DEADHEAD
Tom Andes
My first client was an Uptown lawyer named Donaldson whose daughter had run off with a Deadhead. As anyone will tell you, back then New Orleans was a different city. Less attractive to the credentialed and more welcoming to those of us who couldn’t make it anywhere else. I’d come from New England, a town called Waterford, and I was never going back.
“A Deadhead?” I repeated.
“He’s one of those people who follow that band on tour.” Donaldson shifted in his chair, crossing the opposite leg. New Orleans being a port city, his firm specialized in maritime law. He looked like he’d come from work. He was in a blue, custom-tailored suit I’d bet dollars to donuts came from Perlis, a shop at the swanky end of Magazine where his kind outfitted themselves for their weddings, parties, and funerals. He was 45, six-four, maybe 220, with thinning brown hair and that pudge middle-aged guys carry in their jowls.
I told him I was familiar with the term.
“I don’t mind their music,” he said. “I just don’t see why people need to make a lifestyle out of it. And let me tell you, it’s a bunch of thugs, losers, and nobodies out there on Tour.”
I told him I was not impartial to their music, either. Just the other day, I’d been listening to a cassette bootleg of Jerry Garcia and John Kahn at Oregon State Prison, March 5, 1982. It had what was to my mind the definitive version of “Dire Wolf.”
“Doesn’t anyone listen to Barry Manilow anymore?” he said. “Neil Diamond?”
“Any idea,” I said, “why your daughter would run off with this guy?”
To get my PI’s license, I’d put in three years working for a firm across the river in Gretna. If that experience told me anything, his kid hadn’t run away for kicks.
Donaldson looked baffled. Like there wasn’t any reason his seventeen-year-old would’ve pulled up stakes and bailed except for the inherent wickedness of man- or womankind or the world. I gave him credit: it was a good performance. “We run a tight ship. My wife keeps a clean house, dinner on the table every night at six o’clock. Mass Sunday at St. Patrick’s. My daughter has never wanted for anything.”
“Where did she meet this guy? What’s his name?”
“Erick,” he said, the color rising in his face. “I don’t know his last name. He’s a dishwasher and a pantry chef. As for where she met him, I don’t know that, either. Maybe he was trolling for jailbait, picking up schoolgirls at the streetcar stop. The nuns at Sacred Heart are usually better than this at keeping undesirable elements away.”
“Nothing gets by those nuns,” I said.
“Not usually.” He huffed.
“What’s the name of the restaurant?” I said, and he told me. I wrote that down, too.
Donaldson fidgeted, a pudgy man, picking his manicured nails.
“I don’t like you, Donaldson,” I said, and the guy started to sputter. Likely no one had told him that, not to his face. Not for a long time.
“I don’t—”
I cut him off. Maybe my old colleagues were right, and I didn’t have any business sense, saying that to the first guy who walked through my door, but I’d gone independent because I didn’t want to kiss anyone’s rear end. And teenaged girls didn’t leave home because they fell in love with line cooks. No, they ran away from something.
I said, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Do you have children,” he said, “Mister Genest? Have you raised a teenager?”
I’d played hockey in high school, and I still had that build. I’d had acne, too. That had mellowed with age but left scars. I’d had my nose broken a few times, too.
What did that guy see when he saw me, dressed up in the eighty-dollar suit I’d bought off the rack at Steinmart?
“No children,” I said. “Not that I know of.”
Sitting sideways in his chair, he waved, as if he were dismissing me. “I rest my case.”
I might not have liked him, but I needed the money.
I slapped a contract on my desk. Donaldson gave me a nasty look. He didn’t like me, either. But he signed.
“Boy howdy,” I said, “we’re off to a great start.”
***
A couple hours after Saint Lucia opened, I walked in. Bistro tables crowded a tiny dining room with white tiled floors, paintings cramming the ochre walls like a Parisian salon. French doors opened onto a patio, a narrow, overgrown space out of Gray Gardens. A woman in server’s black and whites came around the bar. Her smile didn’t make it to her eyes.
“Help you?” she said.
“Erick around?” I said, and those eyes got a little wider as she shot a look at the kitchen door. Behind the porthole, guys in chefs’ whites were working the line.
“He’s busy,” she said. Around us at those tables, the quality of Uptown New Orleans tried not to look up from their goat cheese and Belgian endive salads. But they were hanging on every word, all but drooling, fangs out. “Who are you?”
