"The city ain't anything like it used to be. Black kids with shit for brains are provoking everybody in the fucking town. People get killed in Audubon Park, for God's sake. You try to get on the St. Charles streetcar and there's either niggers or Japs hanging out the doors and windows. We used to have understandings with the city. Everybody knew the rules, nobody got hurt. Take a walk past the Desire or St. Thomas project and see what happens."

"What's the point, Julie?"

"The point is who the fuck needs it? I own a recording studio, the same place Jimmy Clanton cut his first record. I'm in the entertainment business. I talk on the phone every day to people in California you read about in People magazine. I come home to this shithole, they ought to have 'Welcome Back Balboni Day.' Instead, I get told maybe I'm like a bad smell in the air. You understand what I'm saying, that hurts me."

I rubbed one palm against the other.

"I'm just a messenger," I said.

"That laundry man you work for send you?"

"He has his concerns."

He waved the woman away and sat up in his chair.

"Give me five minutes to get dressed. Then I want you to drive me somewhere," he said.

"I'm a little tied up on time right now."

"I'm asking fifteen minutes of you, max. You think you can give me that much of your day, Dave?" He got up and started past me to his room. There were tufts of black hair like pig bristles on his love handles. He cocked his index finger at me. "Be here when I get back. You won't regret it."

The woman with the bleached hair sat back down at the table. She took off her glasses, parted her legs a moment, and looked into my face, her eyes neither flirtatious nor hostile, simply dead. Cholo invited me to play gin rummy with them.

"Thanks, I never took it up," I said.

"You sure took it up with horses, lieutenant," he said.

"Yep, horses and Beam. They always made an interesting combination at the Fairgrounds."