The first thing I’d done when I got back to the office-there was the usual accumulation of mail and messages-was clip a recent picture of Corene Davis from a copy of Time. Then I put in a call to United at Idlewild, finally got through, and was informed that, yes, Miss Corene Davis had had a coach reservation on Flight 417 for New Orleans. She had boarded shortly before takeoff, seat 15-A. The man I talked to remembered her, her being so famous and all. He’d been working the desk that day. She had two pieces of luggage. He gave me the name of the captain and stewardesses on the flight. I thanked him and hung up.
I sat there for a while watching twilight seep up around everything. The sky had a red tint to it, and everything smelled of magnolia and the river.
Finally I called downtown and asked for Sergeant Walsh. After a long wait, he came on.
“Don? Lew,” I said. “I want to drop a name on you. Corene Davis.”
“That bitch.” There was a long pause. “You know I had half this force turned out for security-you’d have thought the president was coming to town. And what happens? The broad doesn’t show.” Walsh turned away from the phone for a moment, said something, was back. “Why?”
I wasn’t sure how much I could tell him. Dissembling had kept us alive and more or less intact for a long time when nothing else could.
“I’d been looking forward to hearing her talk,” I said after a moment. “Wondering what happened.”
“Great. I’ve got fourteen unsolved homicides, the makings of a race riot out in Gentilly of all places, the commissioner and assorted councilmen on my tail like a hive of bees-big, hairy, mad bees-and you call up to chat about some trouble-making yankee bitch nigger.”
“Then I guess you better get to work,” I said. “But you know, Don, these days that kind of talk’s a little … passe, if you know what I’m saying.”
A pause. “Okay, Lew. So she ain’t no bitch.”
“Knew you’d see it my way.”
“Sorry. Bad day. So what’d’ya need?”
“Just what happened.”
“Hell, I don’t know, that’s the thing. She got sick in New York or something, was what we heard. Maybe she just thought better of it. Anyway, she didn’t make it down here. My men waited for the next flight, almost two hours. When she wasn’t on that one either, they gave up and went home.”
It was beginning to feel like that’s what I’d better do, too.
“Anything else?” Don was saying.
“One thing, quickly. An outfit on Chartres called the Black Hand. Check it out for me?”
“Don’t have to. Part Panther, part populist politics. There’s money from somewhere, and pull. Into everything. Run by a guy named Will Sansom, now calls himself Abdullah Abded. Lew, you’re not mixed up with them, are you?”
“Curious, is all. Met a couple of their people.”
“Well. That it, then?”
“That’s it.”
“Don’t forget you owe me dinner and a drink. If I can ever get out of this bear pit long enough.”
“I hadn’t forgotten, Don. Give me a call. And hey, thanks.”
Night had just about taken over, and lights were coming on block by block, the city’s dark mask falling into place. In the next few hours those streets would change utterly.
Big money, Don had said. Hand in everything. Not my league at all. Just what the hell had I got myself into?
Chapter Seven
Now two weeks had passed and I had some idea what I’d got myself into, but I wasn’t any closer to finding Corene Davis. And maybe I was as close as I was going to get.
I got up and dumped the rest of the coffee, lit a cigarette.
I had a feeling she’d made it to New Orleans. A hunch. I’d played them before and won at least as often as I’d lost.
I’d made the rounds with my clipped picture. No one had seen her. I’d been visited twice by Blackie and Au Lait. They hadn’t seen her either.
What the hell, maybe she was sick in New York. Maybe she was kidnapped. Or maybe she was dead in a warehouse somewhere.
About all I’d really accomplished was to learn something about Corene Davis. It’s strange how little is left of our lives once they’re rendered down, once they’ve started becoming history. A handful of facts, movements, conflicts; that’s all the observer sees. An uninhabited shell.
She was born in Chicago in 1936. Her father picked up what work he could, not much, all of it hard and hardly paid, her mother was a midwife, later a practical nurse. She’d gone to the University of Chicago on scholarship, become something of a student protest leader, then moved on to Columbia for graduate work, where she’d continued her protest activities while simultaneously becoming active (rare then for grad students) in student government. She had been investigated about that time, she claimed, by the FBI and, she suspected, CIA. Stood watching them tap her phone from a pole at the end of the block and took them iced tea when they climbed back down. But it wasn’t until publication of a revised version of her master’s thesis as Chained to Ruin that she’d become a full-fledged black leader. And so she’d made the round of talk shows and lecture circuits, been written about (as though the writers had encountered utterly different women) in everything from Ebony to The New Republic, and generally become a voice for her, our, people. A second book, on women’s rights, was in the works. She had light skin (“She could almost pass for white,” as one reporter put it), wore her hair clipped short, stood five-six, weighed in at one-ten, neither smoked nor drank, was vegetarian.
And had the capacity, it seemed, to vanish into thin air.
I stubbed out the cigarette in a potted plant LaVerne had given me and looked at my watch. Three ten. Maybe things would look better in the morning. It happened sometimes.
I drew a hot bath and had just settled in with a glass of gin when the phone rang.
“How you feelin’, Griffin?” a voice said.
“Man, it’s kind of late for games. You know?”
“You feelin’ pretty good, huh?”
“Until some asshole called me.”
The voice was silent. A dull crackling sound in the wires, witches burning far, far away. Then after a time the voice said, “You’re looking for Corene Davis.”
“Who is this?”
“Don’t.” And the line was dead.
To this day, I don’t know who it was on the phone that night. But I remember the sound of that voice exactly, and the chill that came over me then, and I remember that I finished off the glass of gin and poured another before getting back into the tub.
Chapter Eight
Could pass for white.
I woke up at ten with that phrase rolling around in my head. I’d had a dream in which people were chasing me with knives down narrow, overhung streets. A big Irish cop watched it all, telling old minstrel-show jokes. The sheets around me were soaked with sweat.
I stripped and showered, then made coffee, real this time, and sat down at the kitchenette table, chrome and red formica. I lit a cigarette. Could pass for white. But her skin looked dark in the picture.
There’s an old novel called Black No More, about a scientist who invents a cream that’s able to turn black people white and the social havoc this brings about, written in the thirties by George Schuyler, a newspaperman. When I was a kid, Dad always used to grin when any of his friends mentioned it. And Mom said she’d whip me if she ever caught me reading it. Till I did, I thought it was about sex.
I walked into the other room, taking the coffee with me, and dialed LaVerne’s home number. Not much chance, but worth a try. When there was no answer, I dialed one of the other numbers she’d given me and asked for her. I knew it was a bar she frequented most afternoons, picking up marks as they floated from posh uptown hotels down into the Quarter and back up. The guy that answered said, “Hold a minute, bud, I’ll check.”