I declined.
“You must be sick,” he said. “Life is a bag of Zapp’s.”
“This report doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It just kind of drops.”
“When someone goes missing, not a lot you can do, bra. You know how many people just disappear in New Orleans every year?”
“You know how many should?”
“You heard from that street freak that was harassing you?”
I shook my head.
“Look out for yourself,” he said.
I peered down at my legal pad and some notes I’d made. About thirty minutes later, I found a vending machine and drank a Barq’s. I ate some Oreos. I walked down a linoleum hall and let myself back into the records room.
What bothered me was that no family members had been interviewed about this guy. When I researched someone, often that was the first place I’d go. Who knows someone best but his own people?
I asked the sergeant – a burly white-haired man who kept a screen saver of George W. Bush on his computer – for an explanation. He stood, his back to the thin walls of pressed wood, where he’d hung photos of himself with three German shepherds sitting at his feet.
“Was he a transient?” he asked.
“No.”
“Who’d we find?”
“People he worked with.”
He nodded.
“He has an address that shows a place on Lakeshore Drive,” I said. “But I know he’d been in prison. Why isn’t there anything about that in the record?”
“You need to call the Department of Corrections for that,” he said. He flipped through a Rolodex, squinted at the tiny card, and read off a name and number. “She’ll get you what you need. Tell her I told you to call.”
I shook the desk sergeant’s hand.
“Good when you can do something,” he said.
“Did you work the street for long?”
“Long enough to piss someone off and end up here.”
The contact from the Louisiana Department of Corrections was a pleasant woman named Lisa. She sounded completely foreign to the Lisa I’d lived with when I played ball. She sounded as if she had a heart. A brain too. I told her the sergeant’s name and that I was researching for a buddy of mine and she told me to give her a few hours.
“Some inmate at Angola escaped this morning,” she said. “Those freakin’ reporters won’t leave us alone.”
I drove back to the warehouse and walked Annie down to Louisiana Products for a po’boy. I made coffee.
At 3, she called back.
“I have two Calvin Antoine Jacobses,” she said. “The first has a DOB March 3, 1974?”
“Let me double-check that birthday.”
“Is he currently incarcerated?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then that’s not him. The only other Calvin Antoine Jacobs I have in the system died two years ago.”
“This guy I need is missing,” I said. “No one ever found him. I didn’t think he was ruled dead.”
She paused for a second. “This guy died in Angola. Let me see… he was from New Orleans. Lived at 2538 Constance. He was convicted of two counts of manslaughter and one count of car theft in 2000.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“I think I love you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Read back that address.”
She did. I smiled.
I promised her free drinks at JoJo’s next time she was in New Orleans. Anything she wanted. My children. My dog. She could be bald with a harelip and I would’ve kissed her at that moment.
“What else can you tell me about Mr. Jacobs?”
“A lot,” she said. “What do you need to know?”
62
I was down on Constance an hour later passing a little neighborhood grocery, Parasol’s Irish bar, and rows of old shotguns until I found the one where Dahlia lived. I parked a block down the street, slid on The Club, and walked down the skinny broken sidewalk and under shady oaks to her door. I knocked. No one answered. I found a place to sit on her small porch, the deck wooden and uneven. I sat for a while, wilting in the heat. I walked back to my truck, stopped, and went back to the house. A warped gate closed the way to the back of the shotgun. It was locked.
I looked down the street and then back the other way.
I hopped the fence and followed a stone path covered in pink bougainvillea that grew over a fence and rotted awning. On the shaded back patio, white and purple impatiens hung from large baskets. In the deep shade, I recognized some yellow jasmine growing from iron grillwork. The air smelled of musky sweetness that enveloped me.
“My mother loved them,” she said.
Dahlia smiled at me, hands covered in white gloves and mashing potting soil into a terra-cotta pot. She wore a boy’s white tank top covered in mud. The cotton hugged the perfect shape of her breasts and tiny waist. She ran her forearm over her brow.
Her dark hair had grown curly in the heat and her large eyes watched me, her jaw loose. Lips parted.
“You want to tell me about your brother?” I asked.
“Jesus,” she said. Smiling. “You don’t stop.”
“I think I have it all figured out, but why don’t you tell me.”
She tilted her head and wrapped her long brown hair into a ponytail. Her hair seemed moist and rich. I could smell her scent. She smelled like coconut oil and warm skin.
“How’d your brother know Christian?”
She held her stare. “My daddy doesn’t like you too much.”
“He thinks I’m trying to save your soul.”
“Too far gone for that.” She pushed out her lower lip with mock sadness.
“Calvin was the real thing.”
“Calvin was a genius,” she said. “He was tested when we was kids and he was off the charts. My daddy tole me they put him in a room with a bunch of toys to figure things out. You know triangle to triangle? Circle to circle? He did all right till he clocked some poor child in the head with a block.”
“Couldn’t stay straight?”
“Hell, no,” she said. She looked at me, suddenly reminded of who I was and backed off. “Oh no. That’s enough. Take what you got and leave.”
“Let me come inside.”
“That just leads to bad things.”
“Not for me.”
“Don’t you like women?” she asked, brushing my chin with her index fingers.
“I like ’em too much,” I said. “They get me in trouble.”
“You got a woman now?”
“Yep.”
“Where she at?”
“She’s waiting on me,” I said. “I can’t leave till I find out what happened with Dio.”
“Dio,” she said. “Shit. Calvin wouldn’t ever taken no name like that. That was his invention.”
“When did you find out?” I asked, leading her into an area I didn’t know myself.
“Last year,” she said. “When he was dead.”
“Dio?”
“The one they called Dio.”
“They used him and killed him.”
She smiled and patted my face. “Right.”
She walked up some concrete blocks and into her house. I followed. She had her back turned to me leaning over her cast-iron sink. Her blue-jean shorts hugged her rounded thighs and her shoulder blades stretched under her brown skin. I was drawn to her neck, the beads of moisture collecting right among the tiny, soft hairs.
“They pay you to be quiet?”
“When I heard those rhymes, I knew,” she said. “Calvin had been workin’ on them since he was twelve. He had notebooks full of ’em. He wrote in them all the time. Made hand copies and sent them to me, even in jail. The ones that came out. The ones about Uptown life and all that? That was him. They didn’t change a word. His heart lived in those old ragged notebooks. We may have moved on, but his soul was still in Calliope where we was raised.”
“What happened?”
“A guard scrambled his brains,” she said, turning her back to me. She was crying. She tilted her head into her hands. Sunlight skimmed through the oaks and broke apart in strobe flashes across her face. Her back door kept slamming open and shut in the summer wind.
I could still smell the jasmine. So sweet and rich.