by James Sallis
“We don’t pollute our bodies with spirits,” Cafe au Lait told me.
“Mr. Griffin,” the black one said, “we are in need of your professional services.”
Bobbie brought the beer and I slid a dollar across the bar toward her.
“Sit down?” I said.
“We’ll stand.” I was sure they knew where the back door was, too.
“Have it your way.” Bobbie brought change. “Now, what is it that I can do for you?”
“It’s a matter of some discretion.” The black one seemed to be a natural leader. He looked around the bar. “We would prefer to speak in less public a place.”
“It’s here or nowhere,” I said. Never give a client the advantage; he’ll think he owns you. Besides, I was thirsty.
“We have been looking for you for three days,” Blackie said. “Your office, your apartment. A man in your business should make himself more easily available.”
“Those who need me usually find me, sooner or later.”
“I suppose we are proof of that statement, yes?” So Cafe au Lait hadn’t lost his tongue after all.
“As I say, it’s a matter of some discretion. Your name has come to us from mutual friends. And it’s a matter which only a brother could handle.”
That “brother” should have warned me; I should have got up then and left. And if we had any mutual friends, I’d turn in an honest tax report next year.
“You’ve heard, of course, of Corene Davis?” Blackie said. At mention of her name, Cafe au Lait raised his open hand to chest level, then closed it. The old man with the spoons looked our direction and snorted. I knew how he felt.
“I subscribe to Time like everybody else,” I said.
“We-by which I mean, our group-we had arranged a speaking engagement for her here in New Orleans. It was a matter of considerable dispute, as you may realize. A black leader, and a black woman what’s more, in the deepest South.” He looked around the bar again. The three of us were the only black faces in it. I suppose that proved something to him. “Many of her supporters thought it was foolish.”
Bobbie brought me another beer. Maybe she figured I needed it.
“At any rate,” Blackie went on, “it was to have been at the Municipal Auditorium, the eighteenth of August, at eight P.M. She was coming in early that morning to speak to some student groups at Tulane and Loyola. She did that wherever she went. Spoke to students, I mean.”
“The force of the future,” Cafe au Lait added. I looked at his hand. It remained still.
“At ten-fifteen on the night of the seventeenth,” Blackie continued, “Corene Davis boarded a night flight to New Orleans at Idlewild. It was a nonstop flight, and a number of her supporters saw her aboard. When we met her plane here in New Orleans-we are a local group, you understand-she was not aboard. Nor has she been heard from since.”
“And you fear….”
“That she has been kidnapped.”
“Or worse,” Au Lait added.
“She has many enemies among the establishment,” Blackie said. “Surely you can understand that.”
“I can indeed. But you need the police, not me.”
The two looked at one another.
“It’s a joke,” Au Lait finally said.
Blackie looked back at me. “Surely you know that nothing good can come of that, Mr. Griffin.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.” I finished the Jax in front of me and signaled Bobbie for another one. “Just what is it you expect from me?”
“We expect you to find her, man.”
“Or find out what’s happened to her,” Au Lait said.
“I see. Has there been a ransom note, anything like that?”
“There’s been nothing, man. And lots of it.”
“And you haven’t released this to the press, the police. How did you explain her missing the engagement?”
“We covered, friend, we covered.” I suspected Blackie didn’t like me a hell of a lot. “No one knows about this but our people in New York, and us. And now you.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found-you consider that?”
“Corene? She was devoted, Griffin. Righteous.”
I shrugged. “Just a thought. Okay, I’ll give it a look. I’ll need some information from you.” I got out my notebook and took down the flight number, departure and arrival times. “She ever been to New Orleans before?”
He shook his head. “What do you want to know that for?”
“People tend to repeat themselves. They’ll stay where they’ve stayed before, eat the same kind of foods. But mostly I’m just trying to get the feel of the thing. Her habits, hobbies, things she liked.”
“Her work was her life.”
“Right on,” Au Lait said.
The businessmen had drifted out the door, along with several sailors and some of the girls. Their places had been taken by a pimp in a yellow suit and two guys who looked like narcs. The old man with the spoons and things had gone to sleep with his head back against the wall. Flies were dipping wings over his open mouth.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said. “How do I find you?”
Blackie looked at Au Lait, back at me. Then he rattled off an address and phone number. “I’m never there, though. Leave a message.”
I copied them down in the notebook, writing at the top of the page: Corene Davis.
“That all you need?” Blackie said.
“I get fifty a day and expenses, no questions asked. Two days up front. Any problem with that?”
“None.” Blackie handed over a hundred-dollar bill that looked as though it had been folded tightly into someone’s watch pocket and sent through the washer a few times.
They walked to the door and damned if they didn’t turn around together at the last minute and, raising their hands to chest level, close them into fists. It looked like it was choreographed. Then they went out the door. Damned if I know how they’d lived this long. If the cops don’t get you, the crackers will.
But anyhow, I had a case.
Power to the people.
