South, America

by Rod Davis

  “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “It’ll be Saturday soon.”

  “Three days.”

  “Three days.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we can’t sit in this bar forever waiting for him to show up.”

  “What, then?”

  I laughed. “We haven’t even tried the phone book.” I looked down the length of the bar for Quasimodo and, by and by, caught his eye. When he came over I asked if he had the white pages. He frowned, but pulled a nasty-looking dog-eared copy from under the register.

  “He ain’t listed.” He shoved the book down to me.

  I looked anyway.

  “Any way you could get us a number?” Elle asked, working her best smile.

  “We don’t give out numbers. Anyway he wouldn’t be there.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to call.”

  “Like I said.”

  I put a twenty on the bar. He looked at it. Turned, picked up some glasses from the washing sink, and went back to the other end. I put the money back in my pocket. Too many questions to a guy who clearly had the capacity to rat out or withhold as he saw fit. And who didn’t like Elfego anyway.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I said. “If we can’t think of anything we’ll come back and try again. And maybe Elfego will show up. Sounds like he runs late pretty often. From what I could tell when I met him, he doesn’t seem the type who figures he’s obligated to explain himself to a guy like the bartender.”

  “Or maybe he’ll take more money.”

  “Or that.”

  We slid off the barstools and walked toward the sidewalk. Quasimodo was busy breaking up some empty liquor bottles in a trash can. We had just stepped outside when the ponytail waiter came up to wipe off an empty table near us. He looked at Elle carefully.

  “You really are T-boy’s sister. I can see it.” He smiled, a slight Floridian drawl. Looking at him again, I was put in mind of an ex-college professor who’d decided on a change of life.

  “I am. Did you know Young Henry?”

  He laughed. “Yep. It’s you. He said you called him that.”

  “You knew him?”

  He glanced toward Quasimodo, who had gone around to tend some of the closer tables to the bar, taking up Elfego’s slack.

  “What a prick. But Elfego should’ve showed up. Now we all have to work more. Of course there’s more tips so I don’t mind so much.”

  “Were you here the night my brother came in? Before . . .”

  The waiter nodded. “I know about that. I’m real sorry. It was hard to believe.”

  Elle nodded.

  “Elfego took it pretty hard.” He caught my look. “You didn’t think so?”

  “He didn’t let on much when I came here last week.”

  “Oh. That was you.” He sized me up. “You’re her ‘friend.’ Obviously.”

  “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “You were. Elfego’s like that. Smartass but I can tell you, it got to him. They were starting to see each other again, him and Terrell.”

  Elle and I looked at each other. I glanced at Quasimodo, who finally seemed to have noticed that we hadn’t actually left.

  “We may get some company.”

  “Yeah,” said the waiter. “Anyway, I wanted to let you know. Elfego lives up near Coliseum, a big apartment in one of those old run-down houses. Mercy Street. 121-B, I think. A big white and gray-trimmed house near the corner, with a black fence. He’s in the place in back. There’s a little Cuban flag drawing or something on his door.”

  “Do you know his phone number?”

  “It’s not in the book but information has it. Villareal is his last name. On Mercy Street.”

  Quasimodo had taken to uninterrupted staring.

  “You think he’s home?” Elle asked.

  “I doubt it. He could be out grocery shopping or up at the mall or hanging out at one of the coffee shops on Magazine.” He glanced at the counter inside. “I don’t know why Quasimodo’s so pissed off. This happens at least once a week. But Elfego’s so good and so many customers like him, and so does the owner, who only comes in a couple nights a week, that he can get away with anything.” He laughed a little. “Charm, you know? It’s part of the business.”

  “Hey, we got customers,” Quasimodo called out. The entire bar looked up.

  “Speaking of which,” Elle said.

  “I know. I better go. Anyway. Call him or go by and if you see him, tell him I told you and he’ll be okay with it. We’re friends.” He looked at us. “Not like with your brother. Just friends. The occasional fuck-buddy.” At that he laughed loud, maybe louder than necessary, and broke off with a flourish of his cleaning cloth, smiling bright, back into the bar. Quasimodo frowned, grimaced, and then, his disapproval registered, went back to the business of pouring drinks and ringing up money.

  We walked away. After a few paces, Elle turned back and gave a little wave to the waiter, who had never given us his name.

  We drove off to find Elfego’s apartment, cutting through the Quarter on Decatur and up Magazine Street to the neighborhood near the old Coliseum theater, in the lower part of Uptown close to the Irish Channel. Moss-draped trees filled a small city park, and around it were homes in all states of repair. On Mercy Street, the big three-stories dominated, but most had turned into rental properties, and as such no doubt brought decent incomes for their owners. I should give that some thought, I said to myself, still thinking like I had been doing before finding a body and finding this woman.

  Twilight had turned to night but it was easy enough to make out a Spanish-style house with a wrought iron fence and a balcony on the second floor. The white and gray paint was peeling badly. I found a place to park a half-block down. “It’s going to get rougher from here,” I said before we got out. “Assuming Elfego has the painting or knows anything about it.”

  She shrugged and opened her door.

