by Seth Pevey
“I don’t see anything else on Andre’s phone that looks helpful,” Felix said, putting the device back down, just a little too hard, on the table, and drawing a few eyes from the seats next to them. He took another monstrous bite of the po’boy and shook his head while his jaw worked at it.
“That’s okay, Felix. Remember when the uncle asked us to mail it to him?”
Melancon ripped the page out of his notepad and put it on top of the cell phone, poking it with his index finger three times for emphasis.
“I think it is time we stopped by that address and dropped the thing off personally. Family members might be our best chance. Talk to Melph, check him out while we’re up here. Then, we head east to have a chat with the stepmama,” Melancon said.
“You think Melph will talk to us? He’s liable to tell us to get fucked, especially if he knows we suspect him in the slightest…which…do we?”
“I don’t know, kid. Everyone is a suspect right now, since I’m not working with much to go on. Though a lot of times, with things like this, it is in the family.”
Felix brushed some crumbs off of his shirtfront, leaned back in the chair, and raised his chin a bit.
“You’re right, it might be our best bet at figuring this out. It’s either that or cruise around and pray Andre pops up on some street corner.”
Melancon nodded, wrapped his untouched roast beef up in the greasy paper, and made for the door. He tipped his hat to the old matriarch of the place as he squeezed between the influx of hungry patrons lined up at the front.
“You need to eat, old man,” his partner said to him once they were back out in the sunshine.
“I can’t think straight with a crowd like that, much less eat.”
The young detective pulled out his own buzzing phone. Melancon knew well who it would be, once again, and he tried to tune out the conversation that had been repeating itself most of that tense morning as he made his way back to his car.
“Yes, Tomás.…Yes, we’re doing our best.… Yes.…Okay, but.…Alright. We’re going to find him. We have to eat, Tomás.… Yes.… Okay. Just give us a little more time. We’re going straight to the family now.…Yes, we will. I’ll tell him to be careful.”
The day had noticeably warmed, the crepe myrtle buds falling on everything. Melancon stopped just a minute to appreciate it all before he swung open the complaining door of the El Camino.
“You reckon the stepmama will be wearing a straitjacket when we see her?” Felix asked, pulling open the passenger door.
Melancon shook his head, yelled over the roaring sound of the old engine. “Shrinks will put you away for almost anything these days.”
“Man, you really don’t like psychologists, do you?”
Melancon shrugged his shoulders, shook his bare head, and then tightened his grip on the old leather steering wheel.
“No, I certainly do not.”
Halfway down Carrollton, Melancon pulled over at a familiar crossroads and killed the engine. “Let’s check the crime scene while we’re over here. Then we pop in on Uncle, unexpected like,” he said.
They stepped out by the corner of Oak Street. There was little to show of the bloody events that had transpired here, only a few days prior. Some tattered police tape, mashed into the mud of the neutral ground by the shoes of passing commuters. One of the short, stubby palmetto trees the city had planted was now sadly uprooted and lying on its side in the Bermuda grass, but otherwise it was business as usual for this busy place.
They stood out under the oak boughs, glancing around, taking it in.
Melancon tried his best to imagine the horror of the thing. The peaceful, jostling ride beforehand. Then the sudden crack of a high-caliber rifle. The echo such a weapon would have had in this place, during a commuting hour, was unmistakable. Hundreds of people would have heard it. How far away would they have heard it from? Over the cars, the streetcar, the children playing in the nearby yard, the mocking birds in the trees, the coffee shop chatter next door, the church bells ringing, they would have heard—
The church bells ringing.
Melancon was seized by that sudden clarity of thought that had yet stubbornly refused to join his hair and his strong back in abandoning him. About fifty yards down Carrolton Street there was a large Catholic Church that the old detective knew well. Although it was far removed from the little neighborhood steeple he’d attended as a boy, here was a building of some repute among Catholics in the city. It had stood there for near two hundred years, even back when the “city of Carrolton” was still a separate thing from New Orleans—a piece of the local landscape and a common place for christenings, marriages, funerals and the like. It had been a decade since Melancon had been inside, but he still remembered the delicately painted faces of the saints looking down at you from the ceiling of the prominent dome in the front. And it had bell towers, a pair of them that flanked the dome. He looked up at them, standing with his arms akimbo in the neutral ground. The sun, intense now and penetrating the oak canopy, made it hard to study the aged piece of architecture as closely as he would have liked. So, he went closer.
With his eyes adjusted and the distance shortened, he was able to study the high perches. Twin spires, one of them quite close and very clearly overlooking the streetcar line. They were the approximate height of a third-story building and made of solid old stone.
Felix was looking, too.
“Sniper’s nest?” the young man asked.
“I can’t imagine anything else. Can’t imagine a person standing out here where we are, in the neutral ground, firing a high-powered rifle, and then being able to just casually stroll away without being noticed, can you?”
Felix squinted up at it, a hand over his eyes. “What about all the porches around here? Some of them look like they might work. Maybe a second-story window?”
“Possible, but what kind of an idiot would come out on his porch and murder someone in broad daylight? Doesn’t make sense. I don’t see many windows with a good angle either.”
