Black Hornet

by James Sallis

  “Take me along, you’re gonna find it cuts into your choice of places.”

  “There is that.” He grinned. “Might just have to put cuffs on you and tell ’em you’re in custody.”

  “You’re a desperate man.”

  “Take care, Lewis.”

  He started out.

  “You never mentioned what you were doing there,” I said.

  He turned back. “Same thing as you. The bus driver that got shot on Carondelet?”

  I nodded.

  “That was my brother.”

  Chapter Eleven

  WE SETTLED ON BREAKFAST. I still owe you that steak dinner then, Walsh told me. You don’t owe me one damn thing, I told him.

  I was awake, out of bed and dressed when the nurse came in at six. It was still mostly dark outside, light nibbling at the sky’s borders in the window.

  You’re supposed to be in bed, Mr. Griffin.

  Do I need to sign anything on my way out?

  Administration’s not open till eight.

  That could be a problem.

  I’d have to call the resident on duty, probably the administrator too.

  Please.

  I have a lot of things that need taking care of, Mr. Griffin, lots of other patients to see.

  I’m sure you do.

  She sighed.

  I never saw the resident or administrator on call. But six brusque phone conversations later I pushed open the front doors of Touro to find Walsh waiting at the curb in his blue Corvair.

  “Need a lift, sailor? Steak dinner perhaps?”

  “Little early for dinner, you think?”

  He shrugged. “Always dinnertime somewhere.”

  In the car I asked him how he knew when I’d be leaving. He said he had me figured for the kind who’d try to slip through the crack of dawn. Patience not being a particular virtue of yours, he said. Or mine either for that matter, he added after a moment.

  He cut over to St. Charles heading downtown.

  “Breakfast be okay, for now?” he asked, and when I said sure, he hauled the little car into the neutral ground for a U-turn back up toward Napoleon. We pulled into the K&B there just as I was telling him he didn’t owe me a thing.

  The breakfast special, three eggs, bacon, grits and biscuit, coffee included, was $1.49. But first we had to sit at an empty table a while waiting. Walsh finally got up, went over and spoke to the waitress behind the counter, who’d been pointedly ignoring us. She almost beat him back to the table with coffee and menus, and a broad smile, for us both. Sallye, her nametag said.

  “Funny the things you just never think about,” he said as she walked away.

  “The ones you try not to think about are a scream, too.”

  Food was there by the time we finished our coffee. The waitress slid plates in front of us and hurried off to bring more coffee in thick-walled mugs. She took the old ones away. Grits swam with bright butter, bacon glistened with grease, eggs were a yellow dam dividing grits grease from bacon grease. Even the bottom of the biscuit was soaked with butter. Mmmmmm.

  “Sure you can afford this?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been saving up for it.”

  The minute we were done, the waitress was back bringing new mugs of coffee and carrying off plates, asking did we need anything else. Walsh shook his head. Sallye left.

  “What the hell did you say to that woman?”

  “Told her you were an African, taught economics up at Tulane.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No. I didn’t. I just said I was a police officer and that we’d appreciate some breakfast after a real tough night’s work. It’s possible she may have gotten the impression that you’re a cop too, I suppose.”

  We sat sipping coffee, watching streetcars and people lumber by outside, trading what little we knew about the shooter.

  Walsh had made a point of spending as much time as possible these past weeks in the vicinity of the shooting sites.

  “I’d swing by whenever I could when I was on patrol, dog them on my own after hours. There was this one guy wearing all black—T-shirt, jeans, some kind of short jacket, maybe canvas, with a lot of pockets—I caught a glimpse of a couple or three times. Always from the back, always just for an instant as he was heading down an alley or cutting between buildings. But I knew from the walk it had to be the same guy.

