Eye of the Cricket (8 page)

In another room I found, jammed into the wall behind broken paneling and swaddled in a canvas backpack, a long-barreled .22
target pistol.

In the last room I found a body lying facedown.

Coming upon the body was like that. It wasn't Shon Delany's, but for a moment, for no good reason, I became absolutely certain
that it was, and couldn't shake the impression.

I spent a couple of hours at the sheriff's office out there. In Jefferson Parish, unlike Orleans, it's the sheriff who handles
police work. Officers sat across tables from me staring and served me plastic cups of coffee foul enough to elicit confession
from the staunchest wrongdoer. They refused to get too worked up over this. Their attitude told me it was the kind of death
that belonged to New Orleans, just happened to stray over the line into their territory.

I gave my statement, survived coffee and stares and when they finally agreed to put a call through, spoke to Don Walsh.

"Good point."

"Let me talk to whoever's running the show."

His brief conversation gained my release and a ride home in one of the patrol cars. Nor did they make me drink any more coffee.

A note from Norm Marcus pushed under my door told me the kids on bikes had struck again, snatching a seventy-year-old woman's
purse and pushing her off the curb. Her leg snapped when she went down. She'd managed to drag herself back up out of the street
but had to lie there until someone driving by stopped to help her.

Having then fed Bat and drunk two cups of scalding tea in the rocker by the window that early Friday morning, I was still
thinking of the body, and of Clare. I remember that I had every intention of getting up soon to fix myself something to eat.

I was thinking of that abandoned house in Metairie, how Armantine Rauch and others had been camping out there, as though
it were only a shelter among trees; thinking how at every turn I seemed to keep running into people who were camping out,
people living temporary lives. Maybe that's what we all do, ultimately. Remembering my own succession of apartments and houses.
Thinking how even here, after all these years (neglectfully, I would have argued, though at some deeper level, I knew, willfully),
I'd never filled in the blanks, never installed things in any kind of permanent place. Furniture, personal goods, books and
papers remained where they were first put down; from appearance, I might just as well have moved in last week.

I was thinking, too, as I rarely did, of my mother.

Growing up, I never realized that all families were not like ours. My mother had withdrawn from the world, walled herself
(as though Calvinist rather than Senegambian bloodflowedin her veins) within exacting rituals of breakfast, job, dinner, housework,
church, sleep. Whenever anything threatened or disturbed that routine, the very ground around us trembled. My father had chosen,
if he had a choice, to withdraw alongside her. There were in our home no visits from parental friends, fellow workers, schoolmates.
No family outings to movies, restaurants, the park. And no acknowledgment of my mother's silent, palpable madness.

Only years later did I begin to understand how strange and distorted that life was—distorted in ways no lens can ever correct—and
how deeply scored by it I had been. It's a heritage my sister Francy seems largely to have escaped, though I've sometimes
wondered if her own desperate grappling after normality, her sensible job, steady-keel husband and life, isn't in its way
every bit as determined.

I was awakened, suddenly, by the phone. Foundering in bright light, confused. I pushed my way up and out of the rocker.

Children outside shouted to one another on their way to school. I had slept three, four hours. A peculiar grayness to the
sky, as though seen through tinted glass. I didn't know it then, but a storage facility on Magazine had caught fire, pouring
smoke into the uptown sky as cubicles of things people no longer needed but would not abandon, old letters and photographs
and high-school yearbooks, wedding dresses, income-tax returns, crippled furniture, burned. Days later I watched a bulldozer
crush and level what little remained.

As I stood there by the window, the machine took the call. This is Lew Griffin, please leave a message. Then Richard Garces's
voice.

"Lew, ring me back when you get in. Your—"

I picked up.

"Richard. I'm here."

"Great, the driving-to-work comedy show. Ten minutes of bad jokes and three of even worse music."

He whistled a few notes and said, "You're an unreconstructed cynic, Griffin."

"I try."

"A sad and unhappy man."

"Indisputably."

"Okay, so I'm afraid I have further bad news for you," Richard said. "You ready for it?"

"I have a choice?"

"You're missing."

"I'm what?" I remembered Chandler's example of colorful American speech, a gangster ordering his subordinate from the room,
saying simply: Be missing.

