NO Quarter (13 page)

Their body language—especially Bone’s—told me that I was right in what I’d been thinking. Bone was starting to figure out how he felt about her.

Finally they came over together.

“Cops,” Bone said to me. “Actually—cop. A detective. Guy I know who knew where I work. He wanted to talk to me
...
about Sunshine. Thanks, Padre.” He picked up his glass, took a swallow. I noted that his hand wasn’t shaky. Neither was he giving off a panicky vibe.

Whatever had happened, he’d kept his cool.

“Detective Zanders. He asked me my whereabouts. Lucky the night manager was there at the restaurant, and was there two nights ago too, when Sunshine
...
well. You’ll be happy to know I’m not a suspect in her murder.”

He met my eyes. I nodded with a shallow dip of my chin.

Bone fished out a cigarette, but his lighter just threw sparks when he flicked it. “Dammit,” he muttered as Alex lit it for him.

My gaze shot significantly at her as she leaned past me, then I threw a quick questioning look at Bone.

It was his turn to nod slyly. He put an arm around Alex’s shoulders. “Alex,” he said, “I’m pretty wound up from this. Plus it was a rough night at work. Would you mind if I didn’t walk you home tonight? Let me call you a cab instead? I need to stay out a while
...
”

I moved away to let them talk in private. Bone had always insisted he and Alex were just good friends, but to me, it looked like something more, even if he wasn’t aware of it. He was very protective of her, and she always seemed to be there for him.

A few minutes later Padre phoned for a cab. A few minutes after that the United rolled up to the curb and Alex went out after kissing Bone on the cheek and waving a big, general goodbye. The building that housed both their apartments was somewhere on Burgundy, more toward the quiet residential end around Esplanade. Quiet, yes, but also where predators will most often sneak through on the off chance of catching someone alone on the sidewalks. Alex, in her black pants and white shirt, was wearing “target” clothes: standard wait-staff wear, even though she was only a clerk in a gift shop. Therefore, the cab—even though home was technically easy walking distance.

Bone sat down next to me with a grunt. “Christ
...
”

“Have you told her anything about it?” I asked.

“About what?”

“It.”

“Oh.” He took a swallow of his drink. “No. Nothing about going looking for Sunshine’s killer. These last two days
...
they haven’t been fun. Alex and Sunshine were very close. They had this long-lost sister thing going. Before Sunshine
...
well,
shit!
Before Sunshine started changing.”

“Okay,” I looked at him. “Are you planning on telling her?”

He regarded me flatly. “Yes. Of course. Among other things, she’s got the right to know.”

“You think so?”

“I definitely do. The three of us were like family
...
once.”

I’ve had relationships, mostly of the hello/goodbye variety, including several here in the Quarter, but I’ve never been married, never had a female best friend. I could understand Bone’s loyalty to Alex because I was experienced and knowledgeable and full of aging wisdom—
ha!
—but I couldn’t
really
understand, you know? It was guesswork on my part.

Even so, I’m pretty good at guesswork. I figured that Bone had come to a sudden, dim realization regarding his feelings toward Alex, but he was still too caught up in his memories of Sunshine and their three-way friendship to see what anyone else could plainly see about Alex. She was completely gone on him, probably had been all the while when he was married to Sunshine, but she was far too good of a person to ever let it show. And she’d been there for him ever since Sunshine left him, being the friend he needed instead of pushing him to notice her. Probably suffering a little guilt for what she felt for him, too, and maybe even some misplaced guilt for the breakup of his marriage.

A damned complicated situation, one mined with all kinds of potential emotional explosives. Would Bone’s decision to include Alex affect what he and I meant to do? Would she get underfoot, become a distraction?

“So,” Bone drained his glass. “When Detective Zanders came around tonight to question me he pretty much confirmed, without actually saying as much, that the police haven’t made any arrests in Sunshine’s case. In fact, it seems that by questioning me they’re scraping the bottom of the suspect barrel. Which means they’ve got nothing, nada, nil. So
...
” His eyes went to the clock on the wall. “Ding, ding. Time’s up. Forty-eight hours, Maestro. What do you say?”

