Monde, and watched the water from the sprinklers click against the piked fence around the park in Jackson Square and drift in a rainbow haze through the myrtle and banana trees. Then I went over to First District headquarters a few blocks away and read Joey Gouza's file. It was another study in institutional failure, the kind of document that makes you doubt your own convictions and conclude that perhaps the rightwing simpletons are correct when they advocate going at social complexities with a chainsaw.
Since age thirteen, he'd had forty-three arrests. He was in the Louisiana reformatory when he was seventeen, he went up the road twice to Angola, and he did a federal three-bit in Lewisburg. He had been arrested for breaking-andentering, auto theft, assault and battery, possession of burglar tools, armed robbery, strong-arm robbery, sale of stolen food stamps, possession of counterfeit money, procuring, tax fraud, and murder. He was one of those career criminals who early on had gone about investigating and participating in every kind of illegal activity that a city offered. But, unlike most petty thieves, pimps, smalltime fences, and smashand-grab artists, Joey had gravitated steadily upward in the New Orleans mob and had developed a skill that was at one time revered in the underworld, that of the safecracker. Evidently he had peeled and cut up safes with burnbars in four states, although he had fallen on only one job, a box in a Baton Rouge pawnshop that netted him eighty-six dollars and a two-year jolt in Angola.
He wasn't hard to find. He owned a small Italian cafd and delicatessen in an old brick, iron-scrolled building shaded by oak trees on Esplanade. The inside smelled of oregano and meat sauce, crab-boil, sautded shrimp, cheese and salami, the fried oysters and sliced tomatoes and onions that went into the poor-boy sandwiches on the counter, the steamed coffee from the espresso machines. The cafe was empty except for a black cook, the counterman, and a couple having breakfast at one of the checkercloth tables.
I asked for Joey Gouza.
'He's back in the office. What's the name?' the counterman said.
'Dave Robicheaux.'
'Just a minute.' He walked to the end of the counter and spoke through a half-opened door.
'Who's the guy?' a peculiar thick voice inside said.
'I don't know. Just a guy.' The counterman looked back at me.
'Then ask him who he is,' the voice said, The counterman looked back at me again. I opened up my badge.
'He's a cop, Joey,' the counterman said.
'Then tell him to come in, for Christ's sake.'
I walked around the counter and through the door. Joey Gouza looked up at me from behind his desk. He was deeply tanned, tall, his face elongated, almost jug-shaped, his salt-and-pepper hair cut military style and brushed up stiffly on his scalp, his eyes as black as wet paint. He wore pleated gray slacks, a lavender polo shirt, oxblood loafers; a cream-colored panama hat sat crown down on the corner of his desk. His neck was unnaturally long, like a swan's, hung with gold chains and medallions, and his open shirt exposed the web of veins and tendons in his shoulders and chest, like those in a long-distance runner or javelin thrower.
But it was the eyes that got your attention; they were absolutely black and they never blinked. And the voice: the accent was Irish Channel, but with a knot tied in it, as though the vocal cords were coated with infected membrane.
His smile was easy, as relaxed as the matchstick he rolled on his tongue. A fat dark man in a green visor, who smoked a cigar, sat at a card table in the corner, adding up receipts on a calculator.
'I got some unpaid parking tickets again?' Gouza said.
I held my badge out for him to see. 'No, I'm Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, Mr. Gouza. It's just an informal visit. Do you mind if I sit down?'
If he recognized my name, it didn't show in his eyes or his smile.
'Help yourself, if you don't mind me working. We got to get some stuff ready for the tax man.'
'I'm looking for Jack Gates,' I said. 'Or Eddy Raintree.'
'Who?'
'How about Jewel Fluck?'
'Fluck? Is this some kind of put-on?'
'Let's start with Jack Gates again. You never heard of him?'
'Nope.'
'That's funny. I heard he fed your brother-in-law into an airplane propeller.'
He took the matchstick out of the corner of his mouth and laughed.
'It's a great story. I've heard it for years. But it's bullshit,' he said. 'My brother-in-law was killed in a plane accident on his way to Disneyland. A great family tragedy.'
The man at the other table was grinning and nodding his head up and down without interrupting his count of receipts.
Then Joey Gouza put the matchstick back in his mouth and leaned his chin on his knuckle. His eyes were filled with an amused light as they moved up and down my person.
'You say Iberia Parish?' he said.
'That's right.'
'You guys gave up shaving or something?'
'We're casual out in the parishes. Let's cut to it, Joey. You're an old-time pete man. Why do you want to give Weldon Sonnier a lot of grief?'
'Weldon Sonnier?'
'You don't know him, either?'
'Everybody in New Orleans knows him. He's a bum and a welsher.'
'Who told you that?'
'That's the word. He borrows big dough, but he doesn't come up with the vig. That'll get you into trouble in this town. You saying I'm connected with him or something?'
'You tell me.'
'I know your name from a long time ago. You were at the First District, weren't you?'
'That's right.'
'So I think maybe you heard stories about me. You probably read my rap sheet before you came here this morning, right? You know I've been up the road a couple of times, you know I burned a box or two. You heard that old bullshit story about how I got this voice, how a yard bitch put a capful of Sani-Flush in my coffee cup. How the yard bitch got his cherry split open in the shower two days later? You heard that one, didn't you?'
'Sure.'
He smiled and said, 'No, you didn't, but I'll give it to you free, anyway. The point is it's not true. I was never a big stripe, I did easy time, I made full trusty in every joint I was in. But the big word there is did. Past tense. I did my time. I've been straight seven years. Look—'
He bounced his palm on top of a paper spindle and gazed reflectively out the window at some black children skateboarding by under the oaks.
'I'm a businessman,' he continued. 'I own a bunch of restaurants, a linen service, a movie theater, a plumbing business, and half a vending-machine company. Are we on the same wavelength here?'
He flexed his nostrils as though there were an obstruction in them and rubbed the grained skin of his jaw with one finger.
'I'll try again,' he said. 'You said it a minute ago, I was a pete man. I punc down for it twice, too. But safecracking became a historical art a long time ago. Today it's all narcotics.'
'Bad stuff?' I smiled back at him.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms up.
'Who am I to judge?' he said. 'But go out to the welfare projects and see who's running the action. They're all colored kids. They scrape out crack pipes, they call it bazooka or something, and sell it for a buck a hit. Nobody who could think his way out of a wet paper bag is gonna try to compete with that.'
'Maybe my information isn't very good. Or maybe I'm a little bit out of touch. But it's my understanding that you've got connections with Bobby Earl, that Jack Gates is a button man for you.'
He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. He took the matchstick out of his mouth and dropped it in the waste can.
