name’s come up in some oddly disparate places.”
Oddly disparate. People who grow up on State Street or Versailles and go to Sophie Newcomb talk like that.
“First I heard about this guy who used to come around collecting for a shyster furniture-and-appliance outfit over on Magazine. He’d wind up telling people how to get out from under-even give them money for payments sometimes. A young Negro, they said. Big, wiry. Almost always wore a black suit. Shirt and tie.
“Then, in a different neighborhood, I’d hear how this same man walked into a French Quarter bar looking for someone who’d jumped bail and walked back out with his man, leaving behind, on the floor, a couple of hard customers with broken arms and cracked ribs.”
She picked up her drink and took a long draw off it. Lowered her eyelids in respect as the taste took hold.
“I had to start wondering if there wasn’t a story here.”
“No, m’am, I don’t think so.”
“I’m painfully aware that I’m at least twice your age, you know. But please don’t call me m’am. That makes me feel even older. Esme. Or just Ez-that’s what most people call me.”
I nodded. She looked his way and the bartender, who was keeping his eye on her, hustled over with another round.
Buster retuned to standard and started a slow shuffle in E, improvising lyrics about Lewis Black and his Uptown Lady. I shot him a hard stare. He grinned.
So did Esme. “Listen,” she said, “they’re playing our song.”
“You want a story?”
“At least three times a week.”
“Then there it is.” I nodded toward Buster and started telling her about him. All those old records, how you’d trip over his name in books on blues and jazz history, the time he put in at Parchman, how he’d spent half his life cooking barbeque in an old gas station up in Fort Worth.
We went through that round and another as I talked. Esme asked if I’d excuse her a minute. She was on the phone maybe a quarter hour, then came back.
“Calling in my column. Work’s done. So now I can relax and have fun. No more grown-up for a while.”
The next morning on my way home from the police station, numb with fatigue, shaky with the adrenaline still sputtering in my veins, I’d read her piece about Buster, titled simply “A Life.” And in days to come I’d read it over and over again, vainly seeking some final clue, some personal message or explanation, some reason that wasn’t there.
“And what might that fun consist of?” I asked.
“Well, I
“Will I do instead?”
“Oh, I suspect you’ll do very nicely, Lewis.”
Another drink turned into several, the club slowly filled with bodies, Buster careened from Carter Family to Bo Chatmon to Chicago blues.
Finally we walked out into a warm, bright night. Across the street, leaves of banana trees moved slowly in the breeze, throwing terrible huge shadows across walls and sidewalk. Behind us Buster complained that his woman had waited till it was nine below zero and put him down for another man.
“Which way?”
“Depends. What are you in the mood for?”
“Creole? French?”
“Animal, vegetable or mineral.”
“Mexican.”
“Greek.”
“Fried cardboard.”
“That even sounds good. I’m starved.”
“Me too.”
“
I had just reached out for that hand-our fingers, I think, barely grazed-when she fell. I looked down at the puncture in her forehead, just beneath the hairline, thick blood rimming over.
I remembered hearing the sound then and, though I knew there would be nothing to see, looked up.
For just a moment I thought I saw something move on one of the rooftops, a shadow crossing the moon. But of course I could not have.
Chapter Four
I counted twelve police cars pulled up at various angles on the street by the time I was put inside one (hand lightly on my head as I was urged into the backseat) and taken downtown. Most of them had flashers going. It looked like one of those carnivals that unfolds out of two trucks and takes over a whole parking lot.
At the station the cuffs were removed, I was given coffee, and for several hours, riders changing from time to time but always the same tired old pony, we played What-was-the-exact-nature-of-your-relationship-to-the- deceased.
It was all pretty much stage whispers and much ado. They knew I wasn’t involved in the shooting. But black man/white woman was a formula they just couldn’t leave alone. That people were getting shot like paper targets out there in the streets was nothing compared to
“Come on, Griffin. Own up to it. You were lovers. Had to be. We know that.”
He lit a cigarette, pushed the pack an inch or two across the table toward me.
“We look into it, we’re gonna find out maybe she paid rent, bought your clothes, kept you in booze. Save us all some time here, boy.”
“What was it, she started asking for something back? A little responsibility, maybe?” This from a wiry guy leaning against the wall behind the smoker.
“We got ten, twelve reporters lined up out there waiting to talk to someone, boy. Trying their damnedest to dig up a photo of you,
“We got to lay this off on someone soon, and I might as well tell you, we don’t much care who it is.”
“Shit deep enough you gonna need a
The wiry guy pushed himself away from the wall. His shoes were thirteens at least. On him, they looked like clown shoes.
“Someone said she’d have you make ape noises toward the end of things. Said that was the only way she could get off. That right?”
Dead silence. Smoke rolled about the room, thick as fog.
“You wanta just wait outside, Solly?”
“I-”
He waited till the other was gone.
“Lewis, we’re trying to do you a favor, man. Just tell us the truth. What you could be looking at, it’s prob’ly ten to twenty, even with good behavior. Your behavior likely to be good?”
I told him I doubted it.
“Somehow I do too.”
I didn’t have a record, that came later; but as I said, my name was on the streets some, even then.
I kept on trying to give them what they expected. Never met an eye, said yessir till my voice went hoarse,
