Moth E-Book

James Sallis

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Lew Griffin
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 288

Beschreibung

One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin's dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, La Verne Adams is dead - and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers... leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery. Abandoning his former career for the safe respectability of teaching, Lew Griffin now spends his time in an old house in the garden district - determined to keep his distance from the lowlife temptations of the New Orleans night. But an inescapable obligation to an old friend is drawing the tormented black ex-p.i. to danger like a Moth to a flame. And there will be no turning back when his history comes calling and the dying begins again.

Leseprobe

Book Two of the Lew Griffin Series

One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, LaVerne Adams is dead - and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers - leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery.

Abandoning his former career for the safe respectability of teaching, Lew Griffin now spends his time in an old house in the garden district - determined to keep his distance from the lowlife temptations of the New Orleans night. But an inescapable obligation to an old friend is drawing the tormented ex-PI to danger like a moth to a flame. And there will be no turning back when his history comes calling and the dying begins again.

James Sallis has published fourteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the L.A. Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to Drive, the six Lew Griffin books are now in development as feature films. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS

Novels Published by No Exit Press

The Long-Legged Fly – Lew Griffin Book One, 1992

Moth – Lew Griffin Book Two, 1993

Black Hornet – Lew Griffin Book Three, 1994

Death Will Have Your Eyes, 1997

Eye of the Cricket – Lew Griffin Book Four, 1997

Bluebottle – Lew Griffin Book Five, 1998

Ghost of a Flea – Lew Griffin Book Six, 2001

Cypress Grove – Turner Trilogy Book One, 2003

Drive, 2005

Cripple Creek – Turner Trilogy Book Two, 2006

Salt River – Turner Trilogy Book Three, 2007

The Killer Is Dying, 2011

Driven, 2012

Other Novels

Renderings

What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

Stories

A Few Last Words

Limits of the Sensible World

Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

A City Equal to my Desire

Poems

Sorrow’s Kitchen

My Tongue In Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

As Editor

Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

Jazz Guitars

The Guitar In Jazz

Other

The Guitar Players

Difficult Lives

Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)

Chester Himes: A Life

A James Sallis Reader

Praise forMoth

‘James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction. His New Orleans is richly atmospheric and darker than noir’

– Lawrence Block

‘If you like Walter Mosley, then Sallis walks the same streets, but the walk is faster, the streets darker. Buy this book’

– Crime Time

‘An intelligent, enigmatic book … engrossing and disturbing’

– New York Times

‘Another walk on Louisiana’s wild side … even stronger than The Long-Legged Fly’

– Kirkus Reviews

‘An outstanding novel’

– Booklist

‘A mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions’

– Harlan Ellison

‘Sallis is a rare find for mystery readers, a fine prose stylist with an interest in moral struggle and a gift for the lacerating evocation of loss’

– New York Newsday

Praise for James Sallis

‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’

– Independent on Sunday

‘James Sallis is a superb writer’

– Times

‘James Sallis – he’s right up there, one of the best of the best… Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy’

– Ian Rankin, Guardian

‘[A] master of America noir…Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared down prose is distinctive and powerful’

– Sunday Telegraph

‘Sallis’ spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’

– Telegraph

‘Sallis is a wonderful writer, dark, lyrical and compelling’

– Spectator

‘Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work’

– London Review of Books

‘Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they’re tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair’

– New York Times

‘carefully crafted, restrained and eloquent’

– Times Literary Supplement

‘James Sallis is without doubt the most underrated novelist currently working in America’

– Catholic Herald

‘Sallis writes crime novels that read like literature’

– Los Angeles Times

‘Allusive and stylish, this stark metaphysical landscape will leave a resounding impression’

– Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

‘The brooding atmosphere and depth of characterisation mark this as superior mystery fare’

– Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

‘I’m brought back, yet again, to my conviction that the best American writers are hiding out like CIA sleepers, long forgotten fugitives from a discontinued campaign’

– Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books

‘Classic American crime of the highest order’

–Time Out

www.noexit.co.uk

To the memory of

Chester Himes

Father, the dark moths

Crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

—JAMES WRIGHT

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

James Sallis Collection

Chapter One

ITWASMIDNIGHT,ITWASRAINING.

