Straughter and I stopped off at the bar for double bourbons on our way to a table in the back corner. Chairs were still inverted on the table. Not that the place ever closed, but they shoved things around and ran a mop through from time to time. Then the invisible layers, the real refuse, would part to let the mop pass and close like a sluggish sea behind it.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. I’ve never had anyone I loved-” I became aware of my pause elongating “-die.”
But I went on to tell him about B.R., about the fight, how Esme and I had met in the wake of it all. The way she crossed her legs and slumped down in the chair and held her glass up to whatever light there was, constantly checking levels, color, how the world looked through that amber lens-as though placing it between herself and the light of some pending eclipse.
He must know all this, I said.
Yes, of course. But the particulars are what matter.
“We decided to go get some food. Dunbar’s, maybe. Or Henry’s Soul Kitchen. That time of night, a mixed party, choices were limited.”
She didn’t talk a lot about you, I told him.
When in fact she’d said nothing at all.
“Funny, but even after she called in her story and said now she could relax, she still listened more than she talked. Watching people, listening to them, the way they moved, how they leaned in and out of conversations. Always somehow apart. I guess she never got far away from that. All these stories, all these lives, went on spinning around her.
“So she didn’t say much. Asked me a lot of questions about my life. But about her own, from what little she did say, I definitely had a sense of strength at the center, at the core.”
“Me.”
“You.”
Straughter went up to the bar and brought back new drinks.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your telling me that. And I want you to know that my appreciation is in no way diminished by your story’s being an utter lie.”
I started to protest, but he cut me off.
“Ez would never have spoken to anyone about me. Not once in all these years did she talk to anyone else about our life together. She just plain would not do it.”
I spread my hands on the table between us. What could I say?
“But the rest, I’m grateful to you for that. Sometimes the smallest souvenirs turn out to be the best ones, with time.”
“I don’t really see how I could have helped.”
“But you did. Want one more?”
“Sure, but it’s my turn. Beer okay?”
I put the bottle in front of him and asked how he found me.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
Later, I’d learn about Hosie Straughter. How he came down from Oxford, Mississippi, at age seventeen, self-taught and dressed in hand-me-downs, and ten years later won a Pulitzer. How he got fired from The Times-Picayune for writing a series on race relations in the city (only a part of the first installment ever saw print) and, on a wing and a prayer and small donations from middle-class black families, began publishing his own weekly, The Griot. Over the years he had become a voice not only for blacks, but for all the city’s eternal outsiders, all its dispossessed. A voice that was listened to.
“No matter,” he said. “I’m a journalist: you know that. So I have my own ways of finding out things I need to know.”
I nodded, took a draw off my beer.
“Not two minutes after I heard Ez was dead-I’d barely hung up the phone-your friend Frankie DeNoux called.”
I hadn’t ever thought of him as my friend, but I guessed now that he must be.
“He told me you’d been taken to the police station and were being held there. By that time it was, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning. Frankie was concerned and wanted to know if I could do anything, find out anything.”
“So Mr. Frankie knows about you and Miss Dupuy.”
“Mr. Frankie. I don’t think I’ve heard that since I left Mississippi. No, he doesn’t know. He only wanted to try to keep you from getting in any deeper, maybe get yourself seriously hurt. He called me because I’m someone who can usually find out what’s going on and sometimes even get things done.”
“You two are tight?”
“There’s history between us.”
“So then what did you do, threaten a front-page expose? Unfair treatment of blacks? Hardly news in this city. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.”
“Nothing quite that histrionic. I simply picked up the phone and called a judge I know. I explained my concern. He said he’d look into it right away.”
“And an hour later I’m out of there.”
“More or less.”
“Then I owe you my thanks.”
“Any debt you might have owed me-had there been one-you’d have repaid this morning.”
We finished our beers and walked back up to Louisiana and across. Straughter had parked his blue Falcon a couple of blocks from the house, before a combined laundromat and cleaners. People sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk out front talking. Steam rose in thick clouds from vents at the back.
“Do you know?” I said. “Do the police have any leads, anything at all?”
“Hard to say. Things are shut up tight on this. But I don’t think so.”
“Man seems to know what he’s doing.”
“And he does appear intent upon going ahead with it.”
“Do me a favor. Let me know if you hear something?”
Straughter tilted his head to the side and forward, peering at me over rimless glasses. With his chin out like that, I saw how perfectly egg-shaped his head was.
“You wouldn’t be taking this personally, would you, Griffin?”
“I don’t know how I’m taking it, not yet.”
“Just be careful. Don’t let it take you instead.” He looked up at squirrels chasing one another along a stretch of powerline, chattering furiously. “You read Ez’s column yet this morning?”
I nodded. They’d run it on the front page, with her usual picture, alongside the story of her murder and a nighttime shot of the street outside the club where B.R. was playing.
“I still don’t understand it, but sometimes that woman knew things nobody else does, things she didn’t even know she knew. She’d sit down at the typewriter, describe someone, set a scene, and it would all just start coming. She was an uptown girclass="underline" Newcomb, sorority, the whole works. What did she know about the life of a black man in prison for murder? But you read the piece. I think the liquor helped make the connections for her at first, whatever the connections were. Later on, she got to like the liquor for itself.”
“She’ll be missed.”
“She will be. City won’t be the same.” He held his hand out. “Bullshit. Of course it will be. This city isn’t ever anything but the same.”
“However hard we try?”
He laughed, we shook hands and parted. I walked back to the house, thinking about Esme. About my hand reaching out for hers as she mockingly clawed at air, about those fingers falling away from me then, and my slow realization of what had happened.
Chapter Six
The woman loving and feeling my care those days was LaVerne. And while I generally made a point of not calling her at work, sometimes an exception shouldered its way in.
I knew her schedule pretty well by then, and got her at the third place I tried. The bartender said just a minute and set the phone down. I listened to what sounded like at least three distinct parties going on in the distance.
“Lewis! Where are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I know what happened last night. Someone said they thought the police still had you. You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah. They let me go a few hours ago, thanks to a friend.”
“Friend?”
“Tell you when I see you. Right now I’m about as dragged out as a man can get.”