by Ace Atkins
Felix kept mopping. The blues played on. Old rhythms returned.
“ALIAS has lost his mind,” I said, and told him about my run-in with Trey Brill and what I learned from Teddy. “This morning, before I picked up the tables and chairs, he told me a dead man had come to visit him in the night.”
“Maybe it happened.”
“Hell no,” I said. “I’m done. Teddy can deal with him the way he wants.”
“Look deeper,” JoJo said.
“Oh, come on, JoJo,” I said. “That kid conned you and me and Loretta. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”
He looked at me. His brown eyes looked heavy with the creased skin around them. “I don’t waste time,” he said. “There’s more to Tavarius. That kid is all right.”
“Maybe he killed Malcolm too,” I said. “He made up a damned good lie about folks ripping him off. He’s so smart, JoJo. I mean, that kid can lie.”
“Easy when you do that,” JoJo said, standing from the bar. “Ain’t it?”
“What’s that?” I said, enjoying the beer and watching Felix mop.
“Handin’ off your troubles.”
“Why are you on his side?” I said. “You were through with him too.”
JoJo settled into his seat, the jukebox cutting on to a new record. He watched the blank row of old brick as he used to when a mirror hung there. He took a sip of beer.
“I was wrong.”
“Come on.”
He opened his wallet and folded down two hundred-dollar bills on the table before me.
“Found it in my jacket last night,” he said. “Tavarius was tellin’ the truth and I shut him out.”
JoJo left me there to think with the folded bills.
And I did for a long time.
60
AT SUNSET, I RAN down St. Charles, turned onto Canal past all the camera shops and jewelry stores, and wound my way to the Aquarium, where I followed the Riverwalk downriver. I passed the vagrants sleeping on rocks still warm from the sun and watched rats skittering through overflowing trash cans. I almost tripped on one as it ran back with a hot dog in its mouth and headed into the rocks along the Mississippi. My Tulane football shirt was soaked in sweat. I tried to slow my breathing and pick up my pace as I stopped at the Governor Nichols Street Wharf. I put my hands on top of my head and noticed everything turn a murky gold and red. The brick and stucco of the old buildings of the Quarter softening.
I decided to cut back through the old district, before the streets became flooded with cars and tourists. I jogged my way down Royal Street, looking up at the scrolled ironwork on JoJo and Loretta’s old apartment, and wound my way around a street musician who used his dog to pick up tips with its mouth.
I wondered if Annie could do that.
She’d probably take the cash and then piss on their foot.
I slowed, made a couple of cuts, and found myself at the old Woolworth’s and a blank stretch of Bourbon. Where Bourbon met Canal, I heard a brass band of teenagers running through the standard “Somebody Is Taking My Place.”
Trombones and trumpets. A skinny kid with an overpowering dented tuba.
All of them were black and wearing T-shirts and shorts.
A little girl, about four, walked around with a shoebox filled with loose coins.
I stopped. Caught my breath.
In the fading light of the day, all gold and dark blue, in this unremarkable little stretch of the Quarter, a half-dozen kids entertained about twenty people. They rolled through “Saints” and took a big finish with some really wonderful solos.
Just when you grew to hate New Orleans with all its dark places and overwhelming violence, you saw something like a bunch of ragtag kids making some spectacular music. I wondered about the violence and the art and how it all fit together.
I felt bad when the little girl walked past me and I didn’t have change in my jogging shorts. I showed her my empty palms and shrugged. She scowled and turned her back to me.
Suddenly the band broke into a song I knew. A heavy funk with the tuba working the hell out of the beat.
I started tapping my foot, the light fading to black all around us.
My smile stopped. My face flushed.
They were playing ALIAS.
61
I SPENT THE NEXT MORNING at the New Orleans Police Department flipping through the missing persons file of Calvin Antoine Jacobs, aka Dio. In the empty office of a desk sergeant who was friends with Jay, I made notes onto a yellow legal pad. I read through interviews with Teddy and Malcolm, other rappers who knew Dio, and a couple that saw him taken away outside Atlanta Nites by two men in ski masks. One reported he heard a muffled pop from inside a black van. I read back through the interview with Malcolm. He talked about the man’s talent and some folks in Calliope he feared. The name Cash was mentioned several times. But Malcolm was their suspect.
Still nothing. Not what I’d hoped to find.
Jay popped his head in and asked if I wanted to go to lunch at Central Grocery.
I declined.
“You must be sick,” he said. “Life is a bag of Zapp’s.”
“This report doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It just kind of drops.”
“When someone goes missing, not a lot you can do, bra. You know how many people just disappear in New Orleans every year?”
“You know how many should?”
“You heard from that street freak that was harassing you?”
I shook my head.
“Look out for yourself,” he said.
I peered down at my legal pad and some notes I’d made. About thirty minutes later, I found a vending machine and drank a Barq’s. I ate some Oreos. I walked down a linoleum hall and let myself back into the records room.
What bothered me was that no family members had been interviewed about this guy. When I researched someone, often that was the first place I’d go. Who knows someone best but his own people?
