Eye of the Cricket

by James Sallis

  Massive and sudden, a doctor said. Nothing they could do. They tried, of course. But... She was sorry.

  So I moved out of Clare's, back again into the old house where I'd lived with LaVeme, taking Bat along. Where often I would stand looking out the window above the kitchen sink to the slave quarters, to the makeshift, long-forsaken office out there, its roof covered with grass.

  Hours earlier, as I stood over a body I thought might be Shon Delany's, I'd been thinking about Clare.

  I opened a can of tuna, real tuna, people's tuna, and put it on the floor by Bat's dish. Rattled the feeder to shake down more dry food. Filled his bowl with fresh water.

  Maybe I wasn't so bad after all.

  I put on water for myself, set out a cup and a bag of Irish Breakfast tea, began rummaging through mail.

  Cut-rate and presorted first-class advertisements from book clubs, record clubs, video clubs. An offer to provide me with a subscription to a catalog of catalogs. A refund check from the electric company for fifty-nine cents.

  The kettle called, and Bat followed me back into the kitchen, thinking something more by way of food might happen there. Hope springs eternal. People drop things. The alert cat pounces before Providence has a chance to withdraw its offer.

  That afternoon I myself had decided that Life, Providence, Chance or Whatever just might be sending me a message and, following the scuffle on Derbigny, returned home to shower off blood, grime and stray bits of skin and street tar, eat cold Dinty Moore beef stew out of a can, put on new clothes and head back out in pursuit of Shon Delany.

  Signals we are set here to read. You must learn to put your distress signals in code. Move along, Griffin.

  I did.

  On foot, to the donut shop where Shon Delany had worked. By then it was almost four. And by then the shop was closed.

  Not just closed. They'd pulled the rug out from under it. Tast-T Donut was shut down like a clam. Gone, abandoned, deserted, defunct.

  A hand-lettered cardboard sign on the door read Sorry Were Not Here. The parking lot was full—employees' cars from the hospital and surrounding medical facilities.

  Next door was a florist's shop. Stucco, a converted single-family residence with diminutive arches out front, every bit as charming as they were nonsensical. Recently painted light green and peach.

  A bell tolled as I ducked through the entryway and came up against a trestle table behind which stood a woman at least six feet tall. Red hair everywhere, thin, wearing a black sheath. She was on the phone and, though motionless, somehow gave the impression of swaying. Willowy. She nodded to me, smiled. Be right with me.

  "Yes, ma'am, I understand that. But if you could just come by the store? We'd be able to do a lot better job for you then.... Great."

  She put the phone down. Bare arms slim and lightly downed. Wrists narrow as a ruler, fingers long when she reached across the table to shake my hand. Late thirties? No perfume, but a smell of soap and, behind that, the faintest trace of sweat.

  Her earrings were tiny sharks with the lower halves of men's bodies hanging from their mouths.

  "One problem working here is, a good-looking man comes in, I know there's no way he's bringing me flowers."

  The phone rang again.

  She shrugged. "Let the machine get it. People don't bother anymore even to bestir themselves."

  Bestir themselves?

  "They call from home in their pajamas or underwear and expect you to drop everything. Deborah O'Neil," she said, taking away her hand. "What can I do for you?"

  She smiled, instinctively turning her head a few degrees to the side and lifting her chin. Incredible profile.

  I asked her about the donut shop.

  "Didn't think you looked like a flowerman," she said.

  She told me they'd been teetering at the edge (yes, she actually said teetering) for months over there. Some days they'd just put out on the shelves whatever was left over from the day before. Even the coffee got undrinkable. Not much for cleaning up, either, near the end. Counters so sticky you put your arm on one you have to shrug off your shirt and leave it there. Glued down for good. Only way they managed to stay afloat at all, long as they did, was by hiring new people when they couldn't pay old ones and let them go.

  I said she seemed to know a lot about the situation over there, an amazing amount really,and she shrugged.

