38

 

A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, I walked with Annie down by the Cornstalk Hotel and let her take a piss on the cornerstone of a building that sold gourmet dog bones for five dollars each. Annie was more of a Milk-Bone woman; I was sure of it. I took her by the leash and trotted her down St. Phillip and across Bourbon and back down Dumaine. Right as we were getting close to Royal again, I saw a two-story building with doors facing outside. Old clothes had been left on the crooked railing and junk cars stood in a small parking lot. A pile of air conditioners sat stacked three high on the bottom floor, where an old man in a plaid shirt beat them with a wrench.

I walked down Dumaine holding Annie’s leash, passing the open door of a voodoo museum where incense blew out. Inside, I could see dozens of lit candles and an old oil portrait of Marie Laveau.

I crossed the street and into the lot of the old motel. The old man didn’t look up from his work, he only kept cussing.

Annie sniffed his leg and he jumped.

“I’m looking for Marion Bloom.”

“No one lives here,” he said. “We’re renovating.”

“Did a guy named Bloom live here?”

He shook his head and patted Annie’s head. “Good dog.”

“This your place?”

“Yeah.”

“Was this a rental?”

“Yeah, but I’d let it turn to shit. I rented it out to a bunch of fucking losers. Had some guy leave his needles right out on the street; another guy took a crap in the sink.”

“Maybe he got confused,” I said. “Did you rent to a guy with a bad ear? You know, like wrestlers get. Lots of extra cartilage.”

He nodded. “I think he said his name was Alix.”

I laughed. “You know where he went?”

“No,” he said. “You a friend of his?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, he left a bunch of shit here. You’re welcome to it. If you don’t get it, I’m throwing it out. Just a bunch of bills and crap.”

I followed him to the back of the old motel, where he had a metal storage shed filled with lawn-mower parts, ratty mattresses, and boxes of soap. He left the door open and light cut in through the dust. I waited as he dragged out an old box marked ALIX.

I looped Annie’s leash into my belt — she kept pulling, smelling something that was dead — as I rifled through the box. Two pairs of Wrangler jeans, an Official Bourbon Street Drunk T-shirt, a box of Polaroid photographs, a loose-leaf binder filled with notes and Bible verses and bills addressed to Marion Bloom.

I searched through the photographs, finding a couple of Bloom at Pat O’Brien’s piano bar. Drunk with a couple of women at his side. His head was turned to the right and I saw the infamous ear. He was short with black hair, big eyebrows, and a larger nose. He looked like a rodent.

One of the women was a light-skinned black woman with long black hair. She wore something on her top that looked more like a bandanna than a shirt, showing her taut midriff. The bikini string from her underwear showed above her tight black pants. She had Asian-looking eyes and thick lips. Thin-boned and standing like a ballerina, with her shoulders back and her hips pushed forward. Her lips were squeezed together as if she were kissing the camera.

I grabbed the photos, the journal, and bills, thanking the man.

“You don’t want this T-shirt?” he asked, rubbing his neck. “Funny as hell.”

“You keep it.”

I tied Annie at an old iron horse post at the C.C.’s coffeehouse on Royal. The owner knew me because JoJo and Loretta used to hang out here a lot.

I bought a café au lait and read through Bloom’s journal. He’d been taking notes on how to be a minister, inserting important Bible verses to use and even a fake résumé of places where he’d “pastored.” Inside the notebook was a real estate booklet with a photo of an old Captain D’s restaurant near Fat City circled in red.

I looked through the pocket, finding some other similar properties and a couple of flyers from a travel agency about cheap flights from New Orleans to Tampa.

In the reverse pocket I found a tabloid-size little newspaper called Big Easy Dreamin’ that advertised strip clubs and massage parlors and all-night XXX video stores. The paper had been folded onto the sixth page. The ad read for a club on Airways Boulevard called Body Shots, where you could drink tequila out of a woman’s navel for five dollars.

In the black-and-white ad, I saw a picture of the woman I figured to be Dahlia. She had her arm around another woman, both wearing bikinis and sombreros, inviting everyone to come on down.

Annie barked at some people passing by and then took a few laps from her water bowl.

I finished the café au lait and walked outside. I called Teddy and got him on his cell. It sounded like he was in his car.

“You know some strip club called Body Shots?”

He grunted. “Man, I don’t go to places like that no more.”

“Do you know it?”

“I can make some calls,” he said. “Sure my boys know.”

“I need you to take me there.”

“Thought you was leavin’ to see your woman in Mississippi,” he said. “Why you want to go out and party?”

“I think I found the folks who took ALIAS for his money.”

“What you mean?”

“A con man named Bloom and a stripper that goes by the name of Dahlia.”

“They workin’ with my brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“But they got the kid’s money?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Where you want me to pick you up?”

“The warehouse.”

 

39

 

“I TOLD YOU, I ain’t never been to this place Body Shots and never use to hang with Malcolm and ALIAS at the Booty Call,” Teddy said as we pulled away from Julia Street in his new white Escalade with gold rims and Gucci interior. “What kind of shit is that? That was some half-assed movie with Will Smith’s wife and I don’t do strip clubs. Not anymore.”

“ALIAS said you owned a table there.”

“That’s not true.”

“Teddy?”

“A strip club is like goin’ to some buffet where they show you the food but you can’t eat,” Teddy said, wheeling up Canal and down onto I-10, headed to Airline Highway, the beginning of old Highway 61. The old road now filled with abandoned roadside motels and diners and places once used by travelers before the interstate. Now it was empty pools and crack dealers and motel rooms rented by the hour. “You know? Like, look at all these beautiful steaks. And all that baked potato with sour cream and chives and shit. But if you try and get one mouthful, you get arrested. Ain’t that fucked-up?”

A 1950s drive-in movie theater sat between a decaying motel advertising AC and color televisions and a defunct steak house. The lot had been surrounded with wire but the tall screen and speaker boxes still stood. Everything still neat and tidy, only a few weeds growing through the cracked asphalt as if the owner waited for the day that the old highway would be back. Until then, it seemed the movie would remain private, only something a few could imagine.

“I just bought this,” Teddy said, thumping his steering wheel. “You like it?”

“Did you really need it?” I said. “Why don’t you put that money to some good use?”

“What, you a communist, Travers?” he asked.

“No, man,” I said. “I just don’t like to see a waste.”

“You remember that community center where we had Malcolm’s wake?”

“Sure.”

“Ninth Ward Records built that shit, man.”

“Good.”

“But you think all the jewelry and cars and homes and women are… what did you say? A waste.”

“Aren’t they?”

“See, you still don’t get it,” he said. “The culture of our world, right. That’s what my people want to see. They want to see you livin’ large and steppin’ out with the Gucci and Vuitton and all them suits from Armani and your woman wearin’ Versace and gold and platinum and diamonds.”

“Maybe you could be different,” I said. “Maybe you could set a better example for the kids who buy those CDs in Uptown, spending the only thirteen dollars they have on a Ninth Ward record.”

Teddy turned down the Master P and looked over at me, the highway whizzing past. “You ever been black?”

“One night,” I said. “But I was very drunk. Someone told me about it later.”

“No playin’,” he said. “You got to know what it feels like to walk into a restaurant or bar or Saks or some shit and have people not wait on you. Have security guards followin’ you while you tryin’ to pick out some goddamned gloves for your brother’s Christmas or bein’ asked to leave a movie theater ’cause you talkin’ too loud.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said. “I never thought you wore blackness on your sleeve.”

“I wear something else, man,” he said. “I wear the car, the jewelry, the two-thousand-dollar suit ’cause that makes people respect me. When I walk into Canal Place, man, people waitin’ for me at the door. They don’t see black no more; they see green. You understand?”

Teddy parked close to the door of the strip club and we could hear the bass-driven funk rattling the corrugated tin of the building. He locked up the Escalade from his key chain and buttoned up his black suit.

He carried a carved wooden cane under his arm as we walked inside.

He didn’t even try to pay a cover.

The little black girl in leather pants and snakeskin bikini top just giggled when he walked in, and ran to get the manager.

“Clout,” I said. “You got it.”

“I got the cash.”

Teddy didn’t look around at the women or the layout, he just took a quick turn and walked up a small flight of steps where there was a circular table and booth. A card on the table read RESERVED.

“This is Stank’s place,” he said. “He called ahead.”

We took a seat. A waitress came over, tight T-shirt with no bra, hoop earrings, and bleached hair, and asked what we wanted. I ordered coffee and Teddy wanted some brandy. He asked for the best they had and I was wondering if Teddy thought the Body Shots had some kind of private reserve.

“What ever happened to that good-lookin’ girl you was seein’ when we played?” Teddy asked.

“The blonde?”

“Yeah.”

“She left me when I quit,” I said. “I wasn’t as good-looking without a salary.”

“Wasn’t into that whole cool blues professor shit?”

“She thought McKinley Morganfield was a former president.”

“Who the fuck was McKinley Morganfield?”

“Never mind.”

As the waitress laid down the drinks, the manager of the bar — a short, swarthy little guy in a black polo shirt and pants — took a seat with us. He shook Teddy’s hand and presented him with a few cigars. Teddy handed one to me but didn’t introduce us. I nodded at the guy and drank my coffee.

The song changed to “Don’t Mean Nothin’” by Richard Marx. I wondered if I’d just entered some kind of eighties time warp or if Richard Marx singing about having self-worth had somehow made him a patron saint to strippers.

“You like Richard Marx?” I asked the little manager.

“Sure, yeah,” he said, snorting, giving Teddy a “you believe this guy” look. “Whatever.”

“Beni?” he asked. “Stank drop some money here.”

“You know it.”

“He works for me.”

“I know.”

“Nick, show him the picture.”

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the photo of Dahlia. The good one from Pat O’s.

“Know her?” Teddy asked.

Beni nodded. He looked up at me and back at Teddy.

“She don’t work that way,” he said. “The girl onstage. The little one with the chain-mesh bikini. You have an hour with her in the back room for free. On the freakin’ house. For him, how ’bout a hundred.”

“We don’t need our dicks jacked, Beni,” Teddy said. “We need a name.”

“She rob you?” Beni asked.

I shook my head.

“Cut you?”

I shook my head again.

“Don’t tell me you’re in love.”

“That’s it, Beni,” I said. “I’m in love. What’s her name?”

“He ain’t in love,” Teddy said. “What’s her name?”

Beni looked down at his hands and adjusted some horrible gold rings on his hairy knuckles. “How much?”

Teddy reached into his wallet and laid down four hundred dollars.

“I shouldn’t pay you shit with all the business that Stank give you.”

Beni scraped up the cash and said, “She quit last week. Left with some other rapper.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“He was a freakin’ black guy. What can I say?”

Teddy shook his head and then shook it some more.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Dahlia,” he said. “That’s all I know.”

“What’s her Social Security card say?”

He looked over at Teddy and raised his eyebrows. “Is this guy joking?”

“Didn’t she fill out anything to get paid?”

“Let me check.”

He returned about ten minutes later with a little index card marked with the name Dahlia, a social with the name Dataria Brown, and an address in Midcity off Esplanade.

“You won’t tell her that we seen each other,” Beni said.

“Why do you care?”

“I just don’t like her is all,” he said. “The way she’d look at me made me not want to turn my back. Like she’d stick a freakin’ knife in it if I looked the other way.”

“Dataria,” I repeated. “You know a guy named Bloom? Boyfriend or something. Has a bad ear?”

“That’s all I know.”

“You sure?”

“She danced, got naked, took her cut, and left,” he said. “What can I say?”

“Was she a good dancer?”

“What?”

“Was she a good dancer?” I repeated over the music.

“Yeah,” he said. “She was. The best I’d ever seen. She could move.”

We drove back in silence. Teddy just kept watching the road, steering with those two fingers like he always did.

“Sure would like to find that money,” he said.

“I know.”

“You want me to go with you?”

“No, I’ll handle it.”

“Nick?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Open that bar up,” he said. “Be true to your dreams.”

 

40

 

I LEARNED HOW TO TAIL people when I was traveling through the Delta with my tracker mentor Willie T. Dean, and Willie T. wasn’t too big on taking no for an answer. I remember we’d once been searching for this man outside Jackson who knew something about the last days of Tommy Johnson and we were tired as hell. We’d been in the Delta for two weeks collecting stories and recording them on video and audio, and here was this guy who thought that white people were an abomination.

He’d rather sell his soul than have us sit up on his porch and ruin his reputation with his neighbors.

So instead of driving back to Oxford, where Willie T. had been teaching blues history for the last thirty years, he told me to park down this dirt road and wait till the old man’s pockmarked red Ford pulled out from the trailer.

We did. After a near fistfight, the purchase of a case of beer, and Willie T. warming him up with stories from our road trips and a little song he played on his 1920s Dobro, we got him talking.

But New Orleans wasn’t the Delta and this Dahlia woman was no bluesman.

I wanted to work alone, so I’d dropped Teddy at home. I soon found out the address in Midcity was bogus and had to have a friend of mine in Memphis run the social. Ten minutes later, he gave me an address back in Uptown, not far from the streetcar line. He used the same computer service as bill collectors, no one more tenacious.

I didn’t know how long it would take for Dahlia — if she even lived there — to pop her head out of the little carriage house where she lived in the Garden District. You could always tell someone lived in a carriage house when the street number contained a “¹/₂.”

I sipped on a Barq’s, ate some Zapp’s Crawtaters, and leaned back into the seat of the Ghost, my stereo tuned low on some ’68 Comeback, a band out of Memphis. The air was sticky and thickly humid. Huge brown elephant ears grew in rotted rows along the steps to the second floor. A collection of rusted wind chimes and flowers rubbed against one another in the summer heat.

I was parked under a huge oak on a little side street near the cross of St. Charles and Napoleon. The streetcar clanged and rolled in the distance. I could smell the Mississippi and the sugary-sweet smell of decaying magnolia flowers. I finished the bag of chips.

I could not see inside the carriage house — the building leaned a little to the right, probably a casualty of the city’s termite plague — but could see blue light leaking through her curtains. I heard the wind chimes ringing and the sound of drunks on the patio of Copeland’s restaurant at the corner.

Forty-two minutes later, Dahlia ran down the creaking wooden steps, past a car covered in a mildewed tarp, and down the narrow gravel drive to a brown Miata. I started to grab her right there, but she was too fast and I was curious about where she was headed.

She started the car, drove a block down Napoleon, and then circled back to St. Charles. I did the same, keeping about three cars back. We passed rows of restaurants and dry cleaners and Victorian houses, up and around Lee Circle. Neon and brightly fluorescent in the night.

She turned on Poydras, headed to the river, stopping down by Peters by Harrah’s Casino. I found a pretty quick parking place, slapped The Club on my steering wheel, and followed. I stayed about eight yards back. I was pretty sure she was headed into the casino, but two seconds later, she ducked into the W Hotel.

I watched from a large bank of windows along Peters as she gave a kiss on the cheek to the bouncer at this place called Whiskey Blue, a bar I’d heard was the top place to be seen in New Orleans. One of those beautiful-people hangouts where everyone dressed like they’re trying to imitate Dieter from the Sprockets skit on Saturday Night Live.

The bouncer — of course dressed in all black — waved me in, unconcerned about my age.

The bar vibrated with techno music and had been softly lit with track lighting and candles. All leather and velour. Soft cushioned sofas and high bar stools. Lots of health-club-muscled men with goatees. A few of the golf-shirt crowd with cell phones on hips. The bar was spare and obsessively clean.

Martinis and Manhattans. Few smokers. These people were too beautiful to smoke. Too rich. Too perfect. Maybe she was moving up from Airline Highway, found her a little sugar daddy.

Dahlia had found a place in the far back corner of the bar. A little cove of low sofas and curved love seats. She’d taken up a comfortable spot on the lap of some white man in a black suit.

I ordered a Dixie from the bartender.

“A what?” asked the bartender. She wore a tight black tank top and a very short miniskirt. Long tanned legs and knee-high black boots.

“A Dixie.”

“Is that with rum?”

“Hops.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What?”

“It’s a beer,” I said.

She pointed to a shelf of imports and other microbrews. I accepted a Sam Adams and waited at the bar, the techno making my ears bleed, some jackass next to me talking to someone about where they “were going to hit next” and a “kick-ass deal” he’d made with a client. I watched Dahlia, keeping my head turned away. The man in the black suit swatted her butt playfully and wrapped his fingers around a frosted martini glass.

About five white people around them laughed at something he’d said. But I could not see his face.

I took a sip of the Sam Adams.

Dahlia snuggled her face into the man’s neck.

He took a broad, self-indulgent smile. Martini in the right hand. Dahlia’s muscular ass in the other. He turned.

Trey Brill.

 

41

 

BEEN A DAY. Been a year. You ain’t sure. All you know is that you left in some broke-ass town with two T-shirts to your name and an old man ridin’ you hard about work. You become just a slave to him. He’s about a hundred years old and old school as hell, the way he play records on this phonograph and sip beer out on his porch with his old lady. You like the old lady. She buy you some new clothes and cook you some food that’s ’bout the tastiest shit you ever put in your mouth. Chicken pie. Greens.

She respect you. She call you ALIAS.

Not the old man. That old man call you kid or Tavarius or just Stovall with a laugh. You ain’t nothin’ but a punk to him, puttin’ up fences till you have blisters, paintin’ some raggedy-ass barn till it get dark. Yesterday he take you fishin’ and think you a fool for not knowin’ how to work a hook.

He don’t know shit.

Tonight he brought you downtown and you think this gonna be all right. You down off another road called Martin Luther King. He tellin’ you all about when he was your age, like you give a shit, and all about whiskey and women — all the money that was floatin’ down these cracked asphalt streets.

But you can’t see it. Clarksdale had to be a broke-ass city from the start, man. The stores have sheets of wood in the windows, just like the places round Calliope, and boys work the corners with their rock just the same. The old man just shake his head at those fools and take you into this old brick building that look out onto the corner. A yellow light comin’ from the door like a candle glow in a skeleton’s mouth.

The corner is workin’ tonight. You can smell the funk sweat off the crackheads’ bodies and that lazy eye from the women in tight skirts. You don’t mess with that. You got your life.

Old man take you inside. The floor is concrete but worn smooth from dancin’ feet. There’s a pool table in the corner with some green felt burned by cigarettes and a small bar where they only serve beer and whiskey. Christmas lights — blue, green, and red — hang from the walls.

You order a forty and get one but the old man swipes it from you.

Two old men sit down with you. Just as old and black and gray as the man and you gettin’ tired. You walk over to the jukebox and check out the tunes while the old men start talkin’ about cotton and farming and some man named Sonny Boy.

Juke has some old-school joints. Run-D.M.C. like Malcolm used to play for you. Music made before you was born. Something called “It’s Like That and That’s the Way It Is.”

You kick it up. Even other punks noddin’ with the music, ’cept the old men.

In the dark bar, concrete cave over your head, you get the mean eye.

Just for playin’ music.

“Tavarius,” the old man call you. “This man is Bronco and his brother, Eddie Wilde. We went to school together here. We was you once.”

You look at his face and don’t see it, listenin’ to Run-D.M.C. and then flippin’ that song to “Rock Box.” You think about Malcolm and the way he died and you clench your jaw real hard. Sweat workin’ hard in this concrete room.

“You still got it?” JoJo ask.

The man he call Bronco, black with green eyes and a face like an Indian, show the back of his forearm and four scars runnin’ like tracks.

“What happen to you?” you ask.

“We had some women trouble.”

You smile, take a swig from JoJo’s beer. He don’t say nothin’, like he can’t see it.

“In fact,” Bronco say, “her name was T-R-O-U-B-L-E. And wadn’t worth the time.”

Eddie Wilde, thin and tall and in a black suit, shake his head. “Pussy make you do some dumb shit.”

“You right,” JoJo say. “Ever think about that? Everythin’ a man do is for pussy. His job, his clothes. Even drivin’ a silly-ass car. But he ain’t never believe it.”

“I remember when you wore your first suit to church,” Bronco say. “You just met Loretta, I do believe, and just about lose your mind.”

“Shit,” JoJo say, snatching the forty away from you and takin’ a sip.

Y’all sit like this a long time. You can hear the trucks and cars prowlin’ down MLK and hear the country thugs talkin’ shit outside. The air is so hot your T-shirt sticks to your skin and soon you start lookin’ at yourself in the mirror when JoJo send you to get beers. You look back at the old men and flex the muscles in your arm.

JoJo start playin’ blues on the jukebox and the old men come alive. Eddie Wilde dance with himself out on the smooth floor, waggin’ his old black-man finger. Bronco sing along with a song call “Feel Like Goin’ Home.”

You could swear that your old man’s eyes get heavy with that, his lips moving over the words. “Late in the evenin’,” he say. His mind forty years behind.