I sighed. “Sure you wouldn’t rather talk movies, have another drink? We were remaking
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
earlier. How would you cast it?”

“Cuckoo’s Nest,”
he said slowly.

It didn’t seem credible he didn’t know it. Actually it didn’t seem likely there was a movie made he wasn’t thoroughly familiar with. “Y’know, with Jack Nicholson
...
”

“I know the film. Some things shouldn’t be tampered with.” He shook himself visibly. “Well, Maestro. We start this now, together—or we part company, now, over it.”

I sat a moment, looking at him.

“You understand that if the killer’s not in the Quarter we don’t stand a chance of finding him. If he’s split town, or even if he’s gone to ground in New Orleans East, he’s as good as on the moon.”

Bone nodded. He was still waiting for my answer. But I’d already decided.

“Let’s get to work,” I said.

A lot of Quarterites draw the line in the sand at noon and will not cross it. Daylight is meant to be slept through, or so say those that work the graveyard shifts, or those that
can’t
stop drinking once they start and so do it
until the sunrise tells them to go the hell home. The bohemians like this schedule because it further distances them from the bourgeois lifestyles they so loathe.

Myself, I don’t like sleeping too, too late. It’s a lousy thing to stir in the late afternoon, brush your teeth, grab your shoes, and go to work.

Even so, when I slipped out of bed shortly after 10 a.m.—having been out until the not-so-wee hours with Maestro—it was a shock to my system.

Alex’s apartment had been dark when I’d come in last night, and there was no sign that she was stirring yet this morning. Hopefully she was still sleeping. Today was her day off. Which was why I was prowling out this early. I could take care of an item on the to-do list Maestro and I had concocted and be back about the time Alex normally got up. I had to talk to her. She had to know what was going on. That she had a right to know wasn’t just something noble-sounding I’d said to Maestro. It was the plainest truth. She had been Sunshine’s best friend, had been part of my family—while I’d had one. She didn’t show her pain and fury the same way I did, but I knew it was there. And I needed her to know that someone—that I—was trying to find justice for Sunshine.

I threw on some clothes and started to make coffee only to discover I had run out. I grabbed my boots from the living room, where Booboo lay splayed comatose across the arm of the couch, no doubt dreaming she was a great leopard lolling on a tree branch on the Veldt. Her black, triangular ears abruptly perked up, reacting to some noise in her dream-hunt, her head lifted, rolled, and she promptly and gracelessly dumped herself to the floor. I pulled on my boots and got out of there so that her indignity wouldn’t be compounded. I’ve no children and never will have, but Booboo satisfies whatever paternal itch I might be harboring. Doesn’t matter that my child is a bit clumsy.

Queasy heat and daylight were waiting for me. I swayed, realized I’d damned well
better
get some coffee in me if I meant to function at all. I started out toward the river. I could swing back around after, hit my target and then head home.

Workmen were on several different surrounding rooftops above, yanking up old shingles, driving nails. That much nearer the murderous sun, and not a lick of cloud in the sky today, and doing manual labor
...
dreadful. I could have a worse job than what I’ve got. I know that.

Some part of the Quarter is always under repair. I sometimes wonder if we’re not the proverbial grandfather’s axe. You know the one: the handle’s been replaced four times and the blade-head three, but we still call it the original axe.

I scratched the stubble under my chin. I hadn’t shaved yesterday or the day before, wouldn’t bother today. I don’t need to be unreasonably groomed for work.

It had been that unpleasant, cringe-inducing incident at Molly’s on Toulouse—that and my ex-husband status was what had brought Detective Zanders around to see me. That very last time I had seen Sunshine alive, a week and a half ago now, and we’d ended up screaming at each other, squandering that last moment that wasn’t going to come again. My fist bunched at my side as I slogged on.
Goddammit!
It was so hateful, so cruel. More than my ex-wife, she had been my dearest friend, and we didn’t get our goodbyes in, didn’t leave things on anything remotely resembling a kind note. It was, I knew, one of those ruthless little jokes of fate that would stay with me for the rest of my days.

