NO Quarter

by Robert Asprin

  Quarterites stop being Quarterites when they bail out to go live in the Marigny or Uptown or other neighborhoods where you can rent bigger places cheaper. I just don’t get that. New Orleans is hardly an earthly paradise. If you’re not going to live in the Quarter—which is undeniably exotic and interesting and unique—then you might as well be living in San Diego or Allentown or Knoxville.

  I turned off Decatur at Barracks and started following it away from the river.

  I didn’t know why Sunshine had moved, and I wondered now, with that same squeamish feeling of betrayal I’d felt with Detective Zanders, if her drug usage had been wrecking her finances. I still didn’t know how heavy she’d been into what. I knew she liked pot and painkillers, didn’t know if there were other things. Despite an adulthood of boozing and cigarette smoking, I wasn’t versed in the peculiarities of narcotics. They were expensive, you could get arrested for possessing them, and you had to associate with riffraff to keep yourself supplied with them. That much I figured I knew. I’d never been tempted to find out more firsthand.

  Sunshine’s place was in the eight ... no, nine hundred block of Barracks. I remembered pouring her into a cab one night, out of the Shim Sham club, hearing her garble her new address to the driver. I couldn’t recall the exact number, but I was pretty sure I could find the place.

  Barracks’ nine hundred block had a park along one side of the street—the Cabrini Playground—though it had no actual playground toys. It was mostly a big open dog park surrounded by a tree-lined, open-work fence of wrought iron and brickwork. Inside the park dogs chased Frisbees and owners mingled and picked up after their pets. That made my job easier. I blended in as just one more Quarterite out for a stroll. I walked slow—not unusual since nobody hurries in the summer heat unless they’re looking to keel over.

  Along the side of the street opposite the park there was a dry cleaner’s, a used bookstore that Alex—who reads at an inhuman speed—was keeping in business, and several residences. I eliminated those that appeared to be single-unit dwellings, which left a building that appeared to contain a number of apartments.

  I paused on the sidewalk, taking my time getting out a cigarette and lighting it. Meanwhile, I eyed the place, memorizing details Maestro had said to look for. Four buzzers, that meant four units. A steel security gate over a wood interior door. You’d need two keys just to get to the foyer, another to get inside your apartment.

  The building showed its age—and there are places still standing here that were put up well before the Civil War—crumbling around the edges. But it was that quaint French Quarter brand of decay. Very little in the Quarter looks trashy. Our neighborhood is a historical preserve.

  I palmed moisture off my forehead, realizing I could probably wring a quart of sweat out of my T-shirt by now. A mule-driven carriage clattered by down Barracks. The driver, wearing a top hat and ruffled white shirt, regaled his two tourist passengers with grand tales of the Quarter’s yore, some of which might actually be true. It was a street scene out of another century.

  I noticed the bicycle when the carriage had passed. Big front basket, chained to the lamppost in front of the building—a delivery bike. The building’s interior door swung suddenly inward, and someone stepped out, unlatching the outer gate. I was moving, reacting fast, not rushing but crossing the street, fishing my keys out of my pocket, glancing up, “noticing” the delivery kid emerging. I caught the gate casually, stepped forward to block the swinging shut inner wood door with my foot—all like I belonged there, like the keys jingling in my hand opened these doors.

  The delivery guy, a kid in a ragged denim vest, scowled past, paying me no mind, grumbling, “No-tippin’ son of a bitch.” He freed his bike and pedaled off.

  My bluff had worked! I was unduly surprised by that, but lingering here slack-jawed wasn’t bright. I let the security gate close and lock itself, stepped into the dim foyer as the old pressurized overhead arm squealed shut the interior door.

  Breaking and entering? No, this was just trespassing. Just?

  I’d meant to case this place, just take a look-see, as Maestro had recommended. Instead, I found myself driven to push ahead. Probably a dumb idea, but I wasn’t going to stop to examine it now that I’d gained entry. Four apartments in here—one of them was Sunshine’s last address. I might as well try to find out what I could. Why waste the opportunity?

