Moth Read online

  Book Two of the Lew Griffin Series

  One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, LaVerne Adams is dead - and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers - leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery.

  Abandoning his former career for the safe respectability of teaching, Lew Griffin now spends his time in an old house in the garden district - determined to keep his distance from the lowlife temptations of the New Orleans night. But an inescapable obligation to an old friend is drawing the tormented ex-PI to danger like a moth to a flame. And there will be no turning back when his history comes calling and the dying begins again.

  James Sallis has published fourteen 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 Moth

  ‘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’

  – Lawrence Block

  ‘If you like Walter Mosley, then Sallis walks the same streets, but the walk is faster, the streets darker. Buy this book’

  – Crime Time

  ‘An intelligent, enigmatic book … engrossing and disturbing’

  – New York Times

  ‘Another walk on Louisiana’s wild side … even stronger than The Long-Legged Fly’

  – Kirkus Reviews

  ‘An outstanding novel’

  – Booklist

  ‘A mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions’

  – Harlan Ellison

  ‘Sallis is a rare find for mystery readers, a fine prose stylist with an interest in moral struggle and a gift for the lacerating evocation of loss’

  – New York Newsday

  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’ 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 the memory of

  Chester Himes

  Father, the dark moths

  Crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

  —JAMES WRIGHT

  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

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  James Sallis Collection

  Chapter One

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT, IT WAS RAINING.

  I scrubbed at the sink as instructed, and went on in. The second set of double doors led into a corridor at the end of which, to the left, a woman sat at a U-shaped desk behind an improvised levee of compute
rs, phones, stacks of paperwork and racks of bound files. She was on the phone, trying simultaneously to talk into it and respond to the youngish man in soiled Nikes and lab coat who stood beside her asking about results of lab tests. Every few moments the phone purred and a new light started blinking on it. The woman herself was not young, forty to fifty, with thinning hair in a teased style out of fashion for at least twenty years. A tag on her yellow polyester jacket read Jo Ellen Heslip. Names are important.

  To the right I walked past closetlike rooms filled with steel racks of supplies, an X-ray viewer, satellite pharmacy, long conference tables. Then into the intensive-care nursery, the NICU, itself—like coming out onto a plain. It was half the size of a football field, broken into semidiscrete sections by four-foot tile walls topped with open shelving. (Pods, I’d later learn to call them.) Light flooded in from windows along three walls. The windows were double, sealed: thick outer glass, an enclosed area in which lint and construction debris had settled, inner pane. Pigeons strutted on the sill outside. Down in the street buses slowed at, then passed, a covered stop. Someone in a hospital gown, impossible to say what sex or age, slept therein on a bench advertising Doctor’s Book-store, getting up from time to time to rummage in the trash barrel alongside, pulling out cans with a swallow or two remaining, a bag of Zapp’s chips, a smashed carton from Popeye’s.

  I found Pod 1 by trial and error and made my way through the grid of incubators, open cribs, radiant warmers: terms I’d come to know in weeks ahead. Looking down at pink and blue tags affixed to these containers.

  Baby Girl McTell lay in an incubator in a corner beneath the window. The respirator reared up beside her on its pole like a silver sentinel, whispering: shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. LED displays wavered and changed on its face. With each shhhh, Baby Girl McTell’s tiny body puffed up, and a rack of screens mounted above her to the right also updated: readouts of heart rate, respiration and various internal pressures on a Hewlett-Packard monitor, oxygen saturation on a Nellcor pulse oximeter, levels of CO2 and O2 from transcutaneous monitors.

  Baby Girl McTell

  Born 9/15

  Weight 1 lb 5 oz

  Mother Alouette

  I could hold her in the palm of my hand, easily, I thought. Or could have, if not for this battleship of machinery keeping her afloat, keeping her alive.

  The nurse at bedside looked up. Papers lay scattered about on the bedside stand. She was copying from them onto another, larger sheet. She was left-handed, her wrist a winglike curve above the pen.

  “Good morning. Would you be the father, by any chance?”

  Reddish-blond hair cut short. Wearing scrubs, as they all were. Bright green eyes and a British accent like clear, pure water, sending a stab of pain and longing and loss through me as I thought of Vicky: red hair floating above me when I woke with DT’s in Touro Infirmary, Vicky with her Scottish r’s, Vicky who had helped me retrieve my life and then gone away.

  Teresa Hunt, according to her nametag. But did I really look like an eighteen-year-old’s romantic other?

  Or maybe she meant the girl’s father?

  I shook my head. “A family friend.”

  “Well, I had wondered.” Words at a level, unaccented. “No one’s seen anything of him, as far as I know.”

  “From what little I know, I don’t expect you will.”

  “I see. Well, we are rather accustomed to that, I suppose. Some of the mothers themselves stop coming after a time.”

  She shuffled papers together and capped her pen, which hung on a cord around her neck. There was print on the side of it: advertising of some sort, drugs probably. Like the notepad Vicky wrote her name and phone number on when I found her at Hotel Dieu.

  Tucking everything beneath an oversized clipboard, Teresa Hunt squared it on the stand.

  “Look, I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “Someone should have explained this to you, but only parents and grandparents are allowed—oh, never mind all that. Bugger the rules. What difference can it possibly make? Is this your first time to see her?”

  I nodded.

  “And it’s the mother you know?”

  “Grandmother, really. The baby’s mother’s mother. We … were friends. For a long time.”

