Authors: Ace Atkins
“ALIAS told you about him, right?”
I leaned in. His eyes grew larger and he moved within inches of the glass. He bit off a cuticle and spit it on the floor.
“He said his ear was bad, right? A really ugly left ear.”
“I can pay you only if the money comes back,” I said. “And I mean all of it.”
“It’s a lot, isn’t it?”
“How do you know?”
“I think he’s gone.”
“Who?”
He laughed.
“Give me something,” I said. “You want him in jail and you want some cash. What else are you going to do?”
“I read,” he said. “I like Dickens. Poor kids making good for themselves. Finding out they’re really rich. Class struggle.”
“Is that it?”
He leaned back into the glass and spoke into the two-way intercom. “Don’t fuck with me. I can ruin people’s lives.”
I waited. He took a breath.
“You know that hotel in the Quarter with the fence made out of corn. It’s iron but looks like stalks.”
“Sure, on Royal. The Cornstalk.”
The place sat about two blocks over from JoJo and Loretta’s place.
“There is a street right there. It’s Dumaine or St. Phillip. I don’t remember, but he used to live there. It’s an old apartment. Used to be one of the motels where the rooms open up outside.”
“Right.”
“That’s all I have.”
“A name?”
“Marion Bloom.”
“Worked with a woman, too.”
“That would be Dahlia. You find Marion, you’ll find Dahlia. She does the work for him when she’s not stripping. When it’s a man, she can turn any boy in about five minutes.”
“Pretty?”
“If you like that,” he said. “You’ll know her when you see her. Real tall with light skin. Almond-shaped eyes. Makes her look kind of Asian. She’s a real doll.”
“That’s it?”
“From what I hear, five thousand is good.”
“You know who they were working with?”
He shook his head.
“Just the job,” he said. “Dahlia talks in her sleep and I talk to those people.”
I got up to leave.
“You have a gun?”
I nodded.
“Excellent.”
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, I walked with Annie down by the Cornstalk Hotel and let her take a piss on the cornerstone of a building that sold gourmet dog bones for five dollars each. Annie was more of a Milk-Bone woman; I was sure of it. I took her by the leash and trotted her down St. Phillip and across Bourbon and back down Dumaine. Right as we were getting close to Royal again, I saw a two-story building with doors facing outside. Old clothes had been left on the crooked railing and junk cars stood in a small parking lot. A pile of air conditioners sat stacked three high on the bottom floor, where an old man in a plaid shirt beat them with a wrench.
I walked down Dumaine holding Annie’s leash, passing the open door of a voodoo museum where incense blew out. Inside, I could see dozens of lit candles and an old oil portrait of Marie Laveau.
I crossed the street and into the lot of the old motel. The old man didn’t look up from his work, he only kept cussing.
Annie sniffed his leg and he jumped.
“I’m looking for Marion Bloom.”
“No one lives here,” he said. “We’re renovating.”
“Did a guy named Bloom live here?”
He shook his head and patted Annie’s head. “Good dog.”
“This your place?”
“Yeah.”
“Was this a rental?”
“Yeah, but I’d let it turn to shit. I rented it out to a bunch of fucking losers. Had some guy leave his needles right out on the street; another guy took a crap in the sink.”
“Maybe he got confused,” I said. “Did you rent to a guy with a bad ear? You know, like wrestlers get. Lots of extra cartilage.”
He nodded. “I think he said his name was Alix.”
I laughed. “You know where he went?”
“No,” he said. “You a friend of his?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, he left a bunch of shit here. You’re welcome to it. If you don’t get it, I’m throwing it out. Just a bunch of bills and crap.”
I followed him to the back of the old motel, where he had a metal storage shed filled with lawn-mower parts, ratty mattresses, and boxes of soap. He left the door open and light cut in through the dust. I waited as he dragged out an old box marked
ALIX
.
I looped Annie’s leash into my belt — she kept pulling, smelling something that was dead — as I rifled through the box. Two pairs of Wrangler jeans, an Official Bourbon Street Drunk T-shirt, a box of Polaroid photographs, a loose-leaf binder filled with notes and Bible verses and bills addressed to Marion Bloom.
