As the waitress laid down the drinks, the manager of the bar – a short, swarthy little guy in a black polo shirt and pants – took a seat with us. He shook Teddy’s hand and presented him with a few cigars. Teddy handed one to me but didn’t introduce us. I nodded at the guy and drank my coffee.
The song changed to “Don’t Mean Nothin’” by Richard Marx. I wondered if I’d just entered some kind of eighties time warp or if Richard Marx singing about having self-worth had somehow made him a patron saint to strippers.
“You like Richard Marx?” I asked the little manager.
“Sure, yeah,” he said, snorting, giving Teddy a “you believe this guy” look. “Whatever.”
“Beni?” he asked. “Stank drop some money here.”
“You know it.”
“He works for me.”
“I know.”
“Nick, show him the picture.”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the photo of Dahlia. The good one from Pat O’s.
“Know her?” Teddy asked.
Beni nodded. He looked up at me and back at Teddy.
“She don’t work that way,” he said. “The girl onstage. The little one with the chain-mesh bikini. You have an hour with her in the back room for free. On the freakin’ house. For him, how ’bout a hundred.”
“We don’t need our dicks jacked, Beni,” Teddy said. “We need a name.”
“She rob you?” Beni asked.
I shook my head.
“Cut you?”
I shook my head again.
“Don’t tell me you’re in love.”
“That’s it, Beni,” I said. “I’m in love. What’s her name?”
“He ain’t in love,” Teddy said. “What’s her name?”
Beni looked down at his hands and adjusted some horrible gold rings on his hairy knuckles. “How much?”
Teddy reached into his wallet and laid down four hundred dollars.
“I shouldn’t pay you shit with all the business that Stank give you.”
Beni scraped up the cash and said, “She quit last week. Left with some other rapper.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“He was a freakin’ black guy. What can I say?”
Teddy shook his head and then shook it some more.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Dahlia,” he said. “That’s all I know.”
“What’s her Social Security card say?”
He looked over at Teddy and raised his eyebrows. “Is this guy joking?”
“Didn’t she fill out anything to get paid?”
“Let me check.”
He returned about ten minutes later with a little index card marked with the name Dahlia, a social with the name Dataria Brown, and an address in Midcity off Esplanade.
“You won’t tell her that we seen each other,” Beni said.
“Why do you care?”
“I just don’t like her is all,” he said. “The way she’d look at me made me not want to turn my back. Like she’d stick a freakin’ knife in it if I looked the other way.”
“Dataria,” I repeated. “You know a guy named Bloom? Boyfriend or something. Has a bad ear?”
“That’s all I know.”
“You sure?”
“She danced, got naked, took her cut, and left,” he said. “What can I say?”
“Was she a good dancer?”
“What?”
“Was she a good dancer?” I repeated over the music.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was. The best I’d ever seen. She could move.”
We drove back in silence. Teddy just kept watching the road, steering with those two fingers like he always did.
“Sure would like to find that money,” he said.
“I know.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“No, I’ll handle it.”
“Nick?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Open that bar up,” he said. “Be true to your dreams.”
I LEARNED HOW TO TAIL people when I was traveling through the Delta with my tracker mentor Willie T. Dean, and Willie T. wasn’t too big on taking no for an answer. I remember we’d once been searching for this man outside Jackson who knew something about the last days of Tommy Johnson and we were tired as hell. We’d been in the Delta for two weeks collecting stories and recording them on video and audio, and here was this guy who thought that white people were an abomination.
He’d rather sell his soul than have us sit up on his porch and ruin his reputation with his neighbors.
So instead of driving back to Oxford, where Willie T. had been teaching blues history for the last thirty years, he told me to park down this dirt road and wait till the old man’s pockmarked red Ford pulled out from the trailer.
We did. After a near fistfight, the purchase of a case of beer, and Willie T. warming him up with stories from our road trips and a little song he played on his 1920s Dobro, we got him talking.
But New Orleans wasn’t the Delta and this Dahlia woman was no bluesman.
I wanted to work alone, so I’d dropped Teddy at home. I soon found out the address in Midcity was bogus and had to have a friend of mine in Memphis run the social. Ten minutes later, he gave me an address back in Uptown, not far from the streetcar line. He used the same computer service as bill collectors, no one more tenacious.
I didn’t know how long it would take for Dahlia – if she even lived there – to pop her head out of the little carriage house where she lived in the Garden District. You could always tell someone lived in a carriage house when the street number contained a “1/2.”
