Elise Blackwell - The Lower Quarter

“I just don’t want to be having this conversation here and now.”

Marion understood that he hadn’t forgotten she was there. She wanted to be quiet for him, but her feet were tingling, one nearly asleep. The next time Clay’s father spoke — something to the effect of here and now being exactly how and when the conversation was going to happen — she lowered herself carefully and sat on a pair of shoes, knees bent to her nose, and wiggled blood into her toes.

To his father’s reiterated question, Clay answered, “I saw his picture in the paper. If he was in New Orleans to see a Fontenot, it certainly wasn’t me.”

“Swear on your mother’s grave that you did not see that man while he was here.”

“I swear on my lovely mother’s grave that I have not seen the vile Czech in this decade or in this country with the single exception of seeing his dead ugly mug in the Times-Picayune.”

“Your lovely blond friend — if I recall correctly, she and Monsieur Ladislav were acquainted previously. Perhaps they had an occasion to talk on his recent visit to our fair city.”

Marion couldn’t make out Clay’s response, which sounded like a series of spits, as though he were trying to get a bitter taste out of his mouth.

“And you would not be in possession of anything that may have been in his possession? Or perhaps your friend took possession of something that you know about?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Clay’s typing resumed, slower but the pace now nearly even.

“If that’s not true, you tell me now. Hell, I can fix it even if you killed that son of a bitch, but only if I know.”

“I understand,” Clay said quietly. “None of that was me. I swear on your wife’s grave.”

“That’s all I needed to know, but I think I will take you up on your generous offer to drive me downtown. If nothing else, it will give us a chance to chat a little more.”

Marion imagined Clay’s face, which she felt sure would be grimacing. She wondered less about what they were talking about and more about whether Clay’s answers would have been the same had she not been in earshot. His father’s questions, she was sure, would never have been asked in front of her knowingly. It occurred to her in a way that didn’t feel quite real that this might put her in danger, but she didn’t think that Clay would ever breathe her name aloud to anyone — not to protect her but to cover himself.

What disappointed her was to find out that rich people were exactly like she expected: unhappy but none the nicer for it. Just because they had troubles of their own didn’t mean they empathized with yours. This man’s annual cigar bill could probably have bailed out her family’s furniture store, but this was a man who would never give up those cigars.

“Father,” Clay hissed just as his father seemed at last to be leaving him alone, “you leave Johanna out of whatever business this is, or I swear — I swear not just on my mother’s grave but on every burial plot and mausoleum in this city — that I’ll put you in the ground next to her at my earliest opportunity.”

Even Marion could tell that Clay couldn’t make good on this threat, and that was her greatest disappointment: Clay himself. Her relationship with him required that he have power, real as well as the kind their fictions bestowed on him — the imagined derived from the real — and now she had seen him stripped of it. She had seen him weak and feeble.

Her initial angry fantasy of bursting from the closet, punishing Clay for putting her in there, for being that ashamed of her, evaporated and left behind only the saltier desire to leave quietly and not come back. In this arid space she felt something else: her aloneness.

She didn’t have family. She didn’t have anything with Clay. She didn’t have any career worth having. She didn’t have friends. Everything she had was borrowed or rented or otherwise temporary, and if she ever needed real help, there was no one she could ask and expect to come through for her. Her times with Clay had served to make her forget that — to sever her from her past and her small future — but he was right. They were nothing but pretend, had never been anything but that.

When the man told her he was a police detective, she was not surprised. He was, as Clay might have said, straight out of central casting, right down to the rumpled pants and hastily combed hair. He looked like a man who lived alone, a man married to a job that was hard enough that he felt justified in making use of its few privileges. In New Orleans that meant he was probably corrupt. Maybe a little, or maybe through and through.

He strode around her studio as though it were a property he owned but had never seen, switching off her music without asking and putting a hard gaze on Marion’s painting of the pawnshop.

“I’m very sorry to bother you,” he said in a way that not only wasn’t convincing but wasn’t even meant to be convincing.

Johanna liked that she knew where she stood with him; she hated false kindness and feared the dangers it represented. This man let her know almost directly that she should never trust him. “But you are interrupting my work,” she said, “so perhaps you could get to your point.”

He told her things that she already knew or had figured out. He told her that there had been a murder just around the corner, that a painting believed to have been in the deceased’s possession had not been found in the deceased’s possession, that he was investigating both crimes — the murder and the theft — and was wondering what she knew about either or both. “Given your line of work,” he added, which she was starting to think was a lot of people’s favorite phrase.

Choosing expediency, she performed one of her rare smiles and told him she didn’t know a thing about either, though it was the case that she had seen a lot of paintings since the storm, and he was welcome to look around and leave his card in case she thought of anything. “I’ve seen the same movies you have,” she wanted to tell him, though if she did she would omit that she’d watched those movies just to learn English and not because she cared for them.

“Who was this man, anyway?” she asked, aiming for simple neighborly curiosity. “A tourist?”

“No idea,” he said, making a show of going from painting to painting around half the room’s circumference. “What’s upstairs?” he asked.

She swallowed, controlling the muscles of her throat so the movement would not show. “It’s an apartment.” She chose the indefinite article carefully, acknowledging no possession. “All the art is down here.”

He stood in the center of the room, thrust his hands in his pockets, and glanced around again. He lifted his chin toward the window. “Mojo Lounge. Good place?”

“Great sandwiches.” Johanna produced another smile. “I never go in there at night.”

“So this fellow who knocked off at the Richelieu. We have reason to believe he might be from your part of the world. I brought a picture in case you might recognize him.”

“If you have no idea who he is, why do you think he’s from one place rather than another?” This time Johanna held back her smile, knowing it might look smug to offer it as she called this policeman out in a lie. “I only mean, if you found a passport or something, then you would know his name.”

“Confidential part of the investigation,” he muttered, with no real effort to sell his lie to her, meaning that he did indeed know who the dead man was. Elizam , she thought, or Clay . Or maybe it was even worse than that.