by Lisa Sandlin
The receptionist smiled. Her plaid dress, hiked up to her thighs as she sat in the steno chair, was trimmed with a large white collar and white cuffs. She rolled her chair to the phone, punched a button, and held up a finger. “Just a minute,” she mouthed at Delpha.
Who nodded. She was thinking about Mr. Wertman and Mrs. Singer and asking them about shopkeepers named Anderson. They’d laughed when they explained that Anderson had been an important name in New Orleans, but before they were born. They were far too young to have known him, but who didn’t know of him? Tom Anderson was New Orleans history, the unofficial mayor of Storyville. Big restaurant, saloon, and all the—did she know what was Storyville?
Delpha knew. An old inmate had entertained a chow-hall table once, gabbing about a frolicsome district devoted to the sporting life.
“It was a place,” Delpha said, not adding: where whores lived.
The brother and sister painted Storyville in proper names: Iberville and Basin Streets, the houses called Mahogany Hall and the Phoenix, madams Minnie White and Jessie Brown. Tom Anderson with the reach of it all. Mardi Gras krewes and Buddy Bolden’s cornet. The brother and sister seemed to enjoy themselves, scattering this history before Delpha. Yes, Mrs. Singer had said, it was a place. Quite a place. And then it wasn’t anymore.
Delpha shifted herself on the couch. Why hadn’t she gotten a cashier’s check at the bank? She could’ve just left it for this smiling receptionist to pass on to Miles Blankenship. Delpha compared her white blouse and ironed black skirt, her well-worn black flats, to the short plaid dress with the oversize white collar, the style she’d glimpsed on magazine covers where models kicked out their legs at party angles. She felt like a drawing for ladies’ goods in a farm catalog.
Shut up, she told that thought. She was out on a work day doing a personal errand. She had a car to drive. Sometime very soon she’d buy a Mounds in the red wrapper, dark chocolate over coconut and an almond in each half, and eat it outside as it melted. But right now she was waiting here with her dishwashing savings in a non-indigent-sized envelope, paying her own way, and that was the name of that tune.
“Mr. Blankenship?” the woman said into the phone. “I have a Miss Wade out here wanting to pay an invoice—” She listened for a minute. “Oh, yes sir, I’ll check.” The receptionist put down the phone and told her Mr. Blankenship would like a word, then asked her if she had brought the invoice with her.
Delpha pushed it over. Then she opened her envelope and counted out $180 into the woman’s hastily offered hand. As the receptionist began to write something, Miles Blankenship strode out into the reception area. Another handsome suit and a faint pink on his cheeks. “Miss Wade,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I wanted to say hello. I hope you’ve recovered from your hospital stay.”
“Sure have.” She stood up and shook hands. “And I thank you again for what you did for me.”
“Just ran defense. You carried the ball. Attorney meetings tend to be forgettable, but not that one.”
Delpha had nothing to say to that, and she became aware of an awkward attention from the receptionist. Mr. Blankenship said, “I wanted to ask you, too, about the first trial you had, in 1959. You didn’t have an attorney?”
Her face closed. “No, sir. Not really.”
Mr. Blankenship looked pained. “After the Gideon case, I mean, after the law changed in ’63, you should have been released.”
“I know who Gideon was. He didn’t play his trumpet for me, Mr. Blankenship.”
“I see. Well. Someday I’d like to hear about your trial.”
Delpha pressed her lips together, nodding once.
He told her not to hesitate to call if he could ever be of service. “Sincere offer, Miss Wade. Nice to see you again.” He walked back the way he’d come. The receptionist’s curious gaze lasted a couple seconds longer then gave way to a smile. What a happy employee she was.
“That the receipt?” Delpha asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I wrote your payment down right there for your records and the date,” the receptionist said. “Covered all the bases. Can I help you with anything else? No? Then you have a nice day.”
Delpha walked out mindful of the power of her own two feet, climbed behind the wheel of the Dart, and creaked its balky door closed. In the rearview mirror, she made the Griffin & Kretchmer smile. She didn’t like how she looked in it.
OK, she’d put the $20 left in the envelope into her purse, and later she would insert the lightly-used business envelope back in its box with the others. That would do it.