I scrubbed at the sink as instructed, and went on in. The second set of double doors led into a corridor at the end of which, to the left, a woman sat at a U-shaped desk behind an improvised levee of computers, phones, stacks of paperwork and racks of bound files. She was on the phone, trying simultaneously to talk into it and respond to the youngish man in soiled Nikes and lab coat who stood beside her asking about results of lab tests. Every few moments the phone purred and a new light started blinking on it. The woman herself was not young, forty to fifty, with thinning hair in a teased style out of fashion for at least twenty years. A tag on her yellow polyester jacket read Jo Ellen Heslip. Names are important.

To the right I walked past closetlike rooms filled with steel racks of supplies, an X-ray viewer, satellite pharmacy, long conference tables. Then into the intensive-care nursery, the NICU, itself—like coming out onto a plain. It was half the size of a football field, broken into semidiscrete sections by four-foot tile walls topped with open shelving. (Pods, I’d later learn to call them.) Light flooded in from windows along three walls. The windows were double, sealed: thick outer glass, an enclosed area in which lint and construction debris had settled, inner pane. Pigeons strutted on the sill outside. Down in the street buses slowed at, then passed, a covered stop. Someone in a hospital gown, impossible to say what sex or age, slept therein on a bench advertising Doctor’s Book-store, getting up from time to time to rummage in the trash barrel alongside, pulling out cans with a swallow or two remaining, a bag of Zapp’s chips, a smashed carton from Popeye’s.

I found Pod 1 by trial and error and made my way through the grid of incubators, open cribs, radiant warmers: terms I’d come to know in weeks ahead. Looking down at pink and blue tags affixed to these containers.

Baby Girl McTell lay in an incubator in a corner beneath the window. The respirator reared up beside her on its pole like a silver sentinel, whispering: shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. LED displays wavered and changed on its face. With each shhhh, Baby Girl McTell’s tiny body puffed up, and a rack of screens mounted above her to the right also updated: readouts of heart rate, respiration and various internal pressures on a Hewlett-Packard monitor, oxygen saturation on a Nellcor pulse oximeter, levels of CO2 and O2 from transcutaneous monitors.

Baby Girl McTell

Born 9/15

Weight 1 lb 5 oz

Mother Alouette

I could hold her in the palm of my hand, easily, I thought. Or could have, if not for this battleship of machinery keeping her afloat, keeping her alive.

The nurse at bedside looked up. Papers lay scattered about on the bedside stand. She was copying from them onto another, larger sheet. She was left-handed, her wrist a winglike curve above the pen.

“Good morning. Would you be the father, by any chance?”

Reddish-blond hair cut short. Wearing scrubs, as they all were. Bright green eyes and a British accent like clear, pure water, sending a stab of pain and longing and loss through me as I thought of Vicky: red hair floating above me when I woke with DT’s in Touro Infirmary, Vicky with her Scottish r’s, Vicky who had helped me retrieve my life and then gone away.

Teresa Hunt, according to her nametag. But did I really look like an eighteen-year-old’s romantic other?

Or maybe she meant the girl’s father?

I shook my head. “A family friend.”

“Well, I had wondered.” Words at a level, unaccented. “No one’s seen anything of him, as far as I know.”

“From what little I know, I don’t expect you will.”

“I see. Well, we are rather accustomed to that, I suppose. Some of the mothers themselves stop coming after a time.”

She shuffled papers together and capped her pen, which hung on a cord around her neck. There was print on the side of it: advertising of some sort, drugs probably. Like the notepad Vicky wrote her name and phone number on when I found her at Hotel Dieu.

Tucking everything beneath an oversized clipboard, Teresa Hunt squared it on the stand.

“Look, I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “Someone should have explained this to you, but only parents and grandparents are allowed—oh, never mind all that. Bugger the rules. What difference can it possibly make? Is this your first time to see her?”

I nodded.

“And it’s the mother you know?”

“Grandmother, really. The baby’s mother’s mother. We … were friends. For a long time.”

“I see.” She probably did. “And the girl’s mother recently died, according to the chart. A stroke, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

There was no way I could tell her or anyone else what LaVerne had meant, had been, to me. We were both little more than kids when we met; Verne was a hooker then. Years later she married her doctor and I didn’t see her for a while. When he cut her loose, she started as a volunteer at a rape-crisis center and went on to a psychology degree and full-time counseling. It was a lonely life, I guess, at both ends. And when finally she met a guy named Chip Landrieu and married him, even as I began to realize what I had lost, I was happy for her. For both of them.

“Did she know Alouette was pregnant?”