They approached the base of the nearest bell tower, which was surrounded by a little sparse patch of grass. The main cathedral had a large series of concrete stairs leading up to it, making the whole structure quite elevated by the pancake standards of Uptown. Melancon could still make out, only just faintly, the green high-water mark on the exterior walls of the tower, just at about his eye level.
The old detective edged closer, right up to the base of the spire, where he looked straight up. A good fifty feet at least, he reckoned. He looked down at the ground beneath him, at his now dusty shoes. He bent down and ran his fingers against a few errant blades of grass.
“There are cigarette butts here,” Felix said.
The young man was standing a few feet away by the Carrolton facing side of the bell tower’s wall, down on his haunches now, picking at little bits of cotton littering the ground.
Melancon took a visual measurement. The spot was a bit too far away from the sidewalk to be so littered. He looked up, then back down to the ground.
“Hand me one of those, will you, kid? Damn back is about to have a fit.”
Felix plucked one of the butts up with apparent distaste and handed it to the old detective.
“B&H.”
Melancon only pretended to read it. The letters were crumpled and his eyes were no longer that sharp. But he knew the make from the color of the text, the circumference, the smell. A strange thing to easily recognize, he knew, but there was no mistaking what was always there at the lamp table next to his long-gone granny’s easy chair.
“My grandmama used to smoke these. Minty little thin things. The kind of thing elegant old ladies used to smoke, back when old folks smoking was the norm.”
“There sure are a lot of them here.”
“Almost like someone up there was nervous, but I doubt it was an elegant old lady,” Melancon said and glanced up at the tower again.
“Can we go up?” Felix asked.
“I don
’t think so, Felix. Last time you had me snooping around a holy place, it didn’t work out so well, remember? Anyway, this might be nothing. Or, it might be something. But we got bigger fish to fry right now. We chase this rabbit, we’re going to lose the other one. I’ll let Janine know about this, and she’ll tell the forensics guys. Don’t touch anything else.”
“Right, find the kid first, before Mr. de Valencia has an aneurism.”
Melancon nodded.
Five minutes later they were pulling up in front of an orange bungalow with a sagging porch, deep in the Seventeenth. The streets were mostly empty, aside from an old, rail-thin man who was planting a small tree in his front yard. Down the road they could hear music coming out of a small corner store. The roads were bad, even for here, and Melancon could find no place to pull over his rust bucket other than a pool of water about ten feet across. Both he and Felix had wet feet by the time they opened the little wooden gate in front of Melph’s place.
They were up on the low-slung porch, looking things over. He let Felix do the knocking while he took a bit of a snoop around. No car in the driveway, doubtful if he’d be home. And why would he come to the door, anyway? But they had to try. Over in one corner of the porch was a lawn chair, and next to it a table, and on that table an ashtray.
“Knock, knock,” Felix said to the closed door. “Anybody home?”
Melancon looked down into the ashtray.
There was no mistaking the butts.
“Felix,” he said in a quiet voice. “Look!”
He pinched up one of the butts.
“B&H,” he said. There was some sort of a smudge on the butt, but Melancon couldn’t quite make out what it was.
Felix knocked once again, harder this time.
“Well, I guess he ain’t home, and what y’all want with him, anyway?” said a female voice from the porch next door. It was a space that shared an intimate closeness with this one, and yet the two detectives had hardly noticed a woman sitting there, reclining in her bathrobe with a petite little lapdog in her arms.
She looked to be in her midthirties, was broad-faced and pretty. Her short, thick legs stuck out from her bathrobe, and she was sipping a tall cup of something.
“We’re trying to find a lost boy. A boy whose last known whereabouts were here. Andre Adai, did you know him?”
“Sure, I know Andre. Weird little kid, but at least he behaved himself. Shit. Not like my kids.”
“You didn’t see anything, did you, miss?” Melancon said, taking his hat in his hands. “Andre has been missing for a few days now and we’ve got no idea where to find him.”
She smiled, looked down the street and put her lapdog down on the ground.
“Sorry.”
“What can you tell us about Melph?” Felix asked. He extended his credentials across the porch railing, but she didn’t look at them.
“He’s fine. Tough type of guy, but fine. He was in the war, you know.”
Melancon nodded, turned to his partner. “You think he’s out looking for Andre?”
“You still didn’t answer my question. What do you want with Melph?” the woman said, a little more demanding this time.
“Does Melph have a woman?”
She gave him a strange look. The little dog let out a few yaps and clicked its nails around the porch. “Ask him yourself,” she said and pointed to the street.
A green Explorer had pulled up onto a grassy spot, elevated above the wide puddle.
Melph stepped out and lowered himself slowly down onto the wet St. Augustine, surveying the situation on his porch. He seemed to understand it immediately, or else his face simply didn’t register any detectible amount of surprise, shock or offense. He quickly strode up the steps and, going right in between the two detectives, jammed a key into his front door.
“You seen Andre?” Felix asked the back of him.
Melph bent down and picked up a few pieces of mail at his threshold, then went inside his house without a word—but he left the door wide open behind him.
The two detectives shared a nervous glance with each other.