I searched through the photographs, finding a couple of Bloom at Pat O’Brien’s piano bar. Drunk with a couple of women at his side. His head was turned to the right and I saw the infamous ear. He was short with black hair, big eyebrows, and a larger nose. He looked like a rodent.
One of the women was a light-skinned black woman with long black hair. She wore something on her top that looked more like a bandanna than a shirt, showing her taut midriff. The bikini string from her underwear showed above her tight black pants. She had Asian-looking eyes and thick lips. Thin-boned and standing like a ballerina, with her shoulders back and her hips pushed forward. Her lips were squeezed together as if she were kissing the camera.
I grabbed the photos, the journal, and bills, thanking the man.
“You don’t want this T-shirt?” he asked, rubbing his neck. “Funny as hell.”
“You keep it.”
I tied Annie at an old iron horse post at the C.C.’s coffeehouse on Royal. The owner knew me because JoJo and Loretta used to hang out here a lot.
I bought a café au lait and read through Bloom’s journal. He’d been taking notes on how to be a minister, inserting important Bible verses to use and even a fake résumé of places where he’d “pastored.” Inside the notebook was a real estate booklet with a photo of an old Captain D’s restaurant near Fat City circled in red.
I looked through the pocket, finding some other similar properties and a couple of flyers from a travel agency about cheap flights from New Orleans to Tampa.
In the reverse pocket I found a tabloid-size little newspaper called
Big Easy Dreamin’
that advertised strip clubs and massage parlors and all-night XXX video stores. The paper had been folded onto the sixth page. The ad read for a club on Airways Boulevard called Body Shots, where you could drink tequila out of a woman’s navel for five dollars.
In the black-and-white ad, I saw a picture of the woman I figured to be Dahlia. She had her arm around another woman, both wearing bikinis and sombreros, inviting everyone to come on down.
Annie barked at some people passing by and then took a few laps from her water bowl.
I finished the café au lait and walked outside. I called Teddy and got him on his cell. It sounded like he was in his car.
“You know some strip club called Body Shots?”
He grunted. “Man, I don’t go to places like that no more.”
“Do you know it?”
“I can make some calls,” he said. “Sure my boys know.”
“I need you to take me there.”
“Thought you was leavin’ to see your woman in Mississippi,” he said. “Why you want to go out and party?”
“I think I found the folks who took ALIAS for his money.”
“What you mean?”
“A con man named Bloom and a stripper that goes by the name of Dahlia.”
“They workin’ with my brother?”
“I don’t know.”
“But they got the kid’s money?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Where you want me to pick you up?”
“The warehouse.”
“I TOLD YOU, I ain’t never been to this place Body Shots and never use to hang with Malcolm and ALIAS at the Booty Call,” Teddy said as we pulled away from Julia Street in his new white Escalade with gold rims and Gucci interior. “What kind of shit is that? That was some half-assed movie with Will Smith’s wife and I don’t do strip clubs. Not anymore.”
“ALIAS said you owned a table there.”
“That’s not true.”
“Teddy?”
“A strip club is like goin’ to some buffet where they show you the food but you can’t eat,” Teddy said, wheeling up Canal and down onto I-10, headed to Airline Highway, the beginning of old Highway 61. The old road now filled with abandoned roadside motels and diners and places once used by travelers before the interstate. Now it was empty pools and crack dealers and motel rooms rented by the hour. “You know? Like, look at all these beautiful steaks. And all that baked potato with sour cream and chives and shit. But if you try and get one mouthful, you get arrested. Ain’t that fucked-up?”
A 1950s drive-in movie theater sat between a decaying motel advertising AC and color televisions and a defunct steak house. The lot had been surrounded with wire but the tall screen and speaker boxes still stood. Everything still neat and tidy, only a few weeds growing through the cracked asphalt as if the owner waited for the day that the old highway would be back. Until then, it seemed the movie would remain private, only something a few could imagine.
“I just bought this,” Teddy said, thumping his steering wheel. “You like it?”
“Did you really need it?” I said. “Why don’t you put that money to some good use?”
“What, you a communist, Travers?” he asked.
“No, man,” I said. “I just don’t like to see a waste.”
“You remember that community center where we had Malcolm’s wake?”
“Sure.”
