Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead Part 8

He shook his head and squeezed the top of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, as if his sinuses ached. For the first time I noticed he wasn't wearing his wedding ring. "I lived in Mid-City, Claire," Mick said. "I lost everything."

"Oh," I said. "What about-"

"She left," Mick said. "She moved back to Detroit." He opened his eyes and looked at me. "Less crime."

"You're kidding," I said.

He shook his head. "Not kidding."

He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall.

Some people, I saw, had drowned right away. And some people were drowning in slow motion, drowning a little bit at a time, and would be drowning for years. And some people, like Mick, had always been drowning. They just hadn't known what to call it until now.

17.

I STARTED THE CASE of Vic Willing again.

Under a gray sky in Jackson Square there were three people reading tarot cards and palms, two people handing out leaflets about how to get to heaven or h.e.l.l, and about five men who met the description Leon had given me of Jackson. This was the man he said had seen Vic Willing the Thursday after the storm. Skinny guy, old, black, missing some teeth, gray and black woolly hair. Usually wore an overcoat and usually carried around one big bag of cans and another big bag of his stuff.

I looked at the potential Jacksons. Two looked mean. One looked crazy. One got up and walked away fast when he caught me looking at him. I didn't see Vic or Leon having a relationship with any of those men. That left one who could be Jackson.

I walked over to him and he smiled and held out a battered paper cup.

"Got any change today?" he asked with a thick southern accent.

"Sure," I said. I put a five in his cup. He thanked me.

"Are you Jackson?" I asked.

He said he was. I introduced myself and asked if I could sit down with him for a minute. He said yes. I sat down and explained to him who I was and what I wanted from him-an account of when he last saw Vic Willing. He told me more or less what Leon had told me: "It was Thursday," Jackson said. "Down by the Convention Center. The National Guard, they rounded everyone up and brought them over there. They didn't know any better. I mean..." He paused for a second. "You'd think after they realized, they would have stopped." He shook his head. "Anyway. The police was rounding everyone up and bringing them there. I was hanging out outside and I see Vic. He didn't know no one else there, I think-I mean, it was a lot of people like me. Not a lot of people like him. So I think he was happy to see me."

"Maybe he was just glad you were okay," I said.

Jackson wrinkled his brow, thinking about it. "Maybe," he said. "I mean, Vic wasn't the type, so much, you know, concerned with other people like that. But it did seem like that, so who knows. So anyway, he comes over and says Hey Jackson and I say Hey Vic, I'm glad to see you okay, which I was. As bad as that place was, I was happy to see everyone who was there, 'cause I knew they were alive, at least. So I was happy to see him too."

"Did he say where he'd been?" I asked.

Jackson thought before he answered. I liked this guy. He thought more in five minutes than most people did in a week.

"No," he said. "No, he did not. At least not that I remember." He looked at me and I thanked him and then he went on: "So I asked him if he was okay and he said yes, and he asked if I was okay, did I need anything, and I said no, thank you, because frankly I didn't think he had anything. I mean, money's no good if there's nothing to buy. I didn't understand people stealing TVs and things like that-I mean, you can't eat 'em. All we needed was food and water, and there wasn't any. Whole city cleaned out by then-restaurants, stores, everything. Kids went out, kids who knew how to steal, and they broke in to the stores and restaurants and got water and whatever else they could find and brought it back for the babies and the old folks. Some of those kids didn't eat nothing themselves, not one bite. But that was all done by then. There were people's houses but that's not something I would do. Not going in someone's house. Not at that particular point. Anyway. Vic asked if I was okay and I said yes, and then he asked how I got there and I told him. He was acting real concerned, you know, like he cared. He asked where the water was coming from, what was going on and all that. I told him, as far as I knew, the water was everywhere. And he asked which levees had broke and I told him what I knew, which wasn't much. Rumors were flyin' all over. People were saying crazy things, like people eating dogs and babies and things like that. But some of the craziest things turned out to be true, like people on the rooftops in Lakeview and down in the Ninth Ward, and just about all of Arabi and Chalmette being all wiped out. So, you know, I told Vic that. I told him everything I knew. Then we shook hands and he was off. No, actually, he gave me some money first. I told him I didn't need it. Nothing to buy. But he gave it anyway."

