by James Sallis
The Long-Legged Fly
( Lew Griffin - 1 )
James Sallis
James Sallis
The Long-Legged Fly
Part One
1964
Chapter One
“Hello, Harry.”
His sick eyes slid in the light. He was wearing a corduroy coat over a denim shirt, chinos bagged out at knee and butt, pant legs too long, cuffs frayed. They’d all seen better days, clothes and man alike. Harry had always been a sharp dresser, people said; they even used the word natty. But now skag and his own errant heart had got him.
“Carl?” His voice was an emphysematous whisper. Even now a cigarette dangled out the side of his mouth. It waggled up and down as he talked. “I got the money, man. Business as usual, right? Just like you said.” A rumbling cough deep in his chest.
“No rush, Harry. Be cool, there’s plenty of time. Let up a little, enjoy life.” The yard lights were behind me and he squinted at the shadow moving toward him. Not that it would have made much difference. He didn’t know me from Earl Long. “And anyhow, first I want to tell you a story. You like stories, Harry?”
Behind us, oil derricks heaved and rested, heaved and rested.
“Magazine Street. Ten-fifteen, Saturday night, about a month ago. There was a girl from Mississippi, Harry. And a party. And you. Any of this beginning to sound familiar?”
His eyes searched the darkness around him.
“I’ve been looking for you a long time, Harry. It took a long time to find you. A man like you, with your needs, he shouldn’t be so hard to find.”
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it down. It lay there like a half-blind eye. I stepped out of the light and when he saw me he was scared for the first time, really scared. Old fears die hard.
“It’s only a story, of course. Stories help us go on living. Stories can’t hurt anyone, can they, Harry?”
I let him see the knife in my hand then, a leatherworker’s knife.
“Big Black Sambo’s coming to get you, Harry. Nigger’s gonna carve you up like you did her. Nothing left for the pigs and chickens, not even enough for soul food.”
His eyes moved. He knew escape was somewhere. But he also knew that like everything else in his life it was going to get away from him.
“Look, man, I don’t know who you are, but you got it all wrong. You listen to me, it wasn’t my fault. I just fix things-arrange them, like-that’s all I ever done. It was those crazies, man. Goddamn long hair and kraut van. They’re the ones did that girl.”
It tumbled out of him much as the world must have gone in: fitful starts, none of them connected; and underneath, everything blurring together.
I raised the knife and light glinted on the curved blade.
“Yeah, I know, Harry. Crazies on skag and smack feeding new monkeys, crazies on speed and booze and horse and the rush of a couple hundred dollars they just boosted out of some mom and pop’s till. But who got the stuff for them, Harry? Who gave it to them and started the party? How much of their stake did it cost them? And whose idea to bring the girl into that?”
Fear lit his eyes like a torch. All around us oil derricks sighed, the last breaths of tired old men.
He turned to run but fear tangled his legs. He fell. I let him crawl, a few yards. He was sobbing. Choking.
“You didn’t even know her name, Harry.” I walked up slowly behind him, got a foot under and flipped him over. He flopped like something not human, and his eyes rolled. I let him have a good long look at my face, all the things that were in it.
“Sleepy after your bedtime story?”
Blood welled out of his throat and soaked denim, corduroy, ground. No light left behind those eyes now. No light anywhere.
I searched his pockets and got the money-that was for the kid. Then I bent down and opened up his wasted belly with the knife.
“That was for Angie,” I said.
Behind us, oil derricks shushed any eulogy.
Chapter Two
I hadn’t been to the apartment in three days, the office in four, so it was a toss-up. Finally, cruising down St. Charles, I decided the office was closer so what the hell. I went around the block a few times. All the parking spaces were filled. I finally pulled the Cad into a towaway zone and raised the hood. Weak, but it might work. It had before.
The bakery was doing hot business, but upstairs it looked like everybody had moved out. There was something peculiar about that at two-fifteen in the afternoon. Then I remembered it was Labor Day. Maybe I’d have to do some work to celebrate.
I stopped in front of the door marked “Lewis Griffin, In estigations” (the v had escaped a year or so back; most days I envied it) and got out the key. There were a lot of notes tacked to the door-I had an informal arrangement with the bakery for taking messages. I ripped them off, turned the key and went on inside. The floor was littered with mail they’d dropped through the slot. I scooped it up and dropped it on the desk with the messages.
There was a half-filled glass of bourbon and an almost empty bottle on the desk. A fly floated in what was left in the glass. I thought about it, fished the fly out with a letter-opener, drank, poured in the rest of the bottle. Then I sat down to go through all the junk.
Most of it was just that. Circulars, subscription renewal notices, religious pamphlets. There were three letters from the bank that I was overdrawn and would I please at my earliest convenience drop by and see Mr. Whitney. There was also a telegram. I held it up, turning it over and over in my hands. Never liked those things.
I finally ripped it open and looked. There was the usual salad of numbers and letters that meant nothing. Under that was the message.
