Last Fair Deal Gone Down (Nick Travers)

by Ace Atkins

  I saw her walk outside to a balcony in a loose-fitting robe and lean over a scrolled balcony sipping coffee. That was noon.

  At 3, she came back to the balcony. She sat down in a director’s chair, propped her feet on the iron railing and read. The Billie Holiday book?

  At 3:43, she went back inside and did not come back outside for two hours. The bright sunshine barely warming a cold day retreated, and the shadows finally returned, falling over my face.

  Around 6, she came out of the street entrance walking toward Esplanade. I tucked the copy of Nine Stories back in my jacket pocket, where I always kept it, placed a few bills under the weight of a salt shaker, and began to follow.

  I had a ragged Tulane cap pulled low over my eyes and wore sunglasses—some Lew Archer I was. I pulled the collar of my trench coat tighter around my face. Not just for disguise, but also to block the cold. December wind shooting down those old alleys and boulevards can make a man want to keep inside.

  She went into the A&P on Royal, and I stayed outside. In a few minutes, she returned, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes and continuing to walk toward the far end of Royal. She walked into one with the doors propped wide open, leaned over the bar, and French-kissed the bartender. He struck an effeminate, embarrassed pose and laughed. She patted him on the face and kept walking.

  At the end of the street, she went inside a bed and breakfast. Semi-renovated. New awning, peeling paint on the windows. I got close enough to see through the double-door windows. She was talking to someone at the front desk. Then she turned, going deeper inside the building. I waited.

  It was cold. There were no restaurants or coffee houses on this side of district. It hadn’t been civilized yet. I blew hot breath through closed fits.

  I waited.

  I got solicited twice. Once by a man. Once by a woman. And had a strange conversation with a derelict.

  “Crack,” he said.

  “Gave it up for the holidays. Thank you, though.”

  “Naw, man. Dat’s my name.”

  “Your name is Crack?”

  “Shore.”

  I asked “Crack” where the nearest liquor store was. He said it was on Rampart, so I gave him a few bucks and told him to buy me a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and whatever he wanted. Actually it wasn’t really a gamble to give him money. Most of those guys work on a strange ethical code when it comes to a fellow drinker.

  He came back, and we sat on the other side of Esplanade watching the bed and breakfast until nearly ten o’clock. The whiskey tasted like sweet gasoline.

  When Sarah came back, her hair was mussed, her jaw worked overtime on gum, and she looked tired. She certainly did not expect what came next as she bent down to re-strap a sequined stiletto.

  As she pulled the buckle tight around her ankle, an early seventies black Chrysler whipped around the corner of Chartres, speeding right toward us. I had no time to push her out of way or yell. I could only watch as she just stayed bent over with her butt in the air. Hand still touching those ridiculous shoes. Very still.

  I knew the car would hit her.

  But it didn’t. Instead, the car skidded to a halt next to her, and a white arm grabbed her by the hair and jerked her in. She screamed as I sprinted across the street. Because of the tinted windows, I couldn’t see the driver, who put the car back in gear and weaved to hit me.

  I bolted away and lunged toward the curb, where Crack was standing holding his bottle of apple liquor. The car’s tires smoked as it headed down Royal.

  I followed.

  My breath came in hard, fast spurts. I knew I was sprinting a losing race, but I followed until I saw the dim glow of the car’s cracked red taillights turning somewhere near Toulouse.

  And she was gone.

  

  Whoever took Sarah dumped her body underneath the Greater New Orleans Bridge on the Algiers side of the Mississippi. Naked with a cut throat.

  Jay Medeaux stood over me at police headquarters on Broad Street and slurped on a cup of black coffee. I rubbed my temples. It was 9 a.m. and I hadn’t slept. His wide, grinning face looked more amused with my situation than sympathetic.

  “No coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Crueller?”

  “Jay, do you mind?”

  “Touchy. Touchy.”

