FOR SOME TIME words had been dropping without apparent reason or provocation, refusing to be dislodged, into my mind. Once it was poshlost, another time sere. Often these were words whose meanings I knew, if at all, imperfectly, though they were familiar.
Coming upon the body was like that. It wasn't Shon Delany's, but for a moment, for no good reason, I became absolutely certain that it was, and couldn't shake the impression.
I spent a couple of hours at the sheriff's office out there. In Jefferson Parish, unlike Orleans, it's the sheriff who handles police work. Officers sat across tables from me staring and served me plastic cups of coffee foul enough to elicit confession from the staunchest wrongdoer. They refused to get too worked up over this. Their attitude told me it was the kind of death that belonged to New Orleans, just happened to stray over the line into their territory.
I gave my statement, survived coffee and stares and when they finally agreed to put a call through, spoke to Don Walsh.
"Lew," he said, "I've been giving this some thought. What you need to work on is finding live bodies for a change. Maybe even the ones you're actually looking for."
"Good point."
"Let me talk to whoever's running the show."
His brief conversation gained my release and a ride home in one of the patrol cars. Nor did they make me drink any more coffee.
A note from Norm Marcus pushed under my door told me the kids on bikes had struck again, snatching a seventy-year-old woman's purse and pushing her off the curb. Her leg snapped when she went down. She'd managed to drag herself back up out of the street but had to lie there until someone driving by stopped to help her.
Having then fed Bat and drunk two cups of scalding tea in the rocker by the window that early Friday morning, I was still thinking of the body, and of Clare. I remember that I had every intention of getting up soon to fix myself something to eat.
I was thinking of that abandoned house in Metairie, how Armantine Rauch and others had been camping out there, as though it were only a shelter among trees; thinking how at every turn I seemed to keep running into people who were camping out, people living temporary lives. Maybe that's what we all do, ultimately. Remembering my own succession of apartments and houses. Thinking how even here, after all these years (neglectfully, I would have argued, though at some deeper level, I knew, willfully), I'd never filled in the blanks, never installed things in any kind of permanent place. Furniture, personal goods, books and papers remained where they were first put down; from appearance, I might just as well have moved in last week.
I was thinking, too, as I rarely did, of my mother.
Growing up, I never realized that all families were not like ours. My mother had withdrawn from the world, walled herself (as though Calvinist rather than Senegambian bloodflowedin her veins) within exacting rituals of breakfast, job, dinner, housework, church, sleep. Whenever anything threatened or disturbed that routine, the very ground around us trembled. My father had chosen, if he had a choice, to withdraw alongside her. There were in our home no visits from parental friends, fellow workers, schoolmates. No family outings to movies, restaurants, the park. And no acknowledgment of my mother's silent, palpable madness.
Only years later did I begin to understand how strange and distorted that life was-distorted in ways no lens can ever correct-and how deeply scored by it I had been. It's a heritage my sister Francy seems largely to have escaped, though I've sometimes wondered if her own desperate grappling after normality, her sensible job, steady-keel husband and life, isn't in its way every bit as determined.
I was awakened, suddenly, by the phone. Foundering in bright light, confused. I pushed my way up and out of the rocker.
Children outside shouted to one another on their way to school. I had slept three, four hours. A peculiar grayness to the sky, as though seen through tinted glass. I didn't know it then, but a storage facility on Magazine had caught fire, pouring smoke into the uptown sky as cubicles of things people no longer needed but would not abandon, old letters and photographs and high-school yearbooks, wedding dresses, income-tax returns, crippled furniture, burned. Days later I watched a bulldozer crush and level what little remained.
As I stood there by the window, the machine took the call. This is Lew Griffin, please leave a message. Then Richard Garces's voice.
"Lew, ring me back when you get in. Your-"
I picked up.
"Richard. I'm here."
"Those bill collectors will be persistent, won't they?"
"Great, the driving-to-work comedy show. Ten minutes of bad jokes and three of even worse music."
He whistled a few notes and said, "You're an unreconstructed cynic, Griffin."
"I try."
"A sad and unhappy man."
"Indisputably."
"Okay, so I'm afraid I have further bad news for you," Richard said. "You ready for it?"
"I have a choice?"
"You're missing."
"I'm what?" I remembered Chandler's example of colorful American speech, a gangster ordering his subordinate from the room, saying simply: Be missing.
"Your guy over at University Hospital? The one that claims he's Lew Griffin? He's gone."
I watched a garbage truck lurch along the street outside. Men would jump off the back, grab a can, empty it and replace it at curbside almost in a single motion, then whistle the truck on, running behind. Fearful of loud noises, Bat was under the couch, ears at alert, eyes set hard on the front door.
"I have a friend who's a resident over there, knows you're a friend too. She called me when she heard about it. He went AWOL last night, sometime between about four and six."
"And no one saw him? Kind of hard to believe no one would notice, the shape he was in. I'm surprised he could even walk."
"Yeah. Everyone is. But people do the damnedest things all the time, things you never thought they'd be capable of."
Leaking fluids it was best not to think about, the garbage truck pulled around the corner.
"Anyhow, he'd been transferred to a room. He wouldn't have been, this soon, ordinarily, but I guess they needed ICU beds for casualties from a multiple pileup out on I-10.
"A nurse's aide checked vitals at twelve, two, and four. When the charge nurse herself went in for a final check at the end of the shift, six-twenty or so, she says, he was gone. His IV had been pulled out and was dripping onto thefloor. There was a rubbery ball of adhesive tape in the sink. He took along toothpaste and toothbrush from a kit the hospital issues patients, left the razor and everything else behind.
"He also left his hospital gown, and no one could figureout what he did for clothes till later on, when another patient down the hall got back from X-ray. Someone had popped the lock on the suitcase in his room. Money and wallet untouched, but they took his clothes. Beige corduroy jeans, blue-and-yellow rugby shirt. Shoes gone too. Black Reeboks."
"You got all that from a friendly phone call?"
"Well, I asked a few questions. You know. I kind of had the idea you'd be going after him, Lew. That you could use whatever I was able to get you."
"I appreciate it, Richard, believe me."
I asked who his friend was at the hospital, wrote it down, and said I'd check in later.
Then I called Don, who told me he'd keep an ear open and added: "Damn, maybe it is you, Lew. Only man I know who's always out the hospital door before they can even slap tape on the bandages."
When I hung up, I saw the blinking light on the machine. I hadn't checked this morning when I came in.
The English department and Dean Treadwell would like me to call at my earliest convenience.
My agent had "small news and a smaller check" on a couple of foreign sales of old books.
Someone wanted to give me a free trial membership to a health club.
And Deborah O'Neil wanted to thank me for the flowers.
I picked up the phone but, after a moment, put it down. I stood looking out the window, then got a pen and yellow legal pad from the shelf by the door and, returningto the rocker, wrote:
This was the first time I saw her. Wearing a red dress, she came in from the darkness. We were almost alone there in the small cafe.
Barely pausing, looking up only once or twice, I wrote for four hours.