NO Quarter (4 page)

He rounded on me. “She was my
wife!
”

“
What?
” I couldn’t hide my surprise.

“We got divorced after we moved here. She didn’t want anyone to know.” He looked away. “The Quarter life changed her. Took her away from me. I couldn’t make it work for her. I’m not proud of that.” He looked up, met my eyes. “That’s why I have to see for myself.”

Things fell into place. The occasions when Bone had been the one insisting Sunshine be poured into a cab when she’d had one too many. That strange way he looked at her the few times they were both in the same bar—and the way she pretended not to notice him, pulling away from him—just a little—if he got too near.

“And that’s all the more reason to stay away from the crime scene.”

“Why?”

“Most folks around here may not know you two were married, but the cops will damn sure find that out. They’ll also be keeping track of anyone who shows their face down there. You think it won’t send off alarm bells if the ex visits the crime scene? Do you really want to become the prime suspect? You’re already likely to get questioned once they discover your relationship.”

“So?
I
didn’t kill her.” But he didn’t seem to like the notion.

For me, avoiding the police is a matter of course—and good sense. I put a hand on his shoulder, this time to show support. “Look, Bone. Go back in, sit down. Get a drink. I’ll go find out what’s happened. But I’d advise you to start getting used to the idea of Sunshine ... being dead.”

He was thinking it over, looking like he really needed that drink, when a cheerful voice hailed us. “Hey, you two!”

It was Bone’s friend, Alex, coming across the street from Pat O.’s, still in her work uniform. She obviously hadn’t heard. I used the distraction to do a fade, throwing her a quick wave. Bone could pass the word on to her. I set out toward the river.

* * *

I’d left my drink on the bartop and the heat was terrible, but good deeds are their own punishment.

The Moonwalk runs along the Mississippi River for about three quarters of a mile from midway through the Quarter to the Aquarium of the Americas and Riverwalk shopping mall. It sits on the edge of the river, just beyond the levee wall built to protect The Quarter from floodwaters. Among New Orleans’ quirks is that the city is several inches
below
sea level. The Moonwalk’s west end, by the paddlewheel riverboats and the Aquarium, is well-lit and patrolled by bored security men on electric carts. It’s popular with lovers and people looking for a pleasant stroll toward Canal Street. In the summer, the breeze off the river makes it about the coolest place to be found in the Quarter, if you don’t count the air-conditioned bars.

Though pleasant by day, the other end is poorly lit at night and tends to attract only those who don’t want to be seen. Wiser heads tend to avoid that area after the sun goes down.

I was curious to find out exactly where it was on the Moonwalk that Sunshine had met her untimely end. She knew the “safe zones” as well as any other Quarterite.

Unlike Bone, I didn’t doubt the rumor. Grown men will gossip like hens about who’s sleeping with who, who made a drunken ass out of himself and so on, but news like this wouldn’t travel unsubstantiated.
Somebody
had actually seen Sunshine’s body, probably after the police arrived, before they covered her up and hauled her away.

If she was still lying down there by the river, though, Bone didn’t need to see it. He was wound up, ready to do something stupid, and stupid could take a lot of unproductive forms. I didn’t want him getting in trouble. My protective instinct had kicked in surprisingly strong, and I still wasn’t sure why.

The nearest point of the Moonwalk was only about three or four blocks away from the Calf, if you count Jackson Square as a block. I wasn’t about to go to the river myself. I’d just as soon have the cops notice
my
face as little as possible. Starting across the Square I could see the cluster of blue-and-whites gathered across Decatur, next to the Jax Brewery. That was down near the Moonwalk’s east end.

I turned to wander casually across the Square and spotted a familiar face. Despite the hour, Rose was still manning her table, along with a few other psychics and artists. Anyone who thinks that street entertainers don’t work should come down to the Quarter and note how many of the artists, mimes, and tarot readers are still at it in the wee hours of the morning, long after everyone except the graveyard-shift bartenders have called it quits.

“Hey, Rose.”

