Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

“Go ahead what?”

“Say what you was saying.”

“Can I get paid after work tonight? I got to hep my auntie wit’ her mortgage.”

“Don’t see nothing wrong wit’ that,” he says.

He squeezes by her on his way to the kitchen, the thick outline of his phallus sliding across her rump.

The party becomes more raucous, grows in intensity, the males-only crowd emboldened by their numbers and insularity. Four bare-breasted women in spangled G-strings and spiked heels are dancing on a stage, fishnet patterns of light and shadow shifting across their skin. Outside, the rain continues to fall and Lisa can see the black-green wetness of the oak trees surrounding the Jewish cemetery, the canopy swishing against the sky, and she wonders if it is true that the unbaptized are locked out of heaven.

Why is she thinking such strange thoughts? She tries to think about her life in New Orleans before the hurricane, before Gerald’s reserve unit was called up, before his Humvee was blown into scrap metal.

She had waited tables in a restaurant in Jackson Square, right across the street from the Café du Monde. There were jugglers and street musicians and unicyclists in the square, and crepe myrtle and banana trees grew along the piked fence where the sidewalk artists set up their easels. It was cool and breezy under the colonnades, and the courtyards and narrow passageways smelled of damp stone and spearmint and roses that bloomed in December. She liked to watch the people emerging from Mass at St. Louis Cathedral on Saturday evening and she liked bringing them the steaming trays of boiled crawfish, cob corn, and artichokes that were the restaurant’s specialty. In fact, she loved New Orleans and she loved Gerald and she loved their one-story tin-roofed home in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But these thoughts cause her scalp to constrict and she thinks she hears hail bouncing off the loading dock outside.

“You got seizures or something?” Rodney asks.

“What?”

“You just dropped the ladle in the gumbo,” he says.

She stares stupidly at the serving spoon sinking in the cauldron of okra and shrimp.

“Take a break,” Rodney says.

She tries to argue, then relents and waits in a small office by the kitchen while Rodney gets another girl to fill in for her. He closes the door behind him and studies Lisa with a worried expression, then sits in a chair across from her and lights a joint. He takes a hit, holding it deep in his lungs, offering it to her while he lets out his breath in increments. Her hand seems to reach out as though it has a will of its own. She bends over and touches the joint to her lips and feels the wetness of his saliva mix with her own. She can hear the cigarette paper superheat and crinkle as she draws in on the smoke.

“I got to pay you off, baby.”

“’Cause I dropped the ladle?”

“’Cause you was talking to yourself at the buffet table. ’Cause you in your own spaceship.”

Someone outside twists the door handle and flings the door back on its hinges. Tookie Goula steps inside, the strap of her handbag wrapped around her wrist, her arms pumped. “You put that joint in your mout’ again, I’m gonna break your arm, me. Then I’m gonna stuff this pimp here in a toilet bowl,” she says.

Moments later, in Lisa’s parked automobile, Tookie stares at Lisa with such intensity Lisa thinks she is about to hit her.

“Next time I’ll let you drown,” Tookie says.

Lisa looks at the Jewish cemetery and the oak trees thrashing against the sky and the rain puddles in the parking lot. The puddles are bladed with moonlight and she thinks of Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice, but she doesn’t know why.

“What do you know about drowning, Tookie?”

Tookie seems to reflect upon Lisa’s question, as though she, too, is bothered by the presumption and harshness in her own rhetoric. But the charitable impulse passes. “Get your head out of your ass. You want to fire me as your sponsor, do it now.”

Lisa still has the hundred-dollar bill Herman Stanga gave her, plus the money she was paid by his cousin Rodney. She can score some rock or crystal or brown skag in North Lafayette and stay high or go on an alcoholic bender for at least two days. All she has to do is thank Tookie for her help and drive away.

“Where you think Limbo is at?” she says.

“What?”

“The place people go when they ain’t baptized. Like all them Jews in that cemetery.”

Tookie stares wanly at the parking lot, her face marked with a sad knowledge about the nature of loss and human inadequacy that she will probably never admit, even to herself.

The next morning Lisa stands at the speaker’s podium at the A.A. meeting in the Pentecostal church, her eyes fixed on the back wall, and owns up to drinking, using, and jerking her sponsor around. She says she intends to work the steps and to live by the principles of the program. Both the brevity of her statement and the sincerity in her voice surprise her. She receives a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, then watches it passed around the room so each person at the meeting can hold it in his palm and say a silent prayer over it. She lowers her head to hide the wetness in her eyes.

“Eat breakfast wit’ me. Up at the café,” Tookie says.

“I’d like that,” Lisa says.

“You gonna make it, you.”

Lisa believes her. All the way to 3:00 p.m., when Herman Stanga pulls up to her shotgun house in the Loreauville quarters and kills his engine by her gallery. His car hood ticks like a broken watch.

“You ain’t gonna unlatch the screen for me?” he says.

“I ain’t got no reason to talk wit’ you, Herman.”

“Got me all wrong, baby. I done a li’l research on your financial situation. You should have gotten at least a hundred t’ousand dol’ars when your husband was killed. The gov’ment ain’t paid you yet?”

She swallows and the tin rooftops and the narrow houses that are shaped like boxcars and the trees along the bayou go in and out of focus and shimmer in the winter sunlight.

“Gerald’s divorce hadn’t come t’rew yet,” she says.

“What you mean?”

“His mama and his first wife was the beneficiaries on the policy. He didn’t change the policy,” she says, her eyes shifting off of Herman’s, as though she were both confessing a sin and betraying Gerald.

Herman feeds a stick of gum into his mouth, smacks it in his jaw, and raises his eyebrows, as though trying to suppress his incredulity. “Tell me if I got this right. He’s putting the blocks to you, but he goes off to Iraq and fixes it so you ain’t gonna have no insurance money? That’s the guy you moping around about?”

He begins to chew his gum more rapidly and doesn’t wait for her to reply. “So what we gonna do about the eight-t’ousand-dol’ar tab you got? Also, what we gonna do about the twenty-t’ree hundred dol’ars you took out of Rodney’s cashbox last night?”

“Cashbox?”

His head bounces up and down ironically, like it’s connected to a rubber band. “Yeah, the cashbox, the one that was in the desk in the office where Rodney said to sit your neurotic ass down and wait for him. You t’ink you can rip off a man like Rodney and just do your nutcase routine and walk away?”

“I didn’t steal no money. I don’t owe you no eight t’ousand dol’ars, either.”

“’Cause you was so stoned out you got no memory of it.” Then he begins to mimic her. “‘Tie me off, Herman. Give me just one balloon, Herman. I’ll do anyt’ing, Herman. I’ll be good to you, Herman. I’ll pay you tomorrow, Herman.’”

How does he speak with such authority and confidence? Did she actually say those things? Is that who she really is?