February 1964. Sixty degrees and sunny on Friday, twenty-eight witli a hard north wind that wouldn't quit by Saturday morning. Shutters banging against the house woke us up at five. Two days later, the snow started. It was getting towards Mardi Gras, I remember, everybody in a panic. But it did quit in time.
December, must have been 1971. Lot of snow-then a lot more ice. Second clay, power lines went down, most of central New Orleans lost electricity. People were ripping the sides off of abandoned houses, setting them afire in fireplaces that hadn't been used for thirty, forty years. Firemen stayed busy that week.
'I only remember seeing snow one other time, all these years,' Deborah O'Neil said across from me. She wore a long print skirt, sleeveless T-shirt and vest I thought of my first impression: how, standing still behind the table, talking on the phone, she seemed to sway. Something substantial and at the same time strangely labile about her. 'I'd been in town a week or so. That afternoon I was sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee, wrapped up in a blanket, trying to make some kind of sense of things, the husband I'd left behind in Florida, the man I'd moved here with, a night-shift job I hated, all these voices I kept hearing inside my head. They weren't talking to me, but they were definitely talking to someone.
'I looked around me there on the balcony, we were in one of three upstairs apartments carved out of an old house on Camp, and I realized it was snowing. Had been for some time. I watched snowflakes fall onto the blanket, or onto my jeans, jeans that had lasted longer than any relationship I'd ever had, and disappear, like they'd passed through walls. Others fell against the balcony railing, onto the leaves of a maple, into standing water at curbside. Into my coffee cup. The whole world glistened.'
As it glistened now.
We sat across from one another watching snow fall, myself out the restaurant's front window, she in mirrors along the side, above tile. The waitress slid bowls of steaming gumbo off her tray, dropped a handful of packaged crackers between.
'And did you ever manage to make sense of things?'
For a moment she was silent.
'No. There was something about the snow, I don't know, but it made things, struggling to understand them, seem less important. Because whatever I did, whatever any of us did, that snow was going to go right on falling…'
'On all the living and the dead.'
She looked at me. 'Yes. Exactly.'
And scooping up a spoonful of soup, blew across it.
'That's what I thought the voices were for a long time. People who had died but were still around, who couldn't let go. I thought I was the only one able to hear them. Or that for some reasonthey could only get through to me-like I was the crystal in a homemade radio, wound with wires. Other times, I just thought I must be crazy.'
Soup tipped from the side of the spoon into her mouth. 'My God this is good! The green stuff's okra?'
'Ritual offering to the Slime God.'
'The world, mind you, subscribed to the latter view exclusively.'
'But obviously at some point you decided you weren't crazy.'
She nodded.
'They reallywere ghosts, in a way, I suppose. People trying to speak, to come into being, through me. With time I learned that I could put them in plays, let them live there.'
The after-work crowd beganfiltering in, pointedly snapping slouch hats against legs to shake off snow, slapping it away with hands from the shoulders of raincoats over business suits and office dresses. Typical city dwellers: were they really expected to put up with this, along with everything else?
A police station inhabited what was once a grand private dwelling across the street. State-of-the-art computer linkages within, battered Chrysler squads and scooters with blue lights on poles without. Patrolmen from over there in uniform and in jeans sat together, six of them, at a back table.
I had called and asked Deborah O'Neil if she'd like to meet me for dinner at Casamento's on Magazine, just off Napoleon. If she were free, that is, or could arrange it; I didn't know her schedule. She said sure, anyone who needed flowers that bad would just go up the street to Scheinuk's anyway, why not.
Menu and restaurant alike were fundamental. Not back to basics, because they'd never left: nothing about the place had changed in forty years. The menu, which like Eddie Lang's cues for the Whiteman orchestra could fit on a single index card, ran to oysters and shrimp: oysters on the half shell, oysters or shrimp fried, served up dressed or not on French or homemade bread, in stews and soups. You wanted vegetables, fries were available. The place itself was timeless pure New Orleans, one long room narrow as a boxcar and reaching to the street behind, kitchen hanging on the back like a caboose, floor and wall sheathed in tile, tables pushed close at either side.
'I'm glad you called,' she said. 'I didn't think you would.'
Another spoonful of soup. Half a buttered cracker.
'I hoped you would.'
The door opened again and cold air flooded in. Before long these front tables would be abandoned, everyone huddled away from them, farther in past the open archway. Cavelike in there. As the night came on.
'You left the man you moved here with, I take it'
'That same afternoon. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my bags packed when he got home from work. The snow hadn't stuck, but there was a thin layer of ice on everything. I remember how it broke on the steps as I went down them. I've lived alone ever since.'
'How long?'
'Almost ten years. Though I have to think: my God, how is that possible? I was twenty when we moved here. Last month I turned thirty. What about you?'
Did I live alone? 'Yes.' Even when I was living with someone, if LaVeme had been right. And she was, about most things.
I told Deborah, briefly, about La Verne. Maybe not so briefly.
'She sounds like an amazing woman.'
'She was.'
We talked on. About what I did and had done for a living all these years, about Vicky, about Jimmi Smith's murder and his sister Cherie's coming to live with Vicky and me, about Alouette and Baby Girl McTell.
Deborah asked if she could have a glass of wine, and I said of course, ordering coffee for myself.
'Well, whatever else it may have been, Lewis, you can never complain that your life's been boring.'
She swirled wine about her glass, in a quick circle, twice.
'Legs,' she said.
I looked at her over the rim of my cup.
'That's what they call those breaks of wine, the way they cling to the side of the glass, run down it. Legs.'
A United cab pulled up out front and honked.
'So tell me, Detective Griffin. Are you on a manhunt tonight?'
'No,' I said, looking about me. 'No. I'm not.'
12
The man in the white tuxedo and the woman in a black silk dress come walking out of the mouth of the mine that moments ago collapsed. Spumes of dust pour from the opening behind them. In this bright sun it looks like smoke. They are holding wineglasses, slim, fluted ones of crystal, through which the sunlight shatters into rainbows and projects itself onto hills, trees, clothing, faces.
Don Walsh's call at eight in the morning hauled me from the dream and informed me that the body I'd found out on Old Metairie Road belonged to one Daryl Anthony Payne, Dapper or Dap to his friends-from his initials and looks both, apparently. He was, or had been, a model, put himself through two years of school up at Tulane on what he made modeling clothes for mail-order catalogs, with plenty left over for a fancy apartment overlooking St.