“Maestro!” She scooted around her table and greeted me with a warm hug. I allowed myself to enjoy the moment. I normally don’t like being touched, but I make an exception for hugs from the fairer sex. “You’re okay? Those guys
...
”

“Realized they made a mistake.”

She stepped back and gave me a measured look. “You didn’t fight some crazy sword duel, did you?”

“Would’ve been kind of difficult with a pool cue. We had a nice chat, shook hands, and went our separate ways.”

She seemed a little disappointed. “Still, it was kinda nice to have somebody come to my rescue. It’s more than that poor girl got.” She gestured across the street toward the Brewery and the gathering of police vehicles. “Murdered. They say some voodoo cult may have done her. Stabbed her and then held some kind of ritual with voodoo dolls and liquor and a couple of dead chickens. ‘Course, it’s just another crime stat for the Chamber of Commerce to play down.”

“Any word on who?”

“Word is it’s Sunshine. You know, the little blonde waitress from Big Daddy’s?”

It’s an exaggeration that everyone in the Quarter knows each other, but not much of an exaggeration. No six degrees of separation here. More like a degree and a half.

“Yeah. I know her
...
knew her. Damn. She was a nice kid.”

“Well,
nice
don’t cut it for armor around here.”

“Nothing much does except for maybe eyes in the back of your head. Did you see her before it happened?”

“Not that I know. I had a couple of readings so I wasn’t watching real close, but I don’t think she came by here.”

“Too bad. Well, I just wanted to check up on you. Watch yourself, okay?” I started to leave.

“Hey! I owe you. How about a quickie reading?” She stepped back around her table and reached for her cards. “On the house. Payback—for saving a foolish damsel in distress.”

I hesitated for a few beats. Normally, I avoid the cards. If anything, these days I believe in them too much, and sometimes getting a warning in advance only makes you so wary and nervous that you end up precipitating the very thing you’re trying to steer around. Still, turning down a free anything from someone you know in the Quarter is a sure way to ruffle feathers, and if she felt it would balance the scales, I owed her the chance.

“Sure. Why not?” I slid into the customer’s chair, trying to appear casual. “So what was that guy mad at you for, anyway? Did you get his reading wrong or something?”

“No.” She started shuffling the deck. “Problem was I got it
right
. Cards told me his girl was steppin’ out on him. I told him. He insisted I was full of shit—refused to pay. I let it go. Then, when he found out it was true, he came after me. Said I put some kind of mojo on her to make it happen.” She snorted. “And some people think denial is a river in Egypt!” She set the deck in front of me.

I did two fast cuts and set it back on the table. Like I say, I believe in the cards. Shuffling doesn’t really do much. If they have something to tell you, they’ll rearrange themselves to deliver the message no matter what you do to the deck physically.

Rose peeled off the top three cards one at a time. It’s an old quickie reading she’s done for me before, considerably faster than the complicated spreads she does for the tourists.

“The Moon,” she said as she glanced at the first card. She knows I can read the cards myself, but is in the habit of doing her readings out loud. “A dangerous undertaking.”

I silently absorbed that.

The Two of Cups was next.

“Lovers or partners,” she pronounced, “someone new in your life, or an old friend at a new level of awareness. Looks like it will work out pretty well.”

I nodded.

When she turned the third card, we both stared in silence for a moment.

The Nine of Swords.

People who don’t know the cards are always afraid of the Death Card. They shouldn’t be. All it means is the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one. The Nine of Swords, however, is the one I always dread. I stared at the card, a very distressed man in bed with nine swords around him—the Lord of Despair and Cruelty. Also known as the martyr’s card, it can mean many things, both internal and external, almost always bringing changes borne out of conflict and suffering. All swords indicate some level of change, but the nine of swords usually involves a
lot
of change. I have reasons for wanting things unchanged, and I’ve never been a big fan of suffering.

“Well
...
it could mean worry or anxiety,” Rose suggested, then glanced up guiltily. Never kid a kidder. We both knew it could also mean downfall, death, or imprisonment.

“Yeah. Well, thanks, Rose. I’ve got to get going.”

