The Long-Legged Fly Read Online Free Page B

for you, if you can do it.”
    “Come on in.” He finished unlocking the door and waved me in ahead of him. “I can do anything. The wizard of the flash, they call me in polite circles.”
    “Oh yeah? When’s the last time you saw a polite circle?”
    “Skip it. What you got?”
    “A picture I clipped out of a magazine. I want you to take it, lighten the skin, change the hair. It’s a black girl. When you get through with her, I want her to look white. Can do, wizard?”
    “Let’s see it.” He took it and held it up to the light. “Well, at least it’s on gloss. How much of a hurry you in?”
    “An hour?”
    “An hour, he says. All right. You wanna wait or come back?”
    “I’ll come back.”
    I pulled the Caddy out of its spot and headed for the Morning Call. Drank three cups of chicory and ate three beignets. A man across from me was reading the Times-Picayune , and I saw the headline on an inside page as he folded it back: CORENE DAVIS—WHERE IS SHE ? So it was finally breaking.
    I was back at Milt’s on the hour. He handed me an eight by ten.
    “It’s grainy but the best I could do,” he said.
    I looked at the picture. Bingo. Barbie’s sister.
    “Can you put it on the tab, Milt?”
    “Tab’s kind of heavy, Lew.”
    I peeled off a fifty and shoved it at him.
    “That cover it?”
    “And part of the tab, too.”
    “Thanks, Milt.”
    “Anytime.”
    I got back in the car and sat there thinking. Now at least I knew who, or what, I was looking for. I even had a picture, a good one. Should I give what I had to Blackie, excuse me, Abdullah Abded, and let him take it from there? He had contacts and resources I didn’t and might find her faster. Or should I go to the police—meet Walsh somewhere and let him play the thing out? I thought back to the newspaper headline buried on an inside page, business as usual, like no one really cared. Which is pretty much the truth of it, I guess.

Chapter Nine
    S O I HIT THE STREETS.
    Parked at the Pigeonhole and walked across, car scooped up on a massive, lumbering forklift and served into one of the cubbyholes like a piece of pie behind me. Bourbon Street, first. If she’d never been in New Orleans before, there was a good chance she made the tour.
    Louie at Pat’s. Barney at The Famous Doors. Jimmy at Three Sisters. Daley at Tujagues. The best I got was a “Well, maybe.” I even hit Preservation Hall and the Gaslight Theatre. But didn’t hit paydirt till I’d worked my way down to The Seven Seas.
    “Yeah, sure thing, she’s been in here every other night this last week or so.”
    “Alone?”
    “Not for long, but she always started off that way.” Then, answering my sharp glance: “She was hooking. Had a look about her, you know? Fresh pony. Guys go for that.”
    “You’re sure it’s the same woman?”
    “Sure? Sure I’m sure. The hair’s different, but that’s her all right. Calls herself Blanche. Pretty heavy behind something, too, I’d say—out of a needle or out of a bottle. Hard to tell.”
    I wondered then: what was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living. It seemed as though I should know. I’d been there more than once and would probably be there again.
    Sooner than I thought, perhaps.
    “Any idea where else she might be working?”
    “Might try Joe’s.”
    “She hasn’t been there.”
    “Well. Place called Blue Door, then. It’s—”
    “I know where it is. Thanks.”
    “ De nada . But how about a drink before you split?”
    I ordered a double bourbon, put it down in one minute flat, left a ten on the bar.
    So Corene had turned herself, or been turned, into a white hustler, I thought, driving out of the Quarter against heavy day’s-end traffic and uptown toward the Blue Door. Stranger things