Dirty South

51

Dahlia’s carriage house off Napoleon was empty. I peered through a window at the top of a wooden landing and saw a bare bulb shining over an empty room. Packing crates, tape, and discarded magazines lay on the blue carpet. The summer light shone gold and hard through the edges of the oaks and the wetness from last night’s rain scattered down on the uneven sidewalks. I asked around but no one seemed to know her, so I walked back to my truck and scanned through the sheet that a bail bondsman I knew in Memphis had faxed me. I located her two most recent addresses, places where she’d received paychecks or credit cards, and headed out to the Hollygrove neighborhood by the riverbend only to find another vacant place. Nothing.

I soon turned back the way I came, into the Irish Channel near the Parasol Bar. An old white-boarded drinking hole that served Wednesday specials on Guinness.

The Irish Channel is a mostly black neighborhood squeezed between St. Charles Avenue and the river. Shotgun shacks and little bungalows. Postwar working-class houses with chain-link fences and mean-ass dogs. It was Saturday and folks hung out on porches and on the stoops of their houses, smoking and playing with children with ragged toys.

I matched the address with a narrow little shotgun so small that it looked like a doll’s house, and walked up a creaking paint-flaked porch. Someone was frying bacon in the back kitchen and playing some T.L.C. “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls.”

A woman sang in the back, and when I knocked on the warped screen porch, she popped her head out and pushed the hair from her eyes. About halfway through the long shot of hall, I knew it was Dahlia.

She wiped her brown hands on a white towel and walked toward me.

Long-limbed with straight black hair and soft almond-shaped eyes, she wore a tan halter top tied at the neck and tight blue jeans. No shoes. A casual smoothness about her walk, a relaxed but confident sexuality.

I swallowed. The Polaroid shot. Only better.

She inched open the door and tugged a smile into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so huge and brown that she sort of swallowed you with them. Her teeth white and perfect, lips sensual.

“I work with Trey Brill.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Your name is Nick and you think Trey ripped off one of your boys.”

I smiled.

The halter top didn’t quite stretch to the edge of the jeans and I noticed how flat and hard her stomach muscles were. I was conscious of her breathing.

“You mind if we talk out here?”

“Come inside.”

I didn’t want to but followed as she returned to the kitchen. I waited in the parlor.

She had a television stranded on a rickety metal-and-faux-wood cart on the right wall as you walked into the room. On the opposite side sat a yellow-and-black couch, a beanbag, and a cheap rocking chair filled with a small back pillow reading LOVE. Small hearts and a couple of angels had been embroidered on the material.

A silent air-conditioning unit sat in a far window. The room’s air was heavy and moist and felt even more humid than it had underneath the thick oak trees outside.

I heard water hissing onto a blackened skillet. She walked back in the room from the kitchen. When I sat down on the couch, she fell in beside me, her arm brushing against mine.

“I’m surprised I found you,” I said. “I’m surprised you know who I am. About the only thing I can do is offer you some money to tell me about you and Trey.”

She leaned back in the pillows and stretched her arms over her head, yawning, her breasts swelling in her shirt. Her chest moist with sweat.

“I’ll also tell the detectives that you were just a player. It was Marion who worked the con, hired by Brill. Right?”

She dropped her chin, put the flat of her palm across my cheek, and crawled into my lap, her legs straddling me. I froze.

Her fingers looped around the back of my neck. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the mouth.

I did not kiss her back, but I didn’t knock her off me either. I could not breathe.

“What?” I asked. My voice was not raised but instead had dropped to almost a whisper.

“That was a job,” she said. “I’m through.”

She smelled like vanilla and ripe flowers and I gently pushed her to the side and stood. She rolled onto the side of her butt and propped herself up with one arm, dark hair spilling over one eye. She drew some imaginary lines in the material of the old sofa. She sighed.

“Trey’s just a boy,” she said. “You playin’ with his mind.”

“And that made you want me?”

“Maybe,” she said, sticking the back of her thumb into her mouth. “Maybe I just wanted to fuck with you.”

“Get in line.”

“People always like to fuck with you?”

I nodded.

“Poor baby,” she said, withdrawing the thumb from her lips.

She picked up the remote and switched the channels, the high-pitched laughter of a sitcom filling the room. Three’s Company. She changed the channel again, soft music. A love scene. And then again, two people fighting. WWF pro wrestling.

“ Rockford Files comes on at six.”

Her eyes tilted up and met mine.

“Tell me how it worked.”

“He hates you a lot.”

“What do you want?”

She tugged at her thumb again with her strong lips and wet them with her tongue.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Either play with me or leave.”

“Trey had Malcolm killed.”

“Who’s Malcolm?”

“Come on.”

“How much?” she asked.

“Depends on what you have to say.”

“Listen, Trey didn’t know about the job on the kid.”

“So, you and Marion just stumbled upon a mark who just happened to work with a man you fucked.”

“I met ALIAS at a club with Trey,” she said. “A kid. A kid that is a millionaire. Marion wanted to use him. This wasn’t about Trey.”

“Where’s the money?”

“Marion took it.”

“Where is he?”

“Fuck off.”

“Why are you still in this shit hole?” I asked. “He left you. Didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s gone,” she said. “Way gone.”

I started to laugh.

Her jaw tightened and her nostrils flared.

She reached out to claw my face.

I grabbed her wrist and pushed her back into the couch. I held both of her arms over her head and placed a knee between her legs. “Trey hired some street freak to kill Malcolm and me. Right? You heard of a man called Redbone?”

She spit in my face. I let her go, my breath rushing from my mouth.

“I don’t know Malcolm. I tole you me and Marion’s thing got nothing to do with Trey. Tell him. I don’t care.”

I heard feet on the boards of her porch and moved close to the door. I steadied my breath and looked down at her. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and reached down on a glass-and-chrome table filled with copies of TV Guide and Star for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

The screen door opened and a large black man walked inside. In his fifties with a short black beard. Greasy white T, hard dark jeans, and fucked-up Wolverine work boots. “Dataria? Who the fuck is this? What y’all doin’ in my house?”

She lit the cigarette and blew smoke up at a cheap fan rocking in the sagging ceiling.

“Oh, just a boy, Daddy,” she said. “He came over and tried to save my soul. Ain’t that right?”

He moved toward me, his hands clenching around the handle of an old lunch pail.

I headed out to the porch and walked to my truck.

I heard him yelling more, a slap, and then a high-pitched scream from inside the tiny house.

I thought about the scream and then kept smelling her on my shirt the whole way down St. Charles.