by James Sallis
And that was just how the world came back, sudden, staccato, as Don and I stood on the steps outside the church.
“Where can I drop you, Lew?”
“I think I’ll walk back. Maybe swing by the school.”
“C’mon. It’s five, six miles at least.”
“I’ll be fine, Don.”
“No you won’t. You haven’t been fine more than ten minutes in all the years I’ve known you. But if you’re saying you’ll get through this, yeah, I guess you will. You always do. Take care, friend. Buy you dinner some night?”
“Sounds good. I’ll call you.”
“No you won’t, Lew. You’ll mean to, but you won’t do it. And then eventually I’ll just come on over there and pry you out of the house and haul you off somewhere. Just like always.”
He started away, shaking his head.
“Don …”
“Yeah?” Turning back. I had never noticed before this just how deeply the web of fine lines had sunk everywhere into his face, or that flesh now hung slack beneath chin and cheekbones. Even his eyes had a grayish cast to them.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, don’t embarrass me in front of Verne’s friends. I hate it when you get all teary-eyed, I ever tell you that?”
“I mean it.”
“Yeah. I know you do. I know that.”
“You hear much from Josie?”
“Not so long as the checks keep coming. Shit, I don’t mean that. She sends me pictures of the kids every few months. She’s real good about doing that.”
“She still loves you, Don.”
“Yeah. Well. Guess I better go shut down a few crack houses, huh? Got a few hours left in the day. You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“I’m sure.”
He climbed into the Regal, his own, that he’d been driving at least ten years, waved to me in the rearview and hauled it into a lumbering U back toward down-town. The department kept offering him new official cars and he kept telling them his was fine, he was used to it.
I walked down State to Freret and turned right. Kids on bicycles heading to and from classes at Tulane or Loyola shot past me. I hadn’t had a car since Vicky left. At first I’d planned to buy one, but I kept putting it off for one reason or another, and after a while it just stopped being important. I’d got used to walking and liked it, and if I had to get somewhere I couldn’t walk, well, cabs in New Orleans are plentiful as roaches.
I crossed Napoleon and, one street over, turned onto General Pershing. Blackjack Pershing, they called him. Most of his mounted troops were “buffalo soldiers.” Black men. They performed so well that Pershing suggested only blacks should be taken into the armed services. Except for officers, of course.
Squirrels ran along power lines with blue jays screaming and swooping about them. It was garbage pickup day for this part of town; emptied plastic bins sat inverted or on their sides before most houses. This stretch was pure New Orleans, a jumble of wrought iron, balconies, leaded glass, gingerbread, Corinthian columns. Grand old homes well preserved, decaying ones once every bit as grand and now carved into multiple dwellings, simple raised cottages and bungalows.
I walked along thinking hard about Verne, and about something I’d read in an art journal, unable to sleep, at two or three that morning. The lives we lead, it said, the art or artifacts we produce, all these are but scrims, one layer over countless other layers, some that reveal, some that conceal.
Twenty-six years ago I killed a man. I was playing detective in those days, and I was pretty crazy back then too, so I guess I must have been trying on some half-imagined role as avenging angel. Like other roles I’ve tried, before and since, it didn’t fit.
The thing is, I rarely think about it. Though from time to time, walking these shabby streets (especially at night, it seems), I’ll glance into a stranger’s face and something there, in his eye, takes me back. Dostoyevsky said that we’re all guilty of everything. And while I never could bring myself to accept Christian notions of sin and atonement, there’s definitely something to karma. The things we do pile up on us, weigh us down. Or hold us in place, at very least.
Chapter Four
I tried to call Boudleaux after reading through the report, but his machine told me he was in Lafayette on business and would be away “indeterminately.” I could have tried motels up there, but he was almost certainly staying with family. And that spread it pretty thin, since one way or another he seemed to be related to just about everyone in Lafayette and Evangeline parishes.
Six months old now, the report was, like all his reports, thorough, concise and poorly spelled, typed on a Royal portable he’d had since college and to every appearance never once cleaned in all that time, e’s and o’s indistinguishable, a’s little blobs of ink atop frail curved spines. And valuable, like most documents, as much for what it did not say as for what it did.
The map is not the territory. The limits of your language are the limits of your world. Catchphrases from the fifties and from circa 1921.
Apparently Alouette, as Boudleaux discovered (hard upon stone-walling from Guidry and a pride of lawyers, and a call from that same judge, who casually inquired concerning the status of his PI license), had not been in her father’s home for some time.
Early spring of last year, one of her teachers, Mr. Sacher, homeroom and American history, began reporting her as nonattendant. Per procedure, he notified his supervisor and principal and attempted, on his own, to reach Alouette or her parents at the phone number listed in school files. Repeatedly, there was no answer at this number. Nor does any record of administrative response exist, though the principal is certain that he and Mr. Sacher “discussed the matter.”
