Fat White Vampire Blues

by Andrew J. Fox

  “You remember which clubs?”

  “Ofcourse not! They were all in colored neighborhoods. Little dirty holes in the wall. I didn’t pay them any attention.”

  Jules snorted with disgust. “So basically what you’re tellin‘ me here is that this guy you turned into a vampire and regularly shared your coffin with, you pretty much knewsquat about.Real good, Maureen. My hat’s off to ya. Fangs fer the memories, babe.”

  “I’mtrying! Can’t you see that I’mtrying?”

  “Well, how about answerin‘ me this, then? How come this guy hatesmy guts so much? How’dI get mixed up in this little romance of yours? What’d I ever do to this guy to make me number one on his hit parade?”

  “I don’tknow! I used to talk about you, I guess.”

  “Talk about me? Like what? What’d you say to that guy about me? You weren’t comparin‘, y’know, oursizes or nothin’?”

  Maureen shot Jules a withering look. “What kind of a tramp do you take me for?”

  “Well, what, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know… He never talked abouthis family and friends, and we had to talk about something while we were together, when we weren’t-you-know-what-ing-so I talked aboutyou. When he’d turn on the radio to some music that he liked, I’d tell him what kind of stuff you liked listening to. Whenever a cabby that I recognized would come into Jezebel’s, it’d remind me of you, and I’d tell some funny little story about you. Sometimes he’d try bringing me a present, some flowers or something. So I’d tell him about all the really darling, funny gifts you used to give me, like that teddy bear with the third eyeball sticking out of its forehead. You remember that? I still have it. Another thing-for years I tried drumming into his head all the rules about living as a vampire, the rulesyou’d never had any problems following, but he never wanted to listen, not even to commonsense stuff like ‘the more vampires you make, the fewer victims left foryou.’ Ifyou, with your thick head, could follow the rules like a little angel, why couldn’the?”

  Jules’s heart sank lower and lower as he listened to Maureen rattle on. All this time, he’d thought maybe there was some chance Malice X could be forced to listen to reason. Some chance that, if Jules could just show up with a big enough gang of his own, he and his enemy could sit down like rational men at the bargaining table and work some mutually acceptable deal. Fat chance ofthat. Thanks to who-knows-how-many years of Maureen’s nagging and invidious comparisons, the only way this war could go down was dirty and personal.

  “Holy Christmas, Mo… if I were Eldo Rado,I’d hate me, too.”

  “What? What are you saying? That this is somehow allmy fault? Is that it? Well, a girl’s gotta talk about something, doesn’t she? It can’t just bewham-bam-thank-you-ma’am every night-he didn’ttalk, Jules! Do you understand? I had to do the talking forboth of us!”

  “Yeah, I understand, baby. Perfectly.” He turned to Doodlebug. “Let’s get outta here. She ain’t gonna tell us anything more useful. Maybe I should just hang out at my usual spots and let him come to us.”

  Maureen grabbed his hand as he tried extricating himself from the couch. “Jules! Don’t go yet. I want to be helpful, Jules. I’m trying so hard. I have papers for you to sign! Insurance papers so you can get some money for your house! I went to the safe deposit box at the Whitney Bank. I still had the key from years and years ago. From when we were like a married couple, and you trusted me with everything. Ever since your mother was still alive, the bank’s been sending a check from your account every month to the insurance company-”

  Jules headed for the door, or tried to. “What good’s money gonna do me if I end up with a stake jabbed through my ticker?”

  Maureen dragged him over to the dining room table, where she had the insurance papers laid out. “Just sign them!” She forced a pen into his paw. “What can it hurt? Maybe you can get yourself another Cadillac. Maybe you can replace some of those old jazz records you lost. As coexecutor, I’ve already filled out everything I could. I made X’s everyplace you need to sign. See? Right there-”

  Jules reluctantly signed everywhere Maureen had made a big purple X. Doodlebug joined them at the table. “Maureen, anything else you remember could be of vital importance to us. Do you recall any distinctive clothing he wore? Maybe a shirt with the logo of a favorite bar? A jacket with a school mascot on it?”

