“Actress, is all we know.”
“You don’t know where she lives?”
He shook his head.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll give it my best shot, but I just can’t hold out a lot of false hope for you. This is a big, dirty city. It’s way too easy to disappear into it-just like those bayous and swamps not too far away. And it doesn’t much care about any of us individually, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl from Clarksdale. Where are you folks staying in town?”
“With my brother’s family on Jackson Avenue,” Clayson said. He gave me an address and I wrote it down. Over near the levee and New Orleans General, from the number. “There ain’t no-isn’t any-phone,” he said.
“Okay then, I’ll be in touch. There are a few things I can check out for you. Maybe something’ll come of it. I’ll let you know.”
They turned and started for the door. They looked even more tired now, and I wondered for a minute if they’d make it through to the other end of all this, and how.
I looked at the snapshot again and said a prayer myself-for Mr. and Mrs. Clayson.
Chapter Two
The clock on the bank at Carrollton and Freret said it was 102 degrees. I looked over at the palm trees lining the trolley tracks on the neutral ground opposite. The palms looked right at home.
I drove out to Milt’s to have some copies of the snapshot made, then took Claiborne back down-town.
Don wasn’t at his desk. A clerk went off to find him, and ten minutes later he came gliding in, shirtsleeves rolled up and sweat stains the size of mud flaps under his arms. His clip-on tie was lying on the desk like a museum relic.
“Hear about Eddie Gonzalez?” he said, sitting. “Went down for the count. Pushing coke at The Green Door.”
He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.
“You’ve got three minutes,” he said.
“I’ll take two of them and keep the other for later. I’ve got a picture. I want it circulated to your men.”
I caught the glint of suspicion in his eye. “Anything I should know about?”
“Just some kid whose parents want to find her is all.”
“Missing persons is down the hall to the left, Lew.”
“A favor, Don.”
“Been a lot of those lately.”
“I hear you.”
“Okay, okay, you’ve got it. That all?”
I handed the copies over. “That’s all. Thanks, Don.”
“Right.” And he was out the door.
I knew how it was. I’d tried it myself for a while, putting in time as an MP. Then the army and I came to an understanding: they would keep me out of a court martial and psychiatric hospital if I would quit busting heads and go on home. At the time it sounded like the best deal anybody ever made me.
I slid out of downtown headquarters and hit the streets. First the crash pads in the Quarter that pulled them in from all over the world it seemed, then those uptown. Actress, I kept thinking. All I knew about New Orleans theater was
Finally, at three or so in the afternoon, I walked into Jackson Square armed with a Central Grocery sandwich.
I hadn’t been there for a long time, but nothing much had changed. A group of bluegrass musicians played by the fountain. Stretched out on the grass nearby were a number of hippies or freaks or whatever they were calling themselves those days-anyhow, they had long hair and their own aggressive dress code. I watched some of the girls in cutoffs and halters and suddenly felt old. Old and tired. Christ, I thought, just turned thirty and they look like kids to me.
I made rounds with my picture, then dropped onto a bench by one particularly fetching specimen of late childhood and ate my sandwich.
I waited.
After an hour or so I gave it up-lots of distractions and a nagging notion that the world might not be so bad after all, but no Cordelia-and wandered over toward the cathedral. I don’t know why. Anyhow, halfway inside the door, about where they start selling trinkets to tourists, I turned around and walked back out.
Until 1850 or so, Jackson Square had been Place d’Armes, and it was there, during the years of Spanish rule a century earlier, that rebellious French leaders had been executed. A few blocks landward, in Congo Square, slaves were allowed to pursue music and mores otherwise proscribed by the Code Noir and
That night LaVerne and I had dinner at Commander’s Palace. Trout Almandine because they make the best in the city and a Mouton-Rothschild because we felt like it. The wine steward seemed a bit huffy at first but, as the evening went on, grew ever friendlier in proportion to the growing redness of his face.
“You know an actress named Willona?” I asked Verne at one point.
“Can’t say I do, Lew. But lots of girls call themselves actresses.”
We went back to the wine and small talk.
About two in the morning Verne’s phone rang and she rolled over to get it. I could hear a heavy, almost growling voice on the other end, but couldn’t make out words.
“Yeah, honey?” Verne said. More growling. “Really? Kinda late for a working girl, you gotta give better notice…. Yeah, sure, honey, I understand, of course I do…. Yeah, I know where it is…. I’ll be there, sure…. Give me thirty, thirty-five minutes, huh?”
She hung up.
“Gotta split, Lew,” she said. “One of my regulars.”
I nodded and she swung out of bed toward the closet. She had more clothes in there than they had at Maison Blanche.
I waited until she’d left, then got up, dressed, and went home.
Chapter Three
Home these days was a four-room apartment on St. Charles where trolleys clanked by late at night and you could always smell the river. It had a couple of overstuffed couches, some Italian chairs, a king-size bed, even pictures on the wall. Mostly Impressionist.
I parked the bug on the street and went in. Poured a brandy and sat on one of the couches sipping at it.
I was thinking about Cordelia Clayson and the ways it could go. Maybe she was hustling on the street corners by now, I didn’t know. Maybe she was into drugs, or booze. Or plain old for-the-hell-of-it sex. Or Jesus. Anything was possible. Whatever, I didn’t feel too hopeful about the news that sooner or later I was going to have to bring her parents. I’d seen too many times what the city could do.
Actress, I kept thinking. Actress. I didn’t know anything about acting, but I’d had a professor at college who had done a bibliography of New Orleans theater since 1868 or some such date, and tomorrow I’d give him a call. Right now it was time for bed. I finished off the brandy, undressed, set the alarm for seven, and hit the sack.
I was wakened at six by the phone.
“Yeah?” I managed to get out.
“Lew? I’m calling from downtown.”