They all slammin’ beers and talkin’ shit when you see those young thugs walk into the joint. They little older than you, wearin’ black Ts with no sleeves and thick gold around their neck. They watch you from the end of the bar with their red eyes.

Under the table, you feel for the knife in your pocket.

While laughin’ at one of JoJo’s jokes, Bronco take the blade from you hand and starts cleanin’ his nails with it.

The country thugs come to you.

You kick the chair out. Ready to fight.

One of the boys smiles. “You right,” he say. “ALIAS, my man.”

Everybody slappin’ you on the back, pullin’ you away from the small corner where the old men drink.

They keep talkin’ but no one is listening.

 

42

 

“HAVE YOU TALKED TO JOJO?” Maggie asked, very early and very bright the next morning. I rolled off the mattress I kept on the warehouse floor and cradled the phone closer to my ear.

“No.”

“He seemed pretty pissed,” she said. “You know, like he didn’t have time to talk.”

“He always sounds that way.”

“You doin’ okay?”

“Fine.”

“You know what I did yesterday?”

“No, but I’d like to know,” I said, growing awake thinking about Maggie. I knew she’d been up since dawn. Her skin would be flushed from taking care of her horses, the smell of hay on her sweaty T-shirt and in her dark hair.

“I rode for about two hours up in the north county,” she said. “You know the land that Abby’s parents had?”

“Yeah.”

“Just me,” she said. “I tried to keep in trees but I got all sweaty and my jeans and boots got hot as hell.”

“I like you sweaty.”

“Well, Tony finds this little creek that I hadn’t thought about since when I was a kid. I just kind of kicked out of my boots and clothes and jumped right in. Nick, it was so cool in there. Some nice big rocks to dry yourself in the sun.”

“You lay in the sun without your boots?”

“Nothin’ else.”

“Nothin’?”

I rolled over on my back and stared at the tin-stamp ceiling. Red chili-pepper lights burned in my kitchen. Morning light shot through the cracks in my bookshelves like lasers.

“Nick?”

“I wish I was in Mississippi.”

“Me too.”

“You’re in Mississippi.”

“But not in Mississippi with you.”

“The entire state is better with me?”

“Not really,” she said. “I just need some help shoveling out the shit in my barns.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Shit shoveler first class.”

“Glad you finally found your calling.”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

I showered and shaved. Annie needed a short walk to fertilize a little tree and I grabbed a croissant and cup of chicory coffee down at Louisiana Products. I made some phone calls. Finally I got one back.

 

 

HIGH GLASS walls surrounded Alyce Diamandis in the little fishbowl office where she worked on the third floor of the Times-Picayune. File cabinets filled almost every other inch of the research library, long and thick as coffins, loaded with newspaper clippings going back to the twenties.

Alyce was a tall, thin woman who wore her black hair twisted up into a bun and held in place with chopsticks. She had on cat-shaped glasses with small rhinestones and a red Chinese dress embroidered with gold dragons.

“Somewhere there’s an Asian drag queen running around naked,” I said, walking into the little cube.

“I was feeling a little yin and yang.”

I’d known Alyce for years through my longtime ex, who once worked at the paper as a crime reporter.

Alyce kept on typing and pushed the glasses up her nose. Wall-to-wall books lined her office and reference guides waited crammed between metal bookends of an A and a Z. A Rubik’s Cube and a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary sat on her desk. “One minute,” she said. “Al-most.”

I picked up the Rubik’s Cube and began twisting it around. “I used to have one of these.”

“I read this morning that when you turn thirty-five,” she said, still typing, “you are officially no longer in a cool demographic.”

“Already passed that.”

“But soon Rubik’s Cubes, Pac-Man, and Duran Duran will be like our grandparents’ nostalgia over Benny Goodman or Clark Gable,” she said. “You know? When Generation X all passes over thirty-five, it’s all over.”

“All those Corey Feldman movies on American Movie Classics.”

She finished clicking, laughing, and turned to me and crossed her long arms across her chest. A small candle burned by the computer monitor, some kind of chocolate aromatherapy. There was a little Zen sand garden and two open Mountain Dew cans.

“I need you to run a name.”

“Can you leave it and come back later? I’m swamped.”

“I don’t need you to dig around in those old clips,” I said. “It would be recent.”

She turned around, gave a small grunt, and typed away. “Name?”

“Trey Brill.”

“You know you could’ve probably gotten this off the Internet?”

“What’s that?”

I stood watching the screen over her shoulder. Five hits. “Football player?” she asked. “Wait. Sports agent?”

“Yeah.”

She clicked more.

I also asked for her to run the name I’d gotten from Teddy’s secretary, Robert McClendon Brill III.

Twenty seconds later, the printer hummed to life and she handed me a couple of hot sheets of paper.

“Sick,” she said.

 

METAIRIE — A college student charged with the rape of a Chalmette teen made his first appearance in court Monday.

Christian Chase, 18, a freshman at LSU, pled not guilty to four counts of sexual battery. The charges stem from a March 5 arrest when a 16-year-old girl from Chalmette accused Chase and another young man of finding her passed out at a Bourbon Street bar and taking her to Chase’s family home in Metairie.

The girl — not identified because she is a minor — told deputies the boys fondled and performed sex acts on her with foreign objects before dropping her in a Dumpster behind a nearby shopping mall. The girl’s face and body had been covered in lewd words and pictures written in permanent marker. The girl’s family has filed a civil suit against Cherries, the bar where police say the girl passed out.

Last week, prosecutors dropped charges against Robert McClendon Brill, 18, a freshman at Vanderbilt University, who deputies say was with Chase that night.

 

“It’s him,” I said, shaking my head.

“You might want to make sure,” she said.

“When did this run?”

“Ninety.”

“It’s him,” I said. “He’s about thirty.”

“Let me run an AutoTrak on him to make sure,” she said. “Can you give me some connections?”

I told her about Brill & Associates in the CBD and his connection to Ninth Ward.

While I waited, I flipped back to the first story that ran on the arrest a few months earlier in 1990. About how Brill’s father was a local attorney and member of one of New Orleans’s big Krewes and Chase’s father owned one of the city’s biggest construction companies. Members of the Metairie Country Club. The boys had attended Metairie Country Day School and had academic scholarship rides. Both had been all-stars on the private school’s soccer team.

“You’re right; it’s him,” Alyce yelled to me from her fishtank office. “Same address in Metairie. God, that’s evil.”

I wondered how Christian Chase felt about being left to hang for what happened to this girl. I wondered how much he knew about Trey Brill now.

“You know the guy who covered this?”

Alyce looked over my shoulder at the byline and smiled. “Of course.”

“Still around?”

 

43

 

TWO HOURS LATER, I sat in the Hummingbird Diner having a late breakfast with a seventy-year-old reporter named Orval Jackson. Apparently the paper had tried to force him into retirement a few years ago by taking his longtime beat. But as a man who’d started covering news when he was sixteen in Kansas and continued with decades at the UPI, he didn’t let a bunch of management assholes tell him what to do. He told me a little about covering the Kennedy White House with Helen Thomas and some about the early days of NASA in the sixties before we got to his stories on Trey Brill and Christian Chase.

“So you remember them?”

“I wish I could forget those two arrogant little pricks.”

“How did Brill get off?”

“His rich daddy.”

Orval had a full head of white hair and clear blue eyes. He wore a short-sleeved blue dress shirt hard pressed and a red tie printed with tiny Tabasco logos. A white Panama hat lay by his elbow where he kept his coffee.

He glanced around the old diner.

“You eat here much?” he asked.

“It’s a block from my warehouse.”

“Hope you have all your shots.”

The Hummingbird was a combination flophouse and diner where you could still get a room for twenty bucks a night. Orange vinyl booths, brown paneled walls, a big board painted with breakfast specials available twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Outside, a red neon sign blinked the word HOTEL. Two homeless men fought outside over a stuffed rabbit and a half-eaten cheese-burger.

We ordered eggs, bacon, and toast. The waitress, a woman I knew named Jennie, plunked down a pot of coffee as a streetcar passed by the windows and shook the glass.

I smoked a cigarette, trying to blow the smoke away from Orval, while we waited for our food.

“Brill just called Daddy from jail,” Orval said. “His father had this lawyer from Baton Rouge named Newcomb swoop in, make a few calls. The boy only spent maybe two minutes in front of a judge before the case was dropped.”

“And Christian Chase?”

“You ever heard of Booker Chase?”

“No.”

“He started his construction company when he was nineteen with one dump truck,” Orval said. “Now most of the new building going on in New Orleans has his name attached. He grew up in the Irish Channel. Scrapped for everything he owned. He expects his kids to hold their water.”

“Didn’t make that call,” I said, stubbing out the cigarette as the plates were laid on the table. I cut into some eggs.

“No, sir,” he said. “Kid got six long years in Angola.”

“Where’s he now?”

“I heard he’s working for his father,” he said. “Booker has the boy driving a dump truck, just like he had to. He’s got an office over in Old Metairie, not far from the country club.”

“Think he’ll talk to me?”

Orval shrugged, buttering his toast and taking a bite. “What’s going on with these kids now?”

“Brill works for a friend of mine,” I said. “His brother was just killed.”

“What’s his name?”

“Teddy Paris.”

“Football player, right?”

I nodded.

“I read about that,” Orval said. “Sounds like his brother was a thug.”

“Yeah, I read that too. The reporter called him a gangster rapper. This kid was a music producer. I’d known him since he was fourteen.”

“Good kid?”

“I liked him a lot,” I said. “He was always respectful and smart. One of those kids wise beyond their age.”

Orval looked at me, still sizing me up, but so good at it that it didn’t show much.

“You work for Teddy Paris?”

“Kind of.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I sometimes research stuff for friends,” I said. “It’s what I do at Tulane and sometimes people hire me for favors.”

“What’s that pay?”

“Teddy bought me a bar in the Quarter.”

Orval nodded. “Maybe I can do something like that when I retire,” he said, taking a bite of toast. “Don’t want to sit on my ass and learn how to drool.”

We ate for a while and I thought about finding Christian.

Orval pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and wrote a few notes on the back. “This is a Belgian beer I’ve been trying to find for ten years. It’s brewed by monks and called Orval, spelled the same way. Can you ask your distributor about it?”

“When I get the bar up and running, I will.”

“When will that be?”

I shrugged.

I looked outside and noticed the sun was gone. Rain began to splat the hoods of Yellow and United cabs parked along St. Charles. The hammering of the hoods grew more intense and I sank into my seat. I knew I’d be soaked all day.

My day was just starting.

“Kid won’t talk to you.”

“I have to try.”

Orval looked around at a prostitute sauntering into the grill with a stained dress and two Japanese tourists in black leather. Both men ordered a couple of Budweisers.

“Jail changes people,” he said. “But you still live a long way from Old Metairie.”

 

44

 

OLD METAIRIE WAS NEW MONEY that had grown old. Big houses and big cars huddled under sprawling oak branches and lined idyllic streets; children rode bicycles and played football in between the rare traffic. There was a pink stucco country club and a ton of small boutiques, coffee shops, and little bistros. A little oasis away from downtown. The neighborhood streets disappeared off Metairie Road under a dome of oak branches as if to hide the secret garden. Marble statues. Stone walkways.

Ferns grew on oaks in the richness of the humidity as a light shower hit the top of the canopied trees and dropped down with a splat on my windshield. The sky had turned a dark gray and pink in the north. I slowed to a stop down on a street called Nassau.

The Chase house was whitewashed brick with big green shutters held down firm with wrought iron. A white lawn jockey showed his lantern to the walkway. I rang the bell. Christian hadn’t been at his father’s office and I’d found his family’s home address in the White Pages.

A black woman appeared, laughing and holding a highball in her hand. Her gray hair pulled straight and tight into a comb. Green eyes wrinkled at the edges. She wore a black pantsuit with a white silk shirt splayed open with several buttons loose.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Chase,” I said, guessing.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Is Christian around?”

She looked back into the house and I heard several people talking and some jazz playing low. It sounded like Earl Hines. Mrs. Chase looked into my eyes and then turned away back into the house, her heels clicking on the marble floors.

I heard her call her son’s name.

I took a few steps back and saw a couple of Mercedeses and Cadillacs parked in a little cove by the four-car garage. No one came to the door for a while. Mrs. Chase did not ask me if I wanted to join the party or have a drink with a few of her friends.

I walked down a stone path back to my truck to make a call when a young man in his late twenties opened the door and followed.

Blue-jeaned and shoeless. A tight black T-shirt hugging his muscular upper body. I almost didn’t recognize him as the man I’d seen with Trey at his firm in the CBD. As he walked toward me, I remembered him playing ball while we waited and the foul smell coming from his body.

Shit.

Christian Chase flexed his arms across his chest and I saw the scarred brand on his arm. The flesh on his biceps had grown pink and swollen where he’d been touched by a hot iron. He smelled like a ton of Calvin Klein.

“Good to see you again.”

“What’s your problem, man?”

“Kenny G, Michael Bolton, Dave Matthews, and Fred Durst. I call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

He tilted his head at me, his green eyes seemed to glow as a slow smile sliced across his face. He chewed gum and stuck his hands into his pockets. He hunched his shoulders while he watched and chewed, almost cheetahlike in the roundness of his muscles.

“Things working out for you since you left the Farm?” I asked.

His gaze loosened and he squinted one eye at me. “What do you know about that?”

“I go to Angola to record musicians,” I said. “One of the finest guitar players of this century, Leadbelly, was once there.”

He popped his gum. “Quit fucking with Trey.”

“He never looked out for you.”

He walked in close, his hands still in his jeans and eyes focused somewhere on the ground below me. He inched in to my face. “You can’t work me. It can’t be done. You can try, but you’re gonna lose.”

“I heard Trey took most of his vacations in Aspen while you were inside. I guess those nice cold beers tasted mighty fine. But I’m sure you met friends.”

“I don’t suck dick.”

“Did Trey come visit you, man?”

He looked away. Stepped back and watched me.

“You think you can come up to my home and disrupt my mother’s party telling me shit about my best friend? You’ve got to be fucked in the head.”

“He conned that money from ALIAS. I need someone to lead me through how it was done.”

“Trey has been my friend since we were six.”

“Whose idea was it to take that girl from Chalmette? Why do you think a black man got stuck with it?”

“Didn’t have anything to do with that,” Christian said. “You liberal fucks always want to play race like we’re cripples. Fuck off.”

“Brill sure didn’t push his daddy away,” I said. “You could’ve used just one person to stand up. But no one did.”

Christian Chase turned and walked away down the narrow stone path. The rain fell harder on me while he opened the porch door and walked inside to the music. He just kept shaking his head and laughing.

The door closed with a solid thud.

 

45

 

FOUR MEMORIES OF MALCOLM played in my head. I didn’t like to remember him. I didn’t want to keep making myself sad and sick over something I had nothing to do with. But these were so personal and old that I was glad this was what my brain had selected. It was the kid, not the man, that stayed. Malcolm remained fifteen in my head: catching balls at the old Saints camp on Airways, hustling players for money the moment we’d step off the plane, smiling on his sixteenth birthday when his brother bought him a Mercedes, and watching him steal the dance floor the night we’d made the play-offs for the first time in years.

He was not hard or scarred. He was unbearded and smiling. He wasn’t left swinging in a tree like a tattered photo from a nineteenth-century lynching.

I drove into my garage and bounded up the steps to the second floor of the warehouse. I heard the laughing. Voices rebounded off my high ceilings and into the metal stairwell like an echoing funnel. I was soaked with water and grew cold on the landing.

I was too tired for another round with Cash or any other random freak who’d broken into my house. I crept back to my truck and grabbed my Glock.

When I returned to the landing, I slid back my metal door, ready to face whatever shit I’d been handed.

“Goddamn, boy,” a voice said. “Look like someone shit in your Cap’n Crunch.”

JoJo, ALIAS, and some friend of JoJo’s I’d met years ago sat at my kitchen table playing cards and feeding Annie leftovers from a Burger King bag. I slowly tucked the gun back into my belt.

“Made some coffee,” JoJo said. “Left it warmin’ on your stove. Why don’t you get some Community Coffee? This cheap shit taste like mud.”

I found a towel in my kitchen and dried my hair, offering my fist to ALIAS.

He gave me a pound but kept his gaze down at the table. I noticed he didn’t have any cards. He leaned his head into his hands.

I shook JoJo’s friend’s hand.

“You remember Bronco?” JoJo asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We met a long time ago.”

“Back when Pinetop come back,” Bronco said. “It has been a while.”

Bronco was about JoJo’s age and black, but with green eyes and high cheekbones. A strong Native American face.

“Bronco rode down with me to help me get some things for Lo,” JoJo said. “You know we sold our place on Royal? Need to clean out by end of the month.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

I took off my jean jacket and hung it on a peg by the door.

“You helpin’ out?” I asked ALIAS.

ALIAS shook his head, dug his sneaker heels into my floor, and pushed back his chair. He stomped off to the bathroom and slammed the door.

“Okay, no help from the kid.”

“Kid’s upset,” JoJo said.

“This I see.”

Bronco sipped on some coffee and rearranged the cards in his hand. “He forgot his head in my home.”

“And?”

“He took two hundred-dollar bills from my wallet.”

I blew out my breath. “Fantastic.”

“I gave him two days to come to Jesus Christ,” JoJo said. “But he wouldn’t. He’s back with you. I can’t do nothin’ with a kid that steal from me. You know my rule.”

I did. Any employee even suspected of stealing was gone. I knew a waitress who once pocketed maybe five bucks from a table. She was let go on the busiest of nights. It was a reputation that had only grown since JoJo opened the bar in ’65.

“Okay,” I said. “I got him now.”

“Me and Bronco goin’ down to Anchor to get dinner,” he said. “You wanna come?”

“Can I bring the kid?”

“Why not?” JoJo said. “He’s yours.”

I looked at the floor for a few moments before walking over to the old gas stove and pouring the coffee JoJo had made. It had been sitting on the burner a long time and seemed slow to pour from my old speckled pot.

“I got the bar,” I said.

JoJo nodded.

Bronco laid down a hand. Three queens and two tens.

JoJo said, “Shit.” He tossed his cards facedown into a pile of matchsticks on the table. Annie followed me from the kitchen.

“I’m gonna ride down to the bar and check things out.”

“Thought you said it was some high-dollar place now.”

“It is,” I said. “It was.”

JoJo looked at me strangely.

“Teddy gave it to me,” I said. “But it’s yours. It’s your bar.”

JoJo laughed. “Bronco, did I not say this was gonna happen?”

“Yes, sir, you did,” Bronco said, shuffling his cards into each hand and keeping his eyes trained on me and JoJo at the same time.

“You want to go check it out?” I said. “See what we can do.”

“You.”

“What?”

“What you can do.”

I nodded, lowered my head, and sipped the coffee.

“We’ll come by after we eat.”

“Fair deal.”

“Last fair deal gone down.”

“On this Gulfport island road,” I said, completing the Robert Johnson lyrics.

ALIAS walked back from the bathroom and took a seat at my sofa. “Y’all give me a phone. I’ll have my people come for me.”

“No,” I said.

“What you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean, you’re comin’ with me.”

“Where?”

“Help with some things.”

“Fuck that, man,” ALIAS said, leaning forward, his Superman symbol dangling off his chest.

“Thanks,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

The kid followed, shoulders slumped and hat down far into his eyes.

I said to the men: “We’ll see you at the bar.”

JoJo winked.

I grabbed a clean shirt, a toolbox, and a flashlight.

At the bottom of the landing and on into the garage, ALIAS turned to me and said, “Man, fuck all this. That man call me a thief.”

“Is that not true?”

“Shit, no.”

“That old man only deals in respect.”

“You got to give it to get it.”

I climbed in and started my truck. We backed out onto Julia Street.

“You know Trey Brill?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He shook his head and made a wry smile.

“Don’t like him,” I said.

“He’s like this white dude that’s always tryin’ to be down and shit. Calls me dog and tries out words he’s heard on BET. He’s just some white boy on the lake tryin’ to call on me. Come on, man.”

“You know a friend of his named Christian Chase?”

ALIAS laughed. “Na, man. Don’t know no dudes named Christian.”

“Was Trey tight with Malcolm?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Malcolm and him rolled.”

“Where?”

“You know, clubs and shit.”

“He ever talk to you about money?”

“Na,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Just askin’.”

“You think he played me?”

“I think he played a lot of folks,” I said.

“Why he do that?” he said. “Boy gets a cut of Teddy’s money all the way.”

“People like that you can’t figure out,” I said. “Their souls are polluted.”

“What about you?” ALIAS said. “Teddy bought you a bar. Ain’t nobody in it for nothin’ else but themselves.”

“That’s a cold attitude.”

“Cold keeps your ass alive,” he said, sliding down deep into the seat, watching the gray buildings and neon weather the rain.