  I flipped my cigarette to the uncarpeted floor, ground it out and pocketed my sunglasses. It was shabby in here—water-stained ceiling, very old paint on the walls, the musty smell of old mold from years in the damp climate. Music thumped heavily from one of the units, obnoxiously loud, the bass cranked up.

  My heart too, beat heavy and loud, but I could have my attack of nerves later. Still, how surreal this was—and, yes, a bit of a thrill too. Me, a waiter, an average guy in a lot of ways, never seriously transgressed the law before, and here I was, sleuthing around, slipping through the shadows ...

  For Chrissake, Bone, have your heart attack later.

  I saw an apartment door, a stairway, and further back the foyer looked like it led to rear units—probably the old slave quarters.

  Four buzzers, four units.

  The nearby apartment door sported a big “#1” drawn in black marker—very classy. I stepped up quietly to it, leaned my ear against the wood, had no idea what I was listening for, and heard nothing. If this was Sunshine’s apartment, it would be unoccupied, wouldn’t it? Did I want to look inside? Who knew what sorts of clues might be found in her old place?

  I gingerly touched the knob. Locked. Break in? I didn’t know how. Maestro, though, probably would. I wished briefly he were here. Then again, he probably would’ve told me not to do this, to be careful, play it safe. He was definitely protective of me ... and it belatedly occurred to me that might become a problem.

  I would check the rear units last. Now I turned toward the stairway. I crept up, trying to be silent in my boots. The stairs hooked to the left, and the thump-thumping music was coming from up here, from behind a single door at the top.

  Three steps below the door I stopped, stared, and knew I had the right place.

  Sunshine had a talent for sketching. People used to tell her she ought to go to college for it. That’s what people say, and Sunshine knew what crap it was. She herself didn’t take her art seriously. It was a minor kind of therapy, and I’d always understood that, as far back as when we first met. Still, I recognized the talent.

  As I recognized, now, the sheet of drawing paper thumbtacked to the center of the apartment door at the top of the stairs.

  Sunshine ...

  I watched as my hand, almost as if had a will of its own, lifted and knocked on the door. This apartment was occupied, the source of the music I’d been hearing. What was I intending to do? I stood frozen, feeling the pounding bass reverberating through the door, proof that I knew even less about Sunshine’s life than I thought. I didn’t want to know about what lay behind that door—but I had to know.

  The door opened, even though I hadn’t touched it, and a head stuck itself into the dim stairway. “Dude, I already paid yuh. Whacha wan’?”

  Here, then, was the delivery kid’s “no-tippin’ son of a bitch”—twenty-four or thereabouts, lean, head shaved up to the temples on both sides and dark sloppy hair where there wasn’t scalp, earlobes pierced to within an inch of their lives, wispy hair on the upper lip, eyes like fried circuits.

  “Is Sunshine here?” I asked, not missing a beat.

  He wore camouflage cargo pants and a dirty white T-shirt with a red Japanese character on it. Behind him a stereo pounded. The air wafting out from the apartment smelled like a marijuana jungle might while it was being slashed and burned. He was holding a roast beef po’boy, still half in its butcher paper.

  “Sun ... shine.” He blinked his nobody-home eyes; then, rallying, said, “
Naw.”

  “Shit. I was s’posed to come see her, y’know, come get somethin’, y’know.”

  “Well ...” he started, then a light seemed to slowy come on in his head. “Yeah. You must be that dude.” He shut the door. I heard him rummaging around for a moment, then he opened the door and shoved a stained manila envelope at me. Surprised, I took it. He started to close the door again.

  “So when’s she gonna be back, dude?” I pushed into the doorway. I figured the kid was too wasted to wonder how I’d gotten into the building.

  “She ...” He took a bite from his sandwich and chewed, cow-like, while he thought. “Oh ... Sunshine’s, like, not here.”

  Great. Inside, past him, the floor was scattered with clothes, magazines, plastic milk crates. Mardi Gras beads, a pile of souvenir tourist junk. A battered saxophone lay across a third-hand coffee table.

