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“Or Eddy Raintree.”
“Who?”
“How about Jewel Fluck?”
“Fluck? Is this some kind of put-on?”
“Let’s start with Jack Gates again. You never heard of him?”
“Nope.”
“That’s funny. I heard he fed your brother-in-law into an airplane propeller.”
He took the matchstick out of the corner of his mouth and laughed.
“It’s a great story. I’ve heard it for years. But it’s bullshit,” he said. “My brother-in-law was killed in a plane accident on his way to Disneyland. A great family tragedy.”
The man at the other table was grinning and nodding his head up and down without interrupting his count of receipts. Then Joey Gouza put the matchstick back in his mouth and leaned his chin on his knuckle. His eyes were filled with an amused light as they moved up and down my person.
“You say Iberia Parish?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You guys gave up shaving or something?”
“We’re casual out in the parishes. Let’s cut to it, Joey. You’re an old-time pete man. Why do you want to give Weldon Sonnier a lot of grief?”
“Weldon Sonnier?”
“You don’t know him, either?”
“Everybody in New Orleans knows him. He’s a bum and a welsher.”
“Who told you that?”
“That’s the word. He borrows big dough, but he doesn’t come up with the vig. That’ll get you into trouble in this town. You saying I’m connected with him or something?”
“You tell me.”
“I know your name from a long time ago. You were at the First District, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“So I think maybe you heard stories about me. You probably read my rap sheet before you came here this morning, right? You know I’ve been up the road a couple of times, you know I burned a box or two. You heard that old bullshit story about how I got this voice, how a yard bitch put a capful of Sani-Flush in my coffee cup. How the yard bitch got his cherry split open in the shower two days later? You heard that one, didn’t you?”
“Sure.”
He smiled and said, “No, you didn’t, but I’ll give it to you free, anyway. The point is it’s not true. I was never a big stripe, I did easy time, I made full trusty in every joint I was in. But the big word there is did. Past tense. I did my time. I’ve been straight seven years. Look—”
He bounced his palm on top of a paper spindle and gazed reflectively out the window at some black children skateboarding by under the oaks.
“I’m a businessman,” he continued. “I own a bunch of restaurants, a linen service, a movie theater, a plumbing business, and half a vending-machine company. Are we on the same wavelength here?”
He flexed his nostrils as though there were an obstruction in them and rubbed the grained skin of his jaw with one finger.
“I’ll try again,” he said. “You said it a minute ago, I was a pete man. I punched, peeled, and burned ’em. I went down for it twice, too. But safecracking became a historical art a long time ago. Today it’s all narcotics.”
“Bad stuff?” I smiled back at him.
