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  "Heard some about you, Griffin."

  I waited.

  "Most all I hear is good—long as a man don't find himself crossed with you."

  I raised my glass in a toast. "You've been asking questions."

  He lifted his own in acknowledgement, drained it in a single draw.

  "You wanted to know about me, you could have gone to your own people. Jimmie Marconi, for instance."

  "What makes you think I haven't?"

  With no signal I caught, Shank broughtfresh beers.

  "Jimmie said hands off. Now that was surprise enough, Jimmie not being one to put his marker in. He takes care of his business, leaves the rest of us alone to do ours, everything runs smooth that way. What floored me was this other thing he said. You tell Lewis to come see me, he said, when it's convenient. When it's convenient. Forty years I worked at Jimmie's side and I never once heard him say that before, not to no one."

  5

  Lneonardo's was atimecapsule diey forgot to bury. The restaurant had been there forever; nothing about it ever changed. Same flockedred wallpaper, same portraits of owners hung high on the walls, same ancient black man sitting on a stool by the side entrance rocking and nodding. Inside, there were no windows, and waitresses in beehive hair went about the same business they'd gone about for forty years or more. The menu ran to heavy Italian, with a handful of New Orleans specialties, barbecued shrimp, roast-beef and oyster po-boys, bread pudding, thrown in for good measure. Once you'd snapped off the heads and spurted juice across the silly apron they insisted you wear, die barbecued shrimp finally didn't taste much different from the lasagna. But no one in his right mind came to Leonardo's for the food.

  I was never sure why they did come. Maybe this was where the folks used to bring them on special occasions when diey were kids or where, he in scratchy wool suit, pajamas underneath, and the family Dodge with its green visored windshield, she in long pleated skirt and flats, they'd had their firstal most-grown-up date. Perhaps they all simply took comfort from the fact that in here, no matter what cataclysms took place outside, nothing changed.

  Jimmie Marconi came because he'd always come here. His old man had come here and his old man before him. Places like New York, Boston, you'd have a regular neighborhood, do business from a booth in the bar on the corner or out of a family restaurant with checkered tablecloths, candles and pots of good, thick marinara reeking of garlic and fresh basil bubbling in the kitchen. That's the way things worked. People wanted tofind you—request a favor, ask for justice, tell you their daughter'd got knocked up by some guy refused to do the right thing—they knew where to come. Here it was different. No neighborhood, families spread out all through the city, across the river, out by Kenner and Jefferson. But when they needed you, they still knew where to come.

  "You don't want to do this, boy," the ancient black man told me as I stood with one foot on the cement step up to Leonardo's.

  "Probably right," I said, entering as he went back to rocking and nodding.

  I pushed my way like an icebreaker past the frontdesk, through baffles of small rooms and beehived waitresses, around the shoal of a chattering, bantamweight maitre d' in double-breasted suit, to the main dining room.

  Faces turned to watch me. Conversations stopped.

  A guy whose neck put me in mind of bulls sat over an espresso at a table near the door. Sucking on a lemon slice, he lumbered to his feet as I came in. So did his counterpart, all wire and nerve endings, at a rear table.

  Jimmie's head rose, too. He regarded me for a moment, two, three, nothing showing in his face. Then his hand came up an inch or two. The bookends sat down.

  I did the same, across from Jimmie, who tucked back into his plate of cannelloni and, finishing that, pulled close a bowl of cantaloupe with shaved prosciutto.

  "You eaten yet?"

  I shook my head.

  "Mama Bella'd be happy to fix you up something special."

  "Mama's other patrons might not appreciate that, sir."

  Jimmie nodded and ate his melon slowly, pushing the bowl away when he was done. Then he spoke to the room:

  "Closing up in here now, folks. Any of you have food coming, they'll bring it to you out front. Please keep your wallets in your pockets, though; tonight your money's no good. Please have a complimentary drink, too, while waiting—and please come back."

  We watched as customers slid from booths and stood, tugging at polyester sport coats, cotton skirts and silk dresses before shuffling out.