  Maureen sat despondently at the table and leaned her head on her fists. “I’ve tried, I’ve tried sohard, but I just can’t remember… Wait. Wait just a minute! Therewas a jacket. A jacket he used to wear lots of times. It was from some school. It had a bird on it!”

  Jules scowled as he continued to sign. “Oh, that’s real helpful, Mo. A bird. There are only-what? Ten thousand different kinds a birds? Was it a parrot? A chicken hawk? A hummingbird, maybe?”

  “I’m not an expert onbirds!”

  “Do you remember what color the bird was?” Doodlebug gently asked.

  “Umm… blue, I think. No, I’msure. It was blue and white.”

  “A bluebird? A blue jay?”

  “A blue jay, I guess. That sounds right.”

  “Jesuit,” Jules mumbled. “What was that fucker doin‘ with a jacket from Jesuit High School?”

  “That’sit!” Maureen cried. “I remember now! He told me he went to Jesuit! The priests gave him a special scholarship! He played on one of the sports teams… not football or basketball. Maybe the bowling team?“

  Doodlebug’s face brightened. “If we could get our hands on the right yearbook-”

  Jules completed the thought. “We could learn his real name.”

  “Just one problem. It’s summer. All the schools are out of session.”

  “But they open up on Monday nights,” Maureen interjected. “All the Catholic schools. During the summer they do open houses on Monday nights, so parents who are looking for a school for their kids can check them out.”

  “How do you know?” Jules asked suspiciously. “When was the last timeyou sent a kid to Catholic school?“

  “It just so happens that one of my regulars at Jezebel’s has a thing for Catholic schoolgirls. Summer is his favorite time of year. He pretends to have a daughter and he goes to all the girls’ schools’ open houses on Mondays and ogles the students. I can’t tell you how many times he’s begged me to use a school uniform in my act. It’s simply impossible to find those plaid skirts in my size.”

  “Monday nights, huh? That’s tomorrow.” A broad grin spread slowly across Jules’s face. “Doodlebug, ol‘ pal, I think it’s high time we look into gettin’ you that high school education I made ya miss fifty years ago.”

  “But Jesuit’s a boys’ school, isn’t it?”

  “Heh. That’s right, slugger.”

  TWELVE

  “I feel perfectlyhideous,” Doodlebug muttered.

  Jules pulled alongside the curb in front of the Banks Street Bar and Grill, two blocks west of Jesuit High School. The tremendous crush of parents and potential enrollees who’d come out for the school’s open house prevented him from parking any closer. “Shaddup already. You got no reason to be whinin‘. I let you pick out your own outfit at Wal-Mart, didn’t I?”

  “And a fat lot of good that freedom of choice did me. Ye gods… even their Women’s Department was filled with the most awful grotesqueries imaginable. But the Boys’ Department-that shapeless denim, those threadbare sports logo T-shirts-all I can say is, I pray it’ll beanother forty-eight years before I shop for boys’ clothing again. And must I wear this ridiculous baseball cap?”

  Jules climbed out of the car onto pavement so broken and tilted it looked like the floor of a fun house. “It’s either that or chop off your hair, pal.”

  “But plenty of boys wear their hair long nowadays.”

  “Not at Jesuit they don’t.”

  They walked toward the imposing three-story brick edifices that overwhelmed Banks Street. In contrast to the Catholic grandeur of the school buildings, the surrounding houses were tired and
dingy, leaning wearily shoulder to shoulder like a police roundup of overworked hookers crowded into a freight elevator.

  They walked into the main academic building and were immediately immersed in a sea of anxious parents, overfriendly faculty, and too-bored-for-words pubescents. Doodlebug stared coldly at the current Jesuit students, standing around nonchalantly in their light brown, paramilitary-looking uniforms.

  “What a perfect bunch of Fascists-in-training,” he whispered harshly to Jules. “Cannon fodder for the next Nathan Knight campaign. And the Jesuits are supposedly theintellectuals of the Catholic Church? This descent into the inferno makes me evenmore grateful to you for making me miss high school.”

  Jules spotted a nun in the crowd. He grabbed Doodlebug’s sleeve and pulled him over to her. “ ‘Scuse me, Sister. My boy and me wanna take a look at your library. Can you maybe point us in the right direction?”

  “Oh, you must mean our Resource Center!”

