Murder for the Bride (8 page)

But behind the girl’s gay and casual voice I had detected fear. I wanted to think it a genuine fear. And if she wanted to lead me into ambush, this seemed a pretty awkward way to go about it. I decided on a compromise. I would shake off my friends, but try to do it in such a way that they could not accuse me of doing it on purpose. I shoved the map in my pocket and walked over to Canal. I went into a big department store and bought some shirts. I made no attempt to find out who was tailing me.

I sauntered over near the elevators, and as one was about to close its doors I hurried over and got in. I got off at the third floor, walked to the back of the store, and went down the stairs and out the fire door at the back. I walked through a parking lot to a parallel street and went down two blocks before turning back onto Canal Street. I took the Algiers ferry at the foot of Canal. There was a faint hot breeze on the Mississippi. At ten minutes of three I stood at the corner of Monroe and Wiedman, bundle in hand. Algiers is as complete a refutation of the romance inherent in the name as its African namesake. It is rough and dirty, with narrow potholed streets and bleary store windows.

At a quarter after three, when I was beginning to wonder if I were getting a touch of heat exhaustion, she came up beside me. She was dressed in the same clothes she had worn in the Rickrack. Her dress was crudely pinned under the arm where I had torn it. There were purple patches of exhaustion under her eyes.

“Come quickly,” she said.

I walked down a number of side streets with her. She kept her eyes downcast. She walked as though she were unutterably weary.

“In here,” she said. It was a coffee shop. Octagonal tile floor, wire-legged tables and chairs, a smell of disinfectant
and burned grease. The only other customer was an old man with his head cradled in his arms on the table. He could have been sleeping or dead. She led the way to a table that was around a jog in the wall, out of sight of the front windows. A ceiling fan creaked slowly overhead.

She sat down and shut her eyes for long seconds. I asked if she wanted some iced coffee. She nodded without opening her eyes. The shuffling waitress set the two glasses down on the imitation marble with more force than was necessary.

The girl opened her eyes and looked at me. I had not been able to see the color of her eyes in the Rickrack. They were green, with small flecks of brown in the iris, close to the pupil.

“You did very well,” she said. “I had to watch and make certain you weren’t followed.”

“What is this all about?” I asked.

“I thought it would be so simple. Now I don’t know how to say it. I called you because there is no one else. No one to help, and the trouble is your fault.”

“
My
fault! Look, I didn’t ask you to …”

“Please. I have been up all night and I am not thinking clearly or saying things well, Mr. Bryant.” She opened her purse, took something out, and handed it to me. I looked at it under the edge of the table. It was a shoemaker’s awl with the metal spike cut off to half its length and resharpened to a needle point.

“What’s this?”

She sighed. “Mr. Bryant, I had my orders. I was to put my arm around you. We had to use care in following you, because the others were following you. It could be done in any dimly lighted place where you would sit down. If you stood at the bar, I was to go to you there and get you to sit at a table. I was ordered to put my arm around you. That instrument would be in my hand. There is a place right there.…” She leaned over and touched the nape of my neck right at the base of my skull. “A small hollow. I was taught about it very carefully and made to practice how it is done. It is very quick and very good. You wouldn’t cry out. You would slump
as though falling asleep. When my companions saw that, one of them would join us and we would take everything from your body and leave you there.”

I stared at her. “Lovely people you run around with!”

“Please. It would have been very easy but somehow I could not do it. I tried to do it my own way. I did not follow orders. That is a very serious thing. It is something we are not permitted to do. When it failed, I knew I was—as dead as they wished you to be. I didn’t want to die. So I ran. Now there is no one I can get to help me. Except you. Maybe you can do nothing. I must have a place where I can sleep, where no one knows I am there. After I have slept, maybe I can start to think again, think how to save myself.”

“What kind of a stupid joke is this?” I demanded.

She looked at me, her eyes steady. She said softly, “You can go. Please go now. There is no point in your staying.”

I put a quarter on the table for the coffee and got up and walked toward the door. I looked back. Her eyes were closed again. She sat slumped in the uncomfortable chair.

