Authors: Ace Atkins
I tried to find what Teddy saw in the open field.
I think he was just numb.
“Sold Malcolm’s car today,” he said to himself.
“Jay Medeaux said you still believe he killed himself.”
He nodded. “I don’t hate him, Nick. I don’t. Even after what coulda happen to me with Cash when that money disappeared. Still don’t change nothin’.”
“I’m leaving town,” I said.
Teddy shook his head and drank down the rest of the Red Stripe in one gulp. He smoothly shifted from the diving board, stood, and disappeared back into the house. I followed.
The inside of his mansion was all slate and tile, all big chunks the size of flagstones in the Quarter. He had a couple of paintings of jazz scenes on the walls, a USS
Enterprise
–sized entertainment center with four big screens. Only one couch and a couple of chairs. Half of a furniture store display.
Teddy handed me a Dixie. “That’s your brand, right?”
I nodded.
“I need you, Nick.”
“Teddy,” I said. “You’re all right now. Talk to the police.”
“Naw, man. Not for that. I need you to hang. You know? Like we did back at camp. Remember how we used to watch them soap operas and shit, laughin’ at them women with those big titties who couldn’t act? Remember that dude who had that eyebrow and shit? You would turn the sound off and make up his voice. Man, that was hilarious.”
“I need to get back to ALIAS. JoJo can’t handle him on his own.”
He reached inside his bulky pants pocket and then pressed a brass key into my palm. He gripped my hand inside his meaty fingers and held me there, looking into my eyes. “There you go.”
I looked at him. He winked.
“It’s the bar,” he said. “It’s yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I bought JoJo’s back,” he said. “It’s yours. You were there when I needed you. You came through.”
“I can’t take that,” I said. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t help you.”
“How you supposed to know it comin’ from my own backyard?” Teddy smiled. “You my brother?”
I nodded.
He shook his head as two women in bikinis came up to him and started tickling him on his side. One of them, a black girl with ringlets of soft brown hair and softer eyes, had a squirt gun tucked into the elastic of her thong bikini. “Come on, Teddy,” she said, teasing. “You promised.”
The other one, a blonde in a red-checked bikini, reached for my hand, her stomach flat and hard. Brown eyes and smooth rich tan. I shook my head, wanting to stay.
“We cool?” Teddy asked. He nodded at me, waiting on my answer as if I had another to give. I nodded. The blonde smelled like cocoa butter and strawberries.
I heard his booming laugh, the splash of water from the pool outside, and smelled the hog meat roasting in the air. I remembered something I had not thought about for years. About ten years ago, we had this smart-ass full-back from Nebraska who thought he was the ultimate practical joker. Sometimes his jokes were funny, like putting child-size jockstraps in all the coaches’ lockers, but sometimes he crossed the line. His jokes a little too mean.
One season, after a few losses on the road, he started giving Teddy a hard time about never having a woman. He said if we won the next game, that he’d get Teddy a date with the best-looking woman in Louisiana.
We won, unexpectedly, in San Francisco. When we stepped off the plane, there was a beautiful black girl in a cheetah print coat and spandex pants holding a sign that read
TEDDY
.
Teddy, his long coat draped over his arm, stopped cold because he was the only Teddy on the team. He pointed to himself, a smile forming on his lips while the smart-ass fullback patted Teddy’s huge back and said “Good luck, Tiger.”
I drove down to JoJo’s and got drunk because that’s what I did back then, only to find Teddy waiting at my apartment when I got back. He sat on the curb in the parking lot, his head in his hands, sobbing.
He’d apparently taken the woman to Commander’s Palace and to the top of the Trade Center for drinks. He walked with her under gas lamps in the Quarter, holding her arm in the crook of his, telling her about growing up in the Ninth Ward with a brother he loved. He told her that she felt special, that he knew things like this just happened, and that maybe he was in love.
She just smiled at him, rarely talking.
She held his hand back to his car, where she unzipped his pants and performed acts on him that he’d only read about as a small fat child growing up in a poor neighborhood.
He kissed the top of her head and told her that he loved her.
