by Rod Davis
Elle took a few steps back. I went directly out to the street and dropped the bags on the curb. Pickup wouldn’t come until Monday but there wasn’t much more I could do. Except hope stray dogs wouldn’t tear the bags open.
I pulled off my bandana and left it on top of the heap, rubbed my face and went back to Elle, explained between breaths and short coughing fits what I had found. A kind of sick expression covered her face, and then one that looked angry.
We sat down on the green wrought-iron bench near the flower beds.
“I have to go back in and open some more windows and turn on a couple of fans.”
“Jesus, Jack, who does something like that?” She rolled her eyes as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “Still, you don’t think they hurt your landlords, do you? I mean, should you check?”
I looked back at their place again. “They’re out of town. That’s what Art’s message said. It looks that way. The doors are all locked.”
I went over and pushed against their back door. It didn’t seem jimmied. I looked through the curtain on one of the back windows and all seemed intact. Nor could I smell anything bad coming out from around the seam of a window pane. I turned to her and shrugged. “Looks okay.”
“Can you call them anyway?”
“I will.”
I took a few breaths. “So, I can’t really show you my fashionable bachelor pad.”
“Can I help?”
“Just stay here. No point both of us smelling like hell.”
I went back inside, while I had the momentum. I looked around much as I could stand. The TV and stereo were busted up but still there. Ditto my laptop, CDs and so on. I didn’t get the impression anything had been stolen. Books and the files on my desk were strewn about. Everything in the place was a write-off.
I opened every window I could and turned on the fans. I left the air conditioner off, since it might just make things worse even if it still worked. I was going to have to think of a good story for the Beckers.
I was on my way out when Elle came through the door. “Just a quick drive-through,” she said, dodging me when I tried to stop her. I went on out. Had to.
Two minutes later, if that, she’d had enough. She hobbled to the edge of the garden, bent over, and threw up.
“I’m usually cleaner,” I said when she sat next to me. I must have smelled pretty bad because even through her own vomit-breath, she got up right away and moved off.
“Can we go back to Boots’s? We need the shower.”
“I shouldn’t have come.”
“You had to.” She sniffed at her clothes, made a face. Then her head shot up. “Damn. I wonder what my house in Tuscaloosa smells like by now.”
I tried smelling my shirt but it was beyond acrid. “That was before it really got going, you know?”
“Before you shot the help.”
“Yeah. Before that.”
I stood up. I hated to go back in but I needed to wedge the kitchen door shut. Not that I was really worried about burglars. But no need to leave it wide open, either. I locked the front door behind me when I was finished.
As we were leaving, I checked the street door to Art’s place and it hadn’t been broken into, either. I used his new garden hose, neatly coiled on a yellow hanger near the gate, to wash off my face and hands. Elle did the same. It helped.
Going back across town, I took Claiborne north of the Quarter. Traffic moved pretty fast, although it also seemed to take forever. We kept the windows down and the A/C on full blast.
Props to Trey for a hell of a statement.
In a way I was glad. The unreality of what we were doing had become an atmosphere around us, blocking out time, history, everything but some imperative to move forward into whatever it was that we were supposed to do. Find a painting. Deliver it. We were living as if nothing else existed. Or ever would.
I didn’t tell her, but each whiff of death and decay that lifted off my clothes and hair as the wind whipped through the open windows was like a summons. The crack that had opened up grew wider, deeper. Demons spoke like angels. A discourse of revenge.
We got to Boots’s, who still wasn’t home. I got a suitcase with some of our clothes from the Taurus’s trunk and carried it inside. We disrobed and put our clothes in a trash bag. We took turns in the shower. It was too unappealing to wash off the filth together, but not enough to keep us from lying in bed afterward for an hour, listening to the radio, barely talking, and then doing what naked people trying not to think about things might do in a similar circumstance. Late afternoon shadows had started to set in when Elle rose, put on black slacks and a classically embroidered, Chinese-style tunic, her black slippers. I had one last pair of clean jeans, and a gray and blue camp shirt.
It was my turn to make a phone call.
25
“Say what? Hell, I’m over here in Biloxi. How can I get there by nine?”
We were crossing town again, but now the congestion was bad and getting even worse. I didn’t like doing the cell phone in that kind of traffic, but Big Red seemed to want the details again, so I had no choice but to talk it through. I had thought he would just want to know I was ready to deliver a day earlier than the deadline and be happy about it. I was wrong.
“I don’t know what else to say. Like I said, Trey called us. Now I’m calling you.”
“This very minute, he called.” Red’s gravelly voice in the receiver was so loud that Elle was able to follow both sides of the conversation if I held the phone just a little off my ear.
“Okay, last night.”
I heard a mutter of curse words. In my mind, thinking of it phrased exactly that way as I listened, I thought, “murder of crows.” It made me want to laugh. I didn’t know why. I should have. I never did.
“I thought we might be able to take care of it. Then I knew we couldn’t.”
“So you can’t put him off a day?”
“I tried. The number he left on our cell doesn’t answer. So I can’t reach him again.”
