House of Blues

by Julie Smith

  What kind of stupid, dammit? But she held her tongue, knowing nothing she could say would speed up the process.

  Evie shrugged, obviously still trying to make sense of it. "I just got involved with somebody I didn't know that well. When I think back on it, I guess thats what happened. He seemed like a pillar of the community. You know. Lawyer. Nice house and everything"—she indicated the room surrounding them—"but I guess when you get down to it, I just . . . really didn't know him. I should have known. I never dated anybody that nice before. Men like that don't like me; why would they? But I thought, since I cleaned up and everything—"

  Cleaned up. Right. "Evie, what happened?"

  "I got drunk. I got drunk and kidnapped Sally so we could be a happy little family .... "

  Reed couldn't help herself: "You must have been seriously loaded."

  "Don't, Reed. Just don't, okay? Don't you think I feel bad enough?"

  "Sorry." But she wasn't. She felt like a Stephen King character, the imprisoned writer in Misery, at the mercy of a lunatic.

  Sally said, "Mama? Go home now? Daddy?"

  "Soon, honey. Soon." Reed's conscience throbbed. She didn't believe in lying to children. But she didn't need an argument now. For the moment, Evie had replaced her ditsiness with a look of determination. ''When things went wrong—you know, at Mother and Daddy's—I came to Mo. My boyfriend. I mean, what else would you do? I thought he'd protect me. But he ordered both of us locked up; all three of us, I mean. I don't know why. I swear I don't. When he came to talk to me that night, all he said was, there was a huge meeting going on here and he'd have to get back to me. I didn't even realize I was locked in until I tried to leave the bedroom."

  "Meeting," said Reed. "That explains what Barron Piggott was doing here. And Bruce Smallwood and Lafayette Goodyear."

  She looked up at her sister. "But the boyfriend, Evie. A thug named Mo!"

  "His name is Maurice Gresham and he's a very nice—"

  "Maurice Gresham?"

  "You know him?"

  "Very well. He and his wife are regulars at the restaurant. Every Tuesday night, just about."

  "Wife! Did you say wife?" Evie's eyes flicked, panicky.

  "Evie, he's no lawyer. And he couldn't possibly own this house. He's a cop—and not a chief or anything either. I don't know if he's even a sergeant."

  Behind Evie the door flew open and the entrance was filled with one of the real big guys she'd mentioned, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. Pointing a gun at the three of them.

  He stepped into the room, the Dragon behind him.

  Evie was right. There was something strange about the Dragon, if that's who Anna was; something shaky and slightly out of control. Her face was chalky and her skin drawn. She looked as if she'd had a horrible shock.

  The big guy put his gun away and began the task of peeling Sally off her mother.

  * * *

  Skip couldn't say when she'd last been to church on Sunday. She didn't know what to wear. Pants were just about all she had, so they'd have to be okay. Maybe with a silk blouse and some nice earrings. Showing respect was the thing. As if she'd taken care. She was puttering around looking for something suitable when she heard Steve sit up in bed and stretch. He was a slow starter in the morning.

  She said, "You like a little investigative jaunt. How about church?"

  "I think I'll pass. I went once."

  She had occasion later to wish he'd gone, so she'd have a reality check on what happened. She'd been a lot more than once, and it was always the same, except that day.

  The church, in a part of the Ninth Ward to which not even she had ever been, was surprisingly affluent—meaning it was a small neat wooden building capable of holding about a hundred people, instead of a garage or someone's living room, which was what she'd imagined.

  The neighborhood was one of tiny houses, quiet-looking, not slummy at all, but there were no sidewalks. Probably the families who lived here had been around for more than a generation.

  The church was dim. After Skip's eyes had grown accustomed, she saw that it had two altars, one in front and one in back, each holding so many statues of saints she wondered how anyone dusted them all. If there were copies of the original St. Expedite, no doubt one was here.

  Though the service had started, there were only a few people in the pews, fifteen or sixteen, she thought; mostly women. It looked like a poor black neighborhood church in the nineties, struggling to keep even a few old women in the congregation, not the sort that Evie would ever even find, let alone be persuaded to join. Skip thought of leaving, but didn't for two reasons.

