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years. The name above was Juan Garces.
    I called to be sure he was in, then walked over to Tchoupitoulas and grabbed a White Fleet cab. An elderly woman behind a minuscule desk in the lobby (it had once been the foyer where residents had mailboxes, and I hope there weren’t too many of them) directed me upstairs.
    He was sitting before a computer monitor and swiveled partway around, hands staying on the keys, when, in the absence of a door, I knocked at the frame. He swung back to the keyboard, hit Save and Exit, came all the way back and got up. We shook hands.
    “Sorry,” he said. “But you have to do what they want you to. You must be Mr. Griffin.” He waved me into a chair.
    Uneven stacks of folders and stapled papers all but covered the table space around keyboard and computer. To the right at shoulder level, beside a narrow window, a plastic board was lined with yellow Post-It notes in a tiny blue script. Garces reached over and peeled off the top one, dropped it into the trashcan under the desk. The other wall was taken over, above, by a reproduction of Matisse’s Blue Frog/Yellow Nude (or is it the other way around? I can never remember) and, below, by a shelf of books running to Robert Pirsig, Genet, Laing and Szasz. I took note of Delany’s Dhalgren and The Motion of Light in Water.
    Garces was fair-skinned with light blue eyes, and somehow gave the impression of being short and gangly at the same time. His dark hair was close-cropped. He wore a black T-shirt, pressed slacks, a linen sportcoat with the sleeves turned up a couple of times, cordovan loafers without socks. Fortyish.
    “So what is it that I can help you with, Mr. Griffin? Something to do with a friend, you said on the phone.”
    “LaVerne Landrieu.”
    “Of course,” he said after a moment. “You’re Lewis: that Griffin. I didn’t connect, when you gave me your name earlier. I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin—”
    “Lew.”
    “Lew. It’s a loss to us all, you know. She made a difference in a lot of lives around here. But you must know that.”
    “No. I don’t.”
    “Oh. But whenever she spoke of you … You two haven’t been in touch, then?”
    I shook my head.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Do you mind my asking if there was any particular reason for that?”
    “What I keep telling myself is that I didn’t think her marriage needed ghosts like me showing up on the stairs.”
    “Did you meet Chip Landrieu?”
    “Afterwards, yes.”
    He nodded. “Things so often happen in the wrong order in our lives.”
    “How well did you know Verne, Mr. Garces?”
    “Richard.”
    I pointed inquiringly back toward the doorframe, the name plaque beside it.
    “No one outside my family ever calls me Juan. And no one, period, calls me Mr. Garces. But I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
    “I mean, did the two of you ever talk? About personal things.”
    He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Once I found out who you were, I naturally assumed … We really should start this whole encounter again from scratch, I think. I assumed you knew LaVerne and I were close. That this was why you came here.”
    The phone buzzed. He excused himself, picked it up, listened for a moment, then responded in Spanish that was far too rapid for me to follow. He hung up and penned a note that he added to the board.
    “Over the years LaVerne and I became good friends, yes. It happened slowly, very slowly, and without either of us planning or even expecting it. People have always come to me to talk, that’s kind of how I got into all this. But that’s as far as it ever goes. And LaVerne was one to keep her distance; you knew that when you first talked to her. We were both private people. Never mixed much socially with those we work with. Try to keep it professional.”
    “But you and Verne…”
    “Yeah, and it was funny. I ’d always been the one to listen. But after a while—we’d go out for coffee after work, or sometimes later on we’d meet for breakfast in the