The Long-Legged Fly (4 page)

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 out. 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.

S
O
I
HIT
THE
STREETS.

Parked at the Pigeonhole and walked across, car scooped up on a massive, lumbering forklift and served into one of the cubbyholes like a piece of pie behind me. Bourbon Street, first. If she’d never been in New Orleans before, there was a good chance she made the tour.

Louie at Pat’s. Barney at The Famous Doors. Jimmy at Three Sisters. Daley at Tujagues. The best I got was a “Well, maybe.” I even hit Preservation Hall and the Gaslight Theatre. But didn’t hit paydirt till I’d worked my way down to The Seven Seas.

“Yeah, sure thing, she’s been in here every other night this last week or so.”

“Alone?”

“Not for long, but she always started off that way.” Then, answering my sharp glance: “She was hooking. Had a look about her, you know? Fresh pony. Guys go for that.”

“You’re sure it’s the same woman?”

“Sure? Sure I’m sure. The hair’s different, but that’s her all right. Calls herself Blanche. Pretty heavy behind something, too, I’d say—out of a needle or out of a bottle. Hard to tell.”

I wondered then: what was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go
on
living. It seemed as though I should know. I’d been there more than once and would probably be there again.

Sooner than I thought, perhaps.

“Any idea where else she might be working?”

“Might try Joe’s.”

“She hasn’t been there.”

“Well. Place called Blue Door, then. It’s—”

“I know where it is. Thanks.”

“
De nada
. But how about a drink before you split?”

I ordered a double bourbon, put it down in one minute flat, left a ten on the bar.

So Corene had turned herself, or been turned, into a white hustler, I thought, driving out of the Quarter against heavy day’s-end traffic and uptown toward the Blue Door. Stranger things have happened. Daily.

The guy behind the bar was Eddie, an ex-con. As a favor to Walsh I’d been a witness at the trial that put him away the second time. Once more and he was down for the count.

“Howdy, Mr. Griffin,” he said when I walked in.

“Behaving yourself, Eddie?”

“Straight as an arrow, ask anyone. Sunday school, prayer meetings. Right as rain.” He looked toward the big window. “Speaking of which,” he said, “raining yet?”

A few drops spattered against the glass and clouds rolled.

“Not yet.”

“Only thing about New Orleans. Rains every damn day.” He went down the bar to wait on a customer who had just come in. Then he came back. “Something I can do for you, Mr. Griffin?”

“I’m looking for a girl, Eddie.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Calls herself Blanche. A hustler. You seen her in here?”

“Blanche. Hmmm, let me see now. ‘Bout five-six, real looker?”

I nodded.

“That’d be Long John’s girl. Brought her marks here a couple of times. Been on the street a week, two at the most. Fresh pony, you know?”

So now I was looking for two people.

“What’s this Long John look like?”

“Mean mother. Real dark-alley material. Six-three or -four, maybe two-forty. Always wears a yellow suit. Never synthetics, always cotton. Says cotton is the American Negro’s heritage. Heavy user.”

“And where could I find him, if I looked?”

“Café du Monde or Joe’s, likely.”

“Thanks, Eddie. Keep your nose clean.”

“Just cleaned it, didn’t I? Cool as silk.”

I went out wondering what Eddie had under the bar for
special
customers.

N
OT
WANTING
TO
GO
TWO
OUT
OF
three falls with the traffic, I grabbed a cab back downtown and had the driver drop me off on Canal.

A crowd was gathering on the sidewalk in front of Werlein’s, doubled by its reflection in storefront glass among black pianos and shiny brass horns. I walked over, hearing about me a flurry of commentary, query, invective.

“Never knew what was coming.”

“I seen it, seen it all.”

“Bad blood ’tween ’em, had to be.”

“Just like that, and its over.”

“Anybody call the police yet?”

One man—both were black—lay on the sidewalk in a mirrorlike pool of blood and urine. There was a sucking wound in his chest where the bullet had smashed its way in; each time he tried to breathe, the fabric around it, though blood-logged, fluttered. Then light went out from behind his eyes and his shirt grew still. He was done with all this.

Another man of about the same age stood over him with the gun hanging limply at his side, saying over and over to himself what sounded like “I done tried to tell him, I done tried to tell him.” As though (I thought, walking on toward the Quarter), speechless and dumb for years, he had found at last a way to speak, to say the things he wanted.

