Free The Long-Legged Fly by James Sallis

through the double doors to the elevator. In the family room, every face turned toward me.

Chapter Eleven
    T HE BREEZE HAD TURNED INTO A STEADY, LOW WIND and there was rain in the air. I drove slowly along Melpomene thinking about parents and children, how so many homes were war zones these days, how love breaks under the weight of years and words and disillusion, how as we get older, more and more, we see our parents’ faces in the mirror.
    I swung onto St. Charles and up into the Garden District. There are entire streets here where you go burrowing down tunnels of green, trees curving over and around you, sky shut away. It reminds you how much of New Orleans is pure artifice—that it’s a constructed city, dredged out of swampland by sheer force of will and labor, nibbled at constantly by history, the river, the swamp’s dark mouth. For most of the 1830s the New Basin Canal, meant to assure American self-sufficiency from Creoles, was hacked out with pick and shovel (there was no dynamite, and no way to keep swamp seepage out except back-breaking pumps from Archimedes’ time) at a cost of well over a million dollars and at least eight thousand lives. A hundred years later the city of New Orleans voted to refill this canal.
    It was as though the city’s image of itself, and the ways it tried to live up to that image, kept changing. It was Spanish, French, Italian, West Indian, African, Colonial American; it was primarily the city of fun and illusion, or primarily the bastion of culture in a new land; it was a city built on the backs of slaves and simultaneously a city many of whose important citizens were gens de couleur libre; endlessly, it adapted.
    I parked on Jackson Avenue and found the address I wanted behind one of a row of apartment houses: what used to be a slave’s quarters connected to what used to be a garage by a room narrow as a sidewalk.
    “I’m looking for the Claysons,” I said to the man who opened the door.
    “You’d be Mr. Griffin?”
    “Yes.”
    “Please come in.” He backed out of the doorway.
    Mr. and Mrs. Clayson were sitting inside on a shabby love seat and stood to introduce me to Clayson’s brother and his brother’s friend. I knew the friend from the streets, a working girl whose specialty was impotent men and rough trade with other women. I wondered if this was home for her.
    As gently as I could, I told them about Cordelia and asked if they’d come with me. Mrs. Clayson closed her eyes and said under her breath what I suppose must have been a prayer. Mr. Clayson looked off at the wall as though he’d just lost whatever faith he’d had up to this point. They stood, and we walked out into the beginning rain.
    By the time we reached Hotel Dieu, it was pouring. I let the Claysons out by the front lobby, told them to wait for me there, and parked. Six steps from the car, I was soaked through.
    We went up in the elevator. I left them in the family room and stepped through the double doors. The doctor I’d spoken to earlier glanced up from a stack of charts at the nurses’ station, then walked toward me shaking his head.
    “She’s gone, Mr. Griffin. Just a few minutes ago. It was her heart, finally. It couldn’t take the strain any longer, I guess, and she arrested.” He held his fist out, slowly opened it. “You’ll want me to talk to the girl’s parents?”
    “I’ll tell them, Doctor—unless they ask things I don’t know. You’ll be here?”
    “I’ll be here.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I didn’t do very much, Mr. Griffin.”
    I went back through the double doors, took the Claysons out into the hall and said what I had to say, then stood waiting through their silence.
    “I’ll take you folks home whenever you’re ready,” I finally said.
    Mrs. Clayson looked at her husband, who was staring out the window into the rain. We could hear the storm breaking around us.
    “I reckon we’re ready now, Mr. Griffin,” she said.
    I was getting into one elevator behind them