  I regurgitated every trivial detail of what I witnessed and knew. Jay listened without asking any questions. He didn’t even lecture me about conducting my own investigation—which he knew I was prone to do. Jay was a good friend.

  I remember him happiest when we beat LSU. His grin wide as he held our coach high on his shoulders in a warped, fading photograph I still kept on my desk.

  He pulled Sarah’s file from Vice and made a few phone calls. We found out she was working for a pimp with the awful moniker of Blackie Lowery. A lowlife whose previous convictions included running a strip club staffed with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, trucking oysters from a polluted water zone, indecent exposure at Antoine’s restaurant, selling illegal Jazzfest T-shirts, and beating the shit out of his pit bull with a Louisville Slugger. Sounded like our man.

  Jay let me go with him to pick the guy up.

  

  We found Blackie outside his Old Style Voodoo Shop spray-painting a dozen little cardboard boxes black -- his back turned as he spurted out a final coat. He was a skinny guy with pasty white skin, a shaved head, and a thick black moustache curled at the end like Rollie Fingers used to wear. He stopped painting and looked sideways at us.

  “Hey, Blackie, why don’t you spell shop with a two Ps and an E?” Jay said. “The tourists would like it more, I bet. Make it sound real authentic, ya’ know.”

  Blackie had his shirt off, and a tiny red tattoo was stamped over his heart. As he watched us, I could see the colored skin beat.

  “We found one of your employees this morning,” Jay said. “Blade sliced her throat real even.”

  He gave a crooked smile and threw down his paint can. “I don’t have a clue.”

  “That’s beside the point,” Jay said. “Come on with us.”

  “Eat me,” Blackie said.

  I walked through a side door and into a voodoo shop. The smell of incense was strong among the trinkets, stones, and powders. A small, glass-topped casket sat in the middle of the room with a carved wooden dummy inside painted to look like a decomposing corpse.

  But beyond the Marie Laveau T-shirts and the hundreds of bags of gris-gris powders, something interested me.

  Fats’ sax sat in a corner.

  

  Sometimes I like to hear Dixieland Jazz after several drinks. Sometimes I like to hear my boots as they clunk across a hardwood floor. Sometimes I even like to cover the tall windows of my warehouse with bed sheets and watch old movies all day. But most of all, I like to sit in JoJo’s and listen to Loretta Jackson sing. Her voice can rattle the exposed brick walls and break a man’s heart.

  It was Christmas Eve, a week after Jay picked up Blackie. I was nursing a beer and watching Loretta rehearse a few new numbers. Old blues Christmas songs that she always mixed in with her set during the season. Growling the words to “Merry Christmas, Baby” and making my neck hairs stand on end.

  “You keep babyin’ that beer and it’s gonna fall in love with ya,” JoJo said, as he washed out a couple shot glasses in the sink.

  “Everybody needs a friend.”

  “Mmhmm.” He dried the inside of the glasses with a white towel and then hung it over his shoulder. “Why you down here today, anyway?”

  “Sam’s been wanting to go Christmas shopping in the Quarter all week. And I promised.”

  “You hear anymore from Medeaux ‘bout that pimp?”

  “Nah. Blackie’s still in jail far as I know.”

  “You let me know if somethin’s different.”

  Loretta finished the song with a great sigh into her microphone and a quick turnaround from the band. The guitar player made his instrument give a wolf whistle as Lor
etta stepped off stage. Running a forearm over her brow, she walked over and sat next to me.

  “My boy Nicholas,” she said as she rubbed my back. “My boy.”

  “Your boy Nicholas sittin’ on his ass drinking while his new woman trudging round these old French streets looking for gifts.”

  “My boy deserves it.’

  “Hmphh.”

  “Y’all talkin’ ‘bout Fats, weren’t cha?”

  JoJo nodded and walked back into the kitchen.

  “Man had a sad life, Nick. Cain’t believe he sold his sax for that girl.”

  “Guess he loved her.”

  “Hell, she was just a two-bit whore.”

  “Loretta.”

