by James Sallis
I stood for a moment wondering (as I had wondered a hundred times before) about the people who lived in that house, what they were like, why they did this, how it all got started. This is a city that dearly loves traditions, and if there’s not one handy, then it’ll just make up a new one.
I crossed St. Charles and walked riverward toward LaVerne’s place.
No mail in the box, of course, no paper on the porch or in the yard: Verne was almost as invisible as I was.
I let myself in, poured half a tumblerful of bourbon in the kitchen, and took it into the front room.
At the time, Verne had a taste for what they called the contemporary look. You’d walk into her second-floor apartment in this old Victorian house and there, sitting on hardwood floors alongside real plaster walls and solid-wood baseboards under cameo-and-wreath ceiling medallions, was all this stark, angular, mostly white furniture. It remained kind of a shock.
Not too long after, Verne switched to (and stayed with) old wooden tables, breakfronts, wardrobes and chairs picked up for next to nothing at used-furniture shops on Magazine and hauled upstairs over the balcony on ropes. One day she arrived breathless to tell me that all the stores had tripled their prices and put up new signs and now she had an apartment full of fine antiques.
Finishing my drink, I poked through books and magazines scattered about on the coffee table. Life, several Mentor Classics, something titled The Killer Inside Me, an Ace Double with a Philip K. Dick novel on the A side, Redbook, Family Circle, a paperback of Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor on the cover.
I opened Life to a spread on Hemingway that, along with half a dozen older photos, included one of him standing outside his home in Idaho just days before he shot himself with one of his beloved shotguns. Was there snow in the background? I remember snow.
I went to the kitchen for another drink. Wandered out onto the balcony, careful to stay back out of direct sight of the street.
A fire burned somewhere close by. I could smell it: loamy, full aroma of wood, acrid tang of synthetics and fabric, heat itself.
Second time I was ever at LaVerne’s, letting myself in with a key same as now, I walked out on this balcony with a cup of cafe au lait and within ten minutes cops were banging on the door below. When I answered it, they threw me up against the wall shouting What you doin’ here, boy? You belong here? Luckily Verne’s neighbor heard it all and told her when she got home in the morning. So four hours after I was hauled in, Verne showed up at police headquarters with her lawyer. Details run together from incident to incident, year to year, but I think I emerged from that particular instance of “cooperation” (no record of arrest, of course) with a fractured rib, broken finger, multiple abrasions. All preexisting, of course. You know how them darkies live.
It didn’t look as though Verne was coming home-not all that unusual. Maybe she’d sold an overnight, or she was staying with one of her regulars. So I had a couple more drinks, napped a bit in front of the TV, and some time after noon walked over to catch the streetcar down to Washington.
Hosie Straughter stood up from the stoop in front of my house as I came around the wall.
Chapter Twelve
“Lewis. You look like absolute unmitigated hell.”
“That’s the trouble with you journalists. Always leaping headfirst for the nearest cliche. You have any idea how many times I’ve already heard that?”
“Women and little children scream and run when they see you, I guess.”
“Women, anyway.”
“Know how that is. You okay?”
“I will be. I think. Some time around January, maybe. Late January.”
“Barring further complications.”
“There is that.”
“But from what I know, seems to me the complications so far didn’t come find you, you went looking for them.”
“Leaping for another cliche?”
“Or jumping to conclusions: you better believe it. With both bare feet. But I’m looking around close and hard as I come down.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you would be. Want some coffee?”
“Only if you hold a gun on me. I was up all night working, already had nine, ten cups.”
“A drink, then?”
“Wouldn’t mind. Only had five or six of those.”
So we went in and I rinsed two of the glasses on the counter by the sink and poured Scotch into them. We sat at the kitchen table. In the South that’s where all the best talking gets done. I put the bottle between us on the table and asked Hosie what he knew.
“Well. I never had one doubt that you’d be going after this person, of course. Couldn’t tell, though, whether it would be right away, or later. I already knew from something Frankie told me, once I put it together with a couple other things I’d caught here and there on the streets, that this young patrolman, guy named Walsh, had the same gleam in his eye. So last night when both your names come up in conversation-after I call from the paper to inquire the nature and extent of your injuries-I pretty much know what’s happened. I just don’t have any particulars. And in my line of work, particulars are the only things worth having.”
He settled back with his glass resting on one leg, an actor who had delivered his lines and now could coast.
“I’m afraid that’s about as particular as it gets,” I told him. “We don’t know who the shooter is, don’t know anything about him, really. Walsh was dogging the places shootings had occurred. He kept seeing this guy. Knew him from the way he walked. I was chasing shadows too, and one of the shadows jumped up to become a guy holding a gun on Walsh.”
Hosie had a sip of Scotch. “I don’t know whether to call that incredible luck, or astonishing stupidity.”
“You got me. Wrong place, right time?”
He grunted. “So that was it, huh? Your wad’s shot. Blank slate, start all over again, same as before.”
“Yeah. Except now he knows we’re out here, of course.”
“So he’ll be harder to find.… He doesn’t know who you are, right? Either of you?”
