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“I’d really like to talk with Eddy. I’d really appreciate it if you could help me.”
“He’s into astronomy or something. He’s weird. I’ve got enough weirdness in my life without a dumb fuck like that.”
Then her boyfriend came back from the men’s room. He was huge, with a wild beard, and he wore striped overalls with no shirt. His massive shoulders were ridged with hair; his odor was incredible.
“What do you think you’re doing, man?” he said.
“Just finishing my conversation with this lady.”
“It’s finished. Good-bye.”
I left two dollars on the bar for the chili and walked back out into the night. The heat of the day had finally lifted from the streets and the cement buildings, the wind was cool blowing from across the river, and I could see the red and green running lights of the oil barges on the water, and the glow of New Orleans against the clouds.
I SLEPT UNTIL nine the next morning, had coffee and beignets at a cool table under the pavilion at the Café du 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 right-wing 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-and-entering, 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 smash-and-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 café 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, sautéed 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 café 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 doo
r. 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.
“Who?”