“He’ll call you. He likes to mindfuck.”
“He does.” I looked quickly at Elle. She rolled her eyes.
“I told you I was going fishing.”
“You said on the weekend. This is only Friday.”
“Plans change.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What I’m telling you is I need to figure out what we’re gonna do about all this.” Pause. “You definitely have the painting.”
“Definitely. Shit.” I hit a huge pothole on Tchoupitoulas and nearly dropped the phone.
“What?”
“Nothing. Traffic.”
Pause. “You’re taking it to exchange for, what was it, some damn aunt?”
“I’m leaving it where it is.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll take you there. I’ll tell you everything I know about it.”
Pause. “So what are you planning to do?”
“I’m going over there at nine tonight. What else can I do? It’s her aunt.”
“And you figure he’ll let her go just because you show up.”
“No. I figure there will be a problem. That’s why I’m calling you.”
Elle shook her head. I’m not sure whether at me or at Red.
“Is that a smartass thing, again?”
“I’m not giving him the painting and I am getting Lenora out of there. But there’s just me and my friend. A little short on muscle.”
“She with you now?”
“Of course.” Elle waved silently, impatiently.
“Hang on,” he said. Through the phone, I heard what sounded like the slapping of waves against a boat or dock. “Go ahead.”
“Thing is, about the muscle. I don’t know who Trey has partnered up with.”
Exasperated breathing. Thudding
noises. “Wait a second while I get this shit stowed. Fuck.”
I thought about telling him about what Trey did to my apartment, but didn’t.
“Jesus, I stink of fish. I gotta go to the casino and clean up.”
“So you’re coming?”
“If he’s trying to cut me out . . . that wouldn’t work out copacetic. For him.”
“No.” I could see it in Elle’s face, too. “By the way, that painting. It’s really something. You a religious man?”
“What?”
“No. I mean it’s got something about it.”
“So you’re an art critic and also a writer.”
Elle put her fingers up to her lips, as if to tell me to just leave it.
“I just mean somebody’s going to want pay a lot to get it back.”
“Not your problem.”
“Okay.”
“So I’ll be there. I figured it would all come back to the city. Just not so soon.”
“I sort of figured you thought that.”
“It started there. It ends there.”
“Let’s say things go bad.”
“Yeah?”
“You have to get the painting from Trey.”
“I ‘have to’?”
“I mean that’s what I would hope. If something goes bad.”
“Son, it’s already pretty bad, wouldn’t you say?”
I put on the brakes hard coming to Canal. It was green my way but a dozen conventioneers wearing name tags and walking like they’d already gotten shit-faced were crossing the street, oblivious. God bless ’em, I guess.
“But if it all works out, you get the painting, we’re clear?”
“We’ve been over that.”
“Okay.”
“Son?”
“Yeah.”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
“I have in mind blowing his fucking head off.”
Much laughter. Not from Elle. “Hell, I might have a beer with you yet.”
“We’ll have to wait until my jaw is better.”
Pause. “Right.” Pause. “Isn’t there something you want to tell me?”
I got across Canal and turned up to pick up St. Peter and on to Decatur again. I looked at Elle to see if she knew what he meant. “No. I mean all I know is we’re to be there at nine.”
“What I’m saying.”
“What?”
“Where, Shakespeare, where? You wanna give me some kind of LZ coordinates?”
I can’t say I had much of an appetite but we had to do something other than drive around drive around until we heard back from Trey. Dooky Chase for some of Leah Chase’s fried chicken would’ve been perfect, but nothing was perfect and we didn’t have the time. Anyway, I had to keep on my ball cap on and shades, so we needed a bar, but not one were I was a regular. And definitely not Rio Blanche.
We settled on a little Thai place at the edge of the Quarter. The main attraction was that it was dark. I ordered chicken pad thai and a beer. Elle asked for the vegetarian version. We picked at the food. I forced myself to get a little protein down although I kept thinking of cats in ovens. We lingered as long as we could, had sweet filtered coffee for dessert. It gave us exactly the buzz we needed.
Afterwards, we walked up to Frenchmen toward the neighborhood park where I’d left the Taurus. The early evening crowd was starting to fill the clubs. The tropical depression that had been pushing in was beginning to dump itself onto the city in a light but steady rain that likely would continue at least a couple of days.
“Worse case scenario, we give up the painting for Lenora,” she said, when we got to the car.
“Worst case.”
“Best case?”
“Best case we get her and give up nothing.”
She pulled me to her, kissed me, pushed me away.
“That first day, you wanted me, right over there on Elysian Fields.”
“The first minute.”
She pulled me back tight against her, kissed me again. Then the ribs spoke up.
“Sorry.” She released the pressure.
“It’s okay. In an hour we’ll be done with him.”
She stared at me with that look from another universe.
“You know what I want.”
“I know.”
“You don’t want the same thing? You just said you’d blow his fucking head off. Unquote.”
“If it comes to that.”
“At least I admit it.”
I opened her door and went around to my side of the car.
