"Max Coll?" I said.
"Yeah. I think Gunner's got it wrong, though. Coll doesn't have any reason to be interested in me. Gunner might get himself popped."
"Where's Gunner now?"
"He didn't say. How do I get involved in crap like this?"
"Let's have a talk with Fat Sammy."
"I can't stand that guy. He looks like a blimp after all the air has gone out of it."
"There're worse guys in the life."
"Oh, I forgot, he gives discounts to the meth whores who work in his porn films," he said.
He fired up the Caddy, the rust-eaten muffler roaring against the asphalt, and we drove in the rain to Fat Sammy's house on Ursulines.
I rang the iron bell at the entrance.
"Who is it?" Sammy's voice said from the speaker inside the archway.
"Dave Robicheaux," I replied.
He buzzed open the gate and we walked through the flooded courtyard to the door of his house, which he had already unbolted and left ajar. I had not told Sammy that Clete was with me. When we stepped inside the living room he was lying on the floor, dressed in purple gym trunks and a strap undershirt, watching an opera on cable TV while he curled dumbbells into his chest. His massive legs were as white and hairless as a baby's, his pale blue eyes looking at us upside down.
"What's the haps, Sammy?" Clete said.
"Who said you could come in here, Purcel?" Fat Sammy asked.
Clete looked at me. "I'll wait in the car," he said.
"Clete's my friend, Sammy."
Sammy set down the dumbbells and got to his feet, his lungs wheezing. The living room was dark, the windows covered with thick velvet curtains. Through a side door I could see two men, neither of whom I recognized, shooting pool. Sammy looked down from his great height at both me and Clete.
"So you want to watch some opera?" he asked. He spread his feet and began touching his toes.
"You know a guy named Max Coll?" I said.
"Do I know him? No. Do I know who he is? Yeah, he works out of Miami 'cause it's suppose to be an open city there. Here's the short version. You want somebody clipped, there's guys in Little Havana who work for a service. You want it done right, you ask for this Irish character. Except some people say he's a wacko."
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Clete staring intently through the side doorway at the two men shooting pool.
"Wacko how?" I said.
"I don't know, 'cause I don't keep company with them kind of people," Sammy said. "Look, what I hear is the wacko screwed up a job in New Orleans and stiffed the wrong people. That means if he goes back to Miami he might float up in a barrel. Now, we done with this?"
"The guy in there with the patent-leather hair? Is that Frank Dellacroce?" Clete asked.
"What about it?" Sammy said.
"Nothing. I thought he was down on a murder beef in Texas. Maybe George W. slipped up during his days as chief needle injector," Clete said.
Sammy's eyes looked at nothing while he scratched at his cheek with three fingers. "Come back another time, Robicheaux," he said.
Outside, rain was sluicing off the rooftops while Clete and I ran for his Cadillac. We got inside and slammed the doors. "Why do you always have to start up the garbage grinder?" I said.
"That grease ball shooting pool put his infant daughter in the refrigerator and held a gun to his wife's head while he did it. You think Sammy is on the square? I think he's a fat douche bag who should have been blown out of his socks years ago."
"You don't listen, Clete. It's hopeless. You'll never change."
"Neither will you, Dave. You'd like to splatter every one of these shitheads, but you won't admit it. Bootsie's death is eating your lunch. You talk about getting honest at meets? Why don't you stop stoking up your own fires?"
We drove over to Decatur in silence, wrapped in anger, with no destination, the sky as gray as dirty wash. Rainwater was spouting from the sewer grates, the guttural roar of the ruptured muffler vibrating through the Cadillac's frame.
"If you want to attack me, Clete, do it. But don't drag my wife's death into it," I said.
"I'm finished talking about it. Live your own life," he replied.
At the traffic light in front of the Cafe du Monde I got out of the car, slammed the door behind me, and ran through the rain to the pavilion. When I looked back over my shoulder Clete was gone and Jackson Square looked as cold and stark as a black-and-white photograph taken in the dead of winter.
I ordered coffee and hot milk and a plate of beignets, but couldn't eat. I walked the streets in the rain, keeping under the balconies, threading through the tourists carrying street-sale ten-dollar umbrellas. I looked through steam-coated windows of cafes and bars where people were watching Saturday-afternoon football on television. On Dauphine I went into a bar that was packed with gay men, all of them shouting in unison to punctuate the gyrations of a famous transvestite dancing on the stage. The bartender wore a pencil-line mustache and earrings and a black leather cap and leather vest without a shirt. He stared at me across the bar.
"You have coffee?" I asked.
"This look like a Starbucks?" he replied in a New England accent.
"Give me a soda with a lime twist," I said.
He fixed my drink and set it on the bar. He smiled to himself, but not offensively.
"On the job?" he said.
"No, not on the job," I said.
"No problem, sir," he said.
I closed my eyes as I drank down the soda and lime in the glass. I could have sworn I tasted the traces of bourbon in the ice. I used the rest room and walked back out on the street, my skin and clothes reeking of cigarette smoke, my head buzzing with sounds like an electric wire popping in a rain puddle.
I lost track of time. It stopped raining toward evening and a wet fog settled on the French Quarter and drifted like colored smoke off the neon lights over the clubs. Bourbon Street, which was closed at night to automobile traffic, became filled with college boys drinking beer out of plastic cups, conventioneers and tourists strung with cameras peering into strip joints that featured both topless and bottomless performances, and black kids tap dancing like minstrel caricatures or running a shuck that begins, "Bet you five dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes at."
I walked along the river where bums sat on stone benches with sack-wrapped bottles of fortified wine between their thighs. I turned up Esplanade and walked all the way to the ragged edge of the Quarter at Rampart, past a hallelujah mission with a neon cross above its door, past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night, over to Basin Street and the long-white wall that fronted St. Louis Cemetery. Through the gates I could see row upon row of whitewashed crypts and stone crosses, framed against the sodium lamps of the Iberville Project that burned in the fog with the incandescence of pistol flares.
I sat down on a bus bench next to a huge man with a wild beard and head of black hair. He wore a suit that looked like it had been pulled from a garbage can, a tie knotted like a garrote in the collar of his flannel shirt. His skin was so grimed with dirt it was hard to tell his race. His eyes made me think of the renegade Russian priest Rasputin.
"You got any money?" he said.
"What do you need it for?" I answered.
"Something to eat. Maybe a drink or two."
I found four dollars and seventy-three cents in my pocket and gave it to him. He clenched it in his hand but remained seated on the bench. "I got me a dry place in one of the tombs. The mission is all full on Saturday nights," he said.
I nodded. A group of tourists were walking by, talking among themselves about either A Streetcar Named Desire, the play by Tennessee Williams, or the original streetcar itself, which today sits like an immobile and disconnected anachronism on a cement pad down by the river.