FATHER GRAVELY ILL STOP ASKING FOR YOU STOP BAPTIST MEMORIAL MEMPHIS STOP PLEASE CALL STOP LOVE MOTHER
I sat there staring at the yellow paper. Ten minutes must have gone by. The old man and I had never been close, not for a long time anyhow, but now he was asking for me. Or was that just something Mom put in? And what the hell happened, anyhow? I couldn’t see anything short of a train or howitzer ever stopping the old horse.
I got up and went to the window, taking the bourbon with me. I put it down in one gulp and put the glass on the sill. Down in the street a group of kids were playing what looked like cops and robbers. The robbers were winning.
I went back to the desk and dialed LaVerne’s number. I didn’t really expect to catch her this time of day, but she got it on the third ring.
“Lew? Listen, man, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all week. Your mother’s been calling me two, three times a day. I left messages all over this town.”
“Yeah, I know, honey. Sorry. I’ve been away on business.”
“But you always let me know …”
“Didn’t know myself until the last minute.” I looked wistfully at the empty bottle on the desk (good word, wistfully), wondering if the drug-store across the street would be open. I hadn’t noticed. “But I’m back now and looking to see you.”
“What is it, Lew? What’s wrong?”
“Mom didn’t say?”
“She wouldn’t even have told me who she was if she didn’t need something.”
“My father’s sick. I don’t know, a heart attack, a stroke, maybe an accident-something, anyhow. ‘Gravely ill’ was what she said.”
“Lew. You’ve gotta go up there. Next plane.”
“And what would I use for money?”
She paused. “I’ve got money.”
“Like the man says, Thanks but no thanks.”
Another pause. “Someday that pride of yours’ll kill you, Lew. The pride or the anger, I don’t know which’ll get you first. But look, it can be a loan, okay?”
“You too, Lew. You know where to find me. Bye.”
“Yeah.”
I put the receiver down and looked again at the empty bottle. Maybe Joe’s was the place for me tonight. I looked at my watch. Maybe eight, nine would be the best time to call. Maybe they’d know something by then. Maybe they knew something already.
I threw the letters from the bank in the waste-basket and headed out the door.
When I got to the street, my car was gone.
Chapter Three
After bailing the car out down by the river-$47.50; they required cash but I managed to hang some bad paper on them; they also required that I affix the new 1964 license plate I’d been carrying in the back seat before I left the lot-I drove to Joe’s.
It’s off Decatur, but you won’t find it if you don’t know where to look. The barmaids are all pros; they migrated from bar to bar all through the downtown area before they found their way to Joe’s and settled in here, like old folks retiring to Florida.
I sat down at the bar and Betty brought me a double bourbon. I sat there smoking and putting down drink after drink. The ashtray was full and the bottle Betty was pouring out of was going down fast when Joe came in. He wanted to know what the Saints’ chances were. I told him. He said ain’t it the truth.
Several working girls came in, gave me a quick eye and moved along. Betty told me about the latest problems with getting to see her kids.
“What else’s going on?” I asked her at one point.
“Tryin’ to stay out of trouble but people won’t let me,” she said.
That’s about the size of it, I thought.
At nine I walked over to the corner phone and placed a call to Baptist Hospital in Memphis, person-to-person for Mrs. Arthur Griffin, charging it to the office. I was routed through several operators and finally got a man who said, “Fifth-floor intensive care.”
“Mrs. Arthur Griffin,” the operator said.
“Just a minute. She may be with her husband; I’ll check.”
The phone was quiet for some minutes. I watched them meander past like sheep on Joe’s revolving Schlitz clock above the bar. Finally a voice came on.
“Lewis? Lewis, is that you?”
“Go ahead,” the operator said.
“Mom. Listen, what’s going on?”
“It’s bad, Lewis. Where have you been? I been tryin’ to get you all week long. It’s bad. It’s a heart attack, Lewis. He’s had a heart attack. A bad one, the doctors say. Now let me get this right.” She was probably reading it off a piece of paper. “A myocardial infarction.”
Somehow I’d known. “How’s he doing?”
“Holding his own, Lewis, holding his own. They say the crisis comes in three days. If he passes that three days, then his chances get a lot better.”
We had a bad connection. I could hear other, distant voices in the wires.
“Mom, listen, is there anything I can do? Anything at all?”
“Just he’s askin’ for you, Lewis. He wants to see his only boy. Lewis, he knows. He knows he’s dyin’. He wants to see you before that comes.”
Betty motioned from the bar, wanting to know if I wanted another one. I nodded.
“I can’t make it, Mom. Not now. I’m on a case. But if there’s anything I can do, anything at all….” I left the rest unsaid. Of course there was nothing I could do. I had a feeling there was nothing anyone could do. Far back in the wires I heard someone say, “Well, then, Harold, when are you coming home?”
Betty brought the new drink around to me at the phone and I had a long draw off it. It went down like a wire brush.
“Lewis, you’ve got to come.”
“I can’t, Mom. The case might break any day. I’ve got to be here. But I’ll call-I’ll be in touch. You keep me posted.”