I went back. “Suppose I can find you a safe place. What then?”

Her lip curled. “Someday you people will learn that there is no safe place in all the world. The days of safe places have gone by.”

“Do you want help, or don’t you?”

“Only if you are willing to help, Mr. Bryant.”

I got change from the cashier, looked up a number, and shut myself in the airless, breathless phone booth. It took a long time before I heard Sam Spencer’s rumble.

“Sam, this is Dil Bryant. I want—”

“You ready to give up gumshoeing and get back on the job, boy?”

“Not yet, Sam. I need help. Look, have you got any visiting big shots staked out in Paul Harrigan’s apartment over on Loyola? Expecting any?”

“There’s nobody there now, but in about ten days I expect—”

“I’m coming after the keys, Sam. And don’t ask me
any questions. Just trust me. Better yet, have your girl seal the keys in an envelope and leave them with the cashier at that drugstore diagonally across the street from you. Have her tell the cashier a Mr. Robinson will pick up the keys. Can you do that right away?”

“Sure, but—”

“Thanks, Sam,” I said, and hung up. Paul Harrigan can afford to keep the apartment in town because Trans-Americas uses it for a billet for visiting brass and pays Paul for its use. It’s over in the university section, a ground-floor apartment with a private entrance at the rear of an old, ugly house.

Back at the table I wiped my face with paper napkins from the table dispenser. “It’s all set. Ready to go?”

She fell asleep in the taxi that took us from the foot of Canal Street to the drugstore and from there to the apartment. I unlocked the door and she went in ahead of me. The apartment had been redecorated since the last time I had been in it. The dark woodwork had been painted white, the walls done in cool greens and blues.

She let me guide her back to one of the two bedrooms. She sat on the edge of the bed and I went around the room, opening windows, drawing draperies. I started the fan and adjusted it. When I looked around she had lain back on the bed.

I spoke to her and she didn’t move. I slipped her shoes off and swung her legs up onto the bed. She mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I shook her until her eyes opened.

“Wha’?” she said.

“I’ll come back around midnight. That’ll give you nearly eight hours’ sleep. I’m taking the keys. Do you need anything?”

She frowned. Her voice was far away. “Dress. Toothbrush. Comb. Lipstick. And …”

I waited and then looked at her again. She was sound asleep, breathing heavily through parted lips. I stood looking down at her in the darkened room. The fan made a soft purring sound. It seems a violation of privacy to look upon a sleeping stranger. In her sleep she rolled over onto her left side, her right leg drawn up, her hands, palms together,
under her cheek. It is the classic pose of a sleeping woman. It exaggerates the curve of hip. Something about her weariness and helplessness brought on desire. Her body had a look of strength. I stood and the blood hammered in my ears louder than the sound of the fan. Then I turned and left. My palms were wet and my hands trembled as I locked the door behind me.

N
ew Orleans has its own unique adjustment to the heat of summer, at least in the Quarter, where the buildings stand shoulder to shoulder. The sidewalks are roofed by galleries supported by iron posts near the curbing. These roofed sidewalks are called, locally, banquettes. The galleries provide a place for out-of-doors living for the people on the second floor. They in turn are roofed. The railings are of ornamental iron patterned in the shape of leaves, usually, because leaves have a look of coolness. Vines grow up the second-floor posts, entwining themselves among the iron leaves, providing the illusion of privacy. There is never a water shortage. It is simple enough to wet down the gallery floor and the casual pedestrian had best keep a wary eye cocked upward for the deluge.

After making the purchases for the girl and putting them in the apartment where she still slept, I walked back into the Quarter, into the long shadows of evening. I saw the galleries and reconstructed in memory the front of the Rampart Street apartment on the edge of the Negro section, and knew that with care those galleries that stretched almost to the corner would give me a chance to shake off my attentive friends.

Barney Zeck was sitting on the top stair when I went up to the third floor. The perennial toothpick was in the
corner of his mouth. The heat seemed to affect him not at all.

“Having fun?” he asked mildly as I came slowly up the flight.

“Oh, dandy!”

“The town is full of big-time law brass, Bryant.”

