by Julie Smith
“Okay, you know why I’m here,” I said, plunking down my drink on a wobbly table. “Who’s this Brack Self character that Eva took out a peace bond against?”
“Oh, that snarling beast,” Pogo said, curling up like a cat into a chair. “A former beau who used his fists to make a point. Black and blue weren’t Eva’s most becoming colors.”
“She liked it rough, huh?”
“Oooh, Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Pogo squealed.
“Say, you little—” Play it cool, I thought. This is just a job.
“She met him here at the open mike when the poetry series started. That first night he got so wasted he just unzipped, whipped it out, and pissed sitting right at a table. While I was performing, I might add. Now that, honey, is what I call literary criticism. Eva mopped it up, and never stopped. And ended up mothering him.”
“How long they together?”
“Until the third occasion she summoned the police.”
He couldn’t have killed her from a jail cell in Tampa. Maybe he had friends.
“How long you been coming here?”
“Since I was a boy. When Mother couldn’t find a babysitter, she’d haul me here when it was Ruby Red’s—”
“I used to come here then, too. Who was your mom?”
“Lily.”
“Lily Lamont?” She was the fancy-pants Uptown debutante who used to cause scenes whenever I was here with Janice. In those days the port was right across the train tracks from the Quarter, and Lily Lamont was usually being held upright between a couple of Greek or Latino sailors. Once I swung open the door to the can to find her on her knees giving one of them a blow job while a rat looked on from the urinal. That’s when I stopped bringing Janice to this dump.
“Did you know Mother?” Pogo squirmed in his seat.
“Only by sight.” So this was the stunted offspring of one of those Ruby Red nights. If Janice were still here, we’d have children his age.
“Your mother still alive?” I asked. “If you care to call it that. She’s secluded inside her Xanadu on Pirate’s Alley.”
I softened to the little creep. He told me that as a kid, his mother would often show up at their apartment on Dumaine with a strange man and they’d lock themselves inside her room for three days with a case of bourbon. Now Pogo lived on a trust fund from the Lamonts, which paid the rent on the apartment. He was finishing a book of poems dedicated to his mother titled The Monster Cave.
“Where did Eva strip?”
“At Les Girls on Iberville. She gave it up soon after she moved in with me. You see, I paid for everything. Because Eva was my teacher and muse.”
“She ever bring any guys home from there?”
“Not guys. Other strippers sometimes.”
“So she swung both ways?”
“Oooh, Lieutenant Girlfriend.” Pogo nudged my leg with his foot. “Do you?”
I heard some ranting and raving from inside the bar, and edged my way in to listen. The place was packed, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke hovering in the spotlight. First up was Millicent Tripplet, an obese woman with ruby lipstick, who recited a poem about how oppressed she felt when she was being fucked by a certain guy, and how depressed she felt when she wasn’t. That got a howl of appreciation. Then a rapper named Pawnshop took the stage, coked out of his gourd, to blow the trumpet and rap about how all the bitches and ho’s weren’t down with his skinny black ass in the baggy jumpsuit. His rhymes were catchy but the rhythm was a snooze. Then came a comic from the racetrack who sounded like my Uncle Dominic; next up was some nerd in a plaid sports coat who read a sonnet about peat moss and death; and then some anorexic lady dressed all in lilac who choked up in the middle and had to sit down. I couldn’t figure out what her poem was about. I think her pooch died.
One thing I clocked: The better the poet, the shorter the spiel. The worst ones droned on forever. I gave Mrs. Pierce an empty shrug, as if to say, No clues here, lady. Then she took the stage, hands folded, looking like a Methodist Sunday school teacher. She held up the flier and announced that she would read the last poem her daughter ever wrote:
I’ve always known you
though we haven’t met.
I know how your name tastes
though I’ve never said it.
You linger on the last step
of stairs I never descend.
I stand with my address book
on a landing to which you never
climb, and every day we stop
just short of each other.
I invoke you to appear,
to kiss childhood back
into my skeptical mouth,
rain into this parched air.
