by Rod Davis
We passed isolated packs of the arts crowd as we got closer to Trey’s gallery, which was about two blocks upriver of Julia, toward the convention center. She gave me her cell and I made another call for Red. This time it rang and then a beep came on, no greeting message. It made me wonder who might be listening. I still didn’t want to leave a message but just in case it would do any good I just said it was Shakespeare and we’d moved to an art gallery, near Julia. I figured he’d know which one. I said to call me right away.
It wasn’t one of the really big nights, like White Linen in August, when the entire district is filled with locals who want to see and be seen. Most actually do come in some sort of white outfits. They cruise the galleries and museums and line up for the etouffée and wine served under the white tents on the blocked-off streets. You had to love this city. It was rent by a horrendous caste system and locked into poverty, about to disappear any given year under a direct hit from the Caribbean. But it was open, not closed to itself, tolerant of all manner of eccentricity, and dedicated to at least the pursuit of happiness regardless of the odds. Which of course was another of its liabilities. It could have people like Trey Barnett right under its skin posturing in white linen and opening an art business. While on one hand it was good that it didn’t matter what went on inside anyone’s storefront, on the other hand it did. On the other hand what was going on right now mattered a lot.
We walked on.
“If she’s hurt—”
“She’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But it wouldn’t be good business to do her harm.”
She gave me a sidelong glance.
“You know what I mean.”
We stopped at the corner. I still couldn’t see a sign for Trey’s gallery. It was on an off-street, also home to ordinary business offices and a bar, its neon light fuzzy in the rain. Another block farther was a small pedestrian boulevard catering mostly to the convention center and casinos.
“So we go in, we get Lenora, we give up the painting,” she said. “That’s it.”
“What choice is there?”
Her eyes flashed.
I took her arm. “What?”
She shook me off immediately.
“And your mob buddy?”
I wiped rain drops from my face. “Red?”
“What’s he gonna do?”
“He didn’t say.”
“You know what I mean.”
I could feel my head tightening. “Leave all that to Red.”
“If he even shows.”
“He will.”
I pulled out my own cell and punched in Red’s number. My eyes locked on hers. I got a busy signal. She flinched in the stare-off.
“I don’t know,” I said, clicking off, looking down the sidewalk. “You want to wait?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
We crossed the street.
“So. We get her. We leave. Then what?” she asked.
“I haven’t worked that part out.”
“Me neither.”
“We should just stick to the plan.” I tried for a reassuring tone. “We have to.”
“I know.”
“The priority is to get out with Lenora. Just keep saying that.”
“Jesus, Jack.”
I stopped again. I didn’t have to take her arm. She turned her body right into mine.
“We’ll get through this,” I said. “We have something he wants more than your aunt.”
“I know that.” She flipped her head to throw off a sheen of rainwater.
“Red has a very big interest in this. He’s not going to leave it hanging.”
“I wish I had that faith.”
“Me, too.”
I thought I saw her expression settle, what we used to call a battle face.
“Are you ready?”
“I was born ready.”
“It will be like back in Mississippi.”
She touched my face. I don’t know why. “It’s all been like Mississippi, Jack, hasn’t it?”
Two doors from Trey’s gallery we saw the lights from the windows and the oversized glass door. I was trying to think if I’d seen the place before. Like most of the buildings in this one-time skid row district, it had been refurbished. The bricks were either new or steam-blasted, and the deep blue trim around the door and front window repainted with care. The only sign, Delta Gallery, was stenciled in black deco letters near the edge of the window. Très artsy.
On the door was a more temporary white sign with carefully hand-inscribed block letters: “Sneak preview tonight: 7–9 only.” When we got closer we could see a small table inside covered with plastic cups, a couple of liter-sized bottles of wine, and a plate of picked-over cheese and crackers. The exhibit room behind it was empty, except for the white walls on which rows of small watercolors in stainless steel frames, all about nineteen or twenty inches diagonal, the size of a TV screen, were precisely arranged.
“Unbelievable. He invited us to an opening.” Her mouth crinkled in contempt.
I tried to size up as much of the set-up as I could. But within fifteen seconds a door at the far end of the viewing room opened.
As if on cue, he emerged and walked toward us, a big smile on his tan face. Like Elle, Trey was dressed all in black—in his case an expensive silk shirt and matching slacks, slick Italian shoes. He opened the door to greet us with the same flourish of his strut across the gallery floor: directly, grandly, even, as though we had come to buy his entire inventory. Which maybe we had.
“Welcome to the Delta,” he said. No doubt he’d named the gallery that way so he could say just that to the prospective patrons. “Come on in.”
Elle looked at him hard. I nodded in greeting, I don’t even know why. Elle walked directly to the center of the empty room. I followed, making a quick check of the surroundings and the possible exits. Only two. One at the back and the other through which we had just come.