  “Then one night, heading up toward Lee Circle from downtown, I saw him, someone that walked like him anyway, coming out of the Hummingbird. I was in the unit and didn’t want to spook him, so by the time I was able to pull around a corner and get out, the guy was already gone down Julia Street somewhere. But that put the Hummingbird at the top of my hit list. I started spending time in a low-life bar across St. Charles drinking draft beer that smelled like cleaning fluid and tasted like sour water. Then yesterday morning, I put my beer down, looked out the window between some old cardboard signs, and there he was.

  “We went together down Julia and up Baronne. Nothing but bars and a few fleabag hotels open, the rest of the street empty, so I’m hanging way the hell back. But somehow he got on to me. Knew I was there, knew I’d been tracking him.”

  “And decided to stop you.”

  “Right.”

  “Any way he could know who you are?”

  “I don’t think so. You ready? She’s looking this way again with coffee in her eyes.”

  Walsh put a five on the table and we limped together out to his car.

  “Where’s home?”

  I must have looked at him sharply.

  “I just meant that I’ll drop you.”

  “Which way you going?”

  He hooked a thumb toward uptown.

  “Good enough. You can let me off at State.”

  “You sure?”

  I told him I was sure, and told him the same thing again, leaning down to the window, once I got out at State.

  There’s this house there on the corner with a glassed-in porch and artificial Christmas tree. Only it isn’t a Christmas tree, it’s a Whatever tree. Stays up year round. Come Easter, pink bunnies and huge plastic eggs appear on it. Halloween, they decorate it with skeletons and spiders, witches, spray-on webs. Masks, streamers, and clowns go up for Mardi Gras. Now it was hung with turkeys, Indians, cranberry bunches, Pilgrim hats.

  I stood for a moment wondering (as I had wondered a hundred times before) about the people who lived in that house, what they were like, why they did this, how it all got started. This is a city that dearly loves traditions, and if there’s not one handy, then it’ll just make up a new one.

  I crossed St. Charles and walked riverward toward LaVerne’s place.

  No mail in the box, of course, no paper on the porch or in the yard: Verne was almost as invisible as I was.

  I let myself in, poured half a tumblerful of bourbon in the kitchen, and took it into the front room.

  At the time, Verne had a taste for what they called the contemporary look. You’d walk into her second-floor apartment in this old Victorian house and there, sitting on hardwood floors alongside real plaster walls and solid-wood baseboards under cameo-and-wreath ceiling medallions, was all this stark, angular, mostly white furniture. It remained kind of a shock.

  Not too long after, Verne switched to (and stayed with) old wooden tables, breakfronts, wardrobes and chairs picked up for next to nothing at used-furniture shops on Magazine and hauled upstairs over the balcony on ropes. One day she arrived breathless to tell me that all the stores had tripled their prices and put up new signs and now she had an apartment full of fine antiques.

  Finishing my drink, I poked through books and magazines scattered about on the coffee table. Life, several Mentor Classics, something titled The Killer Inside Me, an Ace Double with a Philip K. Dick novel on the A side, Redbook, Family Circle, a paperback of Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor on the cover.

  I opened Life to a spread on Hemingway that, along with half a dozen older photos, included one of him st
anding outside his home in Idaho just days before he shot himself with one of his beloved shotguns. Was there snow in the background? I remember snow.

  I went to the kitchen for another drink. Wandered out onto the balcony, careful to stay back out of direct sight of the street.

  A fire burned somewhere close by. I could smell it: loamy, full aroma of wood, acrid tang of synthetics and fabric, heat itself.

  Second time I was ever at LaVerne’s, letting myself in with a key same as now, I walked out on this balcony with a cup of café au lait and within ten minutes cops were banging on the door below. When I answered it, they threw me up against the wall shouting What you doin’ here, boy? You belong here? Luckily Verne’s neighbor heard it all and told her when she got home in the morning. So four hours after I was hauled in, Verne showed up at police headquarters with her lawyer. Details run together from incident to incident, year to year, but I think I emerged from that particular instance of “cooperation” (no record of arrest, of course) with a fractured rib, broken finger, multiple abrasions. All preexisting, of course. You know how them darkies live.

