by James Sallis
“The girl, Sanders.”
“Look, give me some time—a day, right? I’ll do what I can.”
“Noon tomorrow, call me then or before. And Sanders?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t disappear.”
“Disappear, hell. I’m getting easier to spot all the time. Got cops sitting out in the alley waiting to go through my goddam garbage, my wife’s lawyers on me like fleas. Now I gotta have you burning my ass.”
“Reaping what you sow, Sanders.”
“And what about you, man? You ain’t no goddamn pope yourself, now, are you?”
“Noon. Tomorrow.”
I hung up.
And what about me? Back when I found Corene Davis I’d thought my anger, my hatred, was gone forever. I’d been on top for a long time now, even chipped off a little corner of the good life for myself. But it was a lie, a story that didn’t work, a piece of white man’s life, not mine; and now the anger and hatred were coming back. I had kicked that guy in the hotel room in the stomach. I had wanted to kill him, kill them both. Robert Johnson’s hellhound was nipping at my heels.
I tried a couple of numbers for LaVerne and didn’t get her, so I figured she was with a client. Not much wanting to be alone just then, not really alone, but not with anyone either, I drove over to Joe’s.
Happy hour was in full bloom. One guy had already zonked out, face down on one of the corner tables, but everybody kept buying rounds for him and lining them up in front of him. There were the usual jokes about Joe’s hard-boiled eggs. Two guys were throwing darts in the back, with a Playboy picture of Ursula Andress tacked to the board. Nipples were automatic wins.
Nancy asked me what it was going to be and I said it was going to be scotch. To see her, you’d think Joe was violating child-labor laws. She looked fifteen and was twenty-four, with three bad marriages already behind her and another (I’d met the guy, and there was no way) looming on the horizon.
She brought the scotch for me and an orange juice for herself. I’ve never known her to drink.
“How ya been, Lew? It’s been a while.”
“Ça va bien, as our friends from the swamps say.”
“Yeah, I took French in high school. Had this teacher, one of the best-looking guys I’ve ever seen. He’d sit on the edge of the desk, throw his hair back, it was real long for them days, and he’d recite these poems and things. And I’d be looking at his pants the whole time, cause he wore them real tight, and you could see his dick laying there on his left leg. Looked absolutely huge.” She took a swig of o.j. “Found out later he was queer.”
“C’est la vie.”
“How’s Verne?”
“Fine, last I saw of her.”
“She working?”
“Guess so.”
She finished off the o.j. and rinsed her glass, put it mouth-down on a towel.
“I get off at eleven, Lew.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, well, like you say: C’est la vie. Such as it is. You want another, you let me know. That one’ll be on the house.”
“Joe doesn’t believe in the concept of ‘on the house,’ as near as I can recall.”
“What Joe don’t believe in is coming in once in a while to find out what the fuck is going on.” She laughed. “Got him a new young honey.”
“At his age?”
“Ain’t no age limit on love, Lew.”
“How about ‘at his size,’ then?”
“There’s always ways.”
“Right. Wills and ways. What does Martha have to say about this?”
She shrugged. “What’s Martha said about all the others? She’d better be clean, not in his house ever, watch the money, knock on my door when it’s over.”
After a few more scotches I joined the dart throwers and hit four nipples in a row. Goaded on by them, I ate four of Joe’s eggs, then we started in together on the drinks lined up by the zonked guy at the corner table. A long time later I realized that Nancy had her purse and was standing by the door.
“Hey, you coming with?” she said. “Or not?”
“With,” I said. I was wobbly on the way to the car, hers, but I rolled the window down and let air blow in my face all the way to her place and got at least halfway straight.
In her bed, one mattress stacked on top of another, we held one another closely, and soon slept.
Chapter Eight
I WOKE UP FEELING LIKE THE INSIDE OF SOMEONE’S SHOE.
There was a clock on the floor beside the bed and it read 9:43. In the kitchen there was coffee and soft music and a note that said “Thanks, Lew.” There was also, warming in the oven, breakfast.
A cross and a heart-shaped locket hung together from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator.
I finished off the pot of coffee. I couldn’t face food but dumped it in the toilet and flushed, so she wouldn’t know. I showered off the whiskey’s sour smell, her perfume, a little bit of my shakiness and shame.
By eleven I was at the office. There were three messages on the machine. One was from Nancy and said I wish there could be no past, only the present and a future. The second was from Francy, to tell me that Mom was sick with what they were calling an acute depression. The last was from Sanders. Come out to Algiers, he said, 408 Socrates.
I was heading out the door when the phone rang.
“Lew?” LaVerne said when I answered. “Back off Bud Sanders. Please.”
I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said, “I don’t know where this is starting, I don’t know what’s being said here.”
“You don’t have to. Shit, you have to understand everything?” I heard ice cubes clinking against a glass. “He’s a good man, Lew. Everything’s coming down on him now and I don’t know how much more he’s gonna be able to take.”
“You’re telling me he’s a client.”
“No.” Ice again. “I’m telling you he’s a friend, Lew. For a long time now.”
