The Long-Legged Fly Read Online Free

know, that’s the thing. She got sick in New York or something, was what we heard. Maybe she just thought better of it. Anyway, she didn’t make it down here. My men waited for the next flight, almost two hours. When she wasn’t on that one either, they gave up and went home.”
    It was beginning to feel like that’s what I’d better do, too.
    “Anything else?” Don was saying.
    “One thing, quickly. An outfit on Chartres called the Black Hand. Check it out for me?”
    “Don’t have to. Part Panther, part populist politics. There’s money from somewhere, and pull. Into everything. Run by a guy named Will Sansom, now calls himself Abdullah Abded. Lew, you’re not mixed up with them, are you?”
    “Curious, is all. Met a couple of their people.”
    “Well. That it, then?”
    “That’s it.”
    “Don’t forget you owe me dinner and a drink. If I can ever get out of this bear pit long enough.”
    “I hadn’t forgotten, Don. Give me a call. And hey, thanks.”
    Night had just about taken over, and lights were coming on block by block, the city’s dark mask falling into place. In the next few hours those streets would change utterly.
    Big money, Don had said. Hand in everything. Not my league at all. Just what the hell had I got myself into?

Chapter Seven
    N OW TWO WEEKS HAD PASSED AND I had some idea what I’d got myself into, but I wasn’t any closer to finding Corene Davis. And maybe I was as close as I was going to get.
    I got up and dumped the rest of the coffee, lit a cigarette.
    I had a feeling she’d made it to New Orleans. A hunch. I’d played them before and won at least as often as I’d lost.
    I’d made the rounds with my clipped picture. No one had seen her. I’d been visited twice by Blackie and Au Lait . They hadn’t seen her either.
    What the hell, maybe she was sick in New York. Maybe she was kidnapped. Or maybe she was dead in a warehouse somewhere.
    About all I’d really accomplished was to learn something about Corene Davis. It’s strange how little is left of our lives once they’re rendered down, once they’ve started becoming history. A handful of facts, movements, conflicts; that’s all the observer sees. An uninhabited shell.
    She was born in Chicago in 1936. Her father picked up what work he could, not much, all of it hard and hardly paid, her mother was a midwife, later a practical nurse. She’d gone to the University of Chicago on scholarship, become something of a student protest leader, then moved on to Columbia for graduate work, where she’d continued her protest activities while simultaneously becoming active (rare then for grad students) in student government. She had been investigated about that time, she claimed, by the FBI and, she suspected, CIA. Stood watching them tap her phone from a pole at the end of the block and took them iced tea when they climbed back down. But it wasn’t until publication of a revised version of her master’s thesis as Chained to Ruin that she’d become a full-fledged black leader. And so she’d made the round of talk shows and lecture circuits, been written about (as though the writers had encountered utterly different women) in everything from Ebony to The New Republic , and generally become a voice for her, our, people. A second book, on women’s rights, was in the works. She had light skin (“She could almost pass for white,” as one reporter put it), wore her hair clipped short, stood five-six, weighed in at one-ten, neither smoked nor drank, was vegetarian.
    And had the capacity, it seemed, to vanish into thin air.
    I stubbed out the cigarette in a potted plant LaVerne had given me and looked at my watch. Three ten. Maybe things would look better in the morning. It happened sometimes.
    I drew a hot bath and had just settled in with a glass of gin when the phone rang.
    “How you feelin’, Griffin?” a voice said.
    “Man, it’s kind of late for games. You know?”
    “You feelin’ pretty good, huh?”
    “Until some