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"She's going to split. I know the signs."
"Maybe y'all will work it out."
"Come on, Dave, you didn't get off the boat yesterday. It doesn't work that way. You know how things were just before your wife took off."
"That's right, I do. I know how things were. Nobody else does. You get my drift?" I grinned at him.
"All right, I'm sorry. But when it's going down the toilet, it's going down the toilet. You don't turn it around by leaving your piece in a locker. Pull into that truck zone. It's too damn hot out here."
I parked in the loading zone by Pearl's and cut the engine. Cletus was sweating in the sunlight.
"Tell me honestly," he said, "would you have done something like that just to please your wife?"
I didn't even want to think about the things I had done to please my wife, my pale, dark-haired, beautiful wife from Martinique who left me for a Houston oilman.
"Hey, lunch is on you after all," I said.
"What?"
"I didn't bring any money."
"Use your MasterCard."
"They wouldn't renew it. Something about exceeding my credit limit by four hundred dollars."
"Great, I've got a buck thirty-five. What a class act. All right, we eat on the tab. If he doesn't like it, we tell him we're calling Immigration about the Haitians he's got working in his kitchen."
"I didn't know he had any."
"Me either. It'll be fun to see what he says."
The pornographic theater was right on Bourbon Street. Bourbon had changed since I used to come here as a college student over twenty years ago. The old Dixieland bands like Papa Celestin's and Sharky Bonnano's had been replaced by imitation country bands made up of kids in designer jeans, vinyl vests, and puffed white silk shirts with lace brocade, like mambo dancers or transvestites would wear. The burlesque houses had always been seedy places where the girls hustled drinks between sets and hooked loose Johns before closing, but the city code had required them to wear G-strings and pasties, and there hadn't been any dope around, except a little reefer among the desperate, burnt-out musicians who played in a small, dark pit at the bottom of the runway. But now the girls danced completely nude on the stage, their eyes glowing with black speed, their nostrils sometimes still twitching and wet from snorting coke through a rolled-up dollar bill.
The windows of Plato's Adult Theater had been walled up with cinder blocks so no one could see in, and the interior of the small, gold and purple lobby was decorated with erotic art that might have been painted by blind people. We went through the lobby into the office without knocking. A thin man with a pointed, shiny face looked up, startled, from his desk. He wore a powder-blue polyester suit and patent-leather shoes with silver buckles, and his receding, oiled hair glistened in the light from the desk lamp. Cans of movie reels were stacked in a wooden rack against one wall. The surprise and fear went out of the man's face, and he scratched his cheek with one hand and picked up a filter-tipped cigar from the ashtray.
"What do you want, Purcel?" he said indifferently.
"Dave, meet Wesley Potts, our resident bucket of shit," Cletus said.
"I don't have time for your insults, Purcel. You got a warrant or something?"
"That's what they say on television, Pottsie," Cletus said. "You see any TV cameras, Dave?"
"I don't see any TV cameras," I said.
"On television some guy is always saying 'Yo
u got a warrant?' or 'You got to read me my rights,'" Cletus said. "But in big-people land we don't do it that way. You ought to know that, Pottsie."
"I thought you didn't work vice anymore," Potts said.
"That's right. I'm in homicide now. My partner here's last name is Robicheaux. Does that make your swizzle stick start to tingle?"
The man behind the desk blew cigar smoke out in front of him and looked into it with his eyes flat, but I saw his fingers crimp together on the desk blotter.
"Your little brother up at Angola says you're blabbing it around that Dave here is going to get snuffed," Cletus said.
"If that's what my brother says, you ought to be talking to him. I don't know anything about it."