“Ninth Ward Records built that shit, man.”
“Good.”
“But you think all the jewelry and cars and homes and women are… what did you say? A waste.”
“Aren’t they?”
“See, you still don’t get it,” he said. “The culture of our world, right. That’s what my people want to see. They want to see you livin’ large and steppin’ out with the Gucci and Vuitton and all them suits from Armani and your woman wearin’ Versace and gold and platinum and diamonds.”
“Maybe you could be different,” I said. “Maybe you could set a better example for the kids who buy those CDs in Uptown, spending the only thirteen dollars they have on a Ninth Ward record.”
Teddy turned down the Master P and looked over at me, the highway whizzing past. “You ever been black?”
“One night,” I said. “But I was very drunk. Someone told me about it later.”
“No playin’,” he said. “You got to know what it feels like to walk into a restaurant or bar or Saks or some shit and have people not wait on you. Have security guards followin’ you while you tryin’ to pick out some goddamned gloves for your brother’s Christmas or bein’ asked to leave a movie theater ’cause you talkin’ too loud.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I said. “I never thought you wore blackness on your sleeve.”
“I wear something else, man,” he said. “I wear the car, the jewelry, the two-thousand-dollar suit ’cause that makes people respect me. When I walk into Canal Place, man, people waitin’ for me at the door. They don’t see black no more; they see green. You understand?”
Teddy parked close to the door of the strip club and we could hear the bass-driven funk rattling the corrugated tin of the building. He locked up the Escalade from his key chain and buttoned up his black suit.
He carried a carved wooden cane under his arm as we walked inside.
He didn’t even try to pay a cover.
The little black girl in leather pants and snakeskin bikini top just giggled when he walked in, and ran to get the manager.
“Clout,” I said. “You got it.”
“I got the cash.”
Teddy didn’t look around at the women or the layout, he just took a quick turn and walked up a small flight of steps where there was a circular table and booth. A card on the table read
RESERVED
.
“This is Stank’s place,” he said. “He called ahead.”
We took a seat. A waitress came over, tight T-shirt with no bra, hoop earrings, and bleached hair, and asked what we wanted. I ordered coffee and Teddy wanted some brandy. He asked for the best they had and I was wondering if Teddy thought the Body Shots had some kind of private reserve.
“What ever happened to that good-lookin’ girl you was seein’ when we played?” Teddy asked.
“The blonde?”
“Yeah.”
“She left me when I quit,” I said. “I wasn’t as good-looking without a salary.”
“Wasn’t into that whole cool blues professor shit?”
“She thought McKinley Morganfield was a former president.”
“Who the fuck was McKinley Morganfield?”
“Never mind.”
As the waitress laid down the drinks, the manager of the bar — a short, swarthy little guy in a black polo shirt and pants — took a seat with us. He shook Teddy’s hand and presented him with a few cigars. Teddy handed one to me but didn’t introduce us. I nodded at the guy and drank my coffee.
The song changed to “Don’t Mean Nothin’” by Richard Marx. I wondered if I’d just entered some kind of eighties time warp or if Richard Marx singing about having self-worth had somehow made him a patron saint to strippers.
“You like Richard Marx?” I asked the little manager.
“Sure, yeah,” he said, snorting, giving Teddy a “you believe this guy” look. “Whatever.”
“Beni?” he asked. “Stank drop some money here.”
“You know it.”
“He works for me.”
“I know.”
“Nick, show him the picture.”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the photo of Dahlia. The good one from Pat O’s.
“Know her?” Teddy asked.
Beni nodded. He looked up at me and back at Teddy.
“She don’t work that way,” he said. “The girl onstage. The little one with the chain-mesh bikini. You have an hour with her in the back room for free. On the freakin’ house. For him, how ’bout a hundred.”
“We don’t need our dicks jacked, Beni,” Teddy said. “We need a name.”
“She rob you?” Beni asked.
I shook my head.
“Cut you?”
I shook my head again.
“Don’t tell me you’re in love.”
“That’s it, Beni,” I said. “I’m in love. What’s her name?”
“He ain’t in love,” Teddy said. “What’s her name?”
Beni looked down at his hands and adjusted some horrible gold rings on his hairy knuckles. “How much?”