  One was that a woman turned around, saw her, and beamed.

  "Welcome," she whispered, and her face was so warm, so gentle, that it would have been churlish to leave after that.

  The other was that there were three white people in a back pew, all young, and even though scrubbed-up for church, a little on the scruffy side. The sort of people she could picture Evie hanging with.

  In fact, the one woman among them might almost have been Evie—she was blond and very pretty, but too thin, too pale, a little druggy-looking. But she was younger than Evie by five or ten years, Skip guessed.

  Still. Perhaps there was something here—some ministry to addicts; free food after the service.

  Something.

  She sat down and looked around.

  She needn't have worried about getting the uniform right. One woman—though not in the choir, which consisted of five or six people in street clothes—wore what appeared to be a pink choir robe.

  Others had on respectable dresses with nylons and heels; generic church clothes. Two or three wore pantsuits.

  Another, an older woman with huge dark-rimmed glasses, wore a long white robe and matching wrapped head garment. She was tall and looked like some elegant African elder, perhaps dressed for a party at the consulate of a struggling nation.

  The men wore carefully pressed shirts tucked into clean dark pants, collars open; the building wasn't air-conditioned.

  The clergyman who delivered the sermon—Skip never did catch his title—wore an elaborate robe, blue satin lined with pink, and a hat like a bishop's miter. She thought of an essay she had once read by Zora Neale Hurston praising black people, her own people, for their exuberance, and Skip would have been happy to praise the minister's outfit instead of the Lord.

  She wasn't sure what denomination she'd wandered into, but she was pretty sure it wasn't Lutheran or Presbyterian. Though the congregation was tiny, there was not only a pianist, but a drummer, and the minuscule choir could rock out as if it were a hundred strong.

  There was quite a lot of music and some readings, done by different church members, and there were a number of small rituals that Skip had never seen before. At one point the entire congregation got up and walked in a circle. Why, she couldn't have said.

  There were anointings, with perfume, apparently. Once again she wasn't sure why.

  People were given an opportunity to testify about the way their spiritual lives were shaping up. One woman got on a roll, speaking in a kind of rhythmic way, about the unfortunate way her husband had treated her and how Jesus had gotten her through it. She started to sway as she talked, and Skip had a premonition about what was going to happen: She's going to flip out in some way and they're going to say she's "in the spirit" or some such.

  But she didn't. She cried through the last third of her testimony, which sounded as if it had been written and rehearsed, but she didn't flip out.

  Most of the other testimony was a great deal more informal, involving thanks for simple things, mostly: good weather and a good night's sleep; food; family.

  Skip wasn't too sure what moved people to get up and talk, if they had nothing more important to impart than that—the desire to participate, she thought, the need not to be left out.

  One of the white people spoke. He said he had a plant that was growing well and he was enjoying the way God was tending it. Marijuana
was Skip's guess.

  At one point there was something called a "hand blessing," in which people lined up to put a hand on the Bible, it looked like, and say a private prayer. You put down a dollar bill at the time, if you wanted to be so blessed, which struck Skip as at least as good a deal as playing Lotto. She did it herself, praying for enlightenment on the subject of Evie, figuring it couldn't hurt.

  Back in her seat, she thought: What did I do that for?

  The service was long, but it built. Skip tried to explain it later, to Steve, but she couldn't. What she noticed about halfway through was that her hands tingled and her ears rang a little bit.

  When the congregation was invited up to the altar to pray, in some sort of ritual that looked like communion without the bread and wine, she found herself going, though she knew she didn't have to, that it would have been perfectly acceptable to stay where she was.

  She didn't especially believe in God, at least not this one, or at least didn't want any contact with him, after the way he ordered all that slaughter in the Old Testament and the way everyone spoiling to get in a war used his name as a rallying cry. But there she was, kneeling in some unknown and probably unheard—of neighborhood in the middle of nowhere that probably wasn't even on a map, with fifteen or sixteen strangers whose lives she probably couldn't begin to fathom if they spent the next three weeks telling her their family histories.

