For one reason or another, there’s always a dame involved. And when the dame is involved in a case during witch season, it can be a potent combination. In the French Quarter you can find all the women you want. But occasionally you cross paths with a special breed of skirt. That’s what happened to me on a late October night near Canal Street in a strip joint called The High Hat.

While I watched the uniforms cuff Chastity and place her in the back of a patrol car, I became aware of a shimmering red blouse beside me. In it was a ravishing brunette with two loaded brassiere cups adding up to a size forty or higher. In other words, she was built like a brick shit house.

“Excuse me, Mister,” she said. Her voice was low and husky with a sexy tremor. It reminded me of a throaty angel breathing, the way Lauren Bacall sounded when talking to Bogey. “Don’t run over Chastity. She’s a good kid. Just a few misdemeanors, that’s all. Give her a break.”

I swiveled toward the brunette, unable to prevent my eyes from taking a swift survey down her body. I pegged her for pushing thirty, but not by much. Her satiny blouse revealed the tops of her alabaster breasts which stacked as nicely as feathered pillows. The rest of her was equally delectable. Her exceptional figure included finely shaped thighs, knees, and calves that led down to her slender ankles and bad-girl stilettos. She was curvy to the max, built like a Marvel comic book character come to life. Following the brief journey, I found her eyes and kept mine riveted there—strictly business. “And you are?”

The female observed me with unblinking, green-eyed solemnity. “Sophie Denton. I’m kind of the den mother around here.”

“Head stripper, huh? Well, Sophie, it appears one of your cubs got a little careless at home and let a butcher knife slice through a guy’s neck instead of the watermelon.”

“The asshole she’s been living with? He’s dead?”

“Charles Lasky. As dead as Rudy Valle’s comeback.”

Sophie straightened her back, her bosoms swelling as she contemplated this information. “I despise men who take their shortcomings out on women. Serves the lowlife piece of garbage right. She’s better off without him, but you’re wrong about Chastity, Mister. She couldn’t murder him or anyone else. She’s a rabbit. She’d run away first.”

It sounded like Sophie might’ve enjoyed watching the pathologist gut dear ole Charley and I almost said as much. “This is New Orleans, and the eve of Halloween to top things off,” I reminded this red-lipped doll. “Erratic and impulsive behavior is expected.”

“Chastity couldn’t cut anyone.”

I picked up the stress in her voice as clearly as someone with perfect musical pitch can detect an off-key note. It’s part of the reason I’m a good detective. Maybe she wasn’t so sure about Chastity’s pacifism. “I’m sure we’ll be taking a statement from you at a later time, Miss Denton.”

“Would you ask Chastity to call me the minute you finish working her over? She has no family here. She can stay with one of the girls until your boys are done playing with the evidence in her apartment.”

“Unless her alibi is no more genuine than a magician’s sawed-in-half lady and the boys downtown decide to book her tonight,” I said, more interested in Sophie’s shape than her words. “We’ll let her make a phone call when we’re through.”

“See that you do, Detective…?”

“Dyke. Detective William Dyke.”

Sophie Denton shot me a look designed to drop charging elephants. It didn’t work. Then she shrugged as if my name meant less than nothing, all business and sass, and turned on a dime, walking away with a swaggering wiggle that said, I’m your wildest dream. Male catnip. She stirred the primal urges that kept the human race reproducing itself.

I stuck a Camel between my lips, thumbed open my Zippo, and leaned the cigarette into its flame. Sophie’s sculpted torso probably drew more customers into The High Hat than a hole in a window screen draws flies. I idly wondered how many poor slobs had braced her over the years only to discover her to be more cougar than kitten.

I followed the black and white containing Chastity in my unmarked car and thought about all the dames who had snapped due to some abusive piece of garbage, as Sophie had so delicately put it. I knew well the savagery of which humankind was capable. Southern Louisiana was a strange place of courtly manners, elegance, and violence, a curious mixture of stately columned homes and tin-roofed shacks in which both tradition and rebellion festered.

But my mind returned to the luscious form of the not-so-demure Sophie Denton. I wouldn’t have minded crawling between the sheets with that dame. She was the kind who, if she wanted to, could make a man climb the walls. Her body represented more than sex. It represented new hope. A fresh source of sustenance tantalized me, but she ran the joint where Chastity plied her trade. She was undoubtedly all too familiar with flat-feet trying to bust the place, or grab a handful of female now and then as the price of allowing the place to operate.

After spending the best part of a night grilling Lynn Williams, a.k.a. Chastity, and asking if she knew anyone who might benefit by turning the dearly departed Charley into a morgue job, we released her on her own recognizance. I knew she hadn’t committed the crime. Most of these strippers were young, naive girls from small towns, who wouldn’t see the evil in Jack the Ripper even if you showed them pictures of him with his six dead hookers.

A Packard Coupe picked Chastity up in front of the station and I went home to my small riverfront apartment in a building that was slowly sinking into the Mighty Mississippi. A breeze rippled through the palm trees, carrying with it a whisper of death along with the scent of the river. It was a Friday and Halloween began at midnight, a busy evening for brawls and drunk drivers. I idly wondered how many drunken Cajuns would carve one another up into ‘gator bait by Monday morning.

I listened to a serenade led by cicadas and bullfrogs, along with the plaintive sound of an occasional lonely foghorn somewhere upriver. The sounds reminded me of twisted hopes and broken dreams, a longing for something which seemed just out of reach. I fought the urge to dwell on the shapely Miss Denton and the familiar tug of a dangerous thirst. Instead, I indulged in two of my three vices: Scotch and the Blues.

* * * * *

The next morning at the station was relatively slow. “Happy Halloween, assholes,” the chief said as guys went in and out of the locker room, hanging around for a briefing, making time for bullshit and bad jokes over strong coffee. I called Miss Denton and asked her to come down to the station. I told the boys I wanted to interview her personally because she reminded me of a doll I’d been able to break down a couple of years earlier. Yeah, the line had whiskers, but I didn’t care. “New Orleans is a marvelous place for coincidence,” I said to them.

“That’s swell, Dyke. I’m sure your interest is because she’s the sisterly type.” The chief sneered, his mouth crowded with bad teeth and his belly, no doubt, full of Friday night gumbo.

I smiled. The chief was one of those guys whose time was mostly spent complaining about the caseload or his wife. The first wife finally died and he turned around and married another woman just like number one.

“You’re going to need some help talking to the hired help at the bimbo club,” he said. “So don’t think you’re gonna have all the wool on this case to yourself.”

“Never thought it for a moment, Chief. Maybe she can put me wise to which dames might know the score. I’ll see what I can pry out of Miss Denton and the rest of the mugs can interview all the fresh meat they want.” I packed as much sarcasm into my voice as would fit.

“Your bullshit machine is as lame as a three-legged dog, Dyke. Go feed the stripper on your Charlie Chan routine.”

“Ahhhh so. Confucius say, Man who go out with flat-chested woman have right to feel lowdown.”

“Fuck you, Dyke.”

“Likewise, Chief. By the way, it’s Saturday. Shouldn’t you be home watering your grass or screwing your wife or something?”

“With the shit-pile of unsolveds floating around, somebody else’ll have to screw her for me. When you finish working over the stripper, maybe you can drop by and put your chabloke where it’ll do some good,” the chief said with a sarcastic twist of his own.

“I’ll see if I can work her in, but don’t expect me to add you to my Christmas card list.”

He gave me the skunk-eye and went back to his work.