red beans and rice.
Chapter Ten
I GOT HOME MIDMORNING AND WAS WALKING toward the answering machine with its blinking light when the phone itself rang.
“Lew,” Achille Boudleaux said. “You look’n ‘roun’ for me, I hear.” He could speak perfectly proper, unaccented English if he wanted, but rarely bothered without good reason, and never among friends.
I said there was absolutely no way he could know that.
“Why I so damn good. What you wan’?”
I filled him in, including my tracking down Garces at the shelter.
“Is there anything else, A.C.? Something you may have left out of the report? However tenuous it might seem.”
“Hol’ on. I done pull out the notebook cause I know what you wan’ me for.”
Virtual silence on the line. A match striking in Metairie and a long pull on his cigarette. A cough that died aborning, rattling deep in his chest like suppressed memories. Car alarm somewhere down the street. Police siren racing up Prytania.
“Ain’ much here, Lew. One t’ing I din’t put in, but issa long shot, pro’ly don’ lead nowhere. Miss Alouette, she bin keepin’ comp’ny wit’ a guy call hi’self Roach, some say. Make goo’ money, that boy, but he don’ seem to work at anythin’, you know? He from up ‘roun’ Tup’lo.”
“You have any idea how long they’d been a number?”
“Don’t know they were, rilly.”
“Any address for this Roach?”
“You bin off the street too long, Lew. Roaches don’t have no ‘dress, you know that. You wan’ him, you just get on downtown and ax ‘roun’.”
“Okay. Bien merci, Achille.”
“ Rien .”
I cradled the phone and hit Message. After a brief pause, a momentary shush of tape past pinions, Richard Garces identified himself, saying: “Give me a call when you can. I think I have a couple of leads on Alouette.”
I dialed, got a busy signal three times in a row, at last got through and was put on hold. “You’re So Vain” fluted into my defenseless ear and I found myself thinking about Carly Simon’s lips. Something I was pretty sure Richard Garces never did.
“Mr. Griffin,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something of an emergency with one of my girls.” “Lew—remember? And no problem.”
“Super. Okay, here’s the thing. I’m a hacker, or at least I was a while back, and there was a time there when a lot of us kind of stumbled into one another over the years on various bulletin boards. We were all doing social work, that’s what brought us together. Some like myself in small shelters or support services scattered throughout the country, some in institutions, most in public health—MHMR or other government services. Those early contacts developed into a loose network, a place we could go for information we didn’t otherwise have access to, a kind of information underground.”
“Right.” The country—whatever your special interest: law, liberal politics, magazine sales, white supremacy—was rife with such networks, electronic and otherwise. Often I imagined they might represent this skewed nation’s only true intelligence, skein after skein of fragile webs piling one atop another until a rudimentary nervous system came into being.
“Well, I hadn’t logged on to the network in quite a while. My work here at Foucher’s pretty circumscribed. But after you left the other day, after I’d thought about it a while, I got on-line. And after half an hour or so of ‘Good to see your number come up’ and ‘How’s it been going’ and ‘Where the hell you been, man’—I guess the economy’s gotten so bad that these guys don’t have much else to do but sit home, stroke and get stroked by electronic friends—I started asking about an eighteen-year-old who might give New Orleans as a prior address, might be reluctant to say more and is probably in trouble.
“That’s what the network’s about, after all. Alouette doesn’t have any resources, any skills. Wherever she winds up, sooner or
Chapter Ten
I GOT HOME MIDMORNING AND WAS WALKING toward the answering machine with its blinking light when the phone itself rang.
“Lew,” Achille Boudleaux said. “You look’n ‘roun’ for me, I hear.” He could speak perfectly proper, unaccented English if he wanted, but rarely bothered without good reason, and never among friends.
I said there was absolutely no way he could know that.
“Why I so damn good. What you wan’?”
I filled him in, including my tracking down Garces at the shelter.
“Is there anything else, A.C.? Something you may have left out of the report? However tenuous it might seem.”
“Hol’ on. I done pull out the notebook cause I know what you wan’ me for.”
Virtual silence on the line. A match striking in Metairie and a long pull on his cigarette. A cough that died aborning, rattling deep in his chest like suppressed memories. Car alarm somewhere down the street. Police siren racing up Prytania.
“Ain’ much here, Lew. One t’ing I din’t put in, but issa long shot, pro’ly don’ lead nowhere. Miss Alouette, she bin keepin’ comp’ny wit’ a guy call hi’self Roach, some say. Make goo’ money, that boy, but he don’ seem to work at anythin’, you know? He from up ‘roun’ Tup’lo.”
“You have any idea how long they’d been a number?”
“Don’t know they were, rilly.”
“Any address for this Roach?”
“You bin off the street too long, Lew. Roaches don’t have no ‘dress, you know that. You wan’ him, you just get on downtown and ax ‘roun’.”
“Okay. Bien merci, Achille.”
“ Rien .”
I cradled the phone and hit Message. After a brief pause, a momentary shush of tape past pinions, Richard Garces identified himself, saying: “Give me a call when you can. I think I have a couple of leads on Alouette.”
I dialed, got a busy signal three times in a row, at last got through and was put on hold. “You’re So Vain” fluted into my defenseless ear and I found myself thinking about Carly Simon’s lips. Something I was pretty sure Richard Garces never did.
“Mr. Griffin,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something of an emergency with one of my girls.” “Lew—remember? And no problem.”
“Super. Okay, here’s the thing. I’m a hacker, or at least I was a while back, and there was a time there when a lot of us kind of stumbled into one another over the years on various bulletin boards. We were all doing social work, that’s what brought us together. Some like myself in small shelters or support services scattered throughout the country, some in institutions, most in public health—MHMR or other government services. Those early contacts developed into a loose network, a place we could go for information we didn’t otherwise have access to, a kind of information underground.”
“Right.” The country—whatever your special interest: law, liberal politics, magazine sales, white supremacy—was rife with such networks, electronic and otherwise. Often I imagined they might represent this skewed nation’s only true intelligence, skein after skein of fragile webs piling one atop another until a rudimentary nervous system came into being.
“Well, I hadn’t logged on to the network in quite a while. My work here at Foucher’s pretty circumscribed. But after you left the other day, after I’d thought about it a while, I got on-line. And after half an hour or so of ‘Good to see your number come up’ and ‘How’s it been going’ and ‘Where the hell you been, man’—I guess the economy’s gotten so bad that these guys don’t have much else to do but sit home, stroke and get stroked by electronic friends—I started asking about an eighteen-year-old who might give New Orleans as a prior address, might be reluctant to say more and is probably in trouble.
“That’s what the network’s about, after all. Alouette doesn’t have any resources, any skills. Wherever she winds up, sooner or
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