  And something odd happened to her. Something came up through her bent knees—or perhaps it started in her feet, she couldn't be sure—and coursed through her body. It couldn't have been the famous "spirit" because surely that came down instead of up; but it was something. She felt an odd peace afterward, a curious fulfillment.

  Holy shit. Maybe that was a religious experience.

  Of course it was, stupid. You're in a church. Anything that happens here is one by definition.

  Uh-uh. What about that woman with the little boy?

  At the beginning of the service, a little boy had started to cry and his mother had hit him with a belt in the pew beside her, apparently brought especially for the purpose.

  Watching her wasn't a religious experience.

  But what the odd occurrence was, she couldn't decide. Perhaps because it was a small, very focused group, something was unleashed that she hadn't experienced before—some kind of directed energy.

  This was why she thought later that she needed Steve for a reality check. She couldn't even really describe the thing, much less be sure it was real.

  Afterward, she was about to go talk to the minister when a small woman tapped her on the back. "Aren't you Skip Langdon?"

  She turned around, amazed. New Orleans was tiny in some ways—you always knew someone wherever you went—but this time it was not only unlikely, it was impossible. This neighborhood was probably unknown even to the census takers.

  "I'm Emmaleen Boucree. Tyrone's mother? I saw you at a concert once, and Joel showed you to me."

  She was from the family of musicians that had produced Darryl. Skip blurted, "What on earth are you doing here?"

  Emmaleen smiled. "This my old church. I went to this church years ago. My mama still live in the neighborhood, but she gettin' on now. Really gettin' on. She ain' really well enough to come to church. I just come over and bring her something to eat on Sundays and I drop in for services when I have time. We all go to Spiritual churches, all us Boucrees—didn't you know that?"

  "Spiritual churches?" Weren't all churches spiritual?

  "Oh, yeah. We kind of different." She cackled.

  "It was—um, a beautiful service."

  "Was, wasn't it? But kind of tame. You should see it when folks really get goin'—come sometime to the Friday evenin' healin' service; then you really see something. Now how can we help you?"

  Well, I had this funny feeling when I was supposed to be praying, and I was just wondering—was that God or anything?

  "You didn't come here to get touched by the spirit, did you? Miss Langdon, you with me?"

  "Sorry, I guess I spaced out. I'm trying to find someone named Evelyne Hebert. Everyone calls her Evie. Do you know if she goes to this church?"

  "Don' ring a bell. Which I think prob'ly means no." She waved an arm. "You can see it's kind of a shrinking deal anymore—Sunday mornin's at least. I think the Friday night healin's go a little better, probably. L'es go ask somebody who knows."

  She took Skip to the fancifully dressed clergyman, who confirmed that no Evelyne or Evie Hebert, or anyone answering her description, was a member of the church or had been. But he said Skip was invited to come back any time she wanted to and bring all her friends.

  "We glad to have you any time," he said. He shook her hand.

  "We glad to have you," he repeated. And he smiled so benignly that it made her wonder why smiles like that were missing from her life most of the time.

  She had time to go home for lunch before her second appointment, and when she arrived, the kids were in the courtyard with Angel, Steve, Jimmy Dee, and Darryl Boucree, the men drinking coffee at a table under an umbrella. The smaller animals frolicked in the sun, and the day was so perfect it was as if Arthur Hebert were alive again and Sally was home with her parents, and Jim had never gone on that stakeout with her.

  "Darryl. What are you doing here?"

  He got up to kiss her, and she felt the current that was always there. She wondered if it was visible to the naked eye; Steve knew she'd been interested in someone last year, but he didn't know it was Darryl.

  "I came to bring the new baby a toy." She saw that Angel had some kind of chew—thing, which the kids kept snatching and throwing.

  "I saw your Aunt Emmaleen this morning. At least I guess Tyrone's mother's your aunt."

  "Great-aunt, I think. Even I get it mixed up."

  Steve said, "Where'd you see her?"

