The Long-Legged Fly

They’d die.”

“Right. But I need some information, Verne.”

“He’ll give it to you. But Lew-”

“Yes?”

“I think he’s in love. I don’t know if he can let her go. Be gentle with him, try to understand.”

“For you?”

“Whatever.” Ice clinked again against glass. “I’m drunk, Lew. I can’t afford to be drunk; this is one of my regular spots.”

“I’ll come and get you, Verne.”

“No, I’ll be all right. Just switch to coffee and sit here a while. You go on. But Lew?”

“Yes?”

She was silent for several seconds.

“Everything’s so shitty, Lew, so fucked up. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a long time.”

“No one ever has. Ever will.”

“You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine. You be careful. You’re not real good at being careful, Lew.”

“I try.”

“Don’t we all. Bye, Lew.”

“Bye, girl.”

I started out again, then came back and sat at the desk, staring out the window. I felt as though I’d lost something, lost it forever, and I didn’t even know what it was, had no name for it. Those are the worst losses we ever sustain.

Chapter Nine

New Orleans natives accent the first syllable and allow the entire word only two: So-crates. God knows what we’d do with Asclepius. Socrates is part of an old section of houses chopped up into apartments and strange corridors that would be slums in any other city but here are just where poor folk live. A lot of them, oddly, seem to be black. And of course they’re only poor (so the rest of the great American fairy tale goes) because somehow they choose to be.

I took the wrong turn off the toll road and ended up over in Gretna in a warren of Hancock, Madison, Jefferson and Franklin streets. Why not, here of all places, one named for Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s slave- mistress?

I drove back across into Algiers, past driveways filled with junked cars, oil drums and abandoned refrigerators, past storefront churches, bail bondsmen, a martial arts academy, an Ethiopian restaurant, a boarded-up florist, ten blocks of project housing, an overgrown park, and a Bible college, and found Socrates.

Four-o-eight was at the edge, where things had started back up the ladder, a typically grand old New Orleans home renovated within the last ten years and divided (judging from nameplates by the front door) into three apartments. One of the plates read W. Percy, M.D., another R. Queneau. The third one just read B.S. I punched the button beside it. I punched it again. Nothing.

The front door, however, was not locked and led into a foyer with twelve-foot ceiling and stained-glass skylight. Two of the apartments were to the left of an ornate curved stairway leading, presumably, to an upper hallway or balcony, if to anything at all. The third apartment was to the stairway’s right, and that door was unlocked too. I went in.

A narrow hall ran to a well-equipped kitchen at one end, an unoccupied living room, strangely jumbled with antiques and chrome-and-glass, at the other. A ladderlike stairway climbed through the ceiling in one corner and took me into a bedroom smelling of young women-powders, perfume, polish remover, Noxzema. Some clothes were tossed onto the floor by the bed. A Bible was on the bedside table. There was a connecting bathroom, then another bedroom.

I went to the bed first. She was alive but not spectacularly so, deeply drugged, no reaction to a hard pinch, blood slow to come back. Once I figured she was going to be okay, I turned to him in the chair, but there wasn’t anything I could do for him.

Most of what had been his head was splattered against the wall. His hand had fallen into his lap and remained there, the gun, a forty-five, on the floor between his feet. I smelled urine, feces, the animal scent of blood and tissue.

By the wall across from him a camera sat on its tripod, still filming. I didn’t touch it. But I went back down the stairway to the phone in the living room and dialed downtown.

“Walsh,” I said.

“Sergeant’s with the Chief. Can I-”

“Get him.”

“I couldn’t inter-”

“Get him, now, or he’ll have you for breakfast tomorrow.”

A pause. “Could I say who wants him?”

“Lew Griffin.”

I waited all of a minute.

“Lew, what the hell?”

“Four-o-eight Socrates,” I said. “Our friend Sanders has just checked out permanently.”

“Twenty minutes,” Don said. “Don’t wander off.”

Chapter Ten

A crudely lettered title card drew back from the screen and there was Sanders, holding it in one hand, pointing to it like a mime, face contorted into a gigantic smile. It read: Last Film.

He turned his back to the camera and walked slowly to the chair. When he turned around and sat, his expression had changed to a tragic one as exaggerated as the earlier smile. He mimed wiping tears from one eye, then the other. For a moment he hung his head, then shook it sadly again and again.

But an idea was starting up in his mind, and as it formed, the smile slowly returned, more natural now, less exaggerated. He held out his hand and, magically, a forty-five appeared in it. Waving good-bye with one hand, with the other he put the barrel of the gun into the smile.

And that was how I had found him.

“Jesus,” Don said.

Polanski and Verrick looked at one another, shaking their heads.

“He and the girl were living together?” Don said.

I nodded.

“How’d you know that?”

“Someone told me,” I said.

“Who told you?”

“I forget.”

“He the one that drugged her?”

I shrugged.

Don looked back up at the blank screen.

“This is one fucked-up world. And the best we can do is shovel shit from one place to somewhere else for a while.”