Ghost of a Flea

we met, he’d been chief of detectives and a captain. Then sometime in the Seventies the department kicked him up to major. Twenty years later he’d become, at least briefly, maybe permanently-by this time I’d lost track, and he probably had too-an assistant superintendent. But cops don’t take to change any better than they do to handshakes and citizens knowing things about them, and for most of the men he worked with, those to whom he wasn’t just Walsh, he’d remained the Captain.

Dr. Lieber held out hands that looked like a steelworker’s and we shook.

“There’s no real change, sir. Vital signs are stable, the bleeding’s under control. He had developed, as I told you before, a secondary pneumothorax-free air in the chest, and hardly surprising in cases like this-but that’s been taken care of. He’s breathing on his own, without difficulty, though we’re keeping him on the ventilator as a precaution.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Not yet. Everything considered, we’d just as soon he’d stay under a while longer. The rabbit puts his head up, I’ll-”

“Rabbit?”

“Sorry, it’s been a long day. Just something we say all the time around here, among ourselves: that our job in ER is to pull rabbits out of hats and sometimes they don’t even give us the hat. What I meant, first time there is a change, I’ll let you know. Or if I’m not available, the resident on call will.”

“Thank you.”

“No need to. It’s my job. I take the job seriously. So, apparently, did your friend in there.”

Dr. Lieber turned and, pushing the doors open, went back into the ICU. The other cops immediately came over. Santos told them what had been said, then the two of us stepped away. We stood near the wall, in a narrow channel bounded by the ICU doors and an unmanned information desk, looking out. Beyond our dull oblong of an island, visitors and hospital personnel swarmed everywhere, pushing carts, carrying flowers and paper bags of belongings, rubbing at eyes or the backs of necks, embracing. The cover of brochures stacked on a table nearby read Are you ready for Him?

“Walsh stopped on the way home, at a Circle K just around the corner from his apartment. He went in, the guys were already there. He pulled some milk out of the cooler, started toward the register, then went back and got a six-pack. The store owner says he could see him staring into the glass door like he was trying to decide what kind of beer. Afterwards he figured that was why Walsh went after the beer in the first place-just so he could take a look around, without having it be obvious.

“There’s two of them, one guy standing over by the magazines while the other one pretends he’s playing this video game. Only there’s no noise from the game machine, see, and it’s like all of a sudden the one standing there by the machine, he’s the one with the gun, thinks of this and starts getting nervous. Walsh and this guy start walking toward the register at the same time. The guy’s reaching in under his jacket for the piece when Walsh says, Hey buddy, have a beer, and chunks the six-pack right at him. Guy jerks back, his feet slip and he goes down, but the piece goes off anyway. Then the six-pack hits him square in the face. That, the fall when he slams his head, and the store owner’s jumping the counter and doing some slamming of his own with a baseball bat puts this mook down for the count. The other one’s history by now. Long gone.

“But then the store owner, a Mr. Chadras, looks over and sees Walsh lying there with his service revolver drawn and blood streaming out all around him. He’s having trouble breathing, too. But Mr. Chadras, it turns out, was a doctor back in his own country. He grabs a piece of gauze and some Vaseline off the shelf and slaps it over the hole in Walsh’s chest. Saved his life, the paramedics say.

“Boy that did this looks all of nineteen. We tried running him, but the computer just started spitting out empties. Those weren’t all that got spit out last night, either.”

Santos took a small box from his pocket, the kind jewelry comes in.

“I ain’t saying this was right, Griffin-or how it came about. Crew that booked him sent it up late last night. Boy had this tooth he was proud of. You know how they used to have those gold caps? Well, somehow or another this kid had one of those.”

Santos lifted the box top. The gold tooth lay on a nest of cotton batting. Blood still adhered to the upper edge. A few strands of the cotton were stained pink.

Santos shrugged and put the box back in his pocket. “What can I say?”

For some reason, wildly, I thought of Don telling me he’d become a detective mainly because he could write a complete sentence, which put him miles ahead of the competition. I also remembered another time, years later, when I’d come upon him in a spectacularly sleazy bar deep in what was then no-man’s land below the Quarter. “Out of your element, aren’t you?” I’d said. He sat for a moment peering into his glass. “Not really. I’m like you, Lew. I take my element with me.”

Or another time, many years later, when my life had bottomed out. Some of his men had scraped me off the walls of a bar out on Jefferson Highway and taken me to Mercy. When I woke blank as a slate, no idea what had happened and more than a few days gone, Don was sitting beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. Then he said, “What are you gonna do, Lew: there’s nowhere to go but on.”

“Appreciate your filling me in, Santos.”

He nodded.

“You think I can see him?”

“Just family for now. Doctor says they’ll let us in tomorrow, assuming everything goes right. I figure we go in, there’s no problem with you coming along.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“What about Jeanette? She with him?”

“Sent her home to get some rest. Took some talking and fast footwork on my part.”

“I expect it did. Guess I should go by, then, see what I can do.”

“Yeah, she’d like that.”

I stepped off our island and started for the door.

“Hey, Griffin, you need a ride?” Santos called. I turned back to decline, but saying, “Sure you do,” Santos called out again: “Whitaker, you wanna give Griffin here a ride over to Captain Walsh’s?”

The cop I didn’t know detached himself. We went down and out and across the alley to where his gray Crown Victoria was parked by a Dumpster. (“You wouldn’t believe what shows up in there,” he said.) Moments later we pulled into traffic. Whitaker’s radio had come on, turned low, when he hit the key, one of those stations that alternates its own trademark brand of news with talk shows about welfare abuse, the conspiracy of world government and the dangers of water fluoridation. Whitaker took two sticks of gum from a package the size of a paperback War and Peace jammed into where the ashtray had once been. He was, I figured, around thirty.

Much of the drive uptown became a kind of down-and-out Grey Line tour.

“That’s the Billies,” Whitaker said as we passed the slablike, mostly roofless shell of a building. Two men inside sat on boxes at a battered old spool cable, having breakfast from the look of it. I half expected them to lift their cups to us in greeting. “Billy Williams and Billy Nabors. Been there over a year now. Came down from Minnesota, Nebraska, one of them places. Say they just couldn’t take the cold no more.”

Some blocks further on we passed a sixtyish woman wearing a red wool sweater, pink ballet tutu with baggy, lime-green tights, and purple-and-orange sneakers.

“Squeezebox Sally. Makes the rounds on Maple Street every night, all those restaurants and bars up there, with her accordion. Comes up to a table and asks people, usually couples, what they want to hear, but it all sounds the same, mainly just her pushing and pulling at the box, hitting keys at random. Word is, she used to be some kind of piano virtuoso. Word is also that now she’s deaf as a board. Her big finish is always the same: she turns around, bends over and tosses up her skirt.”

“I guess there are some things in New Orleans’s rich cultural life that I’d just as soon miss out on,” I said.

“Could definitely put you off your lasagna.”

We were almost to Don’s by this time. Whitaker took a right by the Circle K where Don had been shot.

“Bonner”-the other cop, that I knew, from back at the hospital-“says you write books.”

“I used to. Used to do a lot of things.”