Book One, Page Six. Return To The Scene.
The real estate agent was late.
Jerry stood on the uptown-river corner of Carrollton and Claiborne and felt the bracing air brush his face. Last night, a front came through with its line of thunderstorms, and now the sky was clearing as the temperature went down. Classic New Orleans winter weather.
The corner was as familiar to Jerry as any in New Orleans. Standing there in this weather shook loose from his memory images of his commute to and from high school in the 1960s. How many times did Jerry stand on that exact spot, waiting for the Tulane bus? A line of them rested across the street along Palmer Park, waiting till it was time to make the U-turn, begin another run, and pick him up. In those days the Tulane buses were the old electric kind, with two roof-mounted poles taking their power from the catenaries above, like the streetcars that waited to begin their own turns in the neutral ground there.
This was where the Jesuit boys and the De La Salle boys separated. The Sallies (that's what Jerry and the other Jesuit Blue Jays called them; the De La Salle boys had their own epithets to shoot back at the Blow Jays) boarded the old, slow St. Charles streetcar, and the Jays crowded into the swift Tulane trackless trolleys. Which had surprisingly good pickup, Jerry remembered.
On his way home every afternoon, Jerry stopped between buses to have French fries and a cherry Coke at the soda fountain of Roquette's Pharmacy. Buses from all four directions ended their routes at this intersection, so bus and streetcar operators were always in and out of Roquette's for a quick cup of coffee. Jerry remembered that the lady behind the counter always had to ask whether they wanted chicory or pure, even though it was the same guys in there every day.
If Jerry had some money in his pocket and time to spare, he'd buy a comic book and read it at the counter while eating a cheeseburger. But mostly what he ordered at Roquette's soda fountain counter was French fries and a cherry Coke. They were the best fries he'd ever tasted. Crinkle cuts. You could watch them being fried as the anticipation grew. For some reason the oil foamed up almost to overflowing in the fryer.
Jerry hadn't thought about those fries in a long time, but knew he still hadn't had their equal in the thirty years since. And the more he thought Roquette's, the more it seemed like something out of an era gone far longer than his teen years.
The building was an antique. It was one of the first branch stores built by Katz and Besthoff when that local drugstore chain began to expand. K&B had moved across the street to a much bigger building, but that left a niche for a little old drugstore that Mr. Roquette filled. Jerry remembered Mr. Roquette as being pretty old even back then. A nice man, soft-spoken and usually smiling, a pharmacist out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
"Dr. Wells?" a woman's voice said.
"Oh!" Jerry said, emerging from his nostalgia. "Are you Miss Gottlieb? With Letter and Farmer?"
"That's me!" she said.
Jerry looked her over. She was about thirty-five. Black hair, big eyebrows, too much makeup, stylish dress too tight. She had not subjected herself to rigorous dieting or workouts, but she was probably in better shape than Jerry was, he concluded.
"I'm glad to meet you!" Jerry said. "I love this old building, and I used to come here all the time. When I saw it for lease I knew I had to at least look into it. I'm thinking about a restaurant."
