Authors: Ace Atkins
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Teddy said when he met him at the foot of the escalator. The PA system played some Sting from his
Live in Tuscany
concert, one of Trey’s favorites.
“He’s my friend.”
“Just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Trey tried to look concerned at Teddy’s sweating and paranoia while they walked outside to the parking lot and stuck his suit in his trunk. Make him think he was flipping out about nothing. They decided to walk over to Bourbon Street and Redfish. Teddy said he couldn’t breathe in the car.
“Are you doing okay, man?” Trey asked as they walked around the old marble Customs House. It was dark now and he could hear all the dance music and that awful Cajun stuff starting up down on North Peters and through the Quarter. Tourists in tennis shoes and shorts, carrying cameras and cups of Hurricanes, walked by the old brick storefronts and under wooden signs flapping in the warm wind.
“Yeah,” Teddy said, huffing and puffing down Iberville and crossing over Decatur Street. “Just got some things on my mind.”
“Your buddy Travers stopped by,” he said.
“You help him out?”
“Yeah,” Trey said. “Gave him what I legally could.”
“Good.”
Some homeless man wandered over, begging them for a few bucks. Said he needed some bus fare, behind him was the red curved neon of an all-night bar.
Trey laughed at him. “Get a job.”
“Can’t,” said the toothless man.
“Sorry,” Trey said. “Jeez.”
Teddy didn’t even notice. He just had his big head down kicking absently at a dirty Lucky Dog wrapper filled with mustard and stinking onions.
“You believe ALIAS?” Teddy asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know him that well.”
“I need that money.”
“I know, Teddy.”
“I don’t think you do,” he said. “Ain’t worried about creditors, man. See, I borrowed some money from Cash.”
Trey stopped walking by a used bookstore. He put his hand on Teddy’s shoulder. “What’s going on? Talk to me, dog.”
Trey knew Teddy liked when he said “dog.” Made him seem like a true Ninth Warder.
Teddy told the whole story about why he’d gone to Cash for money for ALIAS’s video, said he thought they could make it up on the next record from this guy that Malcolm thought was so great named Stank. But Trey knew that Stank hadn’t even cut the damned album yet. They were already getting killed by the latest releases from No Limit and Cash Money. Last year Ninth Ward Records was making those guys sweat.
Teddy said he had till morning before Cash said he was going to kill him. Trey led him into the restaurant, where they took a seat near the bar and ordered. They didn’t talk until the waiter returned.
Trey took a sip of his dirty martini and looked concerned. Redfish had lots of chrome, yellow Christmas lights, a big fake oyster over the bar that had been turned into a mirror. Nice leather seats. It was all right to Trey, but he liked Emeril’s a lot more.
The waiter brought them a couple of plates of Oysters Three Ways: grilled, fried, and raw on a bed of rock salt. Teddy slurped his right off his plate, gobbling everything up just like the street hustler that he’d always been. Or maybe because he thought this was his last supper or something. Pretty weird. Of course Teddy wasn’t brought up with any class. He hadn’t gone to Metairie Country Day or gone to Vandy on an academic scholarship that his parents bought. He hadn’t spent his winters skiing in Vail or summers down in Baja sipping tequila and screwing girls from UCLA.
Teddy went to Freaknik in Atlanta and still paid women to be seen with him.
“Can we get money from anywhere else?” Teddy asked. “Did you check into the cars or the house?”
“Not in one night, man.”
“Don’t you know some people?” he asked. “People in Old Metairie. That kind of money like chump change to them.”
“Teddy, you are my friend. But it doesn’t work that way. I can’t just call up somebody and ask for a half a million. I mean, they’d think I was crazy.”
Trey stirred the martini with his finger. He knew he needed to call Molly, finally buy that sofa from Restoration Hardware, and maybe hook up with this gash who was in grad school at Tulane. A buddy of his had already fucked her. He’d buy her a drink and take her to the Hyatt or something. Heard she had an ass that just wouldn’t quit.
Teddy buried his head in his hands. The redfish entrée came and Teddy pushed it away. “Nick’s got to find it. He has to.”
Trey played with his drink more. Two women, dirty blondes in halters and fake leather pants, walked into the bar. Their boyfriends behind them. Couple of tools in cheap Gap shirts and tourist running shoes. Last year’s Nikes.
