A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke

said.
    â€œThat’s funny. It don’t usually bother you.”
    â€œIt’s just one of those days, Batist.”
    â€œWhen I got some trouble at home, sometimes trouble with my wife, my kids, I don’t like to tell nobody about it. So I just study on it. It ain’t smart, no.”
    â€œI worry about Bootsie. But there’s nothing for it.”
    â€œDon’t pretend you be knowing that. You don’t know that at all.”
    I didn’t say anything more. I pushed the bottles of beer deep into the crushed ice. The bare electric bulb overhead glinted dully off the smooth metal caps and filled the inside of the bottles with a trembling gold-brown light. My hands were numb up to my wrists.
    â€œWe don’t need to ice down no more. We got enough for tomorrow,” Batist said.
    â€œI’ll finish closing up. Why don’t you go on home?”
    â€œI got to sweep out.”
    â€œI’ll do it.”
    â€œI ain’t in no hurry, me.”
    I took another case of Jax off the wall and laid the bottles flat on the ice, between the necks of the bottles I had already loaded horizontally into the cooler. I slid the aluminum top shut with the heel of my hand.
    Batist was still watching me. Then he lit his cigar, flipped the match out the window into the dark, and began sweeping the plank floor. He was a good and kind man, and even though it might be a cliché for a southern white man to talk about the loyalty of a black person, I was convinced that if need be he would open his veins for me.
    I said goodnight to him and walked back up to the house. In the kitchen Bootsie and Alafair were taking pieces of pizza out of a box and putting them on plates.

CHAPTER 3
    T HE NEXT MORNING I left early for New Orleans and spent two hours looking through mug books at my former place of employment, First District headquarters just outside the French Quarter, but I did not see any of the three men who had been inside Weldon’s house. Most of the men I used to work with were gone—burnt-out, transferred, retired, or dead—and the two detectives I talked with were of no help. One was a new man from Jefferson Parish, and the other was bored and uninterested by a case that had nothing to do with his workload. In fact, he kept yawning and playing with his empty coffee cup while I described the three intruders to him. Finally I said, “They don’t sound like local talent, huh?”
    â€œThey don’t clang any bells for me.”
    I had given him my business card. His cup had already made a half-moon coffee print on it.
    â€œBut you’ll rack your memory, won’t you?” I said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIf I wanted to have somebody whacked out in New Orleans, who would I have to see?”
    His face began to grow attentive with the suggestion of the insult.
    â€œWhat are you getting at?” he asked.
    â€œThere are at least four guys in the Quarter who can arrange a contract hit for five hundred dollars. Do you know who they are?”
    â€œI don’t care for your tone.”
    â€œMaybe it’s just one of those off days. Thanks for the use of your mug books. I’d appreciate your keeping my card in your desk in case you need to call me.”
    I drove on over to Decatur by the river and parked my truck down the street from Jackson Square and walked into the French Quarter. The narrow streets were still cool with morning shadow, and I could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the cafés, strawberries and plums from the crates set out on the sidewalks in front of small grocery stores, the dank, cool odor of old brick in the courtyards. It had rained just before dawn, and water leaked out of the green window shutters on the pastel sides of the buildings and dripped from the rows of potted plants on the balconies or hanging from the ironwork.
    I walked down St. Ann in the shadow of the cathedral to a one-story stucco building with a piked gate and