Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher Page B

to die a hero. The chief needs it. This will square you with him, so don’t fuck up.’ Owen did as he was told, and it went as planned: the cop ran into the street and was shot in the chest and Owen walked away. The one thing they hadn’t told him was that the shooter was supposed to shoot him, too. But he missed twice, shattering a store window and wounding another man. When Owen got on a bus for Houston an hour later, he felt he had used up more than one of his nine lives. Wick said that as far as he knew, Owen never returned to New Orleans. That was the last time I heard anything about Valentine Owen.”
    In addition to this portrait of her father that was so at odds with everything her mother ever told her, what Ruby took away was that Marielle was the first (and last) person she ever met who encountered her parents together around the time she was conceived.
    Ruby had her mother’s old address, an apartment house on Cassandra Street. She rode the Gentilly streetcar there. It was a backstreet in a poor parish. The bar, the grocery, the Chinese laundry looked as if they had been there for centuries. The panhandlers, too, all of them on crutches.
    Her mother had relived that week of hers many times over the years. She had accompanied a friend to a jazz club called the King Cobra. The crowd was raucous. The band was hot. Her friend was dating the drummer. During a break, he and a tall man in a white suit joined them. The man introduced himself as Val. They drank bourbon, and after the last set Camille took Val home. She scrambled them eggs and they drank some more. Every night after that they went club hopping until dawn. She was impressed that he had played with some of the musicians they met. He wore lizard boots and a Stetson and rolled his own cigarettes. She became pregnant.
    Then he left.
    Ruby’s own time in New Orleans, seventeen years later, also ended abruptly. It was a hot day, and she and Marielle had been working together all afternoon in the greenhouse. As they sat down to dinner in the garden, Ruby finally got up the courage to ask Marielle if she could stay in New Orleans with her for good. “Of course, honey,” Marielle replied, taking her hand.
    Ruby should have known that nothing good ever comes that easily.
    The following week a man broke into the house and came into Ruby’s bedroom. She was asleep, and suddenly he was on top of her. A big guy with rough hands. One of them was clamped over her mouth. He was tearing at her clothes and trying to push her legs apart. He stank of booze. She bit him. She screamed. Then the lights came on and he froze. Marielle had come up behind him and stuck a pistol in his ear. Ruby never knew she had a gun.
    “Get off of her,” Marielle said.
    She walked him down the hall with the pistol in his back. She opened the front door. “Hands up, and clasp them.”
    “What?”
    “Squeeze your hands together, you son of a bitch!”
    As he stepped outside, she raised the gun and shot him through the hands and slammed the door on his screams.
    Ruby was in shock. Marielle calmly wrapped her arms around her. “I’m so sorry, honey. Did he hurt you?”
    “I’m all right. You shot him.”
    They could hear him howling down the street.
    “I know him,” Marielle said. “His name is Fawkes. And he’s not done paying for this.”
    Two days later, on a warm autumn evening, Marielle disappeared without a trace. It had been a day like any other. A man brought his sick daughter by for some herbs. Marielle visited a client in the hospital, then drove to Metairie and cast a spell to protect a woman from her ex-husband. Later, she dined alone at her favorite restaurant, Ciro’s. The waiters said she received a phone call from a man. They spoke briefly, and five minutes later she went out to the parking lot. No one heard from her after that or saw her blue Cadillac.
    Theodora told Ruby that Marielle had made plenty of enemies.In Ruby’s time with her, she had met so many of her