Black Hornet (4 page)

“You’re welcome,” she said.

So we sat there, me with my beer, her with her Scotch on the rocks, Buster singing about going back to Florida where you gotta plow or you gotta hoe. “Someone coming to take care of the boy?” I asked the barkeep. He shrugged. But eventually a Charity ambulance pulled up out front and two fat white guys came in to fetch him.

The woman sat watching them. When they were gone she held up two fingers and the barkeep brought another round. She picked hers up, sniffed at it, swirled it around the squat glass and put it down without drinking.

“Ever hear of O’Carolan?”

I shook my head.

“He was a minstrel, I guess. A wandering musician. Wrote a lot of music for Irish harp. Supposedly on his deathbed he asked for a glass of whiskey, saying ‘It’d be a terrible thing if two such good friends were to part without a final kiss.’ ”

She turned toward me on her stool and held out a hand.

“You’re Lew Griffin. I—”

“Yes, m’am. I know who you are.”

Her face appeared three days a week atop a
Times-Picayune
column. Mostly light humor about how difficult life was for uptown white women. You know: finding the right caterer, when to wear white shoes, getting the kids off to camp. But every so often she got her teeth into something real. And when she did, the city’s blood, the bottomless despair and pain running in it, squeezed out around her words.

“I spend a lot of time sitting in bars all over the city drinking too much cheap Scotch and bourbon, or in restaurants drinking coffee I don’t want, talking to people some, but mostly listening to them. Past months, your name’s come up in some oddly disparate places.”

Oddly disparate. People who grow up on State Street or Versailles and go to Sophie Newcomb talk like that.

“First I heard about this guy who used to come around collecting for a shyster furniture-and-appliance outfit over on Magazine. He’d wind up telling people how to get out from under—even give them money for payments sometimes. A young Negro, they said. Big, wiry. Almost always wore a black suit. Shirt and tie.

“Then, in a different neighborhood, I’d hear how this same man walked into a French Quarter bar looking for someone who’d jumped bail and walked back out with his man, leaving behind, on the floor, a couple of hard customers with broken arms and cracked ribs.”

She picked up her drink and took a long draw off it. Lowered her eyelids in respect as the taste took hold.

“I had to start wondering if there wasn’t a story here.”

“No, m’am, I don’t think so.”

“I’m painfully aware that I’m at least twice your age, you know. But please don’t call me m’am. That makes me feel even older. Esmé. Or just Ez—that’s what most people call me.”

I nodded. She looked his way and the bartender, who was keeping his eye on her, hustled over with another round.

Buster retuned to standard and started a slow shuffle in E, improvising lyrics about Lewis Black and his Uptown Lady. I shot him a hard stare. He grinned.

So did Esmé. “Listen,” she said, “they’re playing our song.”

“You want a story?”

“At least three times a week.”

“Then there it is.” I nodded toward Buster and started telling her about him. All those old records, how you’d trip over his name in books on blues and jazz history, the time he put in at Parchman, how he’d spent half his life cooking barbeque in an old gas station up in Fort Worth.

We went through that round and another as I talked. Esmé asked if I’d excuse her a minute. She was on the phone maybe a quarter hour, then came back.

“Calling in my column. Work’s done. So now I can relax and have fun. No more grown-up for a while.”

The next morning on my way home from the police station, numb with fatigue, shaky with the adrenaline still sputtering in my veins, I’d read her piece about Buster, titled simply “A Life.” And in days to come I’d read it over and over again, vainly seeking some final clue, some personal message or explanation, some reason that wasn’t there.

“And what might that fun consist of?” I asked.

“Well, I
am
open to suggestion. But another drink and then dinner with a handsome young man is one definite possibility.”

“Will I do instead?”

“Oh, I suspect you’ll do very nicely, Lewis.”

Another drink turned into several, the club slowly filled with bodies, Buster careened from Carter Family to Bo Chatmon to Chicago blues.

Finally we walked out into a warm, bright night. Across the street, leaves of banana trees moved slowly in the breeze, throwing terrible huge shadows across walls and sidewalk. Behind us Buster complained that his woman had waited till it was nine below zero and put him down for another man.

“Which way?”

“Depends. What are you in the mood for?”

“Creole? French?”

“Animal, vegetable or mineral.”

“Mexican.”

“Greek.”

“Fried cardboard.”

“That even sounds good. I’m starved.”

“Me too.”

“
Food.
For the love of God, Montressor.” Hand held before her, fingers clawing feebly for purchase. eyes rolling back.

I had just reached out for that hand—our fingers, I think, barely grazed—when she fell. I looked down at the puncture in her forehead, just beneath the hairline, thick blood rimming over.

I remembered hearing the sound then and, though I knew there would be nothing to see, looked up.

For just a moment I thought I saw something move on one of the rooftops, a shadow crossing the moon. But of course I could not have.

Chapter Four

I
COUNTED
TWELVE
POLICE
CARS
pulled up at various angles on the street by the time I was put inside one (hand lightly on my head as I was urged into the backseat) and taken downtown. Most of them had flashers going. It looked like one of those carnivals that unfolds out of two trucks and takes over a whole parking lot.

At the station the cuffs were removed, I was given coffee, and for several hours, riders changing from time to time but always the same tired old pony, we played What-was-the-exact-nature-of-your-relationship-to-the-deceased.