Chapter Six
The first thing I’d done when I got back to the office-there was the usual accumulation of mail and messages-was clip a recent picture of Corene Davis from a copy of Time. Then I put in a call to United at Idlewild, finally got through, and was informed that, yes, Miss Corene Davis had had a coach reservation on Flight 417 for New Orleans. She had boarded shortly before takeoff, seat 15-A. The man I talked to remembered her, her being so famous and all. He’d been working the desk that day. She had two pieces of luggage. He gave me the name of the captain and stewardesses on the flight. I thanked him and hung up.
I sat there for a while watching twilight seep up around everything. The sky had a red tint to it, and everything smelled of magnolia and the river.
Finally I called downtown and asked for Sergeant Walsh. After a long wait, he came on.
“Don? Lew,” I said. “I want to drop a name on you. Corene Davis.”
“That bitch.” There was a long pause. “You know I had half this force turned out for security-you’d have thought the president was coming to town. And what happens? The broad doesn’t show.” Walsh turned away from the phone for a moment, said something, was back. “Why?”
I wasn’t sure how much I could tell him. Dissembling had kept us alive and more or less intact for a long time when nothing else could.
“I’d been looking forward to hearing her talk,” I said after a moment. “Wondering what happened.”
“Great. I’ve got fourteen unsolved homicides, the makings of a race riot out in Gentilly of all places, the commissioner and assorted councilmen on my tail like a hive of bees-big, hairy, mad bees-and you call up to chat about some trouble-making yankee bitch nigger.”
“Then I guess you better get to work,” I said. “But you know, Don, these days that kind of talk’s a little … passe, if you know what I’m saying.”
A pause. “Okay, Lew. So she ain’t no b
itch.”
“Knew you’d see it my way.”
“Sorry. Bad day. So what’d’ya need?”
“Just what happened.”
“Hell, I don’t know, that’s the thing. She got sick in New York or something, was what we heard. Maybe she just thought better of it. Anyway, she didn’t make it down here. My men waited for the next flight, almost two hours. When she wasn’t on that one either, they gave up and went home.”
It was beginning to feel like that’s what I’d better do, too.
“Anything else?” Don was saying.
“One thing, quickly. An outfit on Chartres called the Black Hand. Check it out for me?”
“Don’t have to. Part Panther, part populist politics. There’s money from somewhere, and pull. Into everything. Run by a guy named Will Sansom, now calls himself Abdullah Abded. Lew, you’re not mixed up with them, are you?”
“Curious, is all. Met a couple of their people.”
“Well. That it, then?”
“That’s it.”
“Don’t forget you owe me dinner and a drink. If I can ever get out of this bear pit long enough.”
“I hadn’t forgotten, Don. Give me a call. And hey, thanks.”
Night had just about taken over, and lights were coming on block by block, the city’s dark mask falling into place. In the next few hours those streets would change utterly.
Big money, Don had said. Hand in everything. Not my league at all. Just what the hell had I got myself into?
Chapter Seven
Now two weeks had passed and I had some idea what I’d got myself into, but I wasn’t any closer to finding Corene Davis. And maybe I was as close as I was going to get.
I got up and dumped the rest of the coffee, lit a cigarette.
I had a feeling she’d made it to New Orleans. A hunch. I’d played them before and won at least as often as I’d lost.
I’d made the rounds with my clipped picture. No one had seen her. I’d been visited twice by Blackie and Au Lait. They hadn’t seen her either.
What the hell, maybe she was sick in New York. Maybe she was kidnapped. Or maybe she was dead in a warehouse somewhere.
About all I’d really accomplished was to learn something about Corene Davis. It’s strange how little is left of our lives once they’re rendered down, once they’ve started becoming history. A handful of facts, movements, conflicts; that’s all the observer sees. An uninhabited shell.
She was born in Chicago in 1936. Her father picked up what work he could, not much, all of it hard and hardly paid, her mother was a midwife, later a practical nurse. She’d gone to the University of Chicago on scholarship, become something of a student protest leader, then moved on to Columbia for graduate work, where she’d continued her protest activities while simultaneously becoming active (rare then for grad students) in student government. She had been investigated about that time, she claimed, by the FBI and, she suspected, CIA. Stood watching them tap her phone from a pole at the end of the block and took them iced tea when they climbed back down. But it wasn’t until publication of a revised version of her master’s thesis as Chained to Ruin that she’d become a full-fledged black leader. And so she’d made the round of talk shows and lecture circuits, been written about (as though the writers had encountered utterly different women) in everything from Ebony to The New Republic, and generally become a voice for her, our, people. A second book, on women’s rights, was in the works. She had light skin (“She could almost pass for white,” as one reporter put it), wore her hair clipped short, stood five-six, weighed in at one-ten, neither smoked nor drank, was vegetarian.
And had the capacity, it seemed, to vanish into thin air.
I stubbed out the cigarette in a potted plant LaVerne had given me and looked at my watch. Three ten. Maybe things would look better in the morning. It happened sometimes.
I drew a hot bath and had just settled in with a glass of gin when the phone rang.
“How you feelin’, Griffin?” a voice said.
“Man, it’s kind of late for games. You know?”
“You feelin’ pretty good, huh?”
“Until some asshole called me.”