“We don’t think he does.”
Hosie stared at the tabletop while I looked out the window at squirrels chasing one another across power lines. When I found my glass empty, I refilled both.
“That’s good,” he said. I never knew if he meant the refill or the shooter’s not knowing who we were. Because just then the door opened and we both looked toward it.
“Lew. You okay? I went straight home once I heard what happened. Thought you’d be there.”
“I was.”
“You ever give any thought to maybe leaving a note, let someone know you’re all right?”
I stood and hugged her. She felt wonderful, smelled wonderful, the way she always did. She was wearing a short blue dress, shiny and satinlike, with red heels (pumps, she called them) and huge red earrings.
“Hosie, this is LaVerne.”
“It sure is.”
“Verne: Hosie Straughter. He’s-”
“I know.” She held out her hand. “Truly a pleasure, Mr. Straughter. I’ve enjoyed your writing over the years, and learned so much from it.”
“Lewis,” he said, cupping their joined hands with his free one. “This is not what one would call a fine Scotch. In fact, more discerning drinkers might be disinclined to call it a Scotch at all. And your attire, this horrid black suit gone slick at the knees, with its uneven cuffs: also questionable. But, be all that as it may, I am forced to admit that your taste in friends is … exemplary. Unassailable. Absolutely. The pleasure, young lady,” he said, lowering his head, “is entirely mine, believe me.”
He picked up his glass and drank off the couple of inches I’d just poured. “And with that simple, heartfelt toast, I’ll leave you two young people to whatever it is that young people do these days.”
Over my protests he left, and we had indeed set about doing what young people did those days, when someone knocked at the door.
“Lewis! You in there?”
/> “Hang on.” I stood up, straightened things and looked at Verne. She made a face and straightened her own things.
I opened the door a few inches. He wore black jeans, western boots, a yellow Ban-Lon shirt. Squinting in the bright sunlight.
“What are you doing here? And more important, how did you find me?”
“Hope you don’t mind. Figured after you got some sleep-”
“Which hasn’t happened yet.”
“-we could get together and-”
He stopped, jaw still working. “Hey. I’m sorry. You get to bed.” At which point LaVerne stepped into sight. “I can come back.”
I opened the door the rest of the way.
“Better come on in. Sun shining off your white face like that, down here, it’s liable to blind someone. You want coffee? Nice shirt, by the way.”
“Had a potful of it already. Hello, miss.” His eyes went back and forth between us a couple of times.
“LaVerne: Don Walsh.” They both nodded. “A drink, then?”
“You got a beer?”
I did. I tracked it down in the icebox, trapped it, and handed it to him. He rolled the first mouthful around a while, swallowed.
“There’s this guy over on Jackson keeps an eye and ear open for us.”
“A snitch.” So I wasn’t as invisible as I thought I was. We seldom are.
“Yeah, well, what’s in a name. He’s turned a lot of things our way.”
“Including my address.”
“It’s any consolation to you, I did have to tell him exactly what our connection was.”
“We don’t have a connection, Officer.”
Silence shimmered in the air like heat lightning.
“I’ll be going now, Lew,” Verne said. “It’s been a long night. Get some sleep, call me later on?”
“You need a cab?”
“No, honey. St. John gave me a lift.” Sinjun. Her fifty-year-old neighbor who still dressed in chinos, sweater, blue shirt, loafers. Like many people in this city, he seemed stuck, like a fly in amber, in some prior era. “He’s waiting at a bar on Claiborne.”
“Beautiful woman,” Walsh said.
True enough. Heads turned, men’s and women’s alike, wherever she went, and I was pleased, flattered, proud, to have her beside me. Only much later, after almost thirty years with and without her, and when it was too late, did I realize that LaVerne had saved my life-that in some strange, indecipherable way we had saved each other’s lives.
And in the years before that realization came, without meaning to I would hurt her terribly again and again, the same way I’d repeatedly damage myself. Each year, the ground pulls harder. Each year, the burden of what we do and fail to do helps push us down.
“You want another beer?” I said. “No? Then what the hell do you want?”
“A question I’ve asked myself again and again.”
“Ever get an answer?”
“Oh yes. Lots of them.”
He found the trashcan under the sink and dropped the bottle in.
“I want to stop feeling this hole where my brother was. I want things to make sense. I want justice and truth and decency and clear blue skies.”
“Walsh?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to have a miserable life, man.”
Chapter Thirteen
We found him, casting ourselves bodily for the fifth or sixth time into the abyss of the absurdly hopeful, ready to call it quits after one, two more, tops, at a bar not far off Lee Circle on Girod.
He had on a tuxedo coat with lapels wide as mud flaps, purple-and-green Hawaiian shirt, khaki work pants, hightop tennis shoes with most of the black worn away. There were patches on the pants that looked like they belonged on a tire.
“Looking good, Doo-Wop.”
“Captain.” Doo-Wop was able to recall the minutest detail of a story you told him four years ago, but he couldn’t remember your name from the beginning of a sentence to its end; so everyone was captain. “Been a while.”
“This is Walsh.”
“Captain,” he said.