 

46

 

DOGS LIKED BEER. I had just cracked opened a Dixie when Annie craned her neck in the slot between the driver and passenger seats and tried to get a good gulp. I gently pushed her into the backseat of my truck with the flat of my hand and pulled out a po’boy from Johnnie’s for ALIAS. He grabbed it and unwrapped the fried oyster sandwich, eating while we waited for the rain to quit pelting the Quarter. I soon learned that ole Polk Salad liked po’boys better than beer. I had to push her back about a dozen times.

The sky turned a deep bluish green and black and the little wooden signs under the crooked wrought-iron balconies swung in the wind. A stripper, bathed in red light, smoked a cigarette by an open door, her black silk robe open to show a pasty white belly.

“You mind if I start calling you Tavarius?”

“Na, that’s cool. But if you holla at me, you know, with my people, call me ALIAS.”

“You think that stripper would like a beer?”

“Man, I wouldn’t let that woman lick the rims on my Mercedes.”

“I see what you mean.” I flicked the switch for my windshield blades on my truck to clear the view. “Good God.”

We laughed for a while. Tavarius worked on his sandwich and I stared across the little street. I felt my breath change. “You want to tell me about what happened in Clarksdale?”

“Ain’t nothin’ to tell.”

“That’s not the way I heard it.”

“All y’all think I’m a thief.”

“You didn’t take JoJo’s money?”

“I got a mansion, two Mercedeses, a four-wheeler with chrome rims, and a Sea-Do. What do I need with an old man’s two bits?”

I finished the beer, the rain still hitting the hood, and tucked the trash back in the sack. I reached into my glove compartment and pulled out the Polaroid I’d found of Bloom and Dahlia at the piano bar.

“You recognize them?”

Tavarius took the picture from my hand, bit his lower lip, and started to nod. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“Her name is Dahlia.”

“That’s the man too,” he said. “That’s them. See that fucked-up ear?”

“Never can be too sure.”

“What you gonna do now?”

“I’m workin’ on some things,” I said. “Don’t want to scare anyone off yet.”

“What these jokers got to do with Teddy’s white boy?”

I shook my head. “That’s the question, man.”

He nodded. I grabbed my toolbox from the rear hatch and ALIAS and I ran for the doors. Annie stayed in the truck with the uneaten portion of my crawfish-and-Crystal po’boy.

In the little cove by the door, a curtain of rain fell close to my shoulder while I turned the key in the lock. The air in the bar popped inside from the vacuum.

ALIAS pulled at his shirt and loose water fell on his jeans and oversized jean jacket. “Shit.”

The bar smelled of fresh paint and Sheetrock. I held open the door while ALIAS wandered inside. I followed, hearing my feet under me sound hollow and unfamiliar. Looking around. Confused. Our voices echoing from the emptiness of the place. I could almost hear the bass and rhythm guitar shaking the old bar despite the black walls and velvet drapes.

Whoever had owned the place had covered up the brick walls and dropped a ceiling from the new rafters. The mahogany bar, seasoned over years with whiskey and gin, had been completely destroyed in the fire and replaced with something black and plastic looking. A lot of mirrors and chrome.

I set the toolbox on the floor, found a light switch, and handed ALIAS a crowbar.

“Ready.”

“For what?”

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s tear it all out.”

“All of it?”

I looked the bar up and down.

“All of it.”

“Why you got a problem with it?”

“Because it makes me sick to think about this bar disgraced another second.”

“You got a problem with things ain’t to your likin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Hard way to be.”

I began to rip the Sheetrock away from the high walls. My shoulders ached and stretched and my breath labored. Rain fell outside, thunder cracked. About seven o’clock, I walked outside, where the rain had stopped and heat rose from the broken streets like a hundred phantoms. A greenish-yellow light leaked down from the Mississippi and all the air seemed darkly blue as if I wore tinted glasses.

The air smelled of ozone, cooked fish, and boiling meat from Lucky Dog carts ready to start the night. Friday night in the Quarter was about to begin. I checked on Annie as ALIAS carried out some of our mess to a Dumpster behind the bar.

I watched the street for JoJo.

I drank a warm beer while Annie did her business on some discarded handbills from the House of Blues and gave ALIAS five bucks to run down to the corner store to grab a Gatorade.

JoJo didn’t come.

I was sitting on the stoop with Annie, the Manhattan sign broken at my feet, when Felix walked by. My friend and the greatest bartender in the Quarter ambled up to the steps and peered into the cave where I worked. “What’s up, Nick?”

His bald head shone like a black bowling ball in the hard outside light.

He sniffed inside, wearing his white tuxedo shirt and tie, the Indian headdress in his hand. I got up, rubbed my blisters on my jeans, and followed.

Felix walked in the bar and looked down at the floors covered in broken Sheetrock. He ran his fingers over the old brick that had been blackened in the fire. “Y’all can’t get this stuff off.”

I nodded.

“We ain’t gonna get arrested, are we?” Felix asked, suddenly pulling his hand back as if the walls were hot. “JoJo sold this place.”

“I got it back.”

He nodded with understanding and stood in the back of the room. “Too bad ole Rolande ain’t around. He could wire the stage back up in about two seconds.”

His words hung in the air, the thought of old Rolande and his scrunched Jack Daniel’s hat. I kicked some of the Sheetrock into a pile and added my completed Dixie.

“I need some music in here while I work.”

“I seen a jukebox for sale over at some place on Esplanade. Look like that ole one we had, only it loaded with stuff I never heard.”

“I can replace the music.”

Felix stood framed by the doorway, a wide swath of light from outside against his head. He stared up at the ceiling. “JoJo had a lot of friends might want to help.”

“He’s in New Orleans,” I said. “But he doesn’t want any part of this.”

Felix looked at his watch and then added the Indian headdress to the trash heap. “Some little Italian man with one of those cell phones been tellin’ me I work too slow. Pour the drinks too hard.”

I smiled.

“You put me back on?”

I nodded. He didn’t ask about his salary.

“I’ll see you Monday morning,” Felix said, and walked back into the street.

I found a cardboard box behind the bar and borrowed a pen from the dude at the used bookstore. I wrote in huge cap letters. JOJO’S BLUES BAR IS BACK. THE ORIGINAL WILL REOPEN SOON.

I hung the sign in the window and stood in the street admiring the work, my boots stuck in a big puddle of storm water. I even crudely drew some musical notes on each side of JoJo’s name.

I smiled and stood back.

The rain began to fall again when I saw him. Just a blur of brown about a block away. His face just a blackened oval in some sort of hood. The night turned the sky purple and gray. A hard wind ripped down Conti smelling of the Mississippi River.

I walked toward the corner.

He turned.

Rain ran down his coat, sluicing from his body, as if made from oil. The man who’d broken into my warehouse.

He buried his head deep into the folds of the wet brown coat as if it made him invisible. He turned a corner.

I followed.

 

47

 

“WHAT YOU DOIN’, MAN?” ALIAS yelled to me.

“I’ll be right back.”

“No, you ain’t. What’s up?”

“Stay here.”

The man in the brown coat disappeared into a group of tourists walking down Chartres by the Fisheries building and across from the Napoleon House. Gold electric light leaked out of the glass doors from the bar as the man’s walk turned into a jog.

He was running, his brown hood tattered and worn, toward Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. My boots clacked on the flagstone, most of the stores now closed. Antique weapons. Haitian art. High-dollar lingerie. Only two men running on an empty street. I could hear the breath inside my ears as he ran toward the steps of the great church and turned into Pirate’s Alley.

A few gas lamps burned in the narrow shot once used as an avenue for smugglers and thieves. The gap narrowed. He passed over Royal.

I hung back. Letting him run out.

I walked behind two women in yellow ponchos drinking Hurricanes.

When I looked again, he was gone.

I passed the women, running for a few blocks.

At Dauphine, I stopped in the middle of the street and turned in all directions. Dance music pulsed from the clubs on Bourbon. Crooked iron hitching posts with horse heads lined the now paved street. The dance music kept pumping.

I ran down St. Peter back toward the church, passing five college girls staggering in the street and holding a young girl up as her head lolled to the side.

I heard scraping.

I looked back down St. Peter toward Rampart.

I saw the hooded figure scaling an old broken drainpipe running along a brick wall. Moss and ferns grew wildly in cracks that he used for footholds.

He was almost to a fire escape that hung uselessly, headed nowhere.

I ran into the building, some kind of anonymous pool hall, and past a grizzled bartender slicing lemons. I moved toward a landing and ran up some beaten wooden stairs. The bartender yelled after me but I pushed through empty liquor boxes and crates of bottles to a door opening into an empty second floor. The dull light of a Falstaff beer sign out front lit half of the room.

I could hear the man’s hands scraping the outside wall. Climbing.

I followed the sound, my eyes adjusting in the light, slowly walking to the window. The dark figure emerged on the landing. I could see his back turned to me.

I grabbed a stray Barq’s bottle from the floor.

Someone ran after me from the steps below, yelling they were going to call the cops.

The yelling grew louder.

I squinted into the dark light.

The man in the hooded coat pressed his face to the glass.

I could not breathe.

His fingernails touched the dirty glass in sharp, long claws. Thick and hardened. His face was gray as a corpse, his eyes yellowed and narrow. Small broken teeth.

I stepped back, my breath caught halfway in my throat.

The face contorted into something someone might think was a smile as he pushed a foot against the sill and began to climb, almost arachnid in his movements. His legs disappeared upward by the time I tried the window, caked and frozen with paint.

I threw the bottle into the glass and kicked out the shards with my boot.

I found my way onto the landing and looking for a foothold to follow.

I heard sirens at the far edge of the Quarter. And when I reached another rusted ladder of a fire escape, I could see NOPD patrol cars stopping by the pool hall and the bartender pointing upstairs.

I climbed.

I pulled myself onto the sloped roof, the figure crawling over the peaked edge of the old metal. My hands shook and I felt with my knees and palms for something solid on the slant. Nothing but moss and mold and metal eaten with rust.

At the peak, I could see deep into Congo Square and the white-lighted marquee of Louis Armstrong Park. I lifted my leg over the peak and the wetness of the metal roof and slid on a steady slope toward the road below the three-story building.

I clawed at the wet metal, trying to stop, but only sliding more. A metal sheet dropped into the air, pinwheeling down.

I picked up speed, the ground below getting closer, and stopped just short of careening off the edge.

The heel of my boot caught in a groaning drainpipe. I held myself there, foot cocked into the mouth of the pipe, supporting all my weight. Three stories of air waited below.

Above me, the man in the coat turned back and then jumped over a narrow crevice onto another rooftop, maybe only three feet away.

More yelling from the broken window on the other side of the street.

Wind ruffled my hair and I smelled the tired beer and urine of Bourbon Street. My hands coated in rust and dirt.

I scrambled upward and made the jump.

A moon hung over the river, the peaks of the old district’s rooftops shining silver in the early light of the summer. My T-shirt covered in rust and mud, sweat soaking my face.

I made two more jumps over narrow alleys.

Then the sound of his scattering feet stopped.

I edged onto my butt, taking a seat. I saw muddy shoe prints running off the roof.

I slid close to the edge and peered into a little banquette.

I turned to my stomach, feetfirst, and left my legs hanging until I dropped onto a second-floor wooden balcony overlooking a little garden. Red, blue, and yellow light scattered in a large open fountain and upon palm and banana trees. Thick asparagus ferns grew from clay pots.

I ran down a creaking wooden staircase and down through a little alley. At the end, a huge metal gate swung open.

Rampart Street. A couple of homeless men on the corner. A crack pusher running for me to make a deal.

“Hey, man. I bet you I know where you got them boots,” he said.

I heard a horn honking from a car heading toward Canal, a hard thud on the other side of the grassless neutral ground, and saw the man I was following roll from the hood of a Buick.

I ran after him but he moved fast, dragging a leg behind him to the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery. He disappeared.

Two cop cars converged on me and shone lights into my face. I stopped.

One of them threw me on the asphalt and pushed a gun into my spine.

“I’m following—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Listen to me, man.”

“Shut up before I kick you in the head.”

I heard the handcuffs clamp hard onto my wrists as the two cops yanked me to my feet and pulled me to the back of a patrol car.

“Stop.”

They did.

“What?” asked some twenty-something steroid freak as he gripped my arm tighter.

“That noise,” I said. “Can’t you hear it? He’s hiding in one of those mausoleums. He’s moving stones.”

“Drugs,” the cop said. “It’ll fry your mind.”

 

48

 

JAY MEDEAUX STOOD over me in the NOPD homicide bureau in a red-and-white softball uniform complete with cleats and scrunched cotton cap. He was popping a ball into his glove pocket and chomping on Big League Chew while he waited for me to finish my story. Two other detectives scribbled on reports in the pooled desk space, their heads down near banker’s lights glowing green.

“You told two officers in the First District you’d seen a ghost,” Jay said. “They thought you was juiced up.”

Anytime Jay was mad he reverted back to his y’at Irish Channel accent, even though he’d graduated from Tulane with a 4.0. When we were roommates in college, he would rarely go beyond the Boot to drink beer because he was studying history and criminology. But when he was pissed, he went back home.

He tossed me the ball.

“You seen that movie Lord of the Rings?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like you been chased by some of those goblins.”

“I know what I saw.”

Jay was a big guy with sandy-blond hair cut down to the millimeter. In the last couple of years, his linemen’s gut flattened out and his face had grown more hardened.

“Nick, it’s Friday night,” he said. “Why’d you have to pick Friday freakin’ night? We were winning. My wife was there showin’ off her new ta-tas in this sweet tank top.”

“New?”

“They were runnin’ a sale in the paper. You believe that? Like they were selling used cars.”

“Vroom. Vroom.”

“You find JoJo?” he asked.

“Yeah, he picked up the kid.”

“Come on.”

Jay took me into a room where a large woman in blue uniform laid out some plastic binders filled with mug shots. I spent more than an hour flipping the sheets, looking at some wonderful freaks that could make only P. T. Barnum smile. But nothing matched the gray face with the yellow eyes in the window.

Jay walked me to a break room on the eighth floor, where he made some coffee and we sat near a window overlooking the tall Gothic-looking Dixie Brewery. Small mushroom patterns of crime lights shone for miles, seeming to spawn from the brightness of the parish jail. Everything in New Orleans worked from pockets of darkness.

“You really going to open the bar?”

“Why not?” I settled into my seat and used a napkin to clean the gutter grime off my boots.

“What about teaching?”

“I only teach two classes a year.”

“What about all your research in Mississippi?”

“Do you want to be the devil’s advocate or are you just trying to yank my chain?”

“Mainly yanking your chain,” he said. “But I don’t think you know what you’re in for. Bills, loans, payroll. Out of your league.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “I have JoJo for advice. He knows a few things about running a bar.”

“True,” he said.

I looked over at Jay in his red-and-white baseball outfit and started to laugh.

“What?”

“You look like a big candy cane.”

He didn’t laugh.

“Nick?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d tell me, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s all twisted and incestuous, man. Just give me a few days.”

“It’s not my case,” he said. “I just hear things. They just took a bunch of files and shit from that record company in the Ninth Ward.”

“What do they think?”

Jay shrugged.

“I understand,” I said. “Any forensic stuff? DNA, fingerprints?”

“It’s all being run,” he said. “But right now, I don’t see a lot of work being done.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s New Orleans, man,” Jay said. “The dead need to wait in line.”

Just as I began to stand, the officer who’d shown me the photopacks walked into the room and opened a binder to a new page.

“That him?”

I stood and flattened my hands on each side of the book. I began to nod slowly and didn’t say anything. I looked at the dirt on my hands and wiped them on my leg.

“Who is he?” Jay asked.

“Some freak grave robber,” she said. “Remember all those tombs in Metairie that got busted into a few years back? He stole old battle flags and Civil War uniforms. Guys in robbery been looking for him ever since.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“People call him Redbone. The name he gave when he was booked went back to some man he killed. Oh yeah, he kills people for money too. Sounds like a sweet man.”

“Never convicted?”

“This guy in robbery suspects he kills people and lays them in old tombs. How we ever gonna find those bodies?”

Jay whistled low. “I got a couch,” he said to me. “Stay a few.”

“I’ve got the kid.”

“Bring him too.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m used to looking out for myself.”

“Listen, I know they’re looking at this Cash guy hard,” Jay said, exchanging looks with the officer and then back at me. “How ’bout we send a little warning to him?”

“It’s not him.”

“Right.”

“Just give me a few days,” I said.

“You still have that Browning?”

“I have a Glock I picked up in Memphis,” I said. “Holds seventeen rounds. Very handy.”

“Keep it close.”

 

49

 

TREY BRILL WATCHED HIMSELF in a wall of mirrors, flexing his chest in his new green Abercrombie T and pushing his hair off his forehead. Christian finished out a set of incline presses behind him, his green eyes glowing light under his thick dark eyelashes. Trey watched his friend, so sleek, brown, and hard under the health-club lights. If he was a woman, he’d like Christian. Christian had style and knew how to whisper the right words into their ears at the bars. He knew how to order drinks and choose a cigar and how to talk anyone into doing anything. Trey would like to be Christian one day. He’d like to be that cool.

Trey traded places with his friend on the bench, smelling his Calvin cologne and feeling his sweat against his neck. He could only hit ten and Christian had done fifteen. But Trey knew he’d still be ripped for Belize this summer. They’d party down there with all those college girls until they couldn’t freakin’ move. Rum Runners and reggae and golf.

“Why you smiling?” Christian asked, wiping his brow with a white towel. Limp Bizkit playing over the PA system. I did it all for the nookie. Goddamn right.

“Thinking about fuckin’ Belize, man,” Trey said.

“Sweet,” Christian said, and gave him a high five.

A couple of young girls in Nike workout tops and bare stomachs rolled by drinking pink smoothies. “That’s nice,” Christian said.

“Go work it.”

“Na, I’m cool.”

The men wandered by rows of mirrors, scattering their images all around them. Sometimes Trey couldn’t tell who was who. Their images merging and changing and morphing into something else. Made him feel a little dizzy just thinking about it.

“What do you want me to do if that Travers dude comes by again?” Christian asked.

“Tell him to piss off,” Trey said, sliding into the pecdec machine and hammering out about eight quick ones. He grunted and slid off the seat as if coming down from a horse.

“He thinks you rolled ALIAS.”

“He’s an idiot.”

Christian shook his head. “Fucking Malcolm Paris already took it for that and killing goddamn Dio. Why would a guy swing himself by a goddamn rope if he was lying?”

“Exactly,” Trey said. “I’m not worried.”

Christian looked at him, changing the weight on the machine to almost double Trey’s. He gave Trey that scary look, the one where he stared into his freakin’ mind with those weird green eyes. It was like he was psychic.

Christian began his set, not slamming the weight like Trey. He worked it slow and even.

“It’s just,” Trey started, “what if he finds out about Dio?”

“Fuck that shit,” Christian said, finishing up. He leaned into Trey’s ear and whispered — just like Trey had seen him do to women in the bars. Trey’s neck pricked in gooseflesh. “Teddy will never let him expose those ‘Lost Tape’ CDs. Dead or alive, Dio is fucking Ninth Ward.”

“Or ALIAS.”

“ALIAS is a punk,” Christian said.

“Teddy doesn’t trust him, either.”

“Would you?”

“Kid’s smart,” Trey said. “I’ll give him that. He sure as shit has fooled stupid-ass Travers.”

“Man thinks he’s saving a poor little black kid’s soul.”

“But really he’s playing with a demon.”

They finished their workout in silence. Trey and Christian exchanging spots, complimenting each other on their set, and working together. Life unchanged since they were boys.

They were walking in the parking lot when Christian asked him, “If this guy doesn’t stop harassing you, why don’t you talk to Teddy?”

“Teddy’s fucked in the head right now.”

“How bad?”

“Far gone,” Trey said. “He called me Malcolm the other day. Man, he misses that boy bad.”

“Kind of like if one of us went before the other.”

“We’ll make it,” Trey said, grabbing his friend’s shoulder. “Just like we made out from that punch in Chalmette. No one’s gonna fuck with the boys’ business.”

As they climbed into Trey’s BMW, the color seemed to shift in Christian’s eyes. A coolness spread across his face and his lips parted.

He stared at Trey as if seeing him for the first time.

They didn’t talk all the way back to Metairie.

 

50

 

“I CAN’T FIGURE THAT BOY OUT,” JoJo said, drinking his 9 A.M. café au lait from the end of the bar as if he’d never left New Orleans. “He wasn’t a bad worker. Got up in the morning, fed the cows, took the work to heart. Listen to me. You understand?”

I nodded. “When did he take the money?”

“Notice it two days ago,” he said. “Ask him about it and he said to me, ‘So what if I did take your money?’ What makes a child like that?”

