Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  She was brown-eyed and had long curly brown hair. She had a little pooch to her belly and her legs jiggled when she danced. But the more twenties she got, the more she shook it.

  I pulled up a chair – the sound of the funk deafening – and leaned into Malcolm. He gave me a pound and offered me a Newport from his pack, his cigarette catching in the side of his mouth by his gold tooth.

  “Where’s ALIAS?” I asked. The music shifted to this old Prince tune about not having to watch Dynasty to have an attitude, and Malcolm ran with it, bobbing his head, cigarette dangling from his lips as he listened.

  “You gonna get that man that took all that money?” Malcolm took a sip of the beer. He’d been smoking it up and his eyes were a little tight. He just kind of hummed each word out of his mouth. Told me he loved me. Loved me for helping his big brother out. He asked if I wanted a cigarette again and I said I did.

  He handed me the pack.

  “I know you always bummin’ off people, right.”

  I appreciated the gesture; he was into respect. Last year when two shitbags had almost killed Loretta, the Paris brothers were the first at the hospital. Malcolm called me about every day after that wanting to know what he could do. He would’ve killed somebody if I’d asked him.

  I took a cigarette and tucked the pack in my jacket.

  “I need to borrow ALIAS.”

  “Take ’im,” Malcolm said. “Boy played out.”

  “Was Dio like that?”

  “Dio was nothin’ but heart,” Malcolm said. I still saw the boy’s face in the hardened man. He still had the same soft eyes and nappy hair from when he used to come by practice with Teddy. Fifteen and running errands for his big brother.

  Malcolm cupped a cigarette to his face, smoke fingering its way up over the lines and creases the last ten years had left.

  “That what killed him?”

  “I don’t know what killed him, man,” Malcolm said. He turned away and took a long drag off the Newport and a deep swig off the forty. “I always thought it was Cash that snatched his ass.”

  “Looking forward to meeting him.”

  “Be careful, brother,” he said. “The man could turn Mike Tyson into his bitch. He likes to make you bow down. Bleed a little bit to his respect.”

  “You think Cash took ALIAS for the money?”

  Malcolm shrugged. “Naw,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to ALIAS? Some white man worked him. That ain’t Cash. He don’t play.”

  “So I heard,” I said. “What happened with Dio?”

  His smile turned.

  “Couple of men took him last year.”

  “Stuffed him in a van at that Uptown club?”

  He nodded.

  “And you don’t think that’s connected to ALIAS?”

  “Why would it be?” he said. “Some hustlers took him down. He’s dead. We’ll never find him.”

  “Police said it was you.”

  Malcolm stuck the cigarette in his mouth and inched closer to my face. He mouthed the word “Shit,” and turned his back to me. “Goddamn, I used to respect you,” he said. “You just like ’em all. Fuck this. I don’t care if I told Teddy to find you.”

  He got up and strutted away, his football jersey un-tucked, and took a long swig from his forty before wrapping his long arms around two of the dancers.

  I found and followed a hallway through a back room where flickered patterns of red and blue lights played in small, individual coves.

  ALIAS lay on a round bed with a young girl, really beautiful with her long black hair partially covered in a black bandanna and long slender legs. She stretched out on top of his back, hugging him tight almost like he was a life preserver, as he – oblivious to her – worked out some aggression on a video game with dragons and knights.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “You get what you need?”

  “No.”

  “I told you, Old School,” he said, pulling on his baseball cap. “You wouldn’t listen. These people done gone. No faces. No names. How you supposed to come through for Teddy? You best call him now and tell him to take a long ride out of New Orleans.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What else you gonna do?”

  “I’m workin’ on it.”

  “Better work fast.”

  “Come on.”

  He patted the young girl’s right hand that gripped him tight, her body prone on his, and she slowly slid off of him. Wordless. Her eyes accusing me for taking him away. She tucked her hair back into her bandanna and stripped off a long shirt to reveal a complicated array of belts, garters, lace, and buckles.

  She was fourteen and then she was an adult.

  ALIAS checked himself in the mirror, grabbed a Saints ball cap that was perched on the edge of the chair, and nodded at me. “Let’s roll.”

  15

  ALIAS WAS HUNGRY and I was fresh out of ideas. But I’d made a ton of calls and hoped Curtis’s countryfied lyin’ ass would come through for once. I checked the cell phone, willing it to ring, but it didn’t while we sat at the counter of the Camellia Grill waiting on ALIAS’s hamburger. I’d ordered an omelette and a cup of coffee. It was about ten o’clock and I was tired. I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water and returned to the seat where ALIAS was already eating. I thought about Maggie’s porch and these great old green chairs she had where we kicked back and talked all night.

  The Camellia Grill was a little diner in a small white house at the end of the streetcar tracks near the turnaround in Carrollton. After being in the humidity all day, the air-conditioning felt nice, and for a long time, ALIAS and I didn’t talk.

  “You trust Malcolm?” I asked.

  He nodded and took another bite.

  “What about Teddy?”

  “Sure.”

  “Malcolm ever ask you for money?”