“I’m a detective.” I wasn’t yelling, but I made sure those fancy folks could hear what I said. “I’d like to talk to him about a young woman he’s involved with. There’s a question of the girl’s age.”
Had the woman sitting at the table by the bar gasped? Chewing, she set her fork down with a chink that was loud in the now silent room.
“I’m afraid,” the woman behind the bar said, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Any idea where I could reach Erick?” I said. “A number, an address?”
“We don’t give out employees’ personal information.” She walked out from behind the bar and backed me toward the door.
Outside, a guy with braided hair, a beard, and a ratty Morning 40 Federation tee-shirt was sitting behind the kitchen, smoking a hand rolled cigarette. He was wearing a rubber dishwasher’s apron.
“You Erick?” I said.
“Who wants to know?”
“I waited half an hour for my crème brulee. They told me that was your department.”
He blinked, his eyes unfocused, then coughed, cleared his sinuses, and blew snot on the sidewalk. “I shot a bunch of Demerol last night. I told them desserts were going to take a while.”
He shrugged, dragged on his cigarette, flicked the butt into the street
Sure enough, I had my man. Now, I wanted to give him a chance to lead me to the kid.
“See you around,” I said.
“Better hope not.” He went back inside.
***
A while later, the same guy came out the kitchen door, looked up and down the sidewalk, fists clenched. I parked across the street in my Jeep, Jerry playing “Deep Elem Blues” on the tape deck.
A Tacoma pickup rolled up. Erick climbed in. Four of them were sitting across the seat, two guys and two girls. They drove to Riverbend, stopped at Cooter Brown’s long enough for the driver to grab a couple to-go boxes, then headed out Carrollton Avenue. They crossed Claiborne, made a U-turn, parked next to a duplex, and went in the bottom apartment.
I called Donaldson from a payphone in front of the Burger King down the street. A woman answered, said he was sleeping.
“He told me to call anytime,” I said. “Day or night.”
“I’ll get him,” she said. This must be the wife, the one who kept the house shipshape. It was a quarter of eleven, but she was wide awake.
“Yes?” Donaldson’s voice was thick with sleep. I told him I’d tracked the kid down.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Do?”
“Yes, do.”
“Get her out of there.”
“How?” I said. “I can’t kidnap her.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “Just don’t make a scene like the one you made at the restaurant. We’ve heard about that.”
“Good news travels fast,” I said.
He hung up.
***
Next afternoon, I pounded on the door of the duplex. Donaldson had given me a yearbook photo of the kid, Liza. She answered. Still in their uniforms, she and a friend were lazing around the living room on an orange thrift store couch watching The Jerry Springer Show on a crappy set with rabbit ears.
“Pack your gear,” I said, “you and your friend. Let’s go.”
“What the hell?” The driver, a guy with blond dreadlocks, was slurping noodles from a takeout container.
“I don’t know how much weed you’ve got in this house,” I said. I’d dealt with deadbeat kids like these across the river, and they were all the same. “But I’m sure the cops would be interested, just like they’d be interested in checking the IDs of the honors students hanging out in your living room.”
The door to the back bedroom opened, and the guy who’d been sitting behind the restaurant came out. He was in the same tee-shirt, cargo shorts, thick through the shoulders.
“Erick,” I said.
“You got me in hot water at work,” he said. “They almost sacked me.”
For a junkie, he had a good right hook. It took two of them—his buddy with the dreadlocks and his girlfriend—to pull him off me. When I came to, I was slumped in the corner, and I could smell that sweet, skunky odor of good sinsemilla. A lighter flicked, water bubbling in a bong.
Someone coughed. My jaw felt like it had been run over with a pickup truck.
I opened my eyes. They were sitting on that couch and in a busted La-Z-Boy that was missing half its stuffing, listening to that same Jerry Garcia and John Kahn bootleg, the show ending with “Dire Wolf,” Jerry singing “Don’t murder me.”
“Want a hit?” The kid with the deadlocks offered me the bong. The stuff would’ve helped my head. But I was clinging to what was left of my self-respect after getting coldcocked by a hippie.
“This my bootleg?” I said. With my face swollen, the words came out funny. I swallowed blood.
The driver dipped his chopsticks into that container of noodles. “It’s a nice jeep.”
“I’m two payments in arrears,” I said.
“We’ll take it off your hands,” the guy said, “you want to get rid of it.”
“Dad sent you?” Liza was sprawled across Erick’s lap, his hand on her thigh.
“Your folks want you home.” Leaning against the wall, I struggled to my feet. I checked myself for dizziness, faintness, wondering would I puke.