I was finished up whitewashing the brick that had been blackened in the fire. I liked the way the paint covered and sealed the grooves, the unevenness of the old pattern of mortar. By the back loading dock, Curtis Lee screwed down ten-inch pine planks into the subfloor. His little cassette recorder shaking with some Little Walter I’d given him to replace the Whitesnake.

Curtis, with a long cigarette trailing from his lips, laid out the floor in a yellow pine jigsaw puzzle and pieced it together with his drill. The cigarette’s ash hung at least an inch long as the sound of the drill almost worked in time with Walter’s music.

“That song take you back, don’t it?” JoJo asked his buddy Bronco, who worked his brush on the opposite wall.

“I guess.”

Bronco wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt and dark jeans. I had yet to see him splatter a drop.

“You don’t like Walter?” I asked.

Bronco shook his head. A long scar on his forearm looked smooth and pink in the morning light.

JoJo sipped on his coffee and returned to the Picayune.

“We knew him,” JoJo said.

“Best harp player I ever heard,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can even touch his licks.”

“You’re right,” JoJo said. “But that doesn’t mean Walter wasn’t a evil motherfucker.”

Bronco kept painting.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Nope,” JoJo said to me, but looking over at Bronco. “Some things are meant to stay up in Chicago.”

When JoJo wanted to keep a secret, he could keep it for decades. You didn’t try.

“Y’all mind watching Tavarius?” I asked. “I’ve got to talk to some folks.”

“On Teddy’s business?” JoJo asked.

“Have to pay my debt.”

“Don’t be goin’ and payin’ it in full,” JoJo said. “All animals lay with their own kind.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Teddy’s music brings on hate,” he said. “Rap doesn’t elevate us. It makes children turn to violence to buy things they don’t need. Money, money, money. Trashy women. That’s not music. Glorifies people being ignorant. Blues is music.”

“So what happened with Walter in Chicago?” I asked.

Bronco shot JoJo a mean stare and JoJo just shook his head at me.

“Maybe ALIAS just doesn’t know how to ask,” I said. “Maybe he needed the money.”

“For what?” JoJo asked. “Two hundred dollars would buy half of Clarksdale. Besides, he didn’t want for nothin’ at my house. He got a room. Loretta cooked and he worked. What else he need?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I reached into my wallet to see how much cash I had on me to pay him back. He caught the wallet between his rough hands.

“Don’t embarrass me.”

“Did I tell you about his mother?”

JoJo turned to listen. Bronco shook out a long Kool cigarette from a pack and excused himself outside.

“His mother overdosed a few years back,” I said. “Tavarius was thirteen. They were living in Calliope and he didn’t tell anyone about it.”

JoJo watched my face, his jaw dropping slack. His eyes softened.

“He didn’t want anyone to take her away,” I said. “Teddy said he’d heard ALIAS thought he’d go to jail if anyone found out.”

“Lord,” JoJo said.

Curtis had finished half the floor while we talked. The puzzle pieces taking shape into the soft, yellow wood.

“Rap’s just dreams,” I said. “People in that world just want something to wish for.”

JoJo nodded. “I heard one time Muddy and old Wolf got into an argument up in Chicago. They kept lighting hundred-dollar bills to see which one would turn chicken. Bought a harp the next day.”

Tavarius walked into the bar, carrying a box of rollers and paintbrushes and some high-gloss black paint for our new front door.

“Old School,” he said, nodding over at me.

He handed JoJo the change, his hands pretend-shaking as if he were a beggar. “It’s all there.”

JoJo counted it out into his hand. “You got a receipt?”

“In the box.”

Tavarius tore open a bag of Doritos and wandered back to where Curtis had unfolded a Playboy he’d found in the trash.

JoJo went to the front door, his feet finding bare spaces in Curtis’s pattern. I watched JoJo, framed in the white afternoon light, laugh with Bronco. Bronco cupped the cigarette tight to his face, squinted up his eyes, and bellowed smoke deep from his body.

Behind me, Tavarius walked forward into the bar.

I could not help but notice the imprint of his sneakers on the fresh wood.

 

51

 

DAHLIA’S CARRIAGE HOUSE off Napoleon was empty. I peered through a window at the top of a wooden landing and saw a bare bulb shining over an empty room. Packing crates, tape, and discarded magazines lay on the blue carpet. The summer light shone gold and hard through the edges of the oaks and the wetness from last night’s rain scattered down on the uneven sidewalks. I asked around but no one seemed to know her, so I walked back to my truck and scanned through the sheet that a bail bondsman I knew in Memphis had faxed me. I located her two most recent addresses, places where she’d received paychecks or credit cards, and headed out to the Hollygrove neighborhood by the riverbend only to find another vacant place. Nothing.

I soon turned back the way I came, into the Irish Channel near the Parasol Bar. An old white-boarded drinking hole that served Wednesday specials on Guinness.

The Irish Channel is a mostly black neighborhood squeezed between St. Charles Avenue and the river. Shotgun shacks and little bungalows. Postwar working-class houses with chain-link fences and mean-ass dogs. It was Saturday and folks hung out on porches and on the stoops of their houses, smoking and playing with children with ragged toys.

I matched the address with a narrow little shotgun so small that it looked like a doll’s house, and walked up a creaking paint-flaked porch. Someone was frying bacon in the back kitchen and playing some T.L.C. “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls.”

A woman sang in the back, and when I knocked on the warped screen porch, she popped her head out and pushed the hair from her eyes. About halfway through the long shot of hall, I knew it was Dahlia.

She wiped her brown hands on a white towel and walked toward me.

Long-limbed with straight black hair and soft almond-shaped eyes, she wore a tan halter top tied at the neck and tight blue jeans. No shoes. A casual smoothness about her walk, a relaxed but confident sexuality.

I swallowed. The Polaroid shot. Only better.

She inched open the door and tugged a smile into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so huge and brown that she sort of swallowed you with them. Her teeth white and perfect, lips sensual.

“I work with Trey Brill.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Your name is Nick and you think Trey ripped off one of your boys.”

I smiled.

The halter top didn’t quite stretch to the edge of the jeans and I noticed how flat and hard her stomach muscles were. I was conscious of her breathing.

“You mind if we talk out here?”

“Come inside.”

I didn’t want to but followed as she returned to the kitchen. I waited in the parlor.

She had a television stranded on a rickety metal-and-faux-wood cart on the right wall as you walked into the room. On the opposite side sat a yellow-and-black couch, a beanbag, and a cheap rocking chair filled with a small back pillow reading LOVE. Small hearts and a couple of angels had been embroidered on the material.

A silent air-conditioning unit sat in a far window. The room’s air was heavy and moist and felt even more humid than it had underneath the thick oak trees outside.

I heard water hissing onto a blackened skillet. She walked back in the room from the kitchen. When I sat down on the couch, she fell in beside me, her arm brushing against mine.

“I’m surprised I found you,” I said. “I’m surprised you know who I am. About the only thing I can do is offer you some money to tell me about you and Trey.”

She leaned back in the pillows and stretched her arms over her head, yawning, her breasts swelling in her shirt. Her chest moist with sweat.

“I’ll also tell the detectives that you were just a player. It was Marion who worked the con, hired by Brill. Right?”

She dropped her chin, put the flat of her palm across my cheek, and crawled into my lap, her legs straddling me. I froze.

Her fingers looped around the back of my neck. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the mouth.

I did not kiss her back, but I didn’t knock her off me either. I could not breathe.

“What?” I asked. My voice was not raised but instead had dropped to almost a whisper.

“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.

Another giggle.

“Riggins,” I shouted. “It’s Nick Travers.”

My voice echoed as I crouched forward and moved out of the ditch and into the trees.

Another shot cracked farther away and I saw the driver’s side mirror of my truck explode. I moved slow, still bending at the waist, watching.

I only heard crickets. Soft feet crunched.

A woodpecker returned to a dead oak tree and a couple of squirrels scattered in the leaves and needles.

More feet ran and then slowed.

The woodpecker stopped.

Then returned.

Dry heated air ran through the woods. A small creek oozed through the uneven splice of a narrow muddy bank.

I crept over the water, several hundred yards from the trailer.

I thought I could come back on whoever was out there.

I was a silent Indian creeping through the land. I could not be heard. I imagined sneaking up behind this peckerwood and catching him. Maybe not.

I tripped over some fishing line tied to a bunch of beer cans, cutting into my palms, and fell to the ground.

A long bowie-knife blade found my throat and I heard a voice I remembered from a decade ago say, “When y’all gonna realize this is the U.S.A., not the U.S.S.R.? I don’t owe shit.”

I looked back. “Hello, Riggins,” I said.

“Travers?”

 

53

 

RIGGINS TOOK ME and Polk Salad Annie to a small camp he’d built in the woods. Nothing more than a child’s play fort made of plywood, furnished with large spindles that once held telephone wires and big tree stumps for seats. I found a stump and sat down by a little ring of rocks filled with charred wood. Riggins poked at the wood with a stick he’d found and belched into his fist.

Annie licked his face.

“You didn’t come out here to bring me a fuckin’ fruit basket or build me a goddamned house,” Riggins said. “Because some of those dickbrains came out last spring and said I need better shelter.”

Riggins had kept the crew cut but decided at some point to grow the whole Grizzly Adams beard. His once thick biceps had grown fat and meaty and it looked as if his stomach had doubled in size. He’d cut his flannel shirt at the armpits and I noticed the Saints tattoo still running down his shoulder. A COUNTRY BOY CAN SURVIVE printed on a Rebel flag flew on the opposite side.

“Some guy that sells RVs out in town knew where I was livin’ and, because he’s some mucho jock sniffer, decided I need some shit called ‘a hand up.’ I said that sounded like a hand job and to take both of his hands to spread his ass real wide to make room for his fuckin’ head.”

“I need to talk to you about Trey Brill,” I said. I had to squint into the sunlight shooting through the oak leaves and vines just to watch his face.

The branch in Riggins’s hand snapped and he brushed at his beard with his fingers. He nodded for a while and spit into the dead fire.

“You seen my wife?” he asked.

“Didn’t know you were married.”

“When Brill cleaned me out, she left me for my next-door neighbor,” he said, his muscles tightening under the bristled cheeks. “A guy who made fuckin’ watches for a living. Watches out of jewels and faces of old movie stars. Guy had this hair transplant that looked like the goddamn head on a little girl’s doll. Goddamn. I stole his Jet Ski, rode it down to St. Charles Parish, and then set the motherfucker on fire.”

I nodded.

“You knew about me and Brill, right?” he asked. “You’re not thinking of having him run your money. God, I thought everybody knew how he fucked me like a monkey on a football.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “The money. Not the monkey. I saw that you filed suit for mismanagement.”

“Yeah, my lawyer was a cocksucker,” he said. “You know that little weight coach we had? The one who drank protein shakes and wore bikers’ pants? He told me this guy was the best in New Orleans. All he did was clean out the rest of my bank account and have his secretary send me a ‘sorry for fuckin’ up your life’ card on my goddamned birthday.”

I picked up a couple of stones on the ground and whizzed them into the woods. The afternoon sun had flushed blood and heat into my face. “What did he do, Riggins?”

“You’re gonna think I’m the biggest dumb-ass you ever heard,” he said. “Almost don’t want to tell you.”

“Trey’s fucking over Teddy Paris.”

“Fat Teddy?”

I nodded.

“Remember when I sent that fucking whore to meet Teddy after we got back from San Francisco?”

“Yeah,” I said, my face unchanging. “Hilarious.”

“Man, that was funny as shit.”

He laughed for a few minutes, really chuckling to himself, until he dropped his big head into his hands and his back began to shake.

“What did Trey do?”

“He sold me my own property.”

“Come again?”

He snorted and pulled out some Copenhagen from a tin. “I know that sounds crazy. But a few years back, he had me invest in this condo project out in Gretna,” he said, tucking a pinch into his lip. “Well, a year after I retired, I didn’t get dick. I get this lawyer and he has some accountant check things out. Turns out, I’d already put in for a hundred grand on the place. He’d sold it back to me for fucking three. Shit, I didn’t know one of these deals from another.”

“I guess Matlock wasn’t your lawyer,” I said.

“The police and my lawyer couldn’t prove shit,” he said. “He’s got these little corporations set up all over. More hidden names than assholes in China.”

“He run over anyone else?”

He nodded. “Tim Z. Bone. DuBois.”

“You know how to find them?”

“No,” he said. “But they were all in the same deal. Tim Z. wanted to grease Trey’s ass with STP and run a rabid squirrel into his cornhole with some PVC pipe. He got put in jail just for tellin’ Trey about it on the phone. He’s got one of those restraining-order things on him now. But in the end, we all decided he’d wallow in his own sin. You know, that’s back when I was all into the Fellowship of Christian Athletes shit. I thought the world was gonna end in 2000. That’s when I built the bunker.”

“Never can be too careful.”

“I got enough cans of beans to make the whole nation fart on cue.”

“What made you trust this guy so much?”

“He’d keep your mind on other things,” he said. “Like this one time, he had this woman come over when I had the gym. To sign contracts and shit. She looked just like Barbie. Had big fake tits and blond hair and the IQ of a squirrel.”

“Smart as the one who would run into the PVC pipe?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Well, anyway, we ended up doin’ it in a three-way mirror after the gym had closed.”

“So there were six of you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s funnier than shit. Would you quit fuckin’ with me and let me tell the damned story? That’s what you wanted, right?”

He didn’t smile.

I did.

“I found out when we were about to go to court that she didn’t even work for Brill,” he said. “She was a damn stripper at that place on Bourbon called the Maiden Voyage. You know, where they used to brag they had the Best Chest in the West?”

We walked back to the trailer, Annie by my side, Riggins leading the way. He strategically spit as we walked, and pointed out different markers that signified boundaries of his land.

“I guess you getting ready for training camp,” Riggins said, his eyes wide.

“Jimmy, I haven’t played for ten years.”

“Really?” he asked, squinting into the sun.

“No lie.”

“Been chopping a lot of wood,” he said. “I’m gonna call the suits tomorrow. Tell them I’ll take a little less for this season.”

“See you out there, brother.”

From my rearview mirror, I watched Jimmy wave from the middle of his long dirt road. I noticed a wall he’d made from small logs that seemed to go on forever. Before I turned a corner, I saw him grab his ax and start on another tall pine.

 

54

 

SUMMER HEAT BAKED oil puddles in the eight-story garage where I sat on the hood of Trey’s new silver BMW with a rusty crowbar in my hand. I’d taken Annie back to the warehouse and spent my last hour counting people walking off the elevator, checking out trucks in the garage, and noticing all the oil spots that reminded me of presidents’ heads. I thought about Maggie and her farm, Polk Salad Annie taking a crap on my sofa yesterday, and ALIAS stealing from JoJo. I tried to remember what JoJo had told me about the liquor-license changeover and a bouncer he knew we could trust.

With restocking the booze, booking the bands, and making schedules for the waitresses we’d have to hire, I hoped I’d still have time to teach. I just wanted to keep the bar running half as smooth as it had under JoJo. I wanted to keep everything the same.

A small bell rang and the doors opened. Footsteps echoed through the concrete cavern and I heard laughing and a woman’s voice playfully telling someone to “shut up.”

“I’m fuckin’ starved,” Brill said as he punched his key chain and the BMW’s horn honked and lights winked. I didn’t move.

Trey caught my eye. I shifted the crowbar into my right hand.

He began to walk faster, leaving the woman in his wake. She tilted her head, looking toward me, sitting hard on her friend’s car. She was in her midtwenties and blond. Boy-short hair and pixie face. A tight white top, Capri pants, and a pink sweater tied around her shoulders.

“What the fuck?” Trey asked.

The woman ran, her arms flouncing on each side of her body, heels wobbling beneath her tanned calves. “Trey, don’t. Trey.”

He reached for his cell phone and I assumed called 911.

No light crept into the floor of the parking garage from the windowless walls. The air smelled like carbon monoxide and garbage.

Brill gave his directions and the little blonde hung on his arm.

“Where’s Dahlia?” I asked.

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s talk.”

“About what?”

“How you stole from Jimmy Riggins and raped a drunk little girl. Or how you were grabbing the ass of the woman who conned ALIAS the other night at Whiskey Blue.”

He began to walk away.

I popped three hard ones with the crowbar into the hood.

“Shit!” Trey screamed.

“Malcolm was a good guy,” I said. “He knew about you siphoning off money from Teddy. Right?”

He shook his head and ground his back teeth together. His face was red and blotched. He wore a blue dress shirt and loose tie. Khakis and big brown New York designer shoes.

“How much did you pay Dahlia?”

“Who’s Dahlia?” the blonde asked.

“Shut up,” Brill said.

A red Toyota truck circled up the curving drive of the parking deck, light casting over me, Trey, and the girl. The car kept rolling, tires squealing, as it headed upward. Trey stood still. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you. Beat my car. I don’t give a shit.”

He turned to walk away. I felt a surge inside me, my hands shaking at my sides, and I ran toward him, the crowbar clanging to the ground. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt and threw him against a dirty minivan. It knocked the wind from him and he dropped to his knees as the woman screamed.

The minivan’s alarm began to sound with the impact.

I gripped the front of his shirt, lifting him to his feet.

He was crying now and trying to catch a breath. His lower lip twitched and he babbled some obscenities at me.

With one hand, I banged him against the van again.

“Listen, you spoiled little shit,” I said. “I know what you are. You wipe your ass with people like that little girl. I know you left Christian holding the bag while you ran games on Jimmy Riggins and some of my teammates. I know Dahlia was the girl who conned ALIAS along with Marion Bloom. She told me. But I bet this was the first time you ever had someone killed. I don’t care who strung Malcolm up in that tree or what kind of shit you planted in his house. You called it. And you had that same street freak you hired come for me.”

I tightened my grip on his oxford cloth. “Malcolm worked for what he had. He wasn’t a twisted little fuck like you.”

When I stood back, I noticed that part of his shirt had come off in my hands.

The girl kneeled, weeping, and holding out her hand. Her fingers stretched out to Trey, who was getting to his feet and pointing at me.

Trey moved inches from my face. I could smell coffee on his breath as he yelled hard. “Don’t you see? Don’t you fucking see?”

The girl screamed, “No. No.” She tugged at his arm, pulling him away. “He’s going to kill you.”

“It’s ALIAS,” he said. “Ask Teddy. There was no con. Teddy knows. Did you ask Dahlia about ALIAS? She’s been with him for months. They took the money together. He lied and told Teddy he’d been conned. Did you ever ask Teddy about the charges he filed against ALIAS last year and the ten thousand ALIAS stole? Or when he caught Dahlia giving ALIAS head in the back of his Bentley?”

“ALIAS doesn’t know Dahlia,” I said. “She was with you at Whiskey Blue.”

“She’s just some ass, man,” he said. “She’s fucked everybody at Ninth Ward. She was there because that’s where the rappers go. Man, I was drunk when she came over to me. Have you seen her? What would you do?”

The girl behind him began to sob harder. I noticed a gold sorority insignia around her neck.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Why would I fucking kill Malcolm?” Trey yelled, grasping his hair in his hands. “He ran the whole company. The only thing Teddy can do is fuck it up. Malcolm was my friend too. I miss him.”

I stepped back, his words flying into me with blood and foam from his mouth. The woman pulling him away, the alarm on the car still blaring into my ears.

“That kid is evil, man,” he said. “Ask Teddy if I’m lying.”

I watched him.

“You hate me because I have money,” he said. “All guys like you and Riggins want to be my friend and then hate me for what I am. Fuck you. Fuck all of you.”

I gritted my teeth and stood by the car, watching Brill and the girl slip into the BMW, back up, and spin away. The car fishtailed, nearly striking a Cadillac, before disappearing down into the parking deck.

 

55

 

TEARS RAN DOWN Teddy’s big cheeks while he answered the question from the BET VJ for 106th and Park. A camera and sound guy cornered him in his big leather sectional while the feed went out live. A few groupies lounged in Teddy’s pool in bikinis with margaritas, watching the sun set into a nice blender of oranges and reds. Louisiana Caribbean. I leaned against a wall by the open kitchen and drank a Coke. There were cheeses and wine, little quiches, fancy toast, and big bowls of caviar on his marble counter.

I didn’t like watching Teddy blasted with all those white-hot lights. I knew the showman in him had made him get back to work too soon after the death of his brother.

Has times been tough? Is the talk of the end of the Ninth Ward label true? Is there any truth that Malcolm’s suicide came out of some debt to a rapper from East St. Louis?

“Silkie,” Teddy said to the young bald man dressed in a baggy Fat Albert sweatshirt and stocking cap. “I think people talk about greatness. And my brother was great. It’s just hard for people to get over that he’s gone.”

What about what folks are saying about Malcolm’s relationship with the late, great Diabolical? That their relationship had been seein’ some dark days before Dio went missin’?

