It was not a place for the conventional tourist, particularly not someone with a history of coronary or vascular trouble. It had screen doors, electric fans instead of air-conditioning, an interior that looked painted with fingernail polish, and cuisine that featured sausage, bacon, cob corn glistening with butter, deep-fried pork chops, greens cooked in ham fat, potatoes floating in grease, and mounds of scrambled eggs that lay in bubbling heaps on a grill that probably hadn't been scraped clean since World War II.
'Does Maggie Glick come in here?' I asked the black woman who sat behind the counter, fanning herself with a magazine.
'Who want to know, darlin'?' she said. I opened my shield.
'She eat breakfast here on the weekend,' the woman said.
'Do you remember somebody leaving a note for her a while back, one with the initials M.G. on the envelope?' I said.
'Could be. Don't remember.'
'I think it's a good time to focus on your memory skills,' Helen said.
The black woman kept flapping the magazine in her face. Her hair was threaded with gray and it rose and fell in the current of warm air generated by the magazine. She did not look at us when she spoke again.
'You see, Maggie comes over here to eat breakfast on the weekend 'cause she don't like the place where she lives or the work she do. When she was a li'l girl, she belonged to the same church as me over in Algiers. I still remember the li'l girl. Every time Maggie comes in here, I still remember that same li'l girl, I surely do. That enough for you, ma'am?'
We drove across the river into Algiers and parked on a narrow street lined with ancient buildings that looked like impacted teeth. The foundations had settled and the upper stories leaned into the sidewalks, the rooftops tipping downward against the light like the brim of a man's fedora. The hotels were walk-ups with stained sacks of garbage propped by the entrances, the taverns joyless, dark places where fortified wine was sold by the glass and where a person, if he truly wanted to slip loose his moorings, could create for himself the most violent denouement imaginable with a casual flick of the eyes at the bikers rubbing talcum into their pool cues.
But the real business on this street was to provide a sanctuary that precluded comparisons, in the same way that prisons provide a safe place for recidivists for whom setting time in abeyance is not a punishment but an end. The mulatto and black girls inside Maggie Glick's bar rejected no one. No behavior was too shameful, no level of physical or hygienic impairment unacceptable at the door. The Christmas tinsel and wreaths and paper bells wrapped with gold and silver foil stayed up year round. Inside Maggie Glick's, every day was New Year's morning, sunless, refrigerated, the red neon clock indicating either the a.m. or the P.M., as you wished, the future as meaningless and unthreatening as the past.
Maggie’s father had been a Lithuanian peddler who sold shoestrings from door to door and her mother a washerwoman in an Algiers brothel. The tops of Maggie's gold breasts were tattooed with roses and her hair was the same shiny black as the satin blouse she wore with her flesh-tight jeans and purple heels. She was lean and hard-edged, and like most longtime prostitutes, withdrawn, solipsistic, bored with others and with what she did, and curiously asexual in her manner and behavior, particularly around Johns.
Maggie sat at the far corner of the bar, a cup of tea on a napkin in front of her. She glanced at me, then at Helen, her eyes neutral, then picked up her cup and blew on her tea.
'You don't have to show me your badge. I know who you are,' she said.
'I thought you were in St. Gabriel,' I said.
'Those cops who got fired or went to jail themselves? One of them was the narc who planted crystal in my apartment. He's in Seagoville, I'm outside. Everybody feeling good about the system now.'
'The word is you set up the drop for the contract on Zipper Clum. When'd you start fronting points for button men?' I said.
'Johnny Remeta told you that?'
'How do you know about Johnny Remeta?' Helen asked.
' 'Cause I read y'all had him in y'all's jail. 'Cause everybody on the street knows he did Zipper Clum. 'Cause he used to come in here. The boy has some serious sexual problems. But who want to go into details about that kind of thing?'
'That's so good of you,' Helen said, stepping close-in to the elbow of the bar, her forearm pressed flat on the wood. 'Is there something wrong about the words we use you don't understand? We're talking about conspiracy to commit murder for hire. There's a woman on death row right now. Would you like to join her there?'
Maggie picked up her cup again and drank from it. She watched her bartender break open a roll of quarters and spill the coins into the drawer of the cash register, then watched a man redeem a marker by counting out a stack of one-dollar bills one at a time on the bar. A young black woman sitting next to a white man in a suit quietly picked up her purse and went out the front door. Maggie Glick looked at the clock on the wall.
'The lady at the cafe across from the French Market said you used to go to her church when you were a little girl,' I said.
Maggie Glick's eyes cut sideways at me, her lips parting slightly.
'You're not a killer, Maggie. But somebody used you to set up a hit. I think the person who used you may have been involved in the murder of my mother,' I said.
Her eyes stayed fixed on mine, clouding, her brow wrinkling for the first time.
'Your mother?' she said.
'Two cops killed her. Zipper Clum was going to dime them. You're a smart lady. Put the rest of it together,' I said.
Her eyes shifted off mine and looked straight ahead into the gloom, the red glow of the neon tubing on the wall clock reflecting on the tops of her breasts. She tried to keep her face empty of expression, but I saw her throat swallow slightly, as though a piece of dry popcorn -were caught in it. Her chest rose briefly against her blouse, then the moment passed and her face turned to stone and the slashes of color died in her cheeks. She raised her cup again, balancing it between the fingers of both hands, so that it partially concealed her mouth and made her next statement an unintelligible whisper.
'What?' I said.
'Get out of here. Don't you be talking about the church I went to, either. What you know about how other people grew up? You used to come in here drunk, but you don't remember it. Now you think you got the right to wipe your feet on my life?' she said.
She wheeled the top of her barstool around and walked toward the fire exit in back, her long legs wobbling slightly on her heels.
Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a flash of wetness in the side of her eye.
That night Bootsie and I went to a movie in New Iberia, then bought ice cream on the way home and ate it on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in back. Clouds tumbled across the moon and my neighbor's cane field was green and channeled with wind.
'You look tired,' she said.
'I can't see through this stuff,' I said.
'About your mother?'
'All the roads lead back to prostitution of some kind: Zipper Clum, Little Face Dautrieve, this woman Maggie Glick, the story the jigger told about my mother working a scam with Mack-'
'It's the world they live in, Dave-prostitution, drugs, stealing, it's all part of the same web.' She looked at my expression and squeezed the top of my hand. 'I don't mean your mother.'
'No, it's not coincidence. Jim Gable-' I hesitated when I used his name, then looked her evenly in the eyes and went ahead. 'Gable and this vice cop Ritter are mixed up with hookers. Passion and Letty Labiche's parents were procurers. Connie Deshotel wet her pants when she thought Passion recognized her. Somehow it's all tied in together. I just don't know how.'
'Your mother wasn't a prostitute. Don't ever let anyone tell you that.'
'You're my buddy, Boots.'
She picked up the dishes to take them inside, then stopped and set them down again and stood behind me. Her fingers touched my hair and neck, then she bent over me and slipped her hands down my chest and pressed
