by James Sallis
“He’ll give it to you. But Lew-”
“Yes?”
“I think he’s in love. I don’t know if he can let her go. Be gentle with him, try to understand.”
“For you?”
“Whatever.” Ice clinked again against glass. “I’m drunk, Lew. I can’t afford to be drunk; this is one of my regular spots.”
“I’ll come and get you, Verne.”
“No, I’ll be all right. Just switch to coffee and sit here a while. You go on. But Lew?”
“Yes?”
She was silent for several seconds.
“Everything’s so shitty, Lew, so fucked up. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a long time.”
“No one ever has. Ever will.”
“You sure you’re gonna be okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine. You be careful. You’re not real good at being careful, Lew.”
“I try.”
“Don’t we all. Bye, Lew.”
“Bye, girl.”
I started out again, then came back and sat at the desk, staring out the window. I felt as though I’d lost something, lost it forever, and I didn’t even know what it was, had no name for it. Those are the worst losses we ever sustain.
Chapter Nine
New Orleans natives accent the first syllable and allow the entire word only two: So-crates. God knows what we’d do with Asclepius. Socrates is part of an old section of houses chopped up into apartments and strange corridors that would be slums in any other city but here are just where poor folk live. A lot of them, oddly, seem to be black. And of course they’re only poor (so the rest of the great American fairy tale goes) because somehow they choose to be.
I took the wrong turn off the toll road and ended up over in Gretna in a warren of Hancock, Madison, Jefferson and Franklin streets. Why not, here of all places, one named for Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s slave-mistress?
I drove back across into Algiers, past driveways filled with junked cars, oil drums and abandoned refrigerators, past storefront churches, bail bondsmen, a martial arts academy, an Ethiopian restaurant, a boarded-up florist, ten blocks of project housing, an overgrown park, and a Bible college, and found Socrates.
Four-o-eight was at the edge, where things had started back up the ladder, a typically grand old New Orleans home renovated within the last ten years and divided (judging from nameplates by the front door) into three apartments. One of the plates read W. Percy, M.D., another R. Queneau. The third one just read B.S. I punched the button beside it. I punched it again. Nothing.
The front door, however, was not locked and led into a foyer with twelve-foot ceiling and stained-glass skylight. Two of the apartments were to the left of an ornate curved stairway leading, presumably, to an upper hallway or balcony, if to anything at all. The third apartment was to the stairway’s right, and that door was unlocked too. I went in.
A narrow hall ran to a well-equipped kitchen at one end, an unoccupied living room, strangely jumbled with antiques and chrome-and-glass, at the other. A ladderlike stairway climbed through the ceiling in one corner and took me into a bedroom smelling of young women-powders, perfume, polish remover, Noxzema. Some clothes were tossed onto the floor by the bed. A Bible was on the bedside table. There was a connecting bathroom, then another bedroom.
I went to the bed first. She was alive but not spectacularly so, deeply drugged, no reaction to a hard pinch, blood slow to come back. Once I figured she was going to be okay, I turned to him in the chair, but there wasn’t anything I could do for him.
Most of what had been his head was splattered against the wall. His hand had fallen into his lap and remained there, the gun, a forty-five, on the floor between his feet. I smelled urine, feces, the animal scent of blood and tissue.
By the wall across from him a camera sat on its tripod, still filming. I didn’t touch it. But I went back down the stairway to the phone in the living room and dialed downtown.
“Walsh,” I said.
“Sergeant’s with the Chief. Can I-”
“Get him.”
“I couldn’t inter-”
“Get him, now, or he’ll have you for breakfast tomorrow.”
A pause. “Could I say who wants him?”
“Lew Griffin.”
I waited all of a minute.
“Lew, what the hell?”
“Four-o-eight Socrates,” I said. “Our friend Sanders has just checked out permanently.”
“Twenty minutes,” Don said. “Don’t wander off.”
Chapter Ten
A crudely lettered title card drew back from the screen and there was Sanders, holding it in one hand, pointing to it like a mime, face contorted into a gigantic smile. It read: Last Film.
He turned his back to the camera and walked slowly to the chair. When he turned around and sat, his expression had changed to a tragic one as exaggerated as the earlier smile. He mimed wiping tears from one eye, then the other. For a moment he hung his head, then shook it sadly again and again.
But an idea was starting up in his mind, and as it formed, the smile slowly returned, more natural now, less exaggerated. He held out his hand and, magically, a forty-five appeared in it. Waving good-bye with one hand, with the other he put the barrel of the gun into the smile.
And that was how I had found him.
“Jesus,” Don said.
Polanski and Verrick looked at one another, shaking their heads.
“He and the girl were living together?” Don said.
I nodded.
“How’d you know that?”
“Someone told me,” I said.
“Who told you?”
“I forget.”
“He the one that drugged her?”
I shrugged.
Don looked back up at the blank screen.
“This is one fucked-up world. And the best we can do is shovel shit from one place to somewhere else for a while.”