Teddy twisted a fat diamond ring on his finger and nodded. “Let people talk. Let ’em talk. I’m here to tell people that Ninth Ward is keepin’ on top. We goin’ out to represent all New Orleans like my brother’s dream. Ninth Ward, Sixth Ward. Calliope. Magnolia. We keep on rollin’.”

What about the feud with you and Cash?

Teddy shook his head and smiled. “Never was no feud,” he said. “People like to talk and divide us. People like to break us apart. But we all the Dirty South.”

Dirty, dirty. Now let’s send it back to New York with a new one from a New-Orleans-boy-made-good-in-Beverly-Hills, Master P.

The VJ shook Teddy’s hand and apologized if the questions got too personal. Teddy shook his hand back, clasping it long and firm, and then shoved the VJ in the chest with the flat of his hand.

“Get out of my house, you goddamn punk-ass nigga.”

“Hey, man,” the VJ said. “Fuck you.”

Teddy lunged for him.

I ran behind Teddy and pushed his swinging arms to his side. He stormed outside and slammed the French doors behind him. Outside, he smiled, leaned down to the pool, and flirted with a couple of women.

After the crew packed up and left, the VJ talking shit about a lawsuit, I took a seat in the leather sectional. Teddy came back and turned on a DVD of Goodfellas.

It was the scene where Pesci and De Niro were burying the body and laughed about the body parts being thrown around. Teddy laughed with them, his eyes glued into the TV world.

“Teddy?”

“What’s up?”

“We need to talk.”

“Wait till you see this,” Teddy said. “They go back to his mamma’s house for more spaghetti. Ain’t that some shit? Do you like spaghetti? Man, I could eat the shit out of Italian. You know, lasagna and fettuccini. Man, I had some eggplant with Parmesan that would knock your dick in the dirt.”

“Yeah,” I said. I stood and walked back to the table of food.

“Hey, man? Grab me a candy bar up there.”

“There aren’t any.”

“What?” Teddy said, leaping out of his seat. He stood over the table and frowned as if someone had served several helpings of dog shit. “Not even a goddamn Snickers. Shit. Sometimes I wonder what I pay people for. You know I got all these people round me on my payroll and they ain’t doin’ shit. Man, I should open my own goddamn catering business and have it done right. We’d have candy bars and shit and Pepsi and shit. Real food.”

“I’d skimp on the shit,” I said. “Want some caviar?”

“That shit got class, but man, it tastes just like fish.”

I smiled.

“Let’s ride,” he said, grabbing his keys and running for the door. I couldn’t even catch a breath.

Two minutes later, we were riding in the Bentley, top down and new beats cranked. He drove about eighty in a forty.

“That’s the one we cut the other night,” he said, sweat beading down his puffy jowls as he talked. “You remember. ‘Project Girl.’ Shiit. Man, that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about the ass. Can’t you see that ‘Project Girl’ pop that ass? You got to make them pop their ass. That’s what Malcolm used to say. Shit, pop it. Pop it. Can’t you see it?”

He let go of the steering wheel and pretended he was gripping two mounds of muscular butt. “Malcolm was a magician. Malcolm could make the crowd slow down, speed up. Pick up the whole world at the projects in Desire and have them roll with his beats. Man, I’m gonna miss those beats. Those crazy NOLA beats. Hard and representin’.”

“Where we headed?”

“Get me a goddamned Snickers.”

“Teddy, you ever have any problems with ALIAS?”

“What you mean?”

“He ever steal from you?”

Teddy turned down his stereo, the heated salty air rushing through the car. The clouds over Pontchartrain growing fat and pink in the soft evening, almost raw like a new wound. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass and mint. Sprinklers misted over the trimmed grass.

He lit a cigar from his pocket.

“Yeah,” he said, thick smoke flying from his mouth. “Kid took two of my credit cards last year. Bought some things.”

“What?”

“Man, I didn’t want to talk about this shit. ALIAS is my boy. You know how he get to your heart, all that shit he been through.”

“What did he buy?”

“Aw, man. Who tole you about that?”

“Just tell me.”

Teddy sighed.

“Everything,” he said. “He worked those Visa cards hard.”

“Like what?”

“I’m talking like twenty thousand? Yeah, some shit like that. Crazy shit. Like bikes from Toys ‘R’ Us and five thousand worth of Air Jordans.”

“You think maybe he worked this con on himself to get it out of the trust fund?”

“Came to me a few times.”

“You ever think about mentioning it to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “How you gonna ever know?”

“You ever see ALIAS with a girl named Dahlia?”

“The stripper?” he asked. “I don’t know her.”

“What about Dataria?” I asked, pulling out the Polaroid with her and Bloom.

“Yeah, you showed me that shit.”

He stole a glance while driving, then pulled the car to the side of the road. Cars whizzed past us, honking, and Teddy lifted up his sunglasses to get a closer look.

“I ain’t neva seen that bitch,” he said. “But man, she could make a dead man’s pecker twist into a pretzel.”

“She has a way.”

He nodded, pulling out, and cruising down the road with two fingers. Driving slow. He turned into a space at the BP and killed the engine. A couple of teenage boys hung back and pointed at the Bentley parked away from the gas pumps. They knew him.

“Come on,” he said. “You want a Snickers?”

“I’m cool.”

“Zagnut?”

“I’ll take a Whatchamacallit.”

“A what?”

“Teddy.”

He laughed. “Man, I’ll be right back. Be cool.”

I sank into the rabbit-fur seats and watched Teddy bound into a Canal convenience store in his $2,000 Armani. He held the cigar in his right hand and clutched a dozen candy bars to his stomach with the other.

I watched him pay the cashier with a $100 bill from his diamond-crusted money clip.

He ate and drove, the cigar now smoldering in the ashtray. The Snickers taking the place of the Cuban.

“I heard you caught ALIAS with a woman in the back of your car one night.”

“Oh yeah,” Teddy said. “He was gettin’ him some. He’s old enough. Didn’t think much of it.”

“Could it have been Dahlia?”

He shook his head. “Man, I don’t know. I know some of my boys were talkin’ about it the next day. Said the woman was lots older.”

“Like Janet Jackson older? Or Eartha Kitt older?”

“Who’s Eartha Kitt?”

“Catwoman.”

“About double his age.”

I buried my head into my fingers, my elbow propped into his door. I didn’t want to see any of the road ahead.

“ALIAS says she was the one who conned him,” I said. “He says he didn’t know her.”

“Man, I don’t know what to think,” Teddy said. “Yesterday, he come over to see me and gets to talkin’ about y’all’s trip to Clarksdale. He said you wanted half of his money if you get it back.”

“I never said that.”

“For real?”

“Man, come on.”

“Kid’s workin’ our crank, ain’t he?”

“Looks that way.”

“Goddamn. Goddamn.”

The sky twisted into dark patterns forming a black-and-peach quilt over the lake. I couldn’t see the shore on the other side. Pontchartrain seemed to be an endless sea.

 

56

 

IT WAS NIGHT now and I drove for about an hour, down to the bar, then back home, where I called JoJo. I finally found him and Bronco at the Spotted Cat in the Marigny watching a guy I knew named Washboard Chaz and some twenty-year-old Italian kid who I’d heard could play Robert Johnson note for note. They were drinking Dixies and laughing with Chaz, his beaten washboard propped in his hands, when I walked into the dark little bar off Frenchman. The place was a narrow shot of bar with a small wood stage by the door and a grouping of mismatched chairs by a plate-glass window. Candles in glass bowls flickered from small tables and on top of the bar.

I bought a Dixie from the bartender, said hello to Chaz while exchanging places with him, and took a seat.

“Think he’d do nicely for a Wednesday night,” JoJo said.

“How’s the kid?”

“Note for note,” JoJo said.

“No shit?”

“No, sir,” he said. “And Eye-talian to boot. How ’bout that?”

Bronco clicked open his stainless Zippo and lit a Kool. He nodded at me, his cheekbones and red-black face something out of a history book. Men clearing the Delta with mules.

I walked outside where I’d left Annie next to a hitching post and let her drink the last few sips of my beer. I went back in and settled back in my seat so I could see where she was tied.

“You still gonna do a red-beans-and-rice on Monday?”

“Be a fool not to,” I said.

“When did that stop you?” JoJo said, his eyes watching mine. No grin forming on his face.

“Where’s the kid?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Left with some hoodlums in some kind of pimped-out truck.”

“How long?”

“Couple hours,” he said. “I ain’t got time.”

“Bronco?” I asked. He turned. “You enjoyin’ the sights?”

He turned to watch a young girl in a red silk dress make herself thin, sliding through the crowd at the bar. He nodded, smoke coming out his nose. “Mighty fine.”

 

 

I FOUND ALIAS alone at his mansion. The door was open, the rooms cavernous without any furniture. I followed the lights and ended up out on his back patio, where he lay reclined in a lounger staring up at the night sky. He had a forty by his side and his tan lug-soled boots crossed at the ankles. He looked over at me and then looked back up at the stars.

“What’s up?”

Annie trotted over to him and started licking his mouth.

“Damn, dog,” he said, kind of laughing like he was twelve.

I looked away. “I talked to Teddy,” I said.

“He say anything about givin’ me my damned dogs back?”

“He told me about you taking his credit cards last year.”

He didn’t turn, pushing Annie away with the back of his hand.

“No one likes to be lied to,” I said.

“What you talking about?” he said. “I never said shit about that.”

“So you admit taking his cards,” I said.

“We was just funnin’.”

“That’s called theft.”

“Man, get that pole out your ass,” he said. “Teddy spends more money on toilet paper.”

“Stand up,” I said.

He mumbled something.

“Stand up,” I repeated. The sound of my voice made Annie’s ears wilt. She walked away.

ALIAS slid his feet to the ground, stood in his sloppy Saints jersey, and groggily looked up at me. The black sky and stars seemed like a dome above our heads. The moon huge and split in half like a paper prop on a small stage.

“I know about Dahlia,” I said. “Don’t much blame you; she has plenty of heat.”

“That bitch? Man, you trippin’. What’s wrong with you, Nick?”

“You told Teddy I wanted to keep half the money I find.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’ve known Teddy for twelve years,” I said. “I’ve known you two weeks.”

I looked away from him at the hard concrete surrounding his pool. Stray boxes and packing tape littered on the ground. I could feel the summer beginning to move in, ready to harden, before that final heat of August when it leaves us.

The sudden thought made me think of family trips to the beach and the way everything faded.

“Go, then,” he said. “Ain’t got time for you.”

“I let you in,” I said. “JoJo and Loretta took you in like they did for me.”

“Go!” he yelled. “Get out of here.”

“You’ve lost it.”

“What?”

“My trust.”

“Fuck you, man. Fuck you and your trust and your goddamn ways.”

I turned with Annie, feeling her wet snout against my hand as I walked back through the empty white rooms.

In my rearview, I saw him watch me as I drove away, the red glow of my taillights cast over his face.

 

57

 

GHOSTS WAKE YOU SOMETIMES. You seen your mamma at the end of your bed once, smokin’ a cigarette and cryin’. Tears made out of blood. You seen your kid friend, Touchee, lyin’ on his bloody stomach like when y’all was at the block party and he walked through glass. You close your eyes tight and don’t like to cut off the light in your closet. Even when it’s empty like tonight. All your clothes, CDs, DVDs, and stereos taken over to Teddy’s place. Man tellin’ you he got to cut back till that next record out. You lay awake tonight in your old kingdom, watching that bare bulb in your closet. Nothin’ but miles of empty shoeboxes.

You cross your arm over your eyes, hear the wind cut off the lake. Tomorrow you got to be out. Tomorrow you got to come up with more rhymes. Aggression. Repression. Depression.

Yeah, you know all those words. They seem to come right out of the air into your head. Almost seem like you got someone whisperin’ things you don’t know into your ear. You tell Teddy about that one time, right when he got you out of Calliope, and he say it ain’t nothin’ but inspiration.

You wonder where that been lately.

Eyes shut tight, you sleep. Seem like hours before you feel the hot breath in your ear and feel cold fingers wrap your face.

“Open your mouth, my l’il nigga, and you get cut,” man says.

You wide awake. You breathe hard through your nose. Sheets wet from sweatin’ all night without no AC.

“You betta calm the fuck down, boy,” the voice say. “You hear me? Ain’t no secrets. Ain’t nobody rip your ass off. You ain’t nothin’ but a liar. Lie to yourself. Lie in your mind.”

The hand ease off. You bite at the fingers but they gone like air.

You get tangled in the sheets and fight — seemin’ like with yourself — until you fall hard on the floor. You can feel. Not see. It’s 3. It’s 4. Ain’t no dawn in sight.

“Whay you at? Come on.” You swing into blindness, black night.

You still smell that funk-ass breath. You feel heat and sourness in your face.

The closet door still cracked to keep out those monsters and ghosts and shit like when you was a kid.

A flash of platinum. Your symbol. Your Superman S on the ground.

You kneel down in that long yellow sliver of closet light that cuts real narrow when it crosses your hands. You holdin’ the platinum.

“That’s mine, kid,” the voice say. “It too heavy for your neck.”

And into the cut of light, you see him.

You can’t breathe. You feel suspended in water, like when you in a pool and you don’t weigh nothin’. Your fingers and legs tingle. You got to hold yourself ’cause you feel you about to piss.

It’s the face from the bus. It’s God.

“Yeah, you right, my nigga,” he say. “Dio back.”

Your hand stretches from you, like you ain’t got no control, and offers that piece of jewelry to Dio, chain twisted up in your fingers. You just want him to go, take what’s his. He’s dead.

Sweat runs cold ’cross your neck.

“Malcolm kept pushin’ too,” Dio say. “Don’t be a hero.”

You close your eyes tight and open them to nothin’.

You hear footsteps runnin’ down that wide marble staircase. Hard feet.

You run to the top, look down, moon flowin’ like spilled milk onto your floors black and white and onto the bald head of a dead man.

Another man waitin’ for Dio.

He got a brown coat that seems to rot off him. Gray skin and yellow eyes.

You can’t move.

Your legs give out. Breath all tight, hands on the cold marble ground. You fight for that cool air, trying to find it. Needing that bubble.

When you get to your feet, they’re gone.

You wonder if you right in the head.

But that funk smell stays.

 

58

 

A KNOCK ON THE WAREHOUSE DOOR before 10 A.M. better mean something important. People have their summer rituals and for me it was about 9, a big bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and then maybe a Josie and the Pussycats marathon or some reruns of the Banana Splits. I knew someone had to be kidding by breaking the sacred tradition. I yawned, punched the intercom at the street, and politely asked, “It’s cartoon time. What?”

“Old School, let me up.”

I held the button there for a moment, trying to think of something to say and not coming up with shit. I buzzed him up anyway and flicked on the bank of industrial switches lighting up the warehouse.

The power brought to life my stereo, caught on WWOZ, and some late-morning zydeco. Good ole Boozoo Chavis.

Annie padded her way into the kitchen and bit at my hand.

She yawned, thrusting out her long boxer legs and her butt in the air. I scratched her ears and tugged my way into some 501s and a white T.

ALIAS bounded into the warehouse, holding a box of Krispy Kreme donuts and a gallon of milk. “Come on,” he said. “Eat up. We got work to do.”

I started to make coffee, doubling the dose of chicory into the old blue speckled pot and laying it onto the burner.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “What’s that?”

“Had a visitor last night.”

I yawned.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“That man you chased down from JoJo’s bar.”

Big fat ceramic Christmas lights burned red, green, and blue over a little tin overhang that ran from my far wall over my stove and old GE refrigerator. The warehouse felt safe and solid.

“You never saw him.”

“Ain’t that many people with yellow eyes. Had that raggedy-ass brown coat too. Just like you said.”

The coffee began to hiss a little, still not perking. I reached under the sink and pulled out a bag of trash, tying it tight. I hooked Annie on her leash with one hand and grabbed the trash in the other, making my way down to the street.

I left the trash on my stoop and kept on walking barefoot down Julia Street.

ALIAS followed. Annie sniffed the ground.

I heard him still talking behind me.

The morning light was clean and bright. A light blue sky, small wispy clouds. I thought about heading down to the restaurant supply place with JoJo. And we needed a new neon sign. We needed that bad before we opened. Blue cursive letters.

“Ain’t you listenin’, jackass?”

I turned. Annie squatted on moss growing on some old bricks.

I stared at him.

He smiled a gold smile. I kept staring.

“He wasn’t alone, neither,” he said.

“Fred Flintstone was riding shotgun.”

“Hey, man. Fuck you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have time for this.”

I walked Annie across the road, fishing into my jeans for a pack of cigarettes and lit one, walking slow back to the warehouse. Some asshole had smashed a blue bottle of vodka on the street and I wished I’d worn shoes.

He stood by my small blue door. His hands crossed over his chest while he leaned back into the old red brick. A red baseball hat with a Japanese character for an insignia. The streetcar clanged way down on St. Charles. I looked at my watch.

ALIAS’s eyes narrowed, his face falling into the shadow of the street. He would not look me in the eye.

“Come get your donuts,” I said. “I’ll take you back. How’d you get here anyway?”

Annie tugged at my leash and I let her run on through the door and up the steps.

“Took a cab,” he said. “You eat ’em, Travers.”

“Hey, you don’t have to be like that.”

“Do what you like.”

He turned away.

I smiled at the ground. “Who was it?”

He got maybe ten yards down the street and turned back, staring into the sun. His feet pigeon-toed. “What?”

“Who was with freak?”

His mouth grew crooked. “Does it matter?”

“Who?”

“Dio.”

“He’s dead, you know.”

He nodded, still squinting at me. “Yeah.”

“Go home, ALIAS,” I said.

 

59

 

JOJO AND FELIX MOVED small tables around the hardwood floor trying to arrange the place like it used to be. They were doing a pretty good job, because for a second when I walked in, I was a little startled that maybe the bar never closed at all. The front door was open, four iron ceiling fans working hard with a straight shot to the rear exit. JoJo had scrounged up some old juke posters from Magic Bus Records Shop and that company from Slidell had finally delivered the jukebox. She wasn’t as pretty as that old sixties classic that had melted in the fire, but she was thick and chrome and stocked with all the great old blues. Bobby Blue to Z. Z. Hill.

“I got this old cooler from that zydeco bar on Bourbon,” JoJo said, pointing to a long refrigerator with a Jax Beer logo on the side. He slid open a top door to show the galvanized steel interior loaded down with Dixies. Regulars, Blackened Voodoo, and the Crimson Ale. “Don’t be a dumb-ass like that man. Keep it simple. Buy from places shuttin’ down.”

“How much I owe you?” I asked.

“A million dollars,” JoJo said.

Felix dropped a mop into a sudsy bucket filled with hot water and Murphy’s Oil Soap and began to wash down the wooden plank floors. I missed the old scarred hardwoods but these were thick and long and would soon become as beaten as an Old West saloon.

“How’d you do that?” I asked, nodding to some blackened grooves already worn by the back door.

JoJo walked over to the bar, where he pulled out a long section of chains. “I whupped the shit out ’em.”

Felt right and good to have JoJo break the place in. He walked around taking in every little curve and pocket, his mind workin’ on the way it should be.

I grabbed a beer from the old cooler, feeling good on the bar stools I’d bought earlier.

JoJo punched up “Mannish Boy” on the jukebox. The version Muddy did with Johnny Winter on the Hard Again album back in the seventies. The album, all bull-shit and academic rhetoric aside, is by far the most enjoyable blues record ever made.

“If you don’t like that,” JoJo said, “you got nothin’ between your legs.”

Muddy sang he was a man. Johnny Winter howled and screamed, backing him up.

Felix moved his hips a bit as he mopped.

JoJo slid behind the bar and opened a cold Dixie with a bottle opener he’d installed under the flat top. “You got four bottle openers all down the line. Don’t want to be foolin’ with nothin’ you got to look for.”

I nodded. He sat beside me, taking a sip.

“Come back, JoJo.”

“No, sir,” he said. “Not yet.”

He smiled. He looked around the dim light of the bar, Muddy alive again on Conti Street. “Besides, if I come back now, how are we gonna see what you gonna do?”

I sipped the beer. It was two o’clock. I didn’t care.

“You want to get a muffuletta down at Central?” JoJo asked.

“Yeah, let me get it,” I said.

JoJo smiled. “I’ll let you.”

“When you headed back?”

“After I eat my muff.”

“Come on, JoJo.”

“It’s all you, son,” he said. He patted me on the back. “How’s it feel?”

“What’s that?”

“To be grown.”

I smiled, the beer was cold in my hand, and I understood.

Felix kept mopping. The blues played on. Old rhythms returned.

“ALIAS has lost his mind,” I said, and told him about my run-in with Trey Brill and what I learned from Teddy. “This morning, before I picked up the tables and chairs, he told me a dead man had come to visit him in the night.”

“Maybe it happened.”

“Hell no,” I said. “I’m done. Teddy can deal with him the way he wants.”

“Look deeper,” JoJo said.

