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WHEN your stitches are popping loose and your elevator has already plummeted past any reasonable bottom and the best your day offers is seeds and stems at sunrise to flatten the kinks or a street dealer's speedball that can turn your heart into a firecracker, you might end up in a piece of geography as follows:
A few blocks off Canal, the building was once a bordello that housed both mulatto and white women; then in a more moral era, when the downtown brothels were closed by the authorities and the girls started working out of taxicabs instead, the building was partitioned into apartments and studios for artists, and finally it became simply a "hotel," with no name other than that, the neon letters emblazoned vertically on a tin sign above a picture glass window that looked in upon a row of attached theater seats. Old people seemingly numbed by the calamity that had placed them in these surroundings stared vacantly through the glass at the sidewalk.
The Mexican man had climbed the fire escape onto the peaked roof, then had glided out among the stars. He hit the courtyard with such an impact that he split a flagstone like it was slate.
The corridor was dark and smelled of the stained paper bags filled with garbage that stood by each door like sentinels. Clete opened the dead man's room with a passkey.
"A Vietnamese boat lady owns the place. She found the guy's pay stub and thought I could get his back rent from the state," he said.
Most of the plaster was gone from the walls. A mattress was rolled on an iron bed frame, and a pile of trash paper, green wine bottles, and frozen TV dinner containers was swept neatly into one corner. A flattened, plastic wallet and a cardboard suitcase and a guitar with twelve tuning pegs and no strings lay on top of a plank table. The sound hole on the guitar was inlaid with green and pink mollusk shell, and the wood below the hole had been cut with scratches that looked like cat's whiskers.
"What was he on?" I said.
"A couple of the wetbrains say he was cooking brown skag with ups. The speed is supposed to give it legs. The mamasan found the wallet under the bed."
It contained no money, only a detached stub from a pay voucher for ninety-six dollars, with Buford LaRose's name and New Iberia address printed in the upper left-hand corner, and a Catholic holy card depicting a small statue of Christ's mother, with rays of gold and blue light emanating from it. Underneath the statue was the caption La Virgin de Zapopan.
I unsnapped the suitcase. His shirts and trousers and underwear were all rolled into tight balls. A pair of boots were folded at the tops in one corner. The toes were pointed and threadbare around the welt, the heels almost flat, the leather worn as smooth and soft as felt in a slipper. Under the boots, wrapped in a towel, was a solitary roweled spur, the cusp scrolled with winged serpents.
"It looks like the guy had another kind of life at one time," Clete said.
"Does NOPD know he worked for Buford LaRose?"
"The mamasan called them and got the big yawn. They've got New Orleans cops pulling armed robberies. Who's got time for a roof flyer down here in Shitsville?"
"Dock Green says a kid's buried on the LaRose property."
"You try for a warrant?"
"The judge said insufficient grounds. He seemed to think I had personal motivations as well."
"You're going about it the wrong way, Streak. Squeeze somebody close to LaRose."
"Who?"
"That old guy, the poet, the fuckhead left over from the sixties, he was working his scam out at Tulane last night. He's doing a repeat performance up on St. Charles this afternoon."
He drummed the square tips of his fingers on the face of the guitar.
"No grand displays, Clete," I said.
"Me?"
Cl
ay Mason's poetry reading was in a reception hall above a restaurant in the Garden District. From the second-story French doors you could look down upon a sidewalk cafe, the oaks along the avenue, the iron streetcars out on the neutral ground, a K&B drugstore on the corner whose green and purple neon hung like colored smoke in the rain.
Clete and I sat on folding chairs in the back of the hall. We were lucky to get seats at all. College kids dressed in Seattle grunge lined the walls.
"Can you believe anybody going for this guy's shuck today?" Clete said.
"It's in."
"Why?"
"They missed all the fun."
In reality, I probably knew a better answer. But it sounded like a weary one, even to myself, and I left it unsaid. Presidents who had never heard a shot fired in anger vicariously revised the inadequacy of their own lives by precipitating suffering in the lives of others, and they were lauded for it. Clay Mason well understood the nature of public memory and had simply waited for his time and a new generation of intellectual cannon fodder to come round again.