I stood up and put a fiver on the table. Even if the service is free, it’s always good to tip well. Besides, the reading had been interesting. I wandered on and hung a right onto Decatur Street as if that had been my destination all along.

I considered the area where the police lights gathered. That was important. I knew where Sunshine worked and vaguely where she lived. The end of the Moonwalk nearer to the French Market was not along any remotely logical route from her work to her home. Whatever happened, it probably wasn’t random violence, like running into a mugger. It looked like a deliberate act aimed at her. What’s more, odds were she knew whoever had killed her. Why else would she travel so far off her normal beat? But the whole voodoo thing didn’t make sense. So far as I knew, Sunshine had never been involved with any of the religions in the Quarter. She certainly never mentioned any interest in
Voudon
. Had she gotten mixed up with some kind of cult? Was this whole thing some ritual gone wrong? If so, the Moonwalk seemed a particularly poor location for it. And from what little I knew of the tradition, stabbing was not normally a part of any of its standard practices—but then, neither was murder.

When I got back to the Calf after making a long circle, Padre was waiting for me with a slip of paper. He didn’t look happy.

“Found this after you left.”

He handed me a folded piece of paper with
Maestro
scrawled gracefully across the outside.

“I let the new kid, Hound, watch the bar for me for a few while I grabbed some stock from the back. Says some girl came by around eleven looking for you. She left this, said she had to go. The kid forgot about it until I found it under the edge of the register.”

I unfolded the white paper and read the brief note scrawled inside:

Maestro, we need to talk.

It’s important. Please call me.

Sunshine

I stared at the signature. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. My fingers felt like they’d frozen to the paper.

Tripwire
...

I ordered two rummincokes from Padre, made sure Alex got hers to her lips. Her small fingers wound tightly into mine as we sat on our stools. Her eyes were wet,
and I kept thinking irrelevantly, inappropriately, about Nicki back at the restaurant, pissed off and crying. Impotent anger. Maybe a special kind of anger only a waitress or waiter knows.

I wasn’t crying. I didn’t know if I would later on or not.

I had stammered out the news to Alex—babbling but hitting the high points.
Sunshine
and
dead
and
stabbed
. And as I did, I realized it was true, all true. Maestro was right, and this wasn’t a rumor.

Sunshine had been murdered.

Or, less passively: Someone murdered Sunshine.

“It’s
...
awful,” Alex choked out the words.

“Yes. It is.”

I had known Alex since before Sunshine and I were married, back in San Francisco. Alex was a transplant herself, from the Southwest, the desert. She’d come alone to California, fleeing the smoldering rubble of a divorce.

She had become Sunshine’s best friend. She was the only one who’d stayed in touch after we’d cleared out of San Francisco. We had provided a safe landing for her when it was her turn to do the same. She’d crashed on our couch, and then she’d moved into the same Burgundy Street apartment building where I still lived—where Sunshine and I had lived together. Sunshine had suggested that she rent the empty apartment in our building.

No, she didn’t
suggest
it. She’d insisted on it.

We three had been such good friends—but what kind of a friend had I been to Sunshine? What kind of husband?

The regulars at the Calf were all talking about Sunshine, naturally. Trading stories, reminiscing, but, really, trying to keep the dead alive a little while longer. That’s another thing you do at times like these. Of course to them, she was just a friend from the Quarter. They had no idea what she had been to Alex—or to me. Some of the others might have known her, but we
really
knew her. It wasn’t cheap sentiment we felt. It was genuine loss. At that moment I
needed Alex and she needed me in a way that was deeper and a little different from what we had known before. Death, when it hits near enough, upsets all arrangements. You reevaluate, scared and desperate, and everything around you suddenly seems doubtful. Tenuous. The relationships you have suddenly take on an increased intensity.

Alex felt it. So did I.

I was in my mid-twenties when I met Sunshine. We were both working at a hipper-than-thou dance club in San Francisco’s South of Market district. I was bar-backing; she was a cocktail waitress. I was probably the only straight male there that didn’t hit on her mercilessly, which was probably why she turned to me for friendship. I’d be there while she waxed delirious about the latest love of her life, the one who was going to make the difference, the guy who was going to seriously straighten her shit out. I’d still be there two weeks later, a sympathetic ear, when the romance went completely to hell.

