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the bars that advertised female wrestling and French orgies, their faces scrubbed and smiling and iridescent in the late-afternoon light. They were as innocent in their oblique fascination with the lascivious as the crowds of college boys with their paper beer cups who laughed at the burlesque spielers and street crazies and knew that they themselves would never be subject to time and death; or maybe they were even as innocent as the businessman from Meridian, who walked with grinning detachment and ease past the flashes of thighs and breasts through those opened doors, but who would wake trembling and sick tomorrow in a motel off the old Airline Highway, his empty wallet floating in the toilet, his nocturnal memories a tangle of vipers that made sweat pop out on his forehead.
    Smiling Jack’s was on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse. If Robin Gaddis was still stripping there, and still feeding all the dragons that had lived inside her since she was a little girl, she’d be at the bar for her first vodka collins by six o’clock, do some whites on the half-shell at six-thirty, and an hour later get serious with some black speed and shift up to the full-tilt boogie. I had taken her to a couple of AA meetings with me, but she’d said it wasn’t for her. I guessed she was one of those who had no bottom. In the years I had known her she had been jailed dozens of times by vice, stabbed through the thigh by a John, and had her jaw broken with an ice mallet by one of her husbands. One time when I was over at the social welfare agency I pulled her family file, a three-generation case history that was a study in institutional failure and human inadequacy. She had grown up in the public housing project by St. Louis Cemetery, the daughter of a half-wit mother and an alcoholic father who used to wrap the urine soaked sheets around her head when she wet the bed. Now, in her adulthood, she had managed to move a half-mile away from the place of her birth.
    But she wasn’t at the bar. In fact, Smiling Jack’s was almost empty. The mirrored runway behind the bar was darkened; the musical instruments of the three-piece band sat unattended in the small pit at the end of the runway; and in the empty gloom a turning strobe light overhead made a revolving shotgun pattern of darkness and light that could be equaled only by seasickness. I asked the bartender if she would be in. He was perhaps thirty and wore hillbilly sideburns, a black fedora, and a black T-shirt with the faces of the Three Stooges embossed whitely on the front.
    “You bet,” he said, and smiled. “The first show is at eight. She’ll be in by six-thirty for the glug-glug hour. You a friend of hers?”
    “Yes.”
    “What are you drinking?”
    “Do you have a Dr. Pepper?”
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “Give me a 7-Up.”
    “It’s two bucks. You sure you want to drink soda pop?”
    I put the two dollars on the bar.
    “I know you, right?” he said, and smiled again.
    “Maybe.”
    “You’re a cop, right?”
    “Nope.”
    “Hey, come on, man, I got two big talents—one as a mixologist and the other for faces. But you’re not vice, right?”
    “I’m not a cop.”
    “Wait a minute, I got it. Homicide. You used to work out of the First District on Basin.”
    “Not anymore.”
    “You get moved or something?”
    “I’m out of the business.”
    “Early change of life, huh?” he said. His eyes were green and they stayed sufficiently narrowed so you couldn’t read them. “You remember me?”
    “It’s Jerry something-or-other. Five years ago you went up the road for bashing an old man with a pipe. How’d you like it up there at Angola?”
    His green eyes widened a moment, looked boldly at me from under the brim of the black fedora, then narrowed and crinkled again. He began drying glasses with a towel, his face turned at an oblique angle.
    “It wasn’t bad. I was outdoors a lot, lots of fresh air, gave me a chance to get in shape. I like farm work. I grew