Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Thirteen

One o’clock of a blurry afternoon. Clouds dragging low in the sky, like the bellies of middle-aged men in bars and bowling alleys. Don has something unidentifiable, fried chicken maybe, or soggy brown cauliflower, on the plate before him. I’ve had three hours’ sleep and can’t even remember dressing to get here. Blur reigns.

“Thanks for coming, Lew. I need you to tell me how crazy this is.”

“Just as soon as you spoon all that up. Be a brave boy, now.” I thought of Virgil, a kid from the sticks like myself. Can’t imagine why. Because Deborah’s wrestle with Greek comedy had body-slammed me into some classical mood? “After which, I’m your man. Crazy being something I know.”

What I didn’t know was where the hell this was going. I looked out over the plain of starched sheet, pale face, across jagged peaks of lumpish brown rising from the flatland, past the forkful of same entering his mouth. Soft light in the windows of his eyes, self there inside groping its way along dim corridors, bumping into doorways. Never a man to seek another’s sanction. And not quite the Don I was used to.

“What do you think of Derick, Lew?”

“Kid that shot you.”

“Yeah. Jeeter.”

I shrugged. “No reason to give it much thought. Should I have? He seems like a good enough kid, I guess, underneath it all. Maybe you do have to scratch deeper than with most.”

“Yeah. Maybe. And maybe you scratch deep enough, we’re all pretty much the same. Derick and I get along, you know? Could be there’s some kind of real connection. Who the fuck knows?”

Don was one of the few cops who managed not to be changed, violated, by what he did. Day after day, year after year, he sat at his ancient, dented, yellow desk with the highest murder rate in the country rising around him like floodwaters, journalists snapping at ankles and knees and city-hall hacks thinking they’d live large by swallowing him headfirst, events of his own life coruscating down like acid rain; and still he’d take time to go meet some youth coming out of lockup and give him a ride home, drop by and leave off groceries with the family of a man he’d sent up.

“It’s not like he has anywhere to go, Lew. Or anything waiting for him there if he did. You know as well as I do what his future looks like. Scratching by, one continuous hustle, the occasional demeaning job if he’s lucky. Cheap room when he can afford it, the street when he can’t, which’ll be most of the time. Till eventually he tries another grab, and-if not that time, then the next-he gets taken down. At which point he’s in the system for good.”

“Meaning for bad.”

“Always. A career con once told me it’s like having concrete slowly poured around you. You move around less and less. Finally you don’t move at all.”

Don pushed tray and table away. They came to a swaying stop, seeming somehow to vibrate a degree or two out of sync with the world about us. Neither of us had ever quite fit, either. Just that sometimes, here and there, cycles would coincide. You learn to slip past closing doors, make your way among the world’s pauses and stammers. Don stared at grease and glycerin-like brown smears left behind.

“Well, that was certainly interesting.”

“I ever mention you’re the kind of man on whom nothing is wasted?”

“Right, Lew. I ever mention how just because I’m a cop you think I’m not gonna know when you quote Henry James?”

“Most reviewers don’t.”

“Hey. Not their fault. They haven’t had the advantage of repeatedly getting drunk with you, after all, hearing the same damn shit again and again.”

“Good point.”

“How’re they gonna know where all that stuff comes from? LaVerne used to tell me how she’d read your latest book and remember back to when you guys had gone to some restaurant you were describing, or to a concert close enough to one in the book that she knew that’s where it came from.”

In the corridor outside, a comet streamed by: doctor on rounds, house staff of interns and residents, straggling tail of med students. Lab coats flapped all about; pockets crammed with guidebooks, rulers, rubber-capped hammers and stethoscopes, when they came to a stop, settled like trucks pulling up at a landfill. Various beepers sounded.

“I’m thinking about asking him to come home with me, Lew. Derick, I mean.”

“I see. And you’ve talked this over with Jeanette, of course.”

“Kind of.”

“Meaning you haven’t.”

“She knows.”

“No she doesn’t, Don.” Out the window, a phalanx of birds pulsed across the sky. Clouds moved in the opposite direction, so that the birds appeared to be moving at furious speed.

They were, I thought, a caret, copyediting sky: insert horizon here. “She may suspect it, sense it. But she doesn’t know until you tell her.”

“You’re right. But we’ve talked about this-haven’t talked about much else lately, when you come right down to it. How Derick’s life has gone, how it’s likely to go. She understands he hasn’t had much of a chance so far.”

Birds having passed from the window’s frame, a Southwest Airlines plane, tiny, iconlike, nosed in to replace them.

“Talk to her, Don. She loves you.”

“She does, doesn’t she?”

“What about Derick himself? What does he say about all this?”

“I’ll have to let you know.”