  "I watch people, notice what happens around me. Always have. Things get slow here off and on during the day, you understand; it all comes in waves. And our office in the back has a window onto the alley. Employees take, took, their smoke breaks out there. I'd be doing the books, shuffling through piles of sales slips and invoices, and I'd hear them talking."

  Did they know what was going on?

  "They knew something was. The shop had recently been sold. Previous owner'd lost interest a long time back, and the shop just went on running itself, heading down theroadthe way it was pointed. New owner bought it as an investment, you see how it's all building up around here. He could care less about donuts. But the shop still went lurching along."

  Any idea whatfinally shut the doors?

  "Well, I don't know, of course. But I think it may have been what happened last night."

  The phone rang again. Low voices from the back of the shop as the answering machine took the call.

  "End of the month. Extra loads of paperwork to catch up on—even more, now that my partner never seems to be around for these things anymore. I've gotten used to being here late. Store closes at six, I'll get dinner and a glass of wine up the street at Sweet Basil's then come back and have two or three uninterrupted hours. So it must have been close to ten, maybe a little past. I was getting ready to leave."

  This is last night.

  "Right. I hear voices in the alley, someone saying 'Motherfuck,' someone else saying 'Be still, girl, don't you move or talk no more.' So I look out. This huge black car, Lincoln, something like that, 's pulled up out front. Four guys in it, all of them in black, too. And black. Driver stays in the car. The three that get out have automatic weapons. One stands by the car, watching up and down the street. Other two go inside. They're in there four, five minutes, come back out and get in the car. When the car pulls onto Jackson, people start running out of the donut shop. Lights are still on inside, but no one's there. This morning when I come in, I see the sign."

  Robbery, you think?

  "Who'd bother? Best day it ever had, that shop never netted two hundred dollars."

  This town, it could happen. A few weeks back, an eleven-year-old knocked off a motel over on Claiborne. Walked in with a .38, pistol-whipped the desk clerk (though he had to get up on a chair to do it), and walked out with eighteen dollars. Still, she had a point.

  You never saw anything like that before?

  She shook her head.

  They were looking for someone.

  "That's the only thing that makes sense, yes. Way they went about it, the weapons, car."

  Who was it in the alley?

  "I don't know names. Just voices."

  But you looked out, through the window?

  "Yes."

  You saw them?

  "Not the woman. She was at the back, in the shadows. I remember the man sounded black but wasn't—that surprised me, when I saw him. Average height, fairly thin. Hair shaved to above his ears, then really long. Kind of a topknot. Like Woody Woodpecker?"

  I asked her if by any chance she knew who owned the shop.

  "Oddly enough, I do. He came by and asked if I'd mind keeping an eye on the property, maybe pass along any inquiries from prospective buyers. I have his name and phone number back in the office, if you want it."

  I did.

  "Assuming I can find it."

  Which she did, finally: thumbtacked to the wall above the phone in a slurry of torn theater tickets, scribbled-over business cards, Post-it Notes, postcard announcements of gallery openings, panel discussions and seminars, posters and playbills for productions of Endgam
e, King Lear and something titled Jimmy Baldwin Disembarks for Heaven.

  "You're in luck," she said.

  I guess we both are.

  "How so?"

  Well, I see you got your play staged, for one thing, gesturing towards the Jimmy Baldwin playbill. What, a couple of months ago?

  "No. That was last year."

  It do okay?

  "If you consider a week's run and half the house empty the whole time, it did. Actually I guess attendance was fairly good the firstnight or two. It gave a false impression. Because of family and friends."

  You have a lot of friends?

  The phone rang. Watching one another, we listened to her voice.

  Heard the beep, heaitl a mumbled message, heard a dial tone as the caller hung up.

  "Not so many that I can't use another one. But what's the second thing?"

  What?

  "You said we were both lucky because I got my play staged—for one thing."

  You're right. Other thing was, I really do need to get some flowers.

  "I see. What kind?"

  Well, I was thinking roses. Pink if you have them.

  "Of course. A dozen?"

  Why not.

  "I'll even pick them out myself."

  She disappeared into the back room and emerged minutes later cradling thirteen baby-pink roses and sprays of baby's breath in green wrapping paper.