  “Yeah, I guess so. That where you got yer books and stuff?”

  “Oh, sir, our Resource Center has much more than justbooks! It’s also our computer hub, audiovisual lab, and creative graphics shop. It’s one of the finest knowledge facilities of any high school in the South. We’re very,very proud of our Resource Center.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. So where is it?”

  “Just take those stairs at the end of the hall to the second floor, then turn right. Or we have an elevator just around that corner there.”

  “We’ll take the stairs. Thanks, Sister. Have a swell summer.”

  The short nun sniffed the air like a groundhog emerging from its hole on the first day of spring. “Say, do you smell somethingburning?”

  Jules was already pulling his companion down the crowded hall. He grimaced, then cuffed the side of Doodlebug’s head. “D.B.! Put out that damn cigarette!”

  They ducked into the stairwell. Both vampires sighed with relief. Jules headed straight for a water fountain tucked in the corner and splashed cold liquid down the neck of his shirt, dousing his smoldering skin.

  “You justhad to chat up a nun, didn’t you?” Doodlebug said, fanning his burning arms. “I didn’t appreciate that whack to the head, by the way.”

  Jules tossed handfuls of water in his friend’s direction. “Look, I found out where the library is, didn’t I?”

  “Resource Center.”

  “Whatever. Sorry about the wallop. I had to think fast.”

  “Next time, let your brain do the thinking, not your hands.”

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor. The Resource Center wouldn’t have looked out of place at a medium-sized university. The facility seemed to have more computers than books. After a few minutes of searching, they found the yearbook collection in a dimly lit, musty-smelling annex room.

  The dusty wooden shelves were lined with thick, hardbound editions ofThe Jayson dating back to the 1920s. Jules scooped up ten of the big volumes, starting with the 1976-77 edition and ending with the one dated 1985-86. He set the stack of yearbooks on a nearby table with a heavy thud.

  “According to what Mo told us, he coulda been here at Jesuit any of these years.”

  “Let’s get cracking, then,” Doodlebug said. He looked around him, clearly uncomfortable, and hugged his arms to his sides. “The sooner we’re out of here and away from all these crucifixes, the happier I’ll be.”

  “Amen to that, brother.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to recognize him?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jules said, laying the first volume flat and skipping over the sections on Student Life and Athletics to the pages with portraits of freshman students. “I got his ugly puss memorized. Maybe he’s a little younger and a little browner in these yearbooks than he was when I saw him, but there’s no way I’d mistake him for anybody else.”

  Ninety minutes later the multitude of crucifixes on the walls and in the pages of the yearbooks had begun taking their toll. Both vampires were sweating profusely. Jules was able to skim the first three or four yearbooks fairly quickly; the number of black students during those years was small, only four to six a page. As the years became more recent, the numbers of black students increased. He found himself having to concentrate more closely, matching the sharp chin and cold, cruel eyes of recent memory against a larger number of possible matches. Many of the faces were soft and relatively innocent; these he was able to discount pretty quickly. Others seemed warier, already cynical and hardened… even kids lucky enough to go to Jesuit weren’t immune to the tough influence of the streets, Jules had to remind himself.

  He wiped his clammy forehead with his sleeve, then cracked open the 1981-82Jayson and flipped to the freshman photos and descriptions. In no time one portrait leapt off the page and drop-kicked him square on the nose.

  “Holy shit… I found him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure!” He quickly read the description beneath the photo. “Look at this-the little fucker was a member of thedebate team! No wonder he talked such a blue streak before pissin‘ on my coffin.”

  “Let me see.” Doodlebug pulled the yearbook to his side of the table. Jules prodded the portrait with a thick forefinger. “Malik Raddeaux?That’s his name? I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have expected his real name to be so close to hisnom de guerre.”

  “Talk English, would ya?”

  “To his gang name. Itis pretty clever, though-substitutingRado forRaddeaux.”

  Jules pulled the book back to his side and read the capsule description again. “Be sure and compliment him when you meet him.”

  “That won’t be long in coming. Now that we have a name to feed to my contact at thePicayune, we should be able to land some solid leads.”

  “Maybe we won’t even hafta bother with your pansy pal at the newspaper.”

  Doodlebug frowned. “Why not? You have a better idea?”

