NO Quarter (15 page)

“So what was that all about?” one of the shooters on the nearer table asked, wandering by. “I always get twitchy when ol’ Pete shows up here.”

“No big deal,” I said. “He was asking if I knew anyone who wanted to stake serious money on this new stick he’s found.”

“Yeah, right.” The shooter was Superboy, yet another Quarter waiter. He snorted. “Like everyone has
so
much extra cash, slow as this goddamn summer’s been.”

“That’s what I told him.” I smiled in easy agreement. “He’s probably gotten the same answer all over. Cash must be pretty slim for him to be canvassing this far off his normal range.”

Superboy nodded and went to take his next shot.

I drained my glass down to the ice, caught Bone’s eye where he was sitting waiting at the bar, and made a small jerk with my head toward the door. He gave a slight nod.

We left the bar separately about two minutes apart and regrouped a block away. I was suddenly feeling
very
cautious.

“We may have a problem,” I told him, aiming us toward the Calf. I wasn’t ready to crash yet. In fact, I was feeling wound up.

“What’s up?” asked Bone.

I gave him a quick briefing on what Pete had told me.

He thought about it for about half a block, then shook his head.

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m still trying to work it out myself,” I admitted. “On the surface it looks like I’m being given an unofficial go-ahead from the cops to conduct my own investigation. Pete went out of his way to tell me the case was being back-burnered and that if I came up with anything on my own, I should pass it along.”

After a moment Bone said, “That’s one way to see it, I guess.” He sounded dubious.

“Pete and me aren’t buddies, Bone. He was delivering a message to me.”

“I guess,” Bone repeated, but now he seemed to be considering it seriously. “I didn’t think the cops worked that way.”

“New Orleans is a funny place,” I explained. “It’s not unheard of for the police to bend the rules or take some covert action to get things done. There’s a long tradition of unorthodoxy here.”

My steps slowed as we turned onto St. Peter Street, closing on the Calf.

“On the other hand, there’s another possibility, too
...
”

“What’s that?” asked Bone.

“That there’s someone high up on the force who’s got a bee in their bonnet that I’m meddling in this Sunshine business, vigilante-wise. They might not look favorably on outside interference. It follows then that they might be slyly goading me into acting on this so that if I try something, they get the killer and me in the same net.”

Tired fingers tied my apron’s strings—
tired, and the night hadn’t even started.

So
sick
of this fucking job
...

In the short time that Maestro and I had been palling around, I’d become aware of his low-level paranoia. It was a mild case and not uncommon. You actually see a fair amount of it in the Quarter, where posturing is an art form. You’ll find plenty of people—usually males—that make a great show of not sitting with their backs to the door in a bar, or who will pull their sweatshirts over their heads if a tourist tries to snap a picture near them.

Don’t want
nobody
seeing my face.

This is said with great moment, with ominous tone, like a kind of reality-show bar drama. We’re meant to buy tickets and keep the show rolling. Right, my friend, somebody’s going to come through the door any minute, Wild West style, and plug you in the back the minute you let your guard down. And, oh yes, absolutely, a photograph of your face would be of inestimable value to the police, to the FBI, to the terrorist networks, or wherever your over-inflated sense of self-importance takes you.

It’s usually people living humdrum, repetitious, everyday lives as desk clerks and carpenters and bar-backs that most need to pretend that they are important, extraordinary. The idea of being
wanted
, even in negative fashion, is quite appealing. If there’s someone out there looking to harm or kill you, then you are made valuable and significant. If you can get your friends or acquaintances to go along with your sham, it reinforces it immensely.

True paranoiacs have a
They
, an intricately constructed and “logically” thought-out conspiracy where they themselves star as the persecuted individual. These are pitiable people, and they need treatment and care.

Everybody else that plays at paranoia by adopting the trappings is just talking shit.

Maestro’s dose of this locally common disorder had never bothered me. He wasn’t obnoxious about it. It had seemed less the macho shtick than it is with most guys—more a mild over-cautiousness, like someone who’s been mugged once too often and is now apprehensive about walking the streets, day or night.

Of course, my diagnosis of Maestro had taken place before I learned he’d once worked for the Mob. Or
...
what did he call it?
The Outfit?
Sounded like a sporting goods store. Still, it certainly gave his cagey manner some credence.

