Black Hornet

Silence shimmered in the air like heat lightning.

“I’ll be going now, Lew,” Verne said. “It’s been a long night. Get some sleep, call me later on?”

“You need a cab?”

“No, honey. St. John gave me a lift.” Sinjun. Her fifty-year-old neighbor who still dressed in chinos, sweater, blue shirt, loafers. Like many people in this city, he seemed stuck, like a fly in amber, in some prior era. “He’s waiting at a bar on Claiborne.”

“Beautiful woman,” Walsh said.

True enough. Heads turned, men’s and women’s alike, wherever she went, and I was pleased, flattered, proud, to have her beside me. Only much later, after almost thirty years with and without her, and when it was too late, did I realize that LaVerne had saved my life-that in some strange, indecipherable way we had saved each other’s lives.

And in the years before that realization came, without meaning to I would hurt her terribly again and again, the same way I’d repeatedly damage myself. Each year, the ground pulls harder. Each year, the burden of what we do and fail to do helps push us down.

“You want another beer?” I said. “No? Then what the hell do you want?”

“A question I’ve asked myself again and again.”

“Ever get an answer?”

“Oh yes. Lots of them.”

He found the trashcan under the sink and dropped the bottle in.

“I want to stop feeling this hole where my brother was. I want things to make sense. I want justice and truth and decency and clear blue skies.”

“Walsh?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to have a miserable life, man.”

Chapter Thirteen

We found him, casting ourselves bodily for the fifth or sixth time into the abyss of the absurdly hopeful, ready to call it quits after one, two more, tops, at a bar not far off Lee Circle on Girod.

He had on a tuxedo coat with lapels wide as mud flaps, purple-and-green Hawaiian shirt, khaki work pants, hightop tennis shoes with most of the black worn away. There were patches on the pants that looked like they belonged on a tire.

“Looking good, Doo-Wop.”

“Captain.” Doo-Wop was able to recall the minutest detail of a story you told him four years ago, but he couldn’t remember your name from the beginning of a sentence to its end; so everyone was captain. “Been a while.”

“This is Walsh.”

“Captain,” he said.

Walsh nodded.

“We’re looking for someone.”

“Course you are.”

I laid a five on the bar. It vanished as quickly as a fly landing by a lizard. First step.

Then the second. “A bourbonish afternoon, I believe,” he said.

So I ordered a round. Paying the toll. The bourbon came out of a jug, but the way Doo-Wop sampled it, it might have been a twenty-year-old single malt. He put the glass down and turned to look at me, ready for business.

I told him we didn’t have much to go on. Told him where Walsh had seen the guy, time of day, how he’d been dressed. Walsh even tried to copy his walk, a deliberate, measured gait: feet placed straight and parallel, toe coming down before heel.

“That’s not it,” he said, “but it’s close. Arms at his sides. They don’t move as he walks. Come to think of it, nothing much seems to move but his feet.”

Doo-Wop thought it over. “Maybe,” he said. He had another little taste of bourbon and put the glass down empty. I signaled to have it refilled. He nodded acknowledgment of the transaction. “Joint on St. Peters. Twice, if it’s your man.”

“When?” Walsh said.

Doo-Wop just looked at him.

“Doo-Wop kind of lives on Hopi Mean Time,” I explained. “Everything’s in the present.”

Walsh nodded.

“This guy ever with anybody else?” I asked. “Or ever seem to know anybody there?”

Doo-Wop shook his head. “Sits by himself. Has a beer, two. Leaves. Don’t talk or want to.”

“You tried.”

“Slow night. I was thirsty.”

“It was night, then. Dark.”

“Yeah. Must of been. Streetlights have this kind of shell around them. Wouldn’t be there days.”

“Cold?”

“Well, I’m wearing what I’ve got on now. So it can’t be all that warm.”

I ordered another round, but by his own reckoning and standards, apparently, Doo-Wop had drunk an amount of whiskey equal to the information he was able to provide. The new bourbon stood untouched before him. Walsh and I started in on ours.

“Captain,” he said eventually.

I turned to him.

“I have a story to tell you.”

“Fair enough.”

“You decide if it’s worth anything.”

I nodded.

What follows is not what Walsh and I heard then, a stuttering, inchoate tale in which the narrator seemed at times a participant, and which seemed somehow still to be going on, but a version pieced together from Doo-Wop’s story and a subsequent telephone conversation with Frankie DeNoux.

For three or four years a building at Dryades and Terpsichore has served as clubhouse, schoolroom, barracks, refuge and halfway house-though officially listed in city records as a temple. It’s headquarters for a group calling itself Yoruba. The group’s minister and family live there, along with others.

Yoruba has gained considerable influence in its immediate community over time and has slowly extended that influence into surrounding communities. Highly visible in their plain cotton clothing dyed light purple, Yoruba’s members devote themselves to community service: caring for the young so that parents might work, staffing referral and health-care services, volunteering as teachers and teachers’ assistants, reading to children at makeshift storefront libraries or to shut-ins at home and in medical facilities.

Yoruba’s sole income derives from the tithes of its followers and from the contributions of other well-wishers. Each Friday these “operating funds” are gathered at various collection sites and delivered to the temple by Yoruba’s minister of defense, Jamil Xtian.

For three, four years this has gone on, no problem. But last Friday there’s someone waiting there by the back door. Two average-height, average-weight men in nondescript clothes and Mardi Gras masks. They step out from behind hedges by the steps and say, We’ll take that off your hands.

When Xtian reaches for his gun, they shoot him once through the chest and grab the duffel bag stuffed with cash. And by the time others come pouring out of the house, all of them trained fighters and all of them armed, the two are gone.

Gone with, according to word on the street, somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.

“That’s it.” Doo-Wop said.