“Like me.”
“Right.”
“And you know what he does for a living?”
“Just like I know what I do for a living. What you do for a living. What we all do, one way or another.” She took another drink. “We aren’t angels, Lew. Angels couldn’t breathe the air down here. They’d die.”
“Right. But I need some information, Verne.”
“He’ll give it to you. But Lew—”
“Yes?”
“I think he’s in love. I don’t know if he can let her go. Be gentle with him, try to understand.”
“For you?”
“Whatever.” Ice clinked again against glass. “I’m drunk, Lew. I can’t afford to be drunk; this is one of my regular spots.”
“I’ll come and get you, Verne.”
“No, I’ll be all right. Just switch to coffee and sit here a while. You go on. But Lew?”
“Yes?”
She was silent for several seconds.
“Everything’s so shitty, Lew, so fucked up. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a long time.”
“No one ever has. Ever will.”
“You sure you’re gonna be okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine. You be careful. You’re not real good at being careful, Lew.”
“I try.”
“Don’t we all. Bye, Lew.”
“Bye, girl.”
I started out again, then came back and sat at the desk, staring out the window. I felt as though I’d lost something, lost it forever, and I didn’t even know what it was, had no name for it. Those are the worst losses we ever sustain.
Chapter Nine
NEW ORLEANS NATIVES ACCENT THE FIRST SYLLABLE and allow the entire word only two: So-crates. God knows what we’d do with Asclepius. Socrates is part of an old section of houses chopped up into apartments and strange corridors that would be slums in any other city but here are just where poor folk live. A lot
of them, oddly, seem to be black. And of course they’re only poor (so the rest of the great American fairy tale goes) because somehow they choose to be.
I took the wrong turn off the toll road and ended up over in Gretna in a warren of Hancock, Madison, Jefferson and Franklin streets. Why not, here of all places, one named for Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s slave-mistress?
I drove back across into Algiers, past driveways filled with junked cars, oil drums and abandoned refrigerators, past storefront churches, bail bondsmen, a martial arts academy, an Ethiopian restaurant, a boarded-up florist, ten blocks of project housing, an overgrown park, and a Bible college, and found Socrates.
Four-o-eight was at the edge, where things had started back up the ladder, a typically grand old New Orleans home renovated within the last ten years and divided (judging from nameplates by the front door) into three apartments. One of the plates read W. Percy, M.D., another R. Queneau. The third one just read B.S. I punched the button beside it. I punched it again. Nothing.
The front door, however, was not locked and led into a foyer with twelve-foot ceiling and stained-glass skylight. Two of the apartments were to the left of an ornate curved stairway leading, presumably, to an upper hallway or balcony, if to anything at all. The third apartment was to the stairway’s right, and that door was unlocked too. I went in.
A narrow hall ran to a well-equipped kitchen at one end, an unoccupied living room, strangely jumbled with antiques and chrome-and-glass, at the other. A ladderlike stairway climbed through the ceiling in one corner and took me into a bedroom smelling of young women—powders, perfume, polish remover, Noxzema. Some clothes were tossed onto the floor by the bed. A Bible was on the bedside table. There was a connecting bathroom, then another bedroom.
I went to the bed first. She was alive but not spectacularly so, deeply drugged, no reaction to a hard pinch, blood slow to come back. Once I figured she was going to be okay, I turned to him in the chair, but there wasn’t anything I could do for him.
Most of what had been his head was splattered against the wall. His hand had fallen into his lap and remained there, the gun, a forty-five, on the floor between his feet. I smelled urine, feces, the animal scent of blood and tissue.
By the wall across from him a camera sat on its tripod, still filming. I didn’t touch it. But I went back down the stairway to the phone in the living room and dialed downtown.
“Walsh,” I said.
“Sergeant’s with the Chief. Can I—”
“Get him.”
“I couldn’t inter—”
“Get him, now, or he’ll have you for breakfast tomorrow.”
A pause. “Could I say who wants him?”
“Lew Griffin.”
I waited all of a minute.
“Lew, what the hell?”
“Four-o-eight Socrates,” I said. “Our friend Sanders has just checked out permanently.”
“Twenty minutes,” Don said. “Don’t wander off.”
Chapter Ten
A CRUDELY LETTERED TITLE CARD DREW BACK from the screen and there was Sanders, holding it in one hand, pointing to it like a mime, face contorted into a gigantic smile. It read: Last Film.
He turned his back to the camera and walked slowly to the chair. When he turned around and sat, his expression had changed to a tragic one as exaggerated as the earlier smile. He mimed wiping tears from one eye, then the other. For a moment he hung his head, then shook it sadly again and again.
But an idea was starting up in his mind, and as it formed, the smile slowly returned, more natural now, less exaggerated. He held out his hand and, magically, a forty-five appeared in it. Waving good-bye with one hand, with the other he put the barrel of the gun into the smile.
And that was how I had found him.
“Jesus,” Don said.
Polanski and Verrick looked at one another, shaking their heads.
“He and the girl were living together?” Don said.
I nodded.