“Oh, come on, JoJo,” I said. “That kid conned you and me and Loretta. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

He looked at me. His brown eyes looked heavy with the creased skin around them. “I don’t waste time,” he said. “There’s more to Tavarius. That kid is all right.”

“Maybe he killed Malcolm too,” I said. “He made up a damned good lie about folks ripping him off. He’s so smart, JoJo. I mean, that kid can lie.”

“Easy when you do that,” JoJo said, standing from the bar. “Ain’t it?”

“What’s that?” I said, enjoying the beer and watching Felix mop.

“Handin’ off your troubles.”

“Why are you on his side?” I said. “You were through with him too.”

JoJo settled into his seat, the jukebox cutting on to a new record. He watched the blank row of old brick as he used to when a mirror hung there. He took a sip of beer.

“I was wrong.”

“Come on.”

He opened his wallet and folded down two hundred-dollar bills on the table before me.

“Found it in my jacket last night,” he said. “Tavarius was tellin’ the truth and I shut him out.”

JoJo left me there to think with the folded bills.

And I did for a long time.

 

60

 

AT SUNSET, I RAN down St. Charles, turned onto Canal past all the camera shops and jewelry stores, and wound my way to the Aquarium, where I followed the Riverwalk downriver. I passed the vagrants sleeping on rocks still warm from the sun and watched rats skittering through overflowing trash cans. I almost tripped on one as it ran back with a hot dog in its mouth and headed into the rocks along the Mississippi. My Tulane football shirt was soaked in sweat. I tried to slow my breathing and pick up my pace as I stopped at the Governor Nichols Street Wharf. I put my hands on top of my head and noticed everything turn a murky gold and red. The brick and stucco of the old buildings of the Quarter softening.

I decided to cut back through the old district, before the streets became flooded with cars and tourists. I jogged my way down Royal Street, looking up at the scrolled ironwork on JoJo and Loretta’s old apartment, and wound my way around a street musician who used his dog to pick up tips with its mouth.

I wondered if Annie could do that.

She’d probably take the cash and then piss on their foot.

I slowed, made a couple of cuts, and found myself at the old Woolworth’s and a blank stretch of Bourbon. Where Bourbon met Canal, I heard a brass band of teenagers running through the standard “Somebody Is Taking My Place.”

Trombones and trumpets. A skinny kid with an overpowering dented tuba.

All of them were black and wearing T-shirts and shorts.

A little girl, about four, walked around with a shoebox filled with loose coins.

I stopped. Caught my breath.

In the fading light of the day, all gold and dark blue, in this unremarkable little stretch of the Quarter, a half-dozen kids entertained about twenty people. They rolled through “Saints” and took a big finish with some really wonderful solos.

Just when you grew to hate New Orleans with all its dark places and overwhelming violence, you saw something like a bunch of ragtag kids making some spectacular music. I wondered about the violence and the art and how it all fit together.

I felt bad when the little girl walked past me and I didn’t have change in my jogging shorts. I showed her my empty palms and shrugged. She scowled and turned her back to me.

Suddenly the band broke into a song I knew. A heavy funk with the tuba working the hell out of the beat.

I started tapping my foot, the light fading to black all around us.

My smile stopped. My face flushed.

They were playing ALIAS.

 

61

 

I SPENT THE NEXT MORNING at the New Orleans Police Department flipping through the missing persons file of Calvin Antoine Jacobs, aka Dio. In the empty office of a desk sergeant who was friends with Jay, I made notes onto a yellow legal pad. I read through interviews with Teddy and Malcolm, other rappers who knew Dio, and a couple that saw him taken away outside Atlanta Nites by two men in ski masks. One reported he heard a muffled pop from inside a black van. I read back through the interview with Malcolm. He talked about the man’s talent and some folks in Calliope he feared. The name Cash was mentioned several times. But Malcolm was their suspect.

Still nothing. Not what I’d hoped to find.

Jay popped his head in and asked if I wanted to go to lunch at Central Grocery.

I declined.

“You must be sick,” he said. “Life is a bag of Zapp’s.”

“This report doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It just kind of drops.”

“When someone goes missing, not a lot you can do, bra. You know how many people just disappear in New Orleans every year?”

“You know how many should?”

“You heard from that street freak that was harassing you?”

I shook my head.

“Look out for yourself,” he said.

I peered down at my legal pad and some notes I’d made. About thirty minutes later, I found a vending machine and drank a Barq’s. I ate some Oreos. I walked down a linoleum hall and let myself back into the records room.

What bothered me was that no family members had been interviewed about this guy. When I researched someone, often that was the first place I’d go. Who knows someone best but his own people?

I asked the sergeant — a burly white-haired man who kept a screen saver of George W. Bush on his computer — for an explanation. He stood, his back to the thin walls of pressed wood, where he’d hung photos of himself with three German shepherds sitting at his feet.

“Was he a transient?” he asked.

“No.”

“Who’d we find?”

“People he worked with.”

He nodded.

“He has an address that shows a place on Lakeshore Drive,” I said. “But I know he’d been in prison. Why isn’t there anything about that in the record?”

“You need to call the Department of Corrections for that,” he said. He flipped through a Rolodex, squinted at the tiny card, and read off a name and number. “She’ll get you what you need. Tell her I told you to call.”

I shook the desk sergeant’s hand.

“Good when you can do something,” he said.

“Did you work the street for long?”

“Long enough to piss someone off and end up here.”

The contact from the Louisiana Department of Corrections was a pleasant woman named Lisa. She sounded completely foreign to the Lisa I’d lived with when I played ball. She sounded as if she had a heart. A brain too. I told her the sergeant’s name and that I was researching for a buddy of mine and she told me to give her a few hours.

“Some inmate at Angola escaped this morning,” she said. “Those freakin’ reporters won’t leave us alone.”

I drove back to the warehouse and walked Annie down to Louisiana Products for a po’boy. I made coffee.

At 3, she called back.

“I have two Calvin Antoine Jacobses,” she said. “The first has a DOB March 3, 1974?”

“Let me double-check that birthday.”

“Is he currently incarcerated?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then that’s not him. The only other Calvin Antoine Jacobs I have in the system died two years ago.”

“This guy I need is missing,” I said. “No one ever found him. I didn’t think he was ruled dead.”

She paused for a second. “This guy died in Angola. Let me see… he was from New Orleans. Lived at 2538 Constance. He was convicted of two counts of manslaughter and one count of car theft in 2000.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“I think I love you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Read back that address.”

She did. I smiled.

I promised her free drinks at JoJo’s next time she was in New Orleans. Anything she wanted. My children. My dog. She could be bald with a harelip and I would’ve kissed her at that moment.

“What else can you tell me about Mr. Jacobs?”

“A lot,” she said. “What do you need to know?”

 

62

 

I WAS DOWN ON CONSTANCE an hour later passing a little neighborhood grocery, Parasol’s Irish bar, and rows of old shotguns until I found the one where Dahlia lived. I parked a block down the street, slid on The Club, and walked down the skinny broken sidewalk and under shady oaks to her door. I knocked. No one answered. I found a place to sit on her small porch, the deck wooden and uneven. I sat for a while, wilting in the heat. I walked back to my truck, stopped, and went back to the house. A warped gate closed the way to the back of the shotgun. It was locked.

I looked down the street and then back the other way.

I hopped the fence and followed a stone path covered in pink bougainvillea that grew over a fence and rotted awning. On the shaded back patio, white and purple impatiens hung from large baskets. In the deep shade, I recognized some yellow jasmine growing from iron grillwork. The air smelled of musky sweetness that enveloped me.

“My mother loved them,” she said.

Dahlia smiled at me, hands covered in white gloves and mashing potting soil into a terra-cotta pot. She wore a boy’s white tank top covered in mud. The cotton hugged the perfect shape of her breasts and tiny waist. She ran her forearm over her brow.

Her dark hair had grown curly in the heat and her large eyes watched me, her jaw loose. Lips parted.

“You want to tell me about your brother?” I asked.

“Jesus,” she said. Smiling. “You don’t stop.”

“I think I have it all figured out, but why don’t you tell me.”

She tilted her head and wrapped her long brown hair into a ponytail. Her hair seemed moist and rich. I could smell her scent. She smelled like coconut oil and warm skin.

“How’d your brother know Christian?”

She held her stare. “My daddy doesn’t like you too much.”

“He thinks I’m trying to save your soul.”

“Too far gone for that.” She pushed out her lower lip with mock sadness.

“Calvin was the real thing.”

“Calvin was a genius,” she said. “He was tested when we was kids and he was off the charts. My daddy tole me they put him in a room with a bunch of toys to figure things out. You know triangle to triangle? Circle to circle? He did all right till he clocked some poor child in the head with a block.”

“Couldn’t stay straight?”

“Hell, no,” she said. She looked at me, suddenly reminded of who I was and backed off. “Oh no. That’s enough. Take what you got and leave.”

“Let me come inside.”

“That just leads to bad things.”

“Not for me.”

“Don’t you like women?” she asked, brushing my chin with her index fingers.

“I like ’em too much,” I said. “They get me in trouble.”

“You got a woman now?”

“Yep.”

“Where she at?”

“She’s waiting on me,” I said. “I can’t leave till I find out what happened with Dio.”

“Dio,” she said. “Shit. Calvin wouldn’t ever taken no name like that. That was his invention.”

“When did you find out?” I asked, leading her into an area I didn’t know myself.

“Last year,” she said. “When he was dead.”

“Dio?”

“The one they called Dio.”

“They used him and killed him.”

She smiled and patted my face. “Right.”

She walked up some concrete blocks and into her house. I followed. She had her back turned to me leaning over her cast-iron sink. Her blue-jean shorts hugged her rounded thighs and her shoulder blades stretched under her brown skin. I was drawn to her neck, the beads of moisture collecting right among the tiny, soft hairs.

“They pay you to be quiet?”

“When I heard those rhymes, I knew,” she said. “Calvin had been workin’ on them since he was twelve. He had notebooks full of ’em. He wrote in them all the time. Made hand copies and sent them to me, even in jail. The ones that came out. The ones about Uptown life and all that? That was him. They didn’t change a word. His heart lived in those old ragged notebooks. We may have moved on, but his soul was still in Calliope where we was raised.”

“What happened?”

“A guard scrambled his brains,” she said, turning her back to me. She was crying. She tilted her head into her hands. Sunlight skimmed through the oaks and broke apart in strobe flashes across her face. Her back door kept slamming open and shut in the summer wind.

I could still smell the jasmine. So sweet and rich.

“I heard he filled the guard’s water bottle with horse shit,” she said. “The guard later said Calvin had tried to kill him with a broken piece of glass.”

I nodded, leaning against the back wall of the tiny kitchen. The ragged wallpaper made soft rubbing sounds.

“So his cellmate was Christian Chase,” I said.

She nodded.

“He pay you for keeping quiet?”

“Trey Brill did,” she said. “I came to them quick and asked for a cut. They let me in. They took me to dinner and later out to clubs with them.”

“And whose idea was it to work ALIAS?”

She shook her head.

“Come on,” I said. “You’ve come this far.”

“They fucked me,” she said. “Both of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They played with me for ten months,” she said. “I came to them whenever they wanted me. They put me on video and would make me sit there while I watched it with their friends. But they didn’t know who I was inside. It was my goddamn idea to run the kid. Marion and I got the idea when he came into the club that night. Kid was fifteen with millions. He had time to make it back. Besides, that was money built on my brother’s soul. Without Calvin, you wouldn’t have no ALIAS.”

“Come with me,” I said. “I need you to tell this to a friend of mine.”

“I’m not talking to the police.”

“Shit,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Come on.”

She twisted her head back and forth like a child. “No.”

“Did you know this guy, Dio? The one who used your brother’s lyrics?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course.”

Her eyes narrowed. I was losing her.

“They killed him and Malcolm.”

“They didn’t kill him,” she said.

I looked at her. The door kept slamming shut and she walked over and latched it, the wind still blowing through the screen.

She grabbed my hand. “Come lie down with me.”

“I think you’re sick, Dahlia,” I said. “You need to find comfort in yourself.”

“Just lie down,” she said.

“What did Trey and Christian pay you?”

“Seven thousand to keep quiet,” she said. “Trey said he knew a man who could make me disappear. He said the man liked to be paid in soiled money left on top of folks’ graves.”

“What about ALIAS’s money?”

She stared at me and shook her head. “Trey got it,” she said. “He said he could double my money if he put it all in stocks. I tried to get it back the other night when I seen him out. I ain’t ever seein’ that money. Yeah, he knew about ALIAS.”

“Talk to my friend,” I said. “He’s a good man. We need to know who killed Malcolm and Dio.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Dio ain’t dead. What you think happen to a boy in prison over six years? You think he might change a bit? Maybe get his teeth knocked out. Get branded. Maybe if he grow a beard and sport some jewelry and earrings, that even his own folks don’t know who he is.”

I couldn’t breathe.

I was afraid she would stop.

“That Christian Chase don’t have a soul,” she said. “I told him I loved him once. He told me I was just loving my own brother ’cause that’s who he’d become.”

 

63

 

TREY WAS SOMETIMES AMAZED by his own intelligence. He’d have a few glasses of good red wine or a few Amstel Lights and sit back and smile at how it all had played out. He grew the business from one player in the NFL to ten pro players, four rappers, an entire label, and eighteen high-level Uptown clients, including a city councilman and the heir to a hot-pepper-sauce franchise. He stared out from his window in the CBD down at a billboard on Canal for Cartier watches and another for a new line from Victoria’s Secret, the woman’s stomach as flat as a plate, her hips expansive. The night was purple, fluorescent lights flickering on the wide boulevard.

He opened his humidor on his desk and clipped off the end of a cigar. He thought ole Chase might want to hit Cobalt tonight. Molly was out of town and he’d line up a couple of dates from a score he’d made at Lucy’s last week.

He checked his properly mussed hair in the mirror and lost the tie.

“Hey, dog,” Trey said as Christian crossed the room in a black sleeveless T and tight khakis with sandals. He’d cut his hair so close that he was starting to look like that rat from Angola Trey had picked up at the bus station two years ago.

“He knows,” Christian said. “He fucking got to Dahlia. I told you, you stupid fuck, we should have axed her ass two months ago.”

“She was your punch,” Trey said. “He doesn’t know shit.”

“That was my dad on the phone,” Christian said. “Told me not to come home ever again. Said two detectives just showed up at his office asking about my relationship with Calvin Jacobs. What the fuck, man? What the fuck did you do?”

“Calm down,” Trey said, pouring himself a few fingers of Knob Creek. “It’ll work out.”

“What!” Christian screamed. “Are you goddamn crazy?”

“All right, let’s think. How do you even know this had something to do with Dahlia?”

“Who else could lead them to us?” he said. “It’s all your fault. It’s all your fucking fault. We had goddamn everything we wanted and you had to go in with that cunt to take ALIAS.”

“She wanted a cut of something.”

“Then give her some of your money.”

“I wanted her to get dirty, too,” Trey said. “You know how that works.”

“Like we all get dirty?” Christian asked. “Like how you had Redbone make that con man from the strip club disappear after you took ALIAS. Sometimes it doesn’t play out like that.”

“What?” Trey said, mussing his hair in the mirror again. “You getting all street on me again. Don’t confuse yourself. You know where you come from. Don’t start actin’ like some stupid nigger.”

Christian balled his hands at his side and ran for Trey. He stood so close that their noses touched. The foulness in Christian’s breath and the fear that poured from his own skin made Trey’s heart race.

He tried to calm himself. “Just chill out.”

“Some of us don’t have our daddy to hold our hands.”

“Hey, man,” Trey said. “Fuck off.”

He turned his back to Christian. He didn’t mean anything by it, but as soon as he pivoted, he knew he’d made a mistake.

“I’m not going back to Angola,” Christian said. “Not for you.”

Christian’s hands darted from his chest and took Trey by the throat. He threw his friend onto his back on the glass desk. Trey felt a heavy split down the middle, cracking like an ice pond from their weight.

Trey’s head rhythmically beat onto the glass.

Trey heard more cracking and tried to yell and scream for help. But he could only think it, his mind unable to control anything. He couldn’t move or speak, only feel the saliva pool on his lips and feel the blood and wetness pour from his mouth and eyes.

“This ain’t your game, dog,” Christian said.

 

64

 

MY CELL PHONE RANG as I headed back from NOPD, where I’d left Dahlia still talking with Jay. I answered, driving with one hand, passing Medina’s on Canal and crossing under I-10. I’d planned to meet JoJo down at Acme for a plate of jambalaya and some oysters. This was their last night in New Orleans. He and Bronco had finished up packing the apartment.

“He’s with me,” the voice said. Cell-phone static crackled over the line.

“Good for you,” I said. “Who is this?”

“Let’s play,” he said. “I have ALIAS, you fucking dumb-ass. I have my goddamn gun screwed in his ear right now. You fucking do one more thing and I’ll drop his ass in the sewer. You fucking hear me?”

“Slow down, Christian.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “Meet me down in the Ninth Ward on Piety. There is a house at—”

“I meet you where I say,” I said. “Fuck no. I’m not meeting you.”

The connection died.

I didn’t breathe for about a minute.

The cell rang again.

A better connection. He didn’t say anything.

“I’ll meet you at your folks’ house,” I said. “In Metairie.”

“No,” he said. “This isn’t about them.”

His voice was strained. The words hard but almost forced from his mouth in a quiet yell.

“That’s it. I’m headed to Old Metairie right now. You can decide on a place. Wait, okay. Yep. Just turned. Headed down I-10. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

I hung up and made a quick phone call.

The cell phone rang as I ran my truck about eighty, skirting the edge of the Metairie Cemetery. High up on the interstate, the mausoleums looked like a small city. Endless rows of crypts.

I answered the phone.

“Where?” he asked.

“You know the country day school?”

He didn’t answer.

“You know, where you and Trey got to be friends?”

“You say my friend’s name again and I’ll kill this little boy with you on the phone.”

 

 

METAIRIE COUNTRY DAY sat at the end of a neighborhood cul-de-sac in a large whitewashed brick house with green shutters. Huge magnolias and oaks stood in bright spotlights in the darkness. Behind the main house, classrooms stretched under two porticos separated by a commons. I heard my feet on the brick walk passing the classrooms as the wind scattered in the oak leaves and branches. Newsletters fluttered on a school bulletin board advertising ski trips to Switzerland and on-line shopping for Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End, and L.L. Bean. Elephant ears and monkey grass grew strong in freshly tilled soil.

I was far from JFK High.

I walked to the end of the portico and the last classroom. It was 10 and I didn’t hear anyone.

I looked into a darkened playground at the still swing sets and empty slides and then back at the long open walkway.

I heard a car door slam behind the school and playground and saw the chugging exhaust of an old car’s tailpipe in the brake lights. I reached for the gun tucked in my belt but left it there.

I walked back toward the front of the school and the main house. I stared over a railing at the little cul-de-sac and the houses lining the street. My truck was parked into a little curve under a light.

I looked at my watch and decided to make one more sweep.

I turned on my heel.

A tremendous force whopped my skull.

I tumbled to my knees, trying to gain my balance, but only finding my palms for support.

Everything was black. I could feel the heat of the blood from my skinned hands.

The air smelled of garbage and decaying skin. My eyes rolled and my vision faded from brown to black. I felt wire around my throat and tore at the hands that choked me.

 

65

 

I COULD NOT BREATHE, the air snuffed from inside, my face filling with blood. My gun fell to the ground.

I jabbed my elbow back into the freak’s chest and leaned forward, pulling him off his feet. I pressed my thumb into his wrists and felt his hands open. Bone and gristle snapping. I bent back his hands and butted him in the head.

He staggered back, facedown, slowly getting to his feet. He raised his head. Grayed skin wrinkled and decayed as a dead leaf across his skull. He reached into his coat and pulled out a little revolver.

He smiled with rotten, uneven teeth that looked like a brown picket fence.

I heard the crack of a gun; I closed my eyes.

The freak doubled over and sprinted down under the dark colonnades. I grabbed my Glock and followed a trail of thin, dark blood.

I’d heard the same car running by the playground and practice fields.

I turned the corner and Bronco joined me at my side. He kept pace, a mesh Caterpillar hat scrunched down in his eyes. I was damned glad I’d called them.

“JoJo’s got cover from the back,” he said. Grinning with the hunt. “You want me to drop that man from here?”

The freak was only about ten yards away, running past the darkened shapes of metal ponies and swing sets. His right hand grasping his left arm and staggering.

JoJo crossed before him, a thick shotgun sighted across the freak’s eyes.

Bronco stopped running and held his Colt in his right hand.

We slowed to a walk.

The man wheezed as if broken inside, sputters of air coming from him. His yellow eyes squinted, face twisted into a feral look of an animal cornered. His lips quivered over his broken teeth and he moved his hand to his pocket.