“Show him,” Erick said.
The kid unbuttoned her shirt. Inside her arm were ridges of scar tissue in half-moon shapes, eight, ten, more than I could count.
“What,” I said, “did you do to yourself?”
“From her curling iron,” she said.
I didn’t want to twig what I was looking at. I’d known Donaldson was hiding something, but not this.
“Your mom?” I said, the kid biting her lip. Scars were on top of scars, burns that must’ve gone back sixteen, seventeen years.
“She gets so angry. She yells, throws things. I’m bad. I make her do it.” The words choked off. Her eyes were shining, and she twisted away from me, wiped her cheek.
“Your dad knows?” I said.
She shrugged.
“You’re seventeen,” I told the kid, “so your boyfriend won’t go to prison, but you’re a runaway, and if the cops come here, they’ll take you home.”
“I’m going to school,” she said. “Why can’t I stay?”
The place was a dump, her boyfriend a junkie. Given her options, was it worse than home?
Dinner on the table every evening at six o’clock, Donaldson had said.
Mass every Sunday.
Well, hell.
“Your mom needs help,” I said.
“And you’re going to help her?” Liza said.
“If I report her to CPS, they’ll get you out of there.”
Liza looked stricken. “Please don’t do that. I couldn’t stand it.” She cocked her head, too worldly for seventeen. “Just don’t tell them where I am.”
“I need a day.” I left, then came back. “And give me my bootleg.”
***
Opposite my desk, Donaldson was sitting with his knee crossed over his ankle. Embroidered streetcars were on his socks, which were likely from Perlis, too. Next to him, his wife was giving me the stink-eye. A short, plump woman, she clutched an overstuffed purse.
“I’ve seen the marks,” I said, “the burns.”
Donaldson opened his mouth, but I held up a finger, silencing him. His wife scratched the stitching, and if it was possible to pour more hatred into that look, she did. The Department of Defense should’ve recruited those eyes for their missile defense program.
“I know,” I said, “it’s embarrassing. You don’t want your fancy friends to find out your daughter’s shacked up with a junkie who’s pushing 30, and you don’t want them to find out your wife is a child abuser out of Mommie Dearest, either.”
Donaldson pounded my desk. “I don’t have to stand for this.”
“Sit down,” I said. He looked like I’d slapped him. “We’re not in court.”
“I was King of Rex,” he said.
“And your wife is certifiable,” I said. “You want that to be the talk of the town?”
He was shaking. Hell, so was I.
I’d found the apartment that morning in the classifieds in the Times-Picayune. It wasn’t much, a studio on Prytania near Zara’s grocery, but it was the best chance the kid had.
“You’re going to send her a check every month,” I told Donaldson, “and you’re going to keep paying her tuition. If you miss a payment, if you hold the money over her head, I’ll find out. If your wife goes near her, I’ll find that out, too.”
Could I do that? I didn’t know. I only needed him to believe it.
And I was angry enough to sell it.
Donaldson’s wife was rocking in her chair.
“She’s bad,” Elaine Donaldson said. “She’s rotten through and through.”
She started crying. Donaldson put an arm over her shoulder.
On the landing, he shook my hand. His wife was at the bottom of the stairs, her purse hanging from her elbow. Dust motes swam in the sunlight coming in the window. The carpet was ratty, the stairwell smelling of mildew. Maybe I’d had it better across the river, when I was doing a job, and I didn’t have to answer to these people, who were evil.
“Thank you,” Donaldson said in a low voice. “I had an operation, years ago, so we wouldn’t have another. She doesn’t know.”
“She needs help,” I said.
He nodded, pudgy chin trembling. “I know.”
***
Later, I picked the kid up at the duplex and dropped her at her new place, a pink stucco building a couple blocks below Napoleon.
“You don’t have to date people like Erick to get back at your parents.”
“He’s not so bad, once you get to know him.”
I told her I’d take her word for it.
She went inside, and I put that bootleg in my tape deck.
When Donaldson’s check came a few days later, I caught up on my jeep payments. The check wasn’t much. But back then, it was enough to scrape by a couple weeks.
Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me, forthcoming from Crescent City Books in 2025. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications including Best American Mystery Stories 2012, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Santa Monica Review. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician, performing solo and with several bands. He is also a freelance editor, writing coach, teaches, picks up catering shifts, and pet sits. His two acclaimed EPs of original songs will be rereleased on vinyl by Southern Crescent Recording Co. in 2025. He can be found at tomandes.com.
