The Long-Legged Fly

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.

Chapter Ten

Not wanting to go two out of three falls with the traffic, I grabbed a cab back downtown and had the driver drop me off on Canal.

A crowd was gathering on the sidewalk in front of Werlein’s, doubled by its reflection in storefront glass among black pianos and shiny brass horns. I walked over, hearing about me a flurry of commentary, query, invective.

“Never knew what was coming.”

“I seen it, seen it all.”

“Bad blood ’tween ’em, had to be.”

“Just like that, and its over.”

“Anybody call the police yet?”

One man-both were black-lay on the sidewalk in a mirrorlike pool of blood and urine. There was a sucking wound in his chest where the bullet had smashed its way in; each time he tried to breathe, the fabric around it, though blood-logged, fluttered. Then light went out from behind his eyes and his shirt grew still. He was done with all this.

Another man of about the same age stood over him with the gun hanging limply at his side, saying over and over to himself what sounded like “I done tried to tell him, I done tried to tell him.” As though (I thought, walking on toward the Quarter), speechless and dumb for years, he had found at last a way to speak, to say the things he wanted.

Years later, as I stood in Beaucoup Books reading a poem in one of the magazines I skimmed from time to time there, that scene, something I’d never again thought of in all those years, came back to me full force. Once again I could see the shirt fabric flapping, the reflection of the crowd in the windows, the peace in both those men’s eyes. You must learn to put your distress signals in code, the poem read.