Ghost of a Flea Read Online Free Page A

left and left the casino.
    Coming back in from the slave quarters, I’d brought Fearing’s spirit with me. Kenneth and I sat together in the dark not talking for a couple more hours. Bat followed me in, too, made another plea for food and, failing, curled up beside me on the chair’s overstuffed, well-worn, moderately clawed arm.
    I was sitting in pretty much the same place and attitude when Deborah came down the next morning. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep upstairs myself, and now I was contemplating piles of laundry that needed doing. An Iwo Jima of whites, Allegheny of darks, a veritable Everest of colors. Where was Teddy Roosevelt when you needed him to go storming up these hills and take them? Even if the famous footage, and in large part the event itself, was faked.
    “It’s a start,” Deborah said, “kind of. Which one’s Krakatoa?”
    “You’re always complaining that I don’t sort things properly.”
    “I just had in mind not putting everything in the washer at once, Lew. It somehow escaped me that the creation of new continents would be involved.” She looked ceilingward, as though for steerage. “Oh well. Just passing through.”
    “City be full of tourists. Always underfoot. Speaking of which: any sign of David?”
    “I didn’t hear him this morning. Want me to go look?”
    “He’d be up and about if he were here. I suspect he’ll wander home when he’s—as my father always said—of a mind to.”
    She went on to the kitchen, where I heard her rummaging: cabinet doors chattered, a drawer slid shut with the sound of an arrow thunking into its target. Dull smack of the refrigerator door opening. Minutes later she walked into the front hallway. A voice, none of which I could make out, unrolled on the answering machine. Then she was there in the doorway.
    “Lew, you better come listen to this.”
    She wore a light green housecoat that matched the glass in her hand turning the orange juice within a sickly color.
    “It’s the third one,” she said, pushing the button on the machine. “It must be from last night. Neither of us thought to check.”
    Mr. Griffin, this is Marie at Book News. I don’t seem to have an e-mail address on file for you. We were wondering if you might have time to review a new translation of Cendrars for us. Give us a call? Thanks .
    The second caller had so much trouble trying to say what he wanted that, after repeated stammering, he finally hung up.
    Then the third. Jeanette’s voice.
    Lew, are you there? … I guess not … Can you call me when you get in? It’s Don, Lew. He’s been shot .
     
    When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, three heads turned towards me. Two of the heads nodded. The owner of the largest of them came to meet me.
    “Griffin,” he said.
     “Santos.”
    No hand was offered. Cops don’t much like shaking hands. And when all was said and done, Santos himself, though his skin was as dark as my own, didn’t much favor black men. No way in hell we were ever going to like one another, his attitude told me; but since I was a friend of Don’s, he always treated me with deference. Don’s retirement had left him chief of detectives.
    “What happened?”
    “Jeanette called you, right?”
    I nodded.
    “She told you Don’s been shot.”
    “And that’s the whole of what I know.”
    One of the other cops approached, and Santos stepped away for a moment to confer.
    “We had kind of a send-off for Walsh last night,” he said upon return. “Nothing formal, just a lot of us who wanted to get together and say hey, we’re here, we appreciate what you’ve been doing all this time. Man did a fuckin’ hero’s job for a lotta years. You think anyone noticed? Anyone but us? So we got together at O’Brien’s, a bar down on—”
    “I know it.”
    “Yeah. Yeah, sure you do.” His eyes met mine. O’Brien’s was the closest thing New Orleans had to a cop’s bar. Citizens knowing cop stuff is another thing cops don’t much