Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  I drove down to JoJo’s and got drunk because that’s what I did back then, only to find Teddy waiting at my apartment when I got back. He sat on the curb in the parking lot, his head in his hands, sobbing.

  He’d apparently taken the woman to Commander’s Palace and to the top of the Trade Center for drinks. He walked with her under gas lamps in the Quarter, holding her arm in the crook of his, telling her about growing up in the Ninth Ward with a brother he loved. He told her that she felt special, that he knew things like this just happened, and that maybe he was in love.

  She just smiled at him, rarely talking.

  She held his hand back to his car, where she unzipped his pants and performed acts on him that he’d only read about as a small fat child growing up in a poor neighborhood.

  He kissed the top of her head and told her that he loved her.

  In seconds, she sat upright in the car and fixed her coat, asking for the money that she was promised. Teddy asked what she meant and didn’t understand until she reached into his pocket, pulled out two hundred-dollar bills, and climbed out of the car.

  Teddy cried and fell asleep on my sofa that night. In the morning, he was gone.

  He never mentioned it again. Ever.

  I drove back to the city and called Maggie on the way, letting her know I’d be late.

  “What happened now?” she asked.

  “I was paid for something I didn’t deserve.”

  “What are you looking for now?”

  “Respect for a friend.”

  36

  I NEVER HEARD BACK from the woman at Pinky’s bar in the Marigny. I never called her and she never called me. No messages, no letters. After Malcolm died, I didn’t see there was much point. Since that morning we’d found him hung in the tree, I’d been bothered. What had happened to the money and the people who’d been working with him? I never was much for neat endings and lost cash. Besides, I was a little pissed-off that Fred at Pinky’s never called me back. If only I’d let her tie me up.

  I drove to Frenchman, parked on the street, and walked over to Pinky’s, the pinup girl winking in neon. It was about 2 on a Sunday and the same British bartender was sweeping up the floor, the radio tuned to some Iggy Pop as he danced with his broom.

  When I walked inside, he turned down the radio and held the broom close to his chest. “We’re closed.”

  “Back to see Fred.”

  “Fred’s asleep.”

  “Where?”

  “Upstairs,” he said, giving me that “you dumb-ass” look. “Where else?”

  He pointed to a flight of stairs hidden behind the bar by neatly spaced spindles. Above the rows of multicolored bottles sat a small shrine made from skulls, cow bones, and a large pentagram. Someone burned incense in the mouth of the skull.

  I bounded up the creaking steps covered in mildewed red carpet and knocked on a door that was already ajar. Near the door was a neat grouping of old plaid furniture and a coffee table made with legs from a mannequin. The more I opened the door, the more mannequins I saw. Black and white. Male and female. Some with pants. Some with whips. Some with bright green wigs, others with dated sixties hair. Even one dressed as a nurse.

  I knocked on the door, hearing a woman giggle in the back.

  A teenage girl, who looked about fifteen, a little plump with black nails and cherry-red hair, bounded out of the room wearing nothing but a long Jazzfest T and said, “You’re not Bob.”

  “No.”

  “Fred?”

  Fred emerged from the door wearing a pink terrycloth robe and holding a Snoball, eating off the top. Her white witch-blond hair packed on top of her head. She had a naked Barbie doll clutched in one of her hands.

  “Yeah?”

  “Nick.”

  “Yeah.”

  I smiled. She walked back into the bedroom. The girl followed, looking at me. I heard her say, “What’s with the dipshit?”

  I crossed my arms on my chest and waited.

  Fred came back. Her breath smelled like the Jack distillery in Lynchburg, a brownish coating on the Snoball. In the back, I heard the girl flip the channels from MTV over to a cartoon featuring fighting Japanese robots.

  She looked up at me, red-eyed and sneering, and belched.

  She stuck a piece of paper in my hand and stumbled back.

  “Five hundred for this,” she said. “It’s all I could get you.”

  “Let me see if it pans out.”

  “It will.”

  I nodded.

  “I talked to Curtis and he knows where to find you,” she said. “Leave the money with Bob. If you don’t, I’ll have Stella pay you a visit.”

  She laughed and left the room. She started giggling and I heard her jumping on the bed with the little girl.

  Written in almost illegible cursive were the words Alix Sentry. Orleans Parish Jail. Waiting for you.

  I heard the Japanese robots kicking ass in the next room and watched the still mannequins watch me as I left the little apartment, not sure where this was headed.

  THE ORLEANS Parish Jail stands right next to the police station down on Broad Street. Someone, probably another inmate, had decided to paint the cinderblock topped in concertina wire with faces out of those eighties Robert Nagel prints, the ones with the women with very white faces and black hair. I walked along the wall and found the front desk, where I checked in with a deputy. I told them I was a friend of Alix Sentry and we had a meeting set up.

  He made a call to Sentry’s holding cell.

  “You’re going to have to wait,” he said. “Takes us about thirty to bring the prisoners in.”

  “What was he charged with?”

  The deputy looked down at the computer screen. “Two counts of fraud and four counts of possession of child pornography. Oh, and drug paraphernalia.”