"So when you saw Vic," I said. "You're sure it was Thursday?"

"I am," Jackson said.

"How are you so sure?" I said.

He looked a little offended. "How you sure today's Tuesday?" he asked.

"Tuesday?" I said. "Tuesday? Are you sure? Because I thought it was Wednesday."

"Tuesday," Jackson repeated with confidence.

I looked around. A group of chubby tourists were about ten feet away, taking pictures of the Presbytere.

"HEY," I called out to them. "h.e.l.lo."

They looked around with a little fear and located me as the source of the sound. That did not rea.s.sure them. I'd dressed in a hurry and I wasn't at my visual best. I wore boots, jeans, two black sweaters, and a red vintage women's overcoat with an ermine collar that probably should have been retired. I was also suffering from an unfortunate homemade haircut/bleach job that had involved pinking shears. I could see how it didn't inspire confidence.

"What's the day," I hollered to them. They looked at each other and then turned away. You know how it is in the city. Those fancy slickers could be up to anything with their trick questions and clever tongues.

Jackson and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Tourists.

"The day," I yelled at them. "That's all I'm asking."

Finally one tall brave man in his fifties hollered back. "January ninth," he called.

"Thanks. But I meant Tuesday or Wednesday," I called out.

"Oh," the man said. "Tuesday." He gave me a smile full of pity and turned back to his group. Then he thought better of it and turned back around, smiled again, and came over and handed me a folded-up dollar bill before retreating back to his tribe.

"Bless you," he said.

"You too," I said, taking the dollar. The man smiled and left. Jackson looked at my new dollar bill. I put it in my pocket. Jackson frowned.

"Okay. It was Thursday," I said. Jackson nodded.

"How did you know Vic, anyway?" I asked him.

Jackson shrugged. "I know everyone around here. And everyone know me too. That's just the way it is. I go all over getting my cans. You see everyone that way."

I asked him if he remembered anything else and he said no. I asked if I could come back and see him again if I had more questions and he said yes. I gave him twenty dollars and left.

I believed Jackson. Vic Willing had been alive on September first. He hadn't died in the flood.

One cause of death ruled out. Only an infinite number of possibilities to go.

18.

LALI VALENTINE WAS the only decent alibi Andray had given me. Ms. Valentine's last known address was on Baronne Street in Central City, a few blocks away from the Garden District. This was where Andray was from, right on the other side of St. Charles Avenue from the District, like two sides of the same coin. Even the floodwaters seemed to have known the difference, slowing to a trickle by the time they reached St. Charles and coming to a gentle stop at Prytania Street.

When I got to Lali's address it was gone. A big pile of lavender painted wood shards lay where the house had stood. In between the shards I could see little bits and pieces of a home: a pink sock, a can of tomato soup, a Lil Wayne CD, a White Hawks record.

Two men were hauling everything out of a house down the block, and I went over and asked them if they knew Lali.

The men were filthy, covered in plaster dust and mold. One of the men took off his dust mask and frowned.

"Lali," he said. "Lali. I think she's staying with her cousins on Magnolia Street. I don't know the number. It's a blue house, right across from the projects. You can't miss it 'cause it's, like, folding."

"Folding?" I said.

"You'll see what I mean," he said. He went back to work.

I thanked him and went back to my truck, but then I stopped. On the corner was the truck with a cherry picker. In the cherry picker was a man doing something to a transformer-one of the little power boxes on top of a pole, twenty-five or so feet up. In some cities they were underground; in New Orleans they were above ground, wires strung around the city like a cat's cradle.

The man wasn't from Entergy, the idiotically named power company. Their people had blue uniforms. This man was in white. Another man was in the truck, operating the crane.

"Hey," I said to the man operating the cherry picker. "Hi."