  "And how would you like to pay for this, sir?"

  Cash okay?

  She punched it in on the computer (I heard a printer start up in back) and told me that would be $9.98.1 pushed a ten across the breast-high table. She went back and got a copy of the printout for me.

  "You'd like these delivered to what address, sir?"

  Oh, you don't have to deliver them, I said.

  She looked up. "I'm sorry?"

  They're for you.

  9

  WE LIVE METAPHORICALLY, striving always to match our lives to images we've accepted or imagined for them—family man, middle American, tine believer, gangster—contriving these containers, a succession of them, that preserve us, define us, that keep us from spilling out and give us shape, but rarely fit.

  Kendall Cibbs lived this way more than most: everything about him expressed itself inrelationship to one piece of land or another.

  Using the number Deborah O'Neil gave me, I firsttried toreach him at what was apparently an office. A woman answered "White House Properties," and when I asked for Mr. Gibbs inquired, "This was in regard to a listed, or a potential, property?" Listed and potential instead of selling and buying. Pure class. Admitting that Mr. Cibbs was out of the office (her tone implying that he was rarely, perhaps never, in the office), she suggested that I try another number, which proved to be a Garden District tour service. There, they thought Gibbs was out looking at a commercial plot on Bayou St. John, after which, to the best of their knowledge, he had no further appointments.

  Once again I explained my interest: that I was handling a missing-persons case and needed to speak with Mr. Gibbs in regard to a recent acquisition, a donut shop at Jackson and Prytania. Former donut shop. I never implied any connection with the police, but the young man to whom I spoke assumed police business and, being authorized to do so, at his discretion, in such cases (ends of words neatly tucked under, a moment's pause before any new sentence began), decided he could give me Mr. Gibbs's beeper number.

  I punched it in and within the quarter-hour had The Man himself calling from what sounded like a very busy street.

  "Kendallgibbs," he said. All one word.

  I told him who I was, what I wanted.

  "I got a brother on the force, you know, fourteen years. Gerard Gibbs? Last four or five of them behind a desk. Light went out on Poydras, he's doing emergency traffic direction and gets run down by a drunk never even noticed he hit him. Worst job in the world. They put a muzzle on you, draw targets on your chest and Kick Me signs on your backside, scatter birdseed around you for pay."

  I grunted what I hoped he'd take as assent.

  "Okay. I'm away from my computer now, so I don't have access to files, paperwork. Of course, being a little old-fashioned, I do still manage to keep a thing or two in my head. What you want's not too complicated, I can probably help you."

  "Thing I need most is to get in touch with the manager."

  "There's not one. Assistant manager'd be the one you'd want Manager walked out over a year ago. People who own the place think, Why pay someone to manage when this assistant's already doing it for scut wages."

  "Guy with Woody Woodpecker hair?"

  "Yeah, that's him all right. Keep expecting him to go Ha-ha-ha-fta-ha. Haiti worker, though. Boy was the damn store. He hired, rode herd, ran totals and made daily bank drops, did more than half the baking himself, cleaned up when he could. I'm keeping him in mind, something comes up. Keith LeRoy."

  "Then you have an address for him."

  "Near's I know, no one does. Wouldn't give out an address, phone number. Boy plays it close to the chest."

  Portrait of the middle-aged detective as Elmer Fudd running headlong into a wall. Staggering back arock on his heels.

  "Well, is there anything—"

  "I didn't say I couldn't help you, Griffin. You want his beeper, or E-mail?"

  Beeper or E-mail. Guy's twenty years old, ran a donut shop for minimum wage, and he's got a beeper? E-mail? The world was getting away from me at an alarming rate. Sometimes I forgot.

  Gibbs gave me both and I thanked him. He said no problem. Anytime.

  "Yo," a voice said on the phonefiveminutes after I beeped.

  "Keith LeRoy?"

  "What chu want wit'im?"

  I told him briefly, reminded him that we'd met three days back at Tast-T Donut.

