James Sallis: Ghost of a Flea

So, veering from prattle about Aristophanes and the play to news of her day at the shop, the latest on Pakistan’s earthquake and the saga of my purposeless sit-in at Joe’s, we went on talking till almost midnight, when Deborah cashed in the chip or two she had left and left the casino.

Coming back in from the slave quarters, I’d brought Fearing’s spirit with me. Kenneth and I sat together in the dark not talking for a couple more hours. Bat followed me in, too, made another plea for food and, failing, curled up beside me on the chair’s overstuffed, well-worn, moderately clawed arm.

I was sitting in pretty much the same place and attitude when Deborah came down the next morning. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep upstairs myself, and now I was contemplating piles of laundry that needed doing. An Iwo Jima of whites, Allegheny of darks, a veritable Everest of colors. Where was Teddy Roosevelt when you needed him to go storming up these hills and take them? Even if the famous footage, and in large part the event itself, was faked.

“It’s a start,” Deborah said, “kind of. Which one’s Krakatoa?”

“You’re always complaining that I don’t sort things properly.”

“I just had in mind not putting everything in the washer at once, Lew. It somehow escaped me that the creation of new continents would be involved.” She looked ceilingward, as though for steerage. “Oh well. Just passing through.”

“City be full of tourists. Always underfoot. Speaking of which: any sign of David?”

“I didn’t hear him this morning. Want me to go look?”

“He’d be up and about if he were here. I suspect he’ll wander home when he’s-as my father always said-of a mind to.”

She went on to the kitchen, where I heard her rummaging: cabinet doors chattered, a drawer slid shut with the sound of an arrow thunking into its target. Dull smack of the refrigerator door opening. Minutes later she walked into the front hallway. A voice, none of which I could make out, unrolled on the answering machine. Then she was there in the doorway.

“Lew, you better come listen to this.”

She wore a light green housecoat that matched the glass in her hand turning the orange juice within a sickly color.

“It’s the third one,” she said, pushing the button on the machine. “It must be from last night. Neither of us thought to check.”

Mr. Griffin, this is Marie at Book News. I don’t seem to have an e-mail address on file for you. We were wondering if you might have time to review a new translation of Cendrars for us. Give us a call? Thanks .

The second caller had so much trouble trying to say what he wanted that, after repeated stammering, he finally hung up.

Then the third. Jeanette’s voice.

Lew, are you there? … I guess not … Can you call me when you get in? It’s Don, Lew. He’s been shot .

When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, three heads turned towards me. Two of the heads nodded. The owner of the largest of them came to meet me.

“Griffin,” he said.

“Santos.”

No hand was offered. Cops don’t much like shaking hands. And when all was said and done, Santos himself, though his skin was as dark as my own, didn’t much favor black men. No way in hell we were ever going to like one another, his attitude told me; but since I was a friend of Don’s, he always treated me with deference. Don’s retirement had left him chief of detectives.

“What happened?”

“Jeanette called you, right?”

I nodded.

“She told you Don’s been shot.”

“And that’s the whole of what I know.”

One of the other cops approached, and Santos stepped away for a moment to confer.

“We had kind of a send-off for Walsh last night,” he said upon return. “Nothing formal, just a lot of us who wanted to get together and say hey, we’re here, we appreciate what you’ve been doing all this time. Man did a fuckin’ hero’s job for a lotta years. You think anyone noticed? Anyone but us? So we got together at O’Brien’s, a bar down on-”

“I know it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure you do.” His eyes met mine. O’Brien’s was the closest thing New Orleans had to a cop’s bar. Citizens knowing cop stuff is another thing cops don’t much like. “Anyhow, Tony Colado snagged a cake half the size of a football field from his uncle’s bakery, a deli a lot of the guys eat at up on Magazine kicked in a tray of sandwiches, like that. Whole thing ran maybe five in the afternoon to eight, eight-thirty.”

Automatic doors from the ICU sprang open and a young man in blue scrubs ambled through. The scrubs, probably the largest available, struggled to cover the man’s chest and bulky shoulders. Weightless blond hair clung to his scalp like damp flower petals; a tiny silver and blue-enamel cross hung from one ear. Beckoning for me to come along, Santos went to meet him.

“Dr. Lieber,” he said. “This is Lew Griffin, he and the Captain go way back.”

Don’s rank and title had changed several times over the years. When he first took the job, not too long after we met, he’d been chief of detectives and a captain. Then sometime in the Seventies the department kicked him up to major. Twenty years later he’d become, at least briefly, maybe permanently-by this time I’d lost track, and he probably had too-an assistant superintendent. But cops don’t take to change any better than they do to handshakes and citizens knowing things about them, and for most of the men he worked with, those to whom he wasn’t just Walsh, he’d remained the Captain.

Dr. Lieber held out hands that looked like a steelworker’s and we shook.

“There’s no real change, sir. Vital signs are stable, the bleeding’s under control. He had developed, as I told you before, a secondary pneumothorax-free air in the chest, and hardly surprising in cases like this-but that’s been taken care of. He’s breathing on his own, without difficulty, though we’re keeping him on the ventilator as a precaution.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Not yet. Everything considered, we’d just as soon he’d stay under a while longer. The rabbit puts his head up, I’ll-”

“Rabbit?”

“Sorry, it’s been a long day. Just something we say all the time around here, among ourselves: that our job in ER is to pull rabbits out of hats and sometimes they don’t even give us the hat. What I meant, first time there is a change, I’ll let you know. Or if I’m not available, the resident on call will.”

“Thank you.”

“No need to. It’s my job. I take the job seriously. So, apparently, did your friend in there.”

Dr. Lieber turned and, pushing the doors open, went back into the ICU. The other cops immediately came over. Santos told them what had been said, then the two of us stepped away. We stood near the wall, in a narrow channel bounded by the ICU doors and an unmanned information desk, looking out. Beyond our dull oblong of an island, visitors and hospital personnel swarmed everywhere, pushing carts, carrying flowers and paper bags of belongings, rubbing at eyes or the backs of necks, embracing. The cover of brochures stacked on a table nearby read Are you ready for Him?

“Walsh stopped on the way home, at a Circle K just around the corner from his apartment. He went in, the guys were already there. He pulled some milk out of the cooler, started toward the register, then went back and got a six-pack. The store owner says he could see him staring into the glass door like he was trying to decide what kind of beer. Afterwards he figured that was why Walsh went after the beer in the first place-just so he could take a look around, without having it be obvious.

“There’s two of them, one guy standing over by the magazines while the other one pretends he’s playing this video game. Only there’s no noise from the game machine, see, and it’s like all of a sudden the one standing there by the machine, he’s the one with the gun, thinks of this and starts getting nervous. Walsh and this guy start walking toward the register at the same time. The guy’s reaching in under his jacket for the piece when Walsh says, Hey buddy, have a beer, and chunks the six-pack right at him. Guy jerks back, his feet slip and he goes down, but the piece goes off anyway. Then the six-pack hits him square in the face. That, the fall when he slams his head, and the store owner’s jumping the counter and doing some slamming of his own with a baseball bat puts this mook down for the count. The other one’s history by now. Long gone.