Tom Andes
My first client was an Uptown lawyer named Donaldson whose daughter had run off with a Deadhead. As anyone will tell you, back then New Orleans was a different city. Less attractive to the credentialed and more welcoming to those of us who couldn’t make it anywhere else. I’d come from New England, a town called Waterford, and I was never going back.
“A Deadhead?” I repeated.
“He’s one of those people who follow that band on tour.” Donaldson shifted in his chair, crossing the opposite leg. New Orleans being a port city, his firm specialized in maritime law. He looked like he’d come from work. He was in a blue, custom-tailored suit I’d bet dollars to donuts came from Perlis, a shop at the swanky end of Magazine where his kind outfitted themselves for their weddings, parties, and funerals. He was 45, six-four, maybe 220, with thinning brown hair and that pudge middle-aged guys carry in their jowls.
I told him I was familiar with the term.
“I don’t mind their music,” he said. “I just don’t see why people need to make a lifestyle out of it. And let me tell you, it’s a bunch of thugs, losers, and nobodies out there on Tour.”
I told him I was not impartial to their music, either. Just the other day, I’d been listening to a cassette bootleg of Jerry Garcia and John Kahn at Oregon State Prison, March 5, 1982. It had what was to my mind the definitive version of “Dire Wolf.”
“Doesn’t anyone listen to Barry Manilow anymore?” he said. “Neil Diamond?”
“Any idea,” I said, “why your daughter would run off with this guy?”
To get my PI’s license, I’d put in three years working for a firm across the river in Gretna. If that experience told me anything, his kid hadn’t run away for kicks.
Donaldson looked baffled. Like there wasn’t any reason his seventeen-year-old would’ve pulled up stakes and bailed except for the inherent wickedness of man- or womankind or the world. I gave him credit: it was a good performance. “We run a tight ship. My wife keeps a clean house, dinner on the table every night at six o’clock. Mass Sunday at St. Patrick’s. My daughter has never wanted for anything.”
“Where did she meet this guy? What’s his name?”
“Erick,” he said, the color rising in his face. “I don’t know his last name. He’s a dishwasher and a pantry chef. As for where she met him, I don’t know that, either. Maybe he was trolling for jailbait, picking up schoolgirls at the streetcar stop. The nuns at Sacred Heart are usually better than this at keeping undesirable elements away.”
“Nothing gets by those nuns,” I said.
“Not usually.” He huffed.
“What’s the name of the restaurant?” I said, and he told me. I wrote that down, too.
Donaldson fidgeted, a pudgy man, picking his manicured nails.
“I don’t like you, Donaldson,” I said, and the guy started to sputter. Likely no one had told him that, not to his face. Not for a long time.
“I don’t—”
I cut him off. Maybe my old colleagues were right, and I didn’t have any business sense, saying that to the first guy who walked through my door, but I’d gone independent because I didn’t want to kiss anyone’s rear end. And teenaged girls didn’t leave home because they fell in love with line cooks. No, they ran away from something.
I said, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Do you have children,” he said, “Mister Genest? Have you raised a teenager?”
I’d played hockey in high school, and I still had that build. I’d had acne, too. That had mellowed with age but left scars. I’d had my nose broken a few times, too.
What did that guy see when he saw me, dressed up in the eighty-dollar suit I’d bought off the rack at Steinmart?
“No children,” I said. “Not that I know of.”
Sitting sideways in his chair, he waved, as if he were dismissing me. “I rest my case.”
I might not have liked him, but I needed the money.
I slapped a contract on my desk. Donaldson gave me a nasty look. He didn’t like me, either. But he signed.
“Boy howdy,” I said, “we’re off to a great start.”
***
A couple hours after Saint Lucia opened, I walked in. Bistro tables crowded a tiny dining room with white tiled floors, paintings cramming the ochre walls like a Parisian salon. French doors opened onto a patio, a narrow, overgrown space out of Gray Gardens. A woman in server’s black and whites came around the bar. Her smile didn’t make it to her eyes.
“Help you?” she said.
“Erick around?” I said, and those eyes got a little wider as she shot a look at the kitchen door. Behind the porthole, guys in chefs’ whites were working the line.
“He’s busy,” she said. Around us at those tables, the quality of Uptown New Orleans tried not to look up from their goat cheese and Belgian endive salads. But they were hanging on every word, all but drooling, fangs out. “Who are you?”
“I’m a detective.” I wasn’t yelling, but I made sure those fancy folks could hear what I said. “I’d like to talk to him about a young woman he’s involved with. There’s a question of the girl’s age.”
