Crescent City Connection

she was just giving off a very nasty vibe.
    Revelas came in from the courtyard. “What you doin’ to Dahveed? He don’t know nothin’.”
    “Look, I don’t want to hurt Dahveed. But I need to find The Monk. Is he here? Is that what’s going on?”
    “Naw. He ain’t here. But I just remembered somethin’ I know about The Monk. Maybe it could help you.”
    She could have screamed.
Just remembered! Goddammit, where were you yesterday?
    She spoke as politely as she could. “What’s that, Revelas?”
    “Before he started helpin’ out aroun’ here, The Monk had a gig. Little somethin’ to help him get through, you know? Support his paintin’ habit.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Well, look, it wadn’t like this.” He swept an arm to indicate the gallery. “Dahveed’s like a artist hissef. No records, no nothin’. You a artist, you get ya money, that the end of the story. This was a regular bi’ness, you know? Like with records and stuff. Maybe that dude have his address.”
    It couldn’t have been that regular, she thought. The Monk doesn’t even have a Social Security number.
    She said, “What kind of business?”
    “Juice bar. You know—one them carrot-mashin’ places; make your yogurt shakes, shit like that.”
    “Uh-huh. You know which one?”
    “Well, I been thinkin’ ’bout that. See, mostly I talk to The Monk. He don’t talk to me—he don’t talk at all, you know about that?”
    “Revelas, you know something or not?”
    He was suddenly belligerent. “Yeah. I know somethin’. You want it or you jus’ want to tear Dahveed place apart? Dahveed jus’ a innocent bystander—other brother might have what you want.”
    Skip suddenly got a tight feeling in her stomach, as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice. If she took a wrong step, she might go flying. Unless she’d misunderstood, he’d already told her something—that meant this was more than smoke.
    “Did you say ‘brother’? He worked for a black man?”
    “Yeah. He work for a brother.”
    “You remember his name?”
    “Don’t know his name. He told me, went in one ear, out the other. What I do remember, I remember the name of the sto’.”
    Skip waited. But the man was obviously pissed off and in a mood to make her work. Finally she said, “Well, what was it, Revelas?”
    “Well, now, you ask me nice.”
    “Oh, forget it. I’ve got work to do.”
    But Dahveed shouted, “For God’s sake, tell her if you know!”
    “All right, bro’. Okay, awrite. I’ll tell her for you.”
    Again she waited.
    Revelas pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Finally he said, “It was Juicy’s.”
    “Juicy’s?”
    “Juicy’s Juice. How you gon’ forget a name like that? Motherfucker say he name it after his girlfriend. Bet she love that. Juicy! Huh.”
    “Now, how would you know a thing like that when The Monk didn’t talk?”
    “Oh.
Now
you be interested in that.”
    “That’s right. Now I be interested.”
    “Well, we was gettin’ to be friends, see. And he tol’ me all his friends was brothers.”
    “I thought he didn’t talk.”
    “Sometimes, if he thought somethin’ was real important, he write it down. We pass notes like—you know?”
    Skip nodded.
    “I said somethin’ like, ‘You the whitest man I ever seen. Not enough to have white skin, you even dress white.’ And that kind of hurt his feelin’s. So he wrote me about workin’ for this brother who own Juicy’s Juice. I laughed, man, I laughed—that just tickle my funny bone. Juicy’s Juice. Who in hell would name a bi’ness somethin’ like that? And whose girlfriend would let ’em?”
    “But he didn’t give you the name of the owner?”
    “I tol’ you already. He tell me, I jus’ don’t remember—Juicy’s Juice the funny part.”
    “What city was it in?”
    “What you mean what city? Racheer. Racheer in New Orleans.”
    “Not Metairie or Kenner? Or Algiers? New Orleans—you sure about that?”
    “Sho’ I’m sho’.”
    She doubted he was, but it was something, anyway. “You know what location?”
    He shook his head. “He never did tell me that.”
    It was all she could do not to dash for the phone book. She already knew there was no Juicy’s Juice in the Yellow Pages— she’d been to every juice bar that was there—but it might be in the white ones.
    It didn’t matter anyway. There was a way to look it up. She could find out who’d been issued the business license.
    She wondered if she should stay and watch the shop