“But then the store owner, a Mr. Chadras, looks over and sees Walsh lying there with his service revolver drawn and blood streaming out all around him. He’s having trouble breathing, too. But Mr. Chadras, it turns out, was a doctor back in his own country. He grabs a piece of gauze and some Vaseline off the shelf and slaps it over the hole in Walsh’s chest. Saved his life, the paramedics say.
“Boy that did this looks all of nineteen. We tried running him, but the computer just started spitting out empties. Those weren’t all that got spit out last night, either.”
Santos took a small box from his pocket, the kind jewelry comes in.
“I ain’t saying this was right, Griffin-or how it came about. Crew that booked him sent it up late last night. Boy had this tooth he was proud of. You know how they used to have those gold caps? Well, somehow or another this kid had one of those.”
Santos lifted the box top. The gold tooth lay on a nest of cotton batting. Blood still adhered to the upper edge. A few strands of the cotton were stained pink.
Santos shrugged and put the box back in his pocket. “What can I say?”
For some reason, wildly, I thought of Don telling me he’d become a detective mainly because he could write a complete sentence, which put him miles ahead of the competition. I also remembered another time, years later, when I’d come upon him in a spectacularly sleazy bar deep in what was then no-man’s land below the Quarter. “Out of your element, aren’t you?” I’d said. He sat for a moment peering into his glass. “Not really. I’m like you, Lew. I take my element with me.”
Or another time, many years later, when my life had bottomed out. Some of his men had scraped me off the walls of a bar out on Jefferson Highway and taken me to Mercy. When I woke blank as a slate, no idea what had happened and more than a few days gone, Don was sitting beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. Then he said, “What are you gonna do, Lew: there’s nowhere to go but on.”
“Appreciate your filling me in, Santos.”
He nodded.
“You think I can see him?”
“Just family for now. Doctor says they’ll let us in tomorrow, assuming everything goes right. I figure we go in, there’s no problem with you coming along.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“What about Jeanette? She with him?”
“Sent her home to get some rest. Took some talking and fast footwork on my part.”
“I expect it did. Guess I should go by, then, see what I can do.”
“Yeah, she’d like that.”
I stepped off our island and started for the door.
“Hey, Griffin, you need a ride?” Santos called. I turned back to decline, but saying, “Sure you do,” Santos called out again: “Whitaker, you wanna give Griffin here a ride over to Captain Walsh’s?”
The cop I didn’t know detached himself. We went down and out and across the alley to where his gray Crown Victoria was parked by a Dumpster. (“You wouldn’t believe what shows up in there,” he said.) Moments later we pulled into traffic. Whitaker’s radio had come on, turned low, when he hit the key, one of those stations that alternates its own trademark brand of news with talk shows about welfare abuse, the conspiracy of world government and the dangers of water fluoridation. Whitaker took two sticks of gum from a package the size of a paperback War and Peace jammed into where the ashtray had once been. He was, I figured, around thirty.
Much of the drive uptown became a kind of down-and-out Grey Line tour.
“That’s the Billies,” Whitaker said as we passed the slablike, mostly roofless shell of a building. Two men inside sat on boxes at a battered old spool cable, having breakfast from the look of it. I half expected them to lift their cups to us in greeting. “Billy Williams and Billy Nabors. Been there over a year now. Came down from Minnesota, Nebraska, one of them places. Say they just couldn’t take the cold no more.”
Some blocks further on we passed a sixtyish woman wearing a red wool sweater, pink ballet tutu with baggy, lime-green tights, and purple-and-orange sneakers.
“Squeezebox Sally. Makes the rounds on Maple Street every night, all those restaurants and bars up there, with her accordion. Comes up to a table and asks people, usually couples, what they want to hear, but it all sounds the same, mainly just her pushing and pulling at the box, hitting keys at random. Word is, she used to be some kind of piano virtuoso. Word is also that now she’s deaf as a board. Her big finish is always the same: she turns around, bends over and tosses up her skirt.”
“I guess there are some things in New Orleans’s rich cultural life that I’d just as soon miss out on,” I said.
“Could definitely put you off your lasagna.”
We were almost to Don’s by this time. Whitaker took a right by the Circle K where Don had been shot.
“Bonner”-the other cop, that I knew, from back at the hospital-“says you write books.”
“I used to. Used to do a lot of things.”
“Didn’t we all,” Whitaker said, pulling up at the curb.
Chapter Six
Regulars knew him as dog boy. He could be found each morning and late afternoon, accompanied by the elderly black man who looked after him, in the small park a block and a half away, riverside, from our house. Whenever someone brought a dog into the park, the boy would drop to all fours and stare into the animal’s eyes. Most of them stared back, boy and dog transfixed before one another, fused in the press of their concentration to something like a single entity; I had seen lap dogs, poodles and Dobermans the size of small cars standing there by him, turning their heads that curious way dogs have, keening in puzzled kinship. Dogs were chiefly what people brought to the park, hence the name, but the boy’s sympathies extended well beyond. Once I observed him by the ironwork fence, back bent to an S curve, chattering away with the squirrel atop it. Another time, what must have been an escaped domestic parrot came to rest, bobbing, in an azalea, while boy and bird, faces but inches apart, rolled, swiveled and ducked heads in tandem.
Lester Johnson had worked for the boy’s family, as a shoe repairman in a store they owned, for over forty-two years, long after people gave up on having shoes repaired; long, too, after Lester’s arthritic hands had grown unable to hold the necessary tacks, narrow-headed hammers, awls and needles, and his eyes unsuited to such detail work. His wife, Emmie, had cared for the boy at first, just as she’d brought up the family’s older children, all of them even then off to college or making their way in the world, but when the boy was three and the family first coming to the realization that something was not quite right, Emmie had died. Her blood pressure shot up not to be brought down, circulation faltered and began to fail, every treatment seemed to further complicate things, and one quiet Saturday afternoon as Lester stood by the bed he watched her, with a single long breath, let go. Four days later he shut up the shoe store for the last time and took over Emmie’s duties.
Over the course of the first couple of years we saw one another in the park, Lester and I had begun speaking. Over the next two or three we’d gradually progressed to brief exchanges. Only this past year, and without its ever emerging as a conscious decision for either of us, I think, had we taken to sitting together and talking.