The hotel used real keys with cumbersome rings, making practically appealing its rule that all room keys be left at the desk. Behind the down-on-its-luck reception desk and the surprisingly crisp woman staffing it, a partial wall of small numbered cubbyholes held the keys of guests out walking the Quarter. Eli counted: his key would make that number three.
“Were you working here before the hurricane?” he asked the woman, guessing that she looked younger under her makeup, was playing at being professional.
“No, sir.” She smiled wide, her small teeth not quite enough to fill her mouth properly or she would have been a beauty. “I’m new.”
He wanted to ask her if the key system had been in place long, but it was obvious that it had been, that the hotel was one of the very few that had simply never updated to the key cards that were now ubiquitous but were new enough to be rare the last time he’d stayed in a hotel before going to prison.
He wanted to ask her if she knew which room the dead man had been discovered in, but even as little as he knew about people, he knew that was a creepy question, one that would make her more cautious with information rather than more forthcoming. Embarrassed to be standing there mute, he asked directions to the nearest place for coffee, and she directed him a block toward the river.
“Welcome,” he said.
“That’s what I’m supposed to say to you, at least what I should have said when you checked in.”
He felt his face warm and hoped that the flush was not visible, that she would not think he was trying to hit on her, given their clear age difference. “I meant welcome to your new job.”
Her confused look told him he was a terrible detective, though perhaps a talent for confusing people could prove a useful skill. To confuse the right person at the right time might loosen a tongue. He’d seen this in prison — someone disarmed by a friendly response when they were expecting defense or a direct comeback when they were expecting fearful evasion.
As he opened the door, warm air reached into the air-conditioned lobby. As he walked down the steps, it swarmed him, then penetrated. Soon an equilibrium was reached, and he and the heat no longer felt like separate things. He followed the clerk’s directions, walking toward the river. In a narrow ice-cream shop, he drank a double espresso standing at the counter. Like the hotel clerk, the worker was young and seemed new to the city. His frequent eye movements made him seem not wholly at ease. Unlike the clerk, though, he was not playing at being professional but declaring himself as nothing of the kind with lobe-distorting ear discs and tattoos that climbed from his hands into the armholes of his tank top. Eli was aware of his own age, the generational difference that had opened between him and the young while he’d been away. When he’d gone in, he’d still been young, a sense that had ended immediately but that he had thought — erroneously — might return when he was released.
Ted had scheduled two appointments for Eli — that afternoon with the cop who’d caught the murder case and the following day with the woman who ran the auction galleries. But Eli hoped the dead man had chosen this part of the city for a reason, that there was something to be learned in the Lower Quarter. He smirked at himself as he imagined asking the kid behind the counter whether he’d ever heard anything about any Eugeen van Mieghem paintings circulating in the neighborhood. He took the sketch he’d made from the newspaper clipping out of his pocket — the one showing the dead man but, Eli hoped, not necessarily as a dead man.
“Buddy of mine disappeared right before the storm. He was staying down here.”
To his surprise the young guy took the picture and looked closely. When he said, “Sorry, man,” he seemed to mean it. “Thing about the storm is that a lot of people won’t be found. Some of them ’cause there’s no one to look for them. Some of them ’cause they don’t want to be found. Some just because they’re gone.” He took Eli’s cup without asking and added a single shot from the hissing machine. “What’s weird is that when a place becomes known for being a place where people disappear, then people who want to disappear start showing up. We’ll be lousy with gutter punks soon enough.” He grinned. “Yeah, you’re thinking I look like one, but I wash my hair. I’ve got a job. I don’t have five dogs, and I can feed the two I do have.”
What Eli had been thinking was that he didn’t know what gutter punks were, but now, it seemed, he more or less did. This was how he felt a lot — not just because he’d been in prison but because he’d largely withdrawn from popular culture even before he had gone in. Inside he’d stepped back into himself, chosen books over movies, weights and meditation classes over television. He’d given up politics altogether. It was a way to survive without going crazy. So often he found himself like a kid learning a second language, picking up meanings and connotations from context. He’d recognize a gutter punk if he saw one now.
He left some coins on the counter and walked along Decatur Street toward the Cathedral, still with only a vague idea of what he could do on his own. What he decided was this: Poke around enough to be able to write up a daily report, dutifully try to make contact with a few local collectors and fences, keep collecting the paycheck, stay paroled.
What surprised him was how comfortable he felt in this city. He knew any sense of familiarity was false. He’d never been here, and the resemblances he noticed between this place and cities he did know — San Juan, Paris, Madrid, Seville, Guadalajara — were superficial. Perhaps it was just the humidity level, but something put him at ease here when usually he lived his life feeling out of place wherever he was, out of step from whomever he was with.
He started with a shop on Chartres that sold a strange mix of old and new paintings, prints from rare books, and miscellaneous antiques and junk. Then he hit three more just like it: one on Royal and two on Dauphine. The shops varied in their degree of clutter and dust and in the relative proportion of junk to antiques, but it was hard to tell the proprietors apart on sight. Each was a sixty-year-old bald man who wore the kind of pants that teachers do, paired with a vaguely ancient cardigan over a nondescript, dingy button-down. It seemed to Eli that usually people look and dress differently but act the same. In this case it was the other way around. The owner of the shop on Royal was fastidious and suspicious, while the first on Dauphine was loose in his speech and gestures as well as gregarious. The final proprietor, of the second shop on Dauphine, performed an exaggerated sexuality and touched Eli’s arm each time he spoke, leaving Eli with the impression that the man was not actually hitting on him but only pretending to, thereby acting out some psychology too complex for Eli to parse. As Eli left the store, he turned and asked the man, “Anyone around here do art shipping or art restoration or even just cleaning?”
“We ship ourselves, cher,” the man said, “so I wouldn’t really know. As for repair, pretty much everyone goes to that Polack looker on Decatur.”
“What’s her place called?” Eli asked.
The man shrugged. “I doubt anyone knows that — no sign, no business cards — but I can tell you where it’s at.”
No sign most likely meant the place was a tax dodge or a front for some kind of business entirely other, but it could mean forger or fence. At the very least, it probably meant somebody who knew people in the lower echelons of the local art world. When he saw the cross street the proprietor had written down, Eli was even more certain he was on to something; the shop was pretty much right around the corner from the Hotel Richelieu.
It would have to wait, though. Eli didn’t have much more time than it would take to grab a sandwich before the meeting with the cop that Ted had arranged. He stopped at a small oyster bar on the way and ate fried oyster po’boy standing up, finding it perfect despite the crappy bread.