While he waited for the guitar player to make up his mind, Valentin gazed past him toward the door, where two men in cheap suits and a young woman in a thin cotton dress had stopped to peer inside. They were whispering among themselves and the girl was staring as if she had never seen anything quite like him before. Once he caught her eye, her face broke into a smile that was shyly wicked.
Eddie McTier shifted his way into Valentin’s line of vision and rapped his knuckles on the table. “That’s it,” he said. There was a small cylinder of gold coins in front of him that looked to be at least the equal of Valentin’s own.
“That all of it?” Valentin asked.
“Every fucking dime,” McTier replied with a snide curl of his lip.
Twine stepped up to the table with a pint bottle of amber liquor in one hand and a short glass in the other. He placed them at McTier’s elbow and skipped away in a hurry.
McTier frowned at the bartender “How come everybody’s so damn skittish today?” he said. “Y’all are actin’ crazy.”
Valentin pushed the deck of cards across the table. “You deal,” he said.
McTier’s face pinched with distrust. He watched Valentin for a second, then fanned a thumb through the deck. Satisfied it was clean, he broke it in half and began to shuffle. “What’s your story, friend?” he inquired.
“No story,” Valentin said. “Just passing through and looking for a game. What about you?”
“What, ain’t nobody told you?”
“Told me what.”
“I come from Georgia. Place called Happy Valley. I heard they like the blues in New Orleans. So I come over and I’m here to stay.”
Valentin studied the sharp’s face, feigning a vague interest, and watched his hands at the same time. McTier was playing it straight so far, but he was talking faster and faster, an old trick that was a variation on the magician’s sleight of hand.
“I got me a woman back home in Thomson. Ain’t but fifteen years old.” He seemed to stumble for a moment. “Got me a child name of Willie. He’s blind.” Now he fell curiously silent for a few seconds, as if he had lost his way. Recovering, he poured his glass full and drank it halfway down. “But truth is, I got more women than I know what to do with,” he crowed as his hands got busy again. “I found me this here young Ethiopian gal and brought her along. I left her over across the river.”
“And what are you doing in Algiers?” Valentin asked.
McTier smiled and said, “Takin’ your money, friend.”
Valentin’s face lightened suddenly and he grinned as if the guitar player had just told a good joke. The whispers at the door stopped and even Mr. Roy halted his wheezing for a few seconds.
“I say somethin’ funny?” McTier asked.
“Deal,” Valentin said.
“I’ll deal all right,” McTier said, and began snapping cards.
Valentin caught the move on the first hand and let it go. It was the same with the second and third, and McTier, looking giddy, drank some more as he watched the Creole’s stack of coins shrink while his grew. A quarter-hour passed in this manner, and Mr. Roy, Twine, the two fellows at the bar, and the trio near the door were all looking at Valentin as if realizing that in fact he was a fool.
For Valentin, it was as easy as hooking a Mississippi catfish. Thinking he had a chump in his sights, and doing some showing off for the locals, McTier tried a more brazen ploy. This time the Creole’s left hand came down with the force of a guillotine to grab the guitar player’s wrist in an iron grip.
“What did I tell you?” Valentin’s voice, though soft, rang out in a room that had suddenly gone dead quiet.
McTier tried to bluff his way out. “What the hell? Take your goddamn paw off me!”
Valentin shrugged and let go, then used the free hand to tear away the cuff of McTier’s shirt, popping the link and revealing the card hidden there, an ace of spades. It would have come in handy on the next deal.
McTier lowered his forehead and his eyebrows dipped into a valley. He muttered something under his breath and a rank smell came off him. On the periphery of his vision, Valentin saw the two men standing in the doorway pull the girl back out onto the banquette as the rounders and Twine dropped from sight like ducks in a shooting gallery. Mr. Roy was too fat to move with any haste, so he just pushed his chair back into the corner as far as he could go, and watched.
McTier got to his feet, the torn cuff dangling. “This game’s over,” he said.
“Damn right,” Valentin countered.
The guitar player jerked a thumb. “Door’s right back there.”
Valentin smiled dimly. “I ain’t going anywhere.”
“Then I’ll take my money and leave.”
Valentin shook his head slowly and said, “No, you won’t.”
A silence fell with a dark weight. From the corner, Mr. Roy saw the way McTier’s face changed. He had made his last threat and it hadn’t worked. This time he had only two choices, to run away or stand and fight. Meanwhile, the Creole sat perfectly still, his hands on the table. Mr. Roy hadn’t even seen him blink.
McTier let out a sudden raw growl as his hand went across his torso to the waist of his trousers. He snapped out a long-barreled Stevens Tip-Up.22 and brought it around at the same moment that Valentin rose abruptly, knocking back his own chair. The bark of the pistol shook the glasses behind the bar and the slug whistled past Valentin’s temple so closely that he felt the wind as it thunked into a wall board behind his head.
In his arrogance, McTier had packed a single-shot revolver, never dreaming that he’d have to use it. It was a mistake, because now a second pistol cracked, and the guitar player stumbled back in two long strides, as if pulled by a rope. Both his hands came up and the.22 tumbled out of the right one. The hole in his chest was still smoking when his knees crumpled and he collapsed to the floor.
The last hollow echo died. Now flat on his back, McTier tried to raise himself, then collapsed back, coughed out a ragged breath, and went still as the blood from his chest welled and spread.
Mr. Roy let out a long, noisy wheeze. Three heads rose up from the cover of the bar and the two men and the young girl edged back into the doorway. The Negro boy who had so ably faded into the wall reappeared, his face cracking into a grin of amazement.
Twine leaned over the bar to stare down at the body. “Holy Jesus,” he said.
Valentin lowered the pistol, laid it on the table, and sat back down. He picked up the pint, poured some of McTier’s whiskey into his glass, and drank it down in a long, slow sip. He looked surprised and perhaps baffled, as if he had wandered in from outside.
Mr. Roy managed to push himself to his feet. “We can take care of it from here on.”
Valentin, coming to his senses, understood. They would remove McTier’s body and cover the shooting with the police, if they talked about it at all. He also understood that he needed to leave. “Give his guitar to someone who can use it,” he said.
Mr. Roy nodded his heavy head.
Valentin walked across the dirty sawdust floor and out onto the banquette, where the young girl’s dark round eyes locked on him with a sort of primitive wonder. She seemed to barely breath as he stepped past her and continued down Evelina Street without looking back. He arrived at the pier just in time to catch the last ferry.
Pony Girl
by Laura Lippman
Tremé
She was looking for trouble and she was definitely going to find it. What was the girl thinking when she got dressed this morning? When she decided — days, weeks, maybe even months ago — that this was how she wanted to go out on Mardi Gras day? And not just out, but all the way up to Claiborne Avenue and Ernie K. Doe’s, where this kind of costume didn’t play. There were skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians and baby dolls, but it wasn’t a place where you saw a lot of people going for sexy or clever. That kind of thing was for back in the Quarter, maybe outside Café Brasil. It’s hard to find a line to cross on Mardi Gras day, much less cross it, but this girl had gone and done it. In all my years — I was nineteen then, but a hard nineteen — I’d only seen one Mardi Gras sight more disturbing, and that was a white boy who took a magic marker, a thick one, and stuck it through a piercing in his earlobe. Nothing more to his costume than that, a magic marker through his ear, street clothes, and a wild gaze. Even in the middle of a crowd, people granted him some distance, let me tell you.