The Long-Legged Fly (6 page)

“I hope,” I said. “She have any money?”

He shook his head. “A few dollars. We ain’t rich people, I guess you can tell.”

We all stood for a moment looking at various walls.

“Can you find her for us, Mr. Griffin?” the man finally said. “We ain’t got—we don’t have much, but we’ll pay what you ask.”

“We pay our bills,” the woman said.

“I’m sure,” I said. “Well, suppose for a start you tell me your names.”

“Sorry,” the man said. “We ain’t—we aren’t quite ourselves. Clayson, Thomas Clayson. My daughter’s name is Cordelia. This is Martha.”

“Tell me a little about what your daughter’s like, Mr. Clayson.”

“Quiet, kind of shy. A good girl. Never had a lot of friends like some others. Always read a lot, ever since I can remember. Loved the movies.”

“She was our pride and joy, Mr. Griffin,” the woman said.

I thought: when the quiet ones finally break loose … I shook my head to clear it. The woman was still talking.

“—so hoped she’d go on to college, make something of herself. Saved all our lives for it. Skimped and saved and did without. And now—” She stopped. He looked at her as though he were going to say something, but didn’t.

“What does she look like?” I asked.

“Well,” he said. “She’s a pretty girl. About, I don’t know, five-four or so. They grow up fast, you know.”

“Wears her hair short, with bangs in front,” his wife added.

“I suppose you might have a picture?”

He reached into his wallet and handed me a snapshot.

She
was
pretty, with wide, alert eyes and thin, serious lips. In the picture she wore jeans and a light pink sweater. She looked a lot like a girl I’d known back home.

“How did, does, she usually dress? Something like this?”

They both nodded.

“And you say she’s been in New Orleans before. Any idea where she might have liked to hang out, or any places she was especially fond of?”

This time they both shook their heads.

“Like I said, she don’t—doesn’t talk a lot,” Clayson said.

“Any friends in the city that you know about?”

“She talked some about a girl named Willona. An actress, if that’s any help.”

“What kind of actress?”

“Actress, is all we know.”

“You don’t know where she lives?”

He shook his head.

“Look,” I said, “I’ll give it my best shot, but I just can’t hold out a lot of false hope for you. This is a big, dirty city. It’s way too easy to disappear into it—just like those bayous and swamps not too far away. And it doesn’t much care about any of us individually, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl from Clarksdale. Where are you folks staying in town?”

“With my brother’s family on Jackson Avenue,” Clayson said. He gave me an address and I wrote it down. Over near the levee and New Orleans General, from the number. “There ain’t no—isn’t any—phone,” he said.

“Okay then, I’ll be in touch. There are a few things I can check out for you. Maybe something’ll come of it. I’ll let you know.”

They turned and started for the door. They looked even more tired now, and I wondered for a minute if they’d make it through to the other end of all this, and how.

I looked at the snapshot again and said a prayer myself—for Mr. and Mrs. Clayson.

T
HE
CLOCK
ON
THE
BANK
AT
C
ARROLLTON
AND
F
RERET
said it was 102 degrees. I looked over at the palm trees lining the trolley tracks on the neutral ground opposite. The palms looked right at home.

I drove out to Milt’s to have some copies of the snapshot made, then took Claiborne back down-town.

Don wasn’t at his desk. A clerk went off to find him, and ten minutes later he came gliding in, shirtsleeves rolled up and sweat stains the size of mud flaps under his arms. His clip-on tie was lying on the desk like a museum relic.

“Hear about Eddie Gonzalez?” he said, sitting. “Went down for the count. Pushing coke at The Green Door.”

He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.

“You’ve got three minutes,” he said.

“I’ll take two of them and keep the other for later. I’ve got a picture. I want it circulated to your men.”

I caught the glint of suspicion in his eye. “Anything I should know about?”

“Just some kid whose parents want to find her is all.”

“Missing persons is down the hall to the left, Lew.”

“A favor, Don.”

“Been a lot of those lately.”

“I hear you.”

“Okay, okay, you’ve got it. That all?”

I handed the copies over. “That’s all. Thanks, Don.”