  It didn’t look as though Verne was coming home—not all that unusual. Maybe she’d sold an overnight, or she was staying with one of her regulars. So I had a couple more drinks, napped a bit in front of the TV, and some time after noon walked over to catch the streetcar down to Washington.

  Hosie Straughter stood up from the stoop in front of my house as I came around the wall.

  Chapter Twelve

  “LEWIS. YOU LOOK LIKE ABSOLUTE unmitigated hell.”

  “That’s the trouble with you journalists. Always leaping headfirst for the nearest cliché. You have any idea how many times I’ve already heard that?”

  “Women and little children scream and run when they see you, I guess.”

  “Women, anyway.”

  “Know how that is. You okay?”

  “I will be. I think. Some time around January, maybe. Late January.”

  “Barring further complications.”

  “There is that.”

  “But from what I know, seems to me the complications so far didn’t come find you, you went looking for them.”

  “Leaping for another cliché?”

  “Or jumping to conclusions: you better believe it. With both bare feet. But I’m looking around close and hard as I come down.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you would be. Want some coffee?”

  “Only if you hold a gun on me. I was up all night working, already had nine, ten cups.”

  “A drink, then?”

  “Wouldn’t mind. Only had five or six of those.”

  So we went in and I rinsed two of the glasses on the counter by the sink and poured Scotch into them. We sat at the kitchen table. In the South that’s where all the best talking gets done. I put the bottle between us on the table and asked Hosie what he knew.

  “Well. I never had one doubt that you’d be going after this person, of course. Couldn’t tell, though, whether it would be right away, or later. I already knew from something Frankie told me, once I put it together with a couple other things I’d caught here and there on the streets, that this young patrolman, guy named Walsh, had the same gleam in his eye. So last night when both your names come up in conversation—after I call from the paper to inquire the nature and extent of your injuries—I pretty much know what’s happened. I just don’t have any particulars. And in my line of work, particulars are the only things worth having.”

  He settled back with his glass resting on one leg, an actor who had delivered his lines and now could coast.

  “I’m afraid that’s about as particular as it gets,” I told him. “We don’t know who the shooter is, don’t know anything about him, really. Walsh was dogging the places shootings had occurred. He kept seeing this guy. Knew him from the way he walked. I was chasing shadows too, and one of the shadows jumped up to become a guy holding a gun on Walsh.”

  Hosie had a sip of Scotch. “I don’t know whether to call that incredible luck, or astonishing stupidity.”

  “You got me. Wrong place, right time?”

  He grunted. “So that was it, huh? Your wad’s shot. Blank slate, start all over again, same as before.”

  “Yeah. Except now he knows we’re out here, of course.”

  “So he’ll be harder to find.… He doesn’t know who you are, right? Either of you?”

  “We don’t think he does.”

  Hosie stared at the tabletop while I looked out the window at squirrels chasing one another across power lines. When I found my glass empty, I refilled both.

  “That’s good,” he said. I never knew if he meant the refill or the shooter’s not knowing who we were. Because just then the door opened and we both looked toward it.

  “Lew. You okay? I went straight home once I heard what happened. Thought you’d be there.”

  “I was.”

  “You ever give any thought to maybe leaving a note, let someone know you’re all right?”

  I stood and hugged her. She felt wonderful, smelled wonderful, the way she always did. She was wearing a short blue dress, shiny and satinlike, with red heels (pumps, she called them) and huge red earrings.

  “Hosie, this is LaVerne.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Verne: Hosie Straughter. He’s—”

  “I know.” She held out her hand. “Truly a pleasure, Mr. Straughter. I’ve enjoyed your writing over the years, and learned so much from it.”

  “Lewis,” he said, cupping their joined hands with his free one. “This is not what one would call a fine Scotch. In fact, more discerning drinkers might be disinclined to call it a Scotch at all. And your attire, this horrid black suit gone slick at the knees, with its uneven cuffs: also questionable. But, be all that as it may, I am forced to admit that your taste in friends is … exemplary. Unassailable. Absolutely. The pleasure, young lady,” he said, lowering his head, “is entirely mine, believe me.”

