The first thing I’d done when I got back to the office-there was the usual accumulation of mail and messages-was clip a recent picture of Corene Davis from a copy of Time. Then I put in a call to United at Idlewild, finally got through, and was informed that, yes, Miss Corene Davis had had a coach reservation on Flight 417 for New Orleans. She had boarded shortly before takeoff, seat 15-A. The man I talked to remembered her, her being so famous and all. He’d been working the desk that day. She had two pieces of luggage. He gave me the name of the captain and stewardesses on the flight. I thanked him and hung up.
I sat there for a while watching twilight seep up around everything. The sky had a red tint to it, and everything smelled of magnolia and the river.
Finally I called downtown and asked for Sergeant Walsh. After a long wait, he came on.
“Don? Lew,” I said. “I want to drop a name on you. Corene Davis.”
“That bitch.” There was a long pause. “You know I had half this force turned out for security-you’d have thought the president was coming to town. And what happens? The broad doesn’t show.” Walsh turned away from the phone for a moment, said something, was back. “Why?”
I wasn’t sure how much I could tell him. Dissembling had kept us alive and more or less intact for a long time when nothing else could.
“I’d been looking forward to hearing her talk,” I said after a moment. “Wondering what happened.”
“Great. I’ve got fourteen unsolved homicides, the makings of a race riot out in Gentilly of all places, the commissioner and assorted councilmen on my tail like a hive of bees-big, hairy, mad bees-and you call up to chat about some trouble-making yankee bitch nigger.”
“Then I guess you better get to work,” I said. “But you know, Don, these days that kind of talk’s a little … passe, if you know what I’m saying.”
A pause. “Okay, Lew. So she ain’t no bitch.”
“Knew you’d see it my way.”
“Sorry. Bad day. So what’d’ya need?”
“Just what happened.”
“Hell, I don’t know, that’s the thing. She got sick in New York or something, was what we heard. Maybe she just thought better of it. Anyway, she didn’t make it down here. My men waited for the next flight, almost two hours. When she wasn’t on that one either, they gave up and went home.”
It was beginning to feel like that’s what I’d better do, too.
“Anything else?” Don was saying.
“One thing, quickly. An outfit on Chartres called the Black Hand. Check it out for me?”
“Don’t have to. Part Panther, part populist politics. There’s money from somewhere, and pull. Into everything. Run by a guy named Will Sansom, now calls himself Abdullah Abded. Lew, you’re not mixed up with them, are you?”
“Curious, is all. Met a couple of their people.”
“Well. That it, then?”
“That’s it.”
“Don’t forget you owe me dinner and a drink. If I can ever get out of this bear pit long enough.”
“I hadn’t forgotten, Don. Give me a call. And hey, thanks.”
Night had just about taken over, and lights were coming on block by block, the city’s dark mask falling into place. In the next few hours those streets would change utterly.
Big money, Don had said. Hand in everything. Not my league at all. Just what the hell had I got myself into?