Moth

Chapter Ten

I got home midmorning and was walking toward the answering machine with its blinking light when the phone itself rang.

“Lew,” Achille Boudleaux said. “You look’n ‘roun’ for me, I hear.” He could speak perfectly proper, unaccented English if he wanted, but rarely bothered without good reason, and never among friends.

I said there was absolutely no way he could know that.

“Why I so damn good. What you wan’?”

I filled him in, including my tracking down Garces at the shelter.

“Is there anything else, A.C.? Something you may have left out of the report? However tenuous it might seem.”

“Hol’ on. I done pull out the notebook cause I know what you wan’ me for.”

Virtual silence on the line. A match striking in Metairie and a long pull on his cigarette. A cough that died aborning, rattling deep in his chest like suppressed memories. Car alarm somewhere down the street. Police siren racing up Prytania.

“Ain’ much here, Lew. One t’ing I din’t put in, but issa long shot, pro’ly don’ lead nowhere. Miss Alouette, she bin keepin’ comp’ny wit’ a guy call hi’self Roach, some say. Make goo’ money, that boy, but he don’ seem to work at anythin’, you know? He from up ‘roun’ Tup’lo.”

“You have any idea how long they’d been a number?”

“Don’t know they were, rilly.”

“Any address for this Roach?”

“You bin off the street too long, Lew. Roaches don’t have no ‘dress, you know that. You wan’ him, you just get on downtown and ax ‘roun’.”

“Okay. Bien merci, Achille.”

“Rien.”

I cradled the phone and hit Message. After a brief pause, a momentary shush of tape past pinions, Richard Garces identified himself, saying: “Give me a call when you can. I think I have a couple of leads on Alouette.”

I dialed, got a busy signal three times in a row, at last got through and was put on hold. “You’re So Vain” fluted into my defenseless ear and I found myself thinking about Carly Simon’s lips. Something I was pretty sure Richard Garces never did.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something of an emergency with one of my girls.” “Lew- remember? And no problem.”

“Super. Okay, here’s the thing. I’m a hacker, or at least I was a while back, and there was a time there when a lot of us kind of stumbled into one another over the years on various bulletin boards. We were all doing social work, that’s what brought us together. Some like myself in small shelters or support services scattered throughout the country, some in institutions, most in public health-MHMR or other government services. Those early contacts developed into a loose network, a place we could go for information we didn’t otherwise have access to, a kind of information underground.”

“Right.” The country-whatever your special interest: law, liberal politics, magazine sales, white supremacy- was rife with such networks, electronic and otherwise. Often I imagined they might represent this skewed nation’s only true intelligence, skein after skein of fragile webs piling one atop another until a rudimentary nervous system came into being.

“Well, I hadn’t logged on to the network in quite a while. My work here at Foucher’s pretty circumscribed. But after you left the other day, after I’d thought about it a while, I got on-line. And after half an hour or so of ‘Good to see your number come up’ and ‘How’s it been going’ and ‘Where the hell you been, man’-I guess the economy’s gotten so bad that these guys don’t have much else to do but sit home, stroke and get stroked by electronic friends-I started asking about an eighteen-year-old who might give New Orleans as a prior address, might be reluctant to say more and is probably in trouble.

“That’s what the network’s about, after all. Alouette doesn’t have any resources, any skills. Wherever she winds up, sooner or later she’s going to have to hook into one of the available programs.”

“And you can track her that way.”

“Ordinarily, no. Well, I guess you could, but it would take forever. There’s no official channel. No central data bank or clearinghouse. The network itself is sketchy, but we’ve got people scattered all through the country, at all levels, and every one of us is facing the same problems day in and day out, a lot of them basically insoluble. So sometimes we’re able to help one another. Provide information or a way around this or that obstacle, maybe cut a corner or two.”

Okay, so it reeked of J. Edgar Hoover-style rationalization. And sure, you had to wonder to what use those less scrupulous might put such information, were it available to them. But I had no reason to believe that Richard Garces was any less liberal in reflex or thought than myself: he’d doubtless covered this same ground many times over.

“You have any indication Alouette was pregnant?” he asked suddenly.

“Not really. Did you?”

“It’s a possibility. You have a pen and paper?”

“Yeah.” I always kept early drafts and aborted pages, folding them in half to make a rough tablet that stayed there by the phone.

“Okay. Out of a couple dozen maybes, I boiled it down to three. These may all be way off base, you understand. Wrong tree-even wrong forest, for all we know. But age, accent and physical description are all good matches.”

“I understand.”

“The first one showed up in Dallas a few months back, brought into Parkland when she was raped by some guys who were looking through the Dumpster she lived in for leftover hamburgers and found her instead. It was behind a Burger King. Right now she’s in the Diagnostic Center. That’s around the corner from Parkland, up on Harry Hines. She’ll be there another few days, then she’ll be farmed out to whatever treatment center or hospital has a bed open up. Gives her name as Delores, and says no next of kin. Right age and general physical appearance.”

“Have a number for the place?”

He gave it to me and said, “I don’t know how much good this will do you. Phones there tend to be answered by untrained attendants who have little comprehension of what they’re up against, even less of any moral and constitutional limits to their protectorship.”

I knew just what he meant, recalling sojourns in psychiatric hospitals and alcohol-treatment centers where constitutional rights, legal principle and simple human dignity were violated unthinkingly and as a matter of course.

“Second is over at Mandeville, the state hospital. Listed as Jane Doe, since all she’ll say is ‘God listens, the angels hear.’ Her social worker’s name is Fran Brown.” He read off a number and extension.

“Third’s up in Mississippi. This is the pregnant one. Was pregnant, anyhow: she delivered last week. Way premature. The baby’s in NICU, barely a pound. And barely hanging on, as I understand. As you’d expect. Her case worker is Miss Siler.” He spelled it. “That’s all I could get: Miss Siler. No first name, credentials, job title. Girl gave her name as McTell. No record of social dependence-as we put it-in Mississippi. No medical coverage or prenatal care, and no father of record entered.”

Again, he read off a number.

“Got it. Thanks, Richard. You ever want to get into a new line of work, you’d make one hell of a detective.”

“Yeah, well. Once in a while we do something that really helps, you know. I hope this is one of those times. A favor?”

“You got it.”

“Let me know?”

“Absolutely.”