Just past midnight, a few last lingerers filed out of the Emporium. Prosper emerged through the bead curtain and turned to close a folding iron gate. The ancient hinges screeched in protest.
Rusty quickly crossed the street to assist him. The gate clanged shut and Prosper locked it.
“Didn’t ask for no help. Don’t need no help.”
He pocketed the key and pulled down the brim of his top hat.
“Nice plant,” Rusty said, following him up Bourbon toward Canal Street. “Never saw it coming.”
“How could you see it, with your eyes glued up high like that? Child’s play to make a cross-hand placement, as long as you hold the mark’s gaze above the neckline.”
“Of course,” Rusty nodded. “Misdirection 101.”
“I guess you forgot that, along with everything else I taught you.”
“Only thing I forgot is how fast your hands are. That was a stupid mistake I’m not apt to repeat.”
“Ah, Rusty,” Prosper uttered with a shake of the head. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned about you, it’s that you’re certain to repeat mistakes. Especially the stupid ones.”
They walked in silence for twenty paces before Rusty tried again.
“Buy you a drink? Or coffee and a beignet?”
“Thank you, no.”
“Where you headed?”
“Storyville. Got a real nice hoochie out there. She’s waiting for me with a pitcher of Hurricanes and a feathered whip.”
The sardonic spite of those words landed so harshly on Rusty’s ears that he didn’t offer a reply. He’d expected no better, but it still stung.
“I’m catching a streetcar home,” Prosper said, a measure of acid removed from his tone. “Been on my feet for ten hours and barely a hundred in the till to show for it.”
“Can you tolerate my company from here to the stop?”
The old man offered no answer, which Rusty chose to interpret as tacit acceptance.
They traversed, without words, the noisiest blocks of Bourbon. Past open doorways filled with blaring music, stumbling tourists, ladies of questionable repute. All of it bathed in a murky neon glow and smelling like last week’s spilled beer.
Not until they’d reached the streetcar stop at Canal and Decatur did Prosper speak.
“Why you here, Rusty?”
“Does making up for lost time sound too optimistic?” Answering his own question with a nod, he quickly added, “I came to square things, with you and Marceline both. Really hoping it’s not too late for that.”
He saw Prosper recoil slightly.
“You don’t want to see me,” Rusty continued, “that’s fine. But the ledger still needs balancing. You two left Vegas in such a hurry, never collected your full pay from Caesars.”
Prosper stopped in his tracks. He looked at Rusty with fresh surprise.
“You think some money’s gonna patch it up? Make things like they were before that desert turned you into something…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, like the memory it alluded to was too distasteful to be spoken aloud.
“For 682 shows,” Rusty said, “you and Marcie served as the best backstage assistants I could ever want. You only got paid for 360 of those shows before you bailed on me.”
“And it took you two years to figure out we’re owed this money?”
“I’ve known all along. Just didn’t know the best way to face you. If this opens a door to getting us back on a good footing, I’d love that. If not, I’m on a plane in two days and won’t bother you again.”
“Keep your payoff. We’re getting along just fine.”
“It’s not a payoff, damnit. It’s simple compensation for the work you both did.”
“I said keep it.”
“Are you answering on Marceline’s behalf? I really don’t think that’s your call, old man.”
Prosper wheeled on him angrily, but Rusty kept talking.
“She’s entitled to decide for herself. I don’t believe she’ll turn it down. Not with a baby on the way.”
“How you know about that?”
Rusty paused before answering. He knew he was entering perilous ground but saw no way around it.
“She came to visit me. A few months ago.”
Prosper sagged for a moment, as if receiving long-delayed verification of some dreaded suspicion.
“It was entirely her doing, OK? She used the Internet to track me down, showed up on my doorstep without any advance notice.”
“In that godawful desert?”
“No. I left Vegas over a year ago. Pretty sure you must’ve heard about that.”
“I heard you vanished, that’s all. Everybody asking, ‘What happened to the Raven?’ Big star magician disappears without a trace, and just when things were going so well for you.”
The biting disdain of that last utterance was enough to give Rusty pause about his whole purpose in coming to New Orleans.
“I moved back to Maryland,” he soldiered on. “Got a house in Ocean Pines, near where I grew up. That’s where Marcie found me. We spoke briefly, but the conversation got cut short.”
