Louisiana Lament

by Julie Smith

  They called the police from their booth.

  ***

  Audrey had made lasagna fit for the gods, but it was going to be a long evening. Eddie figured too much of a good thing would probably make him sleepy.

  “More?” she said, automatically passing the dish.

  “Naah. Gotta work. Say, ya know any biker bars?”

  “Biker bars? Me? Talk to ya daughter.” She began clearing.

  “She probably only knows the dyke ones.”

  “Eddee! Don’t be so hard on her, ya hear?”

  He was half-convinced his daughter was a lesbian. One thing: She never introduced her parents to any boyfriends. Another: She was the hardest bitch in town; that was one thing Janessa was right about.

  “She’s an independent woman, that’s all,” Audrey called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah. Too independent.” Ever since she was a baby.

  “Call her up. Take her with ya.”

  Now that, Eddie thought, was a terrific idea. With a great-looking babe like Angie, he’d get a lot more action than he would by himself. Not that he didn’t have a good pretext—he’d already thought about that—but the idea appealed to him. He picked up his cell phone and punched in her number. “Angie. Whatcha doin’?”

  “Hey, Dad. Same old stuff. Packing for Monte Carlo. Ordering caviar for this party I’m throwing for Eminem. That kind of thing.”

  “Who’s Eminem?”

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “The junior senator from South Dakota, right?”

  “Mayor of Detroit.”

  “Oh, yeah. Mayor Marshall Mathers.”

  “Dad! You amaze me.”

  “Look, forget the caviar. How ’bout going out with your old man?”

  “Uh… well. That’s kind of an unusual invitation.”

  “Hey, I’m hip. I know who Eminem is. Who ya gonna find who’s any cooler?”

  “What’d you have in mind? Want to take in a rap concert?”

  “Thought we’d hit a few biker bars.”

  “Uh-huh. Pick me up on your hog.”

  “I’m serious. We found out Austin’s a biker. I’m going to ask around.”

  “Okay. Now it’s my turn. Who’s Austin?”

  “You remember. Allyson Brower’s son.”

  “You gotta be kidding. That woman’s son’s a biker?”

  “Never more serious. Listen, Angie, you could really help me here.”

  To his amazement, she burst out laughing. “Dad, you’re too much—you know that? Swear to God, Talba’s a fantastic influence on you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Well, think about it. A year ago, would you have asked your innocent daughter to go to a biker bar with you?”

  “Since when have I had an innocent daughter?”

  She laughed again. “This I’ve got to see. Eddie Valentino in a biker bar. What you wearin’, Dad?”

  “Whaddaya mean, what am I wearin’? Who cares what I’m wearin’?”

  “Wear those jeans I gave you.” He’d never had them on. “T-shirt and baseball cap.”

  “I don’t have any T-shirts.”

  “Polo shirt then. Pick me up in an hour.”

  “Sure.” He hung up, elated. “Hey, Audrey—she’s goin’!”

  Audrey came back in, smoothing her apron; beaming. “Now, isn’t that dawlin’? A father-daughter night out.”

  Eddie sighed. At least she wasn’t the kind of wife who complained because he had to work.

  He was looking for the damned jeans when the phone rang again. It was Ms. Wallis, telling him somebody’d shot at Rashad. Well, that was that. He’d meant to go see the kid’s brother, anyhow—it would have to be now. He looked at his watch and figured he could still make his date with Angie.

  Since Ms. Wallis was the mistress of the detailed report, Eddie already had Marlon’s address. He’d always figured there was more to be had there, and maybe a little ol’ gal wasn’t the ideal choice to squeeze it out. (Though he’d have worn a dress to work before he’d have used that phrase in his employee’s presence—or Angie’s or Audrey’s, for that matter. Old he might be, but he wasn’t stupid.)

  He also figured Rashad might have run to his brother’s—even if he hadn’t done it right away. If he’d really been shot at, he might have decided to become a moving target.

  Marlon answered the door with a beer in his hand and from his slightly vague, out-of-focus look, Eddie figured it wasn’t his first.

