kept my head down. Along about daylight I decided what the hell, this dead horse had been beaten enough for one day.
“Sir,” I said. “Don’t you think I should have an attorney present?”
I figured they’d either shoot me or club me over the head and throw me out back with the rest of the trash. And at that point either one sounded preferable to more of the same.
“Why of course I do. I even believe you people, you’re brought up right, you’re good as anybody else. But the fact of the thing is, I can hold you for as long as I need to and ain’t nobody going to say anything.”
“On what charge?”
“Lewis, Lewis.” He shook his head. “Where you been, boy? I don’t need any charges.”
“Maybe that will change.”
“Maybe. But it ain’t yet. Meanwhile you’re a nigger. You been consortin’ with a white woman got herself killed last night. You got no steady employment, got a hist’ry of violence, discharged from the service after beating in a few heads. You’ll be lucky you even make it far as a cell.”
He made a great show of packing his Winston down, snapping it repeatedly against a heavy Zippo lighter with some kind of military emblem on it. He put the cigarette in his mouth, thumbed the lighter’s wheel and held it there.
“You boys come down here with a hard-on from-what? Arkansas? Mississippi? — and the city turns you inside out. You got some bad friends out there. Every day goes by, you sink a little further into the scum that coats this city a foot deep.”
He brought lighter to cigarette, a small ceremony.
There was a rap at the door. The wiry guy stuck his head in.
“See you a minute, Sarge.”
He went over and they stood there talking.
First I could make out only occasional words. Then, as their voices rose, more.
“… come down …”
“… bust … desk jockey … wipe his nose …”
“… collar comes off, like it or not …”
“Fuck that.”
“More like fuck you, Sarge.
“Yeah, like always.”
He came back.
“You’re free to go, Griffin.”
“Just like that?”
He nodded. I started to say something else, ask what the hell, but he stopped me. “Get on out of here.”
The city was just coming alive outside. Soft gray bellies of clouds hung overhead, as though draped, tent-like, on the top of the buildings. Sunlight snuffled and pawed behind them.
And Frankie DeNoux sat on the steps.
I almost didn’t recognize him, since he wasn’t wearing his office.
“Sweet freedom,” he said.
“Believe it. But what are you doing here? Boudleaux finally throw you out? Whoever Boudleaux is.” Far as I knew, no one had ever seen him. “You on the streets now?”
“Ain’t that the way it always is. Do a favor for a guy, he won’ even talk to you after.”
“What favor’s that, Mr. Frankie?”
“Sweet freedom,” he said again.
I just stared at him.
“Got me a man up there. He keeps me posted what’s going down, I slip him a fifty ever’ week or so. Las’ night he calls to let me know this woman’s been shot and the police’ve brought in this guy he knows does some work for me. But the guy ain’t been charged with nothin’, he says, ain’t even on the books.
“Well. This, I know, is definitely not good. Bad things happen in police stations to people who are not there. I know this from working with the criminal element, and with the police element, for forty years. After forty years, I also know a few people. Favors get owed along the way.”
Closing the rest of his fingers, he held thumb and pinky finger out: a stand-up comedian’s phone.
“I made some calls.”
“You made some calls.”
“Well, really it was just one. The other guy wouldn’t talk to me. But …” He waved a hand: here’s the free world anyway.
“I didn’t know you had friends, period, Mr. Frankie. Much less friends in high places.”
“High, low, scattered in between. Lots of those won’t talk to me anymore either. What the hell. ’S all information, Lewis. You got information, you get things. You got things, you get information.”
I was with him so far. But there was one point I wasn’t clear on:
“Why?”
“Why, you got work to do for me, don’t you. Now how you gonna do that locked up in there? Or with your mouth all busted up-you tell me that.”
“Seems obvious, now that I think about it.”
“Don’t it, though.”
“I owe you. Mr. Frankie.”
“You don’t owe me shit, Lewis. And don’t Mr. Frankie me. Back up there, that was mostly smoke. What they call a dog and pony show. But you feel like saying thank you, there’s a Jim’s right round the corner. You could come have some chicken, sit down with me. Forty years I been eating alone.”
I said I’d be pleased to, and we walked on.
“Man might be dropping by to see you sometime later on. He does, you talk to him for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me either.” I held the door open for him. There were a couple of people in line ahead of us. A city bus driver. A rheumy-eyed white man in bellbottom jeans, grimy sweater and longshoreman’s cap. “You know that story ’bout the tar baby?” Frankie said.
I nodded.
“Well, that’s ’bout how black my mother was, Lewis. Black as tar. I ain’t been white a day in my life and ever’body’s always thought I was. Ain’t that somethin’?”
We stepped up to the counter.
“You want white meat or dark?” he said, and laughed.
Chapter Five
Home those days was a slave quarters behind a house at Baronne and Washington that once had been grand and now looked like Roger Corman’s idea of a Tennessee Williams set. Ironwork at gate and balcony had long ago gone green; each story, floor, room, door and window frame sat at its own peculiar angle; vegetation grew from cracks in cement walls and from the rotten mortar between bricks. Few of the porch’s floor planks were intact, many were missing entirely. One vast corner column had burst open. Tendrils of onion plants snaked out from within it.
The slave quarters, however, were in fine repair. In the final decades of its grandness the house had been owned and occupied by the alcoholic, literarily inclined last son of an old New Orleans family. Day after day he sat drinking single-malt Scotch and punching forefingers at his father’s Smith Corona while the house crumbled without and his liver dissolved within. And while his mother finally relocated to the slave quarters out back, as though moving to another state, and went on about her life.
Basically, I had two rooms, one stacked atop the other. Downstairs was a brief entryway with a niche for a couple of chairs to the left and closet-size bathroom to the right, then the kitchen and wooden stairs up to the living-bed-dining-room. There’d been a garden outside when I moved in, but rats had eaten everything down to