  Jules smiled triumphantly. “You didn’t read the whole description, did you? TheseJayson‘s, they’re pretty thorough. Didya notice how they list the names of siblings who attend other Catholic schools? Our boy Malik’s got himself a sister.”

  The first Elisha Raddeaux listed in the phone book turned out to be a fifty-eight-year-old great-grandmother raising two generations of children in a three-room New Orleans East apartment. The second Elisha Raddeaux had left town, leaving no forwarding address with her former landlord or neighbors. The third and final Elisha Raddeaux lived in a modest but well-kept camelback shotgun on Laurel Street, a couple of blocks from Tipitina’s Uptown Music Club.

  The neighborhood was on the dicey side. Several houses hadn’t been occupied in months, maybe years, and were well tattooed with the tags of various neighborhood gangs. Piles of dirty gravel filled the street’s larger potholes, poverty-row Band-Aids for a road in dire need of major surgery. Abandoned shopping carts lay on their sides in the high grass that fronted most of the lots.

  In contrast, the house they’d come to visit was recently painted, with a tall, straight fence surrounding it, a neatly trimmed lawn, and a large tin-roofed utility shed out back. Jules tried opening the gate, then noticed it was locked with a neon-green Kryptonite U-lock. Luckily, the gate had a buzzer attached. He rang it.

  A moment later a young black woman cautiously pushed aside the drapes from her front window. She looked to be about the right age-late twenties or early thirties, which would fit with the information Jules had gleaned from the yearbook. She opened her window a few inches, just enough to make a shouted conversation feasible.

  “What do you want? It’s late.”

  “You Elisha Raddeaux?” Jules asked.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends what you need to see Elisha Raddeaux about.”

  “We’re here to talk about your brother Malik.”

  Her expression remained coldly impenetrable. “I don’t got no brother Malik. You got the wrong address. Go bother somebody else.”

  She started to close her window. The humidity made it stick. S
he cursed. Doodlebug took advantage of the brief opening. Dressed in a flattering silk blouse and high-slit skirt, he was the model of confidence again. “Ms. Raddeaux? We have a very important reason to speak with your brother. We know all about his special condition. We need to warn him about a new bloodborne disease that’s been ravaging the blood-drinking community. It’s vital that we reach him.”

  She stopped struggling with the window. “You on the level with this? You sayin‘ he might be in some kinda health trouble?”

  “My name is Debbie Richelieu, Ms. Raddeaux. I’m a physician and researcher from California. My staff and I have been tracking the transmission of this new disease across the country. I’ve made it my business to get word of a few simple precautions to every known blood drinker. My associates and I overlooked the initial outbreak of AIDS, and we’re determined not to repeat that mistake with this new syndrome. Will you talk with us?”

  She stared suspiciously at Jules. “Who’s the fat dude?”

  “That’s Julius. My assistant. Don’t worry, he’s quite harmless.”

  The drapes fell shut. A few seconds later the front door opened and Elisha Raddeaux walked across her well-tended front lawn to the gate. Jules was surprised to see that she was wearing a black catsuit and a matching, rhinestone-trimmed jacket; given the late hour, he’d expected her to walk out in a rumpled bathrobe. Her tiny waist flared into an impressive set of hips, wide enough to carry a week’s worth of groceries and half a Little League team. The fullness of her hips wasn’t mirrored in the contours of her face, however. As she unlocked the gate, Jules could see some of the same angular harshness in her features that he’d noted in her brother’s.

  She warily hefted the U-lock in her fist and swung open the gate. “C’mon in. I guess wedo have somethin‘ to talk about, after all.”

  “You two go on ahead,” Doodlebug said. “I’ll be right in. I left something in the car.”

  Jules followed her into the house. He’d been inside dozens of camelbacks just like this one, enough that he had a pretty complete mental picture of what the interior would probably look like. This one didn’t fit the bill at all. The furniture was surprisingly modern and high rent. The walls of the long, narrow living room were lined with European-looking leather sofas, German stereo components, and a flat-panel TV big as a casino billboard. A freestanding waterfall burbled in one corner. The dining room was decorated with real oil paintings, not prints. Several of them featured jazz combos, Jules noted with appreciation.