I invoke you at the sudden angle
of smoke, secrets, and zippers,
at the hour when earlobes,
skin along inner thighs,
a smooth chest is tenderest,
love unfolding like a hammock
to fit whatever is nearest.
I invoke your breath’s fur
on my neck, your curve of lips,
the blue seaweed of your hair where
we’ll weave a nest of lost mornings.
The words sent a chill down my spine. It was as if Eva had been waiting for her murderer. Had a date with death. All I could see was Janice, her face bent over a glowing red candle holder, her straight blond hair swaying as she read poems to me. I had to rush out onto the balcony where I could sit alone and be twenty again, if only for a moment, and remember what a love so fragile felt like.
Finally it was raining, coming down in torrents, the oak branches and curlicues of iron lace dripping fat, dirty tears. Drip drop, drip drop. What was that Irma Thomas song we were always listening to in those days? “It’s raining so hard, it brings back memories.” An ambulance raced past, its flashing red lights hellish on the slick street. And I had to endure it all over again, her body dragged from the driver’s seat of our crumpled red Chevy. She had been coming home with a birthday surprise for me, and the MacKenzie cake box was soaked with her blood. I never thought I’d be sitting again with Janice on the balcony at Ruby Red’s, listening to the rain.
I began to haunt the Quarter for the first time in years, trying to get a handle on Eva’s world. Mostly she hung out in what they used to call Little Sicily, around the French Market and lower Decatur Street, where my daddy grew up. Like all the Sicilians in this town, his family had lived over their corner grocery store, Angelo’s Superette at Decatur and Governor Nicholls. My only relative left in the neighborhood was Aunt Olivia, a butch little old maid who used to run a laundromat with her mama on Dauphine Street. She owned half the Quarter, and my Uncle Dominic, who hadn’t worn anything but pajamas for the past twenty years, owned the other half. When I was young everyone was always going, Oh, jeez, you got family in the Quarter, you should visit them. But like my mama always said, “Me, I don’t go by them dagos none. They just as soon stick a knife in your back.”
The neighborhood was a different place now, and I couldn’t understand what anyone down here did to make a living. You hardly saw any grocery stores or dry cleaners or fruit vendors or florists or printing offices or notions stores. Mostly the shops were Pakistani joints selling Mardi Gras masks made in China. Even the criminals were candy-assed, just a bunch of two-bit drug dealers and purse snatchers, nothing like the outfit my mama’s family used to run. In those days, if a girl didn’t cough up to her pimp, she got a Saturday-night makeover with acid splashed in her face. The girls used to roll the sailors right and left, slipping mickeys in their drinks or switchblades between their ribs. Now I walked around at night unarmed with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. The streets were filled with gutter punks, their mangy mutts, and older kids playing dress-up. These kids thought they were being bad bad bad. They’d snort their little powders and do their little humpety-hump on somebody’s futon. Then they’d ride their bikes and eat their vegetables, just like their mamas told them. They even recycled.
I figured with all these Pollyannas floating around, older predators were bound to be lurking in the shadows, dying to take a bite out of this innocent flesh. So the first place I hit was where Eva used to strip, Les Girls de Paree on Iberville between Royal and Chartres. This block of seedy dives was the real thing, the way the whole Quarter used to look when I was coming up. The Vieux Carré Commission must have preserved it as a historical diorama. A hulking bozo with a mullet haircut held the doors open onto the pulsing red lights of a dark pit belting out bump-and-grind. Inside, Les Girls smelled like dirty drawers in a hamper. Or to put it less delicately, like ass.
Some skanky brunette with zits on her behind was rubbing her crotch on an aluminum pole and jiggling her store- bought titties. You’d have to be pretty desperate to throw a boner for a rancid slice of luncheon meat like that. Only two old guys were sitting in the shadows, and I couldn’t figure out how this joint sucked in any bucks. Finally, Mullet-head waltzed over to ask what I wanted.
“I want to talk about Eva Pierce.”
“Miss Ivonne,” he called out, eyeballing me up and down, “copper here.”
This over-the-hill fluffball with champagne hair clopped over to my table. I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips. “What can I do for you, officer?”