For her part, she kept me company when I wanted to go catch a movie or shoot pool or abuse my liver. At first, we didn’t date. I didn’t want to be dating. I’ve never had a flair for it, for the formal courtship rituals.
My first marriage had ended not too long before that in a finale that combined the apocalyptic elements of
Play Misty for Me
,
End of Days
, and the bloodbath at the end of Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
. Sunshine had demonstrated to me, without having to try, that all women weren’t emotionally manipulative furies. So, Sunshine and I nursed each other. She was witty, compassionate, alluring, energetic, and intelligent, though definitely lacking in romantic judgment. We became friends, the longtime kind, the ones who’ve hurt together—the kind of friendship in which lasting bonds are made.

I sympathized with Sunshine. For her incompetent upbringing by hippie parents—“Sunshine” was her real middle name, but her first name was even worse—and for her unbroken run of bad luck with guys, but more because she was a decent person.
Decent.
One not so self-involved that no one else’s pain mattered. One who wasn’t overly sullen or apathetic or surly or stupid or any of the other traits that our generation and the one that followed were said to possess. She was certainly more generally compassionate than I’ve ever imagined myself to be. We didn’t fall in love, exactly, but it seemed that all our other relationships were such disasters that we were better together than apart. We understood each other.

So we got married. Not out of passion, but because our relationship worked. I wanted a permanent ally, someone I could huddle with while the rain was falling. She was that person. I was absolutely sure of it.

Then, somewhere along the way, my empathy with Sunshine had slipped over a barely definable line. I fell in love with her, and suddenly, our comfortable relationship didn’t work anymore. It had been based on friendship and respect, but not passion.

I’d changed. She hadn’t.

Even so, we might have made it work if not for San Francisco. That city is even less sympathetic to young newlyweds than to singles. No love lost there. Being native to the city meant nothing, not if you were trying to find a decent apartment without a six-figure income. Just a place to
live
, basic shelter, with running water and electric lights and a mailbox. Nothing extraordinary, understand, nothing unreasonable. But insatiable landlordish greed made for insanely high rents, which much richer people were willing to pay, and the whole sick, sadistic game just wore us out. So we left, disgusted. San Francisco rejected us like a pair of bad kidneys. We’d decided to try to make a go of it in New Orleans.

The best revenge is living well. We rented a spacious apartment here in the Quarter, with a monthly rent that couldn’t buy you squatting rights on somebody’s back
porch
in San Francisco! Last laughs sound something like this:
hahahahahaheeheehahaha
...

The best revenge
...
revenge
...
tripwire
...

Sunshine had picked out the apartment. We were set. Life was good.

Ha! The wheels were already coming off the bus before we hit New Orleans, long before Alex left San Francisco to join us in the French Quarter.

Alex wiped her eyes with a small square cocktail napkin and numbly picked a cigarette from the pack she’d laid on the bartop. I lit it for her, lit one of my own. Alex is a head shorter than me and, if anything, scrawnier. Sunshine used to joke that Alex and I looked like matching scarecrows.

“She was my ‘little sister.’” Alex’s voice had a ragged edge to it. “If not for Sunshine—and you—I’d still be stuck in San Francisco. Probably homeless by now.”

I squeezed her hand. When , Alex had called us from San Francisco, I’d picked up the phone. I’d immediately recognized the taut, raw-nerved desperation in her voice even before she told me she needed help. She was twisting at the end of her rope, mentally and financially. She was going broke paying $1150 a month for a crummy studio apartment. A
studio
! That’s a goddamned broom closet with a bedpan in San Francisco and doesn’t come furnished. And she wanted
out
.

Sunshine had insisted that Alex join us in New Orleans. She’d had a blast showing Alex around the Quarter and teaching her the ropes. We had only been living in town for a few months, but Sunshine acted like a native.

I was so proud of how quickly Sunshine adapted to New Orleans, to the French Quarter in particular. It was harder for me. She seemed to fit right in.

It was probably
—no, most certainly—
too good a fit.

