The Snare

8. THE MARNIE CASE

8. THE MARNIE CASE Day by day around New Orleans, people followed the Mamie case. It was the springtime event, since Mardi Gras had come too early, scarcely much after New Year's. More than anything else it had an impact, this curious affair, on the New Orleans mentality. For one thing, it reminded people what a singular town they pertained to, and the collective face of it, haglike betimes, but often bewitching still, took a cautious peek in the mirror. The weather helped, and the fresh air. This young man—this Jake Springland—had come from afar to seek them out and had got himself involved, not with two derelicts, underground and underworld at once, but with a whole city. It was enough to make it take a wash and comb its hair and put fresh lipstick on. For another thing, it half-illumined, as one brief flash of an X-ray might illumine a hidden bone structure, the ways of the dark world that lay all around them, not confined to one quarter or area, but a second life webbed invisibly in with their own. Tommy Arnold had been aware of this world for years. Maybe he was a little in love with it. Certainly it was his one abiding interest, since his wife had turned into a nag—their most serious conversations, held regularly every two months, concerned divorce—and since he could not look at his three children except in terms she put to them, one such being that "orphans went around better dressed." So he thought about crime. And he thought too that he ought to be earning more. His train of thought went something like this: New Orleans was 81 8 2 T H E S N A R E the nation's true pulse beat, but the nation did not know it. Voodoo, jazz, sex, and food—who could go further than that toward what was really important to people in the U.S. and A. Not much to do with money maybe. All the better. Once he got one story out, others could follow. All they knew out in the great money-making complex that was the Yewnighted States was that strange things went on down there, and then they hummed a tune or ate a meal that they didn't connect with "down there" at all. Yet both the tune and the meal would have started from down there and only from there. And the down there of their own hearts, the dark tangle, the lurking mysteries, did they know how much of that was a dim carbon of the original which lay spread out before his wandering feet, every day that rolled? But all his reasoning did was frustrate him. He could not get it out, no matter how he wrote it. He could have got it out, out into the big world, if he had put Julia Garrett in it, but he wouldn't do that. He was convinced that this angle would make it, would sell it. But he wouldn't. Protect Julia? Protect that girl! She was already asking for it, courting danger everywhere she turned, determined to do the offbeat, turning herself on with whatever swamplight shone. A tramp? She didn't think of it that way. A tramp anyway? Here he would throw down his copy pencil (he worked at odd times on the copy desk), whip off his eyeshade and go out for coffee. Coffee ran out of his ears all day. At night, alcohol ran out of his pores. He knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to lift that story out of New Orleans and make it fly just the way his father, when he was a boy, wanted to stunt in World War I airplanes (a wonder he lived to tell about it). He'd wound up in stockcar racing instead, picking up money on the side at county fairs. The way that same father in later life took to making over junk cars, souping up the motors, showing great tenderness for their old, beat-up inner parts, then putting on a brave Elizabeth Spencer 83 paint job, all for racing Sunday afternoons up in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and East Texas as well as nearer home in Louisiana. The father worked for a farm machinery firm all week, but on weekends retired behind high board fences in...