  “She ain’t here, right.” I did my best to imitate his slacker-lax speech patterns, but he made Keanu Reeves sound like Olivier. “S’all right, y’know, maybe I could come in an’ wait for her, dude?” A closer look at the apartment might be good.

  He made no move out of the doorway. His stoner-red eyes narrowed, showing a first hint of suspicion. “Wai’ ... who’re you?”

  “Name’s Slim,” I improvised, “friend of Sunshine’s. Are you, y’know, like, her roomie?”

  Something seemed to come alive in that doped-out head at that.

  “Sunshine ain’ here.” He was enunciating carefully now. “She ain’ gonna be here. She’s dead. Yuh unnerstan’? Yuh geddit? An’ I ain’ her fuckin’ roomie, a’ight? I’m her boyfriend.”

  This last he said proudly, defiantly.

  Sunshine’s romantic judgment had never, for as long as I’d known her, been especially astute. But I mean, come on! She must have scraped deep in a rank barrel to find this beauty.

  For a moment, just a split second, I wanted to beat him to death for ever having touched her.

  “Sunshine—dead?” I shook my head. “Aw, dude, no way—really? I can’t believe ... shit. Wow. Hey, dude, I’m real sorry. Real sorry. I feel you. Hey, what’s your name anyway?”

  He seemed to like my show of grief, but it was and wasn’t a show, and I hated, for Sunshine’s sake, having to do it. “Dunk,” he supplied.

  “Short for Duncan?”

  Those fried eyes narrowed again. “Hey ... whacha askin’ me my name for? Huh?”

  “Hey, I’m just a friend of Sunshine’s.”

  “Yeah? Well. Fuck off.” He pushed me back, hard, slamming the door in my face.

  I found myself standing outside the door, with an envelope in my hand. Someone had scrawled a capital M—or maybe a W—on it with a marker. Curious, I opened the battered envelope and looked inside. It held only a yellowed old photograph of a dark-haired man and a blond girl, probably in their late teens or early twenties, both wearing clothes that looked like something from the ’60s. There was something familiar about both of them, but nothing I could pin down. I turned the photo over, but there was nothing written on the back. I had no idea what the photo had to do with Sunshine, but it had come out of her apartment, so I decided to keep it.

  Who had Dunk thought I was when he’d handed it to me?

  Replacing the photo in the envelope I looked up, and found myself looking at the big sheet of drawing paper again. It was yellowed, and taped at its upper right corner. Old ... how many years? Four, five? That was when I’d first seen it, both of us still back in San Francisco, Sunshine and me, still the tightest friends. This drawing ... this sweet, sad drawing of dancing dragons and a magic forest and that remarkable self-portrait, there—Sunshine herself, lying nude on a slab of rock, her then-dark hair spilling over the edge like a waterfall. The dragons danced around her, but it was ceremonial, not celebratory ... and she looked sad. And beautiful.

  I remembered her showing me this, the sheet still in the oversized notebook.

  I pried out the tacks with my thumbnail, rolled up the paper. Whatever else, this Dunk imbecile didn’t deserve to inherit this. I went back down the stairs, the picture in one hand and the envelope tucked under my arm, trying mentally to put the ice pick in that waste-case’s hand.

  * * *

  Excerpt from Bone’s Movie Diary:

  The stoner is that tried & true movie laugh-getter. Familiar from endless teen sex farces. We see Brad Pitt playing this character in True Romance—for once with a performance not beyond his range. Probably best embodied by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The stoner is funny in that same way that drunks were used for laughs in early films. Things change, not for the better. Who knows, 20, 30 yrs. from now maybe we’ll all be laughing at pedophiles. The stoner archetype, however, got an unexpected flip-flop with River’s Edge & Crispin Glover. It’s one of those based-on-a-true-incident movies that is truly disturbing, & not just because I remember the incident in question, which took place in the Bay Area when I was younger. Glover plays a sort of demented tribal chieftain, presiding over a pack of doped-out teen metalheads, one of whom has strangled his girlfriend & then gone to school to brag about it. See? Disturbing. Glover’s mesmerizingly tweaky perf. will seem exaggerated & absurd if you don’t know and recognize this particular subculture. He is the lovably goofy stoner ... gone evil.