This thing about Sneaky Pete, though
...
there I had to wonder.

Dallas was the restaurant’s night manager, a former Navy serviceman and upright guy. He tapped my shoulder before I went out onto the floor. “Nicki’s quit,” he said.

The too-nice, too-sweet waitress who’d been hassled to tears by that eight-top of college boy mooks the night Sunshine died.

“How come?” I asked, pointlessly. Who needs an excuse to quit this line of work?

Dallas shrugged leanly muscled shoulders. “Dunno, Bone. She phoned it in yesterday, when you were off.”

That was certainly decent behavior. When one quits a restaurant, it is almost conventional to go storming out in the middle of one’s shift, preferably while the place is swamped and definitely while tempers are flaring. Big, spectacular, pyrotechnic exits—
that
’s how you quit a restaurant.

But Nicki had been nice, apparently, right to the end. I had liked working with her and would miss her. But, hi-ho, people come and go, and how many coworkers had I known in my time? Hundreds? A solid thousand? Faces replacing faces. Interchangeable personalities. Names programmed to evaporate the minute the person drops out of view.

I hadn’t even gotten a “So long” in, same as with Sunshine. Well
...
not the
same
. Nicki wasn’t dead, after all. Just gone.

Feeling another snit coming on, Bone?
I hit the dining room floor—it was moderately busy—and my face, of course, betrayed nothing. Sometimes it was a fit of anger, impotent resentment that I had to do what I do for a living, anger against no one. Sometimes it
was
focused on somebody or something, usually of little or no consequence, blown all out of proportion. Sometimes, and here was my specialty, it was just a blue funk, that sadness
...

Whatever I felt, though, I’d had a lot of years now to learn not to ride those feelings like a passenger on a runaway train. I was capable of control.

So I waited my tables and fed my feeders and made my tips. It wore away the hours.

Maestro and Sneaky Pete
...
the thought nagged. Maestro was theorizing that the NOPD, using Pete as a mouthpiece, might be setting him up. “Setting me up” is off of page one of the Paranoid’s Bible, but Maestro wasn’t a t
rue paranoid. He didn’t have a
They
that was out to get him. But he might have enemies from his past, might even have inadvertently stepped on some police toes during his decade in the Quarter. I didn’t know why, after all, he had retired from the Mob—the
Outfit
, rather. Frankly I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of grilling him on the subject. Maestro was my friend, yes, but Quarter etiquette about privacy is pretty severe.

Still, the cops setting up Maestro, giving him the green light to go hunt down Sunshine’s killer, all so the police could then both bag her murderer
and
get Maestro for vigilantism
...
sheesh! That presupposed a lot, not all of it terribly rational.

Then again, if I wanted to second-guess myself, what did I know? The biggest run-in with the law in my life had happened last night with Detective Zanders. I couldn’t say, really, what the police were capable of.

Maestro gave off a general air of assurance. Whatever else he might be, he seemed sure of his own capabilities and judgment.

I’d made sure Maestro and I exchanged phone numbers last night. I had the feeling he didn’t give his out casually. Before this Sunshine deal, we just used to run across each other, having learned one another’s customary bar-routes. Now we were tied together into something serious and might need to make contact fast. Actually, cell phones would be even better, except I didn’t own one, and I didn’t think Maestro did either. I more or less detested the things, having learned to hate them from self-immersed jerkoffs that bring them into and use them in movie theatres.
Heretics in the temple.

Maestro told me about the phone call he’d found on his answering machine from Sunshine, two days before the murder. I had found that ... troubling. No, to be honest, that actually hurt a bit. That Sunshine had phoned Maestro, not me. That, maybe, she had been in trouble and needed a hand and didn’t call on me—me, who had once loved her as my wife, and, except for Alex, had known her longer than anyone in this whole city. I could even feel jealous.

What had that call been about? That was the question I ought to be thinking about. Had Sunshine seen trouble coming? Had she seen Maestro as someone who could get her out of a jam? Maestro had missed her call, hadn’t hooked up with her, and two days later she was dead, killed. Could he—or I—have done anything to prevent it?

He didn’t know. I didn’t know. We were going to have to settle for revenge.

I’d told Alex about our plan. We were sitting on the couch in my apartment, where we often watched movies together. She listened quietly. Afterwards she nodded solemnly and said, “Okay.”

