The Long-Legged Fly

by James Sallis

  I made rounds with my picture, then dropped onto a bench by one particularly fetching specimen of late childhood and ate my sandwich.

  I waited.

  After an hour or so I gave it up—lots of distractions and a nagging notion that the world might not be so bad after all, but no Cordelia—and wandered over toward the cathedral. I don’t know why. Anyhow, halfway inside the door, about where they start selling trinkets to tourists, I turned around and walked back out.

  Until 1850 or so, Jackson Square had been Place d’Armes, and it was there, during the years of Spanish rule a century earlier, that rebellious French leaders had been executed. A few blocks landward, in Congo Square, slaves were allowed to pursue music and mores otherwise proscribed by the Code Noir and femme de couleur libre Marie Laveau held court over regular Sunday voodoo rituals. Scenes from our rich heritage hereabouts. Laveau, incidentally, was said to have consorted with alligators. Obviously one hell of a woman.

  That night LaVerne and I had dinner at Commander’s Palace. Trout Almandine because they make the best in the city and a Mouton-Rothschild because we felt like it. The wine steward seemed a bit huffy at first but, as the evening went on, grew ever friendlier in proportion to the growing redness of his face.

  “You know an actress named Willona?” I asked Verne at one point.

  “Can’t say I do, Lew. But lots of girls call themselves actresses.”

  We went back to the wine and small talk.

  About two in the morning Verne’s phone rang and she rolled over to get it. I could hear a heavy, almost growling voice on the other end, but couldn’t make out words.

  “Yeah, honey?” Verne said. More growling. “Really? Kinda late for a working girl, you gotta give better notice… . Yeah, sure, honey, I understand, of course I do… . Yeah, I know where it is… . I’ll be there, sure… . Give me thirty, thirty-five minutes, huh?”

  She hung up.

  “Gotta split, Lew,” she said. “One of my regulars.”

  I nodded and she swung out of bed toward the closet. She had more clothes in there than they had at Maison Blanche.

  I waited until she’d left, then got up, dressed, and went home.

  Chapter Three

  HOME THESE DAYS WAS A FOUR-ROOM APARTMENT on St. Charles where trolleys clanked by late at night and you could always smell the river. It had a couple of overstuffed couches, some Italian chairs, a king-size bed, even pictures on the wall. Mostly Impressionist.

  I parked the bug on the street and went in. Poured a brandy and sat on one of the couches sipping at it.

  I was thinking about Cordelia Clayson and the ways it could go. Maybe she was hustling on the street corners by now, I didn’t know. Maybe she was into drugs, or booze. Or plain old for-the-hell-of-it sex. Or Jesus. Anything was possible. Whatever, I didn’t feel too hopeful about the news that sooner or later I was going to have to bring her parents. I’d seen too many times what the city could do.

  Actress, I kept thinking. Actress. I didn’t know anything about acting, but I’d had a professor at college who had done a bibliography of New Orleans theater since 1868 or some such date, and tomorrow I’d give him a call. Right now it was time for bed. I finished off the brandy, undressed, set the alarm for seven, and hit the sack.

  I was wakened at six by the phone.

  “Yeah?” I managed to get out.

  “Lew? I’m calling from downtown.”

  “Don. Don’t you ever go home?”

  “Funny, my wife’s always asking me the same thing. Can you come down here, Lew? It’s Vice. They think they’ve got your girl.”

  I drove over expecting to talk to Cordelia Clayson in a detention room. Instead, I was ushered into a room on the fourth floor lined with books and what looked like cans of film. Don introduced me to Sergeants Polanski and Verrick and left. “Can’t watch this shit, Lew. Daughters of my own,” he said.

  “Something we picked up at a party down on Esplanade,” Polanski told me. “Thought you’d be interested.”

  While he was talking he threaded film into a projector. When he raised his hand, Verrick hit the lights and there we were, in dreamland.