  I smiled. “We’re not that good friends,” I said. “Really just acquaintances.”

  I waited in a little family-room area close to the desk with two women and five children. One of the women was white and wore a black halter top cut away with straps in the back to show off a tattoo of a dolphin. Her long brown hair had been moussed and puffed up on her head circa 1987 and she’d painted her lips probably a half inch over where they ended. Her kids, I guessed, ran around the sofa while I watched an old console television playing Wheel of Fortune.

  Her kids were scrubbed clean and wearing crisp T-shirts and new jeans.

  The other woman kept trying to guess the answers with words and phrases that didn’t quite make sense. She became very frustrated when this guy on TV never said “Pretty in Link.”

  A deputy called my name and led me through a metal detector. I had to take off my belt buckle and leave my keys in a little plastic bowl on the second try.

  “Does anyone ever try the ole nail file in the birthday cake?” I asked.

  The guy handed the keys back to me and scratched his hairy neck before leading me into an empty room filled with about ten plastic slots, little cubes where you could talk through the plexiglass. I was hoping to see the woman from Midnight Express pressing her boobs against the glass, but I was going to be alone with Alix Sentry.

  The back door opened and a black woman deputy led out a man in handcuffs. His smile so waxen and stiff when he saw me that I had to look away from his face.

  37

  ALIX SENTRY STOOD about five feet eight, bald with just wisps of brown hair ringing his head, with small brown eyes and a pointed nose. He sat on the other side of the partition and folded his hands under his chin. He stared right through the glass, twisting his nose like he was trying to smell something. He wore an orange jumpsuit reading ORLEANS PARISH JAIL and watched me in silence.

  An intercom system separated us. I waited about thirty seconds for him to talk while he stared.

  “You’re a nice-looking man,” he said.

  “Aw, shucks,” I said.

  He smiled. I leaned back in the seat.

  “Maybe we can write,” I said. �
��Pen pals.”

  He smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “Fred Moore call you?”

  “She’s such a sick little bitch.”

  “Everyone likes Barbie,” I said. “A woman on the go.”

  “She likes real ones.”

  I nodded. “You going to help or not?”

  “Depends on what you’ll pay me.”

  “Same as Fred, five hundred.”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t give up Fred for five hundred.”

  “I’m not asking you to give up Fred.”

  He started playing with the zipper on the jumpsuit. “Isn’t this thing so ugly? I feel like I should be in the Ice Capades.”

  “What do you have?”

  “You know what I do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why would you think I’m so fucking stupid?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid.”

  “You know what they arrested me for?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone set me up,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  He blew out his breath and slumped back into his seat with his arms crossed over his chest. He was so average that I could see him living in Metairie with a wife and a Volvo.

  “I want five thousand.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Fred said you did.”

  “Fred isn’t my accountant,” I said. “I can pay you if I find the money.”

  “That’s a big if.”

  I looked over at the female deputy watching us and up at the water-stained tile ceiling buzzing with dull fluorescent light. “You have something else to do?”

  He looked at the back of his hands and stretched.

  “He sold me out,” he said. “He’s the one that planted those magazines of young boys and all of it. I don’t play like that; I never have. He trashed my house and made a phone call to the police that I’d been harassing his kids. Said he was a concerned father and I’d been walking around in a Speedo giving out toys.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  He laughed. “Got somewhere first.”

  “Where?”

  “To this old woman,” he said. “She gave me her jewelry and furs. Made her feel better. I was her friend. He wasn’t.”

  I nodded. The room smelled of Lysol and urine. Words had been carved into the stall where I sat. A hundred phone numbers and names, a couple of business cards of attorneys.

  “I’ll pay two if I get the money back.”

  “Five,” he said. “I know it’s worth that.”

  I blew out my breath and rubbed my face with my hands. Stretched the legs.

  “I’ve been led to you through a few people and now I feel like I’m bargaining for something that doesn’t exist. I don’t think you know shit. I think you’re bored and just want to practice up while you’re waiting for your court date.”

  “ALIAS told you about him, right?”

  I leaned in. His eyes grew larger and he moved within inches of the glass. He bit off a cuticle and spit it on the floor.

  “He said his ear was bad, right? A really ugly left ear.”

  “I can pay you only if the money comes back,” I said. “And I mean all of it.”

  “It’s a lot, isn’t it?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I think he’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  He laughed.

  “Give me something,” I said. “You want him in jail and you want some cash. What else are you going to do?”

  “I read,” he said. “I like Dickens. Poor kids making good for themselves. Finding out they’re really rich. Class struggle.”

  “Is that it?”

  He leaned back into the glass and spoke into the two-way intercom. “Don’t fuck with me. I can ruin people’s lives.”

  I waited. He took a breath.

  “You know that hotel in the Quarter with the fence made out of corn. It’s iron but looks like stalks.”

  “Sure, on Royal. The Cornstalk.”

  The place sat about two blocks over from JoJo and Loretta’s place.

  “There is a street right there. It’s Dumaine or St. Phillip. I don’t remember, but he used to live there. It’s an old apartment. Used to be one of the motels where the rooms open up outside.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s all I have.”