  "Church. There were less than twenty people there and one of them was Emmaleen Boucree."

  "Well, if it was church, that makes sense," said Darryl. "The Boucrees are very large on religion. That's why there's so much good music in those churches out there."

  "What's a spiritual church?"

  "You mean you just went to one and you don't know? Well, I been in 'em all my life—not sure I do either. We're big on statues, I'll tell you that. And you should see it when somebody gets baptized?

  Skip was silent for a minute.

  "What is it?" Steve put a hand over hers. Faintly embarrassed at the gesture, she glanced at Darryl out of the corner of her eye.

  "I don't know. I was just feeling left out, I guess."

  "Left out of what?"

  "Oh, a culture worth having."

  Darryl said, "You one of those white people wants to be black?"

  Skip couldn't think of an answer.

  "Quit looking sheepish," said Jimmy Dee.

  "Well, if you are, I don't blame you," said Darryl, and he leaned over to tweak her cheek, with Steve sitting right there. Absolutely undaunted, Steve kept beaming, still covering her hand with his.

  I wonder what it would be like to trust somebody like that? Why can't I be like Steve?

  From the first moment they'd met, Steve had never given her the slightest reason to think him other than utterly devoted to her, and more than once she'd nearly destroyed the relationship with her doubts.

  He must have had a nice mama.

  The thought made her glance over at Sheila and Kenny, who had no mama at all.

  I hope I can be decent to them. Just give them a little something they can use later. Something; just a little something.

  "I'm hungry," said Kenny, and Jimmy Dee went off to make seafood salad.

  They ate outside, Skip between Steve and Darryl, enjoying as great a sense of well-being as a baby in the womb.

  Why can't I have them both? she thought, knowing she was a fool for thinking it; wondering if adolescence would ever end.

  Before she left for the Blood of the Lamb Divine Evangelical Following, Layne dropped by and Steve and Da
rryl took the kids to find a park for Angel to romp in. It was a weird setup, she thought, not exactly Dan Quayle's notion of the ideal family. But for the moment, just for today, she felt completely happy.

  The Following was in Metairie, in a freshly painted but modest building meant to be lived—in, but, like its owners, born again. If the church lady who'd made the appointment had seemed slightly testy, the one who answered the door more than made up for it. She had on some kind of white summer dress that perfectly set off her chocolate skin, and she wore a yellow headband. Her smile was as wide as St. Charles Avenue and her voice sweet as a pound of pralines. In fact, she was so full of southern hospitality, you'd have thought she'd spent her whole life collecting beauty titles, which she probably had.

  "Welcome to our home," she said in the voice of a docent at a museum. "I am Nikki Pigeon and I would like to say on behalf of the Reverend Mr. Errol Jacomine that we are delighted to have you here today."

  She stepped away from the door so the honored guest could enter, and Skip found herself staring at a smallish white man in a guayabera shirt, sitting on a Victorian love seat upholstered in crimson velvet. Grouped around the love seat were six or eight wooden chairs, not turned to face each other for conversation, but also confronting the door. Each chair was occupied by a man or woman, black or white, young or old—it was an artfully mixed group that gave a peculiar impression of courtiers surrounding a king. The king rose to greet her. When he did, so did everyone else, and Skip knew instantly there was something very wrong here. The king stepped forward. "Hello, hello, Detective Langdon. I am Errol Jacomine. May I congratulate you on the wonderful job you did with the Kavanagh case and express my deepest sympathy about your partner."

  "You seem to know a lot about me." Way too much.

  "Why, you're a very famous young lady." When he smiled, they all did.

  He was average height, even a little short, and slight, with a bit of a bulge at the center. His face was some kind of crude cross between Cajun and redneck—dark hair, fine nose, but mean little eyes and sinewy neck. He parted his hair on the side, and it was a little curly, slightly unruly, which must have given him fits. He looked like the sort of person who'd expect every hair to toe the line. Even if she hadn't felt she had to hose off the smarm after shaking hands with him, she couldn't see what could possibly make him a charismatic leader, though apparently he was to at least the eight people in this room.