We headed up Elysian Fields toward the moneyed neighborhood fronting Lake Pontchartrain. She’d gotten the call a little before eight. I passed the LZ on to Big Red right away. He wasn’t any happier than when I’d told him we had to wait on Trey to give us the location. At least this time he didn’t hang up after calling me “the dumbest motherfucker in motherfucking history.”
I wasn’t familiar with the address Trey had given her, but I knew it had to be a big place. Just before Robert E. Lee and the UNO campus, I turned left. Then a couple of blocks and then left again and after a few more streets a right and there it was: a big, sand-colored ranch-style on a corner lot, with a shingled roof that even in the dark called out for repair. A garage, similar architecture, toward the back. The lot was filled with moss-draped oaks, and also a poorly trimmed line of shrubs along the front. It wasn’t on the water, although it was easy enough to smell and hear the lake.
I noticed a yard sign in front for a local constable race. The neighboring houses were of similar design, either that or a two-story, faux-plantation style. Nouveau riche, professional bourgeoisie, and oldish money crammed together as if they fit. The house was dark. It didn’t seem right.
I parked across the street along a stretch of lawn from a two-story brick imitation colonial. We both looked through the rain-spotted windows for signs that anyone was there. Only one light was on, in the rear, the kind that draws more burglars than it deters, but I figured in this neighborhood anybody with any sense had an alarm system.
A couple of cars came by, big SUVs no doubt from the neighborhood. Elle looked at her watch. It was 9:05.
“You sure this is it?”
“11067. I’m sure.”
“What do you think?”
“I think nobody’s home.”
“Yeah.”
“The fuck is he doing?”
She looked at the house. “I wonder if he even has Lenora.”
A bad thought came to me. I put the car in drive and moved away, toward the lake.
“What are you doing?”
“Is anything behind us?”
She looked around. “No.”
“I don’t see anything either.”
I followed Lakeshore upriver toward Canal. The waves were getting whipped up, but looking out at water made me feel calmer. But I wanted to get back on a big street.
“You think it was a set-up.”
I made a quick check of the mirror. No one was tailing us. “I’m thinking.”
She moved restlessly in her seat. “Where do we go?”
“I’m just driving.”
“Maybe we should go by the house again? Just to be sure?”
I slowed for a homeless guy with a shopping cart shuffling across the street.
“I don’t think we give them another chance.”
“It was definitely the right place?”
“It was the right place. I’m positive. You took the address.”
“I’m just asking.”
I kept driving. I cracked my window for fresh air from the rain.
Elle did the same. The pre-storm breeze felt good. Then she pulled her cell phone from her bag. She pressed call-back. “It still just keeps ringing.”
&
nbsp; “It’s a throwaway.”
She clicked off.
“You have a number from Oxford?”
“I can try information.”
The listing she got was for an office, Barnett Properties. She rang, got a machine, clicked off.
I was more or less headed up Uptown, and decided just to keep meandering that way. Looking all the while for black Volvos with Mississippi tags. Or blue Suburbans.
We had just gotten to Canal when her phone rang.
I could only hear her side of it:
“What the fuck, Trey? . . . Why? . . . You’re joking . . . Okay, Okay . . . Shut up. Don’t ever say that again . . . As soon as we can. Twenty minutes. Maybe less . . . Yes. Of course we do. What about Lenora? . . . She’d better be . . . Say the address again . . .”
She turned to me. “Julia Street, just down from Magazine. It doesn’t have a number on the front. Delta Gallery. How original.” Then she looked away, focused on the voice in her ear. “Whatever, Trey. Okay.” She clicked off.
I took a left. “He changed the location. Classic.”
She slammed the phone back into her bag. “Prick. Called me his big sister again.”
Driving, I used my own cell to try calling Big Red about the location switch but I got a busy signal. I followed Canal to the edge of the Quarter and hooked a right on Magazine. I tried Big Red again. Still busy. No way I was going to leave a message. I couldn’t believe he didn’t have call waiting.
The closer we got to Julia Street, the main drag of the Arts District, the more cars. And pedestrians, despite the light rain. They weren’t touristy-looking, in the sense that they weren’t dressed that way. Most of them were coming in and out of crowded doors here and there. We looked at each other, getting it at the same time.
“Jesus, it’s a gallery night.”
26
We found a place to park on a side street, waiting longer than need be for an older couple and their friends to open the doors to their burnt gold Mercedes, drop their drink cups in the gutter, blah blah blah—all so they wouldn’t have to appear to be hurried into giving up their prime space to another car. It just gave me another thing to be pissed off about and I was glad.
Elle walked up the sidewalk, pausing next to a meter as a group of Uptown swells walked by, talking about an upcoming LSU football game. I locked the car and went back to the trunk. I rummaged through my duffel until I found the Colt. More stopping power than the Glock and it was going to be close quarters. Looking around to check for more passersby, I tucked it in the back of my jeans, under my shirt. The metal was cold against my skin. I caught up to her. Neither of us had an umbrella.