Big Easy Bonanza

like a one-bedroom apartment trying to pass as a bordello. A door to the right was closed.
    “Sshhh,” said Sanders. “The baby’s asleep.”
    “You leave your baby alone at night?”
    “Well, he four now. Anyway, I come back every hour or so. Check on him after my trick.”
    Part of the living room had been partitioned with makeshift curtains that looked like sheets dyed black and then spruced up with silver and gold glitter. A few plants, an old red-velvet sofa, and a scratched coffee table made up the visible furniture. Over the mantel hung a very bad painting of a naked black woman.
    “Tha’s my office,” said Sanders, pointing to the curtains. “When LaBelle was here she use the bedroom. Billy Paul, he was stayin’ by his grandmama then, but I got him back now that bitch outta here.”
    “You and LaBelle used to share this place?”
    “Tha’s right. Till she ran off with two hundred dollars I had saved up. I was gon’ get Billy Paul a color TV—he just got a ol’ black and white, and you know how kids love their TVs. That LaBelle, jus’ one day she was gone and all her stuff and all my money. Jus’ like that.” She snapped her red-tipped fingers. “So now I can’t buy no TV and I gotta turn twice as many tricks to pay the rent, and tha’s why I’m about to tell you where the bitch is stayin’ at.”
    Skip followed her into the kitchen, where a wall telephone hung above a counter strewn with telephone messages and a faux leather address book. Sanders waved at the counter— “Tools of my trade.” She picked up the address book.
    “How long ago did LaBelle leave?”
    “Oh, ’bout six months.”
    “Had you had a fight or something?”
    “Nothin’! No reason in hell for that kind of behavior! Come right out of thin air.” She fingered a line in the book. “Okay, you ready?”
    “Hold it. It seems pretty weird she took all your money and left a forwarding address.”
    “She ain’ leave no forwardin’ address. I do business with a ol’ dude named Calvin manages a big ugly place over in Tremé. He tol’ me she stayin’ there now.”
    “Why don’t you just go over there and get your money?”
    Sanders stared at the backward child that had found its way into her kitchen. “What I’m gon’ do? Shoot her?” Skip forebore to ask why she hadn’t reported the robbery. She knew what would have happened—LaBelle would have said the money was hers and no one would have been able to prove otherwise.
    As Sanders handed over the address book, Skip had a thought. “I noticed you had a white client tonight.”
    “Something wrong with that? You prejudiced?”
    “I was wondering about LaBelle. Does she see white clients?”
    “Oh, law, don’t get me started! Thought she was Queen of Comus or somethin’. She had this notion of her sorry self seein’ only a Very Exclusive Clientele by out-call only, dawalin’. Miss La-de-da! I tol’ her, tha’s a good idea, and you got the looks and all, but how you gon’ meet ’em? Send ’em a brochure? You jus’ cain’ do that if you a freelancer. And—I might as well say it—if you got a jones like that girl does. She could make jus’ enough money to pay the man, and then she was noddin’ out and couldn’t work for hours and hours. How she gon’ set herself up in business that kind o’ way?”

Pain Perdu
    MARCELLE WOKE UP crying, but not for Chauncey, the way she’d done yesterday. The first wave of missing him was starting to pass, and now she was remembering what life was like before Mardi Gras. She was crying for herself.
    She could hear André in his room singing to himself, probably playing quietly with his ships and trucks—boy things. Soon it would be guns—so far she’d held off on that, but it couldn’t last. People would give them to him, all the other kids would have them, it was inevitable—she couldn’t do anything about it, but no surprises there. She couldn’t do anything about anything.
    He needed his breakfast; she needed to get up and give it to him. Oh, hell, André didn’t need her. André was the most self-sufficient child in Orleans Parish, perfectly capable of pouring cereal and milk into a bowl. She turned over, feeling the sun streaming in on her satin comforter.
    Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was eight-thirty. She couldn’t put it off forever. She really would have to get up pretty soon. Okay. She would get up and make André his breakfast.
Pain perdu
. She had loved it when Bitty made