James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

I asked her if by any chance she knew who owned the shop.

"Oddly enough, I do. He came by and asked if I'd mind keeping an eye on the property, maybe pass along any inquiries from prospective buyers. I have his name and phone number back in the office, if you want it."

I did.

"Assuming I can find it."

Which she did, finally: thumbtacked to the wall above the phone in a slurry of torn theater tickets, scribbled-over business cards, Post-it Notes, postcard announcements of gallery openings, panel discussions and seminars, posters and playbills for productions of Endgame, King Lear and something titled Jimmy Baldwin Disembarks for Heaven.

"You're in luck," she said.

I guess we both are.

"How so?"

Well, I see you got your play staged, for one thing, gesturing towards the Jimmy Baldwin playbill. What, a couple of months ago?

"No. That was last year."

It do okay?

"If you consider a week's run and half the house empty the whole time, it did. Actually I guess attendance was fairly good the firstnight or two. It gave a false impression. Because of family and friends."

You have a lot of friends?

The phone rang. Watching one another, we listened to her voice.

Heard the beep, heaitl a mumbled message, heard a dial tone as the caller hung up.

"Not so many that I can't use another one. But what's the second thing?"

What?

"You said we were both lucky because I got my play staged-for one thing."

You're right. Other thing was, I really do need to get some flowers.

"I see. What kind?"

Well, I was thinking roses. Pink if you have them.

"Of course. A dozen?"

Why not.

"I'll even pick them out myself."

She disappeared into the back room and emerged minutes later cradling thirteen baby-pink roses and sprays of baby's breath in green wrapping paper.

"And how would you like to pay for this, sir?"

Cash okay?

She punched it in on the computer (I heard a printer start up in back) and told me that would be $9.98.1 pushed a ten across the breast-high table. She went back and got a copy of the printout for me.

"You'd like these delivered to what address, sir?"

Oh, you don't have to deliver them, I said.

She looked up. "I'm sorry?"

They're for you.

We live metaphorically, striving always to match our lives to images we've accepted or imagined for them-family man, middle American, tine believer, gangster-contriving these containers, a succession of them, that preserve us, define us, that keep us from spilling out and give us shape, but rarely fit.

Kendall Cibbs lived this way more than most: everything about him expressed itself inrelationship to one piece of land or another.

Using the number Deborah O'Neil gave me, I firsttried toreach him at what was apparently an office. A woman answered "White House Properties," and when I asked for Mr. Gibbs inquired, "This was in regard to a listed, or a potential, property?" Listed and potential instead of selling and buying. Pure class. Admitting that Mr. Cibbs was out of the office (her tone implying that he was rarely, perhaps never, in the office), she suggested that I try another number, which proved to be a Garden District tour service. There, they thought Gibbs was out looking at a commercial plot on Bayou St. John, after which, to the best of their knowledge, he had no further appointments.

Once again I explained my interest: that I was handling a missing-persons case and needed to speak with Mr. Gibbs in regard to a recent acquisition, a donut shop at Jackson and Prytania. Former donut shop. I never implied any connection with the police, but the young man to whom I spoke assumed police business and, being authorized to do so, at his discretion, in such cases (ends of words neatly tucked under, a moment's pause before any new sentence began), decided he could give me Mr. Gibbs's beeper number.

I punched it in and within the quarter-hour had The Man himself calling from what sounded like a very busy street.

"Kendallgibbs," he said. All one word.

I told him who I was, what I wanted.

"I got a brother on the force, you know, fourteen years. Gerard Gibbs? Last four or five of them behind a desk. Light went out on Poydras, he's doing emergency traffic direction and gets run down by a drunk never even noticed he hit him. Worst job in the world. They put a muzzle on you, draw targets on your chest and Kick Me signs on your backside, scatter birdseed around you for pay."

I grunted what I hoped he'd take as assent.

"Okay. I'm away from my computer now, so I don't have access to files, paperwork. Of course, being a little old-fashioned, I do still manage to keep a thing or two in my head. What you want's not too complicated, I can probably help you."

"Thing I need most is to get in touch with the manager."

"There's not one. Assistant manager'd be the one you'd want Manager walked out over a year ago. People who own the place think, Why pay someone to manage when this assistant's already doing it for scut wages."

"Guy with Woody Woodpecker hair?"

"Yeah, that's him all right. Keep expecting him to go Ha-ha-ha-fta-ha. Haiti worker, though. Boy was the damn store. He hired, rode herd, ran totals and made daily bank drops, did more than half the baking himself, cleaned up when he could. I'm keeping him in mind, something comes up. Keith LeRoy."

"Then you have an address for him."

"Near's I know, no one does. Wouldn't give out an address, phone number. Boy plays it close to the chest."

Portrait of the middle-aged detective as Elmer Fudd running headlong into a wall. Staggering back arock on his heels.

"Well, is there anything-"

"I didn't say I couldn't help you, Griffin. You want his beeper, or E-mail?"

Beeper or E-mail. Guy's twenty years old, ran a donut shop for minimum wage, and he's got a beeper? E-mail? The world was getting away from me at an alarming rate. Sometimes I forgot.

Gibbs gave me both and I thanked him. He said no problem. Anytime.

"Yo," a voice said on the phonefiveminutes after I beeped.

"Keith LeRoy?"

"What chu want wit'im?"

I told him briefly, reminded him that we'd met three days back at Tast-T Donut.

He interrupted me, gliding back from street talk to standard. "I remember. Big guy, black suit-looked like linen-gold silk shirt. You still looking for Shon?"

"Yes." Four days in a row now, off and on. I was setting personal records for dogged persistence.

"Good to have some continuity in your life. Excuse me." I heard two voices speaking, one quarrelsome, the other flat and uninflected, just out of range of intelligibility. Neither sounded like LeRoy's. Then he said something and the voices stopped. "Sorry. I don't know what good this will do you, if any at all, but you're welcome to it."

"Whatever it is, it has to be better than what I have now."

"Yeah. Way we live, here in this great land. Okay. Last few times I saw him, Delany was hanging with a guy. Thought he was a friend, I'm sure-Delany didn't have any others-but the guy had that look in his eye, throw you over for a dollar?"

"You ever get his name?"

"Never came up. He'd just show up, wait outside for Delany to get off. Leaning against a wall, sitting on a customer's car. I asked Delany who he was once and he said that's my cousin. I told him tell his cousin to stay off the customers' cars from now on."

"That it?"

"Warned you it was thin."

"Then I'll try fattening it up. You have my thanks."

"And you have my you're-welcomes. Damn ain't we a couple of well-bred, civilized types."

"Who would have thought it?"

"Not my mother, for sure. Later, Griffin."

I sat looking at the envelope Sam Delany had given me, at the phone numbers printed on it, on the back flap, in precise, squarish figures. Nine times out of ten, the one thing they don't tell you is the very thing you need to know, the thing that would have kept you from running around in circles, into walls, dead ends and, often as not, trouble.