"Griffin. That right? Man you're looking for, this Rauch, yeah, he comes in here some."
"How often?"
"Some, I said."
"Once a week? Paydays? Every night?"
"Look. Till ATF says I have to, I don't keep track."
"You know where he lives?"
"Around, is what I heard."
"You consider having your people give me a call next time he shows up:
He glanced over at Papa, who nodded.
"Okay."
"Thanks. We-"
"But you want to look him up before then, he teaches a self-defense class over at the high school every Sunday."
I asked for directions and got them.
"That it?"
I nodded.
"Appreciate it, Jack," Papa replied. "You be sure to give Sue Ling my love."
When he was gone, we sat looking down at Wayne.
"Good work, by the way," I told Papa. "Guess Doo-Wop figured I might need you out here. Usually have to do my own heavy lifting."
Papa drained off the last of his beer.
"Yeah. Well, good thing once in a while to just kick back, let somebody else do the cooking."
When I got home that afternoon three police cars were parked a couple of blocks up my street. Cops stood talking to people and writing on clipboards as radios sputtered. The kids on bikes had grabbed another purse and a wallet from an old couple out for a walk. One of my neighbors had chased them halfway to Freret.
19
YOU COULD READ the building's transformations through the years, manifest histoiy, in its string of add-ons and embellishments: the colonnaded entryway that turned it from palatial residence to luxury hotel sometime in thefifties; redundant entrances from subsequent incarnation as apartment building with (judging from electric meters left in place on the rear wall) at least twelve units; from its brief time as church, a long-unused plywood marquee, FIRST UNITY emerging, ghostlike, beneath whitewash.
Now it was a school. Fleurs-de-lis and stylized coat-of-arms medallions high on the walls had been highlighted in peach, as had miniature, rooklike turrets at the roofline. The remainder of the building was light blue. Behind the building, riverside, half a dozen aluminum trailers squatted on high cinder-block foundations with stairways out front, intended to be temporary, auxiliary classrooms, now permanent.
The school on this late Saturday afternoon looked abandoned.
The front fence, facing on Joseph, was impassable, looped in lengths of chain and padlocked. Around to the side near the back, though, was an old delivery entrance. Roots from a nearby oak had shattered its drive to plugs of cement sitting all on different planes, vaguely geodesic, with shoots of giass and weed between them. The gate stood agap. There was a long groove in the cement where the gate had been forced open until it would go no farther, forward or back, and had remained so ever since.
I was crabbing through this gap, thinking I'd come too late, no one's here, it's a waste of time, when a young woman appeared outside a utility shed lodged at the lot's far corner. After a moment others began to emerge, individually, in pairs or small groups. Most wore gym clothes. Fleece shorts, sleeveless Ts and sweats, warm-ups. A few in skintight biker's shorts or cutoff jeans.
I watched as they slipped through the fence on their way back to cars, cups of coffee, Blockbuster videos, showers, drinks, apartments, homes. Stragglers included an elaborately coiffed fiftyish woman in silver warm-ups, a pair of black-clad silent teenagers, an elderly male so bent with arthritis that his face was parallel to the ground.
Was that it?
I waited.
Faint strands of music from inside. Something with a % beat, heavy bass.
The music shut off, and moments later a man stepped out. He wore an unreconstructed silk sportcoat over maroon T-shirt and chinos, carried a backpack and portable CD player. Pulling the door shut behind him, he glanced my way, but his eyes passed on. Then he seemed to remember something he'd forgotten or left behind, and went back into the building.
Towards which I was moving, fast.
I went through the front door just in time to see, out a back window, the chain-link fence rebounding where he'd gone over. It still sang against its posts. The window was never intended for exits, sudden or otherwise. Its frame hung by a corner, tapping alternately at fence and building side, snap-in plastic shutters dropping one by one to the ground.
A quick movement off in trees, worthy of Bigfoot or Deerslayer.
You live the way Rauch does, you better have good instincts and reflexes.
Somehow he'd sensed I was there. Knew I was there.
I went back inside. The floor, which also served as foundation, was cheap cement, poured quickly, pitted and uneven. Exercise mats were scattered about, folding steel chairs pushed together helter-skelter at the back. Two or three were capsized. Rauch had gone up over them to get to the window.
I'd reconnoitered before coming in, of course. The trees, half a block of them, were there to close the school off (symbolically, but it's a city of symbols) from streets behind. Those treeless streets bore derelict rows of single-family residences divided and redivided into housing for double, triple that or more. Front porches sinking like elephants onto their knees, foi'saken appliances, crippled furniture and tireless cars forever at curbside. Sun's fingers peeling paint off the sides of houses. Bodies of rats and squirrels bloating on sidewalks, beneath houses, in the mouths of sewer drains.
The city's tradition of corner grocers lived on here, though, and through the trees, connecting school and spurned neighborhood, where at Mr. Lee's store burgers, tacos, nachos and fries could be purchased, electronic games be played, years of students had worn and maintained a path.
I went over the fence and along that path and emerged just moments after Rauch.
As he came out of the trees, a black Honda Civic swung around the comer from Joseph and pulled in at the curb before him. Rauch peered into it-to all appearances as surprised as I was to see Shon Delany there in the car-and got in.
I was half a block off when the Honda pulled away. In the rearview mirror Shon watched me sprint towards them, slow and stop. I jotted down the license number in my notebook. These days, I trusted very little to memory.
I went back through the trees to the outbuilding, where I failed to find the clues any good detective surely would have, then took a bus home, where, before leaving again for dinner with Deborah and (as it turned out) her play, I sat at the kitchen table looking up at Zeke's note on the refrigerator door and thinking about prison.
Over the years I've spent scattered weekends and overnights in jail, three or four longer layouts as convenient suspect, detainee by caprice, material witness. But there's also one extended stretch-not on record, but floating around if you know where to look, who to ask, in some Platonic shadowland between the ideal and real.
What happened was, I got picked up on Dryades, half a block down from my rented room, for matching the description of someone who had held up a store on Jackson and shot its owner when he pulled a lead pipe with tape on one end out from under the counter.
Matching the description was a joke, of course. Cops (those days white, the only kind) were on the lookout for a young black man. Big and dangerous looking, reports said. That was, what? 65 percent of anyone out on the street in that part of town? Eye of the beholder. But there I was, fortunate enough to be stumbling along as the prowl car drove by. And since I was drunk-this may have been one of my earliest blackouts-not only couldn't I answer questions to their satisfaction, I was so befuddled I didn't even know what was going on.
One moment I'd been doggedly slogging my way towards home, the next I was facedown on the sidewalk with arms behind me and an officer's knee in my kidney. Some of it came back to me later in bits and pieces, fragments, like a series of unrelated snapshots.