“Right.” And he was out the door.

I knew how it was. I’d tried it myself for a while, putting in time as an MP. Then the army and I came to an understanding: they would keep me out of a court martial and psychiatric hospital if I would quit busting heads and go on home. At the time it sounded like the best deal anybody ever made me.

I slid out of downtown headquarters and hit the streets. First the crash pads in the Quarter that pulled them in from all over the world it seemed, then those uptown. Actress, I kept thinking. All I knew about New Orleans theater was
Nobody Likes a Smartass,
which from every indication had been running continuously (and ubiquitously) from about the time Bienville founded the city.

Finally, at three or so in the afternoon, I walked into Jackson Square armed with a Central Grocery sandwich.

I hadn’t been there for a long time, but nothing much had changed. A group of bluegrass musicians played by the fountain. Stretched out on the grass nearby were a number of hippies or freaks or whatever they were calling themselves those days—anyhow, they had long hair and their own aggressive dress code. I watched some of the girls in cutoffs and halters and suddenly felt old. Old and tired. Christ, I thought, just turned thirty and they look like kids to me.

I made rounds with my picture, then dropped onto a bench by one particularly fetching specimen of late childhood and ate my sandwich.

I waited.

After an hour or so I gave it up—lots of distractions and a nagging notion that the world might not be so bad after all, but no Cordelia—and wandered over toward the cathedral. I don’t know why. Anyhow, halfway inside the door, about where they start selling trinkets to tourists, I turned around and walked back out.

Until 1850 or so, Jackson Square had been Place d’Armes, and it was there, during the years of Spanish rule a century earlier, that rebellious French leaders had been executed. A few blocks landward, in Congo Square, slaves were allowed to pursue music and mores otherwise proscribed by the Code Noir and
femme de couleur libre
Marie Laveau held court over regular Sunday voodoo rituals. Scenes from our rich heritage hereabouts. Laveau, incidentally, was said to have consorted with alligators. Obviously one hell of a woman.

That night LaVerne and I had dinner at Commander’s Palace. Trout Almandine because they make the best in the city and a Mouton-Rothschild because we felt like it. The wine steward seemed a bit huffy at first but, as the evening went on, grew ever friendlier in proportion to the growing redness of his face.

“You know an actress named Willona?” I asked Verne at one point.

“Can’t say I do, Lew. But lots of girls call themselves actresses.”

We went back to the wine and small talk.

About two in the morning Verne’s phone rang and she rolled over to get it. I could hear a heavy, almost growling voice on the other end, but couldn’t make out words.

“Yeah, honey?” Verne said. More growling. “Really? Kinda late for a working girl, you gotta give better notice… . Yeah, sure, honey, I understand, of course I do… . Yeah, I know where it is… . I’ll be there, sure… . Give me thirty, thirty-five minutes, huh?”

She hung up.

“Gotta split, Lew,” she said. “One of my regulars.”

I nodded and she swung out of bed toward the closet. She had more clothes in there than they had at Maison Blanche.

I waited until she’d left, then got up, dressed, and went home.

H
OME
THESE
DAYS
WAS
A
FOUR-ROOM
APARTMENT
on St. Charles where trolleys clanked by late at night and you could always smell the river. It had a couple of overstuffed couches, some Italian chairs, a king-size bed, even pictures on the wall. Mostly Impressionist.

I parked the bug on the street and went in. Poured a brandy and sat on one of the couches sipping at it.

I was thinking about Cordelia Clayson and the ways it could go. Maybe she was hustling on the street corners by now, I didn’t know. Maybe she was into drugs, or booze. Or plain old for-the-hell-of-it sex. Or Jesus. Anything was possible. Whatever, I didn’t feel too hopeful about the news that sooner or later I was going to have to bring her parents. I’d seen too many times what the city could do.

Actress, I kept thinking. Actress. I didn’t know anything about acting, but I’d had a professor at college who had done a bibliography of New Orleans theater since 1868 or some such date, and tomorrow I’d give him a call. Right now it was time for bed. I finished off the brandy, undressed, set the alarm for seven, and hit the sack.

I was wakened at six by the phone.