  We walked up the sidewalk to the house. Under the aura of streetlamps, the neighborhood was Faulknerian, with a touch of Elmore Leonard. Maybe the city was like that.

  A light was on in the big front room downstairs but we walked down the driveway. The fence to the back yard had no gate, but a flat stone walkway curved around through the well-kept lawn. A wrought iron patio table and chairs were chained to concrete pads. A flag of Cuba really was painted on a wooden door at the rear of the house.

  Elle made straight for it. When she knocked, the door swung open about two inches.

  “Get back,” I said, catching up to her quickly. “Let me look first.”

  I pushed the door open a little more and called out Elfego’s name. Three times. Nothing.

  “Go in,” she said, trying to push past me.

  I stepped inside, just ahead of her, and felt for a light switch as we hovered at the threshold. I flipped it on.

  We both stared.

  The place was wrecked. Not randomly, as from a fight. Methodically, as from a search. Drawers upturned, sofa cushions pulled out, ripped open, cabinets emptied. Several oil and watercolor paintings, impossible to recognize, were slashed and the frames broken into bits. The stereo and TV, which an angry lover would have destroyed along with everything else, were intact, just shoved around.

  A small kitchen led off to one side and it was the same kind of scene. All the cabinets emptied, cookware and food all over the floor.

  “Trey was here.”

  “Or his sidekicks. I would say so.”

  “He figured it out, too.”

  “He knew both of them.”

  We checked out the rest of the place. In a study off the hall, every book, photo, CD rack or pile of boxes had been tossed around and broken up. More slashed art work. Clothes from an open closet scattered everywhere.

  “Don’t touch anything. We shouldn�
�t even be here.”

  “You turned on the lights and pushed the door open.”

  “Shit. Right. I’ll wipe them when we leave. But let’s not make any more mistakes.”

  I suddenly realized she was going into the far bedroom. I couldn’t get to her in time. I figured that’s where the body would be.

  But it was only another mess. The mattress on the queen-sized bed was slashed, a shiny red comforter and silver sheets hanging off a corner. For the first time, I saw bloodstain.

  “It’s on the sheets, too,” she said. “But not that much.”

  We looked around a little more but that was all.

  We made our way back, checking for anything else we might have missed, and also anxious to get out before anyone, especially police, showed up. I pulled out my shirttail to wipe down what I had touched.

  We were in the yard in back when I noticed a storage shed at the far end of the yard, next to a huge magnolia tree and a rose trellis. The door was open.

  There wasn’t much doubt in either of our minds what would be inside. But again, no corpse.

  The shed had been tossed pretty well, too. Tools scattered everywhere, a couple of smashed storage boxes. Maybe that’s where they thought the painting had been. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw a stack of stretched canvasses, some spattered rags, brushes, an easel.

  I bent down to look at the tubes. They were fossilized, most of the caps off. I held one up for her to see. “So he was a painter himself. Maybe not lately.”

  She flipped through the canvasses against the wall. All were blank.

  I touched her arm. “We shouldn’t hang around.”

  “No.”

  “We should go.”

  We walked wordlessly to the car. As we reached the curb, a streetlamp bulb popped nearby and we both looked up as it fizzled to yellow and out.

  “We need to be gone,” I said.

  “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “No. We can go by the bar again.”

  “Don’t you think we’ve been there enough?”

  “Probably. I don’t know. You have a better idea?”

  She rubbed the sides of her cheeks like they were itching. Turned around, walked a few paces along the street where there had, in fact, been no murders today. That we knew of. She came back. “You’re some kind of reporter, aren’t you? Some kind of fake PI? Can’t you find people?” Her voice rising.

  I unlocked the passenger door, hoping she’d take the cue. “We’ll find him. We need to go.”

  “You have a computer. He must be in public records. Something.”

  “We can’t go to my apartment.”

  She paced down the sidewalk again, returned, gesturing with her arms like a teacher shaking a kid. “We can figure this out, you know?”

  I kept my eye on the street. A block away I could see someone coming with a dog on a leash. It was that time of evening.

  “Let’s get in the car. We can talk about it. We can go get something to eat.”

  Her face screwed into disbelief. “Food?”

  “I’m hypoglycemic. I can feel the headache starting.”

  There was a disbelief in her expression, and then a distant blankness. “This is impossible.”

  “But it’s not. Come on, just get in.”

  She pushed up next to me and kissed me so hard on the lips that her teeth came through onto my lower lip and when she pulled back I felt blood warm in my mouth.

  “It’s safe back there, with Boots?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then let’s go back there. Let’s get something to drink and some takeout food and go back there, Jack, and stay there.”

  She was pushing herself against me, aggressively. It didn’t feel romantic.

  “There has to be more. Your brother would’ve had some other way for you to find the painting, wouldn’t he? He’d have a plan, or a contact, something, right? I mean, he wouldn’t leave it just up to luck and his sometimes lover?”

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  “Like I am?”

  “What?”

  “Your part-time lover?”

  “We’re not lovers.”

  She reached down and grabbed me by the crotch. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  I moved back.

