James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

“Yeah. Maybe. And maybe you scratch deep enough, we’re all pretty much the same. Derick and I get along, you know? Could be there’s some kind of real connection. Who the fuck knows?”

Don was one of the few cops who managed not to be changed, violated, by what he did. Day after day, year after year, he sat at his ancient, dented, yellow desk with the highest murder rate in the country rising around him like floodwaters, journalists snapping at ankles and knees and city-hall hacks thinking they’d live large by swallowing him headfirst, events of his own life coruscating down like acid rain; and still he’d take time to go meet some youth coming out of lockup and give him a ride home, drop by and leave off groceries with the family of a man he’d sent up.

“It’s not like he has anywhere to go, Lew. Or anything waiting for him there if he did. You know as well as I do what his future looks like. Scratching by, one continuous hustle, the occasional demeaning job if he’s lucky. Cheap room when he can afford it, the street when he can’t, which’ll be most of the time. Till eventually he tries another grab, and-if not that time, then the next-he gets taken down. At which point he’s in the system for good.”

“Meaning for bad.”

“Always. A career con once told me it’s like having concrete slowly poured around you. You move around less and less. Finally you don’t move at all.”

Don pushed tray and table away. They came to a swaying stop, seeming somehow to vibrate a degree or two out of sync with the world about us. Neither of us had ever quite fit, either. Just that sometimes, here and there, cycles would coincide. You learn to slip past closing doors, make your way among the world’s pauses and stammers. Don stared at grease and glycerin-like brown smears left behind.

“Well, that was certainly interesting.”

“I ever mention you’re the kind of man on whom nothing is wasted?”

“Right, Lew. I ever mention how just because I’m a cop you think I’m not gonna know when you quote Henry James?”

“Most reviewers don’t.”

“Hey. Not their fault. They haven’t had the advantage of repeatedly getting drunk with you, after all, hearing the same damn shit again and again.”

“Good point.”

“How’re they gonna know where all that stuff comes from? LaVerne used to tell me how she’d read your latest book and remember back to when you guys had gone to some restaurant you were describing, or to a concert close enough to one in the book that she knew that’s where it came from.”

In the corridor outside, a comet streamed by: doctor on rounds, house staff of interns and residents, straggling tail of med students. Lab coats flapped all about; pockets crammed with guidebooks, rulers, rubber-capped hammers and stethoscopes, when they came to a stop, settled like trucks pulling up at a landfill. Various beepers sounded.

“I’m thinking about asking him to come home with me, Lew. Derick, I mean.”

“I see. And you’ve talked this over with Jeanette, of course.”

“Kind of.”

“Meaning you haven’t.”

“She knows.”

“No she doesn’t, Don.” Out the window, a phalanx of birds pulsed across the sky. Clouds moved in the opposite direction, so that the birds appeared to be moving at furious speed.

They were, I thought, a caret, copyediting sky: insert horizon here. “She may suspect it, sense it. But she doesn’t know until you tell her.”

“You’re right. But we’ve talked about this-haven’t talked about much else lately, when you come right down to it. How Derick’s life has gone, how it’s likely to go. She understands he hasn’t had much of a chance so far.”

Birds having passed from the window’s frame, a Southwest Airlines plane, tiny, iconlike, nosed in to replace them.

“Talk to her, Don. She loves you.”

“She does, doesn’t she?”

“What about Derick himself? What does he say about all this?”

“I’ll have to let you know.”

Crowding a cursory knock at the door, Santos stepped into the room. Coat, shirt and slacks looked as though they’d been stuffed into pillowcases for storage and recently fetched out; his tie was bent back on itself like a dog-eared page. A faint reek of garlic, vintage sweat, stale smoke and bourbon came off him.

“Captain.”

“Tony. Up and at it already,” Don said.

Santos shook his head. “Still. I got home long enough to pour two fingers of bourbon and drink the first joint of one of them. Then the beeper went off.”

“Short night.”

“For sure. You told me I’d better get used to them.”

“Long finger of the law. Forever poking at you.”

“More like a thumb lodged securely up my butt.”

“Smile. Fake ’em out. Maybe they’ll think you like it. Maybe you’ll even get to. It could happen.”

“Fuck that.” Santos looked around. Wondering if this was the way he’d wind up, too? If this was what it might come down to, all those years of white nights and bleary mornings, hours at the desk waiting for something to break, while slowly hearts turned hard all around and the hemorrhoids you sat on grew to the size of ostrich eggs? “Didn’t know Griffin was here.”

“Brought the massuh breakfast,” I said.

“I’ll just bet you did. Hitched your mule to that pickaninny post outside, no doubt.”

“Just like we knew it was you right away. Heard the clack of those stacked heels.”

“I assume you want something, Tony,” Don said, “and didn’t just take a wrong turn at the coffeepot downtown.”

“Might be better if Griffin waited outside, Captain.”

“Lot of people have felt that way in the past. What’re you gonna do? Here he is.”

“Yeah. Here he is.” Santos’s eyes, unreadable as ever, flicked from Don’s to mine and back. “Call came in last night from a phone booth, anonymous. Squad responded and found a body. This was down in the hub, what they’re calling the industrial district these days. Where all those apartment complexes went up a few years back, the ones no one moved into. No one that paid, anyway. Block after block of doublegated entrances, intercoms, internal corridors, skylights. Empty as seashells.”

New Orleans has never had much luck with gentrification. Every few years the city grasps at some straw it’s become certain will save it: the 1984 World’s Fair, gambling casinos a decade or so later, or converting the blasted, abandoned ruins of downtown warehouses, on a New York model, into apartments. But the city always winds up in worse shape than before, deeper in debt and ever more desperate, its dreams like Matilda in the old Harry Belafonte song having took the money and run Ven’zuela.

“Squad pulls up. Earl Jackson, Tyra McIlvane. He’s been on the job a month or two, barely cleared ride-along. She’s got almost a year in, making her an old hand by today’s standards, way they come and go. The gate, they finally figure, is jammed shut, chewing gum or something like that in the lock, it looks secure but gives when they shove. They go up slowly, door to door. Garbage covers the stairs, sacks from McDonald’s, pizza cartons, quart bottles of Old Milwaukee, crack vials, cheap wine, lumpy, burned-out mattresses. On the third floor, in what might have been a choice apartment looking out over Lee Circle, only it’s not, it never got to be that and never will, they find the body.

“Been there a long time, they figure. Most of the features are gone and the whole thing’s puffed up like the bad spot on a tire, about to let go. Unbelievably this guy still has a wallet in his pocket. There’s close to sixty dollars in there. No driver’s license, no credit cards. And a social security card issued to David Griffin.”