  “Nice shot!”

  “Hey, no trick shots allowed.”

  “Save some of that for league!”

  I still had hopes the cops would turn up something on Sunshine’s killing all by their lonesomes. No doubt they were aware of the ex-con angle, vis-à-vis the ice pick. Bone, though, wasn’t going to wait any longer. Youth is always impatient and tends toward the frenetic even when standing still.

  Even so, I recognized that determination to act. When I’d first gotten into the game—much younger than Bone—I had been a bit overeager about the work. It had taken me a while to learn not to operate hot. Anyway, by now I’d gotten used to seeing myself in the kid.

  Last night we had stayed late at the Calf, compiling our “shopping list.” I had laid out a somewhat watered-down version of the standard operating procedures for finding someone that didn’t want to be found. I withheld some of the methods I know because Bone wasn’t a professional. I had no intention of steering him into water that was over his head. Quite the contrary, I meant to see him safely through this thing.

  We sat at Fahey’s, having grabbed a small table beneath a stereo speaker. Milo was off tonight, and Debra the bartender was playing a rock CD, and the music blared loud enough that the extra ears in the place wouldn’t hear us. It was a little after one o’clock. Bone had come out without Alex. He’d told me that he had given her the low-down about our hunt for Sunshine’s killer. If I could trust Bone with the truth—some of it, anyway—of who I was, or had been, then I had to trust Alex. I hoped that trust wouldn’t prove misplaced.

  Bone finished telling me about his day’s adventure. My first reaction wasn’t to be impressed by how far he’d gotten in scoping out Sunshine’s last residence. Instead, I bit down on my real response, which was to rebuke him for showing himself to this Dunk character ... that and the potential danger it represented.

  “I’d say he qualifies as a suspect, wouldn’t you?” Bone was drinking soda again tonight, instead of his normal rum.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Dunk is on the list.” Bone could have his soda. I was drinking my habitual Irish, and took a slug of it now.

  “That’s progress, then.” He sounded pleased. He hadn’t worked at the restaurant tonight and so was in a better mood than usual.

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t point out that virtually everyone we came across at the outset of a hunt like this would be a suspect. The idea was to gather every possible candidate, fixing the odds that someone in the net was our man. Then we eliminated suspects as fast as we could, shrinking th
e field, until we could confidently pick out our friend with the ice pick. Still, there was no point in being sour. Bone had done well.

  I had spent my day doing some of that mundane legwork that constitutes much of a hunt. That’s the thing about my old trade. It is, for the most part, boring, or at least not exhilarating. I acknowledged that this search for Sunshine’s killer was different from the jobs I used to do up North. In the old days, I would normally know exactly who I was looking for. My targets, of course, would often be using phony names and even disguises, but they were already identified. Here, neither Bone nor I knew whom we were after. So it wasn’t just a search. We had to solve the crime as well.

  “So, what’d you do today?” Bone asked.

  There were matches going on both pool tables, and I was mentally playing along out of reflex.

  “I listened to gossip,” I said.

  Bone regarded me for a beat. “Gossip?”

  I nodded, lighting a cigarette. “Walked all around the Quarter, stuck my head in here and there. Coffee shops, art galleries, antique stores, grocers. Made a lot of chitchat with the Quarter’s daytimers, people I wouldn’t normally bump into in the bars. You’ve been living in the Quarter, what, two years? You know a whole lot of folks, right? Well, I’ve been here a decade. I know even more.” I blew out a plume of smoke. “It doesn’t take much to steer a conversation without seeming to, especially if it’s toward something juicy. The newscasts might not be talking much about Sunshine’s death anymore, but everybody else still is. Particularly Quarterites, who want their neighborhood safe, where they don’t have to worry about somebody tagging them with a blade when they’re walking home from work.”