I shook my head. “Their lives had gone separate ways many years back.” So separate that I hadn’t even known about Alouette. “She—” Say it, Lew. Go ahead and say her name. Names are important. “LaVerne had been trying to get back in touch, to find Alouette.”

She looked away for a moment. “What’s happened to us?” And in my own head I heard Vicky again, many years ago: What’s wrong with this country, Lew? “Well, never mind all that. Not much we can do about it, is there? Do you understand what’s happening here?” Her nod took in the ventilator, monitors, bags of IV medication hanging upside down like transparent bats from silver poles, Baby Girl McTell’s impossible ark; perhaps the whole world.

“Not really.” Does anyone, I wanted to add.

“Alouette is an habitual drug user. Crack, mainly, according to our H&P and the social worker’s notes, but there’s a history of drug and alcohol abuse involving many controlled substances, more or less whatever was available, it seems. She makes no attempt to deny this. And because of it, Alouette’s baby was profoundly compromised in utero. She never developed, and though Alouette did manage to carry her as far as the seventh month, what you’re looking at here in the incubator is something more on the order of a five-month embryo. You can see there’s almost nothing to her. The eyes are fused, her skin breaks down wherever it’s touched, there aren’t any lungs to speak of. She’s receiving medication which paralyzes her own respiratory efforts, and the machine, the ventilator, does all her breathing. We have her on high pressures and a high rate, and nine hours out of ten we’re having to give her hundred-percent oxygen. Two hours out of ten, maybe, we’re holding our own.”

“You’re telling me she’s going to die.”

“I am. Though of course I’m not supposed to.”

“Then why are we doing all this?”

“Because we can. Because we know how. There are sixty available beds in this unit. On any given day, six to ten of those beds will be filled with crack babies like Alouette’s. At least ten others are just as sick, for whatever reasons—other kinds of drug and alcohol abuse, congenital disease, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care. The numbers are climbing every day. When I first came here, there’d be, oh, five to ten babies in this unit. Now there’re never fewer than thirty. And there’ve been times we’ve had to stack cribs in the hallway out there.”

“Are you always this blunt?”

“No. No, I’m not, not really. But we look on all this a bit differently in Britain, you understand. And I think that I may be answering something I see in your face, as well.”

“Thank you.” I held out a hand. She took it without hesitation or deference, as American women seldom can. “My name is Griffin. Lew.”

“Teresa, as you can see. And since Hunt is the name on my nursing license, I use it here. But in real life, away from here, I mostly use my maiden name, McKinney. If there’s ever anything I can do, Mr. Griffin, please let me know. This can be terribly hard on a person.”

She removed vials from a drawer beneath the incubator, checked them against her lists, drew up portions into three separate syringes and injected these one at a time, and slowly, into crooks (called heplocks) in Baby Girl McTell’s IV tubing. There were four IV sites, swaddled in tape. Almost every day one or another of them had to be restarted elsewhere, in her scalp, behind an ankle, wherever they could find a vein that wouldn’t blow.

She dropped the syringes into the mouth of a red plastic Sharps container, pulled a sheet of paper from beneath the clipboard and, glancing at a clock on the wall nearby, made several notations.

“I don’t know at all why I’m telling you this, Mr. Griffin, but I had a child myself, a son. He was three months early, weighed almost two pounds and lived just over eight days. I was sixteen at the time. And afterwards, because of an infection, I became quite sterile. But it was because of him that I first began thinking about becoming a nurse.”

“Call me Lew. Please.”

“I don’t think the head nurse would care much for that, if she were to hear about it. She’s a bit stuffy and proper, you understand.”

“But what can one more rule matter? Since, as you say, we’ve already started breaking them.”

“Yes, well, we have done that truly, haven’t we, Lew. Do you think you’d be wanting to speak with one of the doctors? They should be along in just a bit. Or I could try paging one of them.”

“Is there anything they can tell me that you can’t?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then I don’t see any reason for bothering them. I’m sure they have plenty to do.”

“That they have. Well, I’ll just step out for a few minutes and leave the two of you to get acquainted. If you should need anything, Debbie will be watching over my children while I’m gone.”

She nodded toward a nurse who sat in a rocking chair across the pod, bottle-feeding one of the babies.

“That’s Andrew. He’s been with us almost a year now, and we all spoil him just awfully, I’m afraid.”

“A year? When will he leave?”

