Ace Atkins - Dirty South

“So what happened with Walter in Chicago?” I asked.

Bronco shot JoJo a mean stare and JoJo just shook his head at me.

“Maybe ALIAS just doesn’t know how to ask,” I said. “Maybe he needed the money.”

“For what?” JoJo asked. “Two hundred dollars would buy half of Clarksdale. Besides, he didn’t want for nothin’ at my house. He got a room. Loretta cooked and he worked. What else he need?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I reached into my wallet to see how much cash I had on me to pay him back. He caught the wallet between his rough hands.

“Don’t embarrass me.”

“Did I tell you about his mother?”

JoJo turned to listen. Bronco shook out a long Kool cigarette from a pack and excused himself outside.

“His mother overdosed a few years back,” I said. “Tavarius was thirteen. They were living in Calliope and he didn’t tell anyone about it.”

JoJo watched my face, his jaw dropping slack. His eyes softened.

“He didn’t want anyone to take her away,” I said. “Teddy said he’d heard ALIAS thought he’d go to jail if anyone found out.”

“Lord,” JoJo said.

Curtis had finished half the floor while we talked. The puzzle pieces taking shape into the soft, yellow wood.

“Rap’s just dreams,” I said. “People in that world just want something to wish for.”

JoJo nodded. “I heard one time Muddy and old Wolf got into an argument up in Chicago. They kept lighting hundred-dollar bills to see which one would turn chicken. Bought a harp the next day.”

Tavarius walked into the bar, carrying a box of rollers and paintbrushes and some high-gloss black paint for our new front door.

“Old School,” he said, nodding over at me.

He handed JoJo the change, his hands pretend-shaking as if he were a beggar. “It’s all there.”

JoJo counted it out into his hand. “You got a receipt?”

“In the box.”

Tavarius tore open a bag of Doritos and wandered back to where Curtis had unfolded a Playboy he’d found in the trash.

JoJo went to the front door, his feet finding bare spaces in Curtis’s pattern. I watched JoJo, framed in the white afternoon light, laugh with Bronco. Bronco cupped the cigarette tight to his face, squinted up his eyes, and bellowed smoke deep from his body.

Behind me, Tavarius walked forward into the bar.

I could not help but notice the imprint of his sneakers on the fresh wood.

DAHLIA’S CARRIAGE HOUSE off Napoleon was empty. I peered through a window at the top of a wooden landing and saw a bare bulb shining over an empty room. Packing crates, tape, and discarded magazines lay on the blue carpet. The summer light shone gold and hard through the edges of the oaks and the wetness from last night’s rain scattered down on the uneven sidewalks. I asked around but no one seemed to know her, so I walked back to my truck and scanned through the sheet that a bail bondsman I knew in Memphis had faxed me. I located her two most recent addresses, places where she’d received paychecks or credit cards, and headed out to the Hollygrove neighborhood by the riverbend only to find another vacant place. Nothing.

I soon turned back the way I came, into the Irish Channel near the Parasol Bar. An old white-boarded drinking hole that served Wednesday specials on Guinness.

The Irish Channel is a mostly black neighborhood squeezed between St. Charles Avenue and the river. Shotgun shacks and little bungalows. Postwar working-class houses with chain-link fences and mean-ass dogs. It was Saturday and folks hung out on porches and on the stoops of their houses, smoking and playing with children with ragged toys.

I matched the address with a narrow little shotgun so small that it looked like a doll’s house, and walked up a creaking paint-flaked porch. Someone was frying bacon in the back kitchen and playing some T.L.C. “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls.”

A woman sang in the back, and when I knocked on the warped screen porch, she popped her head out and pushed the hair from her eyes. About halfway through the long shot of hall, I knew it was Dahlia.

She wiped her brown hands on a white towel and walked toward me.

Long-limbed with straight black hair and soft almond-shaped eyes, she wore a tan halter top tied at the neck and tight blue jeans. No shoes. A casual smoothness about her walk, a relaxed but confident sexuality.

I swallowed. The Polaroid shot. Only better.

She inched open the door and tugged a smile into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so huge and brown that she sort of swallowed you with them. Her teeth white and perfect, lips sensual.

“I work with Trey Brill.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Your name is Nick and you think Trey ripped off one of your boys.”

I smiled.

The halter top didn’t quite stretch to the edge of the jeans and I noticed how flat and hard her stomach muscles were. I was conscious of her breathing.

“You mind if we talk out here?”

“Come inside.”

I didn’t want to but followed as she returned to the kitchen. I waited in the parlor.

She had a television stranded on a rickety metal-and-faux-wood cart on the right wall as you walked into the room. On the opposite side sat a yellow-and-black couch, a beanbag, and a cheap rocking chair filled with a small back pillow reading LOVE. Small hearts and a couple of angels had been embroidered on the material.

A silent air-conditioning unit sat in a far window. The room’s air was heavy and moist and felt even more humid than it had underneath the thick oak trees outside.

I heard water hissing onto a blackened skillet. She walked back in the room from the kitchen. When I sat down on the couch, she fell in beside me, her arm brushing against mine.

“I’m surprised I found you,” I said. “I’m surprised you know who I am. About the only thing I can do is offer you some money to tell me about you and Trey.”

She leaned back in the pillows and stretched her arms over her head, yawning, her breasts swelling in her shirt. Her chest moist with sweat.

“I’ll also tell the detectives that you were just a player. It was Marion who worked the con, hired by Brill. Right?”

She dropped her chin, put the flat of her palm across my cheek, and crawled into my lap, her legs straddling me. I froze.

Her fingers looped around the back of my neck. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the mouth.

I did not kiss her back, but I didn’t knock her off me either. I could not breathe.

“What?” I asked. My voice was not raised but instead had dropped to almost a whisper.

“That was a job,” she said. “I’m through.”

She smelled like vanilla and ripe flowers and I gently pushed her to the side and stood. She rolled onto the side of her butt and propped herself up with one arm, dark hair spilling over one eye. She drew some imaginary lines in the material of the old sofa. She sighed.

“Trey’s just a boy,” she said. “You playin’ with his mind.”

“And that made you want me?”

“Maybe,” she said, sticking the back of her thumb into her mouth. “Maybe I just wanted to fuck with you.”

“Get in line.”

“People always like to fuck with you?”

I nodded.

“Poor baby,” she said, withdrawing the thumb from her lips.

She picked up the remote and switched the channels, the high-pitched laughter of a sitcom filling the room. Three’s Company . She changed the channel again, soft music. A love scene. And then again, two people fighting. WWF pro wrestling.

“ Rockford Files comes on at six.”

Her eyes tilted up and met mine.

“Tell me how it worked.”