Black Hornet

his own weekly, The Griot. Over the years he had become a voice not only for blacks, but for all the city’s eternal outsiders, all its dispossessed. A voice that was listened to.

“No matter,” he said. “I’m a journalist: you know that. So I have my own ways of finding out things I need to know.”

I nodded, took a draw off my beer.

“Not two minutes after I heard Ez was dead-I’d barely hung up the phone-your friend Frankie DeNoux called.”

I hadn’t ever thought of him as my friend, but I guessed now that he must be.

“He told me you’d been taken to the police station and were being held there. By that time it was, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning. Frankie was concerned and wanted to know if I could do anything, find out anything.”

“So Mr. Frankie knows about you and Miss Dupuy.”

“Mr. Frankie. I don’t think I’ve heard that since I left Mississippi. No, he doesn’t know. He only wanted to try to keep you from getting in any deeper, maybe get yourself seriously hurt. He called me because I’m someone who can usually find out what’s going on and sometimes even get things done.”

“You two are tight?”

“There’s history between us.”

“So then what did you do, threaten a front-page expose? Unfair treatment of blacks? Hardly news in this city. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.”

“Nothing quite that histrionic. I simply picked up the phone and called a judge I know. I explained my concern. He said he’d look into it right away.”

“And an hour later I’m out of there.”

“More or less.”

“Then I owe you my thanks.”

“Any debt you might have owed me-had there been one-you’d have repaid this morning.”

We finished our beers and walked back up to Louisiana and across. Straughter had parked his blue Falcon a couple of blocks from the house, before a combined laundromat and cleaners. People sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk out front talking. Steam rose in thick clouds from vents at the back.

“Do you know?” I said. “Do the police have any leads, anything at all?”

“Hard to say. Things are shut up tight on this. But I don’t think so.”

“Man seems to know what he’s doing.”

“And he does appear intent upon going ahead with it.”

“Do me a favor. Let me know if you hear something?”

Straughter tilted his head to the side and forward, peering at me over rimless glasses. With his chin out like that, I saw how perfectly egg-shaped his head was.

“You wouldn’t be taking this personally, would you, Griffin?”

“I don’t know how I’m taking it, not yet.”

“Just be careful. Don’t let it take you instead.” He looked up at squirrels chasing one another along a stretch of powerline, chattering furiously. “You read Ez’s column yet this morning?”

I nodded. They’d run it on the front page, with her usual picture, alongside the story of her murder and a nighttime shot of the street outside the club where B.R. was playing.

“I still don’t understand it, but sometimes that woman knew things nobody else does, things she didn’t even know she knew. She’d sit down at the typewriter, describe someone, set a scene, and it would all just start coming. She was an uptown girl: Newcomb, sorority, the whole works. What did she know about the life of a black man in prison for murder? But you read the piece. I think the liquor helped make the connections for her at first, whatever the connections were. Later on, she got to like the liquor for itself.”

“She’ll be missed.”

“She will be. City won’t be the same.” He held his hand out. “Bullshit. Of course it will be. This city isn’t ever anything but the same.”

“However hard we try?”

He laughed, we shook hands and parted. I walked back to the house, thinking about Esme. About my hand reaching out for hers as she mockingly clawed at air, about those fingers falling away from me then, and my slow realization of what had happened.

Chapter Six

The woman loving and feeling my care those days was LaVerne. And while I generally made a point of not calling her at work, sometimes an exception shouldered its way in.

I knew her schedule pretty well by then, and got her at the third place I tried. The bartender said just a minute and set the phone down. I listened to what sounded like at least three distinct parties going on in the distance.

“Lewis! Where are you? Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“I know what happened last night. Someone said they thought the police still had you. You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah. They let me go a few hours ago, thanks to a friend.”

“Friend?”

“Tell you when I see you. Right now I’m about as dragged out as a man can get.”

“So you’re at home?”

“Home and heading for Dreamland. How’s work?”

“Slow.”

“Doesn’t sound slow.”

“Well. Mostly drinkers. You know. Things’ll pick up once lunch’s over.”

“Come by after while?”

“If I do, honey, it’s going to be real late.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Don’t wait up for me.”

“Real funny, Verne.”

I heard a sharp crack, like a shot, in the background. For a moment, everything at that end grew quiet.

“Verne: you okay?”

“I’m fine. Sal just broke his baseball bat across some guy’s head that was getting out of hand.”

I knew where she was and had to wonder what constituted getting out of hand there. A narrow line, at best. The ruckus had already started up again, louder than before.

“You going to be okay there?”

“I don’t know. Hold on, let me check.”

She turned away, said something, was back.

“We’re in luck, Lew. Sal says it’s okay, he has another bat.”

We laughed, said good-bye and hung up. I poured half a jelly glass of bourbon from a gallon of K amp;B. Dragged a chair over by the window and sat with my feet on the sill. The huge old oak tree out there in the yard had been around at least a hundred years. It had seen grand buildings and neighborhoods come and go, seen the city under rule of three different nations. Now it was dying. Birds avoided it. If you touched it, chunks of dry, weightless wood came away, crumbling into your hand, smelling of soil. Soon a hurricane or just a strong wind, or eventually nothing much at all, would bring it crashing down.

I was reading a lot of science fiction back then. I’d drop by a newsstand, pick up a half dozen books and read them all in a couple of days. As that morning edged over into afternoon, I sat by the window sipping bourbon and looking out at the ancient, doomed oak. The big house’s back door creaked open and shut as workers hurried home for lunch, students to and from classes. And I found myself thinking about a book I’d read not long ago.