“How’d you know that?”
“Someone told me,” I said.
“Who told you?”
“I forget.”
“He the one that drugged her?”
I shrugged.
Don looked back up at the blank screen.
“This is one fucked-up world. And the best we can do is shovel shit from one place to somewhere else for a while.”
“You need me for anything else, Don?”
“No. Go on, Lew. Be careful.”
I walked down the four flights of stairs and outside. An old man in rags was sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the building. “Lock me up, officer,” he told me.
It was a little after nine and had probably been dark thirty minutes or so. A haze of heat and light shimmered over the city. Breathing was like walking in wet tennis shoes.
I retrieved my car from the police lot where Don had checked it in, and drove out Poydras to Hotel Dieu.
At the nurse’s station in intensive care I explained who I was and was told that one of the doctors would see me shortly, please wait in the family room outside. The fear, pain and blinding hope in that room were palpable. At length a tall, stooped young man in yellow scrubs came to the door and said quietly: “Mr. Griffith?”
“Griffin,” I said.
“About Cordelia Clayson?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please come with me.”
We went back into intensive care and to a small room at the far end. He pulled the door closed. Through it I could hear the sound of alarms going off, a voice saying: I need some help over here.
“And just what is your relationship to the patient, Mr. Griffin?”
“As I told the nurse, I’m a private detective engaged by the girl’s parents.”
“To investigate what brought her here to us?”
I shook my head. “To find her for them. My job’s done, except that now I have to go and tell them. And I need to know what to tell them.”
“I see. You’re in touch with the parents, then.”
“I know where to find them.”
He had sad brown eyes. You wondered if they would stay that way, or if after years of this (he couldn’t be more than twenty-six or -seven) they would harden.
“I can’t hold out a lot of hope,” he said. “It’s not the drugs themselves, of course; we’ve learned how to handle all that. But Cordelia had a hard hit of some unusually pure heroin. She was out for a long time, and what happened was, she developed what we call shock-lung syndrome. The heart slows down dramatically and loses the force of its contractions, so that everything kind of backs up. Her lungs are full of fluid. They’re hard to inflate—every breath is like the first time you blow into a balloon—and oxygen levels in the blood are critically low. We’re doing what we can. She’s on a ventilator that does all her breathing for her, and she’s receiving hundred-percent oxygen at high pressures. But we’re not gaining much ground, Mr. Griffin. And frankly, the interventive measures we’ve been forced to use are more likely to lead to further complications than to any resolution of the original problems. We get in this sort of downward spiral after a while. I’m sorry.”
I stood. “Thank you, Doctor. Will Mr. and Mrs. Clayson be able to see their daughter if I bring them down here? Are there restricted visiting hours?”
“Not in this case, Mr. Griffin. I’ll leave instructions at the desk.”
I went out through the double doors to the elevator. In the family room, every face turned toward me.
Chapter Eleven
THE BREEZE HAD TURNED INTO A STEADY, LOW WIND and there was rain in the air. I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents’ faces in the mirror.
I swung onto St. Charles and up into the Garden District. There are entire streets here where you go burrowing down tunnels of green, trees curv
ing over and around you, sky shut away. It reminds you how much of New Orleans is pure artifice—that it’s a constructed city, dredged out of swampland by sheer force of will and labor, nibbled at constantly by history, the river, the swamp’s dark mouth. For most of the 1830s the New Basin Canal, meant to assure American self-sufficiency from Creoles, was hacked out with pick and shovel (there was no dynamite, and no way to keep swamp seepage out except back-breaking pumps from Archimedes’ time) at a cost of well over a million dollars and at least eight thousand lives. A hundred years later the city of New Orleans voted to refill this canal.
It was as though the city’s image of itself, and the ways it tried to live up to that image, kept changing. It was Spanish, French, Italian, West Indian, African, Colonial American; it was primarily the city of fun and illusion, or primarily the bastion of culture in a new land; it was a city built on the backs of slaves and simultaneously a city many of whose important citizens were gens de couleur libre; endlessly, it adapted.
I parked on Jackson Avenue and found the address I wanted behind one of a row of apartment houses: what used to be a slave’s quarters connected to what used to be a garage by a room narrow as a sidewalk.
“I’m looking for the Claysons,” I said to the man who opened the door.
“You’d be Mr. Griffin?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in.” He backed out of the doorway.
Mr. and Mrs. Clayson were sitting inside on a shabby love seat and stood to introduce me to Clayson’s brother and his brother’s friend. I knew the friend from the streets, a working girl whose specialty was impotent men and rough trade with other women. I wondered if this was home for her.
As gently as I could, I told them about Cordelia and asked if they’d come with me. Mrs. Clayson closed her eyes and said under her breath what I suppose must have been a prayer. Mr. Clayson looked off at the wall as though he’d just lost whatever faith he’d had up to this point. They stood, and we walked out into the beginning rain.
By the time we reached Hotel Dieu, it was pouring. I let the Claysons out by the front lobby, told them to wait for me there, and parked. Six steps from the car, I was soaked through.