  “A name?”

  “Marion Bloom.”

  “Worked with a woman, too.”

  “That would be Dahlia. You find Marion, you’ll find Dahlia. She does the work for him when she’s not stripping. When it’s a man, she can turn any boy in about five minutes.”

  “Pretty?”

  “If you like that,” he said. “You’ll know her when you see her. Real tall with light skin. Almond-shaped eyes. Makes her look kind of Asian. She’s a real doll.”

  “That’s it?”

  “From what I hear, five thousand is good.”

  “You know who they were working with?”

  He shook his head.

  “Just the job,” he said. “Dahlia talks in her sleep and I talk to those people.”

  I got up to leave.

  “You have a gun?”

  I nodded.

  “Excellent.”

  38

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, I walked with Annie down by the Cornstalk Hotel and let her take a piss on the cornerstone of a building that sold gourmet dog bones for five dollars each. Annie was more of a Milk-Bone woman; I was sure of it. I took her by the leash and trotted her down St. Phillip and across Bourbon and back down Dumaine. Right as we were getting close to Royal again, I saw a two-story building with doors facing outside. Old clothes had been left on the crooked railing and junk cars stood in a small parking lot. A pile of air conditioners sat stacked three high on the bottom floor, where an old man in a plaid shirt beat them with a wrench.

  I walked down Dumaine holding Annie’s leash, passing the open door of a voodoo museum where incense blew out. Inside, I could see dozens of lit candles and an old oil portrait of Marie Laveau.

  I crossed the street and into the lot of the old motel. The old man didn’t look up from his work, he only kept cussing.

  Annie sniffed his leg and he jumped.

  “I’m looking for Marion Bloom.”

  “No one lives here,” he said. “We’re renovating.”

  “Did a guy named Bloom live here?”

  He shook his head and patted Annie’s head. “Good dog.”

  “This your place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was this a rental?”

  “Yeah, but I’d let it turn to shit. I rented it out to a bunch of fucking losers. Had some guy leave his needles right out on the street; another guy took a crap in the sink.”

  “Maybe he got confused,” I said. “Did you rent to a guy with a bad ear? You know, like wrestlers get. Lots of extra cartilage.”

  He nodded. “I think he said his name was Alix.”

  I laughed. “You know where he went?”

  “No,” he said. “You a friend of his?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, he left a bunch of shit here. You’re welcome to it. If you don’t get it, I’m throwing it out. Just a bunch of bills and crap.”

  I followed him to the back of the old motel, where he had a metal storage shed filled with lawn-mower parts, ratty mattresses, and boxes of soap. He left the door open and light cut in through the dust. I waited as he dragged out an old box marked ALIX.

  I looped Annie’s leash into my belt – she kept pulling, smelling something that was dead – as I rifled through the box. Two pairs of Wrangler jeans, an Official Bourbon Street Drunk T-shirt, a box of Polaroid photographs, a loose-leaf binder filled with notes and Bible verses and bills addressed to Marion Bloom.

  I searched through the photographs, finding a couple of Bloom at Pat O’Brien’s piano bar. Drunk with a couple of women at his side. His he
ad was turned to the right and I saw the infamous ear. He was short with black hair, big eyebrows, and a larger nose. He looked like a rodent.

  One of the women was a light-skinned black woman with long black hair. She wore something on her top that looked more like a bandanna than a shirt, showing her taut midriff. The bikini string from her underwear showed above her tight black pants. She had Asian-looking eyes and thick lips. Thin-boned and standing like a ballerina, with her shoulders back and her hips pushed forward. Her lips were squeezed together as if she were kissing the camera.

  I grabbed the photos, the journal, and bills, thanking the man.

  “You don’t want this T-shirt?” he asked, rubbing his neck. “Funny as hell.”

  “You keep it.”

  I tied Annie at an old iron horse post at the C.C.’s coffeehouse on Royal. The owner knew me because JoJo and Loretta used to hang out here a lot.

  I bought a café au lait and read through Bloom’s journal. He’d been taking notes on how to be a minister, inserting important Bible verses to use and even a fake résumé of places where he’d “pastored.” Inside the notebook was a real estate booklet with a photo of an old Captain D’s restaurant near Fat City circled in red.

  I looked through the pocket, finding some other similar properties and a couple of flyers from a travel agency about cheap flights from New Orleans to Tampa.

  In the reverse pocket I found a tabloid-size little newspaper called Big Easy Dreamin’ that advertised strip clubs and massage parlors and all-night XXX video stores. The paper had been folded onto the sixth page. The ad read for a club on Airways Boulevard called Body Shots, where you could drink tequila out of a woman’s navel for five dollars.

  In the black-and-white ad, I saw a picture of the woman I figured to be Dahlia. She had her arm around another woman, both wearing bikinis and sombreros, inviting everyone to come on down.

  Annie barked at some people passing by and then took a few laps from her water bowl.

  I finished the café au lait and walked outside. I called Teddy and got him on his cell. It sounded like he was in his car.

  “You know some strip club called Body Shots?”