“Where’s the boy?” JoJo asked, pumping the gun.

The man kept wheezing.

Bronco came up fast behind him and slammed a boot into his lower back with a hard steel toe, knocking him to the ground.

He kept his boot there, breathing hard, and shook out a cigarette from a pack, placing it dry into his mouth. “Me and JoJo used to run deer up and down Clarksdale when we was kids. I got to be pretty good. ’Cept JoJo won’t admit it.”

“Bullshit,” JoJo said, dropping the shotgun and sauntering over to the old car.

“Well, hello, Tavarius,” he said so we could all hear.

I followed and found the boy tied with laundry line across his ankles and wrists. A torn piece of brown cloth gouged deep into his mouth. He tore at it with his teeth and tried to break free when he saw JoJo.

JoJo untied him.

I dialed 911.

“What you doin’?” Bronco asked.

“Calling the police.”

“Not on this,” he said, grinding his steel toe into the small of the man’s back. “He’s out of the game.”

He kicked at the man’s head, so quick and violent that I had to turn away.

Bronco picked up the man, as if he was recently found roadkill, and dragged him to the old car. The heels of the killer’s old brogan shoes scuffing behind him. The muscles and veins in Bronco’s huge forearms bulging with his years of strength.

“Get the keys.”

I did, turning off the ignition of the old Pontiac, painted a light gold. Vinyl seats covered in duct tape.

“Pop the trunk,” he said.

I did.

“See you back at the bar,” Bronco said.

“Wait.”

“Come on, Nick,” JoJo said. “Let’s get this kid safe.”

Tavarius was rubbing his wrists. He refused to look me in the face.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know about Dio.”

He shook his head and walked away.

JoJo winked at me and followed.

 

66

 

I HEADED STRAIGHT for the Ninth Ward, driving along Claiborne under the interstate, past the old Victorians boarded up and left rotting, their third-story windows only feet from concrete and steel and speeding cars. I passed little community groceries that sold beer from iced trash cans and offered health care through a backroom doctor. Kids on bicycles circled me at street corners. Lazy-eyed crackheads tried to sell me fruit that had been cut and locked into Ziploc bags, and soft-faced women with protruding bellies wandered shoeless out on Elysian Fields. Under the nearby oaks, the ground had been worn as soft as talcum powder in the yards of the rotting antebellum homes.

I crossed over the channel on a short bridge. Cheap little billboards advertised discount cigarettes and beer, a free AIDS hot line. Barges hugged the edge of the docks and mammoth warehouses sat in rusting humps.

I took a turn onto Desire and wound through the little red, blue, and yellow shotguns. Ninth Ward Records sat behind its wrought-iron fence topped with decorative fleur-de-lis in a big squat concrete building of black and gold. Teddy had his electric-blue Bentley parked by the main glass door.

I walked inside and headed straight back to his office.

He was rearranging his CDs when I walked in. Must have been thousands of them in little piles all over the carpet. He had on a black suit with a red shirt and fedora. I noticed he hadn’t shaved in a while and his eyes looked rheumy.

“We need to talk.”

He nodded, moving like he was a hundred back to his big white sofa. He took off his jacket and stretched out his huge arms across its back.

I stood and crossed my arms over my shirt.

I looked down at my boots.

He was silent.

“ALIAS was conned,” I said. “And so were you.”

He moved forward, a big bear finding his place, and rubbed his hands together. “What happened?”

“Dio wasn’t real,” I said. “One of Trey’s buddies just acted it out. He’d stolen this guy’s rhymes when he was in Angola.”

“What the fuck?” Teddy asked, suddenly awake. “Man, what are you talking about, Dio wasn’t real?”

“The real Dio was a guy named Calvin Jacobs. He was killed in prison.”

Teddy shook his head. “I knew that boy. That boy made my company. I was with him when he got jacked by those men at the club.”

“You knew Christian Chase,” I said. “Trey Brill’s buddy? The real Dio’s sister is Dahlia, man. She got in with Brill ’cause she knew the truth. It was her idea to work the con on ALIAS. ALIAS wasn’t lying, man. She roped him in with Trey’s blessing.”

“Slow down,” Teddy said, standing now and pacing. “This don’t make no goddamn sense. Trey Brill set all this up. Did all this to me? Why? He don’t need money. Why he taken me out? And Malcolm. Jesus.”

Teddy started to cry and I made an awkward move for him, patting him a couple times on his back. “Trey got Malcolm killed,” he said, sobbing. “Didn’t he? Malcolm knew about Dio. Malcolm knew.”

“Only thing I can figure.”

“Lord, Lord. He killed my brother.” Teddy ran to his desk and I watched him. Manic and angry. Three hundred pounds of crying grief. Wringing his hands, face crunched tight in sorrow.

“You made this all happen, Nick,” Teddy said. “You got everybody to come to Jesus. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Nick. Malcolm knew you’d do right.”

He hugged me awkwardly again. “Brill is dead,” Teddy said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “The cops are looking for him. Dahlia turned on Trey and Christian.”

“She what?” Teddy asked.

“They messed up her mind,” I said. “Her soul is gone. They used her up, man.”

“Jesus. Jesus,” Teddy said. “Malcolm said you’d set it straight. I didn’t believe him. That day when we come to you, I told him he’s bein’ foolish. But that boy knew you’d set it straight. He always look up to you. Even when he was a kid.”

I smiled. I patted Teddy on the back. “Come on, let’s go.”

He fell to his knees. He dragged all the papers off his desk and toppled hundreds of CDs. He tried to stand, bounding like a trapped elephant, scattering plastic everywhere.

“Malcolm,” he screamed. “Malcolm. Lord God. Help me.”

He found his feet and gained his composure, wiping his face with the tail of his red silk shirt. He mopped his face, exposing his massive hairless stomach.

I watched him as he reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out a handgun.

“Jesus, no,” I said. “The police will get his ass.”

“Trey couldn’t get enough. He had to bring in the kid.”

I looked at him and tilted my head.

Before I could speak, Teddy leveled the gun at me and fired off three quick rounds, dropping me onto his white carpet. I had to bite into my arm to stop the heat and pain.

“We wouldn’t never found out about Trey and Dahlia wasn’t for you,” Teddy said. “We appreciate that.”

Hard shoes kicked into me and rolled me on my back with the toe.

I stared up into the green eyes of Christian Chase.

 

67

 

YOU CAN’T SLEEP. It’s 4 A.M. and the old man snorin’ in Nick’s bed, his friend Bronco watching a black-and-white movie from the Old West. Bronco doesn’t care much for the man in the mask but he sure like that Indian that ride with him. Every time some shit goes down, Bronco give you a nudge in the ribs and say wake up and listen.

The warehouse seem like a big cave to you, some kind of place where you keep an airplane. Big fans work up the tin ceiling and the smooth wood on the floor feels soft on your bare feet. But you ain’t got no comfort. Neither does the dog. She knows something wrong. The way she just hang by the door, making some whimperin’ sounds.

The old man shootin’ up out of bed in his nightshirt, silver hair on his chest. “Nick?”

“It ain’t him,” you say. “He ain’t back.”

“What time is it?”

“Four.”

He sighs real tight. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” you ask. “I called Teddy fifty times.”

“Show me,” JoJo said, snaking his belt through his britches and buttonin’ up his shirt.

Bronco watches him, stands, cuts off the TV, and straps the shoulders onto his country-ass overalls. His eyes are real hard as he reaches for his cigarettes and some shotgun he bought that he call “Sweet Sixteen.”

“Smells,” JoJo said.

You nod. Things are wrong. Feel wrong in your head.

You stand and walk over to the sink, pourin’ cold water into your hands and watching the sink fill up while you wash your face. As you bend into the water, you watch the Superman symbol Dio touched sink into the clear water like an anchor.

“I know,” you say. You wipe your hands on a dry towel, feelin’ funny and dry in the mind ’cause of the time. Your mind awake; body want to sleep. “Let’s roll.”

Don’t take no time when you down at Ninth Ward. You remember the first time Teddy drove you here and you thinkin’ that the roof was really made out of gold. But it just look like painted tin tonight in the shine of them crime lights. Bugs gatherin’ all around them.

You bang on the window and one of Teddy’s cousins, this boy y’all call Poochie, come to the door. He smile and wave when he see you. Poochie ain’t but like two years older than you and he look like he playin’ dress-up with his cornrows and skinny head in that blue uniform.

“Nigga, you even got a gun,” you say, givin’ him the pound.

The old man whack you in the back of the head. “Where’s Teddy?” JoJo ask.

Ole Poochie shake his head and say he don’t know. But the way he won’t meet you in the eye mean he lyin’.

“Poochie, don’t pull my dick, you seen him down here with my boy Nick.”

Poochie nod.

“So where he at?”

“They left, man. Don’t go ridin’ me about this shit.”

“Somethin’ happen?”

JoJo shake his head. Bronco already headin’ down the hall.

“Hey,” Poochie yell. “Hey.”

But Bronco and JoJo already lookin’ inside of rooms and offices and wanderin’ round the studio where you supposed to cut a record tomorrow.

“JoJo!” Bronco yells. The old man go and you follow.

Poochie try to grab your arm but you already inside Teddy’s office and see Bronco down on one knee, just like that Indian scout in the movie, sniffin’ and trailin’ animals and shit. Only this time, don’t take much.

A big ole pool of red blood mixed in that high, white carpet.

“What up, man?” you yell at Poochie. You get in his face. “What up?”

“They gone, man,” he say. “That’s all.”

“Where?”

Poochie shake his head again. “I don’t know.”

“Where’s Teddy?”

Then you see the gold hook, the one laden down with keys to the two Bentleys and three Escalades, and that big Scarab sport boat. The big ole fish key chain ain’t on the hook.

“Where’s Nick?”

“I seen him come in,” Poochie say. “But only Teddy and some dude left.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some punk nigga.”

“Was he branded?” you ask.

“I don’t know.”

“What he look like?”

“He had eyes like him,” he said, pointing to Bronco.

JoJo look at you and y’all know.

“How long they been gone?”

“They was yellin’ in here and shit for a while and then they left ’bout an hour ago.”

“I know where they at,” you say. “But he gone.”

JoJo look at you.

“He got his boat out in the lake. Man, we ain’t ever gonna find him. That boat run.”

“We need a faster boat, kid,” he says. “What you got hidden with all your toys?”

“Na,” you say. You reach into your wallet and find a platinum card, raised lettering. “But I got someone who can hook us up.”

The C-phone already caught in your hand callin’ on Cash.

 

68

 

I PRESSED MY PALM to the wet bloody mess below my rib cage. My fingers trembled and my breath slowed. All I could smell was new car in the trunk of Teddy’s Bentley and something ripe and sour. My head bounced against a tire iron every time he slowed, my feet crinkling on some shopping bags where they’d placed me. I don’t know if they thought I was dead, or cared. I’d passed out right until I’d been carried out. Everything seemed dulled. My head throbbed from where I fell and hit the edge of Teddy’s desk. I was in shock. My mind unclear.

I kept my palm to the wound, trying to stop the blood. Apply pressure, that’s what you did. Right? I tried to breathe. I wanted to kick at the side of the car. I wanted to try and rip out of the trunk. But I was shut inside, didn’t have the energy, and knew any sound would just draw them to shoot me again.

I breathed. And swallowed.

I felt as if someone had carved into my flesh with a hot knife and kept twisting the blade inside me. Jesus. Jesus.

I closed my eyes and prayed.

Teddy. My mind wasn’t right. Teddy.

We hit a bump and a solid, fleshy mass lolled against me. In the dim glow of the taillights, flickering on and off in a red strobe, I turned my head and saw Trey Brill staring at me with glassy blue eyes. His face gray and covered in dried blood.

“Goddamn,” I yelled. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move in the trunk. I felt as if my body had been wired together and shut inside a coffin.

I kicked hard, denting in the side of the car. I gritted my teeth.

The car slowed.

I heard muffled voices.

I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing even more. I turned my head away from Trey and the smell of his body releasing all of its fluids.

Outside, hands beat on the trunk.

“Calm down,” Christian said.

“It’ll be okay,” Teddy said.

“Cool.”

“Okay, Malcolm,” Teddy said.

“Man, chill.”

“Malcolm?”

“I’m not fuckin’ Malcolm,” Christian yelled. “Now open the goddamn trunk and let’s get this shit done.”

I kept my eyes shut, felt Teddy’s meaty hands lift under me like a spatula and cradle me into his huge arms. I let all my muscles go slack. No breathing. I held my breath.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Lord God Jesus. Jesus my savior.”

“Teddy, shut the fuck up,” Christian said.

Their feet crunched on gravel.

Feet shifted upon wooden planks and I heard the slap of water against pilings. I opened my eyelids just a crack. Still dark. The glow of security lights over dozens of boats parked in narrow little slips.

His feet stopped and he dropped me onto the deck right on my hurt side. I bit so hard into my lip that I could taste blood, an electric current of pain lighting up my body. But I didn’t scream.

In my mind, I saw clear blue water leaking from my eyes and a black shroud covering my face in a tight mask. I took in air slow.

With a thud, Trey’s body dropped onto the deck beside me like a freshly caught fish onto ice. I smelled his odor and heard a ticking sound. When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but his large Rolex’s second hand sweeping across the black face. His wrists turning purple and light gray.

Teddy cried, almost as if he’d become a child again. Sniffling, wailing.

An engine started and puttered.

Christian used my back as a springboard to pop back up to the slip and untie the lines. Seconds later, we moved out.

In the dim blue-black light of the false dawn, I prayed some more.

I thought of my body resting as I bled. I thought about my energy storing up. I’d just lie still for a while. Try and keep conscious. I bit my hurt lip to feel more pain. Keep alert.

My face flush to the ground, brown water running into my purposely open mouth, I saw a revolver on Christian’s hip.

“Stop, cryin’, boy,” he said. “Hard part’s over.”

I heard the radio tune around the dial.

He found a rap station playing a song that kept on with a steady beat. “Oohhhwee.” More beats. More rhymes. “Ooohhhweee.”

Christian rapped along as he steered.

Teddy moved beside him, silk shirt bloody and untucked.

I could only see his back and fat neck stretched tight as he looked down into the water. “Where we goin’, Malcolm?”

“You my dog, Teddy,” Christian said. “You right. We brothers now.”

 

69

 

THAT DOCK WHERE TEDDY keep that Scarab is empty as hell. Light just comin’ over the edge of the lake while you and JoJo and Bronco look out from the marina at all the places where they could’ve gone out in that black water. JoJo’s old truck parked next to Teddy’s Bentley, right by the edge of all those boats, all faded blue and dented. JoJo looks across Pontchartrain and then over at Bronco, who shakes his head.

“Ain’t no way,” Bronco says. “That’s the biggest thing I ever seen.”

“Where that friend you promise?” JoJo asks.

“He comin’.”

“What’s he to you?”

“He owes me.”

“For what?”

“Whatever he want.”

“Words are nothin’ to a thug,” he says. “This boy don’t sound no different than an animal.”

Just as he say that, his old truck gets swallowed up by five white Escalades and a bright yellow Ferrari where you see Cash float out shirtless with leather pants. He wears sunglasses and got a toothpick cocked out the side of his mouth.

JoJo look over at you and shake his head.

“He got a boat,” you say. “Fast as hell.”

He looks over at Bronco. Bronco nods.

“Have no fear,” Cash say.

You ain’t got no time for no introductions and no time for a lot of words.

“Travers out on the lake,” you say.

“What?” he ask. “You want me to take out my sweet little boat for his ass?”

“Listen, goddammit,” JoJo say, gettin’ in Cash’s face and seein’ Cash ain’t used to that. “You either help us get out on that lake and look for my boy or get back to shinin’ your sissy-ass chains.”

Cash smiles platinum and grunts. “Who you, old man?”

“The man been kickin’ ass before your granddaddy even got his dick wet.”

Twelve of Cash’s Angola crew moan and laugh. Cash look at them, givin’ that mean eye, lettin’ them know to shut that mouth.

“Why you want to help that white boy?” he ask.

JoJo turns. “Come on, Tavarius.”

“Tavarius?” Cash asks, laughin’. “Man, now that’s funny. That your name, ALIAS?”

You look at him, cockin’ that head and lookin’ up into his eyes. “Yeah, that’s my name.”

Y’all walk through the crowd, bumpin’ shoulders with some of those do-rag niggas, when Cash yell: “You wit’ me now?”

You turn and nod.

“Well, let’s get in the goddamn boats. Ain’t never too early for no ride.”

JoJo look back, cuttin’ his eyes straight down the narrow little dock. “What you got?”

Cash flicks his forefinger out — almost makin’ it out like a gun — and point to one of them Cigarette racin’ boats you seen when you down in Miami. Man, you heard them things could run you all the way down to the Bahamas before the hour through.

But this boat don’t look nothin’ like that shit in Miami. This one ghetto hard all the way. It’s purple and gold and got the words BALLIN’ III painted in shiny looped letters at the back and the cartoon head of a pit bull in a diamond collar snarlin’ up front of that sleek, long boat. Look like some kind of rocket ship.

“Y’all take the other two,” he yell to some of his boys.

Down the dock, you see Cash got two more boats that look like the same.

“I designed them myself,” Cash says as y’all walk back. “Only limitation is that imagination.”

“Lord God, help the world,” JoJo said. “Your ghetto ass know how to steer?”

“Sit down, ole man, and strap your ass in, ’cause we headed to the goddamn moon.”

The engine start with a chug, chug, chug and y’all is rollin’ out hard as that edge of the lake, where it look like black glass, is turnin’ all purple with the sky.

Y’all is flyin’, skippin’ over tiny little waves listenin’ to Mystikal tellin’ the world to get out his way. Salty mist hittin’ your eyes. Tastin’ the lake on your lips.

JoJo holds on tight.

Bronco finds himself standin’ right by Cash, lookin’ into the wind.

You see that old man’s smile match the thug’s.

 

70

 

“WE NEED SOME WEIGHT,” Christian yelled to Teddy. “Teddy? You listenin’, man? I said, we got some weight?”

“You’re right, Malcolm. It’s all right. We get the weight. Sweet Jesus. We got that weight.”

Christian started laughing. “Stone-cold crazy. Stonecold. Malcolm. Yeah, boy.”

The speedboat cut hard and picked up speed. I felt the water beating hard on the hull and slapping us up and down with the chop. I kept my eyes closed, growing nauseous.

Christian kept rapping along with the radio station in his khakis and sandals. I peeked back at Teddy standing by his side. I looked over at Trey and the way his head bobbed, his body slapping down with the hull every few seconds.

I felt bile rise in my throat.

I got to my feet. Everything shaking. My balance teetering, head swimming in long Olympic strokes. I held on to the rail and, without any great stealth, made my way, trying to get the revolver Christian wore tucked in his belt.

I was within a few feet when he spiked the throttle and threw me onto my back with a thud. He laughed. Teddy peered down at me — but it wasn’t Teddy in his eyes — and he looked away. Dumb and mute.

Christian slowed the boat. A constant chugging from the motor.

He stood over me and kicked me hard in the head.

He kicked me again.

I curled into a ball and then rolled to my hands and knees.

I used the rail and got to my feet, puking all over my shirt.

Everything felt like it was spinning and turning.

“Teddy,” I said. “Come on, man. What happened? It’s still you. It’s still you.”

He slowly twisted his head from side to side. “No.”

“Come on, man.”

Christian leveled the gun at my head, the biggest wicked grin forming on his lips. Green eyes slanting. A pink, blue dawn sliding over the black water, framing his body.

He jumped and fell.

On the deck, Trey’s hands wrapped around Christian’s ankles. Blood poured from his mouth and he made a gurgling, croaking sound.

Christian fired off three rounds into Trey’s head, sending misting blood across the white fiberglass of the hull.

I leapt for him, grabbed his throat, and head-butted him. I plunged my thumbs into his voice box and he made a muted shriek as it cracked in my hands. The gun clattered to the ground.

Teddy never moved as Christian fell. I picked up the gun.

Without hesitation, I aimed it at Christian’s head and pulled the trigger.

Click.

I pulled it again.

Click.

I heard another click and turned.

Teddy was back. Or some part of him.

He had the hammer thumbed back on his .357 Magnum. His eyes and face were dead. No light, no feeling. His black skin slick with sweat. He aimed the barrel toward me and said in his deep voice, “Sit your ass down till we find a good and dark place to kill you.”

 

71

 

CASH HUGS THAT COAST of Pontchartrain, that mean ole humpbacked levee running for miles out on-shore. Look like the spiny back of a dragon blockin’ you from seein’ anything off the lake. The sky is so pink and gray. These big-ass long clouds that crack and stretch like broken slabs of concrete in the early day. The sun just a slice of orange over that long, green levee, colorin’ these old fishin’ shacks on tall crooked wooden legs that stretch out long and crippled. Some of them is just legs now, weather and time and shit bleachin’ all that wood away.