Crowding a cursory knock at the door, Santos stepped into the room. Coat, shirt and slacks looked as though they’d been stuffed into pillowcases for storage and recently fetched out; his tie was bent back on itself like a dog-eared page. A faint reek of garlic, vintage sweat, stale smoke and bourbon came off him.

“Captain.”

“Tony. Up and at it already,” Don said.

Santos shook his head. “Still. I got home long enough to pour two fingers of bourbon and drink the first joint of one of them. Then the beeper went off.”

“Short night.”

“For sure. You told me I’d better get used to them.”

“Long finger of the law. Forever poking at you.”

“More like a thumb lodged securely up my butt.”

“Smile. Fake ’em out. Maybe they’ll think you like it. Maybe you’ll even get to. It could happen.”

“Fuck that.” Santos looked around. Wondering if this was the way he’d wind up, too? If this was what it might come down to, all those years of white nights and bleary mornings, hours at the desk waiting for something to break, while slowly hearts turned hard all around and the hemorrhoids you sat on grew to the size of ostrich eggs? “Didn’t know Griffin was here.”

“Brought the massuh breakfast,” I said.

“I’ll just bet you did. Hitched your mule to that pickaninny post outside, no doubt.”

“Just like we knew it was you right away. Heard the clack of those stacked heels.”

“I assume you want something, Tony,” Don said, “and didn’t just take a wrong turn at the coffeepot downtown.”

“Might be better if Griffin waited outside, Captain.”

“Lot of people have felt that way in the past. What’re you gonna do? Here he is.”

“Yeah. Here he is.” Santos’s eyes, unreadable as ever, flicked from Don’s to mine and back. “Call came in last night from a phone booth, anonymous. Squad responded and found a body. This was down in the hub, what they’re calling the industrial district these days. Where all those apartment complexes went up a few years back, the ones no one moved into. No one that paid, anyway. Block after block of doublegated entrances, intercoms, internal corridors, skylights. Empty as seashells.”

New Orleans has never had much luck with gentrification. Every few years the city grasps at some straw it’s become certain will save it: the 1984 World’s Fair, gambling casinos a decade or so later, or converting the blasted, abandoned ruins of downtown warehouses, on a New York model, into apartments. But the city always winds up in worse shape than before, deeper in debt and ever more desperate, its dreams like Matilda in the old Harry Belafonte song having took the money and run Ven’zuela.

“Squad pulls up. Earl Jackson, Tyra McIlvane. He’s been on the job a month or two, barely cleared ride-along. She’s got almost a year in, making her an old hand by today’s standards, way they come and go. The gate, they finally figure, is jammed shut, chewing gum or something like that in the lock, it looks secure but gives when they shove. They go up slowly, door to door. Garbage covers the stairs, sacks from McDonald’s, pizza cartons, quart bottles of Old Milwaukee, crack vials, cheap wine, lumpy, burned-out mattresses. On the third floor, in what might have been a choice apartment looking out over Lee Circle, only it’s not, it never got to be that and never will, they find the body.

“Been there a long time, they figure. Most of the features are gone and the whole thing’s puffed up like the bad spot on a tire, about to let go. Unbelievably this guy still has a wallet in his pocket. There’s close to sixty dollars in there. No driver’s license, no credit cards. And a social security card issued to David Griffin.”

“Lewis,” Dr. Bijur said.

“We know one another,” I told Santos, who had started to introduce us.

“You … were a great help … to Walsh.”

“We do what we can.”

“Some … of us do.”

The last time I saw her was when Don’s son Danny killed himself. We’d stood together beside the old clawfoot tub he lay in, half afloat, half submerged. Danny had overdosed and backed up the overdose by tying a plastic bag around his head the way the Hemlock Society people said to. Blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making them look like road maps with nothing but interstates.

At that time, years back, Dr. Bijur looked, herself, to be barely hanging on, living off Atrovent and Albuterol inhalers in lieu of air. She still was. I hoped to hell she got a professional discount on the things.

“As I told … Santos,” she went on, stringing words on double fenceposts of pauses for breath and hits off her inhalers, “we’re not … sure what’s happened.”

With each breath her shoulders lifted to help draw in air and her head thrust upward like a turtle’s to add that extra tiny pull. Her ankles were round as soccer balls. Cracked everywhere, her skin had gone gray and dry as parchment from constant steroid use. Back in Arkansas, creeks and rivers would recede, leaving behind mudflats that, baked in the sun, looked much like her skin.

“Someone could have taken a carving knife to him, from the look of it,” Santos said, “then followed up with a vegetable peeler. Mostly, the features are gone. Ears, toes. Not much skin left, either. Your son’s been gone how long?”

“Just over a week.”

“No word from him?”

“None.”

“No idea where he might have gone?”

“Not really.”

“And no recent change in habits? Suddenly talkative, stops talking altogether maybe, starts staying to himself?”