She pulled into the bumpy parking lot, walked up the stairs and greeted her boss, who was stewing over a phone line that was not reaching Xavier Bell, wherever he was. Phelan strode out to reconnoiter the address Bell had given them on the Phelan Investigations contract and returned steaming. Turned out to be a liquor store. All right, their client would remain ignorant of his brother’s location for another day. Phelan needed to go talk to Anderson, anyway, confirm his relation to Bell. But Cheryl’s job nagged at him. He and Delpha spent a concentrated two hours on maps with meandering blue lines and blobs, identifying spots a boat might venture in to unload its grassy booty.
Phelan was still at it when Delpha realized she had left a base uncovered.
Delpha met Mrs. Singer at the shop’s door, where she was in the middle of turning the sign around to close. The bell tinkled as the shopkeeper let Delpha step in. Sun slanting through the wide windows lit the woman’s lined face. Delpha thought how when you had the right bones, a beautiful face stayed a beautiful face.
“Good afternoon. We’re closing a little early for the holiday, Miss …?”
“Wade.” Delpha didn’t know what holiday she could mean.
“Miss Wade. I remember. For the pearls you came back?”
“No, ‘fraid not, ma’am. I just have one more question. About somebody else. I’ll be quick.”
“Why not? We’ve just had a very nice sale, and as of two hours ago”—Mrs. Singer’s smile broadened—“we have a new grandchild in the family. Come up front. We can stay a short while.” She raised her voice. “Hershel, bring another glass. We have here a future customer.”
Delpha followed her past the display cases to the counter. The shawl collar of her pale gray suit had black piping, and her waist a narrow black belt. Her brother, Mr. Wertman, free of his apron, was bringing out a green bottle. He set down three tiny glasses and filled them with a clear, pale brown liquor.
“You like sherry? Surely you do.” He lifted his small glass of crystal, swept with images of ghost-white flowers.
Sherry was a girl’s name. Sherry was a song. Delpha was dying to ask the Wertman’s her question but found herself saying nothing, only touching her glass to theirs, taking care to be light about it.
“Whose grandchild is it?”
Mrs. Singer said, “Herschel’s youngest son has a son.” Sister and brother beamed at each other, privately somehow, though they were standing right in front of her.
Delpha still held up her glass, casting around for a right thing to say. “Well, I hope…I hope the little one has a happy life.” Then, with relief, she added, “Congratulations to you.” Hadn’t ever used this expression before that she could remember. She repeated it in her mind, Congratulations to you.
Mr. Wertman said, “Thank you, young lady. L’chaim.”
Delpha tilted her head at the unknown word then blinked at the taste of the cold, nutty liquid, a light but sharp alcohol the color of honey. The Wertmans smiled a different smile than the receptionist at the law office. The three of them sipped. Her urgent purpose sidetracked, Delpha felt gladly surprised to be in this place, right now, saying a new thing to friendly people, drinking from a fragile glass.
Relinquishing the privacy between themselves, Mrs. Singer said, “Today we sold a map, a fortunate acquisition from the sale of an estate…two years ago? It was drawn in the last years of the 16th century, and it shows the southern coast of the United
States. Of course not then the United States.”
“Not a fortunate acquisition. My sister has a keen eye. She knew at once that—”
“Herschel,” she stopped him. “Trade secrets, Miss Wade. Also called experience. And what did you want to know?” She leaned toward her brother. “She is considering pearls.”
“Pearls, every woman should have,” said Mr. Wertman. His gaze flicked over her plain clothes, but his polite expression didn’t sour. “Single strand?”
“Earrings,” said his sister, and the small black box materialized on the counter, its lid—embossed in gold with Wertman’s—popping open, its contents stealing Delpha’s gaze. Her lips parted slightly. How could it be that the gleam on white pearls consisted of the palest pink mixed with the palest gold? She raised her head, her eyebrows. Something—she didn’t know what—made this sister and brother laugh.
“My boss, well, we’d like to ask about another shop you might have known in New Orleans. Long shot, but was there a store that had birds, do you know?”