  “Yeah?” said his host. Not a good sign. He hoped Marlon wasn’t a mean drunk.

  “Marlon Daneene? I’ve got some news about your brother.” He hadn’t tried to look particularly grim—no point giving the man a heart attack—but he saw the fear spread over Daneene’s face. Okay, so Rashad wasn’t with him.

  “He’s all right so far as I know, but I’ve to talk to you about him.”

  “You a cop?”

  Shame you couldn’t claim to be one, he thought. That would have been the easiest lie. In this case, the next best thing would probably be to tell the truth. “No, I’m working for a friend of his—”

  “Wait a minute. Some lady come by; tell me that.” Eddie could hear a television blasting out commercials in the background. Funny how you could always tell commercials from regular programming; they sounded even phonier.

  “That was Ms. Wallis,” Eddie said. “She’s my associate. We’re very worried about your brother, Mr. Daneene. He called his friend Janessa and told her someone—”

  “Well, he ain’ call me. I don’t b’lieve what ya sayin’. Why he call some gal, not call his own brother?”

  Eddie shrugged. “Maybe he thinks the police have your phone tapped. Listen, I’ve really got to talk to you about this. He told Janessa someone took a shot at him.”

  But Eddie’d lost him. Daneene had turned sullen. “This some sort of trick? Why I’m s’posed to b’lieve a thing like that?”

  “Well, look, he may be in danger. My daughter’s his lawyer. Could you just—”

  “Why Rashad need a lawyer? How he get one if nobody know where he is?”

  Eddie was losing patience. “My daughter is willing to work for him on a pro bono basis—meaning she won’t charge for her services—if he’ll come in and talk to the police. If you’d just tell him—” He held out his card, but Marlon interrupted again.

  “I don’t need this shit.” The black man slammed the door. Eddie tucked the card under the door and walked quickly back to his car, which he’d parked discreetly half a block away. He got in and hunkered down to wait.

  Ten minutes later, about the time it would take to take a whiz, make a couple of calls, explain things to the wife, and find a jacket, Marlon came out and drove away. Eddie followed him to a small, neat bungalow in the Irish Channel and watched him ring the doorbell. After a while he began banging on the door, shouting something. Though a porch light was on, as well as a couple of lights inside, no one answered. Marlon kicked the door and left.

  Noting the address, Eddie followed to see where else he’d lead. But he only drove home, slowly—as if he’d suddenly realized he’d drunk too much to be doing this. Eddie extracted his cell phone and called Talba. “Ms. Wallis, you at the office?”

  “Sorry—still at dinner.”

  “I can’t meet ya tonight. But go to the office anyway, find out who lives at 4921 Laurel Street, and run a background check on ’em. Then read those poems real carefully and write me another report on anything that could be a clue to where the kid would go.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Talba deliberately kept the conversation away from the two murders and Rashad during dinner. This was another of Eddie’s tactics: “Forget the Alamo. Just leave it alone for a while. Catch ’em off guard.”

  But in the end, she found she didn’t have to return to the subject. Janessa kept doing it herself—remembering Allyson and Cassie, fretting about Rashad, speculating as to what had happened. If there was anything to Eddie
’s theory, this was the mark of an innocent person. A guilty one, according to him, would avoid the subject at all costs.

  Still, it gave her a chance to bounce a few things off an insider. “Janessa,” she said, “I talked to a few of Rashad’s friends today. First, Marlon; then Arnelle, the Montjoys, and Wayne Taylor.”

  Janessa had barbecue sauce nearly from ear to ear. She applied a napkin to her mouth, looked at the resulting smears, said, “Owweee, this is good! What they say?”

  “Allyson got quite a few negative reviews.”

  Her sister shrugged. “Well, I liked her. She real nice to me and Rashad.”

  “Did she pay you on time?”

  She shrugged again. “She tight with a dollar. But give her time, she pay. I don’t mind.”

  “Some businesswoman you are.”

  “Who you think you are? My big sister?” Janessa smiled. “Sorry. It did sound like that.” And probably will again, Talba thought, amazed at how easily she’d slipped into the role. She changed the subject. “Tell me something. Did Hunt Montjoy ever visit Allyson?”