“There’s nowhere for him to go. Most of his bowel had to be removed just after birth, and he’ll always be needing a lot of care. Feedings every hour, a colostomy to manage. His parents came to see him when the mother was in the hospital, but once she was discharged, we stopped hearing from them. The police went out to the address we had for them after a bit, but they were long gone. Eventually I suppose he’ll be moved upstairs to pediatrics. And somewhere farther along they’ll find a nursing home that will take him, perhaps.”

I looked from Andrew back to Baby Girl McTell as Teresa walked away. Names are important. Things are what we call them. By naming, we understand. But what name do we have for a baby who’s never quite made it into life, who goes on clawing after it, all the while slipping further away, with a focus, a hunger, we can scarcely imagine? What can we call the battles going on here? And how can we ever understand them?

Through the shelves I watched people gather over an Isolette in the next pod. First the baby’s own nurse, then another from the pod; next, when one of them went off to get her, a nurse who appeared to be in charge; finally, moments later, the young man in lab coat and Nikes who’d earlier been standing at the desk in front. Various alarms had begun sounding—buzzers, bells, blats—as the young man looked up at the monitors one last time, reached for a transparent green bag at bedside, and said loudly: “Call it.” Overhead, a page started: Stat to neonatal intensive care, all attendings. He put a part of the bag over the baby’s face and began squeezing it rapidly.

Then I could see no more as workers surrounded the Isolette.

“Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step out,” Debbie said. She stood and placed Andrew back in his open crib. The child’s eyes followed her as she walked away. He didn’t cry.

I filed out alongside skittish new fathers, smiling grandparents, a couple of mothers still in hospital gowns and moving slowly, hands pressed flat against their stomachs. An X-ray machine bore down on us through the double doors and lumbered along the hallway, banging walls and scattering linen hampers, trashcans, supply carts. Where’s this one? the tech asked. Pod 2, Mrs. Heslip told him.

Most of the others, abuzz with rumor, clustered just outside the doors. Some decided to call it a night and went on to the elevators across the hall, where I knew from experience they’d wait a while. I found stairs at the end of a seemingly deserted hall and went down them (they smelled of stale cigarettes and urine) into the kind of cool, gentle rain we rarely see back in New Orleans. There, when it comes, it comes hard and fast, making sidewalks steam, beating down banana trees and shucking leaves off magnolias, pouring over the edges of roofs and out of gutters that can’t handle the sudden deluge.

I turned up the collar of my old tan sportcoat as I stepped out of the hospital doorway just in time to get splashed by a pickup that swerved toward the puddle when it saw me. I heard cackling laughter from inside.

Earlier I had noticed a small café on the corner a few blocks over. Nick’s, Rick’s, something like that, the whole front of it plate glass, with handwritten ads for specials taped to the glass and an old-style diner’s counter. I decided to give it a try and headed that way. Moving through the streets of the rural South I’d fled a long time ago. Bessie Smith had died not too far from here, over around Clarksdale, when the white hospital wouldn’t treat her following a car accident and she bled to death on the way to the colored one.

At age sixteen, I had fled. Fled my father’s docility and sudden rages, fled old black men saying “mister” to ten-year-old white kids, fled the fields and the tire factory pouring thick black smoke out onto the whole town like a syrup, fled all those faces gouged out and baked hard and dry like the land itself. I had gone to the city, to New Orleans, and made a life of my own, not a life I was especially proud of, but mine nonetheless, and I’d always avoided going back. I’d avoided a lot of things. And now they were all waiting for me.

Chapter Two

A FEWWEEKSBEFORETHAT,ATNINE in the morning, I’d just finished putting a friend’s son on the bus to send him home. He’d kind of got himself lost in New Orleans, and I’d kind of found him, and I think finally we were all kind of glad, parent, child and myself, that I could still do the work. It was a beautiful morning, unseasonably cool, and I decided to walk home. So I left the Greyhound Terminal and started up Simon Bolivar, with downtown New Orleans (what they’re now calling the CBD, for Central Business District) looming at my back like so many cliffs.

I never have figured out just how a street in this part of the city got named for a South American liberator, but that’s New Orleans. Some of the streets down here actually have double signs, a regular-size one and a smaller one riding piggyback, with different names. Further up, where it becomes La Salle, Simon Bolivar has one of those.

