Swamp Gas petered out at about 5:00 in the morning. I was getting ready to leave when I spotted this geezer with a snowy white pompadour hobbling around in his bathrobe and slippers. When he turned around, I had to laugh.
“Hey, Uncle Dominic, it’s me, Vinnie. Chetta’s boy.” I hadn’t see the old guy since my daddy’s funeral.
“Vinnie, let me get a look at you.” He cuffed my head and patted my cheeks. “Not a day goes by I don’t think of my sweet little sister. How she making?”
“Same old, same old.” Mama was still fuming about how Uncle Dominic had gypped her on the inheritance. He stuck a knife in my back, she growled whenever his name came up.
“Remind her she still owes me three hundred bucks for property taxes the year she sold out.”
“What you doing here at this hour,” I asked, swiveling my hips, “getting down with the girlies?” His robe was covered with lint balls.
“Just checking on my investment. Got six, seven other buildings to see this morning. You?” he asked, swiveling his own hips. “Thought you was married. You just like your papa.”
“Here on a murder case. Know this young lady?” I flipped out the picture of Eva and he fished glasses from his robe pocket. “Killed the night of March 28.”
“Let me think,” he said, staring at the snapshot. “Yeah, yeah, I seen her here that morning. Last time I come in to check on my investment. Around this time. I axed her what she was writing down in her little book, and she says, ‘A perm.’ Looked like a bunny with them funny pigtails.”
“She leave alone?”
“Yeah, yeah. No, wait—” He slapped his forehead. “Madonna, how could I forget? She left with that pazzo what got the blue beard.”
Blue Beard.
Bingo.
Then somebody handed me some popcorn still warm in the bag.
The next morning I radioed Blue Beard’s description in to the Eighth District station in the Quarter, and rang Pogo, Miss Ivonne, Miss Ping, and Uncle Dominic to ask them to contact me the minute they spotted him. Uncle Dominic told me he wanted a cut of the reward, and lost interest fast when I told him there wasn’t any. But both he and Miss Ivonne promised to make a few phone calls to help locate Blue Beard. Mrs. Pierce sputtered “God bless you” when I reported that I was zeroing in on the killer.
Where the hell could he be? It wasn’t like a man with blue hair could hide just anywhere, even in the French Quarter.
That afternoon I got a staticky message on my cell phone.
Lily Lamont.
A husky, spaced-out voice said she needed to talk with me in person. That evening. She left an address that at first she couldn’t remember right.
My heels echoed on the flagstones in deserted Pirate’s Alley like the approaching footsteps in those radio plays my daddy used to listen to. A mist had rolled in from the river, wrapping St. Louis Cathedral in fog, and I squinted to make out the address under the halo of a streetlamp. I pictured Lily Lamont blowzy and toothless now, passed out on a filthy mattress cradling an empty bourbon bottle.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I found.
After I was buzzed in, I mounted a curved mahogany staircase that swept me up into a cavernous Creole ballroom under a spidery bronze chandelier. In a zebra-upholstered throne, there sat a mummified lady with white hair pulled back tight from her porcelain face, buttering a slice of raisin-bread toast.
“I’m famished,” Lily Lamont said, taking a bite. “Would you care for some toast and tea? That’s all I ever, ever eat.”
I shook my head. Perched in the zebra chair next to hers was a bulky goon with a body like a boxer’s gone to seed. He was caressing the top of his shiny bald head, several shades paler than his face.
“I don’t believe we’ve ever formally met, Lieutenant Panarello,” she said. Her bones, thin as chopsticks, were swallowed by a red silk kimono fastened by a dragon brooch.
“Not face-to-face.” What was I supposed to do, tell this lady I saw her on her knees in a men’s room thirty years ago?
“And this is my associate, Lucas,” she said, gesturing to Baldie.
I nodded, taking a seat in an elaborately carved bishop’s chair under an alabaster lamp of entwined snakes.
“Nice place,” I said. The floor-to-ceiling windows were draped with damask swags. Outside, shadows from the extended arms of a spotlit Jesus loomed over the cathedral garden.
“I bought this house last year from your uncle, Dominic Zuppardo.” Her sharp little teeth gnawed on the toast like a rat’s. “At a pretty penny. Actually, I paid him twice as much as the sale price we registered. That helped with my property assessment and his capital gains taxes. Smart man.”
Bet Uncle Dominic is kissing her butt now, I thought. So that’s who tipped her off to my investigation.
“Met your friend Miss Ivonne,” I said, since we were having a family reunion. “Place where Eva Pierce used to strip.”
“How is Ivonne?” Lily asked with a tight smile. “I set her up with that club. I’ve never been in it, of course.” Her frail shoulders shuddered.
Ditto, I thought. Miss Ivonne probably called her, too.
“Look, I won’t beat around the bush,” Lily Lamont said, brushing toast crumbs from her fingertips. “I want you to call off your investigation into Eva Pierce’s death. The killer is probably in Timbuktu by now. Questioning all of these people is silly.”
“But I know who did it. A guy with blue hair and beard.”
“Have you ever seen him?” Her enormous hazel eyes studied me slyly over the gold rim of an ornate teacup.
“No, but he used to come to the open mike at the Dragon’s Den all the time to read his lousy perms.”
Baldie winced. Then a shit-eating grin spread across his face. Why the hell would he care about Blue Beard’s poems?
Unless he wrote them.
“Do you have children, lieutenant?” Lily’s voice was filling with church choirs.
“Three. A boy at De la Salle, a girl at Mount Carmel, and another girl starting out at Loyola University next year.” That was why I moonlighted — to pay all those tuitions. The older girl worked at a pizza parlor after school to save up for Loyola. Her dad, you see, was a New Orleans cop.
“And wouldn’t you do anything to help your children?”
“Anything short of—”
“Eva Pierce was a horrible influence on my son.” Lily swayed like a cobra as she mouthed the words in a slow, woozy monotone. “She turned him against me. You should read the venomous words about me she inspired him to pen. She was just using him.”
“Maybe he liked being used,” I said, locking eyes with Pogo’s mother. “Maybe it’s all he’s ever known.”
“Here, this is for you.” Her long indigo fingernail flicked an ivory envelope across the coffee table. “It’s a check for $25,000. Eva’s mother hired you to investigate. I’m hiring you to stop the investigation.” She arched a penciled eyebrow. “Simple.”
I stood up. “Can I used the john?”
“Lucas will show you the way.”
I studied the rolls of skin on the back of Baldie’s head as I followed him down a long corridor, trying to picture him with blue hair and beard. The smartest thugs know the best disguise is something attention-getting but dispensable. And who would testify against Lily and this hitman? My uncle? Miss Ivonne? Trust-fund Pogo? The whole Quarter owed Lily Lamont a favor.
In the bathroom I tore open the envelope with an Egyptian scarab embossed on the flap: 25,000 smackers, made out to cash. I folded the check into my wallet. It was five times what Mrs. Pierce was paying me. I splashed water on my face and took a long look in the mirror. The jowly, unshaven mug of my daddy stared back at me, the face of three generations of Italian shopkeepers who worked like hell and never managed to get ahead. What, you crazy or something? they screamed at me. You want your daughter to graduate from college? Take the damn dough and run, Vinnie.