“You need me for anything else, Don?”
“No. Go on, Lew. Be careful.”
I walked down the four flights of stairs and outside. An old man in rags was sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the building. “Lock me up, officer,” he told me.
It was a little after nine and had probably been dark thirty minutes or so. A haze of heat and light shimmered over the city. Breathing was like walking in wet tennis shoes.
I retrieved my car from the police lot where Don had checked it in, and drove out Poydras to Hotel Dieu.
At the nurse’s station in intensive care I explained who I was and was told that one of the doctors would see me shortly, please wait in the family room outside. The fear, pain and blinding hope in that room were palpable. At length a tall, stooped young man in yellow scrubs came to the door and said quietly: “Mr. Griffith?”
“Griffin,” I said.
“About Cordelia Clayson?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please come with me.”
We went back into intensive care and to a small room at the far end. He pulled the door closed. Through it I could hear the sound of alarms going off, a voice saying: I need some help over here.
“And just what is your relationship to the patient, Mr. Griffin?”
“As I told the nurse, I’m a private detective engaged by the girl’s parents.”
“To investigate what brought her here to us?”
I shook my head. “To find her for them. My job’s done, except that now I have to go and tell them. And I need to know
“I see. You’re in touch with the parents, then.”
“I know where to find them.”
He had sad brown eyes. You wondered if they would stay that way, or if after years of this (he couldn’t be more than twenty-six or — seven) they would harden.
“I can’t hold out a lot of hope,” he said. “It’s not the drugs themselves, of course; we’ve learned how to handle all that. But Cordelia had a hard hit of some unusually pure heroin. She was out for a long time, and what happened was, she developed what we call shock-lung syndrome. The heart slows down dramatically and loses the force of its contractions, so that everything kind of backs up. Her lungs are full of fluid. They’re hard to inflate-every breath is like the first time you blow into a balloon-and oxygen levels in the blood are critically low. We’re doing what we can. She’s on a ventilator that does all her breathing for her, and she’s receiving hundred-percent oxygen at high pressures. But we’re not gaining much ground, Mr. Griffin. And frankly, the interventive measures we’ve been forced to use are more likely to lead to further complications than to any resolution of the original problems. We get in this sort of downward spiral after a while. I’m sorry.”
I stood. “Thank you, Doctor. Will Mr. and Mrs. Clayson be able to see their daughter if I bring them down here? Are there restricted visiting hours?”
“Not in this case, Mr. Griffin. I’ll leave instructions at the desk.”
I went out through the double doors to the elevator. In the family room, every face turned toward me.
Chapter Eleven
The breeze had turned into a steady, low wind and there was rain in the air. I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents’ faces in the mirror.
I swung onto St. Charles and up into the Garden District. There are entire streets here where you go burrowing down tunnels of green, trees curving over and around you, sky shut away. It reminds you how much of New Orleans is pure artifice-that it’s a constructed city, dredged out of swampland by sheer force of will and labor, nibbled at constantly by history, the river, the swamp’s dark mouth. For most of the 1830s the New Basin Canal, meant to assure American self-sufficiency from Creoles, was hacked out with pick and shovel (there was no dynamite, and no way to keep swamp seepage out except back-breaking pumps from Archimedes’ time) at a cost of well over a million dollars and at least eight thousand lives. A hundred years later the city of New Orleans voted to refill this canal.
It was as though the city’s image of itself, and the ways it tried to live up to that image, kept changing. It was Spanish, French, Italian, West Indian, African, Colonial American; it was primarily the city of fun and illusion, or primarily the bastion of culture in a new land; it was a city built on the backs of slaves and simultaneously a city many of whose important citizens were
I parked on Jackson Avenue and found the address I wanted behind one of a row of apartment houses: what used to be a slave’s quarters connected to what used to be a garage by a room narrow as a sidewalk.
“I’m looking for the Claysons,” I said to the man who opened the door.
“You’d be Mr. Griffin?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in.” He backed out of the doorway.
Mr. and Mrs. Clayson were sitting inside on a shabby love seat and stood to introduce me to Clayson’s brother and his brother’s friend. I knew the friend from the streets, a working girl whose specialty was impotent men and rough trade with other women. I wondered if this was home for her.
As gently as I could, I told them about Cordelia and asked if they’d come with me. Mrs. Clayson closed her eyes and said under her breath what I suppose must have been a prayer. Mr. Clayson looked off at the wall as though he’d just lost whatever faith he’d had up to this point. They stood, and we walked out into the beginning rain.
By the time we reached Hotel Dieu, it was pouring. I let the Claysons out by the front lobby, told them to wait for me there, and parked. Six steps from the car, I was soaked through.
We went up in the elevator. I left them in the family room and stepped through the double doors. The doctor I’d spoken to earlier glanced up from a stack of charts at the nurses’ station, then walked toward me shaking his head.
“She’s gone, Mr. Griffin. Just a few minutes ago. It was her heart, finally. It couldn’t take the strain any longer, I guess, and she arrested.” He held his fist out, slowly opened it. “You’ll want me to talk to the girl’s parents?”
“I’ll tell them, Doctor-unless they ask things I don’t know. You’ll be here?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t do very much, Mr. Griffin.”
I went back through the double doors, took the Claysons out into the hall and said what I had to say, then stood waiting through their silence.
“I’ll take you folks home whenever you’re ready,” I finally said.
Mrs. Clayson looked at her husband, who was staring out the window into the rain. We could hear the storm breaking around us.
“I reckon we’re ready now, Mr. Griffin,” she said.
I was getting into one elevator behind them when the other opened.
“You folks go ahead. I’ll be right down,” I said.
LaVerne had just stepped off the other elevator. We waited until they were gone.
“She’s dead, isn’t she, Lew?”
I nodded. “You know the rest?”
“I know.” She looked at the same window Clayson had been looking out. “You think he knew he was killing her? God, he loved her so much-like he was a kid himself, you know?”
“I don’t know, Verne. I don’t think he did.”
“You ever love anybody like that, Lew?”