  A big white dude in black socks was doing things to a young black girl. Alternately fucking and sucking and beating and lecturing her on the philosophy of the bedroom and woman’s natural submission. It sounded like something out of de Sade by way of Heffner and Masters and Johnson—the redeeming social significance, I guess.

  It was cheaply made, frames jumpy, figures and faces out of focus. But the girl was undeniably Cordelia.

  The film lasted maybe fifteen minutes. Nobody said a word the whole time.

  “Your girl?” Polanski said when it was over and the lights were back on.

  I nodded.

  “Who made it—you know?” I said after a moment.

  “Guy by the name of Sanders. You get to know them by their style after a while—camera angles, things like that. Bud Sanders. Rents a cheap motel room, turns a girl up high on speed or whatever’s going, and rolls the camera. Mostly the men are the same ones over and over.”

  “You pick him up?”

  “What the hell for?” Polanski said. “He’d be back out on the street before we started the paper-work.”

  “What about community standards?”

  “You’re kidding. In New Orleans?”

  “We could try,” Verrick added, “keep him busy a while. But it wouldn’t be long. Nothing would stick. Water off a duck’s back. Then he’d just go out and rent a new camera and start all over again.”

  I nodded. I’d seen porn films in my time, some in the line of business, a few for pleasure, but this one had really got to me. I was thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Clayson up on Jackson Avenue and what I’d tell them.

  “Where can I find this Sanders?” I said.

  “Who knows?” Polanski said.

  “Turn over the nearest rock,” Verrick said.

  “What happens to the film now?”

  “We hold it for evidence, then we file it. But there are probably ten, twelve copies of it on the streets by now.”

  “We can’t keep on top of it,” Verrick said. “You close one factory down, two more spring up. Like those dragon’s teeth or whatever they were.”

  I nodded again. “Thanks, Polanski,” I said. “Verrick—let me know how it turns out. What becomes of the girl? If you find her.”

  “Man, the girl’s nothing. They pop out of the woodwork like sweat on a hog. It’s Sanders we want. For good. The girl’s yours, if we ever get to her. But we won’t.”

  I started out the door.

  “And you got a room full of this stuff,” I said.

  “This is just pending cases. You oughta see the vaults down at Central Holding,” Polanski said.

  It was only then, walking out the door, that I realized that I had an erection. It made me remember some of the things my wife had called me.

  Chapter Four

  THE ALARM CLOCK WAS STILL BUZZING WHEN I GOT back to the apartment. I poured a cup of coffee—it was on a timer—and filled a pipe. Then I reached for the phone.

  I got through to Dr. Ropollo at his office in the English building and after telling him what I’d been doing the past ten years (it wasn’t much, after all), asked him about Sanders.

  “Bill Collins is the guy you need to talk to. Teaches cinema up at Tulane. But he’s probably home, or in his studio, this time of day.” He gave me the two numbers and I wrote them down in my notebook. I thanked him and hung up.

  I poured another cup of coffee and tried the first number. Nothing. I dialed the second, studio number. It rang five times.

  “Collins.” A high, slightly effeminate voice, though businesslike at the same time.

  I told him who I was and asked about Sanders.

  “Bud Sanders, you mean? That asshole. Talk about birthright and a mess of pottage,” he said. “Talk about pissing it all away. Be one hell of a filmmaker if he wanted to. Horrible waste of talent.”
He said it as though he were a man who couldn’t tolerate much waste of any kind.

  “You know where I might find him?”

  “Well, he teaches a cinematography course down at the free school. You might get in touch with him there.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Collins,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to your epic now.”

  “Epic, hell. I’m shooting another fucking TV commercial for ‘feminine hygiene products’ is what I’m doing.”

  “I’ll look for it.”

  “Along with the rest of the world.” And he broke the connection.

  The free school wasn’t listed in the book and Directory Assistance had never heard of it. I finally called a flaky friend of mine, a stewardess who spent her off-time collecting lost causes, and got the address.

