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asshole called me.”
    The voice was silent. A dull crackling sound in the wires, witches burning far, far away. Then after a time the voice said, “You’re looking for Corene Davis.”
    “Who is this?”
    “ Don’t .” And the line was dead.
    To this day, I don’t know who it was on the phone that night. But I remember the sound of that voice exactly, and the chill that came over me then, and I remember that I finished off the glass of gin and poured another before getting back into the tub.

Chapter Eight
    C OULD PASS FOR WHITE.
    I woke up at ten with that phrase rolling around in my head. I’d had a dream in which people were chasing me with knives down narrow, overhung streets. A big Irish cop watched it all, telling old minstrel-show jokes. The sheets around me were soaked with sweat.
    I stripped and showered, then made coffee, real this time, and sat down at the kitchenette table, chrome and red formica. I lit a cigarette. Could pass for white. But her skin looked dark in the picture.
    There’s an old novel called Black No More , about a scientist who invents a cream that’s able to turn black people white and the social havoc this brings about, written in the thirties by George Schuyler, a newspaperman. When I was a kid, Dad always used to grin when any of his friends mentioned it. And Mom said she’d whip me if she ever caught me reading it. Till I did, I thought it was about sex.
    I walked into the other room, taking the coffee with me, and dialed LaVerne’s home number. Not much chance, but worth a try. When there was no answer, I dialed one of the other numbers she’d given me and asked for her. I knew it was a bar she frequented most afternoons, picking up marks as they floated from posh uptown hotels down into the Quarter and back up. The guy that answered said, “Hold a minute, bud, I’ll check.”
    I’d finished the coffee by the time she picked up the phone and purred into it, “Yeah, honey?” Honey had a few more syllables than it usually does.
    “Lew. Listen—”
    “How’s your father?”
    “Holding his own, Mom says. It was a heart attack.”
    “You goin’ up there, Lew?”
    “Maybe later. Listen, need to ask you something.”
    “If I know it.”
    “This Nadie Nola cream: it work?”
    “The girls say it does. Light, bright, and damn near white… .”
    I felt a warmth at the base of my spine, a tingling as though nerves beneath my skin were opening like tiny umbrellas, and knew it was all starting to come together.
    “Thanks, Verne. I’ll be talking to you. You get on back to work.”
    “I am working, Lew. You oughta see him over there watching me now, wondering who it is I’m talking to. Shoulders out to here and a wad of bills even Sweet Betty couldn’t get her mouth around. Owns a funeral home up in Mississippi, he says. Must be good money in death up in Mississippi.”
    “Everywhere.”
    I hung up with something gone hard and cold inside me, thinking of Angie, a good enough kid till skag, Harry and her own deep sadness found her. Now her kid was living with her parents up near Jackson. She must be two or three by now, I guessed. And myself—what had I turned into? I could feel that wild hatred building up inside me.
    There’s this guy that lives uptown, Richard. Straight as straight can be, but every weekend he goes out and picks up rich white guys in hotel bars and the like, for sex, they think, and when he gets them alone, he kicks their faces in. I wondered if I was any better. My wife hadn’t thought so.
    I poured another cup of coffee and drank it, then unplugged the pot and headed for the car.
    A photographer I know down off Lee Circle works cheap, doesn’t ask or answer too many questions, and never minds a rush or difficult job if the money’s right. I pulled the Cad into a spot in front of his place and got out. He was just getting there himself, standing at the door with keys in his hand.
    “ ’Lo, Lew. Been a while, my man.”
    “Milt. Got a quickie