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"Who is he?"
"Dock Green."
"That pimp from New Orleans suppose to got clap of the brain?"
"The one and only."
"Dave, we don't got enough local sick ones? You got to import these guys in here?"
Dock Green wore a beige turtleneck polo shirt tucked tightly into his belt so that the movements of his neck and head seemed even more stark and elliptical, like moving images in a filmstrip that's been abbreviated. He sat down in front of my desk without being asked, his
eyes focusing past me out the window, then back on my face again. The skin between his lip and the corner of his nose twitched.
"I got to use your phone," he said, and picked up the receiver and started punching numbers.
"That's a private . . . Don't worry about it, go ahead," I said.
"I'll pick you up at six sharp . . . No, out front, Persephone he said into the receiver. "No, I ain't wanted there, I don't like it there, I ain't coming in there . . . Good-bye."
He hung up and blew his breath up into his face. "I got a charge to file," he said.
"What might that be, Dock?"
"I can see you're on top of things. There's another side to Jerry the Glide."
"Yeah?"
"He went out to my construction site with some of his asswipes and busted up my foreman. He held him down on the ground by his ears and spit in his face."
"Spit in his face?"
"There's an echo in here?"
I wrote a note on my scratch pad, reminding myself to pick up a half gallon of milk on the way home.
"We'll get right on this, Dock."
"That's it?"
"Yep."
"You didn't ask me where."
"Why don't you let me have that?"
He gave me directions. I fingered the tape cassette containing the deathbed statement of the Mexican carnival worker.
"Let's take a ride and see what Jerry Joe has to say for himself," I said.
"Right now?"
"You bet."
The concentration in his eyes made me think of sweat bees pressed against glass.
We drove in a cruiser through the corridor of live oaks on East Main to the site on Bayou Teche where Jerry Joe was building his new home. The equipment was shut down, the construction crew gone.
"I guess we stuck out," I said, and turned across the drawbridge and headed out of town toward the LaRose plantation.