Walsh nodded.
“We’re looking for someone.”
“Course you are.”
I laid a five on the bar. It vanished as quickly as a fly landing by a lizard. First step.
Then the second. “A bourbonish afternoon, I believe,” he said.
So I ordered a round. Paying the toll. The bourbon came out of a jug, but the way Doo-Wop sampled it, it might have been a twenty-year-old single malt. He put the glass down and turned to look at me, ready for business.
I told him we didn’t have much to go on. Told him where Walsh had seen the guy, time of day, how he’d been dressed. Walsh even tried to copy his walk, a deliberate, measured gait: feet placed straight and parallel, toe coming down before heel.
“That’s not it,” he said, “but it’s close. Arms at his sides. They don’t move as he walks. Come to think of it, nothing much seems to move but his feet.”
Doo-Wop thought it over. “Maybe,” he said. He had another little taste of bourbon and put the glass down empty. I signaled to have it refilled. He nodded acknowledgment of the transaction. “Joint on St. Peters. Twice, if it’s your man.”
“When?” Walsh said.
Doo-Wop just looked at him.
“Doo-Wop kind of lives on Hopi Mean Time,” I explained. “Everything’s in the present.”
Walsh nodded.
“This guy ever with anybody else?” I asked. “Or ever seem to know anybody there?”
Doo-Wop shook his head. “Sits by himself. Has a beer, two. Leaves. Don’t talk or want to.”
“You tried.”
“Slow night. I was thirsty.”
“It was night, then. Dark.”
“Yeah. Must of been. Streetlights have this kind of shell around them. Wouldn’t be there days.”
“Cold?”
“Well, I’m wearing what I’ve got on now. So it can’t be all that warm.”
I ordered another round, but by his own reckoning and standards, apparently, Doo-Wop had drunk an amount of whiskey equal to the information he was able to provide. The new bourbon stood untouched before him. Walsh and I started in on ours.
“Captain,” he said eventually.
I turned to him.
“I have a story to tell you.”
“Fair enough.”
“You decide if it’s worth anything.”
I nodded.
What follows is not what Walsh and I heard then, a stuttering, inchoate tale in which the narrator seemed at times a participant, and which seemed somehow still to be going on, but a version pieced together from Doo-Wop’s story and a subsequent telephone conversation with Frankie DeNoux.
For three or four years a building at Dryades and Terpsichore has served as clubhouse, schoolroom, barracks, refuge and halfway house-though officially listed in city records as a temple. It’s headquarters for a group calling itself Yoruba. The group’s minister and family live there, along with others.
Yoruba has gained considerable influence in its immediate community over time and has slowly extended that influence into surrounding communities. Highly visible in their plain cotton clothing dyed light purple, Yoruba’s members devote themselves to community service: caring for the young so that parents might work, staffing referral and health-care services, volunteering as teachers and teachers’ assistants, reading to children at makeshift storefront libraries or to shut-ins at home and in medical facilities.
Yoruba’s sole income derives from the tithes of its followers and from the contributions of other well-wishers. Each Friday these “operating funds” are gathered at various collection sites and delivered to the temple by Yoruba’s minister of defense, Jamil Xtian.
For three, four years this has gone on, no problem. But last Friday there’s someone waiting there by the back door. Two average-height, average-weight men in nondescript clothes and Mardi Gras masks. They step out from behind hedges
by the steps and say, We’ll take that off your hands.
When Xtian reaches for his gun, they shoot him once through the chest and grab the duffel bag stuffed with cash. And by the time others come pouring out of the house, all of them trained fighters and all of them armed, the two are gone.
Gone with, according to word on the street, somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.
“That’s it.” Doo-Wop said.
I put a twenty on the bar, ordered another round. The twenty vanished. Dipping his head a couple of degrees, Doo-Wop acknowledged payment in full. He sampled the new pouring. Approved it.
I looked at Walsh.
He shrugged.
“Could be. There’s definitely been a buzz, something going on. No report, but then there probably wouldn’t be. And if someone did report it, that’s all we’d get.”
“This couldn’t have anything to do with the guy we’re looking for.”
“Anything direct, you mean.”
“Right.”
“Don’t see how.”
“Hang tight. I’ll be back.”
I asked after the phone and found it in the men’s room clinging to a narrow wall between urinal and sink. Dropped in my nickel and dialed Frankie DeNoux.
I’m sure I only imagined the sound of teeth sinking into chicken at the other end. And the sound of a card-board tray being set down, grease oozing slowly out onto files, correspondence, briefs.
“Griffin,” I said. “I need some help.”
“You got it.”
An elderly man came out of the stall, washed his hands at the sink and, turning to get a paper towel from the stack, splattered soapy water on my shoes. I flattened myself against the wall so he could get out.
“Something on the street. Started last Friday. Saturday.”
“People in purple involved?”
“Seems so.”
“And some others in black shirts and berets.”
“Hadn’t heard that part.”
Frankie told me what he knew, then listened to what I’d been able to figure out from Doo-Wop’s story.
“So who’s wearing the funny hats?” I asked.