  “Naw, I’m serious. She was fuckin’ half the band.”

  “What?

  “Sure she was. Saw her almost get her cheap ass beat by Fats’ drummer out back. Havin’ some kind of lover’s quarrel, I guess.”

  “When was this?”

  “Few days before he died.”

  I took a deep breath, and my fist tightened on top of the bar.

  

  Tom Cat was passed out on his sofa when I kicked in the door to his apartment. Little multi-colored Christmas lights had fallen on his body and face, and it gave him a festive, embalmed look. I grabbed him by a dirty Converse high top and yanked him off the sofa. His eyes sprung awake.

  “Who killed him?”

  “Nick, man. Merry Christmas to you, too. Hey, I—”

  “Who killed him?”

  “You trippin’, man.”

  I yanked him to his knees and punched him hard in the stomach. He doubled over weakly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with her?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “The pimp didn’t kill Sarah, did he? He had no reason. You did. You loved her.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I kicked him hard in the side with my boot. I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t make me feel like a man. I just did it.

  “It was a mistake. Fats shouldn’t been a part of it.”

  “Part of what?”

  He rolled to his side and wiped his tears with a ragged flannel shirt sleeve. Pushing his long greasy hair, he told me.

  I did not interrupt.

  

  It was blackmail. Sarah and Tom Cat had worked out a scam on a local trial lawyer. But he wasn’t just any lawyer. He was Spencer Faircloth, lawyer to the New Orleans mob. An all-star backslapper among criminals.

  Their plan included a sick little videotape. Maybe it included a burro. I don’t know what was on it, didn’t want to know, but I took it with me.

  I let Tom Cat go, drove to a nearby K&B drugstore, and looked through a water-logged phone book. Some of the pages were so stuck together that the book felt like papier-mâché.

  There was no listing. I called information and was told he had an unpublished number.

  I called a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound pound bail bondsman I know named Tiny. He asked for the payphone’s number.

  He called me back in five minutes with the address.

  Faircloth lived in an ivy-covered brick mansion with a spiked iron fence and stained glass windows. When I pulled up near the address on St. Charles, dozens of finely dressed men and women were drinking in Faircloth’s hospitality.

  I could see them all, like fish in an aquarium, through the tall windows.

  I lit a cigarette, smoked it into a nub, and then decided to go in.

  Most of the men I passed were in winter wool suits, accented with the occasional silly holiday tie. Candy canes, reindeer, and elves.

  I was dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a jean jacket.

  I wasn’t accepted.

  “Sir?” a large black man asked me.

  “Si.”

  “Can I have your invitation?”

  “I’m here to see Mr. Faircloth.”

  “Mr. Faircloth is spending time with his guests. Can I help you?”

  The man’s hair was Jheri-curled, and he wore a finely trimmed mustache.

  “Aren’t you Billy Dee Williams?”

  He made a move toward me.

  “Tell him that a friend of Sarah’s is here.”

  He looked down at me, and then left.

  I walked over to the buffet line and ate three very tiny turkey sandwiches. I didn’t see any tiny quiches.

  A few minutes later, a young man in his twenties walked over to me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hair seemed slicker tonight. His movements were more polished.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Spencer Faircloth?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t. I’ll just stay here, continue to eat, and thumb my nose at the conventions of the rich.”

  “I’ll have you removed.”

  “You do and I’ll propose a toast to Sarah. The finest whore that Faircloth ever had killed.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Then I remembered him, the younger man from the hotel where I first met Sarah. The one who’d backed up the older man. I looked for him.

  I saw the gray-headed gent laughing it up with a group of his ilk near the French doors.

  I jumped upon the top of the linen buffet table, my dirty buckskin boots soiling the whiteness. I grabbed a glass and spoon and clinked the two together loudly.

  “I would like to propose a toast to the hostess with the mostest. Spence Faircloth.”

  The party hesitatingly clapped. A drunk elderly man hooted his approval.

  “Thank you, grandpa,” I announced to the old man. “But right now, I would like to offer Mr. Faircloth a deal.”