Had the woman sitting at the table by the bar gasped? Chewing, she set her fork down with a chink that was loud in the now silent room.
“I’m afraid,” the woman behind the bar said, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Any idea where I could reach Erick?” I said. “A number, an address?”
“We don’t give out employees’ personal information.” She walked out from behind the bar and backed me toward the door.
Outside, a guy with braided hair, a beard, and a ratty Morning 40 Federation tee-shirt was sitting behind the kitchen, smoking a hand rolled cigarette. He was wearing a rubber dishwasher’s apron.
“You Erick?” I said.
“Who wants to know?”
“I waited half an hour for my crème brulee. They told me that was your department.”
He blinked, his eyes unfocused, then coughed, cleared his sinuses, and blew snot on the sidewalk. “I shot a bunch of Demerol last night. I told them desserts were going to take a while.”
He shrugged, dragged on his cigarette, flicked the butt into the street
Sure enough, I had my man. Now, I wanted to give him a chance to lead me to the kid.
“See you around,” I said.
“Better hope not.” He went back inside.
***
A while later, the same guy came out the kitchen door, looked up and down the sidewalk, fists clenched. I parked across the street in my Jeep, Jerry playing “Deep Elem Blues” on the tape deck.
A Tacoma pickup rolled up. Erick climbed in. Four of them were sitting across the seat, two guys and two girls. They drove to Riverbend, stopped at Cooter Brown’s long enough for the driver to grab a couple to-go boxes, then headed out Carrollton Avenue. They crossed Claiborne, made a U-turn, parked next to a duplex, and went in the bottom apartment.
I called Donaldson from a payphone in front of the Burger King down the street. A woman answered, said he was sleeping.
“He told me to call anytime,” I said. “Day or night.”
“I’ll get him,” she said. This must be the wife, the one who kept the house shipshape. It was a quarter of eleven, but she was wide awake.
“Yes?” Donaldson’s voice was thick with sleep. I told him I’d tracked the kid down.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Do?”
“Yes, do.”
“Get her out of there.”
“How?” I said. “I can’t kidnap her.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “Just don’t make a scene like the one you made at the restaurant. We’ve heard about that.”
“Good news travels fast,” I said.
He hung up.
***
Next afternoon, I pounded on the door of the duplex. Donaldson had given me a yearbook photo of the kid, Liza. She answered. Still in their uniforms, she and a friend were lazing around the living room on an orange thrift store couch watching The Jerry Springer Show on a crappy set with rabbit ears.
“Pack your gear,” I said, “you and your friend. Let’s go.”
“What the hell?” The driver, a guy with blond dreadlocks, was slurping noodles from a takeout container.
“I don’t know how much weed you’ve got in this house,” I said. I’d dealt with deadbeat kids like these across the river, and they were all the same. “But I’m sure the cops would be interested, just like they’d be interested in checking the IDs of the honors students hanging out in your living room.”
The door to the back bedroom opened, and the guy who’d been sitting behind the restaurant came out. He was in the same tee-shirt, cargo shorts, thick through the shoulders.
“Erick,” I said.
“You got me in hot water at work,” he said. “They almost sacked me.”
For a junkie, he had a good right hook. It took two of them—his buddy with the dreadlocks and his girlfriend—to pull him off me. When I came to, I was slumped in the corner, and I could smell that sweet, skunky odor of good sinsemilla. A lighter flicked, water bubbling in a bong.
Someone coughed. My jaw felt like it had been run over with a pickup truck.
I opened my eyes. They were sitting on that couch and in a busted La-Z-Boy that was missing half its stuffing, listening to that same Jerry Garcia and John Kahn bootleg, the show ending with “Dire Wolf,” Jerry singing “Don’t murder me.”
“Want a hit?” The kid with the deadlocks offered me the bong. The stuff would’ve helped my head. But I was clinging to what was left of my self-respect after getting coldcocked by a hippie.
“This my bootleg?” I said. With my face swollen, the words came out funny. I swallowed blood.
The driver dipped his chopsticks into that container of noodles. “It’s a nice jeep.”
“I’m two payments in arrears,” I said.
“We’ll take it off your hands,” the guy said, “you want to get rid of it.”
“Dad sent you?” Liza was sprawled across Erick’s lap, his hand on her thigh.
“Your folks want you home.” Leaning against the wall, I struggled to my feet. I checked myself for dizziness, faintness, wondering would I puke.