  He picked up his glass and drank off the couple of inches I’d just poured. “And with that simple, heartfelt toast, I’ll leave you two young people to whatever it is that young people do these days.”

  Over my protests he left, and we had indeed set about doing what young people did those days, when someone knocked at the door.

  “Lewis! You in there?”

  “Hang on.” I stood up, straightened things and looked at Verne. She made a face and straightened her own things.

  I opened the door a few inches. He wore black jeans, western boots, a yellow Ban-Lon shirt. Squinting in the bright sunlight.

  “What are you doing here? And more important, how did you find me?”

  “Hope you don’t mind. Figured after you got some sleep—”

  “Which hasn’t happened yet.”

  “—we could get together and—”

  He stopped, jaw still working. “Hey. I’m sorry. You get to bed.” At which point LaVerne stepped into sight. “I can come back.”

  I opened the door the rest of the way.

  “Better come on in. Sun shining off your white face like that, down here, it’s liable to blind someone. You want coffee? Nice shirt, by the way.”

  “Had a potful of it already. Hello, miss.” His eyes went back and forth between us a couple of times.

  “LaVerne: Don Walsh.” They both nodded. “A drink, then?”

  “You got a beer?”

  I did. I tracked it down in the icebox, trapped it, and handed it to him. He rolled the first mouthful around a while, swallowed.

  “There’s this guy over on Jackson keeps an eye and ear open for us.”

  “A snitch.” So I wasn’t as invisible as I thought I was. We seldom are.

  “Yeah, well, what’s in a name. He’s turned a lot of things our way.”

  “Including my address.”

  “It’s any consolation to you, I did have to tell him exactly what our connection was.”

  “We don’t have a connection, Officer.”

  Silence
shimmered in the air like heat lightning.

  “I’ll be going now, Lew,” Verne said. “It’s been a long night. Get some sleep, call me later on?”

  “You need a cab?”

  “No, honey. St. John gave me a lift.” Sinjun. Her fifty-year-old neighbor who still dressed in chinos, sweater, blue shirt, loafers. Like many people in this city, he seemed stuck, like a fly in amber, in some prior era. “He’s waiting at a bar on Claiborne.”

  “Beautiful woman,” Walsh said.

  True enough. Heads turned, men’s and women’s alike, wherever she went, and I was pleased, flattered, proud, to have her beside me. Only much later, after almost thirty years with and without her, and when it was too late, did I realize that LaVerne had saved my life—that in some strange, indecipherable way we had saved each other’s lives.

  And in the years before that realization came, without meaning to I would hurt her terribly again and again, the same way I’d repeatedly damage myself. Each year, the ground pulls harder. Each year, the burden of what we do and fail to do helps push us down.

  “You want another beer?” I said. “No? Then what the hell do you want?”

  “A question I’ve asked myself again and again.”

  “Ever get an answer?”

  “Oh yes. Lots of them.”

  He found the trashcan under the sink and dropped the bottle in.

  “I want to stop feeling this hole where my brother was. I want things to make sense. I want justice and truth and decency and clear blue skies.”

  “Walsh?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re going to have a miserable life, man.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  WE FOUND HIM, CASTING OURSELVES bodily for the fifth or sixth time into the abyss of the absurdly hopeful, ready to call it quits after one, two more, tops, at a bar not far off Lee Circle on Girod.

  He had on a tuxedo coat with lapels wide as mud flaps, purple-and-green Hawaiian shirt, khaki work pants, hightop tennis shoes with most of the black worn away. There were patches on the pants that looked like they belonged on a tire.

  “Looking good, Doo-Wop.”

  “Captain.” Doo-Wop was able to recall the minutest detail of a story you told him four years ago, but he couldn’t remember your name from the beginning of a sentence to its end; so everyone was captain. “Been a while.”