She went into the A&P on Royal, and I stayed outside. In a few minutes she returned, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes and continuing toward the far end of Royal. She walked into a place with the doors propped wide open, leaned over the bar, and French-kissed the bartender. He struck an effeminate, embarrassed pose and laughed. She patted him on the face and kept walking.
At the end of the street, she went inside a bed and breakfast. Semirenovated. New awning, peeling paint on the windows. I got close enough to see through the double-door windows. She was talking to someone at the front desk. Then she turned, going deeper inside the building. I waited.
It was cold. There were no restaurants or coffee houses on this side of the district. It hadn’t been civilized yet. I blew hot breath through closed fits.
I waited.
I got solicited twice. Once by a man. Once by a woman. And had a strange conversation with a derelict.
“Crack,” he said.
“Gave it up for the holidays. Thank you, though.”
“Naw, man. Dat’s my name.”
“Your name is Crack?”
“Shore.”
I asked “Crack” where the nearest liquor store was. He said it was on Rampart, so I gave him a few bucks and told him to buy me a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and whatever he wanted. Actually, it wasn’t really a gamble to give him money. Most of those guys work on a strange ethical code when it comes to a fellow drinker.
He came back, and we sat on the other side of Esplanade watching the bed and breakfast until nearly ten o’clock. The whiskey tasted like sweet gasoline.
When Sarah came back, her hair was mussed, her jaw worked overtime on gum, and she looked tired. She certainly did not expect what came next as she bent down to restrap a sequined stiletto.
As she pulled the buckle tight around her ankle, an early-seventies black Chrysler whipped around the corner of Chartres, speeding right toward us. I had no time to push her out of the way or yell. I could only watch as she just stayed bent over with her butt in the air. Hand still touching those ridiculous shoes. Very still.
I knew the car would hit her.
But it didn’t. Instead, the car skidded to a halt next to her, and a white arm grabbed her by the hair and jerked her in. She screamed as I sprinted across the street. Because of the tinted windows I couldn’t see the driver, who put the car back in gear and weaved to hit me.
I bolted away and lunged toward the curb, where Crack was standing holding his bottle of apple liquor. The car’s tires smoked as it headed down Royal.
I followed.
My breath came in hard, fast spurts. I knew I was sprinting a losing race, but I followed until I saw the dim glow of the car’s cracked red taillights turning somewhere near Toulouse.
And she was gone.
Whoever took Sarah dumped her body underneath the Greater New Orleans Bridge on the Algiers side of the Mississippi. Naked with a cut throat.
Jay Medeaux stood over me at police headquarters on Broad Street and slurped on a cup of black coffee. I rubbed my temples. It was nine a.m. and I hadn’t slept. His wide, grinning face looked more amused with my situation than sympathetic.
“No coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Cruller?”
“Jay, do you mind?”
“Touchy. Touchy.”
I regurgitated every trivial detail of what I witnessed and knew. Jay listened without asking any questions. He didn’t even lecture me about conducting my own investigation — which he knew I was prone to do. Jay was a good friend.
I remember him happiest when we beat LSU. His grin wide as he held our coach high on his shoulders in a warped, fading photograph I still kept on my desk.
He pulled Sarah’s file from Vice and made a few phone calls. We found out she was working for a pimp with the awful moniker of Blackie Lowery. A lowlife whose previous convictions included running a strip club staffed with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, trucking oysters from a polluted water zone, indecent exposure at Antoine’s restaurant, selling illegal Jazz Fest T-shirts, and beating the shit out of his pit bull with a Louisville Slugger. Sounded like our man.
Jay let me go with him to pick the guy up.
We found Blackie outside his Old Style Voodoo Shop spray-painting a dozen little cardboard boxes black — his back turned as he spurted out a final coat. He was a skinny guy with pasty white skin, a shaved head, and a thick black mustache curled at the end like Rollie Fingers used to wear. He stopped painting and looked sideways at us.
“Hey, Blackie, why don’t you spell shop with two Ps and an E?” Jay said. “The tourists would like it more, I bet. Make it sound real authentic, ya know?”
Blackie had his shirt off, and a tiny red tattoo was stamped over his heart.
“We found one of your employees this morning,” Jay said. “Blade sliced her throat real even.”
He gave a crooked smile and threw down his paint can. “I don’t have a clue.”
“That’s beside the point,” Jay said. “Come on with us.”
“Eat me,” Blackie said.
I walked through a side door and into the voodoo shop. The smell of incense was strong among the trinkets, stones, and powders. A small, glass-topped casket sat in the middle of the room with a carved wooden dummy inside painted to look like a decomposing corpse.
But beyond the Marie Laveau T-shirts and the hundreds of bags of gris-gris powders, something interested me.
Fats’s sax sat in a corner.
Sometimes I like to hear Dixieland jazz after several drinks. Sometimes I like to hear my boots as they clunk across a hardwood floor. Sometimes I even like to cover the tall windows of my warehouse with bedsheets and watch old movies all day. But most of all, I like to sit in JoJo’s and listen to Loretta Jackson sing. Her voice can rattle the exposed brick walls and break a man’s heart.
It was Christmas Eve, a week after Jay picked up Blackie. I was nursing a beer and watching Loretta rehearse a few new numbers. Old blues Christmas songs that she always mixed in with her set during the season. Growling the words to “Merry Christmas, Baby” and making my neck hairs stand on end.
“You keep babyin’ that beer and it’s gonna fall in love with ya,” JoJo said, as he washed out a couple shot glasses in the sink.
“Everybody needs a friend.”
“Mmhmm.” He dried the inside of the glasses with a white towel and then hung it over his shoulder. “Why you down here today, anyway?”
“Sam’s been wanting to go Christmas shopping in the Quarter all week. And I promised.”
“You hear any more from Medeaux ’bout that pimp?”
“Nah. Blackie’s still in jail far as I know.”
“You let me know if somethin’s different.”
Loretta finished the song with a great sigh into her microphone and a quick turnaround from the band. The guitar player made his instrument give a wolf whistle as Loretta stepped off stage. Running a forearm over her brow, she walked over and sat next to me.
“My boy Nicholas,” she said as she rubbed my back. “My boy.”
“Your boy Nicholas sittin’ on his ass drinking while his new woman trudgin’ ’round these old French streets lookin’ for gifts.”
“My boy deserves it.’
“Hmphh.”
“Y’all talkin’ ’bout Fats, weren’t cha?”
JoJo nodded and walked back into the kitchen.
“Man had a sad life, Nick. Cain’t believe he sold his sax for that girl.”
“Guess he loved her.”
“Hell, she was just a two-bit whore.”
“Loretta.”
“Naw, I’m serious. She was fuckin’ half the band.”
“What?”
“Sure she was. Saw her almost get her cheap ass beat by Fats’s drummer out back. Havin’ some kind of lover’s quarrel, I guess.”