The Red Storm Read Online Free Page B

Nothin’ was good enough for her, see, and she spent the dough faster than I could earn it. Started racking up debts, until I cut her off. Thought that’d be the end of it, but I come home to find she stole my stash and shoved off. Didn’t see her again until a few years later when she came around asking for money. Said she owed some fat cats a lot.”
    â€œDid you help her out?” I asked.
    â€œHell no. Told her she could go whore herself out for the cash. She cried and blubbered, but I didn’t give her a dime, see. Not one goddamn dime. I figured that’d be the last I’d be hearin’ from her till I get word from her sister that she went off and hanged herself. I still got her obituary tacked up somewhere inside. It gives me a good laugh every time I come across it.”
    â€œYou are a bitter, ugly, little man, Rollie,” I said.
    He shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”
    *   *   *
    With not much to go on, I had to take to the streets for leads. I hugged the curb adjacent to the small market stand on North Robertson and Canal, and gaited up to the elderly Creole man that was running the corner fruit stand. I showed him the photograph and it caused him to gape up at me in horror. He screamed an earful of vulgarity and told me to leave him alone, and that my business was not welcome.
    I liked most French Creoles. They were far more accepting of coloreds, like France was. Plus, a lot of them shared African blood. Yet some had an overly pretentious attitude that grew maddening at such times as this.
    I flashed the photo here and there to the local transients that panhandled the same spot for months. What I got for my troubles was responses like “Damn, if I ever saw that dish, I’d remember.”
    In the middle of flashing the photo to a blotto that was so bent that he could hardly stand on his own two feet, let alone focus on a picture, I heard: “Why, I know that woman.”
    I crooked around to see a short, older woman, with white-gold lorgnette folding glasses and a black woven straw hat with a wide dark taffeta ribbon.
    â€œYou do?” I asked.
    â€œWhy, yes. I only recognized her because I saw photographs of her similar to that one when I was helping box up her belongings.”
    â€œYou were a friend of hers?”
    â€œI wouldn’t say we were close. We knew each other from going to the same church and functions. I volunteered to take care of her belongings after she passed away.”
    â€œHow long ago did she pass?”
    â€œIt was only a few months ago, the poor dear.”
    â€œDid you know her daughter?” I asked.
    â€œI saw her a few times, but I didn’t know her well. Frieda tried to get her to go to church with her. She went a few times in the beginning, but never again. Too bad, it would have done her good. I heard she’s singing at some shameful club on Bourbon Street. They play a lot of that jungle music there.”
    â€œDo you know which club?”
    â€œNot offhand. I only recall this because a few of us from church were leaving flyers around there, to try and talk some sense into the unfortunate girls that work that street, when one of them saw her performing.”
    I thanked the woman and made my way to Bourbon.
    The street was thirteen blocks I often avoided at night. By day, it was quiet and by all accounts just another street, but at night it was a different story. Soon as the neon lights came on, the street become a congested three-ring circus of criminals, whores, the promiscuous, drunks, and tourists.
    The area was sort of the city’s unofficial red-light district. The official one ran along Basin Street near the French Quarter and was known as Storyville. The sixteen blocks of vice got its nickname from a city councilman who wrote the ordinance. It was only when the famous Blue Book that listed more than seven hundred prostitutes got into the hands of the navy boys