Black Hornet Read online

  The third part of James Sallis’

  sequence of novels featuring Lew Griffin

  In a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer - by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooter’s sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffin’s side. The victim was white. Griffin is black - a reluctant young PI whose poet’s heart has already been hardened by amoral injustice and heavy drink. And though he had only just met his unfortunate companion, Griffin knows it’s up to him to find her killer - before a madman puts the final match to a volatile urban tinderbox.

  James Sallis has published foueteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the L.A. Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to Drive, the six Lew Griffin books are now in development as feature films. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

  SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS

  Novels Published by No Exit Press

  The Long-Legged Fly – Lew Griffin Book One, 1992

  Moth – Lew Griffin Book Two,1993

  Black Hornet – Lew Griffin Book Three, 1994

  Death Will Have Your Eyes, 1997

  Eye of the Cricket – Lew Griffin Book Four, 1997

  Bluebottle – Lew Griffin Book Five,1998

  Ghost of a Flea – Lew Griffin Book Six, 2001

  Cypress Grove – Turner Trilogy Book One, 2003

  Drive, 2005

  Cripple Creek – Turner Trilogy Book Two, 2006

  Salt River – Turner Trilogy Book Three, 2007

  The Killer Is Dying, 2011

  Driven, 2012

  Other Novels

  Renderings

  What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

  Stories

  A Few Last Words

  Limits of the Sensible World

  Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

  A City Equal to my Desire

  Poems

  Sorrow’s Kitchen

  My Tongue In Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

  As Editor

  Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

  Jazz Guitars

  The Guitar In Jazz

  Other

  The Guitar Players

  Difficult Lives

  Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)

  Chester Himes: A Life

  A James Sallis Reader

  Praise for Black Hornet

  ‘Haunting… Black Hornet is fast-moving, elliptical, and like a jazz trumpet solo, has a plaintive note of melancholy woven through it.’

  – Washington Post Book World

  ‘Wry… Powerful… A rich tapestry of social unrest and vividly evoked characters and settings… What Chester Himes did for Harlem… And Walter Mosley is now doing for Los Angeles, James Sallis is doing for New Orleans’

  – New York Times Book Review

  ‘James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction. His New Orleans is richly atmospheric and darker than noir. Black Hornet is terrific’

  – Lawrence Block

  Praise for James Sallis

  ‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’

  – Independent on Sunday

  ‘James Sallis is a superb writer’

  – Times

  ‘James Sallis – he’s right up there, one of the best of the best… Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy’

  – Ian Rankin, Guardian

  ‘[A] master of America noir…Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared down prose is distinctive and powerful’

  – Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Sallis’s spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’

  – Telegraph

  ‘Sallis is a wonderful writer, dark, lyrical and compelling’

  – Spectator

  ‘Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work’

  – London Review of Books

  ‘Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they’re tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair’

  – New York Times

  ‘carefully crafted, restrained and eloquent’

  – Times Literary Supplement

  ‘James Sallis is without doubt the most underrated novelist currently working in America’ – Catholic Herald

  ‘Sallis writes crime novels that read like literature’

  – Los Angeles Times

  ‘Allusive and stylish, this stark metaphysical landscape will leave a resounding impression’

  – Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

  ‘The brooding atmosphere and depth of characterisation mark this as superior mystery fare’

  – Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

  ‘I’m brought back, yet again, to my conviction that the best American writers are hiding out like CIA sleepers, long forgotten fugitives from a discontinued campaign’

  – Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books

  ‘Classic American crime of the highest order’

  – Time Out

  www.noexit.co.uk

  To

  Joe Roppolo

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  James Sallis Collection

  Chapter One

  BACK IN BASIC, WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE FULLY a fifth of my military career, there was a guy named Robert, a gangly young man from Detroit so black he seemed polished. We were all out on the range one afternoon. They’d hauled an old World War II tank out there, and we were supposed to step up to the line, assemble a molotov cocktail and lob it into the tank through the open hatch. My own toss, most of our tosses, missed pretty sadly. Then Robert toed up there. He stood a few seconds looking off at the tank and hefting the bottle, getting the weight of it. Then with an easy overhand, he dropped his cocktail squarely into the tank: just like a man walking through a door. His perpetual smile jacked up a half degree, no more. “Sort of thing come in handy back home,” he said.

  I remembered that, I think for the first time since it happened, when I read about the sniper.