“So I’ve noticed. Come on in and have a drink.”

He followed me in. I turned on the fans and brought him his drink. He held it up to the light. He looked like a wise and dusty elf.

“Ramifications,” he said softly. “That’s the word. A thing like this, it has ramifications. But not for us. Not for me. I see it simple. Dead woman. So catch the killer. Standard procedure. This is off the record, Bryant. ’Way off the record. I’m a sucker to trust you, maybe. But I’m browned off enough not to care. The orders came down from on high. Drop it. Forget it. Nice, isn’t it?”

I looked at his cold nailhead eyes. There was anger there. “Why?” I asked.

“Apparently this is some kind of an international deal. And we’re just locals. We can fumble the ball. So they whistle us over to the side lines.”

I took a long pull at my drink. “Are they going after the killer?”

“In their own way. But I think, Bryant, they’re more anxious to make a deal with him than they are to clobber him. And I know you want to get your hands on him. I turned over everything I’ve learned. But I held out one little thing. I saved it for you. I don’t like people who kill women. You tell me you’ll use your head and stay cool and I’ll give you my little nugget.”

“I promise, Lieutenant.”

“My favorite pigeon is the big blond guy. I’ve sifted all our stools. He isn’t local. But I got a faint line. Triangulation, maybe. This can be a rough town. Somewhere within a two-block radius of the Café Lafitte at the corner of St. Philip and Bourbon, in an apartment I would have found sooner or later if they’d let me stay on it, somebody is putting on shows. For a special type of people. People who like whips. You know what I mean. The big blond guy goes for that. Anyway, he’s been
to a couple. Now, don’t jump to the conclusion the Lafitte is sour. I’m just using that as a reference point. They have a couple of shows a week. Admission is a hundred bucks. You’ll have to fumble around until you find somebody who can give you a line on it. The next show is tomorrow night, Saturday night.”

“The people from out of town are tailing me, Lieutenant.”

“You won’t get in unless you shake them off.”

“Any suggestions?”

He stood up and yawned. “You’ll have to figure that out. I’d use city busses, myself. One suggestion, though. If you have a drink at the Café Lafitte, stay away from the specialty of the house. It’s a dry Martini with absinthe. They call it an Obituary. Good name, too.”

He closed the door quietly behind him. All the time I showered and changed, throughout the late dinner at Galatoire’s, I tried to decide how I would handle Zeck’s bit of information, knowing all the time that my mind was already made up. The sensible thing to do was to make contact with the Jones boys and give them the data and let them put a net around the entire area Zeck had mentioned. But the blood-darkened face and horrid bulging eyes of Laura kept drifting across the back of my mind and I knew that I wanted a quiet few minutes with Haussmann. All to myself. If she had tried to cross him up by leaving him out of the trade for amnesty, he would have killed her. And I knew that in a few moments with him I could find out.

At eleven o’clock I went into my act. I went out on the shallow balcony into the night, stripped to the waist. I stretched and yawned and went back in. Fifteen minutes later I put the lights out. At eleven-thirty, dressed in the darkest clothes I had, I slipped out onto the balcony, stepped over the railing, lowered myself, hung by my fingertips, and dropped the last few inches onto the gallery roof. I crouched against the front of the building, invisible from the street.

“You hear ’at thumpin’, honey?” a lazy voice asked directly below me.

“Din’ hear no thumpin’,” a woman answered.

I kept low and close to the front of the building. The galleries were of different heights, but they all adjoined. There was a party on one. A party so noisy I could have walked across over their heads trying to stamp holes in the gallery roof. The last gallery was dark, and I stretched out flat and looked down at the sidewalk, thirty feet below. I hunched forward until I could look into the galleries, my head upside down. The screen of vines was thick. I moved to the outside corner and slid down the iron post onto the empty gallery. It was a full ten minutes before there was no pedestrian traffic underneath. I slid down the second post to the sidewalk and walked fast to the corner, hurried around it, and flattened myself in a shallow doorway. No hurrying footsteps, no whistle, no siren.

I came out onto Canal on the Basin Street corner, and got a cab that dropped me a block from Harrigan’s apartment.