I’d finished the coffee by the time she picked up the phone and purred into it, “Yeah, honey?” Honey had a few more syllables than it usually does.
“Lew. Listen-”
“How’s your father?”
“Holding his own, Mom says. It was a heart attack.”
“You goin’ up there, Lew?”
“Maybe later. Listen, need to ask you something.”
“If I know it.”
“This Nadie Nola cream: it work?”
“The girls say it does. Light, bright, and damn near white….”
I felt a warmth at the base of my spine, a tingling as though nerves beneath my skin were opening like tiny umbrellas, and knew it was all starting to come together.
“Thanks, Verne. I’ll be talking to you. You get on back to work.”
“I am working, Lew. You oughta see him over there watching me now, wondering who it is I’m talking to. Shoulders out to here and a wad of bills even Sweet Betty couldn’t get her mouth around. Owns a funeral home up in Mississippi, he says. Must be good money in death up in Mississippi.”
“Everywhere.”
I hung up with something gone hard and cold inside me, thinking of Angie, a good enough kid till skag, Harry and her own deep sadness found her. Now her kid was living with her parents up near Jackson. She must be two or three by now, I guessed. And myself-what had I turned into? I could feel that wild hatred building up inside me.
There’s this guy that lives uptown, Richard. Straight as straight can be, but every weekend he goes out and picks up rich white guys in hotel bars and the like, for sex, they think, and when he gets them alone, he kicks their faces in. I wondered if I was any better. My wife hadn’t thought so.
I poured another cup of coffee and drank it, then unplugged the pot and headed for the car.
A photographer I know down off Lee Circle works cheap, doesn’t ask or answer too many questions, and never minds a rush or difficult job if the money’s right. I pulled the Cad into a spot in front of his place and got out. He was just getting there himself, standing at the door with keys in his hand.
“ ’Lo, Lew. Been a while, my man.”
“Milt. Got a quickie for you, if you can do it.”
“Come on in.” He finished unlocking the door and waved me in ahead of him. “I can do anything. The wizard of the flash, they call me in polite circles.”
“Oh yeah? When’s the last time you saw a polite circle?”
“Skip it. What you got?”
“A picture I clipped out of a magazine. I want you to take it, lighten the skin, change the hair. It’s a black girl. When you get through with her, I want her to look white. Can do, wizard?”
“Let’s see it.” He took it and held it up to the light. “Well, at least it’s on gloss. How much of a hurry you in?”
“An hour?”
“An hour, he says. All right. You wanna wait or come back?”
“I’ll come back.”
I pulled the Caddy out of its spot and headed for the Morning Call. Drank three cups of chicory and ate three beignets. A man across from me was reading the Times-Picayune, and I saw the headline on an inside page as he folded it back: CORENE DAVIS-WHERE IS SHE? So it was finally breaking.
I was back at Milt’s on the hour. He handed me an eight by ten.
“It’s grainy but the best I could do,” he said.
I looked at the picture. Bingo. Barbie’s sister.
“Can you put it on the tab, Milt?”
“Tab’s kind of heavy, Lew.”
I peeled off a fifty and shoved it at him.
“That cover it?”
“And part of the tab, too.”
“Thanks, Milt.”
“Anytime.”
I got back in the car and sat there thinking. Now at least I knew who, or what, I was looking for. I even had a picture, a good one. Should I give what I had to Blackie, excuse me, Abdullah Abded, and let him take it from there? He had contacts and resources I didn’t and might find her faster. Or should I go to the police-meet Walsh somewhere and let him play the thing out? I thought back to the newspaper headline buried on an inside page, business as usual, like no one really cared. Which is pretty much the truth of it, I guess.
Chapter Nine
So I hit the streets.
Parked at the Pigeonhole and walked across, car scooped up on a massive, lumbering forklift and served into one of the cubbyholes like a piece of pie behind me. Bourbon Street, first. If she’d never been in New Orleans before, there was a good chance she made the tour.
Louie at Pat’s. Barney at The Famous Doors. Jimmy at Three Sisters. Daley at Tujagues. The best I got was a “Well, maybe.” I even hit Preservation Hall and the Gaslight Theatre. But didn’t hit paydirt till I’d worked my way down to The Seven Seas.
“Yeah, sure thing, she’s been in here every other night this last week or so.”
“Alone?”
“Not for long, but she always started off that way.” Then, answering my sharp glance: “She was hooking. Had a look about her, you know? Fresh pony. Guys go for that.”
“You’re sure it’s the same woman?”
“Sure? Sure I’m sure. The hair’s different, but that’s her all right. Calls herself Blanche. Pretty heavy behind something, too, I’d say-out of a needle or out of a bottle. Hard to tell.”
I wondered then: what was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living. It seemed as though I should know. I’d been there more than once and would probably be there again.
Sooner than I thought, perhaps.
“Any idea where else she might be working?”
“Might try Joe’s.”
“She hasn’t been there.”
“Well. Place called Blue Door, then. It’s-”
“I know where it is. Thanks.”
“De nada. But how about a drink before you split?”
I ordered a double bourbon, put it down in one minute flat, left a ten on the bar.
So Corene had turned herself, or been turned, into a white hustler, I thought, driving out of the Quarter against heavy day’s-end traffic and uptown toward the Blue Door. Stranger things have happened. Daily.
The guy behind the bar was Eddie, an ex-con. As a favor to Walsh I’d been a witness at the trial that put him away the second time. Once more and he was down for the count.
“Howdy, Mr. Griffin,” he said when I walked in.
“Behaving yourself, Eddie?”
“Straight as an arrow, ask anyone. Sunday school, prayer meetings. Right as rain.” He looked toward the big window. “Speaking of which,” he said, “raining yet?”
A few drops spattered against the glass and clouds rolled.
“Not yet.”
“Only thing about New Orleans. Rains every damn day.” He went down the bar to wait on a customer who had just come in. Then he came back. “Something I can do for you, Mr. Griffin?”
“I’m looking for a girl, Eddie.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Calls herself Blanche. A hustler. You seen her in here?”
“Blanche. Hmmm, let me see now. ‘Bout five-six, real looker?”
I nodded.
“That’d be Long John’s girl. Brought her marks here a couple of times. Been on the street a week, two at the most. Fresh pony, you know?”
So now I was looking for two people.
“What’s this Long John look like?”
“Mean mother. Real dark-alley material. Six-three or — four, maybe two-forty. Always wears a yellow suit. Never synthetics, always cotton. Says cotton is the American Negro’s heritage. Heavy user.”
“And where could I find him, if I looked?”
“Cafe du Monde or Joe’s, likely.”
“Thanks, Eddie. Keep your nose clean.”
“Just cleaned it, didn’t I? Cool as silk.”
I went out wondering what Eddie had under the bar for special customers.