After her first set, the vamp singer bowed to resounding applause and told the audience she would be back after her break. Customers shuffled toward the stage, wanting to talk to her but too shy to speak. Ivory glided through the crowds of admirers and stepped directly up to me; she ignored her fans, much to their disappointment. Some glowered at me, and I could sense their jealousy. Most of them couldn’t understand why I wasn’t grinning like a schoolboy from the attention.
Under other circumstances, Ivory would never have noticed me, but when she noticed my brewing relationship with Sheyenne, she decided to get me for herself. But it hadn’t worked. With Sheyenne around, how could I look at anyone else?
“Hey, sugar. I haven’t seen you around in a while.” Ivory leaned closer, and her cleavage reminded me of a Venus flytrap about to swallow my head. She inhaled deeply. “You’re less warm-blooded now than before.”
I tapped my forehead where the mortician’s putty still covered the scar. “Got shot in the head.”
“Sorry to hear that, but I’m glad you came back to hear me sing.”
“I came back for a lot of reasons.”
She frowned. “Yeah, I heard about your poor little girlfriend. Never knew what you saw in that scrawny thing, when you could have had so much more.” She traced her hands from her rib cage to her waist, then her hips.
“Sheyenne and I were happy enough while it lasted,” I said.
Again, that mock sorrowful pout. “I heard she died, poor thing. I hope she’s doing better now?”
“Sheyenne’s just fine. And we’re still seeing each other.”
“Whenever you’re ready to move on, sugar, I can meet you back in my dressing room.”
“I wouldn’t want you to disappoint all these adoring fans.” I glanced at the crowd of men hovering around.
“Who says I don’t have enough to share?” she said. “Stay for the next set—we’ll talk afterward.”
Without saying a word to the other fans, Ivory returned to the stage, and the lounge lizard played her intro. I got up and left quietly. No need to make a long night seem longer.
Chapter 12
Despite setback after setback, a determined person won’t stay down for long—and Hope Saldana was a determined lady.
Early next morning, I stopped by the Hope & Salvation Mission just to see how the old woman was dealing with the destruction of her place. Even though McGoo had already told me she wasn’t injured in the attack, I wanted to make sure she was all right.
Over the years, some unnaturals had grumbled about Mrs. Saldana’s goody-two-shoes efforts to help down-and-out unnaturals, but she stuck to her guns and continued her missionary work. Her heart was in the right place, and she considered it her duty to help those who no longer had hearts, beating or otherwise.
When I arrived at the smashed mission, I saw Mrs. Saldana standing on the sidewalk out front, arms crossed over her pink flower-print dress. She guided the efforts of her assistant Jerry, a tall and lanky zombie, who was hanging a rectangle of plywood over one of the destroyed storefront windows.
Jerry was one of the first wayward souls that Mrs. Saldana had helped when she opened her mission. As the story went—and the old woman told the story whenever she delivered her sermons, since it made such a great example—Jerry had shambled up to her during a particularly bad jag, intent on eating her brain. But Mrs. Saldana accepted him, read him verses from her well-worn Bible, offered him hope and comfort, and talked him down from his slobbering hunger.
“God loves all His creatures,” she said.
“Even a wretch like me?” Jerry had answered.
She gave him a sincere nod. “Just like the hymn says.”
Jerry broke down and cried, and he’d been her inseparable helper ever since. His hunger hadn’t abated, but he was working his way through a twelve-step program, and there were plenty of rats in the basement for him to snack on.
Now Mrs. Saldana took a step back to inspect the patch-up job. “That’ll do, Jerry.” She gave a brisk nod. “Bless you. Now we can continue our work.”
The old woman had curly permed hair, gray but not yet old-lady blue. At first glance, she looked like everyone’s favorite schoolteacher. No one I knew had ever heard Mrs. Saldana raise her voice or speak a discouraging word. She was an optimist, a caring person—and it pissed me off that anybody would do this to her place. Was it mere vandalism, or did someone hold a specific grudge?
Seeing the smashed-out windows, I unfolded one of the Black Glass, Inc. flyers I’d taken from our office. “Maybe you should give these people a call. It’s a new company that specializes in repairing and replacing windows in the Quarter. I’m sure they deal with regular transparent glass as well as opaque windowpanes.”
She perused the advertisement. “Thank you, Mr. Chambeaux. I like to use local services if I can.”
Her zombie helper looked at me, and the hammer in his hand slipped out of his rubbery fingers. The tool fell on his foot, but he didn’t feel it.
Mrs. Saldana gave a schoolteacherly tsk. “Jerry, you just dropped a hammer. Pay attention. You wouldn’t want to hurt somebody. You could get damaged too. We wouldn’t want that, would we?” Embarrassed, the zombie bent over and picked up the tool.
“Anything else I can do to help out?” I asked.
Her smile reminded me of a grandmother’s kisses and the smell of apple pie. “It’s not me you should be worried about, Mr. Chambeaux. It’s those poor unnaturals who need my help. What a setback!” Dismay was plain on the old woman’s face. “This damage caused a delay in today’s services. I don’t know how I’ll serve breakfast to the needy . . . although I think we can manage coffee. Jerry?”
“Coffee . . .” he said, and shuffled inside through the gaping hole of the ruined door.
Mrs. Saldana smiled at me. “Come on in. Jerry is going to sweep up some of the mess.”
Inside the front room, the old woman used a thumbtack to put the Black Glass flyer on a corkboard she had mounted on the wall. The rest of the board was crowded with snapshots of unfortunate unnaturals she had helped—a toothless grinning werewolf, two ghouls who wore angelic expressions on their faces, and rotting Mel, my very first case as a PI in the Quarter. A sincere handwritten note in blocky letters, written with thick clumsy lines, as if a child had used a brownish-red crayon: Thank you, Mrs. Saldana! We love you and the Hope & Salvation Mission.
In the main room, ten beige metal folding chairs sat in front of the small lectern where Mrs. Saldana delivered her sermons. Each folding chair held a well-thumbed Bible and a stained hymnal. A rarely used piano had been pushed off to the corner. I remembered that Mrs. Saldana had tried to teach Jerry how to play, but he wasn’t dexterous enough to keep up with any fast melodies. A card table held a tray of cookies as well as a large percolating coffeemaker.