Years later, as I stood in Beaucoup Books reading a poem in one of the magazines I skimmed from time to time there, that scene, something I’d never again thought of in all those years, came back to me full force. Once again I could see the shirt fabric flapping, the reflection of the crowd in the windows, the peace in both those men’s eyes.
You must learn to put your distress signals in code,
the poem read.

B
Y
THE
TIME
I’
D
WALKED
BACK
INTO
THE
Q
UARTER,
RAIN
was imminent. I hurried down Chartres and through Jackson Square, with the smell of the brewery everywhere, to the Café du Monde.

He was sitting outside, in one of his yellow suits, with at least half a dozen empty coffee cups on the table in front of him. His pupils were as big as saucers. I could feel hatred building inside me, swelling, like the rain.

“Long John,” I said. “Long gone, like a turkey through the corn—if I remember my blues. Lew Griffin. Where’s Blanche?”

He looked at me out of those huge eyes.

“Now,”
I said.

“What, you got a thing for white, man?” he said.

“Just Blanche. Used to know her.”

He seemed to be looking at something very far away, very private.

“She done changed since then,” he finally said. He picked up one of the cups and peered into it as though he knew coffee was still there, as though its absence were only illusion: interesting, inarguable, but (nevertheless) soon over. “Let me turn you a nice nigger girl. Got some lookers in the bag, whatever you want, they be waiting. Young stuff. Foxes. Lady wrestlers.”

I shook my head.

“It’s Blanche or nothing.”

“Then it’s nothing,” he said after a minute. He laughed and, raising his voice as if to order, said, “Nothing for
all
my friends. Lot of that going ’round, you know. Everywhere you look: nothing.”

“All right. You probably know my name, Johnny, back in there somewhere, wherever you are. And that pretty face of yours, pretty as any of your girls—remember? Think about make-overs, Johnny. About what you could look like tomorrow morning,
n’est-ce-pas?
”

He looked across the table at me much as he’d looked into the empty coffee cup.

“Yeah, I know the name, Griffin. I done heard ’bout you. But she don’t work for me no more, that’s fact.”

“I don’t give a shit who she works for. No more than I give a shit about your pretty face.”

“Yeah.” His head drooped. Suddenly he was tired. “Yeah. I hear you. Thing is, I don’t
know
where she is. I just don’t know.” Something flickered in his dull eyes. “Maybe still at the hospital.”

“What hospital? What happened?”

He stared off toward the river. Atop the levee an old man and a kid were playing godawful trumpet and tap dancing tolerably together. I picked up one of the cups and smashed it down on the table. I went on grinding the shards into the table, blood running from my hand and pooling at the table’s metal rim by his arm. He lifted a sleeve clear.

“Preparing your facial,” I said. “Won’t be a minute.”

“Okay, man, okay. I hear you.”

He pulled a handful of napkins out of the dispenser and dropped them on top of the blood, pulled some more and handed those to me, still looking off toward the river.

“Saturday night we’re together and she just went plain wild on me, man. Crazy—you know what I’m sayin’? I cain’t have no crazy woman workin’ for me. So I dropped her off at the emergency room and left her there. What else could I do? And I knew they’d know what to do for her there.”

“Which hospital?” I said. “Which hospital was it?”

He thought. “Let me see. Baptist. Yeah, that’s it, Baptist. Cause I stopped off at the K&B up the street for a bottle when I left.”

“And this was Saturday night?”

“Saturday night. She just went crazy on me, man.” He looked back at me. Picked up one of the cups and tipped it back as though drinking. Dabbed at his mouth with the back of a hand. “Now what kind of girl was it you said you wanted?”

I wanted to kill him. Kill someone. Instead, I got up and walked away. I found a pay phone down the street, dropped in a nickel and dialed Baptist Memorial, asking for Admissions.

“I’m trying to find my sister,” I said when I got through. “She ran away from home—Mom’s worried to death—and we don’t even know what name she was using other than Blanche. I heard she might have been hurt Saturday night and brought there.”

“Just a minute, sir, I’ll check.” She was gone two or three minutes. “Sir, our records show that a Blanche Davis was admitted Saturday night. Negro, late twenties, early thirties. Could that be your sister?”

“Almost certainly. Could you tell me what room she’s in?”