  It was one crumbling building on the edge of Elysian Fields near I-10. From the look of it, it had been a hotel at one time or another. Now it was filled with long-haired sweaty kids and covered with graffiti. Don’t drop toothpicks in the toilet or the crabs will polevault to freedom, it said on one wall. God is watching you, it said above that. I wondered if he (or she) was watching Cordelia Clayson too.

  I finally tracked down the Administrative Offices on the second floor and walked in. A girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen got up from a desk and walked toward me.

  “Yessir,” she said.

  “Yes’m. I’m looking for Bud Sanders, have a job for him but can’t seem to connect. Wondered if you might be able to help me.”

  “A job, you say?”

  “Right.”

  “Well.” She considered. “You could leave a message with me, I’d see he got it.”

  “I appreciate that, but I’m afraid I’m in a hurry. I really have to get through to him today. If I’m going to use him, that is.”

  “Well.” She looked around the room as though he might be hiding in it somewhere. “Wow, I don’t know.” She reached around behind her and grabbed her braids, tugged at them. “There’s money in it for him, huh?”

  “Yes’m. Quite a bit, really.”

  “Okay. Well, I don’t think he’d want me to let you get away.” That decided, she let the braids go. “He’s on location. Belright Hotel, on Perdido near Tulane and Jeff Davis.”

  “Thanks, Miss.”

  “Ms.”

  “Right.”

  “Room 408.”

  Chapter Five

  THE LAST TIME I’D BEEN TO THE BELRIGHT WAS ON MY honeymoon. We’d ordered chicken sandwiches “with extra chips” and they’d brought enough for a party. They’d also sent up champagne and a fruit basket. I guess we were pretty happy there for a little while. But it was the beginning, still, of a long decline.

  The Belright back then had been pricey and plush. Declines were everywhere.

  I pretended I belonged there, walked through the lobby and up the stairs, something I wouldn’t have gotten away with just a few years before. But now there wasn’t a porter or other service person in sight, only one youngish, half-bald guy behind the desk picking his nose with a ballpoint pen.

  I heaved myself up the four flights and knocked on 408, waited, knocked again. Finally someone opened the door an inch or so and stuck his nose in the crack.

  “Yeah.”

  “You Bud Sanders?”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Maybe I could introduce you.”

  Inside the room someone, a man, said, “Who’s that?”

  “Some wiseass nigger.”

  “I interrupt something between you two fellows?” I said.

  He opened the door wider and glared at me.

  “Look, fellow,” he said. “We’re trying to get a little work done in here. Why don’t you just go away and let us get back to it.”

  “Now let’s see. What kind of work would that be, in a hotel room with all those bright lights I see behind you there? PR film for the Belright, maybe? Hope your demographics are right.”

  “Goddamn.”

  It was the other guy. A second later the door opened and he stood there by Sanders, sweaty and naked at half-mast. I kicked him in the kneecap, then the stomach, and went on in.

  The woman on the bed wasn’t Cordelia. She wasn’t conscious, either.

  I spun around and grabbed Sanders by the neck.

  “Okay,” I said, “I had to see who you had in here. Now you listen to me. First, you get some help for this woman. Then you find Cordelia Clayson—shut up and listen—and you bring her to me at the fountain in Jackson Square by five o’clock tonight.” The other guy was starting to get up so I kicked him again. “Don’t make it so I have to come find you again. Be there.”

  “Man, I don’t know where that girl is.”

  “Find out.” I let go of him. “We’re through talking. You better wrap it up, he’s not gonna feel much like fucking anymore.”

  I went out, down the stairs, through the lobby. Going back outside felt like walking into a forest fire. Sweat burst out of every pore I had.

  There were piles of garbage in plastic bags in the alley alongside the hotel. You could hear flies buzzing inside them, their sound amplified by the taut, membranelike plastic.

  Chapter Six

  WALSH AND I FINALLY GOT TOGETHER FOR LUNCH that afternoon at Felix’s. He was standing at the bar just inside the door when I got there, staring at an oyster.