In seconds, she sat upright in the car and fixed her coat, asking for the money that she was promised. Teddy asked what she meant and didn’t understand until she reached into his pocket, pulled out two hundred-dollar bills, and climbed out of the car.
Teddy cried and fell asleep on my sofa that night. In the morning, he was gone.
He never mentioned it again. Ever.
I drove back to the city and called Maggie on the way, letting her know I’d be late.
“What happened now?” she asked.
“I was paid for something I didn’t deserve.”
“What are you looking for now?”
“Respect for a friend.”
I NEVER HEARD BACK from the woman at Pinky’s bar in the Marigny. I never called her and she never called me. No messages, no letters. After Malcolm died, I didn’t see there was much point. Since that morning we’d found him hung in the tree, I’d been bothered. What had happened to the money and the people who’d been working with him? I never was much for neat endings and lost cash. Besides, I was a little pissed-off that Fred at Pinky’s never called me back. If only I’d let her tie me up.
I drove to Frenchman, parked on the street, and walked over to Pinky’s, the pinup girl winking in neon. It was about 2 on a Sunday and the same British bartender was sweeping up the floor, the radio tuned to some Iggy Pop as he danced with his broom.
When I walked inside, he turned down the radio and held the broom close to his chest. “We’re closed.”
“Back to see Fred.”
“Fred’s asleep.”
“Where?”
“Upstairs,” he said, giving me that “you dumb-ass” look. “Where else?”
He pointed to a flight of stairs hidden behind the bar by neatly spaced spindles. Above the rows of multicolored bottles sat a small shrine made from skulls, cow bones, and a large pentagram. Someone burned incense in the mouth of the skull.
I bounded up the creaking steps covered in mildewed red carpet and knocked on a door that was already ajar. Near the door was a neat grouping of old plaid furniture and a coffee table made with legs from a mannequin. The more I opened the door, the more mannequins I saw. Black and white. Male and female. Some with pants. Some with whips. Some with bright green wigs, others with dated sixties hair. Even one dressed as a nurse.
I knocked on the door, hearing a woman giggle in the back.
A teenage girl, who looked about fifteen, a little plump with black nails and cherry-red hair, bounded out of the room wearing nothing but a long Jazzfest T and said, “You’re not Bob.”
“No.”
“Fred?”
Fred emerged from the door wearing a pink terrycloth robe and holding a Snoball, eating off the top. Her white witch-blond hair packed on top of her head. She had a naked Barbie doll clutched in one of her hands.
“Yeah?”
“Nick.”
“Yeah.”
I smiled. She walked back into the bedroom. The girl followed, looking at me. I heard her say, “What’s with the dipshit?”
I crossed my arms on my chest and waited.
Fred came back. Her breath smelled like the Jack distillery in Lynchburg, a brownish coating on the Snoball. In the back, I heard the girl flip the channels from MTV over to a cartoon featuring fighting Japanese robots.
She looked up at me, red-eyed and sneering, and belched.
She stuck a piece of paper in my hand and stumbled back.
“Five hundred for this,” she said. “It’s all I could get you.”
“Let me see if it pans out.”
“It will.”
I nodded.
“I talked to Curtis and he knows where to find you,” she said. “Leave the money with Bob. If you don’t, I’ll have Stella pay you a visit.”
She laughed and left the room. She started giggling and I heard her jumping on the bed with the little girl.
Written in almost illegible cursive were the words
Alix Sentry. Orleans Parish Jail. Waiting for you.
I heard the Japanese robots kicking ass in the next room and watched the still mannequins watch me as I left the little apartment, not sure where this was headed.
THE ORLEANS Parish Jail stands right next to the police station down on Broad Street. Someone, probably another inmate, had decided to paint the cinderblock topped in concertina wire with faces out of those eighties Robert Nagel prints, the ones with the women with very white faces and black hair. I walked along the wall and found the front desk, where I checked in with a deputy. I told them I was a friend of Alix Sentry and we had a meeting set up.
He made a call to Sentry’s holding cell.
“You’re going to have to wait,” he said. “Takes us about thirty to bring the prisoners in.”
“What was he charged with?”