  "You too," he told his bookends when the citizens were gone.

  They didn't like it—eyesflashingYou know you can't trust these people—but they left.

  "Have a coffee with me at least?"

  "Sure."

  Busboys in yellow vests and black pants came through a doorway at the back of the room to retrieve dishes.

  "Sister doing okay, Joseph?" Jimmie asked one of them.

  "Yessir. Thank you, sir."

  "Heading for college this fall, I understand," Jimmie said to the other, who nodded. "You know you got a job here anytime you need it, right? Summers, holidays. Anytime."

  They took the dishes away. Moments later the one whose sister was doing okay returned with two espressos.

  "Good health," Jimmie said.

  I nodded. One healthy sip and my coffee was gone. Jimmie held the saucer in his left hand, up close to his face, working the cup with his right. Something axlike about that face. Sharp nose, narrow features. Eyes like wedges.

  "Don't know as how I ever sat across the tablefroma black man before."

  No response called for—none I'd care to give, at any rate.

  Jimmie's hand fluttered up. No one seemed to be watching, but fresh coffees materialized.

  "We've known each other now what? four, five years? I try to keep track of you. What it looks like to me is, you have trouble enough keeping track of yourself."

  What could I say?

  'That's what we're here for, Griffin. To bear witness, to take notice. Ever doubt that, you just look into a child's eyes."

  "Your man, Joey the Mountain. He's been asking about me."

  "Not anymore he ain't."

  "And about the woman I was with the night I got shot."

  Jimmie sipped at his coffee.

  "You doing okay, right? From die shooting. You recovered."

  I nodded.

  "That's good." Jimmie threw back the last spoonful or so of his espresso. "Never could get where I was able to care much for this stuff, but I keep trying. What I want is a drink. You want a drink?"

  I didn't catch any signal, but the maitre d' materialized at our table.

  "Single-malt Scotch suit you?" Jimmie said.

  "Always has."

  Two doubles, Marcel."

  They were there in a blink. I picked up mine and looked through it, remembering how she'd done that very thing in the dive down on Dryades. I swirled the first taste, oily, deep, abiding, over the back of my tongue. Life was good.

  "What we hear is, Eddie Bone called you that night."

  "He did. Said I should catch him at the club later on."

  "He didn't say what he wanted."

  "No."

  "He ever call you like that before?"

  "No again."

  Jimmie wet the tip of his tongue with Scotch. He put the glass down before him on the table and sat looking at it.

  'We want the woman," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Not something you ask."

  Okay. I had another taste. "What about the shooter?"

  Marconi shrugged. "He turns up, we want to talk to him. Where you from?"

  I told him.

  "You got snapping turtles up there, right? Big fuckers that look like rocks, move just about as fast. And once they bite down—it don't matter what on, a stick, your hand—they don't let go till it thunders. I figure you're like those turtles, get your beak onto something, you don't let go. No way you're gonna hold off looking for this woman."
/>   The maitre d' brought new glasses of single malt. Crystal. Stricdy Sunday best: I don't think regular folks in regular clothes and regular lives got them. We sat quiedy.

  "Maybe this time I help you," Jimmie said after a while.

  "Sounds to me like any help rendered here, it would be mutual."

  "So we help one another, then."

  He slid a four-by-six photo across the table. Dana Es-may looked out at me.

  "You understand how it is. Our people walk in down there, everything stops. They start asking questions, suddenly everybody's deaf and halfway out the door. You, it's different. You know the scene, people know you. Fifty a day plus expenses sound about right?"

  "Couple of conditions. I report only to you—"

  "No problem."

  "—and I say it's over, whatever the reason, it's over. No questions asked."

  "Don't see why not."

  I polished off my Scotch. When I was a kid, Mom made pitchers of Kool-Aid, poured it into bright-colored spun-aluminum glasses, green, gold, silver, blue. Other kids gulped theirs down in an instant. My own sat for half an hour as I sipped and savored. They never understood how I could do that.