Parents were listed in Alouette’s file as Horace and L. Guidry, and above Occupation (the forms were filled out by the students themselves) was entered Fuzzician. Sacher checked the phone book and found no home number (assuming it was unlisted) but in the yellow pages a Horace Guidry, Internist, with offices in the Touro area. When he called and finally talked his way past the receptionist and a nurse, Dr. Guidry listened a moment and told him he would have to get back to him. And when, later that afternoon, he did, it was by way of a conference call, their two phones looped into an intercom phone at the downtown offices of Bordelon, Bordelon and Schmidt.
Stating his concern, Sacher was informed by one of the lawyers that Alouette had upon her own volition and without notice, some weeks previously, departed her father’s board and care. Her present whereabouts were unknown, though efforts were still under way to locate her.
Had there been family difficulties? Sacher asked. Was Alouette under any unusual pressures?
You are her teacher, am I correct? a third voice inquired. And upon Sacher’s assent, went on: Then I’m afraid I see no compelling or appropriate reason for us to answer such an inquiry.
Boudleaux had found his way to Mr. Sacher within three hours of being engaged by Chip Landrieu. As it happened, he had a couple of cousins who worked in the mailroom at Bordelon, Bordelon and Schmidt. And so, not long after closing that same day, a Friday, Boudleaux knew what there was in B, B amp;S’s file concerning Alouette. Which wasn’t much.
Following a couple of practice runs, absences of two or three days the first time, then several weeks, from both of which she returned properly sorrowful and acquiescent, one Tuesday morning she headed off to school and to all appearances fell through a rabbit hole. Police were properly notified. Friends interviewed. Malls, clubs and other teenage water holes scouted. All to no avail.
The Guidrys had themselves engaged a local agency, South-East Investigations, to conduct a search for the girl. Clyde South and Michelle East were married, and Boudleaux knew them both. They were running into stone walls too.
To his report Boudleaux had appended a list of others he’d interviewed and (before being taken off the case) planned to.
On second or third reading, one of the attributions caught my eye. Counselor, it gave as occupation,
then: Foucher Women’s Shelter. Where Verne had been working the last few years. The name above was Juan Garces.
I called to be sure he was in, then walked over to Tchoupitoulas and grabbed a White Fleet cab. An elderly woman behind a minuscule desk in the lobby (it had once been the foyer where residents had mailboxes, and I hope there weren’t too many of them) directed me upstairs.
He was sitting before a computer monitor and swiveled partway around, hands staying on the keys, when, in the absence of a door, I knocked at the frame. He swung back to the keyboard, hit Save and Exit, came all the way back and got up. We shook hands.
“Sorry,” he said. “But you have to do what they want you to. You must be Mr. Griffin.” He waved me into a chair.
Uneven stacks of folders and stapled papers all but covered the table space around keyboard and computer. To the right at shoulder level, beside a narrow window, a plastic board was lined with yellow Post-It notes in a tiny blue script. Garces reached over and peeled off the top one, dropped it into the trashcan under the desk. The other wall was taken over, above, by a reproduction of Matisse’s Blue Frog/Yellow Nude (or is it the other way around? I can never remember) and, below, by a shelf of books running to Robert Pirsig, Genet, Laing and Szasz. I took note of Delany’s Dhalgren and The Motion of Light in Water.
Garces was fair-skinned with light blue eyes, and somehow gave the impression of being short and gangly at the same time. His dark hair was close-cropped. He wore a black T-shirt, pressed slacks, a linen sportcoat with the sleeves turned up a couple of times, cordovan loafers without socks. Fortyish.
“So what is it that I can help you with, Mr. Griffin? Something to do with a friend, you said on the phone.”
“LaVerne Landrieu.”
“Of course,” he said after a moment. “You’re Lewis: that Griffin. I didn’t connect, when you gave me your name earlier. I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin-”
“Lew.”
“Lew. It’s a loss to us all, you know. She made a difference in a lot of lives around here. But you must know that.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Oh. But whenever she spoke of you … You two haven’t been in touch, then?”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Do you mind my asking if there was any particular reason for that?”
“What I keep telling myself is that I didn’t think her marriage needed ghosts like me showing up on the stairs.”
“Did you meet Chip Landrieu?”
“Afterwards, yes.”
He nodded. “Things so often happen in the wrong order in our lives.”
“How well did you know Verne, Mr. Garces?”
“Richard.”
I pointed inquiringly back toward the doorframe, the name plaque beside it.
“No one outside my family ever calls me Juan. And no one, period, calls me Mr. Garces. But I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I mean, did the two of you ever talk? About personal things.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Once I found out who you were, I naturally assumed … We really should start this whole encounter again from scratch, I think. I assumed you knew LaVerne and I were close. That this was why you came here.”
The phone buzzed. He excused himself, picked it up, listened for a moment, then responded in Spanish that was far too rapid for me to follow. He hung up and penned a note that he added to the board.
“Over the years LaVerne and I became good friends, yes. It happened slowly, very slowly, and without either of us planning or even expecting it. People have always come to me to talk, that’s kind of how I got into all this. But that’s as far as it ever goes. And LaVerne was one to keep her distance; you knew that when you first talked to her. We were both private people. Never mixed much socially with those we work with. Try to keep it professional.”
