“Right.” The country-whatever your special interest: law, liberal politics, magazine sales, white supremacy-was rife with such networks, electronic and otherwise. Often I imagined they might represent this skewed nation’s only true intelligence, skein after skein of fragile webs piling one atop another until a rudimentary nervous system came into being.
“Well, I hadn’t logged on to the network in quite a while. My work here at Foucher’s pretty circumscribed. But after you left the other day, after I’d thought about it a while, I got on-line. And after half an hour or so of ‘Good to see your number come up’ and ‘How’s it been going’ and ‘Where the hell you been, man’-I guess the economy’s gotten so bad that these guys don’t have much else to do but sit home, stroke and get stroked by electronic friends-I started asking about an eighteen-year-old who might give New Orleans as a prior address, might be reluctant to say more and is probably in trouble.
“That’s what the network’s about, after all. Alouette doesn’t have any resources, any skills. Wherever she winds up, sooner or later she’s going to have to hook into one of the available programs.”
“And you can track her that way.”
“Ordinarily, no. Well, I guess you could, but it would take forever. There’s no official channel. No central data bank or clearinghouse. The network itself is sketchy, but we’ve got people scattered all through the country, at all levels, and every one of us is facing the same problems day in and day out, a lot of them basically insoluble. So sometimes we’re able to help one another. Provide information or a way around this or that obstacle, maybe cut a corner or two.”
Okay, so it reeked of J. Edgar Hoover-style rationalization. And sure, you had to wonder to what use those less scrupulous might put such information, were it available to them. But I had no reason to believe that Richard Garces was any less liberal in reflex or thought than myself: he’d doubtless covered this same ground many times over.
“You have any indication Alouette was pregnant?” he asked suddenly.
“Not really. Did you?”
“It’s a possibility. You have a pen and paper?”
“Yeah.” I always kept early drafts and aborted pages, folding them in half to make a rough tablet that stayed there by the phone.
“Okay. Out of a couple dozen maybes, I boiled it down to three. These may all be way off base, you understand. Wrong tree-even wrong forest, for all we know. But age, accent and physical description are all good matches.”
“I understand.”
“The first one showed up in Dallas a few months back, brought into Parkland when she was raped by some guys who were looking through the Dumpster she lived in for leftover hamburgers and found her instead. It was behind a Burger King. Right now she’s in the Diagnostic Center. That’s around the corner from Parkland, up on Harry Hines. She’ll be there another few days, then she’ll be farmed out to whatever treatment center or hospital has a bed open up. Gives her name as Delores, and says no next of kin. Right age and general physical appearance.”
“Have a number for the place?”
He gave it to me and said, “I don’t know how much good this will do you. Phones there tend to be answered by untrained attendants who have little comprehension of what they’re up against, even less of any moral and constitutional limits to their protectorship.”
I knew just what he meant, recalling sojourns in psychiatric hospitals and alcohol-treatment centers where constitutional rights, legal principle and simple human dignity were violated unthinkingly and as a matter of course.
“Second is over at Mandeville, the state hospital. Listed as Jane Doe, since all she’ll say is ‘God listens, the angels hear.’ Her social worker’s name is Fran Brown.” He read off a number and extension.
“Third’s up in Mississippi. This is the pregnant one. Was pregnant, anyhow: she delivered last week. Way premature. The baby’s in NICU, barely a pound. And barely hanging on, as I understand. As you’d expect. Her case worker is Miss Siler.” He spelled it. “That’s all I could get: Miss Siler. No first name, credentials, job title. Girl gave her name as McTell. No record of social dependence-as we put it-in Mississippi. No medical coverage or prenatal care, and no father of record entered.”
Again, he read off a number.
“Got it. Thanks, Richard. You ever want to get into a new line of work, you’d make one hell of a detective.”
“Yeah, well. Once in a while we do something that really helps, you know. I hope this is one of those times. A favor?”
“You got it.”
“Let me know?”
“Absolutely.”
So then I had to go find Roach, of course.
Bars, taverns, street corners. The Hummingbird Grill, the Y at Lee Circle, Please U Restaurant, a group of men seated as usual on the low wall before a parking lot. One establishment had as identification only a piece of cardboard with Circle View Tavern hand-lettered on it; it was taped to the window among campaign posters (Dr. Betty Brown, School Board, Third Ward: Your Children Need Her) and long-out-of-date showbills (Catch Some Soul at Fat Eddie’s).
I asked at Canal and Royal, again at Carondelet and Poydras, around Jackson Square, along Decatur, Esplanade and into the Faubourg Marigny. When New Orleans’s founding Creoles overflowed the Quarter, they spilled into the Marigny-years before Irish, British and other Anglo settlers began moving into the regions above Canal. When I first came to New Orleans, the Quarter itself was crumbling and everything below Esplanade was strictly no-man’s-land. Then, gradually, those buildings were reclaimed; and in recent years the Marigny’s become a cozy residential area where alternative bookstores, lesbian theaters, small clubs and flea markets thrive.
One small corner bookstore there has, packed in with Baldwin, Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf, Gore Vidal and a wall of books on sexuality, what must be the definitive collection of a genre few know exists: lesbian private-eye novels. I counted once, and there were fourteen different titles; whenever I’m in the Marigny I drop by to check for new ones. This time when I stepped in off the sidewalk a face turned up to me and its owner carefully set back on a shelf the book he’d been paging through.
“Lew,” he said.
It was Richard Garces. “What are you doing here?” seemed a pretty stupid question, but I asked it anyway.
“I live here. Buy you a drink?”
“Why not?”
We walked down to Snug Harbor and settled in at a table by the window. Women in cotton dresses and army boots went by. Men with ponytails and expensive Italian suitcoats worn over ragged T-shirts and jeans. Richard and I decided on two Heinekens.
“I’ve been down here almost since it started,” he told me. “Had a store myself for a while, sold prints and original photographs, a lot of it friends’ work. Paid someone else to run it, of course. I still do a turn now and again at the Theater Marigny, and I work weekends on the AIDS hot line.”
“A pillar of the community.”
“My community, yes. Actually I am.”
A middle-aged couple came in and stopped by our table to say hello to Richard before moving on to a table of their own. It was obvious from their ease with one another that they’d been together a long time. Both were black, introduced by Garces as Jonesy and Rainer (not Rene: he spelled it). A youngish woman came and peered into the window, hands curved around her eyes like binoculars, before stomping away. She wore a taffeta party dress, Eisenhower jacket and old high-top black basketball shoes.