  "Anything you need, information, money, names, you only have to call. My private number's on the back of the photo."

  "Thanks. Better get to work, huh?"

  I was almost to the door when he spoke.

  "Appreciate what you did for my daughter, Griffin."

  The etiquette of these things dictated that I not mention it until he did; now I was free to ask.

  "She okay, then? Still at home?"

  "Nah. Was for a while. Says much as she loves me she can't be around me. Too much baggage's the way she puts it. Too much stuff cluttering up the shelves. Last I heard from her she's living with this older guy up in Jackson. Both of them got custom Harleys, his jet-black, hers pink, make their living, such as it is, hauling all this shit in a trailer—old army equipment, dolls, iron cookware—between flea markets. Talk about too much crap cluttering up the shelves. So how long's that gonna last? I don't see her much, or hear from her. Not direcdy. But at least I know she's alive. Thanks for coming in, Griffin."

  I had to wonder when was the last time Jimmie Marconi thanked someone.

  TWO GUYS HAD her back in die kitchen. They'd bent her forward over the table and kicked her legs apart and one of them, a congenital lowlife named Duke Heslep, was holding her there, hands pushed down on her shoulders, while the other one bucked in and out and whenever she made a sound pulled at the hair he'd wrapped in one fist.

  Heslep's who I was looking for. Week before, when his trial date on an assault charge rolled up, he'd failed to show. Holding Heslep's bond, Frankie DeNoux wound up forfeiting, not the sort of story's end Frankie much cared for. So he commissioned a sequel, suggesting that I locate Mr. Heslep and remind him of his duty as a citizen.

  Half a day of asking questions and making myself a general pain in the ass led me to an abandoned apartment house in the weblike tangle of streets just uptown of Lee Circle and riverside of St. Charles. The door stood open—off its hinges, in feet, and leaning against the wall. Inside there seemed to be two categories of bodies: those caught up in some contemporary version of the tarantella, and those stoned or otherwise semicomatose on couchs, stained mattresses and floor.

  Largely unnoticed, I walked through the former and stepped over and around the latter to another open doorway rear left.

  "Sweet young stuff, Duke. You gonna want some once I'm done."

  The one on the joyride had his back to me. Duke stared in fascination at the wavelike motion of the girl's buttocks when his friend drove into her. I was there beside them before they knew it.

  "Who the fuck—" Duke began.

  I grabbed his hair and slammed his face against the table, putting an end to his curiosity.

  The other guy fell out of the girl as he stepped towards me. He landed a quick, hard jab with his left as his right came around for a hook—a great punch, but it quickly lost force since I now had a death grip on his privates. I hung on and squeezed. Hoped I was tight enough for him.

  When finally it penetrated that tilings had changed, the girl, without moving any other portion of her anatomy, turned her head, face blank, pupils black buttons. Her eyes went from the hand I had clamped on the guy's privates to the one still pressing Duke's face against the table, blood from his broken nose pooling beneath. Then she looked at me.

  'What do you like?"

  Using his privates like the handle of a shotput, I threw Humper against the wall. He slid down it into a huddle, hugging himself and retching. Then I pulled Duke upright, hand still wrapped in his hair, and told him he was coming with me. Blood glopped onto his shirt when he nodded.

  I marched him out through bodies and down the stairs. His eyes darted about looking halfheartedly for help he was not going to get. Only when we were outside did I realize the girl had followed us.

  She'd come around enough to look confused by then, a definite improvement over the blankness I'd seen before. She was still pretty vague, though, and still naked, which even in New Orleans could be a problem.

  "Take your clothes off," I told Heslep.

  We must have been quite the sight walking up Felicity to where I'd left the car, this white guy in underwear shirt and Jockey shorts, black socks and shoes, bleeding all over himself, spaced-out young woman holding up downsize pants with both hands as alternately she bounced off walls and staggered off the curb into the street, big buck nigger in black suit bringing up the rear.