  He shook his head, looking confused. I passed him some ketchup and asked the waiter for some Crystal sauce. Just right on an omelette.

  “Is Teddy gonna die?” ALIAS asked.

  “No.”

  “How you know?”

  “’Cause Teddy can talk his way out of anything.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean Teddy knows how to survive.”

  “So why you workin’ so hard?”

  “Just in case.”

  “Cash is evil.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Me and him know each other. He offered me money to get on his label.”

  “You gonna leave Teddy?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What do you want to be when you’re grown up?” I asked.

  “I am grown up.”

  “You’re fifteen.”

  “I’m a man,” he said.

  “You like women?”

  “They a’ight.”

  “Just all right.”

  “Yeah, I like them.”

  He looked away from me and dabbled a fry into the ketchup.

  “I have a woman in Mississippi that’s pretty pissed at me.”

  “You fuck someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Get drunk?”

  “No.”

  “Then what she bitchin’ ’bout?”

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow and she had something planned.”

  He finished off the burger and carefully poured more ketchup in a neat little pile. He liked to keep everything separate. There was no mixing of ketchup and fries till he was ready.

  “Who was that girl at the club?”

  “Tamika.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A friend.”

  “She’s a kid.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “She use her sister’s driver’s license so she can dance. She ain’t bad. She can shake her ass and shit.”

  The streetcar passed underneath the oaks outside. A priest and a woman with a bruise under her eye walked in and found a seat by the bathroom. I finished the omelette and drank some more coffee.

&
nbsp; “Where we gonna head next?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I excused myself and walked outside, trying Curtis again. The phone rang about six times before he answered. He sounded out of breath.

  “Stella got me doin’ this exercise tape, got that black dude that’s some kind of big star in Hong Kong. You know he got that funny head that look like a turtle? Man, that shit kickin’ my ass.”

  “What you got?” I watched my truck across the street and a couple of kids skateboarding around it. Crime lights scattered on my hood and I heard some bottleneck guitar playing at a biker bar in the crook of St. Charles.

  “Pinky’s Bar.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s in the Marigny but ain’t no fag place or anything,” Curtis said. I heard Stella yelling at him. “Ask for Fred. You’ll get what you need.”

  16

  PINKY’S SPECIALIZED in kick-ass punk music, explosive drinks, and a Tuesday-night bondage show, or so I heard from Curtis. I’d left my leather mask back home and I never owned a whip in my life but decided I’d be safe. I told ALIAS he could wait in the truck, but he said he wanted to see this place. He said freaks were interesting and wanted to know if it was like that shit in Pulp Fiction. I’d parked off Elysian Fields and Chartres by a methadone clinic and a vegetarian restaurant that offered discounts to same-sex couples. A few years back, I wouldn’t have even driven through this neighborhood; the gunshots and violence were constant. But a few years ago, the homosexual community had taken over the Marigny, cleaning it up and making it their own. But now the historic district right by the Quarter was going through another change. Gentrification. Now it was hipper than Uptown and way too cool for the Quarter.

  And Pinky’s, I think, was supposed to be too cool for anyone.

  A nice neon sign of a forties pinup in a pink nightgown hung over the vinyl padded door with a diamond glass for a window. Nice curvy butt and shoulders and blond hair on top of her head in ribbons. She winked at you, holding a hand of cards. Pink neon surrounding her body. From inside, Johnny Cash was singing “That Lucky Old Sun,” the Ray Charles number.

  A grizzled white dude with multiple piercings and a shaved head smoked a clove cigarette behind the bar and flipped through a copy of Newsweek. A photo of George W. Bush on the cover looking intense. He nodded along with the article as I waited for a little service.

  “What’ll it be?” he asked. He was British.

  “Two Cokes.”

  “I want a beer,” ALIAS said.

  “One Coke and a Barq’s.”

  “Man, that’s root beer.”

  “No shit.”

  ALIAS walked off to the jukebox.

  “I’m also looking for a guy named Fred Moore,” I said.

  “She’s not in.”

  “She?”

  “She’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “She had to pick up the band.”

  We waited as the bar really opened up. The lights dimmed. More pink neon. Black-and-white photos of forties B actors and movie posters for these noir films that I didn’t even know lined the walls. A few Bettie Page flicks. Some sixties Roger Corman stuff. ALIAS loaded up the jukebox with some rap music I’d never heard.

  The waitresses walked in and started getting ready for the night. Brunette and blond. They were all beautiful and young and hard as hell. Their pasty white faces never saw the sun. Deep red lips outlined in black and hair up in Andrews Sisters configurations. Tight black Ts with glitter sayings: BITCH and HOT STUFF and double dice on snake eyes. They all wore combat boots and black socks.

  ALIAS gave me a wild stare over the back of one of the girls and mouthed the word “Freak.”

  A few minutes later, an older woman with hair so blond I wasn’t too sure it wasn’t white walked in the door with a group of tired kids hauling guitars and pieces of a drum kit. She pointed out the stage cast in a red light, walked over to the bar, and asked the pierced Brit for the mail.