  His name was Terence Gully and he was twenty-three. He’d been in the Navy, but things hadn’t gone well for him there. Discrimination, he told friends, ex-employers, would-be employers, people on the streetcar or at bus stops. So at eleven A.M. o
n a bright fall day Gully had lugged a .44-caliber Magnum rifle and a duffel bag full of ammunition up an old fire escape onto the roof of The King’s Inn motel half a mile from City Hall, taken up position in a concrete cubicle there, and opened fire. Tourists and office workers on lunch break started going down before anyone knew what was happening. A Nebraska couple staying at the motel on their honeymoon, returning from breakfast. A couple of motel employees. A police officer who’d heard the first shots and rushed over from City Hall.

  Hours later, bodycount mounting (bodycount being a term we were getting used to hearing in those years, grâce à LBJ and General Westmoreland), they brought in a Seaknight chopper from the naval air base at Belle Chase. As they flew in low over the roof preparing to open fire, the pilot and police heard Gully ranting below them: “Power to the people…. You’ll never take me…. Africa! Africa!”

  The pilot would later distinguish himself in Vietnam and return home, Purple Heart and Medal of Honor prominently displayed behind his desk, to a Ford dealership out in burgeoning Metairie, where mostly he sat in his glassed-in office and steadily poured Scotch into his coffee, himself a kind of exhibit now, as customers and their children ranged through the showroom beyond. One of the officers aloft with him that day, Robert Morones, would go on to become the city’s youngest chief of police and eventually settle into the easy chair of perennial reelection to his seat in the state legislature.

  The siege lasted over twelve hours and left in its wake fifteen dead, thirty or more injured, untold damage both from diversionary fires Gully had set and from returned police gunfire.

  The siege also left in its wake a badly shaken city. There had always been a silent accommodation here, a gentlemen’s agreement that blacks and whites would go on pursuing their parallel lives. But had the codes now changed? If one black man could carry his rage on his back onto a roof and from there hold hostage an entire city, if a group of black men (like those calling themselves Muslims) could recant their place in white man’s society, if still other groups and individuals (Black Panthers, The Black Hand) openly advocated taking up arms against that society—what remnants obtained of any agreement? Or, finally, of society itself.

  The man who cut your yard Monday noon and shuffled feet when he came for his pay might come after your possessions and station, your livelihood, your very life, Tuesday night.

  Made you think of the city under Spanish rule circa 1794, when Governor Carondelet, perched on the edge of a chair the French Revolution was busily pulling out from under European complacencies, mindful how quickly this sort of thing might spread, encircled the city with walls and forts, not to turn away attackers, but to help contain (he thought) its own French citizens.

  Floors and makeshift shelves at Terence Gully’s Camp Street apartment were stacked with literature: pamphlets, flyers, tracts, hand-lettered posters. Over and over on the plasterboard walls Gully had scrawled peace signs, swastikas and slogans.

  KILL THEM ALL!

  BLACK IS RIGHT

  HATE WHITE PEOPLE—BEASTS OF THE EARTH

  The King’s Inn shootings were one parochial incident all but lost among a hundred others in those years of mounting violence. The first Kennedy had already gone down. The Watts riots were just around the corner. Memphis was waiting for Martin Luther King, L.A. for Robert Kennedy, a lectern in the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, for Malcolm X. A month or so before, fifteen black men and women in Sunday best had staged a sit-in at City Hall’s basement cafeteria, where blacks weren’t served, and were dragged away by police. Three civil rights workers would be killed up in Mississippi just months later.

  Looking back now, 1968 seems pretty much the hub year, a fulcrum. During the summer Olympics in Mexico City two American athletes were suspended for giving a black-power salute. The Tet Offensive also started up that year—along with bloody racial riots on the unreported back lots of Vietnam.

  Not that I was much up on current events at the time. I had my hands full just getting to know my new home: how to get around in New Orleans, how to slide through the days here, how to clip off enough to survive, how to get by. When you’re young, history’s not worth much. When you get older, whether you consider it baggage or burden, history’s a large part of what you have. So a lot of this I learned, or relearned, later on.

  Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

  So I couldn’t have told you then, even with a knife at my throat (were you, for instance, some singular historical mugger intent upon relieving passersby of their lives’ spare change), what year Vietnam got under way, when either Kennedy went down, what the Watts riots were really about.

  Now I know.

  But even then there were things you couldn’t help knowing. You’d turn on the radio while shaving and between songs hear about men whose faces had been torn off. Drop by Alton’s Barbershop, he’d snap the cloth around in front of you, and just for a minute, as both your eyes went to his big black-and-white set on a shelf above the cash register, the weight of the world would settle on you. The sky would fall. You’d feel your feet sink a little deeper into the ground.

