He laughed.

"Yeah, the old man lost his interest in garden hoses after that," he said.

"Everybody likes to come back to his hometown once in a while. That's a perfectly natural thing to do. No one's worried about that, Julie." I looked at his eyes. Under his sweaty brows, they were as shiny and full of light as obsidian.

He shook a cigarette out of a package on the cement and lit it. He blew smoke out into the sunlight and looked around the swimming-pool area.

"Except I've only got a visa, right?" he said. "I'm supposed to spread a little money around, stay on the back streets, tell my crew not to spit on the sidewalks or blow their noses on their napkins in the restaurants. Does that kind of cover it for you, Dave?"

"It's a small town with small-town problems."

"Fuck." He took a deep breath, then twisted his neck as though there were a crick in it. "Margot-" he said to the woman playing cards under the umbrella. She got up from her chair and stood behind him, her narrow face expressionless behind her sunglasses, and began kneading his neck with her fingers. He filled his mouth with ice, orange slices, and cherries from his glass and studied my face while he chewed.

"I get a little upset at these kind of attitudes, Dave. You got to forgive me," he said, and pointed into his breastbone with his fingertips. "But it don't seem to matter sometimes what a guy does now. It's always yesterday that's in people's minds. Like Cholo here. He made a mistake fifteen years ago and we're still hearing about it. What the fuck is that? You think that's fair?"

"He threw his brother-in-law off the roof of the Jax's brewery on top of a Mardi Gras float. That was a first even for New Orleans."

"Hey, lieutenant, there was a lot of other things involved there. The guy beat up my sister. He was a fucking animal."

"Look, Dave, you been gone from New Orleans for a long time," Baby Feet said.