“Go on,” the neighbor woman said from her porch. “I’m sure he don’t mind.”
They stood on the threshold between the porch and a darkened living room that smelled faintly of marijuana and wet cypress.
Melph was moving around noisily in the attached kitchen. “She’s right,” he called, “come on if you’re coming.”
Melancon glanced back to where his El Camino was parked in its dirty pool of water, crammed between the blocky SUV and a full can of garbage, just behind. No chance for a quick escape there, were things to suddenly go sour.
He caught Felix give him a slight nod. The boy could be a risk taker when things got to this point.
Melancon stuck his head in and craned his neck, which let him see just into the kitchen.
Melph was standing over the sink with his back to them. Melancon put his hand on his holster and stepped inside.
“You going to shoot me in my own house?” Melph said, raising his head from the sink.
Melancon got a clear look at the man as he turned to face the two detectives, a glass of water in his bony hand. Tall and thin and handsome. The kind of guy that women go crazy for—the muscles, the tattoos, the rakish dreadlocks slung across his brow. He had a tiredness around his eyes as he lifted the glass to his lips and downed the whole of it in a series of thirsty gulps.
“Hadn’t planned on doing any shooting. But there have been some bullets flying lately. Can you blame us for being a little jumpy?”
“Hey, you came looking for me. I’m the one that should be jumpy.” Melph wiped his mouth dry with a bare arm and approached them, bending slightly down to get on the eye level with the old detective. “But I’ve been around too many flying bullets to be jumpy, Detective. You look like you’ve dodged a few yourself.”
Melph glanced sideways at Felix with a dismissive smirk, and turned back to his kitchen. “No luck. How about you, find him yet?” he asked over his shoulder.
The two detectives looked at each other in silent tension.
“Answer me this, then,” Melph went on. “See, I always thought, and this is probably just from picking up false intel from the TV, but I always thought that private detectives needed to be hired by someone in order to take a case. So, who the hell hired y’all? Because I know Lashawn didn’t. She ain’t all there at the moment, I’m afraid.”
“Some cases we take on a pro bono basis. This is one of them,” Melancon replied coolly.
“Pro bono, eh?”
“It means—” Felix started to say.
“I know what it means, kid.”
Melancon used the awkward silence that followed to take a look around the living room, in which he was still standing, very much on guard. There was nothing unusual about it for a man in his midthirties, nothing overtly sinister, except that it was quite clearly the home of a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor—flat-screen TV bigger and nicer than any other object in the room, a picture of the Saints running back as the sole wall decoration, a kitschy statue of Bob Marley and a mason jar of pot sitting squarely on the coffee table in lieu of the books on architecture and gardening and other such flourishes of taste you might find purposely smattered around a married man’s home.
“Andre,” Melph said, pulling a beer from the fridge and popping the top off against the kitchen island. He took another long drink. “You know, sometimes I thank God for certain things.”
“Like what?” Melancon asked, shifting his focus and taking one more step towards the kitchen.
Melph chucked to himself over his bottle. “It might confuse you.”
“Try me.”
“For example,” Melph said, pointing his beer finger at the two detectives, “just the other day I thanked God to be just smart enough. You know what that means?”
Melph looked heavily at Felix as he joined the two detectives in the living room, placing his long frame down on the couch. “I�
�m no genius, mind, but I got a decent enough head on my shoulders. And that’s the important part. Decent enough. See, you…I already know what you thinking about that boy. You would call a mind like Andre’s gifted, wouldn’t you? As if being that kind of way was some kind of…reward. A gift. Shit.”
He threw his feet up onto the coffee table and stretched out.
“It isn’t a gift. It isn’t a reward at all. It’s a curse. God made somebody that smart…like as a curse. Andre knows it, too. Shit, when I was his age I was just smart enough. Smart enough to be a kid. Chased every girl on the block, hung out with boys who would have died for me in a split second. All ’cause I wasn’t Andre’s kind of smart. Because that boy is cursed with intelligence…smart as he is, don’t know how to do anything except blow that damn horn.”
“That’s why we have to find him,” Felix said, his voice going hostile and sour. “And why we have to find who shot his daddy so we can send that bastard to Angola State Penitentiary.”
Melph smiled, sipped his beer. “Andre ain’t going to be found unless he wants to be. But I think you know that already. That’s why you’re here with no Andre and no clue, isn’t it?”
“So, you haven’t seen him?” Melancon pressed.
“What’s it look like? Do you detect any thirteen-year-old Rain Man–looking motherfuckers around here?”
“So, you just lost him, is that it?”
Melph said nothing, but the old detective was sure he saw a look of shame pass over those handsome features, of only for a brief moment.
“And no idea who is responsible for this murder, I suppose?”
“Shit. Nope.”
“You wouldn’t tell us anyway, even if you knew, though, would you?”
“Probably not. Because you not even them people, anyway. You just a couple of guys getting your wet feet all over my rug.”
They looked down, embarrassed, backing off slightly.
Melancon let a heavy silence hang for a long moment between them. Then he nodded to his young partner, who was beginning to go a bit red around the ears. “Well, sorry for wasting your time.”