It was all pretty much stage whispers and much ado. They knew I wasn’t involved in the shooting. But black man/white woman was a formula they just couldn’t leave alone. That people were getting shot like paper targets out there in the streets was nothing compared to
this
danger. Eternal vigilance.

“Come on, Griffin. Own up to it. You were lovers. Had to be. We know that.”

He lit a cigarette, pushed the pack an inch or two across the table toward me.

“We look into it, we’re gonna find out maybe she paid rent, bought your clothes, kept you in booze. Save us all some time here, boy.”

“What was it, she started asking for something back? A little responsibility, maybe?” This from a wiry guy leaning against the wall behind the smoker.

“We got ten, twelve reporters lined up out there waiting to talk to someone, boy. Trying their damnedest to dig up a photo of you,
any
photo, they can run with their stories. Mayor’s already called the chief—his and Ms. Dupuy’s family go way back—and the chief’s called me. Chief’s waiting up for me to get back to him.”

“We got to lay this off on someone soon, and I might as well tell you, we don’t much care who it is.”

“Shit deep enough you gonna need a
big
boat, anyway you come at it.”

The wiry guy pushed himself away from the wall. His shoes were thirteens at least. On him, they looked like clown shoes.

“Someone said she’d have you make ape noises toward the end of things. Said that was the only way she could get off. That right?”

Dead silence. Smoke rolled about the room, thick as fog.

“You wanta just wait outside, Solly?”

“I—”

“Now?”

He waited till the other was gone.

“Lewis, we’re trying to do you a favor, man. Just tell us the truth. What you could be looking at, it’s prob’ly ten to twenty, even with good behavior. Your behavior likely to be good?”

I told him I doubted it.

“Somehow I do too.”

I didn’t have a record, that came later; but as I said, my name was on the streets some, even then.

I kept on trying to give them what they expected. Never met an eye, said yessir till my voice went hoarse, kept my head down. Along about daylight I decided what the hell, this dead horse had been beaten enough for one day.

“Sir,” I said. “Don’t you think I should have an attorney present?”

I figured they’d either shoot me or club me over the head and throw me out back with the rest of the trash. And at that point either one sounded preferable to more of the same.

“Why of course I do. I even believe you people, you’re brought up right, you’re good as anybody else. But the fact of the thing is, I can hold you for as long as I need to and ain’t nobody going to say anything.”

“On what charge?”

“Lewis, Lewis.” He shook his head. “Where you been, boy? I don’t need any charges.”

“Maybe that will change.”

“Maybe. But it ain’t yet. Meanwhile you’re a nigger. You been consortin’ with a white woman got herself killed last night. You got no steady employment, got a hist’ry of violence, discharged from the service after beating in a few heads. You’ll be lucky you even make it far as a cell.”

He made a great show of packing his Winston down, snapping it repeatedly against a heavy Zippo lighter with some kind of military emblem on it. He put the cigarette in his mouth, thumbed the lighter’s wheel and held it there.

“You boys come down here with a hard-on from—what? Arkansas? Mississippi?—and the city turns you inside out. You got some bad friends out there. Every day goes by, you sink a little further into the scum that coats this city a foot deep.”

He brought lighter to cigarette, a small ceremony.

There was a rap at the door. The wiry guy stuck his head in.

“See you a minute, Sarge.”

He went over and they stood there talking.

First I could make out only occasional words. Then, as their voices rose, more.

“… come down …”

“… bust … desk jockey … wipe his nose …”

“… collar comes off, like it or not …”

“Fuck that.”

“More like fuck you, Sarge.

“Yeah, like always.”

He came back.

“You’re free to go, Griffin.”

“Just like that?”

He nodded. I started to say something else, ask what the hell, but he stopped me. “Get on out of here.”

The city was just coming alive outside. Soft gray bellies of clouds hung overhead, as though draped, tent-like, on the top of the buildings. Sunlight snuffled and pawed behind them.

And Frankie DeNoux sat on the steps.

I almost didn’t recognize him, since he wasn’t wearing his office.

“Sweet freedom,” he said.

“Believe it. But what are you doing here? Boudleaux finally throw you out? Whoever Boudleaux is.” Far as I knew, no one had ever seen him. “You on the streets now?”

“Ain’t that the way it always is. Do a favor for a guy, he won’ even talk to you after.”

“What favor’s that, Mr. Frankie?”

“Sweet freedom,” he said again.

I just stared at him.

“Got me a man up there. He keeps me posted what’s going down, I slip him a fifty ever’ week or so. Las’ night he calls to let me know this woman’s been shot and the police’ve brought in this guy he knows does some work for me. But the guy ain’t been charged with nothin’, he says, ain’t even on the books.

“Well. This, I know, is definitely not good. Bad things happen in police stations to people who are not there. I know this from working with the criminal element, and with the police element, for forty years. After forty years, I also know a few people. Favors get owed along the way.”

Closing the rest of his fingers, he held thumb and pinky finger out: a stand-up comedian’s phone.

“I made some calls.”

“You made some calls.”

“Well, really it was just one. The other guy wouldn’t talk to me. But …” He waved a hand: here’s the free world anyway.

“I didn’t know you had friends, period, Mr. Frankie. Much less friends in high places.”

“High, low, scattered in between. Lots of those won’t talk to me anymore either. What the hell. ’S all information, Lewis. You got information, you get things. You got things, you get information.”

I was with him so far. But there was one point I wasn’t clear on:

“Why?”