“Yeah?” I managed to get out.

“Lew? I’m calling from downtown.”

“Don. Don’t you ever go home?”

“Funny, my wife’s always asking me the same thing. Can you come down here, Lew? It’s Vice. They think they’ve got your girl.”

I drove over expecting to talk to Cordelia Clayson in a detention room. Instead, I was ushered into a room on the fourth floor lined with books and what looked like cans of film. Don introduced me to Sergeants Polanski and Verrick and left. “Can’t watch this shit, Lew. Daughters of my own,” he said.

“Something we picked up at a party down on Esplanade,” Polanski told me. “Thought you’d be interested.”

While he was talking he threaded film into a projector. When he raised his hand, Verrick hit the lights and there we were, in dreamland.

A big white dude in black socks was doing things to a young black girl. Alternately fucking and sucking and beating and lecturing her on the philosophy of the bedroom and woman’s natural submission. It sounded like something out of de Sade by way of Heffner and Masters and Johnson—the redeeming social significance, I guess.

It was cheaply made, frames jumpy, figures and faces out of focus. But the girl was undeniably Cordelia.

The film lasted maybe fifteen minutes. Nobody said a word the whole time.

“Your girl?” Polanski said when it was over and the lights were back on.

I nodded.

“Who made it—you know?” I said after a moment.

“Guy by the name of Sanders. You get to know them by their style after a while—camera angles, things like that. Bud Sanders. Rents a cheap motel room, turns a girl up high on speed or whatever’s going, and rolls the camera. Mostly the men are the same ones over and over.”

“You pick him up?”

“What the hell for?” Polanski said. “He’d be back out on the street before we started the paper-work.”

“What about community standards?”

“You’re kidding. In New Orleans?”

“We could try,” Verrick added, “keep him busy a while. But it wouldn’t be long. Nothing would stick. Water off a duck’s back. Then he’d just go out and rent a new camera and start all over again.”

I nodded. I’d seen porn films in my time, some in the line of business, a few for pleasure, but this one had really got to me. I was thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Clayson up on Jackson Avenue and what I’d tell them.

“Where can I find this Sanders?” I said.

“Who knows?” Polanski said.

“Turn over the nearest rock,” Verrick said.

“What happens to the film now?”

“We hold it for evidence, then we file it. But there are probably ten, twelve copies of it on the streets by now.”

“We can’t keep on top of it,” Verrick said. “You close one factory down, two more spring up. Like those dragon’s teeth or whatever they were.”

I nodded again. “Thanks, Polanski,” I said. “Verrick—let me know how it turns out. What becomes of the girl? If you find her.”

“Man, the girl’s nothing. They pop out of the woodwork like sweat on a hog. It’s Sanders we want. For good. The girl’s yours, if we ever get to her. But we won’t.”

I started out the door.

“And you got a room full of this stuff,” I said.

“This is just pending cases. You oughta see the vaults down at Central Holding,” Polanski said.

It was only then, walking out the door, that I realized that I had an erection. It made me remember some of the things my wife had called me.

T
HE
ALARM
CLOCK
WAS
STILL
BUZZING
WHEN
I
GOT
back to the apartment. I poured a cup of coffee—it was on a timer—and filled a pipe. Then I reached for the phone.

I got through to Dr. Ropollo at his office in the English building and after telling him what I’d been doing the past ten years (it wasn’t much, after all), asked him about Sanders.

“Bill Collins is the guy you need to talk to. Teaches cinema up at Tulane. But he’s probably home, or in his studio, this time of day.” He gave me the two numbers and I wrote them down in my notebook. I thanked him and hung up.

I poured another cup of coffee and tried the first number. Nothing. I dialed the second, studio number. It rang five times.

“Collins.” A high, slightly effeminate voice, though businesslike at the same time.

I told him who I was and asked about Sanders.

“Bud Sanders, you mean?
That
asshole. Talk about birthright and a mess of pottage,” he said. “Talk about pissing it all away. Be one
hell
of a filmmaker if he wanted to.
Horrible
waste of talent.” He said it as though he were a man who couldn’t tolerate much waste of any kind.