Somewhere in the back of my mind I had to be wondering, too, just what the hell I was doing. Alouette was right. My son had disappeared, my god-daughter was receiving anonymous threats, I’d just got scraped up off the floor with the medical equivalent of a spatula-and here I was, fiftyodd years old, snaking under a house to try and find out who’s been killing pigeons. Strange life all around.
“You the tax man,” he said, “or one of Mr. Hoover’s minions, you just might as well go on back out of here, and fast.”
I told him who I was.
“Lew Griffin.” He grunted. “Think I may’ve done heard some ’bout you.”
“Oh?”
“Damn, man, this here ain’t nothing but a overgrown small town. Ever’body know your business. You bring trouble.”
“Got a load with me now, in fact. Thought you might help put me together with the people who need it.”
“So they live happily ever after.”
“Something like that.”
“Ain’t got much truck with other folks’ needs. Not a one of them’s ever he’ped me much.”
“I know that.”
“Think you know a lot, don’t you?” Someone was walking on the porch floor above us. Their floor, our roof. Rotted from rain, desiccated from heat, boards creaked, went swayback and threatened to give way. “But look at you. Come crawling up under here like some goddamn kid looking for answers, still think the world got answers for you. Ain’t no fortune cookies, you know. Break’m open, read what to do in there.”
We listened as footsteps paced back and forth above.
“Cold as a sonuvabitch down here,” I said.
“You get used to it after a time. Year or two. I been down here-hell, I don’t know how long I been down here. Man gets used to ’most anything…. You feelin’ trollish?”
“I don’t know what I’m feeling. Not my feet. And the fingers are going fast.”
“Shiiii. You a part-timer.” That was funny enough to say again. “Part-timer.”
“More ways than one,” I admitted. “But you’re not. And I figure you have to have seen my boy over there in the park.”
“One they call Dog Boy.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen him all right. Seen you with him, too.”
“Then you know how much he loves life.”
“I know how much he loves animals.”
“There’s a difference?”
Mister Bones shrugged. His breastplate rattled like Venetian blinds in wind.
“Someone’s been killing pigeons. Poisoning them.”
“Sure have. For a time now … You okay under here? You don’t look too comfortable. Noticed a blanket set out to dry on a porch across the way yesterday, probably still be there.
We could go get that for you.”
Moments limped by.
“I want to find them. The ones who are doing it.”
“They’re survivors, you know. Pigeons. You have to respect that.”
Even though he was looking out towards the park and couldn’t see me, I nodded.
“Like us,” he said. “You hungry, Griffin? Miz Miller up the way left a can of Vienna sausages out on the stoop for me last night. Be happy to share them with you, you want.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The stairway stank of urine, beer, stale cigarette smoke and mold. Once, long in the past, there’d been carpeting. Fragments of green remained in patches, mostly beneath nailheads, like tufts of hair sprouting from old men’s ears. As I entered, someone let loose a bowl of water from the third landing, screaming I told you not to come back here, goddamn it! No one else on the stairway as the cascade came down and I ducked aside. A door slammed.
Each floor held six apartments, A through F, though in no apparent order. A might just as easily be the apartment nearest the stairs, or tucked away between E and B. A pencil eraser would have taken down most of the doors. Walls bore deep gouges, long troughs, as though trucks had been driven repeatedly into them over the years. Here and there plaster had come away in great statuelike chunks; elsewhere it clung on bravely. At one turning I put my hand against the wall and precipitated an avalanche of plaster nuggets, pebbles, powder. This went on for some time. Stairwell corners held stacks of gravid boxes, belongings for which residents had no room inside, presumably. Surprising that these hadn’t long ago been borne off. Posters of Sixties movies and rock shows hung alongside paintings of clowns and seascapes on landings. The whole stairway creaked and swayed like a suspension bridge.
I climbed to the fourth floor. Four’s about as far as it goes for most of New Orleans, outside downtown anyway. The city’s well below sea level, filled-in swampland for the most part, one of those triumphs of man’s imagination and will that the world periodically refutes with such rejoinders as floods and hurricanes. Then I came to 4-A.
This door wasn’t going to be taken down with an eraser. It fit the frame flush. No give to it, no space about the edges, no apparent weak spot. Door and frame both steel.
I knocked. It was like rapping knuckles on a boulder. Whole armies could be on the move in there, tanks, armored vehicles, transports, and I wouldn’t hear them.
Incredibly enough, the door opened.
A thirtyish man in cornrows wearing Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes, barrel-like shorts, oversize rugby-style shirt (I hoped Tommy had more), stood there. Skin color medium brown, eyes blue-gray. Brows and upper lip lifted at the same time, three birds taking flight.
“Those our bitches?” someone behind him said.
“Sure nuff don’t look to be,” the doorman said. Then to me: “Whatchu want?”
Taking that as an invitation, I pushed my way in. Doorman fell back, then recovered and came towards me, leg lifting for a karate kick. When the ankle came up, I grabbed it and twisted as I shoved it towards the ceiling, hammered a fist into his crotch. He went down as the others shot up off the couch.
I’d taken notice of the rock sitting by the door as I entered. Judging from roundness and polish, it had spent several human lifetimes in water somewhere perfecting itself. About the size of an orange and used as a doorstop, no doubt. The one who’d come up off the couch and started towards me went down hard when it hit him square in the forehead. I’d thrown underhanded, like a kid on a softball team. That left two of us on opposite banks with the river of a sky-blue couch between. This one was older, done up in high grunge: plaid shirt with sleeves flapping, long-sleeved T-shirt under, cord jeans bagged into camel’s knees and shiny with wear. Both hands came up, palm out. He stepped out from behind the couch shaking his head.
“Whatever this is, man-”
“You live here?”
He shook his head again.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Guess I’d best be asking myself that same question ’long about now.” He looked down at the floor, from one to the other of the bodies there, then back at me. “Thing is, I went to high school with Pryor here, guy making that snoring sound? Not that we ever hung out back then, nothin’ like that. But this morning when I ran up against ’im at Hoppin Jon’s, suddenly he’s acting like we’re old-time bros.”