She kept wiping her nose and eyes. She turned her gaze back to a book placed in front of her drink.
“How is it?” I asked.
She cocked her head at me and a thin strap fell from her shoulder.
“The book.”
“Oh,” she said, and closed it and showed me the cover. Lady Sings the Blues. “A friend gave it to me.”
As I was about to pursue the thought, two guffawing men walked into the deserted bar. Laughing, smirking. Drunk, with slow-moving eyes and aggressive swaggers. One nodded at the bartender. He nodded back.
“Ready?” the bartender asked her.
“Oh. Yes.”
I put my hand over hers; it was cold and shaking. “You don’t have to do this.”
She smiled at me with her eyes. “It’s gonna be just fine. Just gonna be fine.”
I kept my hand over hers.
One of the businessmen approached me. Maybe I was generalizing, but he sure fit the description. Brooks Brothers suit and a wedding ring. His hair was silver, and his expensive cologne clashed with his hundred-buck-meal onion breath. Big fun on the bayou in the Big Easy.
“We already paid,” he said. “You’ll have to do it yourself, son.” He made a yanking motion with one hand.
The younger businessman snorted. The bartender was wise enough to shut up.
I looked for a long time at the older man. He probably had everyone in his company scared of him. Everyone called him sir and catered to his every egotistical whim. He’d never sweated, never done a damn thing but hang out at the fraternity house and kiss ass until he made partner. I stared.
He looked down at my tattered and faded jean jacket and sneered. “What do you want?”
I slowly reached down the side of my leg and pulled out my boot knife. I grabbed him by his tie — red with paisley patterns — cut it off at the knot, and shoved it in his mouth. The younger man moved in as the CEO took a swing at me. I caught his fist in my hand and squeezed. If I had anything, it was strong hands from shirking tackles when I played football.
I brought the guy to his knees.
“Sir, when your grandkids are sitting on your lap this Christmas and everything is all warm and fuzzy, I want you to remember this. I want you to think about it as you light the tree, cut the turkey, and pat the kids on the head. Tell the boys when they come to New Orleans to treat the ladies real nice.”
I released my grip. He wouldn’t think about what I said. He was not me, and I was not him. I remembered something a psychologist friend had told me years ago: Don’t expect anything from a pig but a grunt.
She agreed to walk with me to the Quarter only after I gave her fifty bucks. It was fifty I didn’t have, but it was the only way. Together we crossed Canal, dodging cars, soon smelling that cooked-onion-and-exhaust scent that floats around the old district.
I took her to a small bar off Decatur to talk, really it was just a place to sit and drink, only four feet from a sliding window. I got two beers in paper cups, and we sat down. No one around us except an elderly black waiter in a tattered brown sweater. Sarah finished half her beer in one gulp.
I asked her if she was afraid.
“No. Not of you.”
“What then?”
She finished her beer and pulled a cigarette from a pack extracted from a cheap vinyl purse. I lit it.
“Tell me about you and Fats. You know he’s dead?”
“I know.”
She sat there for a moment just looking at me.
“Was he a regular?”
She dropped her head, kneading the palm of her hand into her forehead. The cigarette held high in her fingers.
“Did you work for him at his apartment or did he get a hotel?”
She scratched the inside corner of her mouth and took another drag of the cigarette.
“You were with him the night he died, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I exhaled a long breath and gambled with what I said next. “That man didn’t have anything. Why’d you set him up? You could’ve rolled anybody, like those two in the hotel. You’d come up with a lot more money than what Fats had. He was a sweet old guy. He had more talent than someone like you could ever comprehend. Just tell me who helped you.”
“Stop it. Just stop it. You don’t know anything.”
“Why?”
“You got it all messed ’round. You don’t know how it was.”
“How was it, Sarah? You tell me.”
“I loved him.”
I laughed.
“He tole me he’d marry me. Imagine that. Him marrying me. Even sold his saxophone to—” She was sobbing now.
I waited. When she stopped, she told me about how they first met. Thursday nights she would wait for him outside JoJo’s, listening to his sweet music. The day he told her that he loved her, it was raining. “Real black clouds over the Mississippi,” she said.
“So why’d he sell his sax?”
“To buy me.”
It was two in the morning when I got back to the Warehouse District, lonely, cold, and tired. I didn’t want to be alone. A light was on across Julia Street in the warehouse of a neighbor, one of the many artists who lived in the district. A ballet instructor. Beautiful girl. Good person.
I parked my Jeep, grabbed a six-pack of Abita out of the fridge, then found myself buzzing her from the street-level intercom. I could hear Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 filtering out a cracked second-story window and reverberating off the concrete and bricks down the street. Her blurred image floating past the dim windows.
As I stood there, I suddenly felt silly because she could have company. I guess I arrogantly thought she would always just be there when I needed her. Just waiting, no need for a life of her own. But I guess she thought of me like one of the neighborhood cats that she consistently fed whenever they decided to wander by for a meal.
Sam slid back a rusted viewing slot, then opened the door smiling. Short blond hair and blue eyes. She wore cutoff gray sweatpants and a man’s ribbed white tank top tied at her waist. She’d been dancing a long time — enough to build a sweat.
“I don’t remember ordering a pizza,” she said.
“I do. Should be here in fifteen minutes — chicken, artichoke hearts, and white cheese.”
She shook her head and laughed. She slid two heavy bolts behind us, and I followed her up the stairs. I put my hand on her back. It was very warm.
The next day I played the waiting game in a little tourist café on Royal. I waited and I watched Sarah’s apartment. I ate two bowls of bland gumbo and a soggy muffuletta, drank draft Abita until I got loopy, and then switched to “Authentic French Market Coffee.” Tasted like Maxwell House.
I saw her walk outside to a scrolled balcony in a loose-fitting robe and lean over, sipping coffee. That was noon.
At three, she came back to the balcony. She sat down in a director’s chair, propped her feet on the iron railing, and read. The Billie Holiday book?
At 3:43, she went back inside and did not come back out for two hours. The bright sunshine barely warming a cold day retreated, and the shadows finally returned, falling over my face.
Around six, she came out of the street entrance walking toward Esplanade. I tucked the copy of Nine Stories back in my jacket pocket, where I always kept it, placed a few bills under the weight of a salt shaker, and began to follow.
I had a ragged Tulane cap pulled low over my eyes and wore sunglasses — some Lew Archer I was. I pulled the collar of my trench coat tighter around my face. Not just for disguise, but also to block the cold. December wind shooting down those old alleys and boulevards can make a man want to keep inside.