Explaining the incident to Zanders, however, had meant recounting Sunshine’s condition that night—her high-tension anger, her shrieky mind-altered behavior. There was no way to pretty it up, to paint her personality that night as anything except that of a raving maniac’s ... and that hurt, describing her that way. It magnified how I already felt about the entire thing. It was like ... pissing on her grave.

Except, of course, she probably wasn’t in the ground yet. There was a grisly thought. I knew she had family—a mother anyway—in Chicago and presumed the
...
body
...
would go there.

Is this how it goes? Sunshine stops being Sunshine, and becomes, instead, a body; from animate to inanimate in my thoughts. Next? Sunshine
was
, not Sunshine
is
.

These were inevitabilities, of course. That was how it went, and, more to the point, how it was supposed to go. Humans must process the deaths of those around them. Sunshine wasn’t the first person I’d known who had died, though she was certainly the closest to me. She was also the only one I personally knew who had been murdered.

I generally frown on people that visit their places of work during their off-hours.
Don’t you have anything better to do?
Yet here I was, blinking at the familiar yet strange dining room currently awash in stark daylight and populated by just a few occupied tables, and this the decidedly subdued breakfast crowd.

I went to sit at the L-shaped bar. A minute later P.J. came up to the other side.

“Bone. Out in the daytime. And you haven’t burst into flames.”

“Hilarious. Coffee, P.J. Please.”

I’d always thought her a good waitress, too good to be wasting her time on this dead-ass shift. I dug out my smokes.

She set a hot cup in front of me. “Do you want some breakfast with that?”

I’d remembered to refill my lighter with fluid. I lit a cigarette. “This
is
breakfast,” I assured her.

The coffee was good. I sipped, smoked and generally stayed hid behind my sunglasses. I thought about what I had planned for this morning. It was quite an itinerary we’d devised, Maestro and me, though—credit where credit’s due—last night he had laid out the bulk of the scheme for locating Sunshine’s killer. Actually, it was less than a scheme. Nothing flashy about it, just solid logical avenues to pursue. And he had rattled it off so easily and precisely, like he was reciting the rules to a board game.
We could try this, we could look into that.
We had such-and-such in our favor, but these factors were against us.

We had moved off to a back booth of the Calf, and Padre had somehow magically orchestrated the crowd so that we were left alone. There we’d hatched and outlined and polished.

There was in the end, of course, no presto-quickie formula for locating someone the police were already actively hunting. Our man—and “man” we took on faith, owing to the murder method and to Mother Mystic’s information—had eluded the cops long enough to outlast the immediate attention of the media, and thereby the public. That first go-for-broke frenzy would die down. This wasn’t to say that the police would just drop it now, or that they were more interested in good press than in actually catching the murderer. But—and Maestro had said it at the outset—they had limited manpower and resources, and other cases would be taking up their time by now.

P.J. reappeared to refill my coffee. I was feeling a lot less zombie-like now.

“Uh, Bone
...
”

I glanced up. P.J. is my age or older, with that accompanying maturity that sets both of us apart from the world’s twenty-somethings. She had a pageboy haircut, and her eyes were regarding me
...
leerily, it seemed.

“What?”

“Did the cops really come by here last night and arrest you, or is that just crap?”

I suddenly felt my blood cooling. I would have just sat there staring at her from behind my shades, but luckily my smartass-retort chip activated. “Do I look terribly arrested this morning, P.J?”

Behind P.J.’s left shoulder, back toward the waiters’ station and the entry into the kitchens, I now noticed two heads peeking out. One was the dishwasher, a perpetually stoned gutter-punk-with-a-job; the other, one of the cooks. They were nudging each other with elbows, trading hushed, gleeful words, looking my way.

Oh, Christ. Like I needed this.

“You don’t,” PJ admitted, to my comeback. “Crap, then.”