  He handed some stuff to her but didn’t mention me. She had on large black sunglasses in the darkened bar. Long black shirt, tight black pants.

  I introduced myself and said I’d like to talk to her about some business in private. Johnny Cash came back on in the shuffle and sang about God havin’ a heaven for country trash.

  “I do my business here. You don’t like, then fuck off. This is my place.”

  She sat at the bar stool next to me. She was in her late forties or early fifties. She reminded me of Deborah Harry if Deborah Harry lived an even tougher life. She lit a long cigarette.

  “Who was Pinky?”

  “My mother.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit,” she said. “I’ve heard that more GIs jacked off to her than Betty Grable.”

  “You must be proud.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “I had one of those posters of Farrah Fawcett. Got me through puberty.”

  “You must be proud too.”

  “I have guilt.”

  She took a long draw of cigarette and nodded about ten times, letting the smoke just float out of the corner of her mouth. Her mouth looked like a shrunken, dead rose. She kept looking over my shoulder at ALIAS. She watched him as she played with her cigarette.

  Fred motioned for the bartender. “Watch that kid.”

  The bartender nodded.

  “The kid’s with me.”

  “What are you, into some kind of Big Brother program?” she said. “Get rid of that guilt you got.”

  “I heard you could lead me to someone who conned a friend of mine.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Great question,” I said. “I can arrange money.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Curtis Lee.”

  “Thought he was on the Farm.”

  “Got out.”

  “I would’ve stayed if I was married to that wretched woman.”

  “He loves her.”

  “Curtis has problems.”

  “Maybe.”

  She walked off, spoke to the band for a few minutes, and then returned to the bar. Punks began to fill up the place, all black-T-shirted and pierced, tattoos muraling their arms. Heads shaved. Hair moussed up in impossible directions.

  “What do you want to know?”

  I repeated the story about Teddy, the kid, and the con. The man with cauliflower ears. She listened.

  “How much money did he lose?”

  “That’s for you to find out and then tell me who I need to find.”

  She shrugged. “How much?”

  “Has to come through first.”

  “I haven’t run a game in five years.”

  I ordered another Coke. She paid for it and I appreciated that.

  “Anyone run the big games around here?”

  “Used to be this cocksucker named Fourtnot but he died in the eighties. I don’t know. Mostly freelance. Lots of Lotto games. Big cons on old women down at the lake-front. But what you’re talking about is impressive. Good imagination.”

  “Not bad.”

  She reached out with her long fingers and slowly raked her red nails across my arm.

  “Tell your boy to get lost and come with me,” she said.

  “Where would you start?”

  She flipped her hair back and lit another cigarette. She looked at herself in the mirror, not finding what she was looking for, and mussed her hair with her fingers. “I will. You won’t.”

  Her fingers were stained with nicotine and her breath smelled of garlic and mint. She looked at me and sighed. “I want five thousand.”

  “Has to come through tonight,” I said.

  “I’ll work on it.”

  “I need it within a couple of hours.”

  She nodded.

  “What happened to Pinky?”

  “She jumped off the balcony of the Fountainebleau in Miami.”

  She stubbed her cigarette into an ashtray filled with peanut shells and walked away.

  17

&nbs
p; I DROPPED ALIAS at his mansion a little past midnight. He told me that the place – a Mediterranean Revival number on Pontchartrain with bonsai-looking trees – was going to be plowed under someday and updated with something he’d seen on Deep Space 9. We walked inside an empty house and I noticed a little spot for him in the living room with a GI Joe sleeping bag and a small CD player. Dozens of rap CDs lay on the floor by his pillow and a couple of discount packs of chips and warm liters of Pepsi. Little indentations from missing furniture spotted the white carpet. Moonlight crept into his paneled French doors from the pool.

  “You sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

  I gave him the number to the cell and watched him as he tucked himself into the blanket and turned his back to me.

  I drove back home, hoping that thing from Fred would shake out. Without that, I didn’t have much. Teddy wouldn’t respond to my messages about that dick Trey Brill. I was beginning to lose patience and I was tired as hell.

  But as soon as I got close to my warehouse on Julia, I felt something was out of place.

  Four cars were parked in broken patterns in front of businesses that had closed up for the night. A black Cadillac Escalade, two red Ferraris, and a green Rolls, all their bright silver rims shining down the stretch of asphalt.

  I didn’t turn into the warehouse. I parked down the street and walked.

  The convertible top was down on the Rolls. A box of.38 slugs sat empty in the passenger seat. The light to my warehouse burned bright through a huge bank of industrial windows. The small blue door that leads to the second floor was closed.

  I slipped a key into the lock and slowly pushed it open with both hands. I reached for the Glock in my jacket. The seventeen rounds waited jacked inside.

  Upstairs, I heard Annie’s high-pitched barking. She yelped in an urgent rhythm.

  I crept up the stairs and heard a crash in my loft and a couple of men laughing.

  I moved forward, my heart skipping pretty damned quickly in my chest. I tried to control my breathing and slip silently to the landing. Annie kept barking, her yips working into a howl.