  And in New Orleans those days you couldn’t get away from talk of the sniper. Wherever you went, whoever was talking, that was the subject. Like weather, it was everywhere.

  Then someone stopped talking about it and started doing something.

  Monday morning, mid-November. A young man walking along Poydras on his way between the parking space he rented by the month and his job at Whitney National fell as he started across Baronne and lay dying against the curb. He was wearing a suit, he was white, and he had been shot, once, through the chest. Police sealed off and searched the area to no avail.

  Wednesday, again downtown, on Carondelet a block from Canal, another fell, an off-duty bus driver. By-standers this time reported hearing shots spaced perhaps six seconds apart (investigators counted it out for them, to be sure), and said that the shots came from high up. A roof perhaps. Or one of the upper windows in this sole canyonlike stretch of the city. The bus driver had been struck first in the middle of his forehead, then squarely in the chest, through the sternum just above the ziphoid process.

  Saturday the action moved uptown, to Claiborne, where a German tourist fell, dead before he hit the buckling sidewalk, as he exited a Chick’n Shack. Police found a single shell casing, already baked halfway into roofing tar, atop a boarded-up Holy Evangelical church nearby.

  Police Chief Warren Handy told the public there was no cause for alarm. That the incidents did not appear to be related. And that, at any rate, the department (“I’m going on record here”) anticipated speedy apprehension of whatever parties might prove responsible for this “horrendous outrage.”

  The Times-Picayune recycled Terence Gully stories, with new sidebars, and pointed out that all those shot were white. COPYCAT KILLER, bold headlines announced the first day. GUERILLA LOOSE IN THE CITY? they asked the next. FIRST SHOTS OF A RACE WAR? the weekly newspaper Streetcar suggested.

  Then on Wednesday, with a Loyola adjunct instructor dead in the street outside an apartment complex undergoing restoration on Jefferson, John LeClerque and Monica Reyna, hosts of WVUE-TV’s six o’clock news (his toupee, her lisp and impossibly red lips in tow) blossomed to life onscreen before a headline in two-inch letters, stark black on white: ROOFTOP KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.

  Chapter Two

  “’LO, LEW.”

  I returned his cool regard. We were all into cool those days: cool regards, cool threads and music, cool affairs. Hand-slapping, tribal handshakes and high fives hadn’t yet quite caught on.

  “You got it,” I told Sloe Eddie. “Sometimes low, other times high.”

  One night, ten years ago at least, Eddie had gone sailing on sloe gin fizzes and not hove back into port for almost a w
eek; he’d earned the nickname for life.

  “You get high enough you’n see all the shit.”

  “So they tell me. Like we don’t see enough of it down here.”

  “Got that right.”

  “You coming?”

  “Going. Two young ladies and a new bottle of Cutty waitin’ for me. Your man’s hot tonight, though.”

  I went on inside, sat at the end of the bar, and ordered a Jax.

  The club, like most of them, smelled of mildew, urine, beer, and edgy, cheap alcohol. Twenty or thirty years ago someone had scraped together enough money to buy the place, nailing down his piece of American dream, turning the gleam in his eye momentarily real. He’d hired a crew of workmen. They’d begun fixing it up: excavated studs preparatory to tacking up prefab panels, laid new Formica along part of the bar, soldered temporary patches on bathroom plumbing. But then the money ran out, a lot quicker than Someone had anticipated, and his crew jumped ship.

  Most of the club’s patrons had jumped ship too, from the look of it. A scatter of couples at the tables, a teenage hooker dropping shots of Smirnoff’s like clear stones into beer.

  The TV over the bar was on, some show about a paraplegic chief of police, the premise of which seemed to be that a cripple, a woman and a young black man, together, made up a single effective human being. The young black guy pushed the chief’s wheelchair around, and the show was set in San Francisco. I kept on waiting for YBM to push the damned thing to the top of one of those famous hills and let go. There’d be this gorgeous minute or so of “Blue Danube” or “Waltzing Matilda” as the wheelchair plunged ever faster down hill after hill into traffic, doom, the bay.

  Against the back wall, in the light of a portable spot, Buster was giving it everything he had. He always did. There’d been nights the bartender and I were the only ones around, and even then I couldn’t tell a difference.

  Light spurred off the sunburst finish of his Guild as he leaned back in the chair and threw his head up. The steel tube on his finger glinted, too, as it slid along the strings. Both feet struck the floor, levered up on their heels, struck again.