"Your guy over at University Hospital? The one that claims he's Lew Griffin? He's gone."

I watched a garbage truck lurch along the street outside. Men would jump off the back, grab a can, empty it and replace it
at curbside almost in a single motion, then whistle the truck on, running behind. Fearful of loud noises, Bat was under the
couch, ears at alert, eyes set hard on the front door.

"I have a friend who's a resident over there, knows you're a friend too. She called me when she heard about it. He went AWOL
last night, sometime between about four and six."

"And no one saw him? Kind of hard to believe no one would notice, the shape he was in. I'm surprised he could even walk."

"Yeah. Everyone is. But people do the damnedest things all the time, things you never thought they'd be capable of."

Leaking fluids it was best not to think about, the garbage truck pulled around the corner.

"Anyhow, he'd been transferred to a room. He wouldn't have been, this soon, ordinarily, but I guess they needed ICU beds for
casualties from a multiple pileup out on I-10.

"A nurse's aide checked vitals at twelve, two, and four. When the charge nurse herself went in for a final check at the end
of the shift, six-twenty or so, she says, he was gone. His IV had been pulled out and was dripping onto thefloor. There was
a rubbery ball of adhesive tape in the sink. He took along toothpaste and toothbrush from a kit the hospital issues patients,
left the razor and everything else behind.

"He also left his hospital gown, and no one could figureout what he did for clothes till later on, when another patient down
the hall got back from X-ray. Someone had popped the lock on the suitcase in his room. Money and wallet untouched, but they
took his clothes. Beige corduroy jeans, blue-and-yellow rugby shirt. Shoes gone too. Black Reeboks."

"You got all that from a friendly phone call?"

"Well, I asked a few questions. You know. I kind of had the idea you'd be going after him, Lew. That you could use whatever
I was able to get you."

"I appreciate it, Richard, believe me."

I asked who his friend was at the hospital, wrote it down, and said I'd check in later.

When I hung up, I saw the blinking light on the machine. I hadn't checked this morning when I came in.

The English department and Dean Treadwell would like me to call at my earliest convenience.

My agent had "small news and a smaller check" on a couple of foreign sales of old books.

Someone wanted to give me a free trial membership to a health club.

And Deborah O'Neil wanted to thank me for the flowers.

I picked up the phone but, after a moment, put it down. I stood looking out the window, then got a pen and yellow legal pad
from the shelf by the door and, returningto the rocker, wrote:

Barely pausing, looking up only once or twice, I wrote for four hours.

Falling faintly and faintly falling.

Beginning Thursday afternoon as I headed home from the florist's on Prytania, continuing on into the evening as I sat remembering
Clare's death, then through the night and into Friday morning as I sat by the window writing about LaVeme, temperatures had
dropped like a kid cannonballing off a high dive: all impulse and plummet and loss of control, hard crash at the bottom.

Mention it to someone from New Orleans and he'll remember, to the moment, the times in his life it snowed.

January 1955. I was lead in the senior play and we had to cancel. Car went off the road into a drainage canal, this was up
on Palmetto, other side of Carrollton, on my way home. Damn stuff was on the ground four days, shut the whole city down. It
was pretty, though, I'll give you that—for about two hours.

February 1964. Sixty degrees and sunny on Friday, twenty-eight witli a hard north wind that wouldn't quit by Saturday morning.
Shutters banging against the house woke us up at five. Two days later, the snow started. It was getting towards Mardi Gras,
I remember, everybody in a panic. But it did quit in time.

December, must have been 1971. Lot of snow—then a lot more ice. Second clay, power lines went down, most of central New Orleans
lost electricity. People were ripping the sides off of abandoned houses, setting them afire in fireplaces that hadn't been
used for thirty, forty years. Firemen stayed busy that week.

"I only remember seeing snow one other time, all these years," Deborah O'Neil said across from me. She wore a long print skirt,
sleeveless T-shirt and vest I thought of my first impression: how, standing still behind the table, talking on the phone,
she seemed to sway. Something substantial and at the same time strangely labile about her. "I'd been in town a week or so.
That afternoon I was sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee, wrapped up in a blanket, trying to make some kind of
sense of things, the husband I'd left behind in Florida, the man I'd moved here with, a night-shift job I hated, all these
voices I kept hearing inside my head. They weren't talking to me, but they were definitely talking to someone.

