James Sallis - The Long-Legged Fly

Most of what had been his head was splattered against the wall. His hand had fallen into his lap and remained there, the gun, a forty-five, on the floor between his feet. I smelled urine, feces, the animal scent of blood and tissue.

By the wall across from him a camera sat on its tripod, still filming. I didn’t touch it. But I went back down the stairway to the phone in the living room and dialed downtown.

“Walsh,” I said.

“Sergeant’s with the Chief. Can I-”

“Get him.”

“I couldn’t inter-”

“Get him, now, or he’ll have you for breakfast tomorrow.”

A pause. “Could I say who wants him?”

“Lew Griffin.”

I waited all of a minute.

“Lew, what the hell?”

“Four-o-eight Socrates,” I said. “Our friend Sanders has just checked out permanently.”

“Twenty minutes,” Don said. “Don’t wander off.”

A crudely lettered title card drew back from the screen and there was Sanders, holding it in one hand, pointing to it like a mime, face contorted into a gigantic smile. It read: Last Film .

He turned his back to the camera and walked slowly to the chair. When he turned around and sat, his expression had changed to a tragic one as exaggerated as the earlier smile. He mimed wiping tears from one eye, then the other. For a moment he hung his head, then shook it sadly again and again.

But an idea was starting up in his mind, and as it formed, the smile slowly returned, more natural now, less exaggerated. He held out his hand and, magically, a forty-five appeared in it. Waving good-bye with one hand, with the other he put the barrel of the gun into the smile.

And that was how I had found him.

“Jesus,” Don said.

Polanski and Verrick looked at one another, shaking their heads.

“He and the girl were living together?” Don said.

I nodded.

“How’d you know that?”

“Someone told me,” I said.

“ Who told you?”

“I forget.”

“He the one that drugged her?”

I shrugged.

Don looked back up at the blank screen.

“This is one fucked-up world. And the best we can do is shovel shit from one place to somewhere else for a while.”

“You need me for anything else, Don?”

“No. Go on, Lew. Be careful.”

I walked down the four flights of stairs and outside. An old man in rags was sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the building. “Lock me up, officer,” he told me.

It was a little after nine and had probably been dark thirty minutes or so. A haze of heat and light shimmered over the city. Breathing was like walking in wet tennis shoes.

I retrieved my car from the police lot where Don had checked it in, and drove out Poydras to Hotel Dieu.

At the nurse’s station in intensive care I explained who I was and was told that one of the doctors would see me shortly, please wait in the family room outside. The fear, pain and blinding hope in that room were palpable. At length a tall, stooped young man in yellow scrubs came to the door and said quietly: “Mr. Griffith?”

“Griffin,” I said.

“About Cordelia Clayson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please come with me.”

We went back into intensive care and to a small room at the far end. He pulled the door closed. Through it I could hear the sound of alarms going off, a voice saying: I need some help over here.

“And just what is your relationship to the patient, Mr. Griffin?”

“As I told the nurse, I’m a private detective engaged by the girl’s parents.”

“To investigate what brought her here to us?”

I shook my head. “To find her for them. My job’s done, except that now I have to go and tell them. And I need to know what to tell them.”

“I see. You’re in touch with the parents, then.”

“I know where to find them.”

He had sad brown eyes. You wondered if they would stay that way, or if after years of this (he couldn’t be more than twenty-six or — seven) they would harden.

“I can’t hold out a lot of hope,” he said. “It’s not the drugs themselves, of course; we’ve learned how to handle all that. But Cordelia had a hard hit of some unusually pure heroin. She was out for a long time, and what happened was, she developed what we call shock-lung syndrome. The heart slows down dramatically and loses the force of its contractions, so that everything kind of backs up. Her lungs are full of fluid. They’re hard to inflate-every breath is like the first time you blow into a balloon-and oxygen levels in the blood are critically low. We’re doing what we can. She’s on a ventilator that does all her breathing for her, and she’s receiving hundred-percent oxygen at high pressures. But we’re not gaining much ground, Mr. Griffin. And frankly, the interventive measures we’ve been forced to use are more likely to lead to further complications than to any resolution of the original problems. We get in this sort of downward spiral after a while. I’m sorry.”

I stood. “Thank you, Doctor. Will Mr. and Mrs. Clayson be able to see their daughter if I bring them down here? Are there restricted visiting hours?”

“Not in this case, Mr. Griffin. I’ll leave instructions at the desk.”

I went out through the double doors to the elevator. In the family room, every face turned toward me.

The breeze had turned into a steady, low wind and there was rain in the air. I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents’ faces in the mirror.

I swung onto St. Charles and up into the Garden District. There are entire streets here where you go burrowing down tunnels of green, trees curving over and around you, sky shut away. It reminds you how much of New Orleans is pure artifice-that it’s a constructed city, dredged out of swampland by sheer force of will and labor, nibbled at constantly by history, the river, the swamp’s dark mouth. For most of the 1830s the New Basin Canal, meant to assure American self-sufficiency from Creoles, was hacked out with pick and shovel (there was no dynamite, and no way to keep swamp seepage out except back-breaking pumps from Archimedes’ time) at a cost of well over a million dollars and at least eight thousand lives. A hundred years later the city of New Orleans voted to refill this canal.

It was as though the city’s image of itself, and the ways it tried to live up to that image, kept changing. It was Spanish, French, Italian, West Indian, African, Colonial American; it was primarily the city of fun and illusion, or primarily the bastion of culture in a new land; it was a city built on the backs of slaves and simultaneously a city many of whose important citizens were gens de couleur libre; endlessly, it adapted.

I parked on Jackson Avenue and found the address I wanted behind one of a row of apartment houses: what used to be a slave’s quarters connected to what used to be a garage by a room narrow as a sidewalk.

“I’m looking for the Claysons,” I said to the man who opened the door.

“You’d be Mr. Griffin?”

“Yes.”

“Please come in.” He backed out of the doorway.

Mr. and Mrs. Clayson were sitting inside on a shabby love seat and stood to introduce me to Clayson’s brother and his brother’s friend. I knew the friend from the streets, a working girl whose specialty was impotent men and rough trade with other women. I wondered if this was home for her.

As gently as I could, I told them about Cordelia and asked if they’d come with me. Mrs. Clayson closed her eyes and said under her breath what I suppose must have been a prayer. Mr. Clayson looked off at the wall as though he’d just lost whatever faith he’d had up to this point. They stood, and we walked out into the beginning rain.