  “I see.” She probably did. “And the girl’s mother recently died, according to the chart. A stroke, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  There was no way I could tell her or anyone else what LaVerne had meant, had been, to me. We were both little more than kids when we met; Verne was a hooker then. Years later she married her doctor and I didn’t see her for a while. When he cut her loose, she started as a volunteer at a rape-crisis center and went on to a psychology degree and full-time counseling. It was a lonely life, I guess, at both ends. And when finally she met a guy named Chip Landrieu and married him, even as I began to realize what I had lost, I was happy for her. For both of them.

  “Did she know Alouette was pregnant?”

  I shook my head. “Their lives had gone separate ways many years back.” So separate that I hadn’t even known about Alouette. “She—” Say it, Lew. Go ahead and say her name. Names are important. “LaVerne had been trying to get back in touch, to find Alouette.”

  She looked away for a moment. “What’s happened to us?” And in my own head I heard Vicky again, many years ago: What’s wrong with this country, Lew? “Well, never mind all that. Not much we can do about it, is there? Do you understand what’s happening here?” Her nod took in the ventilator, monitors, bags of IV medication hanging upside down like transparent bats from silver poles, Baby Girl McTell’s impossible ark; perhaps the whole world.

  “Not really.” Does anyone, I wanted to add.

  “Alouette is an habitual drug user. Crack, mainly, according to our H&P and the social worker’s notes, but there’s a history of drug and alcohol abuse involving many controlled substances, more or less whatever was available, it seems. She makes no attempt to deny this. And because of it, Alouette’s baby was profoundly compromised in utero. She never developed, and though Alouette did manage to carry her as far as the seventh month, what you’re looking at here in the incubator is something more on the order of a five-month embryo. You can see there’s almost nothing to her. The eyes are fused, her skin breaks down wherever it’s touched, there aren’t any lungs to speak of. She’s receiving medication which paralyzes her own respiratory efforts, and the machine, the ventilator, does all her breathing. We have her on high pressures and a high rate, and nine hours out of ten we’re having to give her hundred-percent oxygen. Two hours out of ten, maybe, we’re holding our own.”

  “You’re telling me she’s going to die.”

  “I am. Though of course I’m not supposed to.”

  “Then why are we doing all this?”

  “Because we can. Because we know how. There are sixty available beds in this unit. On any given day, six to ten of those beds will be filled with crack babies like Alouette’s. At least ten others are just as sick, for whatever reasons—other kinds of drug and alcohol abuse, congenital disease, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care. The numbers are climbing every day. When I first came here, there’d be, oh, five to ten babies in this unit. Now there’re never fewer than thirty. And there’ve been times we’ve had to stack cribs in the hallway out there.”

  “Are you always this blunt?”

  “No. No, I’m not, not really. But we look on all this a bit differently in Britain, you understand. And I think that I may be answering something I see in your face, as well.”

  “Thank you.” I held out a hand. She took it without hesitation or deference, as American women seldom can. “My name is Griffin. Lew.”

  “Teresa, as you can see. And since Hunt is the name on my nursing license, I use it here. But in real life, away from here, I mostly use my maiden name, McKinney. If there’s ever anything I can do, Mr. Griffin, please let me know. This can be terribly hard on a person.”

  She removed vials from a drawer beneath t
he incubator, checked them against her lists, drew up portions into three separate syringes and injected these one at a time, and slowly, into crooks (called heplocks) in Baby Girl McTell’s IV tubing. There were four IV sites, swaddled in tape. Almost every day one or another of them had to be restarted elsewhere, in her scalp, behind an ankle, wherever they could find a vein that wouldn’t blow.

  She dropped the syringes into the mouth of a red plastic Sharps container, pulled a sheet of paper from beneath the clipboard and, glancing at a clock on the wall nearby, made several notations.

  “I don’t know at all why I’m telling you this, Mr. Griffin, but I had a child myself, a son. He was three months early, weighed almost two pounds and lived just over eight days. I was sixteen at the time. And afterwards, because of an infection, I became quite sterile. But it was because of him that I first began thinking about becoming a nurse.”

  “Call me Lew. Please.”

  “I don’t think the head nurse would care much for that, if she were to hear about it. She’s a bit stuffy and proper, you understand.”

  “But what can one more rule matter? Since, as you say, we’ve already started breaking them.”

  “Yes, well, we have done that truly, haven’t we, Lew. Do you think you’d be wanting to speak with one of the doctors? They should be along in just a bit. Or I could try paging one of them.”

  “Is there anything they can tell me that you can’t?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Then I don’t see any reason for bothering them. I’m sure they have plenty to do.”

  “That they have. Well, I’ll just step out for a few minutes and leave the two of you to get acquainted. If you should need anything, Debbie will be watching over my children while I’m gone.”

  She nodded toward a nurse who sat in a rocking chair across the pod, bottle-feeding one of the babies.

  “That’s Andrew. He’s been with us almost a year now, and we all spoil him just awfully, I’m afraid.”

  “A year? When will he leave?”

  “There’s nowhere for him to go. Most of his bowel had to be removed just after birth, and he’ll always be needing a lot of care. Feedings every hour, a colostomy to manage. His parents came to see him when the mother was in the hospital, but once she was discharged, we stopped hearing from them. The police went out to the address we had for them after a bit, but they were long gone. Eventually I suppose he’ll be moved upstairs to pediatrics. And somewhere farther along they’ll find a nursing home that will take him, perhaps.”