I heard the lock on the front door click. I turned to see Trey pull the sign from the window, and walk to a panel on the corner wall to enter a digital code. An elaborately rigged set of blinds moved in from each side of the display window and then folded shut, a separate system for the door. The outside world was sealed away.
“We had a decent turnout, even with the weather. But you know, kind of serendipitous in a way, raising money for storm victims and all that.”
He came up to Elle, who had turned to watch her flesh and blood—and murderer of her brother. He glided down the walls, looking at the art, perfectly highlighted by the track lighting on the ceiling. The layout alone must have cost him a bundle. Each piece was titled the same: “Red Gator,” with subtitle written in elegant cursive just below.
The one nearest me was “Red Gator: Oxford ’65.” In it, a large alligator with a surreal glint in its jet-black eyes, done up photorealist, was sprawled at the front gate of the Ole Miss campus, which was tiny and ugly and out-of-scale. The gator had inhaled an angry-looking Governor George Wallace all the way to the waist. He was holding a sign that said, “States’ Rights!”
Just to its right, “Red Gator: Sand Dooms,” showed the title creature on a Gulf Coast beach on a blanket, facing the water. On one side was a black man in a green swimsuit and on the other a blond woman in a white bikini. All three were holding hands, or claws.
I didn’t want to look at the art, that not being the purpose of the visit, but, as I may have mentioned, I have a propensity to dissociate in times of life-threatening stress. Ergo, I had to admit the show wasn’t bad.
“You like them?”
“Not bad. Glad you had time for painting. You know, between gutting innocent animals and baking them in my apartment.”
“You have such bad taste, what did it hurt?”
&
nbsp; I took a half-step and he moved back, more like a boxer than someone afraid. I could have pulled out the Colt but we hadn’t seen Lenora.
He shrugged, that baiting kind of smile guys give to each other just before they try to take each other’s head off. I returned the expression.
I saw Elle looking toward the back of the room at the rear exit, a closed double door. Trey could tell what we were thinking. But for him, the game was just beginning.
“Elle? What about you? You like this work?”
“Where’s my aunt?”
Trey mockingly smashed his fist against his heart. “The worst criticism of all. To be ignored.” He waited a beat. “And by family.”
I moved next to Elle, keeping everything in my peripheral vision.
He came closer, looking at her, smiling. “So, you really didn’t notice?”
“What?”
“The artist.”
“I don’t care whose stuff you’re pimping.”
“But darlin’, darlin’, you do. You really do.”
She turned her back to him, moving to the double door. “Where’s my aunt?”
He followed her until she stopped. She turned to look at him and he spread his arms as though making a sweep of the room for a visiting audience of nobles.
It was all between them. He had lost interest in me, other than a perceptive regard for whether I would try to kill him.
“Why, darlin’, can’t you see? These are all mine. It’s my debut into the art world as one of its own. An artist, not just a businessman.” He walked up to a row of the works. “I call it the Red Gator series. See? Gators. Red. It’s going to be a big hit, big sister. Blue dogs gonna kiss my Mississippi ass.”
He was beaming with pride. I wondered if it would be reviewed in any of the arts papers. I was actually thinking of journalist questions. I needed to start thinking of questions from my other previous life, the one where you got into situations where people shot at each other.
Elle glanced at one of the watercolors. I don’t know what she was thinking but it could have been that they were political in a way not to have been expected from a guy like Trey. But then that was the South in America, wasn’t? Hardly anything made sense straight on.
“Why do you think I changed the meeting place to bring you down here? A lot more interesting than an old dope house up by the lake, wouldn’t you agree?”
Cold-blooded and bound for hell that he was, he really did want Elle’s approval. The vulnerability in his expression only lasted a second, but it was there. I could feel something zing between the two of them to which I could never be a party. Not just the kinship. Maybe not even the childhood days before everything went bad. Something else. It was like being present in a room with a huge and violent storm that you could feel but not see, not even explain.
Then Trey’s eyes went hard again, and when I glanced at Elle, I could see nothing in her face that resembled kindness, let alone aesthetic appreciation.
“It figures you’d be into reptiles.” She stepped up to the closest watercolor, “Red Gator: Delta Blues,” showing the alligator in a chain gang. She cocked her head, pursed her lips as if considering the aesthetics, then spat directly onto it. She backed off, looked at it again. “It just needed that detail.”
Trey crossed his arms on his chest, gave me a quick once-over, and looked at her a long time. Then he smacked his mouth open and shut, like a swamp creature.
Elle stepped off hard toward the double door. When she got to it she stopped. She stared at it as though it would open of its own volition. She was like Moses at the Red Sea, waiting for the consciousness of God to catch up.
“Open this now.”
Why, sister, that’s just the delivery and prep area.”
“I know what it is.”
“Why so anxious? Everything’s going to work out just fine.” He walked slowly toward her. So did I.
Elle twisted the door handle but it was locked.