  He interrupted me, gliding back from street talk to standard. "I remember. Big guy, black suit—looked like linen—gold silk shirt. You still looking for Shon?"

  "Yes." Four days in a row now, off and on. I was setting personal records for dogged persistence.

  "Good to have some continuity in your life. Excuse me." I heard two voices speaking, one quarrelsome, the other flat and uninflected, just out of range of intelligibility. Neither sounded like LeRoy's. Then he said something and the voices stopped. "Sorry. I don't know what good this will do you, if any at all, but you're welcome to it."

  "Whatever it is, it has to be better than what I have now."

  "Yeah. Way we live, here in this great land. Okay. Last few times I saw him, Delany was hanging with a guy. Thought he was a friend, I'm sure—Delany didn't have any others—but the guy had that look in his eye, throw you over for a dollar?"

  "You ever get his name?"

  "Never came up. He'd just show up, wait outside for Delany to get off. Leaning against a wall, sitting on a customer's car. I asked Delany who he was once and he said that's my cousin. I told him tell his cousin to stay off the customers' cars from now on."

  "That it?"

  "Warned you it was thin."

  "Then I'll try fattening it up. You have my thanks."

  "And you have my you're-welcomes. Damn ain't we a couple of well-bred, civilized types."

  "Who would have thought it?"

  "Not my mother, for sure. Later, Griffin."

  I sat looking at the envelope Sam Delany had given me, at the phone numbers printed on it, on the back flap, in precise, squarish figures. Nine times out of ten, the one thing they don't tell you is the very thing you need to know, the thing that would have kept you from running around in circles, into walls, dead ends and, often as not, trouble.

  I dialed the number for Delany's rentedroom, then, glancing up at the clock, his mother's. He'd said he took care of the family. Maybe that included watching the younger kids after school.

  "Baldwin-Delany residence." The eight-year-old, from the sound of it.

  "Could I speak to Sam Delany?" I said.

  "May I ask who's calling?"

  I told her.

  "I'll see if
he's in."

  He was, and was on the phone in the time it took to hand the receiver over.

  "Mr. Griffin. Thank you for calling. You have news?"

  "Nothing substantial." I told him about the donut shop closing, briefly recounted my conversations at the florist's next door and with Keith LeRoy. "Reason I'm calling is to ask if you know anything about a cousin of Shon's, guy he's been seen with lately."

  "How lately?"

  I said I wasn't sure. Couple of weeks maybe.

  "And someone told you this was Shon's cousin?"

  "That's how Shon identified him to the assistant manager at the donut shop, yes. Sounded like they might be tight. Getting that way, anyhow."

  "Did you get a name?"

  "No."

  Moments went by. I could hear a TV in the background. X-Men, Ninja Turtles, something on that order. Kids' voices.

  "I was afraid of that."

  "So afraid that you didn't bother to tell me about it."

  "I guess I thought if I said it aloud, somehow that was going to make it true. Like the kids when they were younger. They'd be in bed at night and think they saw something in the corner, so they'd be very careful not to look that way. Because if they did, it was going to be there."

  "So who's this cousin?"

  "His name's Armantine Rauch, everyone calls him Army. And he's not a cousin, he's Shon's half brother—like I am. One of Shon's old man's other adventures."

  "You know him?"

  "Much to my displeasure and misfortune, I do. Years back, Army showed up on our doorstep saying he had no other place to go. I was about Shon's age then—fifteen, sixteen. Mom's a pushover, as always. Has no idea how she's going to take care of the kids she already has but never even skips a beat before taking in this new one."

  "How long was he with you?"

  "Less than a year. First, money started disappearing from the coffee can in the kitchen, then from Mom's purse. Never much money, mind you, because there wasn't much. Fifty cents here, a dollar. Then we heard neighbors start complaining. Mail was missing from their box, they'd say. A grill or a lawn chair left on the gallery had disappeared. One man said the gallon of gas he'd put in his moped the night before, to get to work on, was gone when he went out the next morning 'round five. Few clays later, a car got stolen from up the street. Not long after, police came knocking at the door. Wanted to know if an Armantine Rauch lived there."