“I know the drill, Santos.”

“Sure you do. No one new in his life, then? Woman, male friend, lost parent?”

I shook my head. “I assumed he’d gone back to the streets. Descendre dans la rue, as the French put it. Doesn’t transfer well to English, but it’s what the French have always done-1789, 1830, 1871 or last week, it’s all pretty much the same-when the world starts weighing on them.”

“He’s got a history of this kind of thing, then. Dropping out. Disappearing.”

I nodded.

A morgue assistant in dreadlocks that looked as though they’d been pressed between hot rocks made his way through the minefield of gurneys, found one and, bent like a surfer over his board, rolled it towards us. When he pulled back the rough sheet, Santos and Dr. Bijur looked up at him. A young woman’s body lay there, face gray, lips and breasts pale and translucent as wax. He checked the toe tag.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “Wrong citizen.”

Moments later, he trucked another gurney and rider down the waves. From size and general build, the body under the sheet easily could be David’s, I thought. But when Smashed Dreadlocks pulled back the cover, the world you and I live in day to day went flying away. What lay underneath looked like a skinned deer, a Gray’s Anatomy dissection showing muscle, sinews and tendons, flesh that peculiar maroon color. Most of one eye was left. And the eye wasn’t David’s.

I told them so. “What happened?”

“First we thought some kind of compulsive, serial killer thing,” Santos said.

“Too many bad … movies.” This from Dr. Bijur.

“Yeah, but how’re you not gonna think that. Just look at this poor son of a bitch. Some kid practicing peeling grapes, you think?”

Back home, in the hill country not far from where I was raised, poor folk lived off squirrels they nailed to trees then skinned in a single long tear. The meat went into skillets for frying and into pots for stew. The skins stayed behind on trees. Dozens of them, hundreds finally, ringing the homestead.

“Not much … I could put my finger on … a hunch…. Kind of thing happens … you do this all these years.” When she stopped to rest from that last headlong plunge, I realized that Santos and I were breathing hard ourselves. If this had been a musical, all the bodies on gurneys under sheets would start chugging right along with us.

“We have someone on call … for situations like … this. Professor at LSU … came right down. New York … one or two other major cities’ve … got them on staff … full-time.”

Santos and I exchanged glances.

“You told me on the phone it was bugs,” he said.

Taking a hit off one of her inhalers, Dr. Bijur decided it was empty. She tossed it backhand towards one of several tall galvanized cans sitting about (best not to think what might be in there), then started rummaging in the soft plastic cooler slung over her shoulder for a replacement. The discarded one fell short by a yard and hit the floor spinning. Santos walked over, picked it up, sank it.

“You’re supposed to float … the damn things. They tip over, whatever … they’re still good. Like we aren’t going to know … when they don’t … work anymore?”

Her eyes went wide with the fresh (concentrated?) hit. “Greevy’s a forensic … entomologist. Roaches were hard at work … he says. Man’d only been there … two, three days, not … weeks, like we’d thought.”

“And my son’s wallet? How’d that get there?”

Dr. Bijur shrugged her shoulders. At first I didn’t take it for what it was; it looked like all her other struggles for breath.

“He doesn’t drive and … there’s no … bus … for a while. Bill’d probably … be out at the site … if you wanted to go by.”

One of those typical New Orleans cul-de-sacs, city’s ancient soul pushing up through layers of attempts at refurbishment, this long-unused lot in the crook of old buildings extended half a block before it ended at a wall of cinder block serving no discernible purpose. Yet even here, on this bare, abandoned island, in the shade of automobile tires, shopping carts, shattered wine and antiseptic bottles, sacks of garbage bleached gray and dry as driftwood, life went on.

Dr. Greevy sat on the overturned ceramic tumbler of a Sixties washing machine. The console stood alongside, Large load, Normal, Warm/cold dialed in-for how many years now? Green shoots ran out from beneath the tumbler. Knees apart with elbows propped on them, Greevy held the last two inches of a po-boy in both hands. Sauce and part of a meatball ejected when he took a bite. He chewed once or twice and swallowed.

“You’d be Griffin.”

I nodded.

“It wasn’t your son, was it?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.” He finished off the po-boy, wiped hands on the backs of trouser legs. “Body was up there, third floor, but you know that. Not much to see. Anything likely to be of use to you, it probably rolled out of here with the body.”

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

“We never do. Count ourselves lucky if we’re able to figure out so much as what direction to look in.” He smiled. “Man had your son’s wallet. Stands to reason you’d want to know what killed him, where he’d been-anything you can find out. It’s a deep canyon, with only this foot-wide path up here on the rim. But it’s what you have.”

“And you’re going to tell me that? What killed him, where he’d been?”

“Some of it, anyway. Like everything else, that depends mostly on luck. Give me a few days.”