“Eva Pierce” is all I said. Her lips were pink and puffed out like Vienna Sausages. They must have kept a vat of collagen under the bar.
“I’ve been waiting for this little bereavement call,” she said, sliding into a chair. “I’m still broke-up about Eva. She didn’t belong here, and I was glad to see her leave. All she ever did was write poetry and sip 7-Up. But she sure attracted the chicken-hawks.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“I don’t rat out my customers.”
“Eva liked it rough, and swung both ways, right?”
“Where you hear that, babe?” She yanked a Vantage from inside her bra and lipped it.
“Her roommate Pogo.”
“Me and his momma used to have the best damn time.” she shrieked, pounding the table. “But don’t ever cross that woman. No siree.”
“You know Lily Lamont?”
She slit her eyes at me. “You sure get around for a cop.”
“Some people pay me to.”
“Look, officer,” she said, shooting a stream of smoke toward the ceiling through those lips, “Eva went home with a couple of the girls here, but they just wanted somebody’s shoulder to cry on. Eva was a mommy, not a dyke. She took care of stray animals and people. Like that Brack creature and poor Pogo. She was like Dorothy in the goddamn Wizard of Oz. All she ever talked about was that farm in Ohio.”
“So who’d want to kill her?”
“You got me,” she said. “Maybe the wicked witch with her flying monkeys. Or the blue guy.”
“The blue guy?”
Miss Yvonne stifled a laugh. “Buffed-up psycho used to come in here, hair and beard dyed cobalt-blue. He wore a cat-o’-nine-tails around his neck. Sure took a liking to Eva, but I run him off.”
I was walking back down Chartres Street, thinking about Janice, when I heard a dog leash rattling behind me.
“Oh, Lieutenant Girlfriend.” It was Pogo walking this dust mop named Welfare, now squatting at the curb. I hadn’t seen Pogo since last Tuesday at the Dragon’s Den. I was becoming a regular at the open mike, and starting to get a kick out of it. It was like a cross between a gong show and the observation room on Acutely Disturbed at DePaul’s.
“Been meaning to ask you,” I said. “Eva go to the movies a lot?”
“Never,” he said, picking up a dog turd between two fingers with a plastic baggie. “She preferred to star in her own epic drama.”
“So why was she carrying popcorn the night she died?”
He stopped. “Popcorn? I never thought about that. Maybe she swung by the Cloister after she said goodnight at Molly’s. Sometimes the bartender there hands out bags of popcorn. Just before dawn.”
I smiled. The Cloister. A few doors down Decatur from Molly’s.
Pogo put the plastic baggie in his pocket. Who would’ve ever thought that one day the Quarter would be filled with rich people walking around with dog turds in their pockets? The dagos moved to Kenner just in time.
“Ever see Eva around a man with a blue beard? Blue hair and beard. And a whip?”
“Oh, him.”
“She date him?”
“He followed her to the open mike from Les Girls. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Now we have to listen to his poetry.”
“His perms any good?”
Pogo pulled out the baggie of dog mess and waved it in my face. “See you at the open mike, Lieutenant Girlfriend.”
If the garage rock band at the Cloister banged out one more song, I thought my skull would pop. I nursed several Seven and Sevens while I jotted down random thoughts in my notebook, hoping Swamp Gas would finally run out of steam. The crowd was twentysomethings dressed in black with all the hardware in Home Depot dangling off their mugs. I wondered if they got snared in each other’s rings and things when they got down to business and had to use a wire cutter to separate themselves. Nobody seemed to be having a particularly good time. Janice and I’d had more fun eating thirty-five-cent plates of red beans and rice at Buster Holmes. A steady stream of couples was going in and out of the bathrooms in back, but not for any lovey-dovey. They were wiping their noses and clenching their jaws when they walked out. That explained the coke residue on the straw in Eva’s purse.
Finally I was getting somewhere.
Swamp Gas petered out at about 5:00 in the morning. I was getting ready to leave when I spotted this geezer with a snowy white pompadour hobbling around in his bathrobe and slippers. When he turned around, I had to laugh.
