previous one.
In his sock drawer I found a bottle of vodka and his 'throw-down,' an old.32 revolver with worn bluing, taped wooden grips, and serial numbers that had been eaten and disfigured with acid. I flipped open the cylinder. Five of the chambers were loaded, and the sixth had been left empty for the hammer to rest on.
I started to replace the revolver in the drawer; instead, I pushed the drawer shut and dropped the revolver into my pants pocket.
On the way out of the apartment I looked again at Lou's blood on the floor. Doobie Patout's shoes had tracked through the edge of it and printed the logo of his rubber heel brightly on the wood.
What a way to exit thirty-seven years of law enforcement, I thought. You died face down in a rented garage apartment that wouldn't meet the standards of public housing; then your colleagues write you off as a drunk and step in your blood.
I looked at the smudged letters SI again. What were you trying to tell us, Lou?
Doobie Patout locked the door behind me when I walked outside. A red glow was spreading from the eastern horizon upward into the sky.
'This is what I think happened, Doobie. You can do with it what you want,' I said. 'Somebody found Lou passed out and tossed the place. After he ripped some pages out of Lou's notebook, he put Lou's twenty-gauge under his chin.'
'If he tossed the place first, he would have found Lou's.357, right? Why wouldn't he use it? That's the first thing you jumped on, Robicheaux.'
'Because he would have had to put it in Lou's hand. He didn't want to wake him up. It was easier to do it with the shotgun.'
His eyes fixed on mine; then they became murky and veiled as they studied a place in the air about six inches to the right of my face. A dead palm tree in the small yard clattered in the warm morning breeze.
It was Saturday, and I didn't have to go to the office, but I called Rosie at the motel where she was living and told her about Lou's death.
At noon of the same day Cholo Manelli drove a battered fire-engine-red Cadillac convertible down the dirt road by the bayou and parked by the dock just as I was headed up to the house for lunch. The left front fender had been cut away with an acetylene torch and looked like an empty eye socket. The top was down, and the back seat and the partly opened trunk were filled with wrought-iron patio furniture, including a glass-topped table and a furled beach umbrella.
He wore white shorts and a green Hawaiian shirt with pink flamingoes printed on it. He squinted up at me from under his white golf cap, which was slanted over one eye. When he grinned I saw that an incisor tooth was broken off in his lower mouth and there was still blood in the empty space above his gum.
'I wanted to say good-bye,' he said. 'Give you something, too.'
'Where you going, Cholo?'
'I thought I might go to Florida for a while, take it easy, maybe open up a business like you got. Do some marlin fishing, stuff like that. Look, can we talk someplace a minute?'
'Sure. Come on inside the shop.'
'No, you got customers around and I got a bad problem with language. It don't matter what I say, it comes out sounding like a toilet flushing. Take a ride with me, lieutenant.'
I got into the passenger's seat, and we drove down to the old grocery store with the wide gallery at the four- corners. The white-painted iron patio furniture vibrated and rattled in the back seat. On the leg of one chair was the green trademark of Holiday Inn. Cholo parked in the shade of the huge oak tree that stretched over the store's gallery.
'What's with the furniture?' I said.
'The owner wanted me to take it when I checked out. He said he's been needing some new stuff, it's a write-off, anyway, and I'm kind of doing him a favor. They got po'-boys in here? It's on me.'
Before I could answer he went inside the store and came back with two shrimp-and-fried-oyster sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise, lettuce, and sliced tomatoes. He unwrapped the wax paper on his and chewed carefully on one side of his mouth.
'What's going on, Cholo?' I said.
'Just like I said, it's time to hang it up.'
'You had some problems with Baby Feet?'
'Maybe.'
'Because you called an ambulance for me?'
He stopped chewing, removed a piece of lettuce from his teeth, and flicked it out onto the shell parking lot.
'Margot told him. She heard me on the phone,' he said. 'So last night we was all having dinner at this class place out on the highway, with some movie people there, people who still think Julie's shit don't stink, and Julie says, 'Did y'all know Cholo thinks he's Florence Nightingale? That it's his job to take care of people who get hurt on ball fields, even though that means betraying his old friends?'
'I say, 'What are you talking, Julie? Who's fucking Florence Nightingale or whatever?'
'He don't even look at me. He says to all the others, 'So we're gonna get Cholo another job 'cause he don't like what he's doing now. He's gonna start work in one of my restaurants, down the street from the Iberville project. Bus dishes for a little while, get the feel of things, make sure the toilets are clean, 'cause a lot of middle- class niggers eat in there and they don't like dirty toilets. What d'you say, Cholo?'
'Everybody at the table's grinning and I go, 'I ain't done anything wrong, Julie. I made a fucking phone call. What if the guy'd died out there?'
'Julie goes, 'There you go again, Cholo. Always opening your face when you ain't supposed to. Maybe you ought to leave the table. You got wax in your ears, you talk shit, you rat-fuck your friends. I don't want you around no more.'
'When I walked out, everybody in the restaurant was looking at me, like I was a bug, like I was somebody didn't have no business around regular people. Nobody ever done anything like that to me.'
His face was bright with perspiration in the warm shade. He rubbed his nose on the back of his wrist.
'What happened to your tooth, Cholo?' I asked.
'I went down to Julie's room last night. I told him that he was a douche bag, I wouldn't work for him again if he begged me, that just like Cherry LeBlanc told him, he's a needle-dick and the only reason a broad like Margot stays with him is because what she's got is so wore out it's like the Grand Canyon down there and it don't matter if he's a needle-dick or not. That's when he comes across my mouth with this big glass ashtray, the sonofabitch.
'Here, you want to see what he's into, lieutenant,' he said, pulled a video cassette out of the glove box, and put it in my hand. 'Go to the movies.'
'Wait a minute. What's this about Cherry LeBlanc?'
'If he tells you he never knew her, ask him about this. Julie forgot he told me to take some souvenir pictures when we drove over to Biloxi once. Is that her or not?'
He slipped a black-and-white photograph from his shirt pocket and placed it in my hand. In it, Julie and Cherry LeBlanc sat at an outdoor table under an umbrella. They wore swimsuits and held napkin-wrapped drinks in their hands; both were smiling. The background was hazy with sunshine and out of focus. An indistinct man at another table read a newspaper; his eyes looked like diamonds embedded in his flesh.
'I want you to be straight with me, Cholo. Did Feet kill her?' I said.
'I don't know. I'll tell you what happened the night she got killed, though. They had a big blowup in the motel room. I could hear it coming through the walls. She said she wasn't nobody's chicken, she wanted her own action, her own girls, a place out on Lake Pontchartrain, maybe a spot in a movie.
So he goes, 'There's broads who'd do an awful lot just to be in the same room with me, Cherry. Maybe you ought to count your blessings.' That's when she started to make fun of him. She said he looked like a whale with hair on it, and besides that, he had a putz like a Vienna sausage.
'The next thing I know she's roaring out of the place and Julie's yelling into the phone at somebody, I don't know who, all I heard him say was Cherry is a fucking nightmare who's snorting up six hundred dollars' worth of