  She snorted in derision, or exasperation. Then her right knee buckled for a second. I reached out to steady her. I had no idea how she was holding all this together. And she wasn’t.

  She shook loose and finally got in the car. “Stop for some wine,” she said. “You can get a pizza on Magazine. Then home. You know, our home of the day.”

  There was no fairy tale build-up or romantic wooing over candlelight or under the waxing moon. There was no time. There had barely been time to get the Bordeaux at the drugstore and the cheese and mushroom pizza at Sicily’s.

  At “home,” in the little room, there was no time for anything but draining half the bottle in a couple of gulps each, not like shots but like some kind of sacrament, some kind of diversion. And then some sitting in silence with the radio on and also the TV on, listening to neither, and then just rising together and slipping off our clothes and falling onto the bed. We made love like people without time. People without injury.

  19

  It took time for us to awaken. And for Elle to remember that the cell phone trilling somewhere in the room was in her handbag. It was just past midnight. We had fallen asleep so hard it might have been days rather than just a couple of hours. Having lain still so long, I could barely move. Passion had overridden the pain from Big Red’s fists, but now it was definitely back. Elle moved slowly, too, but from grogginess. By the time she got the phone, the voice mail had taken over. She slumped naked at the edge of the bed listening to the message.

  “It’s Elfego.”

  The room was dark, other than the bathroom light I must have left on, and a greenish glow around Elle’s face from the illuminated screen on the cell.

  I worked to come awake, to get into a sitting position. “What?”

  “Elfego. I don’t know how he has this number. Young Henry, I guess. He said to call him back.” She put the phone down and moved close to me. “He sounded pretty high.” She ran her fingertips along my side. “Hey.”

  I winced.

  “Sorry.”

  “It was worth it.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay. Stiff from not moving.” She smiled faintly. “You?”

  “I’m better.”

  She kissed me lightly as she pushed the call-back button. I could hear a ringing through the receiver. Then a muffled “Hola.”

  “Elfego?”

  She looked at me.

  I heard these bits from her end of the conversation:

  “You’re okay? . . . How bad? . . . It was Trey . . . Jesus . . . Should you go to the emergency room? . . . Okay . . . No, we’re in town . . . Really. We just got here. How did you get this number? . . . Okay, no, that’s fine. Listen, I need to see you . . . Really . . . Elfego, where are you? You sound drunk . . . Can we meet somewhere? . . . I can’t tell you like this . . . Well you say a place. We’ll be there . . . Down there? . . . No, okay, okay . . . When . . . Okay . . . Yes. Yes. Just us . . . I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. And I’m glad you’re alive . . . Bye.”

  She looked down at her body, not so much at the form of it but at the fact that it existed and was in this particular place at this particular time. She shook her head repeatedly. “I guess we’re going out.”

  We got dressed—a slow process for me—while she told me what Elfego had said.

  The choice of bar was odd, down by the convention center, but also maybe okay, since it was so filled with late-night partiers and tourists, all strangers to each other. A few extra people wouldn’t be noticed. The mu
sic was classic rock and New Orleans R&B, about the only redeeming quality.

  We made Elfego right away. He had found a table back in a corner, as out of the way as possible. Not a guy for understatement, he was wearing a blue and orange tropical shirt and yellow cotton trousers. Also a straw hat and shades. And he wasn’t alone. Ponytail waiter from Rio Blanche had pushed a chair up close to him and when we approached, I realized that probably he was there to hold Elfego up—figuratively and literally.

  Elle and I crossed the crowds on the peanut shell-littered floor to the two chairs across from our new friends. I was favoring my left side but otherwise loosening up. “How’s it going?” I said, sitting with an involuntary groan.

  Even behind the sunglasses and straw beach hat, I could see Elfego was pretty beat up. Maybe worse than me. Elle’s wounds were on the inside, but no less damaging. What a trio we made. Only Ponytail looked unscathed.

  “It’s one in the morning and we’re in a shitty tourist dive. How do you think it’s going?” Elfego said. It was hard to understand him. Inside his badly swollen mouth his tongue was likely cut up. Maybe some broken teeth. He didn’t smile enough for me to figure it out.

  Elle looked at both men silently. Then, to Ponytail, “So he came to you.”

  “Por qué no?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” She looked at Elfego. “I didn’t know you had my number.”

  “I have lots of numbers, sweet pants.”

  “You got it from Young Henry.”

  “Well, duh.”

  Elle tried to put her hand on Elfego’s, but he drew back.

  “I didn’t come here to chat. Hell, I didn’t want to come here at all—”

  “—He can barely walk—”

  “—I came here because, one, they didn’t kill me, and two, I figured if they wanted it that bad I should give it to you, like your brother asked me.”

  Elle glanced at me.

  “You have his painting?”

  I tried to stop her but it was out. Elfego cocked his head, looked at his friend. “What painting?”

  “Elfego.”

  “Oh yeah, the one Trey beat the shit out of me looking for? You know, someone might have mentioned that to me. It’s hell getting your nose broken having no . . . fucking . . . idea . . . why.”