A rattling of unoiled brakes announced the imminent appearance of the next streetcar from around a blind corner.
“She’s an adult who can make up her own mind,” Prosper grumbled. “What are you bothering me for?”
“I don’t have her address, or even a phone number. Hoping we can all sit down tomorrow and handle this.”
Prosper almost replied, then stopped. His upper body trembled as if animated by some inner palsy. Rusty laid a hand on his shoulder, half surprised it didn’t get shrugged away.
A streetcar rolled noisily toward them, its bottle-green flank grinding to a halt at the curb. People started filing in. Some with the $1.25 fare handy, others searching their pockets for change.
“What’s wrong?” Rusty asked, hand still on the quaking shoulder. “Talk to me, please.”
“Won’t do no good,” Prosper answered, stepping forward to free himself. “Even if I give you the address, you won’t find her.”
“What are you talking about?”
Prosper eased himself onto the first step leading into the streetcar, then turned. For the first time, Rusty beheld the full grip of misery suffocating his estranged mentor. It wasn’t mere age that had carved those hollows in his face, etched those dark circles under his eyes. The man was clearly terrified.
“She’s gone, Rusty. Five months pregnant, and my baby girl’s gone.”
He stood on the step for an agonized moment, backlit by the soft yellow light of the streetcar’s interior. Rusty grabbed the hem of his velvet jacket, yanking him around.
“Hold it! What do you mean, gone?”
Prosper brought both gloved hands together as if in prayer, then drew them apart with splayed fingers. It was a familiar performance bit, usually accompanied by a burst of flame from ignited flash paper.
“Disappeared, like smoke. Four days and no trace of her. Tell me, what you gonna do about that?”
Prosper turned away and dropped a handful of coins into the fare box. Rusty remained for a moment on the curb, mind churning incoherently. The sense of disorientation he’d been surfing since the turbulent plane ride reached a dizzying crest.
Gone?
The door started to swing shut with a metallic shudder. Rusty reached one arm in through the gap and lurched up the step. The door clanged hard against his shoulder.
The gray-haired driver, screwed into his pilot’s chair with a weary mien that suggested he’d been navigating this route since the first tracks were laid, shot Rusty a dirty look.
“What the hell, man? Ever boarded a streetcar before?”
Prosper sat slumped in an aisle seat, not even glancing up as Rusty bumped past him. The window seat was occupied so he took one two rows behind. He forced himself to stay calm and wait for a chance to ask the question humming in his brain like a maddened wasp.
What the hell happened to Marceline?
• • •
Twenty minutes later, Prosper reached up to pull the cord as the streetcar approached the intersection of St. Charles and Felicity. They’d advanced into the Lower Garden, a largely residential district with a smattering of food and nightlife options adding to the foot traffic.
Rusty rose and followed him out the car’s back exit. They walked slowly down Felicity’s cracked sidewalk, toward the river.
“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on, Prosper?”
“Told you already. I ain’t heard from my daughter in going on a week. If you came to see her, I can’t tell you where she is ’cause I don’t know.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Four nights ago, which you wouldn’t have to ask if you’d been listening.”
“So that was Monday?”
“She stopped by the house to show me one of those…pictures they take inside her belly.”
“An ultrasound?”
Prosper grunted in confirmation, then continued. “We were gonna meet for lunch at Two Sisters the next day. She never showed. Didn’t return my calls all day and night. So I drive over to her place—”
“Is she still living in the Marigny? She mentioned that, last time I spoke with her.”
Prosper directed a glimpse of bottled fury at Rusty, silently telling him one more interruption would bring this conversation to a permanent close.
“Place ain’t fit for habitation, I never understood why she chose to live there. Her apartment’s not bad but the neighborhood’s halfway to a slum. Anyway, she wasn’t home. I called the hospital where she works, they ain’t seen her. She missed three shifts in a row. They’re about ready to fire her.”
“Have you talked to the police?”
“Damn right I have. Went straight to the precinct, didn’t bother with the phone. Detective there, man named Hubbard, he brushes me off quick.”
“He didn’t even take a report?” Rusty asked incredulously.
