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"So you didn't know anything about her friends?" I said.
"No, sir. She was here three weeks. They come and they go. That's the way it is. I don't know what else to tell you."
"Do you know anything about your bartenders?"
His eyes focused on a spot inside his cigarette smoke.
"I'm not understanding you," he said.
"Do you hire a bartender who hangs around with ex-cons or who's in a lot of debt? I suspect you probably don't. Those are the kind of guys who set up their friends with free doubles or make change out of an open drawer without ringing up the sale, aren't they?"
"What's your point?"
"Did you know she had been arrested for prostitution?"
"I didn't know that."
"You hired her because you thought she was an honor student at USL?"
The corner of his mouth wrinkled slightly with the beginnings of a smile. He stirred the ashes in the ashtray with the tip of his cigarette.
"I'll leave you my card and a thought, Mr. Trajan. One way or another we're going to nail the guy who killed her. In the meantime, if he kills somebody else and I find out that you held back information on me, I'll be back with a warrant for your arrest."
"I don't care for the way you're talking to me."
I left his office without replying and walked back down the length of the bar. The black woman was now outside, washing the front window. She put down her scrub brush, flung the whole bucket of soapy water on the glass, then began rinsing it off with a hose. Her skin was the color of burnt brick, her eyes turquoise, her breasts sagging like wate
r-filled balloons inside her cotton-print dress. I opened my badge in my palm.
"Did you know the white girl Cherry LeBlanc?" I asked.
"She worked here, ain't she?" She squinted her eyes against the water spray bouncing off the glass.
"Do you know if she had a boyfriend, tante?”
"If that's what you want to call it."
"What do you mean?" I asked, already knowing the answer that I didn't want to hear.
"She in the bidness."
"Full time, in a serious way?"
"What you call sellin' out of your pants?"
"Was Mr. Trajan involved?"
"Ax him."
"I don't think he was, otherwise you wouldn't be telling me these things, tante." I smiled at her.
She began refilling the bucket with clear water. She suddenly looked tired.
"She a sad girl," she said. She wiped the perspiration off her round face with her palm and looked at it. "I tole her they ain't no amount of money gonna he'p her when some man make her sick, no. I tole her a pretty white girl like her can have anything she want—school, car, a husband wit' a job on them oil rig. When that girl dress up, she look like a movie star. She say, 'Jennifer, some people is suppose' to have only what other people let them have.' Lord God, her age and white and believing somet'ing like that."
"Who was her pimp, Jennifer?"
"They come here for her."