I pushed up from the stool, dealt two singles onto the bartop.

“Coffee’s only a buck, Bone. And I’m not charging you for it.”

“Then put it all in your pocket. If we don’t take care of each other, who will?” And I was out of there, aware that yet another onlooker had come out from the kitchens, to ogle, aware of those eyes following me back out into the blast furnace morning.

I didn’t appreciate being gossiped about, but there wasn’t much I could do, and frankly, I should have seen it coming. The tale of Detective Zanders stopping by the restaurant to question me would, naturally, be passed on and embellished. You don’t have to go into a bar to make contact with the local rumor mill, I reminded myself. Still, as one who doesn’t listen to gossip, it irked me to be an
item
of gossip.

* * *

Sunshine, I knew, had moved sometime during the past two months from the apartment Alex had helped her find after our split. The second move had happened during that stretch when I was deliberately avoiding her. Changing addresses is nothing unusual here. Compared to the rest of the city—though certainly not to, say, oh, San Francisco—rents are steep in the Quarter. Your basic working class Quarterite might vacate his or her premises for a number of reasons. Landlords renovate buildings, raise rents, might even turn your place into condos. I had been lucky. Two years at the same apartment, still paying the same monthly rent.

Quarterites stop being Quarterites when they bail out to go live in the Marigny or Uptown or other neighborhoods where you can rent bigger places
cheaper. I just don’t get that. New Orleans is hardly an earthly paradise. If you’re not going to live in the Quarter—which is undeniably exotic and interesting and unique—then you might as well be living in San Diego or Allentown or Knoxville.

I turned off Decatur at Barracks and started following it away from the river.

I didn’t know why Sunshine had moved, and I wondered now, with that same squeamish feeling of betrayal I’d felt with Detective Zanders, if her drug usage had been wrecking her finances. I still didn’t know how heavy she’d been into what. I knew she liked pot and painkillers, didn’t know if there were other things. Despite an adulthood of boozing and cigarette smoking, I wasn’t versed in the peculiarities of narcotics. They were expensive, you could get arrested for possessing them, and you had to associate with riffraff to keep yourself supplied with them. That much I figured I knew. I’d never been tempted to find out more firsthand.

Sunshine’s place was in the eight
...
no, nine hundred block of Barracks. I remembered pouring her into a cab one night, out of the Shim Sham club, hearing her garble her new address to the driver. I couldn’t recall the exact number, but I was pretty sure I could find the place.

Barracks’ nine hundred block had a park along one side of the street—the Cabrini Playground—though it had no actual playground toys. It was mostly a big open dog park surrounded by a tree-lined, open-work fence of wrought iron and brickwork. Inside the park dogs chased Frisbees and owners mingled and picked up after their pets. That made my job easier. I blended in as just one more Quarterite out for a stroll. I walked slow—not unusual since nobody hurries in the summer heat unless they’re looking to keel over.

Along the side of the street opposite the park there was a dry cleaner’s, a used bookstore that Alex—who reads at an inhuman speed—was keeping in business, and several residences. I eliminated those that appeared to be single-unit dwellings, which left a building that appeared to contain a number of apartments.

I paused on the sidewalk, taking my time getting out a cigarette and lighting it. Meanwhile, I eyed the place, memorizing details Maestro had said to look for. Four buzzers, that meant four units. A steel security gate over a wood interior door. You’d need two keys just to get to the foyer, another to get inside your apartment.

The building showed its age—and there are places still standing here that were put up well before the Civil War—crumbling around the edges. But it
was that quaint French Quarter brand of decay. Very little in the Quarter looks trashy. Our neighborhood is a historical preserve.

I palmed moisture off my forehead, realizing I could probably wring a quart of sweat out of my T-shirt by now. A mule-driven carriage clattered by down Barracks. The driver, wearing a top hat and ruffled white shirt, regaled his two tourist passengers with grand tales of the Quarter’s yore, some of which might actually be true. It was a street scene out of another century.