I walked past the projects. Newer ones of slab and plastic looking like cheap college dorms from the fifties, older brick-and-cement ones like World War II institutional housing, most of them with sagging porches, window frames and entryways, air conditioners propped on long boards, spray-painted lovers’ names or exhortations to Try Jesus on the walls. Then, crossing Martin Luther King, I passed the old Leidenheimer Bakery and a lengthy stretch of weathered Creole cottages and doubles, storefront churches, windowless corner foodstores. Every couple of blocks there were clusters of chairs and crates beneath trees on the neutral ground where the community’s social life is carried on. Lots of boarded-up buildings with signs on them. Do Not Enter, No Admittance, Property Pelican Management. There were even signs on the Dumpsters outside the projects: Prop. of HANO. Signs on everything. The ones we read, and the ones we just know are there. We learn.

I went on up to Louisiana, turned left, looked in the window at Brown Sugar Records and across at the Sandpiper’s sign over the door, a two-foot-high martini glass complete with stirrer and olive and a rainbow arcing into the glass. It’s supposed to be lit up, of course, probably all greens and blues, but the lights haven’t worked in twenty years at least. These great old signs still turn up all over the city. Things are slow to change here, or don’t change at all.

I went on across St. Charles to Prytania, stopped at the Bluebird for coffee, and stepped through my front door just as the rain began. First a few scattered drops—then a downpour so hard you could see and hear little else.

Fifteen minutes later, the sun was struggling back out.

I poured an Abita into an oversized glass and settled down by the window to look over notes on Camus and Claude Simon. It was my semester to teach Modern French Novel, something that rotated “irregularly” among our three full-time professors (who got benefits) and four part-time instructors (no benefits: administration would be ecstatic if everyone were part-time), and it had been a while. My last couple of books had done well, and I hadn’t been teaching much. But then I started missing it. Also, I couldn’t seem to get started on a new book. I’d begun two or three, but they kept sounding more like me—my ideas, the way I see things—than like whatever character I supposedly was writing about.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.

That great opening line of the novel I probably admire more than any other I’ve read. And I thought again how much blunter, how much more matter-of-fact and drained of passion the phrase is in French than it ever could be in our own language. How well it introduces this voice without past or future, without history or anticipation, with only a kind of eternal, changeless present; how Meursault, and finally the novel itself, becomes a witness upon whom only detail (sunlight, sand, random clusters of events) registers. Telling in the calmest way possible this astonishing story of a man sentenced to death because he failed to cry at his mother’s funeral.

I remembered, as I always did now, reading this, the telegrams Mother had sent, one before, one after, when my father was dying.

Afloat in reverie, I’d been distractedly watching a man make his way over the buckling sidewalk beneath an ancient oak tree opposite, and when now he turned to cross the street, I took notice.

Moments later, my doorbell chirred.

In the stories, Sherlock Holmes is forever watching people approach (and often hesitate) in the street below, and by the time they’re at the door ringing for Mrs. Hudson he has already deduced from carriage, dress and general appearance just who they are and pretty much why they’ve come.

I, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea why this man was here.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said when I opened the door. Still wearing, or wearing again, the suit he’d had on last week. It hadn’t looked too good then. The tie was gone, though. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, and I apologize for coming into your home like this. I’m—”

“I know who you are.”

At his look of surprise, I said: “Hey. I’m a detective.”

“Oh.” As if that, indeed, explained it.

“And of course, as a writer, an inveterate snoop as well.”

That was true enough. Sometimes sitting in restaurants or bars I’d become so engrossed in eavesdropping that I’d completely lose track of what my companion was saying. LaVerne had always just sat quietly, waiting for me to come back.

“Oh.” A perfunctory smile.

“Actually, I saw you two out together a few times. The Camellia, Commander’s, like that.” Only a partial lie.

“Then you should’ve come over, said hello.”

I shook my head.

“I know what she meant to you, Griffin. What you meant to one another.”

He didn’t. But he was a hell of a man for coming here to tell me that.

“You want a drink? Coffee or something?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

“Well, I tell you. What I’ve been having is this fine beer made out of hominy grits or somesuch right here in Governor Edwards’s own state. But what I’d really like is a cup of café au lait. One so muddy and dark you think there’ve got to be catfish down in there somewhere. You in a hurry?”

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll make us a pot. What the hell.”

He followed me out to the kitchen, staring with fascination at shelves of canned food and two-year-old coupons stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, rifling the pages of surreptitious cookbooks, fingering the unholy contents of a spice rack.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” he told me when the coffee was ready and we were back by the window, he in a beat-up old wingback, me in my usual white wood rocker. “I mean, I know; but I don’t know how to tell you.”

He sipped coffee. From his expression it was, in miniature, everything he had hoped for from life.

