The Long-Legged Fly

Au Lait. They hadn’t seen her either.

What the hell, maybe she was sick in New York. Maybe she was kidnapped. Or maybe she was dead in a warehouse somewhere.

About all I’d really accomplished was to learn something about Corene Davis. It’s strange how little is left of our lives once they’re rendered down, once they’ve started becoming history. A handful of facts, movements, conflicts; that’s all the observer sees. An uninhabited shell.

She was born in Chicago in 1936. Her father picked up what work he could, not much, all of it hard and hardly paid, her mother was a midwife, later a practical nurse. She’d gone to the University of Chicago on scholarship, become something of a student protest leader, then moved on to Columbia for graduate work, where she’d continued her protest activities while simultaneously becoming active (rare then for grad students) in student government. She had been investigated about that time, she claimed, by the FBI and, she suspected, CIA. Stood watching them tap her phone from a pole at the end of the block and took them iced tea when they climbed back down. But it wasn’t until publication of a revised version of her master’s thesis as Chained to Ruin that she’d become a full-fledged black leader. And so she’d made the round of talk shows and lecture circuits, been written about (as though the writers had encountered utterly different women) in everything from Ebony to The New Republic, and generally become a voice for her, our, people. A second book, on women’s rights, was in the works. She had light skin (“She could almost pass for white,” as one reporter put it), wore her hair clipped short, stood five-six, weighed in at one-ten, neither smoked nor drank, was vegetarian.

And had the capacity, it seemed, to vanish into thin air.

I stubbed out the cigarette in a potted plant LaVerne had given me and looked at my watch. Three ten. Maybe things would look better in the morning. It happened sometimes.

I drew a hot bath and had just settled in with a glass of gin when the phone rang.

“How you feelin’, Griffin?” a voice said.

“Man, it’s kind of late for games. You know?”

“You feelin’ pretty good, huh?”

“Until some asshole called me.”

The voice was silent. A dull crackling sound in the wires, witches burning far, far away. Then after a time the voice said, “You’re looking for Corene Davis.”

“Who is this?”

“Don’t.” And the line was dead.

To this day, I don’t know who it was on the phone that night. But I remember the sound of that voice exactly, and the chill that came over me then, and I remember that I finished off the glass of gin and poured another before getting back into the tub.

Chapter Eight

Could pass for white.

I woke up at ten with that phrase rolling around in my head. I’d had a dream in which people were chasing me with knives down narrow, overhung streets. A big Irish cop watched it all, telling old minstrel-show jokes. The sheets around me were soaked with sweat.

I stripped and showered, then made coffee, real this time, and sat down at the kitchenette table, chrome and red formica. I lit a cigarette. Could pass for white. But her skin looked dark in the picture.

There’s an old novel called Black No More, about a scientist who invents a cream that’s able to turn black people white and the social havoc this brings about, written in the thirties by George Schuyler, a newspaperman. When I was a kid, Dad always used to grin when any of his friends mentioned it. And Mom said she’d whip me if she ever caught me reading it. Till I did, I thought it was about sex.

I walked into the other room, taking the coffee with me, and dialed LaVerne’s home number. Not much chance, but worth a try. When there was no answer, I dialed one of the other numbers she’d given me and asked for her. I knew it was a bar she frequented most afternoons, picking up marks as they floated from posh uptown hotels down into the Quarter and back up. The guy that answered said, “Hold a minute, bud, I’ll check.”

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.