He either didn't hear me or pretended not to hear me.

"Hey. h.e.l.lo."

No answer. I saw he had earm.u.f.fs on, the kind men use when they tear up the sidewalks.

I went back to the man who'd given me directions to Lali. This time his smile was less genuine.

"Excuse me," I said. "Sorry to bother you again. But I was wondering. Do you know what those men are doing over there?"

The man shook his head. "It's funny, I been wondering the same thing. They're not Entergy. And the phone company got nothing to do with the power, and that's what's up there-transformers. So no, I got no idea. What do you think?"

We looked at the men in white and then back at each other.

"I don't know," I said.

"I don't think it's anything good," the man said.

"No," I said. "Me either."

I thanked him again and went back to the corner. I watched the man in the cherry picker for a few minutes, but I couldn't quite see what he was doing up there. It looked like he was fixing something. But the power was still off for the whole block. Maybe he was trying to fix it.

Maybe. But no one was trying to fix the power anywhere else. And I doubted that one little transformer was why it was down.

Mysteries never end. But you can't solve them all. Not in one day, at least.

I drove toward the Magnolia Projects. The projects were closed. I didn't know if they'd been closed before or after the storm-like a lot of cities, New Orleans was shutting down its projects and sending people out into the world with Section 8 vouchers. Across the street was a blue shotgun house. The shotgun was missing its back wall. The side walls folded in where the back wall was missing.

On the porch was a young girl of maybe seventeen with a pretty face and black hair in a ponytail. Her legs dangled where stairs used to be. Next to her was a boy about twelve, just as pretty. The girl was smoking a cigarette, or a joint, pa.s.sing it to the boy, who had a few drags before handing it back.

I parked the truck and got out and walked toward them. The girl watched me and the boy watched a tree on the street. The tree lay on its side, roots sticking out like arms. The girl smoked the cigarette. Up close I saw it was long and thin like a hand-rolled joint, but brown and wrinkled, as if it had been wet. Whatever they were smoking, it smelled sour. It wasn't pot. The girl handed it to the boy, ignoring me.

"Are you Lali?" I asked the girl.

She looked at me.

"Lali?" I asked again.

She nodded.

I gave her my spiel of who I was and what I was doing and what I wanted. She looked down at the ground beneath the porch while I talked. She didn't seem to be listening. They pa.s.sed the cigarette back and forth.

"I ain't feel good," she said when I was done. "I think I'm sick."

Her accent was so thick I had to translate in my head as she spoke. She looked sick. She looked listless and her hair was dull and broken. If she was in Westchester she'd be on thirty different meds and seeing three kinds of therapists. Here, she got a folding house.

I asked her if she remembered seeing Andray that night.

"I dunno," she said. She didn't look at me. "Andray? s.h.i.t, I ain't seen him in, I don't know. Long time. During the storm? I see Terrell. That's who I see during the storm. Terrell and Trey. And Peanut too. I seen him."

I pulled myself up on the porch and sat down next to her.

"Andray might be in trouble," I said. "You might be his only alibi."

She laughed. It sounded like nothing was funny and nothing ever had been.

"Andray" she said. "That mothaf.u.c.ka."

The boy reached into his pants and pulled out a .44 Magnum. I watched him. He didn't point the gun at me or Lali. He pointed it at the tree. Lali seemed not to notice.

"s.h.i.t," she said. "I ain't remember nothing. That was f.u.c.ked up. I ain't remember seeing Andray nowhere."

"I'm not a cop," I said to her. "I'm trying to keep Andray out of jail, not put him in."

I explained the situation to her again. She didn't listen. She took a big hit off her cigarette and exhaled toward my face. It smelled sour and acidic.

"What is that, anyway?" I asked.

The boy shot the tree.

Lali and I both jumped in place. When the shot hit the tree a bunch of living things rushed out of it: squirrels ran in a panic across the street, pigeons flew away in terror. The boy fell back from the blast and a quick smile flashed across his face.