“You need me for anything else, Don?”
“No. Go on, Lew. Be careful.”
I walked down the four flights of stairs and outside. An old man in rags was sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the building. “Lock me up, officer,” he told me.
It was a little after nine and had probably been dark thirty minutes or so. A haze of heat and light shimmered over the city. Breathing was like walking in wet tennis shoes.
I retrieved my car from the police lot where Don had checked it in, and drove out Poydras to Hotel Dieu.
At the nurse’s station in intensive care I explained who I was and was told that one of the doctors would see me shortly, please wait in the family room outside. The fear, pain and blinding hope in that room were palpable. At length a tall, stooped young man in yellow scrubs came to the door and said quietly: “Mr. Griffith?”
“Griffin,” I said.
“About Cordelia Clayson?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please come with me.”
We went back into intensive care and to a small room at the far end. He pulled the door closed. Through it I could hear the sound of alarms going off, a voice saying: I need some help over here.
“And just what is your relationship to the patient, Mr. Griffin?”
“As I told the nurse, I’m a private detective engaged by the girl’s parents.”
“To investigate what brought her here to us?”
I shook my head. “To find her for them. My job’s done, except that now I have to go and tell them. And I need to know what to tell them.”
“I see. You’re in touch with the parents, then.”
“I know where to find them.”
He had sad brown eyes. You wondered if they would stay that way, or if after years of this (he couldn’t be more than twenty-six or — seven) they would harden.
“I can’t hold out a lot of hope,” he said. “It’s not the drugs themselves, of course; we’ve learned
how to handle all that. But Cordelia had a hard hit of some unusually pure heroin. She was out for a long time, and what happened was, she developed what we call shock-lung syndrome. The heart slows down dramatically and loses the force of its contractions, so that everything kind of backs up. Her lungs are full of fluid. They’re hard to inflate-every breath is like the first time you blow into a balloon-and oxygen levels in the blood are critically low. We’re doing what we can. She’s on a ventilator that does all her breathing for her, and she’s receiving hundred-percent oxygen at high pressures. But we’re not gaining much ground, Mr. Griffin. And frankly, the interventive measures we’ve been forced to use are more likely to lead to further complications than to any resolution of the original problems. We get in this sort of downward spiral after a while. I’m sorry.”
I stood. “Thank you, Doctor. Will Mr. and Mrs. Clayson be able to see their daughter if I bring them down here? Are there restricted visiting hours?”
“Not in this case, Mr. Griffin. I’ll leave instructions at the desk.”
I went out through the double doors to the elevator. In the family room, every face turned toward me.
Chapter Eleven
The breeze had turned into a steady, low wind and there was rain in the air. I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents’ faces in the mirror.
I swung onto St. Charles and up into the Garden District. There are entire streets here where you go burrowing down tunnels of green, trees curving over and around you, sky shut away. It reminds you how much of New Orleans is pure artifice-that it’s a constructed city, dredged out of swampland by sheer force of will and labor, nibbled at constantly by history, the river, the swamp’s dark mouth. For most of the 1830s the New Basin Canal, meant to assure American self-sufficiency from Creoles, was hacked out with pick and shovel (there was no dynamite, and no way to keep swamp seepage out except back-breaking pumps from Archimedes’ time) at a cost of well over a million dollars and at least eight thousand lives. A hundred years later the city of New Orleans voted to refill this canal.
It was as though the city’s image of itself, and the ways it tried to live up to that image, kept changing. It was Spanish, French, Italian, West Indian, African, Colonial American; it was primarily the city of fun and illusion, or primarily the bastion of culture in a new land; it was a city built on the backs of slaves and simultaneously a city many of whose important citizens were gens de couleur libre; endlessly, it adapted.
I parked on Jackson Avenue and found the address I wanted behind one of a row of apartment houses: what used to be a slave’s quarters connected to what used to be a garage by a room narrow as a sidewalk.
“I’m looking for the Claysons,” I said to the man who opened the door.
“You’d be Mr. Griffin?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in.” He backed out of the doorway.
Mr. and Mrs. Clayson were sitting inside on a shabby love seat and stood to introduce me to Clayson’s brother and his brother’s friend. I knew the friend from the streets, a working girl whose specialty was impotent men and rough trade with other women. I wondered if this was home for her.
As gently as I could, I told them about Cordelia and asked if they’d come with me. Mrs. Clayson closed her eyes and said under her breath what I suppose must have been a prayer. Mr. Clayson looked off at the wall as though he’d just lost whatever faith he’d had up to this point. They stood, and we walked out into the beginning rain.
By the time we reached Hotel Dieu, it was pouring. I let the Claysons out by the front lobby, told them to wait for me there, and parked. Six steps from the car, I was soaked through.
We went up in the elevator. I left them in the family room and stepped through the double doors. The doctor I’d spoken to earlier glanced up from a stack of charts at the nurses’ station, then walked toward me shaking his head.