“But you and Verne…”
“Yeah, and it was funny. I’d always been the one to listen. But after a while-we’d go out for coffee after work, or sometimes later on we’d meet for breakfast in the morning-I found myself babbling on and on about my problems, my previous or current live-in. Or my relationship with my parents, for God’s sake. That had never happened before, and I’ve been doing this work for a long time. Then one morning when the plates have been cleared and we’re sitting there over a final cup of coffee she says to me: I want to tell you about my life, I want someone to know all this.”
“People here didn’t know?”
“What they knew was that this woman had paid her dues at one of the country’s toughest rape centers, and then on her own she had gone back to school and got a degree in psychology and now here she was, twelve or fourteen hours a day sometimes. That’s all they had to know.”
He looked briefly out the window. A jay screamed as it swept across the pane and out of sight.
“I listen, sometimes all day and part of the night, to people’s problems. I know what it’s like out there, and how little I can do. One of my clients, last month her boyfriend fucked their year-old daughter and then slammed her headfirst against the wall ‘so she wouldn’t tell.’ I’ve got pregnant mothers trying to live out of Dumpsters and a shopping cart. And husbands or parents swooping in all the time with their lawyers and threats trying to take my clients’ kids away, always with this same attitude, like if I just’ll listen to them, I’ll know what’s right. I don’t know what’s right, Lew.”
He looked back at me. “I’m sorry. A little off track there. But there are days, and this is one of them, when I have to wonder what my place really is in all this.”
“I understand.”
“Yeah. You pretty much lived it, LaVerne said.”
“Not anymore.”
“Well. Maybe not. Not on the surface, anyway.”
I thought of a review of my third novel, published in a small magazine specializing in mysteries. I’ve had dozens of bad reviews, most of them justified, I’m sure, but that was the only one I ever felt unfair. Cadging personal details from my publisher and a common acquaintance, the reviewer proceeded to ignore my novel and instead to review me, claiming that Black Hornet was nothing more than a record, a document, of my personal failures.
Maybe that reviewer was right. And maybe Richard Garces was right, too. Who knows what evil …? Well, the Shadow do. Or he be sposed to, at any rate.
“Over the next months,” Garces went on, “LaVerne told me what I guess must be her whole life story. Even for me, I have to say, it was something of a revelation. And then, to think that she could come through all that and arrive where she did.”
“She was rather an amazing woman.”
“I don’t think any of us ever quite realized how amazing.”
“We don’t, usually. Not till afterwards. Things happening in the wrong order, like you say.”
“Yeah.” We were both quiet a moment. “She told me one night how she waited for you for over two hours outside, what was it, a bus station? Your friend from Paris-”
“Vicky.”
“-had just gotten on the plane to go back, and I guess this was a little after LaVerne and Guidry split up, when she’d already been working rape-crisis for a while. You hadn’t seen each other, I guess, for a long time by then, and she went down there without any idea what to expect, how you’d react. Or even how she felt about it all herself.”
“ ‘Whatever works. You wait and see.’ ”
“Right. And she told me that that was maybe the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. That she’d never been more afraid than she was that night, and the next few days. I don’t know. But that story has really stayed with me. Whenever I think about making decisions, really hard ones, I still think about that.”
“She ever talk much about when she and Guidry were together?”
He shook his head. “That whole period was kind of walled off. She did once tell me that the whole time she was married to Dr. Guidry she felt she was masked, as for Mardi Gras, and that no one would ever b
e able to see who she really was, however closely they looked. I remember thinking it was something like the way people remember war experiences: these brief, incredibly concentrated periods of time that become central to their lives and all-consuming, but then that time’s gone and the experiences are essentially meaningless in the everyday practical world around them, and they let them go. Except in a way I guess LaVerne was talking about a period of peace, surrounded by war.”
“You sure of that?”
“Which part?”
“The peace part.”
“You mean, was the period as tranquil as it appeared?”
“Right.”
“Few periods are, really-even after our memory’s got to work on them. But I more or less felt she wanted somehow to preserve that time, keep it apart. Pure, in a manner of speaking.”
“Maybe so. But she and Guidry split, not at all too peacefully from what little I know. So what happened? Did they get along? Were there problems between them, even early on?”
Garces shrugged. “The book’s closed.”
“So maybe we’ll have to go see the movie.”
I stood and thanked him for his time and help. Then in a time-honored tradition stretching back from Columbo at least to Porfiry Petrovich, I thought of one more thing. “So why do you think LaVerne wouldn’t talk about that period with you, when she talked about everything else?”
“I really don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”
“Was there something different about it? Not just that she was chasing the American Dream and it almost caught her. But something-I don’t know-traumatic, maybe?”
He hesitated, but when he glanced at me then, we both knew.
“You mean her daughter.”
I nodded. He exhaled.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to mislead you. Hell, of course I was; nothing else I can call it. But LaVerne had told me you didn’t know about Alouette. She didn’t talk about her very much herself. I guess things hadn’t gone well for a long time.”
“And then they didn’t go at all.”