'No, we don't. Get that out of your head. You come around here again and you're going to be back in custody.'
'You want the guys who killed your mother. That's the word on the street. You think they're the same guys who're trying to pop me.'
While he was talking I was waving my hand at Helen Soileau out in the hall, pointing at the phone so she would start a trace on the call.
'I met Jimmy Figorelli when I first got to New Orleans. He said if I wanted some work, I should rent a post office box and leave the box number for somebody named M.G. at a cafe across from the open-air market on Decatur. I wrote the box number down on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and wrote M.G. on the outside and gave it to a black lady behind the register at the cafe. When I was going out, she said, 'Maggie only eats here on the weekend. I'll give it to her then, okay?''
'I'm writing all this down. You've got to go slower,' I said.
'Good try.'
Change the subject, I thought.
'What was the front money?' I asked.
'I didn't say I got any front money. Sir, I didn't say anything that indicates I committed a crime.'
'Did you burn the car to make us think you'd blown the state?'
'I started thinking about those cops leaving me chained up while a sniper tried to cut all my motors. That's what they call it. They use a hollow point or a steel-claw bullet to core a plug out of your head. If the target is armed, his motors shut down and all his muscles die…Anyway, their car got burned. They can buy a new one… Say, forget about waving to that woman cop to trace this call. I'm on a cell phone.'
He broke the connection.
I dropped the receiver on the desk blotter and went to the window.
The parking lot was full of cars and noon-hour traffic was backed up on the streets from a passing freight train. Then the caboose of the train clicked down the track, the red-and-white-striped mechanical guard rose into the air, and the traffic flowed out of the side streets and the parking lot, the white sun reflecting blindingly off the windows like the swimming, mismatched eyes of the mythological Argus.
I went into Helen's office.
'He was outside?' she said.
'He had to be.'
'He knows the drill. He was guessing. Every one of these morons wants us to think he's a criminal genius.'
'He knew I waved to a 'woman cop.''
'You put out an APB?'
'Yeah. No luck.'
She put a stick of gum in her mouth and chewed it while she read the notes on my legal pad. Her hair was bright yellow and waved and molded into place with chemical spray.
'The go-between on the hit is somebody with the initials M.G.?' she said.
'First name Maggie,' I said. Our eyes locked on each other's.
'Maggie Glick? I thought Maggie Glick was doing fifteen in St. Gabriel,' Helen said.
'Let's take a ride to New Orleans Monday morning.'
She stood a ballpoint pen upside down on its cap and studied it. 'I've got a lot of work in my basket, Dave. I think right now this guy is NOPD's headache.'
I nodded and went back out in the hall and closed her door softly behind me.
She followed me into my office. 'I know I said I'd help, but this stuff is starting to eat you up,' she said.
'What stuff?'
'About your mother. Sometimes you just have to let the bad guys drown in their own shit.'
'You're probably right,' I said.
Ten minutes before 5 P.M. she opened the door to my office and leaned inside.
'Did you see the B amp;E report on Passion Labiche's house?' she asked. 'No.'
'I didn't know about it, either, not till a few minutes ago. Somebody came through a screen and tore her house up but didn't take anything except a box of old photos.'
'Photos?'
'Remember I told you about Passion saying she'd seen Connie Deshotel's face in an old photo?'
'Yeah, but Passion and Connie Deshotel just don't connect for me,' I said.
'You still want to go to the Big Sleazy?'
'With you, always,' I said.
'Hey, bwana?'
'What?'
'Connie Deshotel's dirty.'
The next morning, Saturday, I drove out to Passion Labiche's house. She unlatched the front door and asked me to follow her into the kitchen, where she was canning tomatoes. She lifted a boiling cauldron off the stove with hot pads, pouring into the preserve jars on the drainboard while the steam rose into her face. She had placed a spoon into each of the jars to prevent the glass from cracking, but one of them suddenly popped and stewed tomatoes burst in a pattern like a broken artery on her arm and the front of her dress.
She dropped the cauldron into the sink, her face bright with pain.
'You okay?' I said.
'Sure,' she said, wiping at her arm and dress with a dishrag.
She continued to wash her arm and scrub at her dress, rubbing the stain deeper into the fabric, spreading a huge damp area under her breasts.
'I have to change. Fix yourself something, or do whatever you feel like,' she said, her face sweating, her eyes dilated.
She ran up the stairs. When she came back down she had washed her face and tied her hair up on her head and put on a yellow dress. She cleaned off the drain-board with the heavy-breathing, self-enforced detachment of someone who might have just stepped back from a car wreck.
'I went over the breaking-and-entering report on your house. The intruder took nothing but a box of photos?' I said.
'That's all I'm missing so far. I wouldn't have known they were gone, except some shoes fell down from the shelf,' she said.
'You told Connie Deshotel you'd seen her in an old photo. Is there any reason she wouldn't want you to have a photograph of her?'
'It was probably kids. Who cares? Why you spending time on this, anyway? None of this got anything to do with my sister.'
'Was there a picture of Connie in the box that was stolen?'
'I don't know and I don't care. You stop bothering me with this.' She rubbed butter on the place where she had scalded herself with stewed tomatoes.
'Why'd that stain on your dress disturb you, Passion?'
She looked out the window at her garden and barn and the pecan trees down by the bayou, the skin twitching at the corner of her mouth.
'You better go about your business, Dave. I don't make good company some days. Funny how a policeman gives the grief to the person he can get his hands on, huh?' she said.
Monday morning Helen and I took an unmarked car to New Orleans and parked behind the old U.S. Mint on the river and cut through the open-air market on Decatur. The pavilion was crowded with people, and farther up the street a Dixieland band was playing in a courtyard and a man was selling snowballs from an umbrella-shaded cart on the sidewalk. We crossed Decatur to the cafe where Johnny Remeta had dropped off the number of his post office box.
