I left the restaurant and looked up and down Ste. Catherine. The bikers had been drifting in, and Harleys and Yamahas lined both sides of the street to the east. Their owners straddled them, or drank and talked in packs, leathered and booted despite the warm evening.
Their women sat behind them, or formed conversational clusters of their own. It reminded me of junior high. But these women chose a world of violence and male dominance. Like hamadryas baboons, the females in the troop were herded and controlled. Worse. They were pimped and swapped, tattooed and burned, beaten and killed. And yet they stayed. If this was improvement, it was hard to imagine what they?d left behind.
I scanned to the west of St. Laurent. Right away I saw what I was looking for. Two hookers lounged outside the Granada, smoking cigarettes and playing the crowd. I recognized Poirette, but wasn?t sure about the other.
I fought an impulse to give this up and head for home. What if I?d guessed wrong on the dress? I?d chosen a sweatshirt, jeans, and sandals, hoping they?d be nonthreatening, but I didn?t know. I?d never done this kind of fieldwork.
Cut the crap, Brennan, you?re stalling. Get your sorry butt up there. The worst that can happen is they blow you off. Won?t be the first time.
I moved up the block and planted myself in front of the two women.
?
The women stopped talking and inspected me much as they would an unusual insect, or something odd found in a nostril. Neither spoke. Their faces were flat and devoid of emotion.
Poirette shifted her weight, thrusting one hip forward. She was wearing the same black high-tops she?d had on when I first saw her. Wrapping an arm across her waist and resting the opposite elbow on it, she regarded me with veiled eyes. Pulling hard on her cigarette, she breathed the smoke deep into her lungs, then pooched out her lower lip and blew it upward in a stream. The smoke looked like haze in the pulsating neon glow of the hotel sign. The sign?s blinking cast nets of red and blue across her cocoa skin. Wordlessly, her dark eyes left my face and returned to the sidewalk parade.
?What you wantin?, ch #232;re??
The street woman?s voice was deep and raspy, as if the words were formed by particles of sound with empty gaps floating among them. She addressed me in English, with a cadence that spoke of hyacinths and cypress swamps, of gumbo and zydeco bands, of cicadas droning on soft summer nights. She was older than Poirette.
?I?m a friend of Gabrielle Macaulay. I?m trying to find her.?
She shook her head. I wasn?t sure if she meant she didn?t know Gabby, or was unwilling to answer.
?She?s an anthropologist? She works down here??
?Sugar, we all work down here.?
Poirette snorted and shifted feet. I looked at her. She was wearing shorts and a bustier made of shiny black vinyl. I was certain she knew Gabby. She?d been one of the women we?d seen that night. Gabby had pointed her out. Up close she looked even younger. I concentrated on her companion.
?Gabby?s a large woman,? I went on. ?About my age. She has?-I groped for a color term-?reddish dreadlocks??
Blank indifference.
?And a nose ring.?
I was hitting a brick wall.
?I haven?t been able to reach her for a while. I think her phone?s out of order, and I?m a little worried about her. Surely y?all must know her??
I drew out my vowels and emphasized the Southern version of
Louisiana shrugged, a fluid, Cajun version of the universal French response. More shoulder, less palm.
So much for the Daughters of Dixie approach. This was going nowhere. I was beginning to understand what Gabby had meant. You don?t ask questions on the Main.
?If you run into her, will you tell her Tempe?s looking for her??
?That a Southern name, ch #232;re??
She slipped a long, red nail into her hair, and scratched her scalp with the tip. The updo was so lacquered, it would?ve held in a hurricane. It moved as one mass, creating the illusion that her head was changing shape.
?Not exactly. Can you think of anywhere else I might look??
Another shrug. She withdrew her nail and inspected it.
I pulled a card from my back pocket.
?If you think of anything, this is where you can get in touch with me.? As I walked away I could see Poirette reaching for the card.
Approaches to several streetwalkers along Ste. Catherine yielded much the same result. Their reactions ranged from indifference to contempt, uniformly leavened by suspicion and distrust. No information. If Gabby had ever existed down here, no one would admit it.
I went from bar to bar, moving through the seedy haunts of the night people. One was as the next, brainchildren of a single warped decorator. Ceilings were low, and walls cinder block. All painted with Day-Glo murals, or covered with fake bamboo or cheap wood. Dark and dank, they smelled of stale beer, smoke, and human sweat. In the better ones, the floors were dry and the toilets flushed.
Some bars had raised platforms on which strippers writhed and slithered, their teeth and G-strings glowing purple in the black lights, their faces fixed in boredom. Men in tank tops and five o?clock shadows drank beer from bottles and watched the dancers. Imitation elegant women sipped cheap wine, or nursed soft drinks disguised to look like highballs, rousing themselves to smile at passing men, hoping to lure a trick. Aiming for seductive, they looked mostly tired.
The saddest were the women at the borders of this flesh trade life, those just crossing the start and finish lines. There were the painfully young, some still flying the colors of puberty. Some were out for fun and a quick buck, others were escaping some private hell at home. Their stories had a central theme. Hustle long enough to make a stake, then on to a respectable life. Adventurers and runaways, they?d arrive by bus from Ste. Th #233;r #232;se and Val d?Or, from Valleyfield and Pointe-du-Lac. They came with gleaming hair and fresh faces, confident of their immortality, certain of their ability to control the future. The pot and the coke were just a lark. They never recognized them as the first rungs on a ladder of desperation until they were too high up to get off except by falling.
Then there were those who?d managed to grow old. Only the truly canny and exceptionally strong had prospered and gotten out. The ill and weak were dead. The strong-bodied but weak-willed endured. They saw the future, and accepted it. They would die in the streets because they knew nothing else. Or because they loved or feared some man enough to peddle ass to buy his dope. Or because they needed food to eat and a place to sleep.
I appealed to those entering or those leaving the sisterhood. I avoided the senior generation, the hardened and street smart, still able to rule their patches just as they in turn were ruled by their pimps. Perhaps the young, naive and defiant, or the old, jaded and spent, might be more open. Wrong. In bar after bar they turned away from me, allowing my questions to dissolve into the smoky air. The code of silence held. No access to strangers.
By three-fifteen I?d had it. My hair and clothes smelled of tobacco and reefer, and my shoes of beer. I?d downed enough Sprite to reclaim the Kalahari, and my eyes were seeded with gravel. Leaving yet another loony on yet another bar, I gave up.
19
THE AIR HAD THE TEXTURE OF DEW. A MIST HAD RISEN FROM THE river, and tiny droplets sparkled like
