The expected interruption came a

The expected interruption came around nine, with an authoritative knock on my door. I knew who it was even before I pulled myself out of bed to answer it.

Farley Nuckolls is no stranger to my three rooms over Holliday’s. He’s a sallow scarecrow of a man who always seems to be wearing his father’s castoff clothes. He has deepset eyes, a sharp, curved, Evil-Eye Fleagle kind of nose, and almost no chin whatsoever. His lower lip just seems to sort of blend in with an extended turkey-wattle of loose skin at his neck. He looks very much like a cartoon turtle with a detective’s gold shield.

He made a show of displaying the shield now, as I opened the door.

“Mind if I come in, Gallegher?” he asked.

“Got a warrant?” I mumbled. I’m no fool, even if I looked like one standing in the doorway in my boxer shorts.

“Do I need one?” he asked. “Something to hide, pal?”

Any time someone calls me ‘pal’, especially a detective with the NOPD, I get antsy. Images of Humphrey Bogart and Barton MacLane flash by my eyes. I don’t like getting rousted, especially at nine in the morning. On the other hand, I wasn’t so stupid as to believe that, if Farley wanted, something so simple as the lack of a warrant would keep him out. That sort of crap might play in Peoria, but in New Orleans the cops go pretty much wherever they want.

I scratched at my butt and turned away from him.

“Aw, screw it. Come on in, Farley. Want a beer?”

He didn’t answer. Truth was, I didn’t want one myself. I had a feeling I was going to need all my wits about me over the next little while. I told him to have a seat while I got dressed. I slipped on a pair of faded wide-butt jeans and a flannel shirt. It was a chilly morning, and I had no idea where I would be sleeping that night. As I slipped on my sneakers, Farley busied himself by perusing my library.

Farley Nuckolls isn’t exactly a friend. It would be more appropriate to say that our paths cross all too frequently for either of our comforts. In the course of doing favors for friends (and, as I’ve stated, friends of friends), I have occasionally trod rather clumsily all over the outer edges of the legal envelope. Bend the rules long enough, and you are sure to attract the attention of nosy cops and ambitious detectives. Once in a while, I come across something that has more than incidental bearing on one of Farley’s cases, and I’ve passed the information along.

Most times I keep it to myself.

Farley isn’t exactly sure what I do. I don’t think he knows about the favor thing, at least not the gory details. Sometimes I think he regards me as just another thread in the tattered fabric of Vieux Carre vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, and loose change. Maybe he’s right. Sometimes I get the impression he knows more than he lets on, and allows me enough free rein to operate, as long as he benefits from it.

Farley Nuckolls, despite his benign appearance, can be a complicated man. He’s also no slouch in the investigating department. He’s smart, observant, and almost obsessively compulsive about tending to the details. Being a gold shield in New Orleans tends to carry a lot of baggage. The police department in Orleans Parish has a long and distinguished history of corruption. With the abundance of numbers rackets, illegal gambling, drug dealing, loansharking, prostitution, illicit cigarette distribution, and plain old garden-variety code violations, the opportunity to skim is rampant. The best way to get away with something in this town is to assure that some cop with the right amount of juice is looking the other way even as he’s digging in your pocket for payoff change. To my knowledge, and we have broken bread on numerous occasions, Farley is clean. He has expressed a keen disregard for bad cops. He’s dangerous if you’ve done something bad, and at just this moment I had the notion that he suspected me of doing something downright malignant.

“Wanna tell me where you were last night?” he opened.

Did I mention he was direct?

“When?”

“Let’s start around nightfall.”

I took a cola out of my refrigerator and opened it as I sat on the couch. I pointed to it, offering him one, but he declined, shaking his head.

“Why?” I asked. “You think I’ve done something, Farley?”

“Have you?” he replied, taking the recliner for himself. After years of enduring my hulking frame, the chair seemed to swallow him up.

“Lots. Nothing up your alley, though, I’m afraid.”

He sighed, and pulled out the ubiquitous pocket notebook. He flipped several pages, and settled on one that captured his attention.

“You know a guy named Lester Vincouer?”

I took a sip of the cola. “Never met the man.”

“Know who he is?”

I thought about it a second. There was nothing criminal in what I was doing for Clancey.

“Sure. I know who he is. But I never met him.”

He consulted the notebook again, though I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he had memorized every fact he’d gleaned over the previous twelve hours.

“You know his wife?”

“Clancey? Yes, Farley, I do.”

“How you know her? Clancey?”

“She hired me to find something.”

“And what was that?”

“Her boyfriend.”

Farley stood and walked around the room. He surveyed the bookcase again, and the diplomas hanging on the wall.

“I don’t see any PI license up here, Gallegher. Have you hung out a shingle without telling the police?”

“C’mon, Farley. You and I both know that a PI license, like the vice-presidency, is worth about as much as a bucket of warm spit. I don’t carry a weapon. You won’t find a gun anywhere in this apartment. She just wanted me to do some legwork for her, without her husband finding out. There’s nothing in that that’s illegal, or requires a license.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, with a tone that made it clear the matter was not finished. “And how’d she come across you?”