  They were silent.

  The two men were whispering to Faircloth, who had his arms tightly wrapped around himself.

  “You might call it the last fair deal gone down, like my old friend Fats used to say. The deal, Mr. Faircloth, is that you join me on this table and announce to the party that you are a gutless turd who had a friend of mine killed.”

  The crowd stayed silent. A wrinkled old woman with huge breasts shook her head and blew breath out her nose.

  “But where is the deal, you ask?” I said, reaching deep into the inner layer of my denim jacket and pulling out the videotape.

  I held it high over my head like a Bourbon Street preacher does a Bible. I mimed my hands to pretend I was weighing the two.

  Billy Dee Williams was trying to approach me from behind.

  “What’ll it be, Spence?”

  Faircloth shook his head, turned on his heel like a spoiled child, and walked away.

  I put the videotape back in my jacket and hopped off the table.

  Just like any other unwanted guest, no one tried to stop me as I left. I think they were waiting for me to pull a red bandana up over my nose and ask for their jewels.

  I got in my Jeep and headed back to the Warehouse District, my hands shaking on the wheel.

  

  I returned to my warehouse only long enough to grab a fresh set of clothes, binoculars, a six-pack of Abita beer, a frozen quart of Loretta’s jambalaya, my Browning, and Sam’s Christmas present—a 1930s Art Deco watch that I bought on Royal Street a few weeks ago.

  It was so silent in my darkened space that I could hear the watch’s soft ticks as late-day orange light retreated through the industrial windows.

  I tucked everything in a tattered army duffle bag and put it outside my door.

  I used only the small lock near the doorknob, leaving the deadbolt open.

  Walking across Julia Street, I felt a cold December wind coming from the Mississippi. It smelled stagnant and stale. I could almost taste its polluted, muddy water.

  In the warehouse opposite mine, Sam slid back the door with a scowl on her face. Her short blonde hair was tousled, and she was wearing an old gray Tulane sweatshirt of mine that hung below her knees.

  “You’re scowling.”

  “You left me wandering around the Quarter.
What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She let me in and I followed her to the second floor of her warehouse that looked down on a dance studio. The lights were dimmed on the floor below, and a stereo softly played Otis Redding.

  “I’m still mad.”

  “I know.”

  She reheated the jambalaya in a black skillet, and we shared the six-pack of Abita. I told her about Tom Cat and about Spencer Faircloth’s dinner party. She shook her head and tried not to laugh. When I told her I had my gun, she didn’t like that at all, and walked out of the kitchen. One of her cats trailed her.

  But she warmed up after a few more of Otis’ ballads and a few more Abitas.

  Later, we made love in her antique iron bed, Christmas lights strung over her headboard. The beer, food, and music blended into a fine holiday mood.

  The next day, we opened our gifts. She gave me an old Earl King record I’d wanted for years, a gunmetal cigarette lighter, a first edition of Franny and Zooey, and a framed picture of Tom Mix.

  She loved the watch.

  We returned to bed a few more times that day, only leaving the mattress for the kitchen and something to eat. It was one of the best Christmases I can remember.

  

  They came around midnight, Sam still cradled in my arms asleep. Two cats were curled in balls at the foot of the bed. I could hear the sound of the engine and two doors closing while I carefully un-entwined myself from Sam and peeked through her blinds. The car, a black sedan, was still running. Two men were at my front door with a crowbar.

  I walked into the kitchen, pulled on my jeans, boots, and the Tulane sweatshirt. I inserted a clip into the Browning and pulled a black watch cap over my ears.

  Before clanking down the steps to the street level, I called 911, reported a burglary and shooting at my address, and hung up.

  Outside, it was cold enough to see my breath.

  I could see someone seated in the back of the sedan smoking a cigarette. A tiny prick of orange light and then a smoky exhaling that clouded the windows. Without stopping, I bent at the waist and jogged behind the car. I opened the back door and climbed inside.