Louisiana Lament

were with her, she cut through the French Quarter, notorious for its traffic, and parked in a lot on North Peters.
    Then she crossed the street and tucked herself out of sight at a coffeehouse, to see if a Le Sabre pulled into the same lot. She didn’t see one, but the traffic was fierce, which was good. If she could lose them, they could lose her.
    Next she strolled to the Riverwalk, stopping to get a soft drink from a street vendor, hoping she looked like a happy young woman taking a mental health day. Once inside the mall, she decided on Victoria’s Secret as an ideal place to make a spectacle of herself. First the beauty treatment at Eve’s, then some fancy lingerie—it would look as if she were getting ready for a hot date. She made a big show of looking at whatever could be seen through the window, holding nighties and bras up to her body, finally disappearing into a fitting room and waiting in line to make her purchase. If anyone was watching, he’d have no idea there was nothing in her enticing shopping bag except a pair of bikini panties.
    She strolled back to her car, transferred the wig, clothes, and other items from their current bag to the Victoria’s Secret bag, pretended to retrieve a straw hat from the back seat, which she put on, and then emerged once again onto North Peters. Next, she bought a Lucky Dog, which she ate by the river. Ostentatiously, she read the poetry book as she munched. If the tail was still with her, she must be boring the pants off him.
    Finally, she went back to the street and walked in the opposite direction from the parking lot, toward Esplanade Avenue. There was a small women’s clothing shop there, into which she ducked for a few minutes, and other stores further down the street—Tower Records, Bookstar, the French Connection. She could dilly-dally forever and never leave the block. Inside the clothing store, she took off the hat, just to make it slightly harder to recognize her, and walked toward the other stores, keeping a careful eye out for a taxi. If she didn’t find one, she could keep wandering.
    She didn’t.
    Okay, fine. She went into Tower Records, checked out some African musicians Darryl had been talking about and popped back out into the sunlight, just as a taxi was drawing up to the curb to let someone out. She darted into it.
    “Turn left as soon as you can,” she said. “Then go to Dauphine and turn toward Canal.”
    The cabbie, a white guy with a steel-gray ponytail muttered, “Whatever ya want” in a seen-it-all voice. But she noticed he checked her out in the mirror, unsure what manner of screwball he had in his cab.
    Going across the Quarter was going to be slow, so slow she might be able to see if they were being followed, though there’d be dozens of obstructions, mostly in the form of delivery trucks; if the Le Sabre was there, the obstructions might even work to her advantage, since at a distance, one cab looked much like another. She found this almost the worst part of the trip, feeling more trapped even than earlier, when her hand was being held by a hostile force who was also a relative.
    By the time they turned onto Dauphine, she was sweating despite the AC, but there was no sign of the Le Sabre. At Canal, she said, “Let’s go to the library.”
    “What library?”
    “You know. The main library.”
    The guy didn’t even bother with the mirror—he twisted to the back for an eyeful. “Lady, I ain’t never had nobody want to go to the library before.”
    “Tulane and Loyola Avenue,” she said.
    She left the conspicuous straw hat in the cab, figuring she could always replace it. The library was actually the first real place on her agenda. By now, she was pretty sure she was free of her pursuers (if there was more than one), but she sure wished she had at least an inkling of what they might look like. White males, she figured. And there ought not to be many of those in the library during working hours. She kept an eye out as she prowled.
    She had come to the library for its
Times-Picayune
files, invaluable for a certain kind of background check—the kind you couldn’t yet get on the Internet. She knew what she wanted, though, and that ought to help.
    She’d lost a big part of the day, and she was antsy, but she had to focus, at least for awhile. Before she got started, she made a phone call to a man she knew named L. J. Currie, telling him she’d meet him at his office at four o’clock. It was late in the day for him to