I asked the sergeant – a burly white-haired man who kept a screen saver of George W. Bush on his computer – for an explanation. He stood, his back to the thin walls of pressed wood, where he’d hung photos of himself with three German shepherds sitting at his feet.
“Was he a transient?” he asked.
“No.”
“Who’d we find?”
“People he worked with.”
He nodded.
“He has an address that shows a place on Lakeshore Drive,” I said. “But I know he’d been in prison. Why isn’t there anything about that in the record?”
“You need to call the Department of Corrections for that,” he said. He flipped through a Rolodex, squinted at the tiny card, and read off a name and number. “She’ll get you what you need. Tell her I told you to call.”
I shook the desk sergeant’s hand.
“Good when you can do something,” he said.
“Did you work the street for long?”
“Long enough to piss someone off and end up here.”
The contact from the Louisiana Department of Corrections was a pleasant woman named Lisa. She sounded completely foreign to the Lisa I’d lived with when I played ball. She sounded as if she had a heart. A brain too. I told her the sergeant’s name and that I was researching for a buddy of mine and she told me to give her a few hours.
“Some inmate at Angola escaped this morning,” she said. “Those freakin’ reporters won’t leave us alone.”
I drove back to the warehouse and walked Annie down to Louisiana Products for a po’boy. I made coffee.
At 3, she called back.
“I have two Calvin Antoine Jacobses,” she said. “The first has a DOB March 3, 1974?”
“Let me double-check that birthday.”
“Is he currently incarcerated?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then that’s not him. The only other Calvin Antoine Jacobs I have in the system died two years ago.”
“This guy I need is missing,” I said. “No one ever found
him. I didn’t think he was ruled dead.”
She paused for a second. “This guy died in Angola. Let me see… he was from New Orleans. Lived at 2538 Constance. He was convicted of two counts of manslaughter and one count of car theft in 2000.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“I think I love you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Read back that address.”
She did. I smiled.
I promised her free drinks at JoJo’s next time she was in New Orleans. Anything she wanted. My children. My dog. She could be bald with a harelip and I would’ve kissed her at that moment.
“What else can you tell me about Mr. Jacobs?”
“A lot,” she said. “What do you need to know?”
62
I WAS DOWN ON CONSTANCE an hour later passing a little neighborhood grocery, Parasol’s Irish bar, and rows of old shotguns until I found the one where Dahlia lived. I parked a block down the street, slid on The Club, and walked down the skinny broken sidewalk and under shady oaks to her door. I knocked. No one answered. I found a place to sit on her small porch, the deck wooden and uneven. I sat for a while, wilting in the heat. I walked back to my truck, stopped, and went back to the house. A warped gate closed the way to the back of the shotgun. It was locked.
I looked down the street and then back the other way.
I hopped the fence and followed a stone path covered in pink bougainvillea that grew over a fence and rotted awning. On the shaded back patio, white and purple impatiens hung from large baskets. In the deep shade, I recognized some yellow jasmine growing from iron grillwork. The air smelled of musky sweetness that enveloped me.
“My mother loved them,” she said.
Dahlia smiled at me, hands covered in white gloves and mashing potting soil into a terra-cotta pot. She wore a boy’s white tank top covered in mud. The cotton hugged the perfect shape of her breasts and tiny waist. She ran her forearm over her brow.
Her dark hair had grown curly in the heat and her large eyes watched me, her jaw loose. Lips parted.
“You want to tell me about your brother?” I asked.
“Jesus,” she said. Smiling. “You don’t stop.”
“I think I have it all figured out, but why don’t you tell me.”
She tilted her head and wrapped her long brown hair into a ponytail. Her hair seemed moist and rich. I could smell her scent. She smelled like coconut oil and warm skin.
“How’d your brother know Christian?”
She held her stare. “My daddy doesn’t like you too much.”
“He thinks I’m trying to save your soul.”
“Too far gone for that.” She pushed out her lower lip with mock sadness.
“Calvin was the real thing.”
“Calvin was a genius,” she said. “He was tested when we was kids and he was off the charts. My daddy tole me they put him in a room with a bunch of toys to figure things out. You know triangle to triangle? Circle to circle? He did all right till he clocked some poor child in the head with a block.”
“Couldn’t stay straight?”
“Hell, no,” she said. She looked at me, suddenly reminded of who I was and backed off. “Oh no. That’s enough. Take what you got and leave.”
“Let me come inside.”
“That just leads to bad things.”
“Not for me.”
“Don’t you like women?” she asked, brushing my chin with her index fingers.
“I like ’em too much,” I said. “They get me in trouble.”
“You got a woman now?”
“Yep.”
“Where she at?”
“She’s waiting on me,” I said. “I can’t leave till I find out what happened with Dio.”
“Dio,” she said. “Shit. Calvin wouldn’t ever taken no name like that. That was his invention.”
“When did you find out?” I asked, leading her into an area I didn’t know myself.
“Last year,” she said. “When he was dead.”
“Dio?”
“The one they called Dio.”
“They used him and killed him.”
She smiled and patted my face. “Right.”
