176827.fb2 The Long-Legged Fly - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 8

The Long-Legged Fly - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 8

Chapter Seven

Now two weeks had passed and I had some idea what I’d got myself into, but I wasn’t any closer to finding Corene Davis. And maybe I was as close as I was going to get.

I got up and dumped the rest of the coffee, lit a cigarette.

I had a feeling she’d made it to New Orleans. A hunch. I’d played them before and won at least as often as I’d lost.

I’d made the rounds with my clipped picture. No one had seen her. I’d been visited twice by Blackie and Au Lait. They hadn’t seen her either.

What the hell, maybe she was sick in New York. Maybe she was kidnapped. Or maybe she was dead in a warehouse somewhere.

About all I’d really accomplished was to learn something about Corene Davis. It’s strange how little is left of our lives once they’re rendered down, once they’ve started becoming history. A handful of facts, movements, conflicts; that’s all the observer sees. An uninhabited shell.

She was born in Chicago in 1936. Her father picked up what work he could, not much, all of it hard and hardly paid, her mother was a midwife, later a practical nurse. She’d gone to the University of Chicago on scholarship, become something of a student protest leader, then moved on to Columbia for graduate work, where she’d continued her protest activities while simultaneously becoming active (rare then for grad students) in student government. She had been investigated about that time, she claimed, by the FBI and, she suspected, CIA. Stood watching them tap her phone from a pole at the end of the block and took them iced tea when they climbed back down. But it wasn’t until publication of a revised version of her master’s thesis as Chained to Ruin that she’d become a full-fledged black leader. And so she’d made the round of talk shows and lecture circuits, been written about (as though the writers had encountered utterly different women) in everything from Ebony to The New Republic, and generally become a voice for her, our, people. A second book, on women’s rights, was in the works. She had light skin (“She could almost pass for white,” as one reporter put it), wore her hair clipped short, stood five-six, weighed in at one-ten, neither smoked nor drank, was vegetarian.

And had the capacity, it seemed, to vanish into thin air.

I stubbed out the cigarette in a potted plant LaVerne had given me and looked at my watch. Three ten. Maybe things would look better in the morning. It happened sometimes.

I drew a hot bath and had just settled in with a glass of gin when the phone rang.

“How you feelin’, Griffin?” a voice said.

“Man, it’s kind of late for games. You know?”

“You feelin’ pretty good, huh?”

“Until some asshole called me.”

The voice was silent. A dull crackling sound in the wires, witches burning far, far away. Then after a time the voice said, “You’re looking for Corene Davis.”

“Who is this?”

Don’t.” And the line was dead.

To this day, I don’t know who it was on the phone that night. But I remember the sound of that voice exactly, and the chill that came over me then, and I remember that I finished off the glass of gin and poured another before getting back into the tub.