Mr. Wertman was nodding. “The birds brought in customers. Customers liked them. A clever gimmick, our father thought—but imagine the cleaning they had to do.”
“When we were small,” his sister said, “one of the sons invited us in to see the birds. Gold cages hanging in the store, cages painted pink and green. It was like colors were singing.”
Delpha’s eyes went from one to the other. “Their name was…”
“Sparrow.” They said the name together, but neither laughed at the coincidence.
“So there were Sparrow brothers?”
Mr. Wertman said that the Sparrows had two sons, mostly grown by the time he and his sister knew the neighborhood.
“We did business within a block of one another,” Mrs. Singer said. “We never…associated. The Sparrows would not have approved of that anyway, if you understand me.” She angled toward her brother. “Which son won a medal in the war?”
Mr. Wertman’s brow creased. “I don’t remember which was which. The Great War was before we were born, Miss.”
They stared at each other, and Mr. Wertman finally shrugged. “One of them won a medal. And didn’t…was it one of them who had a child that was put away?”
“Yes, it was, yes. Though again, which one…” Mrs. Singer’s hands opened. “Neighbors talked about that. Something not right, so one of them put his child away in an institution. Imagine.”
Delpha did not have to imagine “institution.” Did your parents know the boys’ parents?”
“Not after Kristallnacht. In Germany. You must know of that? WSMB—that was the radio station—and the papers reported that smashing of Jewish shops and synagogues, and…everything else. Not long after, someone threw a large stone through our window. A shopkeeper across the street saw one of the Sparrow men, one of the sons. Our father went and spoke to old Mr. Sparrow. He turned his back. After that, our parents stopped knowing them. For us, the Sparrows weren’t there. For them, no Wertmans.”
For a second the Wertmans’ lively faces appeared to be shaded in curves of charcoal. The cheer in the shop had drained. Delpha understood that she’d done that, as surely as if she’d dropped the delicate glass.
“The proprietor of a nearby restaurant helped my father glaze the new window. There were others like that. Later when Herschel went to the Army, our mother hung the blue star in the window.”
“Would you like more sherry?” Mr. Wertman’s finger left a damp print on the cold bottle.
Alcohol was a parole violation, but Delpha said yes. She had her information, but she found she longed for the mood to return, the light mood between the Wertmans that had spilled over onto her. It too was a discovery, and she realized that she was even more curious about that. She prolonged the conversation.
“Your client come and get his map yet?”
“Oh no, we’ll ship it to him in Miami. For his law office, he bought it. Would you like to see?”
“I would.”
Mr. Wertman produced from the other room a drab drawing only about a foot wide and not even as tall, expanded by a mat and a plain black frame. Delpha was disappointed. She’d expected something bright, maybe with gold on it, and much larger, say, the size of the U.S. maps of multi-colored states like the one that had hung on the wall of Gatesville’s day room. In that one, Texas was green, and Louisiana and Oklahoma were yellow.
How neat the design on the browned old paper was, though, with its edges marked off by squares and numbers. Its maker had labeled the country Flo ri da. He had included a chopped-short Florida, a southern coastline with inlets of water, and far up above, groups of pointy hills, the stray tree here and there.
Delpha looked up. “But…it’s worth a lot of money even if…if Florida isn’t shaped like that?”
“In 1597, Miss Wade—”
“Please, call me Delpha.”
Mrs. Singer inclined her head, her palm hovering over the map. It was clear she enjoyed gazing at it. “In 1597, Delpha, it was the height of knowledge that this cartographer showed the world. This is what they knew.”
This is what they knew. Cartographer. Delpha took in the unfamiliar word. The idea was not unfamiliar. He’d drawn what he knew. That was not much more than the shape of a coastline. Other people would draw different pictures, later, when more territory was known, all the way up to the colored map in the Gatesville day room. Which was correctly drawn. But nobody would pay a lot of money for that map, while they were paying it for this old one.
So, discoveries mattered. Even the beginnings of discoveries. They mattered in the world and to Delpha personally, and this idea struck her as a form of advancement. To know that about herself.
