Crescent City Connection

percent of the itinerant geniuses who pass through these portals. That oversized official of enforcement can get a truckload of search warrants and she will turn up neither address nor phone number. These people want cash and I pay them in cash—I doubt half of them even have bank accounts. For all I know, some don’t know how to sign their names.
    “Not that The Monk is like that, of course. He reads; he definitely writes. Otherwise, how could he communicate? However, I have a motto: Tell me no answers and I’ll ask you no lies.”
    Lovelace almost laughed.
If I could, I would,
she thought.
I’ll bet I could like Dahveed. In a superficial kind of way.
    There was really nothing to do but go to work. She had phoned Anthony that she’d be late, and he’d said, sure, be as late as you want, just let me know and I’ll give you a two-cent raise.
    She couldn’t believe it last night when she came out to announce dinner. The Monk just wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the bathroom taking one of his endless showers, and he wasn’t on the porch sulking.
    He was gone.
    She had heard him leave a hundred times, so this time he had been careful to be quiet.
    He’ll be back, she thought. He’s just walking.
    He hadn’t come back. She had driven him away. He had been so afraid of his father, and of her father, that he had left his own home, and all because of her.
    She could have kicked herself in the seat of the pants. She would have done anything to take back the whole conversation, everything she’d said about the cop. She didn’t have to see any cop—she could have gone back to Northwestern, or to Mexico to find her mom—she certainly didn’t have to see any cop.
    Maybe she could have just gone on living with her uncle, hoping her grandfather and her dad and the FBI wouldn’t find her. Isaac would have been fine then, his life wouldn’t have been disturbed.
    But in her heart, she knew it wasn’t true, especially after the thing that had happened that morning. She couldn’t simply have waited for the blow to fall, the moment when she walked through a doorway and someone grabbed her—grabbed her or her uncle.
    Isaac would truly have been no safer than she, perhaps less so; he was simply wrong if he thought otherwise.
    Still, she couldn’t bring herself to meet the cop this morning, couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t her decision, that it was Isaac’s as well. She needed to give him time, needed to talk about it with him, to let him figure out an escape route for himself.
    But perhaps he’d found one. It made her feel immeasurably sad that he hadn’t discussed it with her, had just up and left.
    He hated her, probably. And she deserved it, for coming into his life and endangering him like this. He wasn’t a well person, she knew that. But he was more sane than otherwise, she was pretty sure of that. She wondered if his apparent craziness was meant to conceal something else, was simply an act, like Hamlet’s antic disposition.
    She got off the bus and walked toward Judy’s Juice.
Am I crazy, too?
She thought,
Maybe I should just go find the cop now. It’s not like I only had one chance.
    But she had promised Anthony she’d be there.
    * * *
    Dorise thought about it, and realized that not only had she never been out with a lawyer, she’d probably never even been out with a man who had graduated college. A lawyer had an advanced degree, if she wasn’t mistaken.
    She’d certainly never been out with a man who wore suits to work—a white-collar dude. The phrase was so odd when applied to her life, it was like a foreign language. A movie star would have been more believable—at least she’d actually spent time fantasizing about that. It had a certain familiarity.
    A lawyer was the kind of person who lived in the houses she worked in.
    The wisdom of what her sister had said came down on her—she didn’t hang with lawyers, except when she was the help. She had no idea what she was going to talk to Dashan Jericho about.
    Still, he was taking her to Commander’s Palace. She’d never in a million years thought she’d get to go to Commander’s Palace, and she wasn’t sure what to wear, except that maybe it should be the sort of thing you wore to church. And he’d already seen her one good suit.
    She got a loan from her sister and went out to Dillard’s to buy herself a nice dress.
    What would make him proud of me?
she thought.
Something red? No, that’s for later, to be sexy. For a first