Greevy reached behind him. He’d tucked a bottle of Pearl back there, and in the interim a grasshopper had claimed it as perch. Slowly Greevy brought the bottle up close, until the two of them were eye to eye.

“It’s really their world, you know.”

Kiting out over fragments of brick, dropping at glide’s end onto a grassy patch, the grasshopper took flight. Greevy sat looking after it.

“City has several dozen varieties of roach,” he said at length. “All of them as distinct as individual human faces, many of them deriving from one specific area of the city. Not to mention the others. Fleas, mites, lice. Moths and ants. Or our best if most rapacious friends, flies. Not only different from one another, but vastly different in behavior, diet, where they lay their eggs, how the young develop, gestation period.”

Greevy took a deep swig of beer and held the bottle out to me. What the hell. Here we were, casual scientists, two men of the world talking things over, trying to understand. I drank and passed the bottle back.

“Day or two, the samples I took will start hatching. From the eyes, mouth, wounds. I’ll be able to tell you more then. Almost to the moment how long he’d been dead. What he’d been eating. What parts of the city he frequented.”

The bottle shuttled back another time or two.

“Strange work you do,” I said.

Though there’d been no bell, kids began spilling out onto streets from a school nearby, those with top grades, I assumed, let go early as reward. They took to bicycles and buses and looked impossibly young, part of the world’s order and continuity. They fit.

One of them, though, twelve maybe, a girl with skin white as paper and coppery hair, stepped in front of us and stood there fiercely.

“What are you men doing?” she said.

Greevy ignored her.

“You’ve been sitting there watching, for a long time now. I saw you from inside, through the window. That’s how it can start. I should call the police.”

“We’re just friends, miss,” Greevy said, “catching up on things. Neither of us even knew there was a school nearby. Believe me, no harm’s intended.”

“Sure you are. You people never intend harm, do you? And this is where you usually meet, right? In the middle of a vacant lot.”

“Miss. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

A bus pulled in at the stop across from the school. Our inquisitor’s eyes went from us to the bus and back.

“Well-” She turned and ran for the bus, sprang aboard. We saw her face in the back window, still watching us, till the bus passed out of sight. Neither Greevy nor I spoke for a time.

“Had a son once myself,” he said finally. “Long gone now.”

“Divorce?”

“Death.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.” He upended the empty bottle. A drop or two came out. “Boy was never right. Just couldn’t get it together, and even when someone else’d pull it together for him, he couldn’t keep it in the road. Something just got left out in the mix, you know. No one’s fault. But no one should have to live like that, either. All I could think when I heard was, Good, he’s not hurting anymore.

“It’s all a gift, Griffin. All of it. You think maybe your son, wherever he is, knows that?”

“I think he does, yes.”

“Good.” After a moment he said, “So how do I get in touch, assuming I have something for you?”

I scribbled name, address and phone number on a sheet from my notebook, tore it out and handed it to him. It went haphazardly into a coat pocket, no surprise. Though from general appearance the coat had been in use for some time, the pocket was still sewn shut. He had to rip out stitches to get the paper in.

“Circle K up by the corner,” he said. “Still have more than an hour before my ride shows up. You want, we could grab a quart of beer, a couple of dogs.”

Fine idea, I said, just what I wanted, and we swung that way. But when we got there a tour bus sat across the street. Through storefront windows we could see streams of elderly folk clutching bags of chips and pretzels, bottles of orange juice, candy bars, souvenir pralines. Greevy and I ended up on the curb by a nearby Exxon station. NOPD cars came drifting past as kids schlepped home lumpy knapsacks, lunchboxes, Gameboys, Walkmen, form-fitted saxophone and French horn cases.

“They think it’s Disneyland,” Greevy said.

“Kids?”

“The tourists. Look at them. Like this is what they’ve been waiting for all along, what their lives’ve come down to, this pitiful bus ride with a package of Fritos and an adventure happening outside the window at the end. The kids know better. At least I hope to hell they do.”

Listing right then left, a man with bandy legs approached us.

“Sonny Payne,” he said. “How do you do. I’m homeless and I’m hungry. If you don’t have it, I understand, because I don’t have it either. But if you do, anything you might see fit to pass on, a sandwich, a few coins, a piece of fruit, will be appreciated. Thank you.”

He stood there swaying, ticking it out. No response came, he’d move along, deliver the same speech verbatim just down the line. Greevy, however, pulled out his wallet and handed the man a ten.

“Thank you, sir.”

“My son was on the streets for years.” Greevy passed the quart of Corona to me. One of the NOPD cars slowed to check us out, then went on.

“I think it’s against the law, our sitting out here drinking,” I told him.

“Yeah. Probably is.” He took the bottle back and drained it. “You up for one more?”