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But he had hidden a paper clip in his mouth. He picked the lock on his handcuffs, ripped the .357 Magnum out of the driver's shoulder holster, and blew both detectives all over the front windshield.
He was never caught again. The bucket of a Ferris wheel fell on him in Pocatello, Idaho.
I spent the day driving and walking the streets of the neighborhood, from Canal all the way over the Esplanade Avenue. I talked with blacks, Chicanos, and blue-collar white people in shoe-shine stands, seven a.m. bars, and corner grocery stores that smelled of chitlins and smoked carp. Yesterday I had been a small-town businessman. Today I was a cop, and I got the reception that cops usually get in a poor neighborhood. They made me for either a bill collector, a bondsman, a burial insurance man, a process server for a landlord, or Mr. Charlie with his badge (it's strange how we as white people wonder at minority attitudes towards us, when we send our worst emissaries among them).
Once I thought I might be close. An ex-boxer who owned a bar that had a Confederate flag auto tag nailed in the middle of the front door took the wet end of his cigar out of his mouth, looked at me with a face that was shapeless with scar tissue, and said, "Haitian? You're talking about a boon from the Islands, right?"
"Right."
"There's a bunch of those cannibals over on North Villere. They eat all the dogs in the neighborhood. They even seine the goldfish out of the pond in the park. Don't stay for supper. You might end up in the pot."
The yard of the one-story, wood-frame yellow house he directed me to was overgrown with wet weeds and littered with automobile and washing-machine parts. I drove down the alley and tried to see through the back windows, but the shades were pulled against the late-afternoon sun. I could hear a baby crying. Sacks of garbage that smelled of rotting fish were stacked on the back steps, and the diapers that hung on the clothesline were gray and frayed from handwashing. I went around front and knocked on the door.
A small, frightened black man with a face like a cooked apple came to within three feet of the screen and looked at me out of the gloom.
"Where's Toot?" I said.
He shook his head as though he didn't understand.
"Toot," I said.
He held his palms outward and shook them back and forth. His eyes were red in the gloom. Two children were coloring in a book on the floor. A wide-hipped woman with an infant on her shoulder watched me from the kitchen door.
"Vous connaissez un homme qui s'appelle Toot?" I said.
He answered me in a polyglot of French and English and perhaps African that was incomprehensible. He wa
s also terrified.
"I'm not from Immigration," I said. "Comprenez? Pas Immigration."
But he wasn't buying it. I couldn't reach past his fear nor make him understand my words, and then I made matters worse when I asked again about Toot and used the term tonton macoute. The man's eyes widened, and he swallowed as though he had a pebble in his throat.
But it was hopeless. Good work, Robicheaux, I thought. Now these poor people will probably stay frightened for days, shuddering every time an automobile slows out front. They would never figure out who I was and would simply assume that I was only a prelude of worse things to come. Then I had another thought. Police officers and Immigration officials didn't give money to illegal immigrants.
I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet, creased it lengthwise, and slipped it through the jamb of the latched screen.
"This is for your baby," I said "Pour vot' enfant."
He stared at me dumbfounded. When I looked back at the screen from my truck, he and his wife were both staring at me.
I bought a block of cheese, a half-pound of sliced ham, an onion, a loaf of French bread, and a quart of milk in a Negro grocery store, parked by the cemetery, and ate supper while the rain began falling out of the purple twilight. Over on Basin I saw a neon Jax signal light over a barroom.
When you don't nail a guy like Toot in his lair, you look for him in the places that take care of his desires. Most violent men like women. The perverts bust them up; contract hit men use them as both reward for their accomplishment and testimony of their power. I knew almost every black and high-yellow pick-up bar and hot-pillow joint in New Orleans. It was going to be a long night.
I was exhausted when the sun came up in the morning. It had stopped raining at about three a.m., and the pools of water in the street were drying in the hot sunlight, and you could feel the moisture and heat radiate up from the concrete like steam.
I brushed my teeth and shaved in a filling station rest room. My eyes were red around the rims, my face lined with fatigue. I had gone into a dozen lowlife Negro bars during the night, had been propositioned, threatened, and even ignored, but no one knew a Haitian by the name of Toot.
I had coffee and beignets in the Café du Monde, then gave the neighborhood around the cemetery one more try. By now my face had become so familiar up and down Iberville and St. Louis that grocery and drugstore owners and bartenders looked the other way when they saw me coming. The sun was white in the sky; the elephant ears, philodendron, and banana trees that grew along the back alleys were beaded with moisture; the air had the wet, fecund taste of a hothouse. At noon I was ready to give it up.
Then I saw two police cars, with their bubble-gum lights on, parked in front of a stucco house one block up North Villere from the yellow house where the frightened man lived. An ambulance was backed up the driveway to the stairway of the garage apartment. I parked my truck by the curb and opened my badge in my hand and walked up to two patrolmen in the drive. One was writing on a clipboard and trying to ignore the sweat that leaked out of his hatband.
"What have you got?" I said.
"A guy dead in the bathtub," he said.
"What from?"