Trey stopped a few feet to her right side, clicked his tongue. I was close enough to touch her, or to take him out with a hard kick, like the one Red had given me. It got very quiet, then Trey pivoted around on one heel of his Italian shoes and ambled back to the wine and snack table.
“Wait,” I said to her under my breath.
We both watched Trey pour himself a plastic cup of the house white. He raised the cup in a toasting gesture, drank it in a single swallow. He made a slight face, set it down. “This stuff isn’t bad but not really my personal favorite.”
Then he came back to us. As he did, I heard voices from behind the closed door. So did Elle. I adjusted my stance again anticipating the need to hit something. It occurred to me I’d actually been doing that from the moment we had spotted the gallery.
“As requested,” Trey said, and took a key from his pocket. He looked at it and then at Elle. I thought he was going to stroke her hair but seemed more to regard her with a fascination from over the decades. “When we go in, you need to think about what you want out of this and how you’re going to help. And by the way, I don’t see any large container with an obscure Spanish oil painting in your possession.” He clicked his tongue again. “But then I probably wouldn’t have brought it, either.”
He put the key in the lock, twisted it, and then paused. “But on the other hand I did bring what I promised.”
He pushed the doors open to a long, rectangular storage room crammed on each side with double-decker shelves full of frames and boxes and the various tools of the trade. A couple of cluttered work benches were pushed together at the back, next to another door, probably leading to the alley. A tiny closet with toilet and sink were just inside the entryway, to the left.
I stepped in ahead of Elle and Trey. Two guys were at the back, by the tables. One, with a goatee, was leaning on a wooden cane, pants bagged out like they might be concealing bandages. That would be Reggie. The other was a skinny, youngish kid with unkempt straw-colored hair and a purple and green “Biloxi Rocks” T-shirt.
Then there was Lenora. Elle spotted her at the same time. I heard a small, suppressed gasp as she spun toward Trey and shot him a look beyond mortal rage. In the next second she was running to her aunt.
I’d seen a lot of things I wish I hadn’t in the course of my careers. What people could do to each other had long ago settled into that crack in my head, or soul, that started reopening yesterday. This would lodge in there pretty well.
They had suspended Lenora from a support beam at the far left corner of the room. Her hands were bound up above her head, a gag made of gray tape lashed across her mouth. She was completely naked. She might as well have been crucified.
Elle looked around in a panic for something to cover Lenora’s almost limp body, cursing at Trey as though each epithet were a hollow-point bullet.
I spotted a folded white drop cloth about the size of a bed sheet on one of the shelves, grabbed it, and took it to her. Nobody stopped us. More like they found it amusing.
“Lenora, Auntie Lenora, are you all right?”
Lenora seemed to bring her mind back from someplace far away. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I had the feeling it was for the first time since Trey had kidnapped her.
Elle pulled off the tape. Lenora gasped, taking in fresh breath. Then Elle draped the drop cloth around the small, trembling body as best she could. “Cut her down right now you sick piece of shit.”
“We’ll have a little talk first, I think.”
Elle started toward Trey until the kid grabbed her. I moved toward him but Reggie limped forward much faster than I would have thought, intercepting me. He raised a Beretta to my head. “Give me a fucking excuse.”
I stopped. After a moment, Elle stopped fighting against the kid.
Trey looked at us like trapped animals. Which we were. Which can lead to multiple outcomes. “Nobody’s going to hurt y
ou if you stay calm. Like I said.”
Elle pushed again against the kid’s hold. “Take her down. Let us go.”
Trey laughed. “Sounds like the old days playing down by the river.”
We stayed in position for a moment, some evil piece of choreography.
Then came a faint but resolute voice: “I’m okay, child. I’m okay.”
Elle stopped struggling, but in the same moment she noticed, for the first time, that the top joints of the middle two fingers on Lenora’s left hand were missing, caked over with dried blood. I guess the overall shock impact of Lenora’s condition had blocked the details. Elle’s face seemed to dissolve in horror.
“I see it,” I said. “But the bleeding’s stopped. There’s nothing to do right now—”
“No shit.” The words were still in Reggie’s mouth when I felt a blinding slash across the back of my head. I stumbled forward a couple of steps, but regained my balance. All I could see were flashes and pinprick sparkles. “That’s a start,” he elaborated. “Looks like you’ve already had a little payback, though.”
I turned to look at him, best I could. His face was twisted in hatred and gloating. A few scabs from stray No. 5 pellets. I could see his cane leaning against the wall.
“But not nearly as much as you’re gonna be getting.” He bitch-slapped me across my nose with the back of his hand.
More sparkles. It was getting hard to just stand straight. I thought about going for the pistol but it would be suicide. Mostly I hoped they didn’t see its outline under my shirt. They hadn’t even frisked me. Maybe I should have told Trey he needed to improve the quality of his help.
“I promised Reggie a free one,” Trey said, coming up to me. He took my face in his hand, not gently. I could see him trying to look into my eyes. Then he let me go and moved back.