Late afternoon the next day, Maureen left her house in the Irish Channel for a run. She jogged up Sixth Street, crossed Magazine Street, crossed Prytania Street, and then made a left turn onto St. Charles Avenue.
She wanted to reach Audubon Park, circle the park twice, and start heading home before dark. She had plans for that night. Big plans. If she didn’t run and lingered around the house, she wouldn’t be sharp later. She’d feel slow and tired, especially after seeing so little daylight. She’d start drinking early. Earlier. She might even change her mind about going through with her plan and stay home, hiding in her living room. Not an option.
At a half mile or so into her run, when she hit the intersection of Louisiana and St. Charles, her legs started to lighten and loosen. Her blood pumped hard through her arms and legs. She flexed her fingers as she ran. Her chest burned from the previous night’s abundance of cigarettes, but her wind was good overall. She felt her body coming back to life for her once again, her run beating back the ravages of another daylong hangover. She knew she demanded a lot of her body. Between what she did with it and what she put into it, she also sent it a lot of mixed signals. It always responded and gave her what she demanded of it. Pretty quickly, too.
How long her body would remain so responsive, she didn’t know. She was thirty. She lived hard, had done so since eighteen. These past few weeks, the ones away from work, she’d begun bumping up against her physical limits. By the time she’d gotten home from Frenchmen Street, cleaned up, and climbed into bed, her conversation with Dice turning over in her head, the sunrise, and her hangover, had arrived.
No Frenchmen Street tonight, she thought. That had been dumb luck, a surprise opportunity, running into that feuding couple in d.b.a. Tonight, she was getting back on target, back to her plan, and the hunting ground was closer to home. Right in the neighborhood. Which, of course, made things much riskier. This project was as important, she reminded herself, as anything she’d be doing were she on the job. And not only important to her. She might quite possibly be saving someone’s life.
Picking up her pace, she followed the streetcar tracks along the dusty neutral ground of St. Charles, passing under the branches of the live oaks, their leaves staying green into the heart of November. Three miles later, she’d reached her destination.
She skipped across St. Charles through stopped rush-hour traffic and into Audubon Park, chastising herself for being tempted not only by the water fountain, but also by the empty benches on the banks of the lagoon. Maybe tomorrow, she told herself. Maybe later in the week she’d get up to the park to hang out and relax for once, to read a book, to watch the ducks and squirrels from one of the benches. Everyone else could rush by her for a change. Such a beautiful park, she thought. She couldn’t believe sometimes that she ran under the boughs of oak trees draped with wispy gray Spanish moss. Like something from a movie or a postcard. Right there, inches above her head. So many gorgeous, quiet hideaways in the park, and she was always running right by them. Panting. Pushing. Of course, park benches and ducks, peace and beauty, they were not the reasons she had added the loops around the park to her runs.
A couple of circuits helped Maureen accomplish two things. First, the extension added almost four miles, bringing her nearer an even ten miles.
Second, it gave her a reason to pass by the Heath house.
*
Solomon Heath’s mansion sat on the edge of the park behind a screen of squat, sprawling live oaks, ancient dark-bodied trees whose knotted branches dragged in the grass like the impossibly long and bendy arms of great jungle apes. Running by the mansion in the late afternoons and evenings, Maureen had often glimpsed Solomon sitting in one of the throne-like white rocking chairs on the wraparound porch, his hand gripping a highball glass. He seemed to be watching the birds and squirrels flitting about in the branches of the oaks.
One evening she’d seen him standing, looking contemplative, at a tall second-floor window, the curtain held aside with one hand. That time he seemed to be looking at her instead of the park’s modest wildlife, watching her as she ran past his property. She’d seen him on several evenings standing watch over a generously smoking grill.
Every time she saw him, he was alone. Every time one hand clutched a glass. Bourbon, she figured. Really excellent bourbon, she imagined, that he bought by the case.