The story you are about to hear is true. This is the city. Charlotte Web, Louisiana. The Phantom wasn’t a man who solved cases; he was a man who closed chapters that polite society pretended had already ended in the boneyards. You wanted a problem to go away, you called on death. He operated out of an office that smelled of stale cigarettes, and beefaroni. His suits were a little too sharp, his fedora a little too low, hiding eyes that had seen things best left buried, though he was the one digging them up.
In a city of perpetually wet pavement and shadows that stretch like accusations, lies and betrayal sung in hushed tones about a man of legend, few names were whispered after midnight. One of them belonged to J. Phantom. Phantom wasn’t a man who solved cases; he was a man who closed chapters that polite society pretended had already ended, the lunatics, the unsightly and harlots with loose lips.
They called him the “ghost digger of last resort.” His clients didn’t come to him with missing persons; they came with missing souls, with specters haunting their boardrooms, or with the restless dead whispering secrets they couldn’t afford to get out. He didn’t use a magnifying glass; he used a silver hip flask filled with Mama’s crawdad squeezin’s she called Bayou Muscatel.
The damp air of Charlotte Web hung thick enough to chew a cheap stogie, clinging to the bone-cold streets of uncured asphalt, coughing pneumonia. The bayou, a black mirror reflecting nothing but the city’s hollow neon struts, offered no absolution, just the steady, indifferent, stagnant waters canoodling with the levee. The Phantom leaned against the peeling paint of the lounge doorway—‘La Mort Douce’—a place for losers and boozers, its brass sign dangling like a loose tooth. In his hand, a 12 oz can of Bayou Manischewitz, with an Absolut kicker.
Inside, an accordion with a lisp was screeching zydeco, sounding like rusty nails scratching a washboard. He wasn’t listening. His eyes tracked the shifting silhouette slinking down Dauphine Street: a woman in a dress stitched from midnight and regret, hips swaying like a promise soaked in kerosene, with legs stretching to Baton Rouge.
He had a macabre style, he felt the dead uttered more honesty than the living, the whore strangled, her mouth curled in a scream spoke of pain and depravity, but she was hiding a secret, a baby of a man of importance, the esquire would be needed to find the bastard. Drunk off self-hate, this femme fatale talked like slow molasses and appeared like brown sugar with a Creole twang. It was her tenacious nature that appealed to the man whose blood ran cold. There were demons to hunt and the innocent to snuff, so no ugliness surfaced to leave a stain on a reputation.
The night began with shivers, a corpse so badly ravaged there was no recognizing it. Sugar took a big inhale and rattled off the signature magics left on the body. The Esquire, in tune with her, was on the case; the hunt would be brutal but worth it. The mumbo jumbo about to…less the rubber chickens.