“She’s gone, Mr. Griffin. Just a few minutes ago. It was her heart, finally. It couldn’t take the strain any longer, I guess, and she arrested.” He held his fist out, slowly opened it. “You’ll want me to talk to the girl’s parents?”
“I’ll tell them, Doctor-unless they ask things I don’t know. You’ll be here?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t do very much, Mr. Griffin.”
I went back through the double doors, took the Claysons out into the hall and said what I had to say, then stood waiting through their silence.
“I’ll take you folks home whenever you’re ready,” I finally said.
Mrs. Clayson looked at her husband, who was staring out the window into the rain. We could hear the storm breaking around us.
“I reckon we’re ready now, Mr. Griffin,” she said.
I was getting into one elevator behind them when the other opened.
“You folks go ahead. I’ll be right down,” I said.
LaVerne had just stepped off the other elevator. We waited until they were gone.
“She’s dead, isn’t she, Lew?”
I nodded. “You know the rest?”
“I know.” She looked at the same window Clayson had been looking out. “You think he knew he was killing her? God, he loved her so much-like he was a kid himself, you know?”
“I don’t know, Verne. I don’t think he did.”
“You ever love anybody like that, Lew?”
“No.”
“Think you ever will?”
I shook my head.
“Me neither.”
“I better be going, Verne. Her parents are waiting.”
“Lew.” She looked back from the window. “Will you come stay with me tonight? I don’t want to have to think about myself tonight. I don’t want to think about-” She moved her mouth but no further words came.
“I’ll be there.”
She just nodded. Something in her face made me think of when we’d first met, how beautiful I’d thought she was and all I had felt for her that night so suddenly, how I would have done anything then to make her feel safe and happy and cared for-anything. Though I couldn’t tell any longer how much of what was left was feeling, how much only memory.
Chapter Twelve
I dropped off the Claysons, who were slowly turning to stone, and told them again that I was sorry.
“We’ll be expecting a bill, Mr. Griffin,” Mrs. Clayson said, handing over a scrap of paper with their home address penciled on it.
They wouldn’t be getting one, though. I drove uptown with my thoughts in tow. The rain had run most drivers off the streets; only good ones, and the fools, remained. One of the latter had just tried sliding into home under a trolley. He didn’t make it.
I was remembering all the women I’d loved or thought I would. Thinking how that felt at first, how the feelings declined, how they stayed around for a while like locust husks on a tree and then one day just weren’t there anymore.
LaVerne met me at the door in what could not possibly have been the gown she was wearing when we first met but looked just like it. She said nothing. On the coffee table inside sat chilled scotch, a pitcher of martinis, a plate of cheese and fruit, mixed nuts in a round silver bowl.
I pointed to the pitcher and she poured martini into a glass of ice. She poured herself one as well, without ice, and we sat there, two lonely people together for however long it would last. I thought of lines by Auden: “Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good.”
Verne leaned against me and shut her eyes.
“Why do things always have to change, Lew? When I was a kid my mother’d have a new man around the house every few months-wasn’t that often, but seemed like it, you know how it is when you’re a kid-and I kept wondering why she couldn’t just find one she liked and leave those others alone. Never occurred to me that she didn’t have m
uch to say about it. That the world wouldn’t be the way she wanted it, the way any of us want it, just because we want it so bad.”
She sipped at her drink and we sat there quietly for a while, each with his own thoughts.
“I used to ride trains a lot. Mama’d put us on one and give the conductor fifty cents to look out after us. And I’d sit in the end car and watch everything pass by, all those places and people I’d never get to know, gone for good-and so quickly.”
She looked up at me.
“I’m still on that train, Lew, I’ve always been. Watching people I’ve loved go away from me, for good.”
She looked into my eyes for a long time and then made an odd, choked sound. I don’t know if she had tried to make a train sound or if it was a sob, but I reached for her there on the couch as, outside, the storm began to quieten.
Part Three
1984
Chapter One
Light: it slammed into my eyes like fists.
I groaned and tried to move my arms. Someone had put sandbags on them to hold them down. I was incredibly thirsty. The air reeked of alcohol, vitamin capsules and fresh urine. Red hair floated above me somewhere.
“I wou’n’t be trying to move about too much, sir,” a voice said, each r a tiny engine turning over, almost catching.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“You’re in Touro Infirmary, sir.” Again, those r’s. “The police brought you here. Welcome back. Try to rest.”
Everything kind of floated away then, and for a long time there were just snapshots. Some kid about nineteen who said he was a doctor, holding the garden hose he said he was going to “run” down my nose. He didn’t. Dozens of lab people with Mason jars they needed to fill with blood. A guy in a three-piece suit who sat as far away from me as he could get and wanted to know how I was handling all this.
Gradually days fell into place. Labwork before breakfast, a perfunctory visit from your doctor about ten, group at eleven, lunch, kitchen duty, thirty-year-old travel films, TV, evening medications, lights out at ten.