“You and LaVerne, you were together a long time.”

He looked at me. After a moment I nodded.

“We weren’t.” He looked down. I thought of a Sonny Boy Williamson song: Been gone so long, the carpet’s half faded on the floor. Or possibly it was carpets have faded—hard to tell. Though mine were hardwood. “What I mean is,” he said.

And we sat there.

“Yeah,” I said finally. I got up and put on more milk to heat, poured us both refills when it was steaming, settled back. My rocker creaked on the floorboards.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We got together pretty far along in life. I sure didn’t think there was anyone like LaVerne out there for me, not anymore. All that stuff about candlelight and the perfect mate and little bells going off, that’s what you believe when you’re nineteen or twenty maybe, some of us anyway. Then you get a few years on you and you realize that’s not the way the world is at all, that’s just not how it goes about its business. But still, one day there she was.”

He looked up at me and his eyes were unguarded, open. “I hardly knew her, Lew. Less than a year. I loved her so much. Sure, I know an awful lot’s gone under the bridge, for both of us, but I still think we’ll have some time, you know? Then one day I look around and she just isn’t there anymore. Like I’m halfway into this terribly important sentence I’ve waited a long time to say and I suddenly realize no one is listening. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been hoping somehow I’d be able to see LaVerne through your eyes, have more time with her, find out more about her, that way. Stupid, right?”

“No. Not stupid at all. That’s what people are all about. That’s something we can do for one another. We always get together to bury our dead. And then to bring them back, to remember what their lives were like, afterwards. Though Verne’s life wasn’t one either you or I can easily know or imagine.”

He nodded.

“Good. You have to know that before you can know anything else. But I just don’t see what you want me to tell you. That she loved you? She must have, and you must know it. That it’s terrible how she was taken from you? Hell, of course it is, man. Join the fucking club.”

“You think—” he started, then took another draw of coffee. “I’m sorry. I haven’t made myself at all clear. I didn’t come here for assurances, however much I could use them just now. And yes, I know LaVerne loved me.” He looked up from his cup. “Just as she did you, Lew.”

Something grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let go. I swallowed coffee. It didn’t help much.

“There have to be a lot of reasons why I came here. Maybe there’ll be a time to sort them all out later. But primarily I came here to hire you.”

“Hire me?” I said. It sounded more like hrm.

“I need a detective, Lew. A good one.”

“I don’t do that anymore. Hell, I never did it very much. I sat in bars and drank, and eventually guys I was looking for would stumble by and trip over my feet. I’m a teacher now.”

“And a writer.”

“Yeah, well, that too. Once you’ve lost your pride, it gets easier, you know: you’ll do almost any damned thing. You start off small, a piece for the local paper, or maybe this tiny little story about growing up, something like that. That’s how they hook you. Then before you know it, you’re writing a series for them.”

“Yeah. Yeah, LaVerne told me a thing or two about your pride.”

“Which in my particular case went after a fall.”

“And I read your books, Lew. All of them.”

“Then you must be one hell of a man for sure. Don’t know if I could do it.”

“Yeah,” he said, placing cup and saucer on the floor beside him and waving off my tacit offer of more. Some people still know how to let a good thing be. “You wanta stop pushing me away here, Lew? ‘S’not much about this whole thing that’s funny. You know?”

I shook my head. Not disputing him: agreeing. The invisible something eased off on my throat and went back to its dark corner.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Good.” He took a cream-colored envelope out of his inside breast pocket and held it, edge-down like a blade, against one thigh. “You know anything about LaVerne having a kid?”

“She never had any. Always told me she couldn’t.”

“Not only could, it seems, but also did. Back when she was married to Horace Guidry—”

“Her doctor.”

He nodded. “Went on fertility drugs or something, I guess, when he kept insisting. Then when they split, I guess he got full custody, no visitation. Even a restraining order.”

“In consideration of the respondent’s unwholesome past, no doubt.”

“And of the petitioner’s large sums of money and standing in the community, right. You got it.”

“Why would she never have said anything?”

“I asked her that once, when she first told me. She couldn’t say. But I think maybe it was kind of like she shut that door completely—like she had to, just to keep on getting by. Know what I mean?”

I did. I also knew that winds have a way of coming out of nowhere and blowing those doors open again.

We sat there silently a moment and he said, “Yeah, I guess we don’t ever know anybody as well as we think we do, huh?”

“I’m beginning to think we don’t ever know anyone at all.”