Cash slow his purple boat, his right hand on that wheel that look like a racecar. He open up his C-phone and start talkin’. He yellin’ into it, tellin’ them to “Work ’em. Work ’em.”

He flick it shut and turn to JoJo. “My boys seen ’em. They was right down by the causeway and must’ve got scared. They’s runnin’ ’em back toward us. Both my boats like two pit bulls.”

JoJo smiled. “Hot damn,” he said. But then he stopped smilin’ when Cash turn the boat toward the bridges headin’ out of the city. “They see Nick?”

Cash shook his head. “Just Teddy and some other brother.”

“That brother is Dio,” you say.

“What?” Cash says, wealth flashin’ in his mouth. He starts to laugh.

“Dio ain’t dead,” you say. “Some rich motherfuckers over in Metairie made him up. He ain’t neva real.”

“What you mean, not real?” Cash asks, lookin’ back. Real concerned now.

“I said that nigga weren’t eva real,” you say. “This boy Christian just actin’ thugged up. They weren’t his rhymes, man. He stole them off a dead man he knew in Angola and then made his own self disappear. They schemed all them lost records and shit.”

Cash shook his head. “That the boy on the boat?”

“Yeah.”

“He got to win the Academy Award,” he say. “I even heard folks out in Calliope say they his people.”

Bronco reach into a duffel bag and hands JoJo a long, black pistol.

“Teddy know about this?” Cash ask.

You say he did.

“Lord help ’em both,” Cash say. “You gonna kill ’em, old man?”

“I kill anyone gets in my way.”

“You with him, Tavarius?” Cash ask.

“All the way.”

“Y’all just thugs and don’t even know it.”

Cash lay down the throttle and that long green levee break behind you. Y’all runnin’ down a long old railroad bridge crossin’ the water.

“The Trestle,” JoJo says, to no one in particular.

 

 

CHRISTIAN STEERED the boat while Teddy tied Trey’s body with thick white rope and wrapped the cord of a ship radio around his neck, letting the heavy transmitter fall to his chest. He duct-taped a big red fire extinguisher to his dead body and pulled the cover of a black pillowcase over his head.

“Goddamn, he wouldn’t quit lookin’ at me,” Teddy said. “You like that, Malcolm?” He started to laugh. “You like that?”

“Yeah, Teddy,” Christian said. “Good boy.”

I held my place on a backseat, rolling and rocking with the boat. My entire body smeared with my own blood and vomit. Dark maroon stains across my palms.

“Teddy, you remember that time you won the Atlanta game? You scooped up the ball and ran in for a touchdown. We went down to that bar in the Quarter and later on you danced on a table with that midget. You remember that? Man, we had a good time.”

I smiled up at him.

He tilted his head at me. His eyes narrowing. “You ain’t nothin’.”

“I’m your friend. It’s Nick.”

“Nick?”

He smiled for a moment, eyes softening.

His shape darkened as we headed for the long train bridge — Christian squeezing through the narrow opening — sewing our way under two more long bridges of the old highway and then the interstate twisting north. He smiled as the day softened all pink and gold all the way to the Gulf. Christian running us close to the shore and cursing God for only finding marsh.

We slowed to a chug as he looked for solid ground.

I held out my hand to Teddy.

The smile shut off.

“It’s all gone too far,” he said.

We were on the far edge of Orleans Parish, the edge of the Bayou Sauvage.

I could smell the foulness of the bayou rot as we moved away from the lake and deeper into the high grass. I’d hunted around here sometime back with JoJo, a place called Blind Lagoon.

I heard the scream of a nutria in the slate-gray-and-pink morning. The swamp rat’s bloated body swimming in the high grass, slabs of yellow and brown teeth like a prehistoric animal. Red eyes watching us in the fresh light.

Dawn was here.

Dead cypress silhouetted the landscape like amputated appendages.

As Christian slowly moved into the marsh, engine revving and stopping, revving and stopping, I saw an eagle turn in the sky and hang there for a moment, just riding in the wind that moved him.

 

72

 

“AIN’T NOBODY GOING to get through that mess,” JoJo say, lookin’ into that smelly-ass swamp. Cash keep the boat back a ways from where Teddy stand on the Scarab. You once wanted that boat but now you want to drill holes in it and watch it sink way down deep into all that brown-green ooze you passin’ through.

You hear the crack of a gun. A bullet spiderwebs the window on Cash’s boat.

JoJo pushes you down. Cash yells.

“He’s dead,” he says. “I should’ve killed that fat son of a bitch when I got the chance. Goddamn. Shootin’ my boat. Man.”

He reaches for a big-ass .44 he got kept in a little cover by the steering wheel. “Yeah, that’s right.” He revs the motor and drifts closer. “Come on, motherfucker. Cash here to play.”

Bronco inches down on the side of the boat, his gun aimin’ right toward the Scarab.

Y’all drift.

The sound of the cars on the bridges fade away. All you see now is high grass and these tall things that look like bamboo. Ducks. Big funny-lookin’ pelicans and shit. The high grass parts and you see an alligator.

You fall down on your face tryin’ to get to a corner. It’s green and scaly with a knotty back swimmin’ away from the boat.

JoJo look at you and kind of laugh. “Bronco? Guess Tavarius don’t like gators any better than you.”

“I make that motherfucker into a pair of boots.”

Cash squeeze off a couple shots and you hear Teddy’s boat shoot out, engine revvin’ real hard. Cash slam down that throttle and y’all ride, beatin’ through the tall grass and sendin’ up muck, like some kind of green-ass milk shake, splatterin’ behind you.

“Got him,” Cash say, laughing. “We got him.”

Teddy’s boat revving real hard. Smoke shootin’ from the engine, whining almost like a scream, but not moving.

 

 

CHRISTIAN TRIED to reverse the boat and then run her forward. But nothing would get him untangled from the high grass and mud that clogged the propellers of the engine. I looked back and saw JoJo with Cash in this big, purple Cigarette boat and then Bronco and ALIAS. My eyes wavered and I bent at the waist for a few more dry heaves.

Christian turned to me, seeing the smile form on my face, and plodded back, knocking me in the chest with his fist. I tumbled back into the water, twirling in the bayou, feet sucking deep into the muck, and finally finding the way to air. I swallowed in light and oxygen, brushing reeds away from my face.

He looked down at me. “Push, goddammit. Push us out of this shit.”

I moved to the side of the boat, found my fists on the hull loosening, handprints painting brown patterns on the white paint, and pretended to move the boat from the reeds.

Christian revved her motor again and foul-smelling bubbles of marsh gases erupted from deep in the bottom.

Teddy stood over me, his arm extended with his gun. He squeezed off a few in the direction of Cash.

Still, I heard the steady, constant motor of Cash’s boat. Chugging. Ready to pounce.

I pretended to push more. My weight not moving a feather.

Teddy disappeared from the stern.

I walked backward in the thick water. The water level coming up to my neck.

I saw a water moccasin glide and curve sideways from the middle of the little lagoon.

Cash hit the engine hard and the long torpedo of boat shot forward hard and fast.

Teddy fired, the glass windshield exploding from Cash’s boat.

The boat whooshed by me and collided hard with Teddy’s Scarab. A cracking thunderous crash.

I heard two splashes and saw Teddy scrambling into the water, paddling his way to a shore that barely existed. Deeper into the reeds and grasses.

Silence. The engines died.

Yelling.

JoJo jumped in and high-stepped his way to me.

I felt my eyes roll back in my head and I tumbled backward.

He caught me and dragged me to a long flat of mud. My face flush into the gray muck, seeing scattering animals’ footprints. The early-morning heat rising in odorous waves from the pile.

I collected myself. Wavered to my feet.

I heard a few more shots.

Two other big purple Cigarette boats ran close to the line of tall grasses. Some of Cash’s boys getting up to their waists, guns held high over the water, slogging through. I saw a couple up to their ankles in marsh. Each step taking a grimace from the men, mud and decaying earth sucking them down.

I heard rustling. Grasses shifted near where I stood.

I wandered forward, the heat and sun and loss of blood wrapping the whole earth in a halo.

JoJo yelled for me.

I fell to my knees, sinking up to my elbows and thighs through it all, water and mud covering my face. Losing a boot and pulling off the other one, crawling for the sound through a tunnel of broken reeds, where cloven feet scattered in a labyrinth of high grass.

I tumbled out about thirty yards on the other side.

I stood on a muddy little bank, the bayou holding me up to my knees.

Teddy was stuck, frozen. Birds trilling all around us.

He turned to me. His red shirt muddy and torn. Dirt and mud caked over his face and into his hair. He looked almost comical.

But he wasn’t laughing.

His gun hung loose in his hand.

 

 

TWO of Cash’s boys haul Dio’s ass out of the damned bayou, pulling him out by his neck. Cash stand like some kind of general, shirtless and scarred, on our boat waiting to meet him. He reach down into the water, grab him by his arms, and pull him on board with all of us. Ain’t no real sound comin’ from nowhere. Just animal sounds and water slapping real low from beneath them bridges. You don’t say a word.

You just walk over with Cash and look down at the man you thought was God.

He look the same but don’t seem the same.

He look at you, recognize you know he ain’t shit, and then see his eyes jump down to your Superman platinum.

He reach for it and you knock his hand away.

“You just takin’ my place,” Dio says. “You just like me.”

Cash says, “Shut the hell up.” He knock him across the mouth with the butt of his gun. Then you hear him cock the motherfucker and hand it to you.

It feel strong and warm in your hand and don’t take you but two seconds to aim that bitch right at Dio’s heart.

“What’s your name?” you say.

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

JoJo behind him now and he got his hand out. He got his palm out, waiting for you to lay that steel in his hand.

“Shoot him!” Cash yell. “Shoot. Shoot.”

JoJo shake his head on the other side.

“My name is Christian,” he says. “Christian Chase.” His eyes are green but loose and heavy. He don’t show nothin’.

You thumb back the hammer and let it down loose.

You hand that gun to JoJo.

He take it.

Just as you step back, Christian turn and come at Cash with a knife in his hand. He gets that blade right at his face.

But Bronco steps from beside you, grab him at his wrist, and you see the punk drop to his knees and start cryin’ like a bitch. The knife fallin’ out of his hand.

Cash pick up the knife, look at it, and toss it in the water.

He nod at Bronco.

Bronco nod back at him, their shapes gettin’ thrown down on the tops of water in a silver mirror.

A boat pull up beside you and Cash pulls Christian from his feet and throw him in with some of his boys.

“Welcome to the Dirty South, Christian Chase.”

Cash smile at y’all from the other boat, throwing you the keys.

They float off and turn, breaking hard in the middle of the bayou and headin’ back out into Pontchartrain.

JoJo’s hand feel good on your shoulder.

 

 

I LOOKED at Teddy frozen in the mud. We didn’t exchange words. His eyes watched something beyond my shoulder, maybe a sound he heard, and wavered deep into the marsh that held him.

“Come on.”

He stretched the gun out from his arm. His eyes reflected a person I’d never met.

“We all go back to mud,” Teddy said, the fat shaking under his chin. Contorting with the emotion in his voice. “My preacher used to tell me and Malcolm that. Told us to be like the mud. That’s what we came from. What we all gonna be.”

I breathed, smelling the putrid smell of animals and plant life rotting around us in a big compost pile. Bile rose in my throat.

I heard boats buzzing and scattering away out in the bayou.

He pulled the gun back into him. An eagle swooped down and then caught a wave of rising air, shooting quickly back up into the blue sky.

Teddy Paris smiled. “Always knew you could take a joke, Travers.”

He slid the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The hard cracking sound brought a scattering of birds and insects floating off the marsh in a black stream and pinpointed dots that covered the white sun.

I dropped my head, turned, fighting the marsh, and made it halfway back through the grassy tunnel carved by a wild animal.

I crawled to get away from the place I’d seen Teddy slowly disappear into the bayou.

 

73

 

THE WORD CAME DOWN two weeks later that Ninth Ward Records was no more. You thought you was headed right back to Calliope, slidin’ right back in with your grandmamma and workin’ block parties to feed yourself. But right when you think you broke, you find yourself in New York City. You and Cash got a mack deal with a record company that been around for a hundred years. You see pictures of all them folks that come before you down this long white hall at these tight offices. Jazz women and blues daddies like the old man and Nick listen to. And that’s all cool, ’cause you know someday you just gonna be down that same line.

That new joint you’re workin’ in New York keepin’ you away from the Dirty South. You like seein’ your face off buses and bein’ thug-lipped over Times Square and it’s cool and all meetin’ Diddy and LL at some party in the middle of a big park made out of green grass. But somehow you feel like you losin’ you. Your rhymes not comin’ out the way you feel. The beats you hear sound like someone openin’ up a tin can.

You make a call. You on a plane.

You ride onto Canal, cruise uptown, pick up that little honey you’d met at this club with Malcolm Paris back when, and roll down to the Quarter in a white Escalade limo. See how Old School makin’ out. You don’t need to know. You just wonderin’.

You pay some big man in a straw hat five dollars at the door and see Loretta howlin’ a big mess onstage. Man, you ain’t never known that woman could sing like that. She got a storm inside her that always seem quiet to you.

Nick behind the bar with some bald black man. JoJo hangin’ in the back, leanin’ against the wall by the door. He smilin’, watchin’ his wife and Nick. Kind of takin’ it all in. You smile at that, shrug off your mink coat, and order a bottle of Cristal from some little honey waitress. Little Miss you with punch you in the ribs and you laugh till they ask you for ID and say champagne ain’t on the menu. And that shit ain’t cool.

Loretta keep singin’, all wrapped up in some fine-ass green satin. Face all painted up, silk hankie in her hand. “Don’t ask me no questions, and I won’t tell you no lies.”

The music is old. You don’t like it. But you can’t help but move your feet. ’Cause you been to where it come from and some way you knowin’ more about yourself.

Nick come by and say hello to you and your girl in between sets, but a few seconds later, he get called back to the bar to give a mess of folks some more beer. He seems to like poppin’ the tops of those Dixies and you thinkin’ about grabbin’ some while he ain’t lookin’.

Your date not hangin’ with the scene and disappears back into the bathroom. You tell her to hang. But she want to move on now. She got some girlfriends down at some club that you used to know. Everything in New Orleans change. But still the same.

The old man and you talk about New York and he ask you about some clubs in Harlem that you know ain’t even real. He make fun of your mink and them boots you paid a thousand bucks for and you laugh at that. ’Cause that teasin’ ain’t no disrespect. That ole man like you.

Nick still won’t pour you no alcohol and you knock hard on the bathroom tryin’ to find the girl. You hear her laughin’ inside and you push open the door, findin’ her snortin’ up off the top of a towel rack with some little white dude.

She don’t see you. But you leave her there and walk the Quarter. You got $2,000 in your pocket, a room at the Monteleone, and a record in the gate just jumpin’ for number one.

You sit down at Jackson Square, where you used to make money shinin’ shoes, and down past the mall, where you was thrown out for hustlin’. Your mind race over these months. Teddy’s ride. Malcolm and you hangin’ at the clubs. All the champagne and the way Malcolm treated you. He tellin’ you it’s family. But he just treatin’ you like he treat himself.

Time on your Cartier say you left the bar two hours ago. You thinkin’ about the girl, you guess. Ain’t no way you thinkin’ about Nick and the old man. But they all there. Them doors on Conti closed, houselights on in the bar, and JoJo and him just clearin’ up beer bottles into a trash can.

JoJo singin’ along to the jukebox.

You knock on the glass.

And Loretta lets you in.

Everyone stops for a while. No money bein’ counted. No beer bein’ drunk.

Just all y’all sittin’ at this little table. Loretta and JoJo. You and Old School. And you laughin’ about things that been and some things that JoJo think gonna happen.

That jukebox slows after the last song. Neon and chrome real bright.

Another record slips onto the turntable and finds its groove.

That beat, man. It’s old but strong.

You’re home.

 

EPILOGUE

 

I STILL TRAVEL the Delta when I find myself lost. I like the feel of the wide expanse of flat brown earth, the clapboard bars with cold beer and greasy pork sandwiches, the tiny white Baptist churches that shake and pulse with religion on Sundays, the barren plantations and forgotten towns where ghosts still live. JoJo and I would meet halfway during our exchanges, most of the time along Interstate 55 down in Vaiden for a chicken-fried steak meal. It was early fall and even just off the interstate, I could smell the leaves burning from the little houses and trailers off the road.

I had a seat in a booth when JoJo walked in and hung up his Carhartt farm coat on a spindly hanger by the door. He slid into the seat, scanned the menu, and tossed it in the center of the table.

“ALIAS didn’t care much for this place,” I said. “Ordered a cheeseburger.”

He laughed. “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t that surprise me?”

“You seen that new video he got out?” JoJo asked.

“He’s doing fine in L.A.,” I said. “Asked me to come out and see him.”

“You going to?”

“Can you see me in L.A.?”

“He may need you to,” he said. “This ain’t over. You understand?”

“I do.”

“When you side with a man, you keep on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If not, you ain’t no better than Teddy.”

I looked out at the trucks lining up to hit the interstate. On the side of a trailer, someone had painted the image of three cowboys running cattle in a wide open prairie. The fall sun struck the painting as it turned and elevated up on the high road heading north.

“What made him sick in the mind?” JoJo asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re mad at yourself, but you always knew it,” he said.

I nodded. We ate the chicken-fried steak and drank coffee, talking more about ALIAS, two new hands JoJo had hired on the farm, the team I helped coach at JFK, and the possibility of getting Buddy Guy to play a small show during Jazzfest.

“Meet you back here in ten days,” he said. “Same time.”

I nodded.

“You quit teaching,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

“Tulane hired a Harvard professor to replace Randy,” I said. “He wanted me to expand upon theories of the blues and intercultural dimensions of the framework of the South.”

“That’s a lot of thought about blues.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I can do what I do on my own. And the bar is working right now.”

JoJo laughed. “Blues ain’t nothin’ but a botheration on your mind.”

“I’ve heard that.”

We shook hands and I watched his old truck stop before heading south to New Orleans. I thought I heard some pounding bass work and bounce coming from his cab. I tried to listen harder but JoJo pulled out onto the road and the music followed.

I shook my head.

I drove as far as Batesville. If I turned west, I’d head to Clarksdale, where Willie T. Dean wanted to meet. He said he had the most unbelievable lead on the best bluesman I never heard of. True Willie T. Always the next adventure.

I stopped at Highway 6 and instead headed east. The sun sank down behind me, swallowing the road and disappearing into the Delta.

I took a shortcut off 6 and wound down through a cypress swamp where men in small boats drank beer and fished with cane poles, the misty blue-and-yellow light filling the cab of my truck, where Annie slept on the rear seat. A bone tucked under her paw.

The fall sky was slate blue and gray when I arrived at the dented silver mailbox and turned along a long gravel road. The small white clapboard house waited, draped in big ceramic Christmas lights. Maggie’s truck parked sideways by a propane tank. Her cotton shirts, faded blue jeans, and her son’s jerseys riffled in the wind.

I parked alongside of her truck. The red, green, and yellow lights warming up the chill.

Annie and I followed a stone path as the door opened, an old screen door slamming shut from a rusted spring.

Maggie tucked her hands into her jeans and shrugged her shoulders in a tight black T-shirt. The summer tan still coloring her face and long arms. Wind sifting her black hair across her eyes.

She reached down a hand and pulled me up onto the porch.

The crossroads were far behind me.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

Thank you: Master P, Joseph L. Porter, BET’s 106th and Park, Dashiell Hammett, Lil Wayne, Polk Salad Annie, John D. MacDonald, Mystikal, Blind Willie’s, XXL, Louis Armstrong, the late, great Hummingbird Grill, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society.

Special thanks to Keith Wehmeier, Debbi Eisenstadt, Tim Green, Jere Hoar, Laura Lippman, Ted O’Brien, Keith Spera, Tom Piazza, Kline Sack, and Randy Wayne White.

Carolyn, thank you for always being a friend to Nick, understanding the cooler parts of Southern culture, and making sure everything is the best it can be. And a big thanks to RP in NYC for being a terrific friend and reader and for taking care of his people.

An extra special thank you to Jan Humber Robertson for saving a story from disaster.

None of this would be possible without Angela — my muse, fellow barbecue connoisseur, and best friend.

 

About the Author

 

ACE ATKINS, an Alabama native, earned nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the Livingston Award for his work covering crime at the Tampa Tribune. He now teaches at the University of Mississippi and lives on a century-old farm outside Oxford with a half-dozen faithful mutts, including Elvis and Polk Salad Annie. And yes, Ace is his real name.

 

Books by Ace Atkins

 

DIRTY SOUTH

DARK END OF THE STREET

LEAVIN’ TRUNK BLUES

CROSSROAD BLUES