“Hey, Uncle Dominic, it’s me, Vinnie. Chetta’s boy.” I hadn’t see the old guy since my daddy’s funeral.
“Vinnie, let me get a look at you.” He cuffed my head and patted my cheeks. “Not a day goes by I don’t think of my sweet little sister. How she making?”
“Same old, same old.” Mama was still fuming about how Uncle Dominic had gypped her on the inheritance. He stuck a knife in my back, she growled whenever his name came up.
“Remind her she still owes me three hundred bucks for property taxes the year she sold out.”
“What you doing here at this hour,” I asked, swiveling my hips, “getting down with the girlies?” His robe was covered with lint balls.
“Just checking on my investment. Got six, seven other buildings to see this morning. You?” he asked, swiveling his own hips. “Thought you was married. You just like your papa.”
“Here on a murder case. Know this young lady?” I flipped out the picture of Eva and he fished glasses from his robe pocket. “Killed the night of March 28.”
“Let me think,” he said, staring at the snapshot. “Yeah, yeah, I seen her here that morning. Last time I come in to check on my investment. Around this time. I axed her what she was writing down in her little book, and she says, ‘A perm.’ Looked like a bunny with them funny pigtails.”
“She leave alone?”
“Yeah, yeah. No, wait—” He slapped his forehead. “Madonna, how could I forget? She left with that pazzo what got the blue beard.”
Blue Beard.
Bingo.
Then somebody handed me some popcorn still warm in the bag.
The next morning I radioed Blue Beard’s description in to the Eighth District station in the Quarter, and rang Pogo, Miss Ivonne, Miss Ping, and Uncle Dominic to ask them to contact me the minute they spotted him. Uncle Dominic told me he wanted a cut of the reward, and lost interest fast when I told him there wasn’t any. But both he and Miss Ivonne promised to make a few phone calls to help locate Blue Beard. Mrs. Pierce sputtered “God bless you” when I reported that I was zeroing in on the killer.
Where the hell could he be? It wasn’t like a man with blue hair could hide just anywhere, even in the French Q
uarter.
That afternoon I got a staticky message on my cell phone.
Lily Lamont.
A husky, spaced-out voice said she needed to talk with me in person. That evening. She left an address that at first she couldn’t remember right.
My heels echoed on the flagstones in deserted Pirate’s Alley like the approaching footsteps in those radio plays my daddy used to listen to. A mist had rolled in from the river, wrapping St. Louis Cathedral in fog, and I squinted to make out the address under the halo of a streetlamp. I pictured Lily Lamont blowzy and toothless now, passed out on a filthy mattress cradling an empty bourbon bottle.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I found.
After I was buzzed in, I mounted a curved mahogany staircase that swept me up into a cavernous Creole ballroom under a spidery bronze chandelier. In a zebra-upholstered throne, there sat a mummified lady with white hair pulled back tight from her porcelain face, buttering a slice of raisin-bread toast.
“I’m famished,” Lily Lamont said, taking a bite. “Would you care for some toast and tea? That’s all I ever, ever eat.”
I shook my head. Perched in the zebra chair next to hers was a bulky goon with a body like a boxer’s gone to seed. He was caressing the top of his shiny bald head, several shades paler than his face.
“I don’t believe we’ve ever formally met, Lieutenant Panarello,” she said. Her bones, thin as chopsticks, were swallowed by a red silk kimono fastened by a dragon brooch.
“Not face-to-face.” What was I supposed to do, tell this lady I saw her on her knees in a men’s room thirty years ago?
“And this is my associate, Lucas,” she said, gesturing to Baldie.
I nodded, taking a seat in an elaborately carved bishop’s chair under an alabaster lamp of entwined snakes.
“Nice place,” I said. The floor-to-ceiling windows were draped with damask swags. Outside, shadows from the extended arms of a spotlit Jesus loomed over the cathedral garden.
“I bought this house last year from your uncle, Dominic Zuppardo.” Her sharp little teeth gnawed on the toast like a rat’s. “At a pretty penny. Actually, I paid him twice as much as the sale price we registered. That helped with my property assessment and his capital gains taxes. Smart man.”
