Recovering Charles Read Free

played a private investigator, a good one mind you, and de-li-cious on the eyes, but he wasn’t a detective because he didn’t have the piece of paper or formal training.”
    Now I added laughter to the eye-rolling. “You’ve lost it, Jordan. You’ve jumped the shark this time.”
    “So in closing . . .” She flipped her hair and acted as if she hadn’t heard me.
    I liked it.
    “The tasty Tom Selleck could never become an actual Sleuth, because he didn’t have enough respect from his peers. He was too much a renegade. You need industry support to reach—”
    “All right! I give, Matlock!”
    “Now that guy could have been a Sleuth—”
    “You win!”
    “It took you long enough.” She pulled her hair toward her right side, draping it over her shoulder, and let linger a style of smile that I’d never seen from her before. Seductive. Soft. “I hope it doesn’t take you that long to ask me out.”
    Why not? I thought.
    We left the club and I bought her a strawberry-topped Belgian waffle at an IHOP in Jersey.
    “Make a bet?” she asked.
    “OK. I’ll bite.”
    “If I can eat this waffle in five minutes or less you have to take me to any restaurant I want for our first real date.”
    “How about three?” I countered.
    “Four.”
    “Deal. And if you can’t eat that ginormous waffle in four minutes or less?”
    “I’ll teach you to play the acoustic as well as I can.”
    “Chomp chomp!” I taunted.
    Two weeks later we ate at the Rainbow Room in the RCA building. The meal was so expensive I could have paid for personal lessons from Eric Clapton.
    That was the night I expected the spark my father had described to ignite my heart and change the nature of our friendship.
    It didn’t, though I held hope it someday would.
     

    Chapter
2
     
    I couldn’t turn off the TV.
    I had plenty to do the week Katrina rearranged the Gulf. I was on deadlines to deliver photos to two clients and was already a week late on delivering a rough cut of a DVD slideshow I’d created for Jordan’s real-estate broker.
    But I just couldn’t turn it off.
    The final death toll would be hard to pin down, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said in a news conference. She was taking a beating from the national press, which some felt was unfair. Mayor Ray Nagin also had his critics for what they called his dramatic exaggerations and tendency to place blame everywhere except on his own shoulders. Images of submerged and abandoned yellow school buses filled TV screens and newspaper front pages. But above all, FEMA had become the easiest target. Federal bureaucracy. Washington, D.C. mentality. A useless Bush crony. A disconnected president.
    None of that mattered to me. Not as I heard another explanation of how the levees failed and Lake Pontchartrain had taken eighty percent of the city prisoner. Not as I watched a woman sob on live national TV that her twin sons were missing. Nine years old. Former Haitian refugees. One was wearing a red tank top and the other his favorite New Orleans Saints T-shirt.
    I’d never felt such raw emotion for anyone not sharing my last name.
    I changed the channel. Bernard was on another network. He had arrived at the Superdome but had yet to find his wife. He carried a wallet-sized picture of her. He was drinking a Dasani.
    “Good, someone got him water. Keep looking, Bernard, you’ll find her.” I didn’t mean to say any of that out loud, but I did.
    I flipped to MSNBC. They reminded us the hurricane hadn’t only been cruel to New Orleans. For half an hour, local NBC reporters in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi went national to tell their stories. Hellacious devastation in Long Beach, Mississippi. Power outages in Mobile, Alabama. Fires everywhere. Hospitals shuttling patients out of state. Neighbors helping neighbors.
    I opened my laptop and visited the Red Cross web site. I donated a hundred dollars to their Katrina Disaster Relief Fund and bookmarked the page.
    I turned the television