The deputy looked down at the computer screen. “Two counts of fraud and four counts of possession of child pornography. Oh, and drug paraphernalia.”
I smiled. “We’re not that good friends,” I said. “Really just acquaintances.”
I waited in a little family-room area close to the desk with two women and five children. One of the women was white and wore a black halter top cut away with straps in the back to show off a tattoo of a dolphin. Her long brown hair had been moussed and puffed up on her head circa 1987 and she’d painted her lips probably a half inch over where they ended. Her kids, I guessed, ran around the sofa while I watched an old console television playing
Wheel of Fortune
.
Her kids were scrubbed clean and wearing crisp T-shirts and new jeans.
The other woman kept trying to guess the answers with words and phrases that didn’t quite make sense. She became very frustrated when this guy on TV never said “Pretty in Link.”
A deputy called my name and led me through a metal detector. I had to take off my belt buckle and leave my keys in a little plastic bowl on the second try.
“Does anyone ever try the ole nail file in the birthday cake?” I asked.
The guy handed the keys back to me and scratched his hairy neck before leading me into an empty room filled with about ten plastic slots, little cubes where you could talk through the plexiglass. I was hoping to see the woman from
Midnight Express
pressing her boobs against the glass, but I was going to be alone with Alix Sentry.
The back door opened and a black woman deputy led out a man in handcuffs. His smile so waxen and stiff when he saw me that I had to look away from his face.
ALIX SENTRY STOOD about five feet eight, bald with just wisps of brown hair ringing his head, with small brown eyes and a pointed nose. He sat on the other side of the partition and folded his hands under his chin. He stared right through the glass, twisting his nose like he was trying to smell something. He wore an orange jumpsuit reading
ORLEANS PARISH JAIL
and watched me in silence.
An intercom system separated us. I waited about thirty seconds for him to talk while he stared.
“You’re a nice-looking man,” he said.
“Aw, shucks,” I said.
He smiled. I leaned back in the seat.
“Maybe we can write,” I said. “Pen pals.”
He smiled. “I’d like that.”
“Fred Moore call you?”
“She’s such a sick little bitch.”
“Everyone likes Barbie,” I said. “A woman on the go.”
“She likes real ones.”
I nodded. “You going to help or not?”
“Depends on what you’ll pay me.”
“Same as Fred, five hundred.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t give up Fred for five hundred.”
“I’m not asking you to give up Fred.”
He started playing with the zipper on the jumpsuit. “Isn’t this thing so ugly? I feel like I should be in the Ice Capades.”
“What do you have?”
“You know what I do?”
“Yes.”
“Then why would you think I’m so fucking stupid?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“You know what they arrested me for?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone set me up,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
He blew out his breath and slumped back into his seat with his arms crossed over his chest. He was so average that I could see him living in Metairie with a wife and a Volvo.
“I want five thousand.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Fred said you did.”
“Fred isn’t my accountant,” I said. “I can pay you if I find the money.”
“That’s a big if.”
I looked over at the female deputy watching us and up at the water-stained tile ceiling buzzing with dull fluorescent light. “You have something else to do?”
He looked at the back of his hands and stretched.
“He sold me out,” he said. “He’s the one that planted those magazines of young boys and all of it. I don’t play like that; I never have. He trashed my house and made a phone call to the police that I’d been harassing his kids. Said he was a concerned father and I’d been walking around in a Speedo giving out toys.”
“What did you do to him?”
He laughed. “Got somewhere first.”
“Where?”
“To this old woman,” he said. “She gave me her jewelry and furs. Made her feel better. I was her friend. He wasn’t.”
I nodded. The room smelled of Lysol and urine. Words had been carved into the stall where I sat. A hundred phone numbers and names, a couple of business cards of attorneys.
“I’ll pay two if I get the money back.”
“Five,” he said. “I know it’s worth that.”
I blew out my breath and rubbed my face with my hands. Stretched the legs.
“I’ve been led to you through a few people and now I feel like I’m bargaining for something that doesn’t exist. I don’t think you know shit. I think you’re bored and just want to practice up while you’re waiting for your court date.”