“Cully Tucker introduced her. They’re old friends.”

“Oh, Tucker,” he said. He might as well have been saying cow flop. It didn’t take Freud to recognize the disrespect in his voice.

“What’s this all about? You come all the way up here to give me a hard time about looking for someone’s boyfriend? I know a guy in Atlanta who runs a business just looking for long-lost lovers and classmates and such. You don’t need to be a PI to do that stuff.”

“No, I guess not,” he said, and returned to the chair. “Look, Gallegher, about eight last night, someone walked into Lester Vincouer’s house in Lake Terrace and opened his throat for him. It was grisly. Also, about eight last night, someone called the Lake Terrace PD and said they saw some guy hanging around the front of Vincouer’s house. Described him as a big guy, real wide, like a football player.”

“You figuring on me in this, Farley?”

“I’m just asking questions. So, I’m asking this one again. Where were you about eight o’clock last night?”

“You know I don’t have to answer that,” I told him, then held up my hands as he started to protest. “But I will. I was out. I don’t have any witnesses to support me, though. At nine, I was in Molly’s next door having a Dixie. The bartender will vouch for me. At five yesterday I was here in my humble abode with a young lady. She will vouch for me, but I’d rather not bring her into it.”

Farley consulted his notebook. “That would be Ms. Coley.”

I nodded.

“Yes, it was. So I figure you’ve talked with both Meg and Clancey Vincouer, right?”

He didn’t answer. Farley didn’t like answering questions. He preferred to ask them. “You wanna tell me why you asked Ms. Coley to have Clancey out of the house last night between seven and ten o’clock?”

“Who called the Lake Terrace police, Farley? Did they leave a name?”

He ignored me.

“Ms. Coley says you asked her yesterday afternoon to see to it that Ms. Vincouer was out of her house. So she takes Ms. Vincouer out of the house, and Mr. Vincouer gets his throat cut. We got a call describing someone at the Vincouer house around the time of death that sounds suspiciously like you. So you wanna tell me what’s up?”

“You trying to make me on the Vincouer killing, Farley? If so, I’m not saying anything else without a lawyer. You want to listen to the truth, and not some bullshit from an unidentified phone caller, then we have room to talk.”

Farley Nuckolls closed his notebook, and placed it back in his jacket pocket.

“I always believed you were dirty, Gallegher. Every time you show up in my life, there’s a body around. There was that Adam Kincaid mess...”

“Self-defense,” I argued.

“I know. And Barry Saunders...”

“Also self-defense.”

“Yeah, right. The former owner of a land-development company, presumed dead, gets whacked in your bar while presumably creeping the place. Self-defense my ass. Someday I’m going to get the real story behind that one.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“Don’t test me, Gallegher. I’m tired of people dying in the process of trying to kill you. I know all about you and Leduc, which ties you in with the families and just about everything shady in this town.”

“I’m not involved with the families.”

Which was, tangentially, correct.

He leaned forward, making him seem even smaller in the oversized recliner.

“I wanted to do this civilized, Gallegher. I have two uniforms downstairs in the bar talking with Shorty. Right now you look bad in this thing.”

“Based on what? Who made this phone call, Farley?”

“Where were you at eight o’clock last night?”

“You want to make me for this?” I argued, a little louder than I intended. “Then arrest me right now. Take me downtown. You want to force this issue, you want me to lawyer up and tear your ponied case to shreds? You do it. Do it right now!” I held my hands out in front of me, pushing him to cuff me.

He couldn’t do it, and he knew I had him cornered. There was nothing in his case but circumstance. Unless someone out there had a picture of me skulking out of Vincouer’s sunroom, all he had was me working for Clancey, me asking Meg to have Clancey out of the house, and an unidentified caller describing some guy who could be any one of the Saints’ front defensive line.

Farley was thorough, though, and it was just a matter of time before he pulled together enough threads to make a decent circumstantial case. If someone out there was trying to frame me, they’d find a way to get something incriminating in his hands. For the moment, though, he knew I’d have his ass on a bum arrest.

He stood and glared at me.

“I don’t care for you, Gallegher. You bend every rule you run across, and you’ve shinnied out of every bust we’ve tried. If you hadn’t helped me out on a couple of important cases, I’d have run your ass in years ago. I’m telling you here and now that you look dirty in this Vincouer thing, and I intend to see you in Angola before it’s over. Don’t leave town.”

“Or what?” I said, “You arrest me right now, or get off my back. If I want to leave town, the Constitution says I have the right.”

He’d used his last bullet, so rather than deal with me he turned his back and left the room, slamming my door on the way out.

I sat in the recliner and hyperventilated for almost a quarter hour. That had been close, and there was no doubt he would be back sooner or later. I needed help, lots of it, and I needed it yesterday. It was time to find out just who was trying to set me up, and get some advantage. I knew people who had been to Angola prison upstate, and I didn’t like their travelogues.