“Or jumping to conclusions: you better believe it. With both bare feet. But I’m looking around close and hard as I come down.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you would be. Want some coffee?”
“Only if you hold a gun on me. I was up all night working, already had nine, ten cups.”
“A drink, then?”
“Wouldn’t mind. Only had five or six of those.”
So we went in and I rinsed two of the glasses on the counter by the sink and poured Scotch into them. We sat at the kitchen table. In the South that’s where all the best talking gets done. I put the bottle between us on the table and asked Hosie what he knew.
“Well. I never had one doubt that you’d be going after this person, of course. Couldn’t tell, though, whether it would be right away, or later. I already knew from something Frankie told me, once I put it together with a couple other things I’d caught here and there on the streets, that this young patrolman, guy named Walsh, had the same gleam in his eye. So last night when both your names come up in conversation-after I call from the paper to inquire the nature and extent of your injuries-I pretty much know what’s happened. I just don’t have any particulars. And in my line of work, particulars are the only things worth having.”
He settled back with his glass resting on one leg, an actor who had delivered his lines and now could coast.
“I’m afraid that’s about as particular as it gets,” I told him. “We don’t know who the shooter is, don’t know anything about him, really. Walsh was dogging the places shootings had occurred. He kept seeing this guy. Knew him from the way he walked. I was chasing shadows too, and one of the shadows jumped up to become a guy holding a gun on Walsh.”
Hosie had a sip of Scotch. “I don’t know whether to call that incredible luck, or astonishing stupidity.”
“You got me. Wrong place, right time?”
He grunted. “So that was it, huh? Your wad’s shot. Blank slate, start all over again, same as before.”
“Yeah. Except now he knows we’re out here, of course.”
“So he’ll be harder to find.… He doesn’t know who you are, right? Either of you?”
“We don’t think he does.”
Hosie stared at the tabletop while I looked out the window at squirrels chasing one another across power lines. When I found my glass empty, I refilled both.
“That’s good,” he said. I never knew if he meant the refill or the shooter’s not knowing who we were. Because just then the door opened and we both looked toward it.
“Lew. You okay? I went straight home once I heard what happened. Thought you’d be there.”
“I was.”
“You ever give any thought to maybe leaving a note, let someone know you’re all right?”
I stood and hugged her. She felt wonderful, smelled wonderful, the way she always did. She was wearing a short blue dress, shiny and satinlike, with red heels (pumps, she called them) and huge red earrings.
“Hosie, this is LaVerne.”
“It sure is.”
“Verne: Hosie Straughter. He’s-”
“I know.” She held out her hand. “Truly a pleasure, Mr. Straughter. I’ve enjoyed your writing over the years, and learned so much from it.”
“Lewis,” he said, cupping their joined hands with his free one. “This is not what one would call a fine Scotch. In fact, more discerning drinkers might be disinclined to call it a Scotch at all. And your attire, this horrid black suit gone slick at the knees, with its uneven cuffs: also questionable. But, be all that as it may, I am forced to admit that your taste in friends is … exemplary. Unassailable. Absolutely. The pleasure, young lady,” he said, lowering his head, “is entirely mine, believe me.”
He picked up his glass and drank off the couple of inches I’d just poured. “And with that simple, heartfelt toast, I’ll leave you two young people to whatever it is that young people do these days.”
Over my protests he left, and we had indeed set about doing what young people did those days, when someone knocked at the door.
“Lewis! You in there?”
“Hang on.” I stood up, straightened things and looked at Verne. She made a face and straightened her own things.
I opened the door a few inches. He wore black jeans, western boots, a yellow Ban-Lon shirt. Squinting in the bright sunlight.
“What are you doing here? And more important, how did you find me?”
“Hope you don’t mind. Figured after you got some sleep-”
“Which hasn’t happened yet.”
“-we could get together and-”
He stopped, jaw still working. “Hey. I’m sorry. You get to bed.” At which point LaVerne stepped into sight. “I can come back.”
I opened the door the rest of the way.
“Better come on in. Sun shining off your white face like that, down here, it’s liable to blind someone. You want coffee? Nice shirt, by the way.”
“Had a potful of it already. Hello, miss.” His eyes went back and forth between us a couple of times.
“LaVerne: Don Walsh.” They both nodded. “A drink, then?”
“You got a beer?”
I did. I tracked it down in the icebox, trapped it, and handed it to him. He rolled the first mouthful around a while, swallowed.
“There’s this guy over on Jackson keeps an eye and ear open for us.”
“A snitch.” So I wasn’t as invisible as I thought I was. We seldom are.
“Yeah, well, what’s in a name. He’s turned a lot of things our way.”
“Including my address.”
“It’s any consolation to you, I did have to tell him exactly what our connection was.”
“We don’t have a connection, Officer.”
Silence shimmered in the air like heat lightning.
“I’ll be going now, Lew,” Verne said. “It’s been a long night. Get some sleep, call me later on?”
“You need a cab?”
“No, honey. St. John gave me a lift.” Sinjun. Her fifty-year-old neighbor who still dressed in chinos, sweater, blue shirt, loafers. Like many people in this city, he seemed stuck, like a fly in amber, in some prior era. “He’s waiting at a bar on Claiborne.”
“Beautiful woman,” Walsh said.
True enough. Heads turned, men’s and women’s alike, wherever she went, and I was pleased, flattered, proud, to have her beside me. Only much later, after almost thirty years with and without her, and when it was too late, did I realize that LaVerne had saved my life-that in some strange, indecipherable way we had saved each other’s lives.
And in the years before that realization came, without meaning to I would hurt her terribly again and again, the same way I’d repeatedly damage myself. Each year, the ground pulls harder. Each year, the burden of what we do and fail to do helps push us down.
“You want another beer?” I said. “No? Then what the hell do you want?”
“A question I’ve asked myself again and again.”
“Ever get an answer?”
“Oh yes. Lots of them.”
He found the trashcan under the sink and dropped the bottle in.
“I want to stop feeling this hole where my brother was. I want things to make sense. I want justice and truth and decency and clear blue skies.”
“Walsh?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to have a miserable life, man.”
Chapter Thirteen
We found him, casting ourselves bodily for the fifth or sixth time into the abyss of the absurdly hopeful, ready to call it quits after one, two more, tops, at a bar not far off Lee Circle on Girod.
He had on a tuxedo coat with lapels wide as mud flaps, purple-and-green Hawaiian shirt, khaki work pants, hightop tennis shoes with most of the black worn away. There were patches on the pants that looked like they belonged on a tire.
“Looking good, Doo-Wop.”
“Captain.” Doo-Wop was able to recall the minutest detail of a story you told him four years ago, but he couldn’t remember your name from the beginning of a sentence to its end; so everyone was captain. “Been a while.”