beauty of a woman who had never let the authority of another define her.
Her horn-rimmed glasses gave her a studious look that her careless and eccentric dress belied. I felt guilty watching her without her knowledge, but in that moment I also realized what it was that attracted men to her.
She was one of those women we instinctively know are braver and more resilient than we are, more long- suffering and more willing to be broken for the sake of principle. You wanted to feel tender toward Megan, but you knew your feelings were vain and presumptuous. She had a lion's heart and did not need a protector.
'Oh, Dave. I didn't hear you come up on me,' she said, removing her glasses.
'I was down at the library looking at your work. Who were those Indians Adrien Glazier was taking down?'
'One of them supposedly murdered two FBI agents. Amnesty International thinks he's innocent.'
'There were some other photos in there you took of Mexican children in a ruined church around Trinidad, Colorado.'
'Those were migrant kids whose folks had run off. The church was built by John D. Rockefeller after his goons murdered the families of striking miners up the road at Ludlow.'
'I mention it because Swede Boxleiter told me a hit man named Harpo Scruggs had a ranch around there.'
'He should know. He and Cisco were placed in a foster home in Trinidad. The husband was a pederast. He raped Swede until he bled inside. Swede took it so the guy wouldn't start on Cisco next.'
I sat down on the top step of the gazebo and tossed a pebble into the bayou.
'Clete's my longtime friend, Megan. He says he needs this security job with Cisco's company. I don't think that's why he's staying here,' I said.
She started to speak but gave it up.
'Even though he says otherwise, I don't think he understands the nature of y'all's relationship,' I said.