"I looked around me there on the balcony, we were in one of three upstairs apartments carved out of an old house on Camp,
and I realized it was snowing. Had been for some time. I watched snowflakes fall onto the blanket, or onto my jeans, jeans
that had lasted longer than any relationship I'd ever had, and disappear, like they'd passed through walls. Others fell against
the balcony railing, onto the leaves of a maple, into standing water at curbside. Into my coffee cup. The whole world glistened."

As it glistened now.

We sat across from one another watching snow fall, myself out the restaurant's front window, she in mirrors along the side,
above tile. The waitress slid bowls of steaming gumbo off her tray, dropped a handful of packaged crackers between.

"And did you ever manage to make sense of things?"

For a moment she was silent.

"No. There was something about the snow, I don't know, but it made things, struggling to understand them, seem less important.
Because whatever I did, whatever any of us did, that snow was going to go right on falling...."

"On all the living and the dead."

She looked at me. "Yes. Exactly."

And scooping up a spoonful of soup, blew across it.

"That's what I thought the voices were for a long time. People who had died but were still around, who couldn't let go. I
thought I was the only one able to hear them. Or that for some reasonthey could only get through to me—like I was the crystal
in a homemade radio, wound with wires. Other times, I just thought I must be crazy."

Soup tipped from the side of the spoon into her mouth. "My God this is good! The green stuff's okra?"

"Ritual offering to the Slime God."

"The world, mind you, subscribed to the latter view exclusively."

"But obviously at some point you decided you weren't crazy."

She nodded.

A police station inhabited what was once a grand private dwelling across the street. State-of-the-art computer linkages within,
battered Chrysler squads and scooters with blue lights on poles without. Patrolmen from over there in uniform and in jeans
sat together, six of them, at a back table.

I had called and asked Deborah O'Neil if she'd like to meet me for dinner at Casamento's on Magazine, just off Napoleon. If
she were free, that is, or could arrange it; I didn't know her schedule. She said sure, anyone who needed flowers that bad
would just go up the street to Scheinuk's anyway, why not.

Menu and restaurant alike were fundamental. Not back to basics, because they'd never left: nothing about the place had changed
in forty years. The menu, which like Eddie Lang's cues for the Whiteman orchestra could fit on a single index card, ran to
oysters and shrimp: oysters on the half shell, oysters or shrimp fried, served up dressed or not on French or homemade bread,
in stews and soups. You wanted vegetables, fries were available. The place itself was timeless pure New Orleans, one long
room narrow as a boxcar and reaching to the street behind, kitchen hanging on the back like a caboose, floor and wall sheathed
in tile, tables pushed close at either side.

"I'm glad you called," she said. "I didn't think you would."

Another spoonful of soup. Half a buttered cracker.

The door opened again and cold air flooded in. Before long these front tables would be abandoned, everyone huddled away from
them, farther in past the open archway. Cavelike in there. As the night came on.

"You left the man you moved here with, I take it"

"That same afternoon. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my bags packed when he got home from work. The snow hadn't stuck,
but there was a thin layer of ice on everything. I remember how it broke on the steps as I went down them. I've lived alone
ever since."

"How long?"

"Almost ten years. Though I have to think: my God, how is that possible? I was twenty when we moved here. Last month I turned
thirty. What about you?"

I told Deborah, briefly, about La Verne. Maybe not so briefly.

"She sounds like an amazing woman."

"She was."

We talked on. About what I did and had done for a living all these years, about Vicky, about Jimmi Smith's murder and his
sister Cherie's coming to live with Vicky and me, about Alouette and Baby Girl McTell.

Deborah asked if she could have a glass of wine, and I said of course, ordering coffee for myself.

"Well, whatever else it may have been, Lewis, you can never complain that your life's been boring."

She swirled wine about her glass, in a quick circle, twice.

"Legs," she said.

I looked at her over the rim of my cup.

"That's what they call those breaks of wine, the way they cling to the side of the glass, run down it. Legs."

A United cab pulled up out front and honked.

"So tell me, Detective Griffin. Are you on a manhunt tonight?"

"No," I said, looking about me. "No. I'm not."