She sipped the cold wine, lifted back again into Mrs. Singer’s and her brother’s almost-restored mood, which was, she understood, held aloft by the grandson. The mood was a picture into a possible place where some people lived, as remarkable to Delpha at first sight as the old map had been to Mrs. Singer. As near as she could tell, this mood was a family place. They were long used to friendliness, this brother and sister, at ease. A searing feeling passed from her stomach into her chest. There could sometimes be friendliness in prison. Not ease. To make a mood like this took time and habit.
Delpha coveted it, this calm and friendly place she had just glimpsed. Yes, she did. Not so long ago, someone had asked her what she wanted. Here was something. How many years to make a thing like this? And with who?
Mrs. Singer added, “Cornelius Van Wytfliet was one of the first to map the New World. This is only one page of his atlas.”
“One page,” Delpha repeated. Oh. Like a road atlas for a territory without roads, this drawing was one page from a book of maps. That explained its size. It had been in a book. At the bottom, flowing from its boxed border upward to the curved coastline, Cornelius had drawn a broad field of wavy lines that meant water.
An idea lapped onto the shore of Delpha’s mind.
“I’ll go,” she said. “Thank you.” She would not say congratulations again, but she searched for something. “You said it was a holiday?”
Mr. Wertman capped the green bottle. “A Jewish holiday. Today is—”
“—the birthday of the universe,” Mrs. Singer finished. Keys jingled. “I’ll walk you to the door.”
XXXI
SHE WAS CLOSE to whispering, but Phelan recognized her voice when she said his name because he’d been waiting to recognize it.
“It’s Cheryl. Frank’s going out tonight.”
“When?”
“Round ten.”
“Know where?”
“Hell, no. The king doesn’t tell the peons where the ball’s gonna be.”
“Try to find out, Cheryl. I’m on come over by your house. You know the UTote’M?”
“Down the end of the street, sure. Hit it twice a day.”
“OK. Number of the pay phone there’s 361-5709. Write that down. You call me there. Try to get it out of him. Anything else you know?
”
“Yeah. It’s for sure only tonight. Not going off on a trip this time. He’s all bent out of shape about that.”
“Like how?”
“Like he doesn’t get to play with the big kids. He said to be ready to make pancakes and link sausage when I see him next. So I said, ‘And when would that be, Your Royal Highness?’”
“What’d he say?”
“‘Shut up.’”
“You sure you wanna keep this husband, Cheryl?”
“I wonder.” The receiver set down quietly.
Phelan sadly beheld the heat-rising feast he’d just unpacked onto a dinner plate. Pile of fried catfish, crispy hushpuppies. Side of slaw, side of beans, tartar sauce in three separate containers, lemon slices, and napkins.
He dumped most of the Styrofoam container of beans into his mouth. Then the hushpuppies. Couldn’t risk choking on catfish bones. Still chewing, he pissed and then stepped out of his clothes and deserted them on the bathroom floor. Yanked on dark pants and t-shirt, black low-tops, the Bellas Hess outfit. Had gear prepared: binoculars, a big flashlight and a little one, hundred dollars in twenties, his gun, and a ball cap that shadowed his face. In the glove compartment of his car was stashed a roll of dimes for the phone. In his trunk, among other equipment, a tire iron and a baseball bat. If there was something else he needed besides ESP, Gorilla Monsoon’s backhand chop, and a poncho of invisibility, he was sure to find out.
He made a phone call.
“What?” E.E. barked.
“The upholsterer,” Phelan said, “he’s going out tonight, and I’m calling you like I said.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. The wife’s gonna call back. She finds out, I find out.”
“We find out.”
“Iffy, E.E. Put somebody sneaky on him, and we’ll all caravan out to the location. Or send your guys out wherever they’ve been looking. Seeing as you’re the police and you have guys.”
Phelan coasted into a spot near the UTote’M’s outside pay phone with its dangling, ripped phone book, sat, his ball cap low. If he walked out to the curb, he could sight down Figg Street to Frank’s driveway and his wife’s pretty Mustang. Also a spavined pickup with new tires. Phelan had scoped out the pertinent geography soon after Cheryl’s visit to his office, including the pay phone’s number, which he memorized. Now, given the abused state of its directory, he hoped the phone was still in working order.