“They’re taking him to surgery tomorrow, Lewis. They’re going to put some kind of a balloon in his heart, something that’s supposed to help him. I hoped you’d be here.”
“I can’t. I just can’t. Not now. But I’ll be in touch.”
“Let me give you this number,” she said. “There’s always someone here. You make friends fast when something like this happens. It’s one of the waiting rooms. We all sleep here at night. Everybody looks out for each other. Now you call, you hear? I never can get you.”
She read off the number and I copied it down in my notebook, scrawling underneath it: Dad. Someone on the line was saying, “But I can’t wait that long, I gotta know tomorrow.”
“I’ll be talking to you then, Mom,” I said, and hung up.
I went over to the bar and had three straight doubles. How many of these was it that had killed Dylan Thomas? Then I scooped up my change, all but a couple of dollars, and moved on.
Chapter Four
“Roaches,” I told the bartender at a hole-in-the-wall in the Irish Channel. His name was sewn over his shirt pocket, PAT, but whoever did the needlework, in cursive, left a heavy line trailing from the belly of the P to the A, so it looked more like RAT.
In a notoriously wild city, the Channel at one time and for a long time was the wildest spot of all, scene of bars with names like Bucket of Blood, showers of bricks for encroaching outsiders, police killings. Whenever it rained, which in New Orleans was damn near always, water poured down from the Garden District just uptown onto the poor, low-living Irish here, which is probably where the name came from.
“Other people’s roaches, other place’s roaches, run for cover when you turn the lights on. You ever seen any different? But not here, man. New Orleans roaches are more liable to drop to one knee and give out with a chorus or two of ‘Swanee.’ They’re the true Negroes, roaches are, the only pure strain that’s left, maybe. You know what happened in all them woodpiles.
“And the damn things’ve been around forever. You’ve got fossils that are two hundred and fifty thousand goddam years old and the roaches in there are exactly like the ones we could go pull out of your bathroom over there right now. They don’t have to change, man; they can live off of anything. Or nothing.
“Whatever we dream up to kill them, they learn to live off it. One of them can live for a month off the glue on a postage stamp, for godsake. Cut off their heads and they go on living, even-only finally they starve to death.
“And here’s something else. Found this in a book published at least a hundred years ago. This was like the Raid of its day, what everybody did. You were supposed to write the roaches a letter, this book says, and you’d say something like, ‘Hey, Roaches, you’ve been on my case long enough, guys, so now it’s time to go bother my neighbors, right?’ Then you’d put this letter wherever the buggers were swarming. But first you’ve got to fold the letter and seal it and go through all the usual shit, the writer says. Like the roaches are gonna know if you get it wrong, if you don’t put on enough postage or whatever. And then he tells you: ‘It is well, too, to write legibly and punctuate according to rule.’ ”
“You’re drunk, mister,” the barkeep said.
“I am most assuredly that very thing,” I said with the best Irish lilt I could manage. Just talking was hard enough at that point. “It’s been a long siege.”
“Have to cut you off, buddy. Sorry.”
“No problem. I was cut off a long time ago. If you only knew.” I pointed more or less at the stitching on his shirt. “You Irish?”
“Hell no. Named for my mother, Patricia: Pat.” Then, with a grin: “You?”
“It’s converted this last St. Pat’s Day I was. Hopin’ just a bit of the luck-of-the might rub off?”
“And has it?”
“Not so much as a smudge, I’m sorry to tell you. Not a smudge.”
And scuttled home in the darkness.
Chapter Five
A case-that’s what I’d told mom and Verne both. But the case had holes you could drive a transport truck through and the break I’d mentioned was as far away as the end of Pinocchio’s nose on Liar’s Day. I thought about the kids playing cops and robbers down by the office. Was that all I was doing?
I mixed a cup of instant, poured in bourbon, and stretched out on the swayback couch in my half of a shotgun house on Dryades. It was five in the morning. My tongue felt like someone’s dirty glove. Little men with jackhammers and earth-moving machinery were rebuilding the inside of my head.
At that time of day, Joe’s was filled with Greek sailors and the kind of working girls who hustle day and night just to break even. There were a few scattered businessmen off Canal Street-after all, the place is an institution-and over in the corner, an old man with things bent all around his wrists, neck and ankles. They looked like old spoons, bits of copper wire, just about anything you’d pick up off the street. He was drinking bottled Dixie. He had a scraggly, filthy beard and hair that crept out like vines from beneath a wool knit cap. The place also had more than the usual number of flies, brought there by Joe’s free lunch, which consists of hard-boiled eggs (heavy on the hard) and chopped ham sandwiches out of a can.
I was halfway through my third Jax, sitting alone at one end of the bar, when I looked up and saw these two dudes walk in. Both wore modified military attire, fatigues and caps, with hightop black tennis shoes. One was deep, ebony black, the other coffee-colored. Cafe au lait.
They looked the place over, then went to the far end of the bar and said something to Bobbie. She waved a hand my way and they followed the hand.
“Lewis Griffin?” the black one said.
I held up my hand for another Jax. Bobbie nodded.
“Buy you fellows something?”
