I went across to the Cafe du Monde and had a couple of coffees and an order of beignets. Then I bought a piece of sugar cane at the Market and was walking back up Chartres toward Canal to catch the trolley, sucking at the sugar cane, when a Pinto pulled up beside me.
“Griffin? Spread ’em,” the man said. I did, leaning forward onto the car. It gets to be habit after a while.
One of the guys flashed a badge, not local. The other one turned me around to face him.
“Okay, Griffin, you’re clean. Where you living?”
I shrugged.
“No known address,” he said to the other one. “Got a job?”
I shook my head, thinking how ancient this encounter was.
“No income,” he said.
“Been offered a place to stay, though,” the one with the badge said.
“That right?”
Their conversation went on without me.
“The halfway house.”
“Well. Maybe you better take that offer, Griffin.”
“Yeah. Be a real good idea.”
“Then maybe you could kind of keep an eye on Sansom and his people for us. We know something’s gotta be going on down there.”
“We just don’t know what.”
They both got back into the Pinto.
“You need money, Lew?”
I shook my head.
“Sure you do. Everybody needs money. You be thinking how much you need and let us know. We’ll work something out. See you, Lew.”
I watched the Pinto drive away down Chartres, hoping someone would rearend it.
Chapter Two
“I am pleased that you reconsidered,” Sansom said. He wore a dark suit with suspenders and looked like a lawyer. “More coffee?”
I shook my head.
“We’ve put you in room C-6. Only a couple of other guys in there right now. Any problems, let me know. Usually we ask for some work in return, but you’ve already done yours. Come and go as you wish. Make any money, throw in the pot whatever you think’s right. There’s food laid out in the common room every day between four and six-cold cuts, fruit, cheese, soup, bread.”
“I met some people on the way here,” I said.
“Let me guess. Guys in gray suits with short hair and rep ties? Yeah, they think we ought to still be painting slogans on ghetto walls instead of actually doing something. I don’t know, maybe they think we’re stockpiling bombs in the basement. We don’t have a basement, man-this is New Orleens.” For a moment intelligence fell away from his face and he became a caricature. “We don’t be good niggahs, Massuh Griff’n.” Then he laughed, a deep, rolling laugh. “Come on. I’ll take you up.”
The room was surprisingly light and airy. Beds occupied each corner, a small round table and chairs took up the room’s center. There wasn’t much else: a squat bookcase, some shelves nailed to the wall, a couple of throw rugs.
“Where is everyone?”
“Jimmi-” He pointed to one of the beds, meticulously made. “-does volunteer work with a child care group and is out most days. Carlos-” This bed was unmade. “-passes out flyers, telephone books, whatever work he can get. You never know, with him. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall to your right, towels and all that on shelves behind the door. Again, you let me know if there’s anything else you need; otherwise, we’ll all leave you alone.” He stuck out a hand. “Glad you came, Lew.”
I was kind of glad too. I lay on the bed watching the ceiling and wondering what the next move should be. When I woke up, it was dark outside.
I wandered downstairs to the common room. A couple of guys were hunched over a chess set, a half-dozen others were circled around a TV showing the last scenes of The Big Sleep. Dinner was long gone and I was starving.
I remembered passing a Royal Castle on the way there, and headed for it. Not many people on the streets-too damned cold-and not many people in the R.C. either. One guy with a beard and scraggly thin hair drooling onto his french fries; a young couple making out in the back booth; two Wealthy Independent Businessmen talking over the charts and invoices spread between their baskets of burgers. The clock said it was 9:14.
I had a mushroom burger, baked potato with sour cream, coffee. My first real food for a while, if you could call it that. It all smelled of bacon grease and tasted as though it had been cooked by the same person who invented polyester.
I paid the cashier, which put a hefty dent in my ready cash. She didn’t punch out prices but merely hit keys carrying stylized pictures of a hamburger, a mushroom, a potato, a steaming coffee cup.
“Come see us again real soon,” she said.
“Had a great time,” I told her.
I meandered along Basin, gradually aware that a car was pacing me. Turned into a side street and the car followed, against the one-way sign. Finally just turned and waited for them.
“Spread ’em, Griffin,” one of the guys said. I already had.
“You thought over what we were talking about earlier?”
I shrugged.
“Man needs friends in today’s world, especially a black man, right? You a friend of ours?”
I shrugged again.
“Man don’t know if he’s a friend of ours, Johnny.”
The guy in the car shook his head sadly.
“Makes you wonder who he is a friend of. Hello: what’s this? Johnny, you see this, don’t you? Where’d it come from?”
“Came out of his inside coat pocket, Bill.”
“And what is it?”
“Looks like a bag of some kind of white powder, near as I can tell.”
“You writing all this down?”
“Check.”
“You going out to do your laundry, Griffin? This some Tide or Cheer here?”
“Don’t think so, Bill,” the other one said.
“Nope. Ain’t Tide or Cheer. What is it, Griffin?”
“You tell me.”
“Looks like high quality coke to me, Mr. Griffin. I’m quite surprised you don’t recognize it.”
“Never saw it before.”
“Sure, Lew. No one ever has. Amazing how no one ever sees any of this. Right, Johnny?”
“Right.”
“You writing all this down?”
“Right.”
I walked-mainly because of the lawyer who materialized from nowhere and told me, the desk sergeant and then the court that he represented a rehabilitation center operated by “one William Sansom and Associates.” Somehow he managed to get a judge down there and had me in the courtroom for a prelim within the hour. The judge was a woman of fifty or so who listened closely to everything, yawned a couple of times and said, “No P.C. It’s out.” I saw Walsh standing at the back of the courtroom. He and the two feds exchanged glances as they left the courtroom.
It was nearly midnight when I got back to the place. The TV was still on, but nobody was there watching it. Upstairs one of the bunks held a snoring body cocooned in sheets. On another a guy sat nude, reading Principles of Economy.
“You must be Lew,” he said. “Glad to have you with us.”
I nodded, went down to the bathroom, came back and stretched out on my bed with a copy of Soul on Ice that I’d found by the john.
“You read a lot, huh?” he said after a while.
I lowered the book. “Couldn’t afford much education, and couldn’t sit still for most of what I could afford. I’ve been trying to make it up ever since.”
“You read Himes?”
“Much as I could find in used-book stores.”
“Hughes?”
“Every word.”
“Don’t run into many readers,” he said. “I’m Jimmi. Jimmi Smith. Used to be a teacher. Loved it. But I couldn’t leave the kids alone.”
“Girls?”