“Show him,” Erick said.
The kid unbuttoned her shirt. Inside her arm were ridges of scar tissue in half-moon shapes, eight, ten, more than I could count.
“What,” I said, “did you do to yourself?”
“From her curling iron,” she said.
I didn’t want to twig what I was looking at. I’d known Donaldson was hiding something, but not this.
“Your mom?” I said, the kid biting her lip. Scars were on top of scars, burns that must’ve gone back sixteen, seventeen years.
“She gets so angry. She yells, throws things. I’m bad. I make her do it.” The words choked off. Her eyes were shining, and she twisted away from me, wiped her cheek.
“Your dad knows?” I said.
She shrugged.
“You’re seventeen,” I told the kid, “so your boyfriend won’t go to prison, but you’re a runaway, and if the cops come here, they’ll take you home.”
“I’m going to school,” she said. “Why can’t I stay?”
The place was a dump, her boyfriend a junkie. Given her options, was it worse than home?
Dinner on the table every evening at six o’clock, Donaldson had said.
Mass every Sunday.
Well, hell.
“Your mom needs help,” I said.
“And you’re going to help her?” Liza said.
“If I report her to CPS, they’ll get you out of there.”
Liza looked stricken. “Please don’t do that. I couldn’t stand it.” She cocked her head, too worldly for seventeen. “Just don’t tell them where I am.”
“I need a day.” I left, then came back. “And give me my bootleg.”
***
Opposite my desk, Donaldson was sitting with his knee crossed over his ankle. Embroidered streetcars were on his socks, which were likely from Perlis, too. Next to him, his wife was giving me the stink-eye. A short, plump woman, she clutched an overstuffed purse.
“I’ve seen the marks,” I said, “the burns.”
Donaldson opened his mouth, but I held up a finger, silencing him. His wife scratched the stitching, and if it was possible to pour more hatred into that look, she did. The Department of Defense should’ve recruited those eyes for their missile defense program.
“I know,” I said, “it’s embarrassing. You don’t want your fancy friends to find out your daughter’s shacked up with a junkie who’s pushing 30, and you don’t want them to find out your wife is a child abuser out of Mommie Dearest, either.”
Donaldson pounded my desk. “I don’t have to stand for this.”
“Sit down,” I said. He looked like I’d slapped him. “We’re not in court.”
“I was King of Rex,” he said.
“And your wife is certifiable,” I said. “You want that to be the talk of the town?”
He was shaking. Hell, so was I.
I’d found the apartment that morning in the classifieds in the Times-Picayune. It wasn’t much, a studio on Prytania near Zara’s grocery, but it was the best chance the kid had.
“You’re going to send her a check every month,” I told Donaldson, “and you’re going to keep paying her tuition. If you miss a payment, if you hold the money over her head, I’ll find out. If your wife goes near her, I’ll find that out, too.”
Could I do that? I didn’t know. I only needed him to believe it.
And I was angry enough to sell it.
Donaldson’s wife was rocking in her chair.
“She’s bad,” Elaine Donaldson said. “She’s rotten through and through.”
She started crying. Donaldson put an arm over her shoulder.
On the landing, he shook my hand. His wife was at the bottom of the stairs, her purse hanging from her elbow. Dust motes swam in the sunlight coming in the window. The carpet was ratty, the stairwell smelling of mildew. Maybe I’d had it better across the river, when I was doing a job, and I didn’t have to answer to these people, who were evil.
“Thank you,” Donaldson said in a low voice. “I had an operation, years ago, so we wouldn’t have another. She doesn’t know.”
“She needs help,” I said.
He nodded, pudgy chin trembling. “I know.”
***
Later, I picked the kid up at the duplex and dropped her at her new place, a pink stucco building a couple blocks below Napoleon.
“You don’t have to date people like Erick to get back at your parents.”
“He’s not so bad, once you get to know him.”
I told her I’d take her word for it.
She went inside, and I put that bootleg in my tape deck.
When Donaldson’s check came a few days later, I caught up on my jeep payments. The check wasn’t much. But back then, it was enough to scrape by a couple weeks.
Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me, forthcoming from Crescent City Books in 2025. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications including Best American Mystery Stories 2012, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Santa Monica Review. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician, performing solo and with several bands. He is also a freelance editor, writing coach, teaches, picks up catering shifts, and pet sits. His two acclaimed EPs of original songs will be rereleased on vinyl by Southern Crescent Recording Co. in 2025. He can be found at tomandes.com.