  “Ummm… don’t think so. He come see Rashad sometime.”

  “So he was around, right? Did he ever hit on you?”

  “Hit on me?” She started laughing so hard Talba could see the half-chewed food in her mouth; she prayed it wouldn’t spew out all over the table, but she didn’t have her hopes too high. Janessa was braying. “I wouldn’t call it hittin’ on me, exactly. See, there I am paintin’ the mural and he comes in the bathroom, unzips, whips out his dick, and says, ‘How you like this, baby?’ ”

  Talba was appalled. “What’s the matter with you, girlfriend? You’re right—that’s not hitting on you—it’s practically assault.”

  “No, it wadn’t, it really wadn’t. He just messin’ around. ’Cause the next thing he does, he turns around like I’m not even there, and takes a leak.”

  She was still laughing, but Talba was speechless. Finally she said, “And you stood there and watched, or what?”

  “You crazy? ’Course I didn’t stand there and watch. I ran outta there screamin’—guess tha’s what I was supposed to do. Miz Allyson, she come runnin’, gets the story, I think she’s gon’ be real mad. And, really, I think she was a little put out. She make him apologize when he come outta there. He say he don’t mean nothin’, somethin’ like that. Later she tell me how he an ‘eccentric genius,’ he’s not like regular people, and I got to make allowances. When she go ‘eccentric genius,’ Rashad spin his finger—”

  “What?”

  “You know.” Janessa made the sign for “crazy.” “Some reason it struck me funny. That’s what I was laughin’ at—never did know if he meant Allyson or Hunt. Both of ’em eccentric, you want to know what I think.”

  It was just the sort of thing Hunt Montjoy was known for, the kind of story men tell on each other, tears flying out of their eyes from laughing so hard. She couldn’t imagine why Janessa found it funny, except that her sister had evidently become enmeshed in the rhythms of the household. Bizarre behavior had begun to seem commonplace to her. What Allyson’s reaction meant she couldn’t imagine—except maybe an impulse to avoid legal action. If there was one good thing about Hunt Montjoy as a person—not a writer—she hadn’t heard it yet.

  Not even from his buddy Wayne.

  She ran the other nutballs by Janessa, but she didn’t get much back. It didn’t matter—this wasn’t a working dinner. It was the first dinner the two sisters had ever shared and they’d gotten through it without tears, sulks, blows, or gunshots—a raging success, in Talba’s opinion.

  Janessa was contemplating dessert when Eddie called. The girl came alert. “Eddie hear from Rashad?”

  “He didn’t say, but I don’t think so.” Janessa wore such a puppy-dog look Talba could remember the desperate, yearning loves of her own younger self.

  Given the kid’s weight problem, she disapproved of dessert but she let her have it anyhow. Then she hurried her out of the restaurant, told her to call if Rashad surfaced in any way, and returned to the office, per Eddie’s instructions.

  She ran the Laurel Street address through a database and found its owner was Felicia Dufresne, a gorgeous name in Talba’s opinion. Dufresne was forty-five and had once made news when she was interviewed in connection with a crime in her neighborhood. Talba read the lurid story with satisfaction, reflecting that the best thing she’d ever done was get access to Angie’s LexisNexis: The news story said Felicia was a clerk in the assessor’s office. From another source, Talba learned she had no liens against her, and owned her modest house. A perfectly ordinary woman, to all appearances. Rashad was twenty-two and Marlon slightly older—Dufresne could be their mother. Or maybe the aunt. Talba wished she had a way of checking her race, but until Louisiana put marriage and birth records online even she couldn’t figure a way to do it.

  She put the report on Eddie’s desk, and turned her attention to the book of poems. Flipping through it, she found an entire section about a woman the poet had apparently loved. Why hadn’t she noticed this before, she thought? And realized it was because they weren’t attached to anyone’s name, being entitled merely “Street Songs.” Some were written from the woman’s viewpoint. The woman had been in love, too, but not with Rashad. These were about crack cocaine, about the ritual and the smoke and the high and the crash; about the cravings, and the mess her life had become; about her attempts to love someone who loved her—the poet, Talba imagined—and her failure to love anything at all except her habit.