  I didn't want to diink about what would happen if a police car cruised by. Mostly, unless there was a specific call, they stayed out of this part of town.

  "And that was Marconi's daughter?" Verne said. "Anyone want more?"

  I accepted the platter of ham and sweet potatoes as Mother said "No thank you, dear."

  'Yeah. I didn't know it then, or for a longtime, really. Figured she was just another messed-up kid. Lots of them around those days. I called Frankie DeNoux to meet me downtown, dropped Heslep off at his new rent-free accommodations, then asked the girl if she had someplace, a home, a friend's place, where she could go. She looked up at me with these strange, hollow eyes.

  "Sure," she said, and started away. I watched her turn the corner.

  Moments later, she was back. "I don't," she said. "Not really."

  "Wait, let me guess. You took her home."

  I nodded.

  "Lew picks up strays," Verne said to my mother. "Can't seem to help himself."

  "It was just for a few days. Once I got her settled in, she was out like a light. I didn't do much better myself, woke up fully dressed with my head on the kitchen table. I put her in touch with a friend of Don's who ran a halfway house. Went to see her a couple of times while she was there. Mosdy we'd sit and watch TV together. Then after she got out she started coming by my apartment once or twice a week. Never said much about what she was doing, where she was living."

  "And you didn't ask, of course."

  People want to tell me something, I listen. What they don't want to tell me is their business, I figurethey have reasons.

  "What she did talk about a lot then was stuff she was reading, all these thoughts clambering about in her head.

  One week she'd show up having just read Hesse, or The Seven-Storey Mountain, and that's where everything would begin and end, that was the whole world. Maybe life wasn't about possessions, about personal gain or power, she'd tell me, maybe what was important was this struggle, trying to understand yourself and others even when you knew you never could. Or she might talk about communities, what they were, how important it was to become part of one, to turn away from what she called the lure of your own reflection in the mirror."

  "I can't remember being that young anymore, Lew. I know I was, all those grand thoughts running through me, but I can't remember it, can you?"

  "Some days, a few good days, I'm still that young."

  Verne
nodded. "Let me get coffee started."

  She came back with the sugar bowl and a quart carton of Schwegmann milk. "Ready in a minute."

  "Her name was Mary Catherine, but she went by Cathy. Didn't take me long to catch on to how smart she was, and I asked if she'd thought about college. ''You didn't go to college,' she said, "and you know everything.' What I knew, I told her, I'd managed to learn the hard way, assbackwards and stubborn like I did most things, reading books the way ore companies strip-mine mountains, taking what I could of the best stuff and leaving the rest in ruin, and I wasn't about to recommend that for anyone else.

  " 'It can get expensive,' I told her, 'but there are all kinds of scholarships and loans available.'

  "I remember her looking up at me and saying, 'Oh, that wouldn't be a problem.'

  "Month or so later she tells me she's been accepted up at LSU. She'll come visit on holidays, she says, and she does, the first couple, but then she stops. Not that I was surprised. Never expected anything else."

  Verne went to the kitchen, returning with coffeepot and hotpad. Cups were already set out on the table. She poured.

  "You still didn't know who she was?"

  "Not a clue. I must have changed living quarters a couple of times in the next few months, I was doing that a lot then—"

  "At least you had a place," Mother said.

  LaVerne's eyes met mine. She shook her head gendy.

  "Then one day I'm coming home, around the big house and through unruly hedges—I was supposed to cut them, as part of my rent, but never got around to it—to the little one where I live out behind, and someone's waiting by my door, looks like he might juggle tractors to stay in shape.

  " 'Do something for you?' I ask.

  " 'Nope.'

  "I have the keys in my fist, sticking out between fingers.

  " 'You Griffin?'

  "Yeah.

  " 'Jimmie Marconi says he appreciates what you did for his kid.'

  "I don't know this Marconi or his kid, I tell the guy.

  " 'Sure you do. Mary Catherine.' His eyes remind me of Cathy's back when I first saw her. Flat, blank, affectless.