“He took one. I gave him a picture of Marcie and all her information. Next day he calls me back, says they got nothing. Investigated her place, no sign of a crime. Her car’s gone so they think she maybe just took off. Like that’s something she does all the time.”
Rusty mulled in silence for a few paces. It did strike him as wildly out of character for Marceline to take a trip without letting her father know, but how sure could he be of that? Close as he’d once been to these people, years had since passed. He didn’t learn much from Marceline’s surprise visit to Ocean Pines last fall, except that she was pregnant and employed at a hospital in New Orleans.
In fact, he suddenly remembered, she never told Prosper she was coming to visit me. Worried it might upset him too much.
“Is there any reason you think some harm has befallen her?” he asked. “I know it’s unlike her to take off without telling you, but is there anything specific that’s got you so scared?”
Prosper stopped talking. He stopped walking, too, as if a mental image had just formed that rendered forward movement an impossibility until it cleared his vision.
“No-count son of a bitch. Man’s bad news all around, I told her that from the jump.”
“Who?”
“Abellard, for Christ’s sake. Son of a bitch who knocked her up.”
Hawking and spitting on the pavement like the name he’d just uttered left a poisonous taste in his mouth, Prosper resumed his shuffling gait. Rusty followed in silence for a few steps.
“You think this man knows where she is?”
“Course I do. She broke it off with him last month. Said she’s had enough of his disrespect, that’s what she told me. But there’s more to it than that. Man like him, he ain’t gonna lay down when a woman shows him the exit. ’Specially not with his seed already planted.”
“Abellard, huh. What’s his first name?”
“Joseph. First time Marcie brung him around, I said lose this one, he’ll bring you nothing but tears. She used to listen to me, same as you did. She says don’t worry about it, he’s only rough on the outside. Six months later she’s pregnant. She wants to break it off, but it’s too late. Man ain’t gonna let her walk, I know it.”
“Where can I find this guy? I want to talk to him.”
Without replying, Prosper stopped walking again. For a moment, Rusty thought the old man had expended enough effort to lay down right here on the uneven cement of the sidewalk. Then he saw Prosper reaching in his pants pocket for a key chain, and realized they’d arrived at the Lavalle homestead. Rusty had been so consumed by the disturbing conversation, he hadn’t even realized they’d reached the 1400 block of Camp Street.
A 1920s-era shotgun house crouched low behind a ragged row of hedges opposite Coliseum Park. A cluster of palmettos and elephant ears filled the front yard, enclosed by a chain link fence. Under the glow of twin porch lamps, the house grinned at Rusty like an old friend caught by surprise.
I’ll be damned. Looks smaller than I remembered it.
A modest domicile by most measures, the significance of this house assumed mountainous heights in his psyche. It had once been more than just a home for a young and wayward Rusty Diamond. It had been his school, his refuge, the inner sanctum where he’d spent untold hours in study of the skills that would later bring him fame.
Looking at the stooped old man trying to find the right key on a rusted brass chain, Rusty saw him unobscured by the ravages of age and the gap in communication that yawned between them. He’d never known a man like Prosper Lavalle. More than a mentor or even a father, during the formative years of Rusty’s life he’d been something close to a living god. And his daughter, Marceline, once seemed no less than the embodiment of love itself.
“I’ll find her,” Rusty said.
“Ain’t your problem, son. Police already done what little they’re willing to. I’ll stay on them, at the end of thirty days maybe they’ll get serious and start asking for some DNA samples. Meantime I post flyers around town, call the hospitals and central morgue every night. Bracing myself for the worst. All the while, I’m waiting for her to show up on this stoop, out of the blue with some funny story about where she’s been.”
“Prosper, I’ll find her. I promise.”
Those words didn’t come easily, reminding Rusty of the last time they’d been together and the wafer-thin basis of trust connecting them.
Prosper shook his head in protest, but it was a meek effort.
“Don’t trouble yourself. You got some guilt you wanna pay off from what went down in Vegas, fine. I’ll hold the money for her, and if…”
The sentence died unfinished. Rusty knew Prosper had caught himself before saying, if I ever see her again.
He’d probably thought those words a hundred times in the past several days. It was Rusty’s unannounced appearance out of the past that brought them to his lips. Both men knew it.
“Why don’t you invite me in? Make me some of that jasmine tea I remember so well, and we can talk about it.”