  “Somehow I always expect them to scream right before they go in. You know, suddenly grow a little mouth in there, and cute little round eyes, like in Disney cartoons.”

  He shrugged and downed it, his last, and we grabbed a table being vacated by two fortyish guys wearing tiny old earrings, shorts and not much else.

  Both of us ordered po’boys and beer.

  At some point during the meal, and for no particular reason, I asked Don about his father. He shrugged.

  “Didn’t really know him much. Left, or my mother threw him out, or he got put away, whatever, when I was, I don’t know, nine or ten, maybe. What I do remember’s not good. Lots of hollering and being stood in corners or sent to bed, a few beatings—more, toward the end. Usual happy American childhood, right?”

  “Close, anyway. Seems like it.”

  I bit off a plug of hard bread, shredded lettuce, hot sauce, oysters. Chewed.

  “Mine never touched me. Never said much, but you could see the world going on back there behind his eyes. Had this kind of private smile, mostly. I didn’t know him very well, either, not even what he did for a living. He’d go away for long periods, months sometimes. And he’d always be a little … I don’t know … different, when he came back. Nothing you could pin down, but different. Like whatever he’d been away doing had changed him. And so I had all these different fathers coming home every time. But I didn’t know any of them, not really.”

  A drunk stumbled up on the street outside and pressed his face close to the glass. The black man in livery shucking oysters behind the bar gently shooed him away.

  “I remember one time I was nine maybe. I’d done something pretty terrible—stolen dimes from a jar of them my mother kept in the closet, I guess. They were standing in the doorway to the room where both of us kids slept, and they must have thought I was asleep. ‘You’ve got to lay hands on him this time, George,’ she was telling him. And after a while my father just said, very quietly, ‘I will not bring violence into my home, Louise. I’ve lived by it too long.’ The next few times he left, he stayed away longer, then one of those times he didn’t come back at all. After a while Momma moved us in with relatives.”

  “Jesus, Lew.”

  “—has nothing to do with it, as Mae West said.” I finished up my beer and signaled for two more. “Anyhow, I made all that up. Nothing mysterious or dangerous about him. He was just an ordinary man.”

  Don looked at me a long time. “Sometimes I think you just may be as crazy as everyone says you are.”

  “I am. Sometimes.”

  We drank our beers.

  “Ordinary,” Don sai
d. “I used to be that, I guess.”

  “Well, good buddy, whatever else happens, at least you’re still white.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.” And putting down the empty glass: “You want to get some air?”

  We walked down Decatur to the French Market and trudged over the levee. A cool breeze eased in off the water. Due south along the river’s curve lay the city’s bulky torso, flanked by the wharf with its growth of ships, tugs, barges. The Canal Street ferry was just pulling out of its slip heading at an angle toward Algiers.

  That camel’s hump of land over there, directly opposite oldest New Orleans and now the city’s fifth ward, is central to its history. At various times called Point Antoine, Point Marigny and Slaughter House Point, in the last days of French rule it was the site both of the colony’s abattoir and powder magazine—and a depot for shipment after shipment of slaves newly arrived from Africa.

  Dr. King had a dream. I at least had History.

  Chapter Seven

  I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY MAKING PHONE CALLS and wondering. Maybe I should have stayed there at the Belright and called Vice. They wanted Sanders; maybe something in the scenario—whatever it turned out to be—would have led us to Cordelia. But Sanders himself seemed, as they said over at Jefferson Downs, a better horse.

  Still, I didn’t really expect him to meet me. I figured it might take two or three times to convince him I was serious. And next time he wouldn’t be so easy to find.

  I was half right.

  Just as I was leaving the office to head for Jackson Square, the phone rang.

  “Griffin? Sanders, Bud Sanders. I asked some people about you, man.”

  I let it hang there.

  “They said you’re crazy as shit. Someone told me you killed a man you didn’t even know up near Baton Rouge a couple of years back.”