Then she leaned over and kissed me.

And I let her. I kissed back. As for the question I was waiting to ask her untill after we’d gone wherever the trail of Sunshine’s killer took us
...
well, I had my answer without ever having to ask for it.

It was nice holding her in my arms. She was completely different from Sunshine, but her body fit against mine in a way that made it seem almost as if I had found my other self—the female version. It felt so right that I completely forgot about the photograph from Sunshine’s apartment. I had meant to show it to her to see if she knew anything about it.

“That all your tables, Bone?”

I blinked. I was sipping a stone cold cup of coffee and dragging languidly on a cigarette. Earlier, I had been rolling silver—that’s wrapping individual settings of silverware up in napkins for the busboys to deliver to fresh tables—so the graveyard shift wouldn’t have to bother. I looked now and saw the big wicker basket was full. I didn’t have any customers left out on the floor. In fact, the place was just about dead.

“All done, Dallas.”

Dallas cupped my shoulder briefly with a large strong hand. “Well, why don’t you total your tickets and cash out, huh? You don’t look so hot.”

“I don’t
...
” Then I was nodding. “I think—I’m going to need a few days off.”

He eyed me. “I can’t really spare you on this shift, Bone.”

And I couldn’t afford to miss work, not really. I didn’t live as close to disaster as some, but I brought in enough money to keep my apartment, pay bills, spend modestly, and not a whole lot more.

“Bring Conrad up from the lunch shift,” I suggested. “He’s always whining about not making enough tips.”

“Conrad whines about bad tips because he’s a lousy waiter. I put him in your slot, he’ll just be making bad money at night, and this shift will suffer. Oh, screw it. You really need time? Okay, Bone. Take your days. Just so long as this isn’t your way of quitting on me.”

“Thanks, Dallas.”

I tossed my coffee and my smoke and was picking at my apron strings, my fingers raw. I had been peripherally aware all night of the rest of the staff eyeing me, the nudging and nodding and murmuring. Yes, the gossip about Detective Zanders’ visit was still going. There was no point in trying to explain the truth. It would only be fanning the flames. Fortunately, I was already too tired and out of it tonight to really care.

My hurt, sore fingers—sometimes they got banged and bumped hard enough to break the skin, and I wouldn’t notice until the end of the night—froze in untying my short black apron. I hurried across the floor, my eyes tracking along the front windows.

I pulled open the restaurant’s door, leaned out of the air-conditioned cool into a sultry night alive with music knocking from passing cars, roaches scuttling the sidewalks. I called out, “Piper! Hey!”

He was a little guy, as small as Alex, wearing a draping old raincoat that pretty much enveloped him. His steps were tiny, and he was that nebulous age of all gutter-punks—sixteen going on death. Sleeping bag in a dirty knapsack, unhealthy skin. “Dropped out,” they might have said when I was a boy. Piper had definitely been dropped, and I doubted anybody wanted him back. And even so, he was among the less scummy of the homeless youths that we all share the Quarter with.

“Hi, Bone.”

“Piper, we got a leftover sandwich. You want it?”

He grinned rotting teeth at me, and I ushered him inside, steering him toward the end of the L-shaped bar.

“One last customer, all right?” I told Dallas, who shrugged and went into the office, as I fetched Piper the sandwich. Employees at the restaurant were entitled to one free meal per shift. While I usually skip it, sometimes I’ll box mine up to take home on the off chance I’ll remember to eat it later.

I slapped the cold Italian salami and cheddar onto a plate and brought it out to Piper. He was so named for the penny whistle he sometimes blew in the Square as he begged for spare change. Others of his rather sorry breed panhandled, prostituted themselves, and committed petty crimes. Very lucky ones might hook up with a lover who had a job and an apartment.

Piper looked at the food with moon-eyed hunger.

“How about a beer?” I offered and didn’t wait, pulled the tap and set the amber pint by the plate.

“I, um, well, y’know
...
I don’t got anything to spend.”

“No worries, Piper.”

“I can’t think of anything I done to deserve this,” he said, appearing genuinely confused.

“I’ll give you the chance to deserve it.”

His black fingernails drummed either edge of the plate a few seconds. Then, he said, “Okay.”