The voice was silent. A dull crackling sound in the wires, witches burning far, far away. Then after a time the voice said, “You’re looking for Corene Davis.”
“Who is this?”
“Don’t.” And the line was dead.
To this day, I don’t know who it was on the phone that night. But I remember the sound of that voice exactly, and the chill that came over me then, and I remember that I finished off the glass of gin and poured another before getting back into the tub.
Chapter Eight
Could pass for white.
I woke up at ten with that phrase rolling around in my head. I’d had a dream in which people were chasing me with knives down narrow, overhung streets. A big Irish cop watched it all, telling old minstrel-show jokes. The sheets around me were soaked with sweat.
I stripped and showered, then made coffee, real this time, and sat down at the kitchenette table, chrome and red formica. I lit a cigarette. Could pass for white. But her skin looked dark in the picture.
There’s an old novel called Black No More, about a scientist who invents a cream that’s able to turn black people white and the social havoc this brings about, written in the thirties by George Schuyler, a newspaperman. When I was a kid, Dad always used to grin when any of his friends mentioned it. And Mom said she’d whip me if she ever caught me reading it. Till I did, I thought it was about sex.
I walked into the other room, taking the coffee with me, and dialed LaVerne’s home number. Not much chance, but worth a try. When there was no answer, I dialed one of the other numbers she’d given me and asked for her. I knew it was a bar she frequented most afternoons, picking up marks as they floated from posh uptown hotels down into the Quarter and back up. The guy that answered said, “Hold a minute, bud, I’ll check.”
I’d finished the coffee by the time she picked up the phone and purred into it, “Yeah, honey?” Honey had a few more syllables than it usually does.
“Lew. Listen-”
“How’s your father?”
“Holding his own, Mom says. It was a heart attack.”
“You goin’ up there, Lew?”
“Maybe later. Listen, need to ask you something.”
“If I know it.”
“This Nadie Nola cream: it work?”
“The girls say it does. Light, bright, and damn near white….”
I felt a warmth at the base of my spine, a tingling as though nerves beneath my skin were opening like tiny umbrellas, and knew it was all starting to come together.
“Thanks, Verne. I’ll be talking to you. You get on back to work.”
“I am working, Lew. You oughta see him over there watching me now, wondering who it is I’m talking to. Shoulders out to here and a wad of bills even Sweet Betty couldn’t get her mouth around. Owns a funeral home up in Mississippi, he says. Must be good money in death up in Mississippi.”
“Everywhere.”
I hung up with something gone hard and cold inside me, thinking of Angie, a good enough kid till skag, Harry and her own deep sadness found her. Now her kid was living with her parents up near Jackson. She must be two or three by now, I guessed. And myself-what had I turned into? I could feel that wild hatred building up inside me.
There’s this guy that lives uptown, Richard. Straight as straight can be, but every weekend he goes out and picks up rich white guys in hotel bars and the like, for sex, they think, and when he gets them alone, he kicks their faces in. I wondered if I was any better. My wife hadn’t thought so.
I poured another cup of coffee and drank it, then unplugged the pot and headed for the car.
A photographer I know down off Lee Circle works cheap, doesn’t ask or answer too many questions, and never minds a rush or difficult job if the money’s right. I pulled the Cad into a spot in front of his place and got o
ut. He was just getting there himself, standing at the door with keys in his hand.
“ ’Lo, Lew. Been a while, my man.”
“Milt. Got a quickie for you, if you can do it.”
“Come on in.” He finished unlocking the door and waved me in ahead of him. “I can do anything. The wizard of the flash, they call me in polite circles.”
“Oh yeah? When’s the last time you saw a polite circle?”
“Skip it. What you got?”
“A picture I clipped out of a magazine. I want you to take it, lighten the skin, change the hair. It’s a black girl. When you get through with her, I want her to look white. Can do, wizard?”
“Let’s see it.” He took it and held it up to the light. “Well, at least it’s on gloss. How much of a hurry you in?”
“An hour?”
“An hour, he says. All right. You wanna wait or come back?”
“I’ll come back.”
I pulled the Caddy out of its spot and headed for the Morning Call. Drank three cups of chicory and ate three beignets. A man across from me was reading the Times-Picayune, and I saw the headline on an inside page as he folded it back: CORENE DAVIS-WHERE IS SHE? So it was finally breaking.
I was back at Milt’s on the hour. He handed me an eight by ten.
“It’s grainy but the best I could do,” he said.
I looked at the picture. Bingo. Barbie’s sister.
“Can you put it on the tab, Milt?”
“Tab’s kind of heavy, Lew.”
I peeled off a fifty and shoved it at him.
“That cover it?”
“And part of the tab, too.”
“Thanks, Milt.”
“Anytime.”
I got back in the car and sat there thinking. Now at least I knew who, or what, I was looking for. I even had a picture, a good one. Should I give what I had to Blackie, excuse me, Abdullah Abded, and let him take it from there? He had contacts and resources I didn’t and might find her faster. Or should I go to the police-meet Walsh somewhere and let him play the thing out? I thought back to the newspaper headline buried on an inside page, business as usual, like no one really cared. Which is pretty much the truth of it, I guess.