They call New Orleans the Big Easy, and it is that. Jobs and relatively cheap apartments are easy to find, even in the Quarter. The pace is Southernly slow, and there’s the general sense that no one expects much of you. It makes for a kind of slacker’s paradise. Sunshine landed a gig waiting tables on St. Louis Street, and I snagged one for myself just off Bourbon. Fine? Dandy? Not entirely. As we settled into the rhythm of the Quarter, Sunshine began to change.

She was better off here, I knew, than in San Francisco. Without the pressure of worrying about simple survival, I could see her relaxing, the knots untying. And it was nice, very nice having her in my life. We had a chance to actually
be
a couple. She seemed to be happy
...
but we really hadn’t left our problems behind us.

Patterns repeat, of course, and Sunshine had always been drawn to men—especially the bad ones. And the Quarter is full of temptation for those who look for it. I knew her eyes were wandering, like a kid’s in a candy store. As our lifestyle adjusted to the nocturnal schedule required by our jobs, she began to stay out later and later, often coming home after sunrise. She stopped watching movies with me, and she slept most of the time she was home. Bit by bit she pulled away into the night, until, not long after Alex had settled into her own place, Sunshine asked me for a divorce.

“It’s not about you, Bone,” she’d insisted. “I just need my own space. I need to find myself, find my passion. I feel like I’m tied down. We’ll still be friends.”

Those dreadful words. The masquerade ended. The lights came up; the masks were set aside.

I told her that I loved her. She told me that she knew it, then she smiled, kissed me on the cheek, and walked away.

So we divorced, almost as quietly as we had married. We both agreed to keep tight and maintain our friendship. For a while, it worked.

Our marriage had not cured Sunshine’s addiction to men, so I wasn’t really surprised when after a month or so she found the same sort of relationship troubles here that had plagued her back in ’Frisco. Bad boyfriends were her habit. It was another of her habits, though, that started causing me to worry.

I knew that Sunshine had been a drug user of the recreational sort. Pot, painkillers, nothing stronger I knew of—nothing that showed on the surface, anyway. But if she used while we were married, she kept it quiet. She never brought any dope into our apartment. Her life had never derailed because of it, no more than alcohol has destroyed my life. Yes, I drink. No, alcohol doesn’t take the higher moral ground over narcotics. Yes, a lot of the Quarter’s social scene revolves around the bars, and the Quarter is where I live. Why do you ask?

After we split, I started hearing through the rumor mill that she was getting a bit heavier into the drug scene. I didn’t like that—didn’t like that I was
hearing
it, that is. I try to avoid bar gossip, but it’s frankly impossible. Drama is a way of life for some Quarterites, usually those with the least going on in their lives. If they can’t find that drama or melodrama, they invent it, and they’ll do every damned thing in their power to make you a part of it. Or at least to listen to them and take their side.

This time they were talking about her, Sunshine, which was disturbing, but it was also, incidentally, a sure sign she’d been absorbed into Quarter society. She left the St. Louis Street restaurant for Big Daddy’s. Again, I wasn’t surprised. People bounce around in the business. No big deal.

I wasn’t seeing so much of her. It was a slow change, slow enough that I didn’t realize it right away. Maybe I didn’t want to think she was ducking me
...
actually, that’s bullshit. I didn’t want to think
I
was doing the ducking—which might well have been the case.

When I did see her, she was
...
off. The rumormongers had it that she’d become a full-blown druggie. I made an effort not to be influenced by that. It was tough. She wasn’t looking right. Behavior, familiar mannerisms, everything about her skewed just so ... out of adjustment. I tried to get her to open up. I did the good friend shtick. But she laughed it off, changed the subject. Something wrong with the laugh, too—brittle, off-key. I persisted and got told, bluntly, to give it a rest. That I had lost the right, with the divorce. That stung, especially since our parting hadn’t been my idea.

Her behavior continued to deteriorate, though I couldn’t have said just how, exactly, she was different. Even those changes I could see weren’t extraordinary, weren’t really cause for alarm. But she felt wrong to me. I saw her less and less.