Black Hornet

I’m sure you do.

She sighed.

I never saw the resident or administrator on call. But six brusque phone conversations later I pushed open the front doors of Touro to find Walsh waiting at the curb in his blue Corvair.

“Need a lift, sailor? Steak dinner perhaps?”

“Little early for dinner, you think?”

He shrugged. “Always dinnertime somewhere.”

In the car I asked him how he knew when I’d be leaving. He said he had me figured for the kind who’d try to slip through the crack of dawn. Patience not being a particular virtue of yours, he said. Or mine either for that matter, he added after a moment.

He cut over to St. Charles heading downtown.

“Breakfast be okay, for now?” he asked, and when I said sure, he hauled the little car into the neutral ground for a U-turn back up toward Napoleon. We pulled into the K amp;B there just as I was telling him he didn’t owe me a thing.

The breakfast special, three eggs, bacon, grits and biscuit, coffee included, was $1.49. But first we had to sit at an empty table a while waiting. Walsh finally got up, went over and spoke to the waitress behind the counter, who’d been pointedly ignoring us. She almost beat him back to the table with coffee and menus, and a broad smile, for us both. Sallye, her nametag said.

“Funny the things you just never think about,” he said as she walked away.

“The ones you try not to think about are a scream, too.”

Food was there by the time we finished our coffee. The waitress slid plates in front of us and hurried off to bring more coffee in thick-walled mugs. She took the old ones away. Grits swam with bright butter, bacon glistened with grease, eggs were a yellow dam dividing grits grease from bacon grease. Even the bottom of the biscuit was soaked with butter. Mmmmmm.

“Sure you can afford this?” I asked.

“Don’t worry. I’ve been saving up for it.”

The minute we were done, the waitress was back bringing new mugs of coffee and carrying off plates, asking did we need anything else. Walsh shook his head. Sallye left.

“What the hell did you say to that woman?”

“Told her you were an African, taught economics up at Tulane.”

“You didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t. I just said I was a police officer and that we’d appreciate some breakfast after a real tough night’s work. It’s possible she may have gotten the impression that you’re a cop too, I suppose.”

We sat sipping coffee, watching streetcars and people lumber by outside, trading what little we knew about the shooter.

Walsh had made a point of spending as much time as possible these past weeks in the vicinity of the shooting sites.

“I’d swing by whenever I could when I was on patrol, dog them on my own after hours. There was this one guy wearing all black-T-shirt, jeans, some kind of short jacket, maybe canvas, with a lot of pockets-I caught a glimpse of a couple or three times. Always from the back, always just for an instant as he was heading down an alley or cutting between buildings. But I knew from the walk it had to be the same guy.

“Then one night, heading up toward Lee Circle from downtown, I saw him, someone that walked like him anyway, coming out of the Hummingbird. I was in the unit and didn’t want to spook him, so by the time I was able to pull around a corner and get out, the guy was already gone down Julia Street somewhere. But that put the Hummingbird at the top of my hit list. I started spending time in a low-life bar across St. Charles drinking draft beer that smelled like cleaning fluid and tasted like sour water. Then yesterday morning, I put my beer down, looked out the window between some old cardboard signs, and there he was.

“We went together down Julia and up Baronne. Nothing but bars and a few fleabag hotels open, the rest of the street empty, so I’m hanging way the hell back. But somehow he got on to me. Knew I was there, knew I’d been tracking him.”

“And decided to stop you.”

“Right.”

“Any way he could know who you are?”

“I don’t think so. You ready? She’s looking this way again with coffee in her eyes.”

Walsh put a five on the table and we limped together out to his car.

“Where’s home?”

I must have looked at him sharply.

“I just meant that I’ll drop you.”

“Which way you going?”

He hooked a thumb toward uptown.

“Good enough. You can let me off at State.”

“You sure?”

I told him I was sure, and told him the same thing again, leaning down to the window, once I got out at State.

There’s this house there on the corner with a glassed-in porch and artificial Christmas tree. Only it isn’t a Christmas tree, it’s a Whatever tree. Stays up year round. Come Easter, pink bunnies and huge plastic eggs appear on it. Halloween, they decorate it with skeletons and spiders, witches, spray-on webs. Masks, streamers, and clowns go up for Mardi Gras. Now it was hung with turkeys, Indians, cranberry bunches, Pilgrim hats.

I stood for a moment wondering (as I had wondered a hundred times before) about the people who lived in that house, what they were like, why they did this, how it all got started. This is a city that dearly loves traditions, and if there’s not one handy, then it’ll just make up a new one.

I crossed St. Charles and walked riverward toward LaVerne’s place.

No mail in the box, of course, no paper on the porch or in the yard: Verne was almost as invisible as I was.

I let myself in, poured half a tumblerful of bourbon in the kitchen, and took it into the front room.

At the time, Verne had a taste for what they called the contemporary look. You’d walk into her second-floor apartment in this old Victorian house and there, sitting on hardwood floors alongside real plaster walls and solid- wood baseboards under cameo-and-wreath ceiling medallions, was all this stark, angular, mostly white furniture. It remained kind of a shock.

Not too long after, Verne switched to (and stayed with) old wooden tables, breakfronts, wardrobes and chairs picked up for next to nothing at used-furniture shops on Magazine and hauled upstairs over the balcony on ropes. One day she arrived breathless to tell me that all the stores had tripled their prices and put up new signs and now she had an apartment full of fine antiques.

Finishing my drink, I poked through books and magazines scattered about on the coffee table. Life, several Mentor Classics, something titled The Killer Inside Me, an Ace Double with a Philip K. Dick novel on the A side, Redbook, Family Circle, a paperback of Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor on the cover.

I opened Life to a spread on Hemingway that, along with half a dozen older photos, included one of him standing outside his home in Idaho just days before he shot himself with one of his beloved shotguns. Was there snow in the background? I remember snow.

I went to the kitchen for another drink. Wandered out onto the balcony, careful to stay back out of direct sight of the street.

A fire burned somewhere close by. I could smell it: loamy, full aroma of wood, acrid tang of synthetics and fabric, heat itself.

Second time I was ever at LaVerne’s, letting myself in with a key same as now, I walked out on this balcony with a cup of cafe au lait and within ten minutes cops were banging on the door below. When I answered it, they threw me up against the wall shouting What you doin’ here, boy? You belong here? Luckily Verne’s neighbor heard it all and told her when she got home in the morning. So four hours after I was hauled in, Verne showed up at police headquarters with her lawyer. Details run together from