  And some were from the poet’s point of view. They were not character studies—they were about the way he loved her. About looking for her in crack houses and bus stations and shelters. About helping her get sober, once even taking her to rehab in another state, only to watch her decline again. The woman had eventually died of an overdose.

  In the poems, he called her Celeste, but Talba suspected that wasn’t her real name. If the poems were autobiographical, Wayne wasn’t kidding about Rashad’s penchant for broken wings.

  Talba also found a poem entitled “Paw-Paw”—a portrait of a man who faced great odds, but always maintained his dignity, mostly through the sheer strength of his religious faith, something the poet couldn’t share—indeed treated with the greatest irony. Clearly, he had tremendous respect for his grandfather, but not a lot for the God who had treated him so badly and who, eventually, had even taken the old man’s mind. To Talba, this was one of his best poems—simple and moving; more direct than some of the others. She suspected it had been written more recently, perhaps after studying with Wayne Taylor.

  Of special interest, though, were two sections she’d skipped in her earlier effort to find material on Cassie and Janessa. The first was entitled simply “Places,” and the second, “Boy on a Bike.” The “Places” section contained poems about the lake, about the neighborhood where Rashad had grown up, about City Park, his grandfather’s nursing home, the house where he’d lived as a boy (“House of Fear”—that was interesting).

  There were eight in all.

  And there were a dozen poems about a young boy’s bike rides. As Marlon had mentioned, Rashad had grown up on Chippewa Street, near the St. Thomas Project, once the toughest and meanest neighborhood in the city. The project had since been torn down, but it had apparently loomed large in Rashad’s consciousness as a kid. Against his mama’s wishes, he’d ridden his bike there, as well as all along Tchoupitoulas Street, near the Jackson Street Ferry and the wharves that lined the river. The poem called “Celeste” was the one that caught her eye:

  She say, “Whatever you do, boy,

  Don’t go in them projects;

  They got drugs there, and real bad things

  Turn you into a jailbird,

  Maybe a corpse.”

  So I find me a secret place,

  Down near the old abandoned factory,

  Pretty blue place where no one go.

  But I can

  Turn into a wharf rat.
r />   Celeste be my tree house,

  My fort,

  Be where I go if I gotta get away.

  Later, when I’m grown up,

  Be where I take my true love

  In the dark,

  With all them rats;

  Be our heaven.

  Other side be the river—

  You can look out through the cracks

  And see Algiers,

  See the bridge.

  Own the whole world.

  Tchoupitoulas ran from Canal all the way to Audubon Park, and many of the poems had to do with exploring it. What Rashad was talking about here had to be the old Celeste Street Wharf, just off Tchoupitoulas, almost under the bridge. Under “Places,” he had one about that area, too, called “Jackson Street Ferry,” that mentioned the “sky-blue stretch of the Celeste Street Wharf.” And in “Street Songs” he’d named his “true love Celeste. One of the “Street Songs” had to do with taking her to “a secret place” to detox, a dark place, with rats, where you could see the river.

  All this was way too coincidental—almost transparent, it seemed to Talba. Her heart thumped as she wondered if it was ridiculously obvious, therefore couldn’t possibly be where he was.

  But she thought of the universal writers’ dilemma—obscurity. Of the way you could write about your worst enemy or your secret crush in a perfect cocoon of safety—the certain knowledge that he or she would never see your work. The hardest thing about bring a writer—particularly a self-published poet—was getting read. She wondered if the police would think to read Laments. And thought not. At any rate it wouldn’t be the first thing they’d do—any more than it was the first thing Talba had done. If Rashad had nowhere to go, his old fort would be a natural; that is, if not for the fact that he’d published its existence. No one she’d questioned had mentioned it, though. She had to wonder why.

  She got together the report on Dufresne, and then marked the references in the book, along with a note about her theory, put them on Eddie’s desk, and went home, hoping to find a dark, quiet house.