She walked up some concrete blocks and into her house. I followed. She had her back turned to me leaning over her cast-iron sink. Her blue-jean shorts hugged her rounded thighs and her shoulder blades stretched under her brown skin. I was drawn to her neck, the beads of moisture collecting right among the tiny, soft hairs.
“They pay you to be quiet?”
“When I heard those rhymes, I knew,” she said. “Calvin had been workin’ on them since he was twelve. He had notebooks full of ’em. He wrote in them all the time. Made hand copies and sent them to me, even in jail. The ones that came out. The ones about Uptown life and all that? That was him. They didn’t change a word. His heart lived in those old ragged notebooks. We may have moved on, but his soul was still in Calliope where we was raised.”
“What happened?”
“A guard scrambled his brains,” she said, turning her back to me. She was crying. She tilted her head into her hands. Sunlight skimmed through the oaks and broke apart in strobe flashes across her face. Her back door kept slamming open and shut in the summer wind.
I could still smell the jasmine. So sweet and rich.
“I heard he filled the guard’s water bottle with horse shit,” she said. “The guard later said Calvin had tried to kill him with a broken piece of glass.”
I nodded, leaning against the back wall of the tiny kitchen. The ragged wallpaper made soft rubbing sounds.
“So his cellmate was Christian Chase,” I said.
She nodded.
“He pay you for keeping quiet?”
“Trey Brill did,” she said. “I came to them quick and asked for a cut. They let me in. They took me to dinner and later out to clubs with them.”
“And whose idea was it to work ALIAS?”
She shook her head.
“Come on,” I said. “You’ve come this far.”
“They fucked me,” she said. “Both of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They played with me for ten months,” she said. “I came to them whenever they wanted me. They put me on video and would make me sit there while I watched it with their friends. But they didn’t know who I was inside. It was my goddamn idea to run the kid. Marion and I got the idea when he came into the club that night. Kid was fifteen with millions. He had time to make it back. Besides, that was money built on my brother’s soul. Without Calvin, you wouldn’t have no ALIAS.”
“Come with me,” I said. “I need you to tell this to a friend of mine.”
“I’m not talking to the police.”
“Shit,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Come on.”
She twisted her head back and forth like a child. “No.”
“Did you know this guy, Dio? The one who used your brother’s lyrics?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Of course.”
Her eyes narrowed. I was losing her.
“They killed him and Malcolm.”
“They didn’t kill him,” she said.
I looked at her. The door kept slamming shut and she walked over and latched it, the wind still blowing through the screen.
She grabbed my hand. “Come lie down with me.”
“I think you’re sick, Dahlia,” I said. “You need to find comfort in yourself.”
“Just lie down,” she said.
“What did Trey and Christian pay you?”
“Seven thousand to keep quiet,” she said. “Trey said he knew a man who could make me disappear. He said the man liked to be paid in soiled money left on top of folks’ graves.”
“What about ALIAS’s money?”
She stared at me and shook her head. “Trey got it,” she said. “He said he could double my money if he put it all in stocks. I tried to get it back the other night when I seen him out. I ain’t ever seein’ that money. Yeah, he k
new about ALIAS.”
“Talk to my friend,” I said. “He’s a good man. We need to know who killed Malcolm and Dio.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “Dio ain’t dead. What you think happen to a boy in prison over six years? You think he might change a bit? Maybe get his teeth knocked out. Get branded. Maybe if he grow a beard and sport some jewelry and earrings, that even his own folks don’t know who he is.”
I couldn’t breathe.
I was afraid she would stop.
“That Christian Chase don’t have a soul,” she said. “I told him I loved him once. He told me I was just loving my own brother ’cause that’s who he’d become.”
63
TREY WAS SOMETIMES AMAZED by his own intelligence. He’d have a few glasses of good red wine or a few Amstel Lights and sit back and smile at how it all had played out. He grew the business from one player in the NFL to ten pro players, four rappers, an entire label, and eighteen high-level Uptown clients, including a city councilman and the heir to a hot-pepper-sauce franchise. He stared out from his window in the CBD down at a billboard on Canal for Cartier watches and another for a new line from Victoria’s Secret, the woman’s stomach as flat as a plate, her hips expansive. The night was purple, fluorescent lights flickering on the wide boulevard.
He opened his humidor on his desk and clipped off the end of a cigar. He thought ole Chase might want to hit Cobalt tonight. Molly was out of town and he’d line up a couple of dates from a score he’d made at Lucy’s last week.
He checked his properly mussed hair in the mirror and lost the tie.
“Hey, dog,” Trey said as Christian crossed the room in a black sleeveless T and tight khakis with sandals. He’d cut his hair so close that he was starting to look like that rat from Angola Trey had picked up at the bus station two years ago.
“He knows,” Christian said. “He fucking got to Dahlia. I told you, you stupid fuck, we should have axed her ass two months ago.”
“She was your punch,” Trey said. “He doesn’t know shit.”
“That was my dad on the phone,” Christian said. “Told me not to come home ever again. Said two detectives just showed up at his office asking about my relationship with Calvin Jacobs. What the fuck, man? What the fuck did you do?”