“That was a job,” she said. “I’m through.”
She smelled like vanilla and ripe flowers and I gently pushed her to the side and stood. She rolled onto the side of her butt and propped herself up with one arm, dark hair spilling over one eye. She drew some imaginary lines in the material of the old sofa. She sighed.
“Trey’s just a boy,” she said. “You playin’ with his mind.”
“And that made you want me?”
“Maybe,” she said, sticking the back of her thumb into her mouth. “Maybe I just wanted to fuck with you.”
“Get in line.”
“People always like to fuck with you?”
I nodded.
“Poor baby,” she said, withdrawing the thumb from her lips.
She picked up the remote and switched the channels, the high-pitched laughter of a sitcom filling the room. Three’s Company. She changed the channel again, soft music. A love scene. And then again, two people fighting. WWF pro wrestling.
“ Rockford Files comes on at six.”
Her eyes tilted up and met mine.
“Tell me how it worked.”
“He hates you a lot.”
“What do you want?”
She tugged at her thumb again with her strong lips and wet them with her tongue.
“I’m tired,” she said. “Either play with me or leave.”
“Trey had Malcolm killed.”
“Who’s Malcolm?”
“Come on.”
“How much?” she asked.
“Depends on what you have to say.”
“Listen, Trey didn’t know about the job on the kid.”
“So, you and Marion just stumbled upon a mark who just happened to work with a man you fucked.”
“I met ALIAS at a club with Trey,” she said. “A kid. A kid that is a millionaire. Marion wanted to use him. This wasn’t about Trey.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Marion took it.”
“Where is he?”
“Fuck off.”
“Why are you still in this shit hole?” I asked. “He left you. Didn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s gone,” she said. “Way gone.”
I started to laugh.
Her jaw tightened and her nostrils flared.
She reached out to claw my face.
I grabbed her wrist and pushed her back into the couch. I held both of her arms over her head and placed a knee between her legs. “Trey hired some street freak to kill Malcolm and me. Right? You heard of a man called Redbone?”
She spit in my face. I let her go, my breath rushing from my mouth.
“I don’t know Malcolm. I tole you me and Marion’s thing got nothing to do with Trey. Tell him. I don’t care.”
I heard feet on the boards of her porch and moved close to the door. I steadied my breath and looked down at her. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and reached down on a glass-and-chrome table filled with copies of TV Guide and Star for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
The screen door opened and a large black man walked inside. In his fifties with a short black beard. Greasy white T, hard dark jeans, and fucked-up Wolverine work boots. “Dataria? Who the fuck is this? What y’all doin’ in my house?”
She lit the cigarette and blew smoke up at a cheap fan rocking in the sagging ceiling.
“Oh, just a boy, Daddy,” she said. “He came over and tried to save my soul. Ain’t that right?”
He moved toward me, his hands clenching around the handle of an old lunch pail.
I headed out to the porch and walked to my truck.
I heard him yelling more, a slap, and then a high-pitched scream from inside the tiny house.
I thought about the scream and then kept smelling her on my shirt the whole way down St. Charles.
52
I remembered Jimmy Riggins as the white boy from Nebraska who carried defensive linemen on his back like children as he shot through blocking holes and scrapped for five to ten yards almost every time he touched the ball. He wore black reflective paint under his eyes like some leather-helmeted wonder from another era and after games often wore fur coats he’d made from animals he killed himself. Wildcats and Kodiaks from Alaska. He bragged once of making love to three women simultaneously and of outrunning a deer that he’d startled in a backwoods creek in rural Louisiana. He’d been on three Sports Illustrated covers, cut a locally produced country- western album, and made All-Pro for four years as if the NFC’s fullback was a position he owned.
But after a string of eight DUIs, even fans and front-office types in New Orleans became a little worn with his personality. And then five years ago, when he was photographed sunbathing nude with a sixteen-year-old singer who’d made a name for herself on a nationwide shopping mall music tour, the ride was over.
He was traded to the Cardinals, the worst of all pro football franchises, and soon disappeared. Replaced by a stable of fresh new runners with better knees and media-savvy personalities.
I never knew Riggins that well. After all, he’d been an offensive player, and even on the same team, folks tend to stick to their own kind. But through the Picayune stories I found yesterday, I learned of a lawsuit he’d filed against Trey Brill three years ago. And after calling around to some old teammates on Sunday, I found Riggins’s address – a rural route in Slidell, only about fifteen minutes out from the city.
The country road wound around a small creek and through a cattle pasture where fattened red-and-white cows chomped down grass. I followed my coffee-stained map through three or four country roads until I found the house.
The place was colorless, eroded clear of paint from decades of rain, with a ripped screen door hanging off a lower hinge. Behind the old house and under a live oak draped in Spanish moss sat a little squat trailer, the towing hitch held vertical by a pile of concrete blocks.
A yellow “No Hunting” sign had been nailed to a dying tree.
Two Big Wheels, a rusted-out Fiero, and an early-nineties F-150 with K-C lights had been parked in a muddy, grassland ground.
I knocked on the door and then hung back off his stoop beside some piles of two-by-fours and bricks. I listened to the crickets hanging into the woods of pine and large oak. In the deep woods, I heard feet shuffle.
Near the edge of the woods, a man giggled.
Then a shot.
I ran fast around my old truck, where Annie yelped to me from the passenger seat, and through a scattered patch of trees.
I squatted down into a ditch by the edge of the small forest. Pines, palmettos, and knotted old oaks surrounded me. Vines and broken branches and decaying stumps covered the forest floor. A thick black snake twisted out from a hole in a toppled tree and sauntered away. Overhead, only small pricks of yellow light broke through the leafy ceiling.
A flash of a plaid shirt showed deep in the woods.