“I know this guy’s your friend, but who is he, really?” Trey asked, trying to seem interested in Teddy’s problems. “I mean, as a professional. He’s a teacher, right? My buddy Josh is a lawyer and has three investigators working for him. They’d do a better job. This guy doesn’t impress me.”
“Yeah?” Teddy said. “Nick once got this woman out of jail after forty years. Also took down that L.A. motherfucker that owned that Blues Shack club.”
“So he’s muscle?” Trey asked. “That’s not what we need. Let me get someone good on this. This guy, no offense, man, seems like a real loser. He was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon on it.”
“I have till the morning,” Teddy said, head up and watching Brill now. “Ain’t you listenin’?”
Trey shrugged. “Aren’t you above this thug shit now? You worked too hard. You don’t need people like that.”
“What you got goin’ on, Brill?” Teddy asked, looking Trey hard in the eye. He held his stare. “You wouldn’t want to see me lose, would you?”
“After all we’ve been through?” Trey asked. “We’re more brothers than you and Malcolm.”
“You still meetin’ with him tonight?”
“Should I cancel?”
“I guess not,” Teddy said. “Don’t have nothin’ to do with my troubles.”
Trey winked at him.
Teddy smiled. “You a hustla too, right?”
Trey smiled back and took a sip of the martini. “You know it, dog.”
I CHECKED WITH CURTIS at his house — and got nowhere — dropped by the warehouse and fed Annie, leaving on Cartoon Network for her to watch
Super-friends,
and headed out to a strip club in New Orleans East where I knew I’d find ALIAS. It was about eight o’clock and the sky turned black and purple on the horizon as I drove I-10 toward Slidell and found the exit. I passed an old Shoney’s and a now-defunct shopping mall that had become the place for local crack deals and gun-fights. The cops didn’t even like to patrol here anymore.
About ten years ago, New Orleans East was a suburb of corporate apartments and yuppie condos along with the usual strip malls and chain restaurants. But since the Hope VI federal housing initiative took off and local slumlords could get easy money through Section 8 housing grants, New Orleans East had taken over where the now-demolished Magnolia and Desire housing projects had left off.
But instead of brick and mortar sheltering the poor, it was Sheetrock and flimsy plywood — no apartment manager having to answer for shit while the slumlords grew rich and wrote off millions on their taxes.
The Booty Call Club was pretty much black-only with the loose gathering of basic out-of-town white businessmen with per diem cash to spend. Nothing special. A rambling building with no windows next door to a Denny’s. By the parking lot stood an industrial plastic sign of a cartoon black woman covering her breasts with a Mardi Gras mask.
The inside was dark, lit in a few areas with track lighting and neon beer signs. The air smelled like cherry incense and Pine-Sol. Toward a main stage where some woman was twirling on a brass pole to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” I found Malcolm sipping on a forty-ounce and smoking a Newport. His Saints jersey running down to his knees and his Timberland boots propped up in a chair before him. A couple of other teens I’d seen at the video shoot gathered around the girl’s stage and stuck twenties into her garter.
She was brown-eyed and had long curly brown hair. She had a little pooch to her belly and her legs jiggled when she danced. But the more twenties she got, the more she shook it.
I pulled up a chair — the sound of the funk deafening — and leaned into Malcolm. He gave me a pound and offered me a Newport from his pack, his cigarette catching in the side of his mouth by his gold tooth.
“Where’s ALIAS?” I asked. The music shifted to this old Prince tune about not having to watch
Dynasty
to have an attitude, and Malcolm ran with it, bobbing his head, cigarette dangling from his lips as he listened.
“You gonna get that man that took all that money?” Malcolm took a sip of the beer. He’d been smoking it up and his eyes were a little tight. He just kind of hummed each word out of his mouth. Told me he loved me. Loved me for helping his big brother out. He asked if I wanted a cigarette again and I said I did.
He handed me the pack.
“I know you always bummin’ off people, right.”
I appreciated the gesture; he was into respect. Last year when two shitbags had almost killed Loretta, the Paris brothers were the first at the hospital. Malcolm called me about every day after that wanting to know what he could do. He would’ve killed somebody if I’d asked him.
I took a cigarette and tucked the pack in my jacket.
