I tossed the ball up in the air and remembered the party at Teddy’s house when we got back to New Orleans. He’d shook his fat butt on the counter of his kitchen with two women and an honest-to-God midget someone met in the Quarter.

I tossed the ball up in the air again. “ALIAS is safe,” I said. “He’s with JoJo. But in case anyone asks, you don’t know shit.”

“A’ight,” he said, burying his big head into his beefy arms. I heard him sniffle and cough, his body shaking loud and hard deep inside, and the rippling pain hurt my heart so badly I worked to change the subject.

“You can buy a new mixing board. That’s what, five thousand? Man, that’s how much you paid for those rims on that Bentley.”

“If I don’t get another album from the kid, man…”

On the wall, he had a picture of him and Mike Tyson and Don King. Another showed a picture of Teddy and Sherman Helmsley. He signed the photo “Movin’ on Up.”

“He’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

“He always come back here,” he said. He nodded to a long row of keys that hung from gold hooks behind his desk. “You see all that? I let all my talent see where I can take ’em. You see I got two Bentleys. Three Escalades. And that little one there, the one with the platinum fish? Man. That’s my baby right there. Sweet little Scarab boat. Got to slap ALIAS hand every time he come in here tryin’ to take them keys. I said he cut some platinum albums and he can have it. That’s how I know he’ll be back. He want it so bad it hurt him.”

“This album was the trade with those people in L.A.?”

“No,” he said, pulling his head free from his arms and settling into his large desk chair. “That’s the last of the Dio tracks. This is for somethin’ else I owe.”

“What about Cash?”

“Don’t worry about Cash,” he said. “He know the money comin’.”

“You paid him back?”

“Waitin’ on the call,” he said. “We got to meet. Calm things down. Smooth it over.”

Teddy’s face sagged and his expression turned inward, looking down at the calluses on his hands and the manicure on his fingers.

“Talked to Jay Medeaux,” I said. “Cops don’t think Malcolm killed himself. Didn’t think he could hang himself in that tree.”

Teddy shook his head. “He hung himself.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Can I see his papers now?”

Teddy shook his head and buffed his nails on his pant leg. “It’s over,” he said. “We straighten this thing out with Cash and we done. What Malcolm done was not right. He took a kid’s money and killed the best rapper we ever had.”

“He was your brother.”

“Let’s not talk,” Teddy said. The room quiet as hell, Teddy’s face only lit with a small banker’s light. “Okay?”

The phone rang and Teddy took it, slumping back into his leather office chair. He grunted a couple times and then said, “I got it.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You roll with us?” he asked.

“Where to?”

“Antoine’s,” he said. “Cash ready to make the deal.”

34

ANTOINE’S ISN’T MY FAVORITE restaurant. Most of the places I enjoy are far out of the Quarter in little neighborhood pockets where the food’s cooked on broken-down stoves by women who look on their customers as extended family. But I used to eat at Antoine’s and Commander’s Palace – one of my favorites – for special occasions with JoJo and Loretta. They found it very important that I know how to handle myself in nice places. Sit up straight. Use the right fork. They also taught me how to order and how to dress and how to recognize the better foods. “Don’t be so country,” JoJo said to me about a thousand times. Antoine’s used to have a menu printed completely in French with waiters who held their jobs as lifelong professions.

But recently I’d noticed a change in the old place. You saw more and more out-of-town businessmen walking from its century-plus doors chomping on toothpicks, wearing golf shirts without a tie or jacket. The waiters had grown ruder, the food a shadow of what it had once been. The menu printed in English.

We rode in a stream of Bentleys and Escalades rolling into the Quarter. I’d grabbed the sport coat that I’d worn to Malcolm’s wake over my white T-shirt. Jeans and boots were at least better than a golf shirt. The music battling from each car didn’t even stop when we rolled onto St. Louis near the old Wildlife and Fisheries Building and Teddy’s flunkies were left to go park.

We were seated at a huge rectangular table in the center of the restaurant. White tile floors. Café chairs with tables covered in white linen. The walls lined with pictures of dead starlets and U.S. presidents.

A man in an out-of-style Italian suit sat with a peroxide-blond woman with mammoth breasts. He fed her ice cream from his spoon and nearly dropped the white mess in his lap when Teddy’s boys walked in.

We didn’t even have time to settle our asses in our seats when Cash parted a scurrying group of waiters with about ten of his men and found a seat opposite Teddy. He wore a white linen suit without a shirt. Platinum weighing hard on his neck and fingers. Teddy nodded but did not get up.

Bad energy filled the room.