"Jew go home."
Gold nodded, then looked quickly to the right and stood as LaVerne entered the room, pulling a robe close about her. Her feet were bare. She beamed a smile in his direction.
"Ma'am."
"Feeling better this morning, Lewis? And while we're on the subject, how did it get to be morning already? Tell me there's coffee."
"There could be."
"Soon?"
I got up and started assembling equipment. "Rough night?"
"Rough enough. Not as rough as yours, from the look of it."
I measured coffee into the basket of the percolator and put it on the stove, put a pan of milk beside it to steam. She sank into a chair.
"Mel Gold: LaVerne. Mel's here-"
I turned back. "Why are you here, Mel?"
"I didn't say, did I?" Evidently he had some trouble disengaging himself from Verne's smile and that sleepy, soft, cross-eyed look she always had when shefirst got up.
I knew exacdy how he felt.
"Not in so many words."
"I told you how it started, how it kept getting worse and worse. Well, finally it got so bad that my wife was afraid to stay home by herself all day. At that point I went to the police. Problem is, they said, very little's actually been done. All of it could be written off as no more than kids' pranks. They'd arrange for squad cars to drive through the neighborhood on a regular basis, every couple of hours say, but for now that was about the extent of it.
"I thanked the officer and asked if it would be possible to speak to his superior. I'd be happy to wait, I said-and wait I did. Finally someone named Walsh came out looking for me. After listening to my story, asking a question or two, he repeated pretty much what I'd already heard.
'But if you choose to pursue this on your own,' he said, 'and that's probably what it'll take, you might want to get in touch with this man.' He slid your card across the desk. 'This isn't comingfrom me as a cop, you understand.' "
I poured for LaVerne, half coffee, half hot milk at the same time, then for our guest. What was left went into my own cup.
"Just what is it you expect of me, Mr. Gold?"
"To tell the truth, I don't have much left in the way of expectations, fromyou or anyone else. I just want to be left alone. Lieutenant Walsh said that you might be willing to ask around-'become a presence,' as he put it. That that might be enough in itself. He did mention that you had a wide network of friends."
Did I?
"I've set aside considerable funds over the years, Mr. Griffin. My credit line, you'llfind, is excellent."
Not much of a sense of humor, but hey. I looked across the table at LaVerne. She liked him too. That cinched it.
"Assuming I knew what a credit line was," I told him, "I still wouldn't have the least idea how to go about checking one."
"It's simple-"
"Hey. Relax, okay? I'll look into it."
"Thank you."
I made more coffee and took down details.
As it happened, Mother and Mel Gold departed together-synchronously, at any rate.
She materialized in the kitchen as we were finishing up the interview and second pot of coffee, bags by the front door and taxicab already called, to announce that she'd be going: You don't need me here anymore, Lewis, best be getting myself back home to where I belong.
Mel Gold fairly leapt to his feet when she appeared in the doorway. And when, moments later, the cab blew its horn, he insisted upon carrying her bags out.
I shook his hand at curbside, told him I'd be in touch. He crossed to a mint-green-and-wliite BelAir.
"Thanks for coming, Mom."
Verne was standing on the porch; they'd said their good-byes inside. Mother glanced towards her.
"That's afine woman you got there, Lewis."
"I know."
"Don't know what she sees in you, of course."
"Neither do I."
"But you be good to her."
"I'll try."
"Yeah. Yeah, I spect you might do that You write me sometime, boy."
I opened the door for her, helped her in. She slid for wardtill she was on thefrontof the seat, small face framed in the window.
"Two of us are gonna go on loving you no matter what, you know."
I nodded. She slid back on the seat and sat very straight and still as the cab pulled away. She looked like a child sitting there. Small, lost, alone.
That was the last time I saw her alive.
7
I've never seen anything like that before." "Any luck at all, most people never do." Verne knew about the man I'd killed a few years back, but we never spoke of it, not then, when I climbed into bed beside her after the long drive back with his blood still on my hands, and not now, as we sat together, eleven in the morning, on her narrow balcony. Box seat at the Orpheum. Beneath us opera New Orleans went into its second act.
We all know it's out there, just at the edge of our vision, past the circle of light from our campfires. Camus said only one diing is necessary, to come to terms with death, after which all things are possible; but we go on failing to meet its eyes, ever dissembling, dressing it up in period costume, caging it in music or drama, gelding it to murder mysteries: how clever we are.
How I used to love that late scenefrom "Benito Cer-eno." I was fifteen, skipping breakfast before school and ignoring calls to dinner because I'd just discovered books and what seemed to me then their far realer world. Blacks have taken over the ship but with the approach of an official vessel set up an elaborate Trojan-horse masquerade whereby the enslaved whites pretend to dominance.
That tome was the ultimate dissembling. Because the slave couldn't say what he meant, he said something else. And that scene from "Benito Cereno" seemed to me just about as something else as it got.
In African folklore there's a great tradition of the trickster, Esu-Elegbara. Hoodoo turns him into Papa Legba. In America he becomes the signifying monkey, given to self-relexive flights of ironic, parodic language foregrounding what W.E. B. Du Bois defined as the black's double consciousness.
We're all tricksters. We have to be, learn to be. Dissembling, signifying, masking-you only think you have a hold on us, tar babies all.
I got up and this time, instead of shuttling glasses in and back out, exported the botde itself from the kitchen.
"Appreciate your help, Verne. Some comfort in knowing I won't have to disturb Doo-Wop."
"Man's busy making a living."
"Aren't we all."
"But findingher there like that pretty much shuts it down for you, doesn't it? What's left? Eddie Bone's out of the picture. Now the woman."
I drank off the last of my Scotch. Its sudden swell of warmth inside echoed precisely that of the long, slow noon and sun beyond-or my feelings for LaVerne. Front tire flat, her bicycle leaned on its kickstand inches away from my right ear. Before me on the railing were small pots of basil, rosemary, thyme and lemon grass.
"You're right. Precious little left to go on. Clothes imtraceable: everythingfrom Montgomery Ward and the like. No mail, of course. Cans of Spam and generic chili, packets of hot dogs; sacks, boxes and condiments from carryout Chinese food, old White Casde burger bags. We're not even sure who was living in the apartment."
The phone rang. Verne went in to answer and remained there conversing, some friend, maybe, or one of her regulars, as I finishedoff the Scotch. I looked in at her and she smiled, holding out her left hand with thumb, index and little fingers extended: Love you.
Verne leaned against the wall as she talked. The phone was set in a niche there. A table beneath held piles of junk mail and unread magazines, a pad of paper for messages.