“I need to borrow ALIAS.”
“Take ’im,” Malcolm said. “Boy played out.”
“Was Dio like that?”
“Dio was nothin’ but heart,” Malcolm said. I still saw the boy’s face in the hardened man. He still had the same soft eyes and nappy hair from when he used to come by practice with Teddy. Fifteen and running errands for his big brother.
Malcolm cupped a cigarette to his face, smoke fingering its way up over the lines and creases the last ten years had left.
“That what killed him?”
“I don’t know what killed him, man,” Malcolm said. He turned away and took a long drag off the Newport and a deep swig off the forty. “I always thought it was Cash that snatched his ass.”
“Looking forward to meeting him.”
“Be careful, brother,” he said. “The man could turn Mike Tyson into his bitch. He likes to make you bow down. Bleed a little bit to his respect.”
“You think Cash took ALIAS for the money?”
Malcolm shrugged. “Naw,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to ALIAS? Some white man worked him. That ain’t Cash. He don’t play.”
“So I heard,” I said. “What happened with Dio?”
His smile turned.
“Couple of men took him last year.”
“Stuffed him in a van at that Uptown club?”
He nodded.
“And you don’t think that’s connected to ALIAS?”
“Why would it be?” he said. “Some hustlers took him down. He’s dead. We’ll never find him.”
“Police said it was you.”
Malcolm stuck the cigarette in his mouth and inched closer to my face. He mouthed the word “Shit,” and turned his back to me. “Goddamn, I used to respect you,” he said. “You just like ’em all. Fuck this. I don’t care if I told Teddy to find you.”
He got up and strutted away, his football jersey un-tucked, and took a long swig from his forty before wrapping his long arms around two of the dancers.
I found and followed a hallway through a back room where flickered patterns of red and blue lights played in small, individual coves.
ALIAS lay on a round bed with a young girl, really beautiful with her long black hair partially covered in a black bandanna and long slender legs. She stretched out on top of his back, hugging him tight almost like he was a life preserver, as he — oblivious to her — worked out some aggression on a video game with dragons and knights.
“You ready?” I asked.
“You get what you need?”
“No.”
“I told you, Old School,” he said, pulling on his baseball cap. “You wouldn’t listen. These people done gone. No faces. No names. How you supposed to come through for Teddy? You best call him now and tell him to take a long ride out of New Orleans.”
“Maybe.”
“What else you gonna do?”
“I’m workin’ on it.”
“Better work fast.”
“Come on.”
He patted the young girl’s right hand that gripped him tight, her body prone on his, and she slowly slid off of him. Wordless. Her eyes accusing me for taking him away. She tucked her hair back into her bandanna and stripped off a long shirt to reveal a complicated array of belts, garters, lace, and buckles.
She was fourteen and then she was an adult.
ALIAS checked himself in the mirror, grabbed a Saints ball cap that was perched on the edge of the chair, and nodded at me. “Let’s roll.”
ALIAS WAS HUNGRY and I was fresh out of ideas. But I’d made a ton of calls and hoped Curtis’s countryfied lyin’ ass would come through for once. I checked the cell phone, willing it to ring, but it didn’t while we sat at the counter of the Camellia Grill waiting on ALIAS’s hamburger. I’d ordered an omelette and a cup of coffee. It was about ten o’clock and I was tired. I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water and returned to the seat where ALIAS was already eating. I thought about Maggie’s porch and these great old green chairs she had where we kicked back and talked all night.
The Camellia Grill was a little diner in a small white house at the end of the streetcar tracks near the turnaround in Carrollton. After being in the humidity all day, the air-conditioning felt nice, and for a long time, ALIAS and I didn’t talk.
“You trust Malcolm?” I asked.
He nodded and took another bite.
“What about Teddy?”
“Sure.”
“Malcolm ever ask you for money?”
He shook his head, looking confused. I passed him some ketchup and asked the waiter for some Crystal sauce. Just right on an omelette.
“Is Teddy gonna die?” ALIAS asked.
“No.”
“How you know?”
“’Cause Teddy can talk his way out of anything.”
“What you mean?”
“I mean Teddy knows how to survive.”
“So why you workin’ so hard?”
“Just in case.”
“Cash is evil.”
“How do you know?”