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and all. Don’t owe that nigger nothing, though. ’Cept pure hurt, he ever think ’bout messin’ with my Ellie again.”
    Cornell turned away as though to leave. If it was only subterfuge from the first, or if suddenly he gave in to impulse, buckled under to the tug and tumble of his emotions, I’ll never know. But he wheeled back around. His knife slashed through the space where moments ago my throat had been.
    I had watched his center of gravity start to shift, muscles begin bunching, and was already rolling away clockwise when he turned. Now I rode my own momentum full circle. Dropped to a squat as I went on around, drove clasped hands against his right knee.
    I felt something in there snap as he went down hard. Only ligaments, I hoped.
    I reached up and took the knife. When I stood, Buster grinned at me.
    “What’s a lonely ol’ man like me to do? She’s so sweet, Lew.”
    “Sweet.”
    “Pure as sugar cane.” He finished off his tumbler of wine and got up. “Back on the horse. Anything you specially want to hear, Lew?”
    “ ‘Black Snake Moan’ might be appropriate.”
    Buster rejoined his guitar. Somehow he never looked quite right without it; you had a sense of missing body parts. Dampening the A string with the heel of his hand while hammering at it with his thumb, he started a vamp on the top strings, all pulloffs and bends.
Mmmmmm, mama what’s the matter now.
    Someone beside me said: “Buy you a drink?”
    She wore a denim skirt, wool sweater, Levi jacket. Her hair was shorter than in her picture. Light brown, with a lot of red.
    “Figure you could probably use one.”
    “Okay.”
    We went over and sat at the bar. The barkeep slid a bottled Lowenbrau, glass inverted over it, in front of me. I thanked both of them.
    “You’re welcome,” she said.
    So we sat there, me with my beer, her with her Scotch on the rocks, Buster singing about going back to Florida where you gotta plow or you gotta hoe. “Someone coming to take care of the boy?” I asked the barkeep. He shrugged. But eventually a Charity ambulance pulled up out front and two fat white guys came in to fetch him.
    The woman sat watching them. When they were gone she held up two fingers and the barkeep brought another round. She picked hers up, sniffed at it, swirled it around the squat glass and put it down without drinking.
    “Ever hear of O’Carolan?”
    I shook my head.
    “He was a minstrel, I guess. A wandering musician. Wrote a lot of music for Irish harp. Supposedly on his deathbed he asked for a glass of whiskey, saying ‘It’d be a terrible thing if two such good friends were to part without a final kiss.’ ”
    She turned toward me on her stool and held out a hand.
    “You’re Lew Griffin. I—”
    “Yes, m’am. I know who you are.”
    Her face appeared three days a week atop a Times-Picayune column. Mostly light humor about how difficult life was for uptown white women. You know: finding the right caterer, when to wear white shoes, getting the kids off to camp. But every so often she got her teeth into something real. And when she did, the city’s blood, the bottomless despair and pain running in it, squeezed out around her words.
    “I spend a lot of time sitting in bars all over the city drinking too much cheap Scotch and bourbon, or in restaurants drinking coffee I don’t want, talking to people some, but mostly listening to them. Past months, your name’s come up in some oddly disparate places.”
    Oddly disparate. People who grow up on State Street or Versailles and go to Sophie Newcomb talk like that.
    “First I heard about this guy who used to come around collecting for a shyster furniture-and-appliance outfit over on Magazine. He’d wind up telling people how to get out from under—even give them money for payments sometimes. A young Negro, they said. Big, wiry. Almost always wore a black suit. Shirt and tie.
    “Then, in a different neighborhood, I’d hear how this same man walked into a French