Every Dead Thing (35 page)

“I was thinking of getting a bite to eat,” he said. “You interested?”

I was surprised. I guessed that he wanted to talk but I had never spent time with Louis without Angel being present as well.

I checked on Rachel. The bed was empty and I could hear the shower running. I knocked gently on the door.

“It’s open,” she said.

When I entered, she had the shower curtain wrapped around her. “Suits you,” I said. “Clear plastic is in this season.”

The sleep hadn’t done her any good. There were dark rings under her eyes and she still looked shaky. She made a halfhearted effort to smile, but it was more like a grimace of pain than anything else.

“You want to go out and eat?”

“I’m not hungry. I’m going to do some work, then take two sleeping pills and try to sleep without dreaming.”

I told her that Louis and I were heading out, then went to tell Angel. I found him flicking through the notes Rachel had made. He motioned to my chart on the bedroom wall. “Lot of blank spaces on that.”

“I still have one or two details to work out.”

“Like who did it and why.” He gave me a twisted grin.

“Yeah, but I’m trying not to get too hung up on minor problems. You okay?”

He nodded. “I think this whole thing is gettin’ to me, all this…” He waved an arm at the illustrations on the wall.

“Louis and I are heading out to eat. You wanna come?”

“Nah, I’d only be the lemon. You can have him.”

“Thanks. I’ll break the bad news of my sexual awakening to the
Swimsuit Illustrated
models tomorrow. They’ll be heartbroken. Look after Rachel, will you? This hasn’t been one of her better days.”

“I’ll be right along the hall.”

Louis and I sat in Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. There weren’t too many tourists there; they tended to gravitate toward the Acme Oyster House across the street, where they served red beans and savory rice in a hollowed-out boat of French bread, or a classier French Quarter joint like Nola. Felix’s was plainer. Tourists don’t care much for plain. After all, they can get plain at home.

Louis ordered an oyster po’boy and doused it in hot sauce, sipping an Abita beer between bites. I had fries and a chicken po’boy, washed down with mineral water.

“Waiter thinks you’re a sissy,” commented Louis as I sipped my water. “The ballet was in town, he’d hit on you for tickets.”

“Shows what he knows,” I replied. “You’re confusing things by not conforming to the stereotype. Maybe you should mince more.”

His mouth twitched and he raised his hand for another Abita. It came quickly. The waiter performed the neat trick of making sure we weren’t left waiting for anything while trying to spend as little time as possible in the vicinity of our table. Other diners chose to take the scenic route to their tables rather than pass too close to us and those forced to sit near us seemed to eat at a slightly faster pace than the rest. Louis had that effect on people. It was as if there was a shell of potential violence around him, and something more: the sense that, if that violence erupted, it would not be the first time that it had done so.

“Your friend Woolrich,” he said as he drained the Abita halfway with one mouthful. “You trust him?”

“I don’t know. He has his own agenda.”

“He’s a fed. They only got their own agendas.” He eyed me over the top of the bottle. “I think, if you were climbing a rock with your friend and you slipped, found yourself dangling on the end of the rope with him at the other end, he’d cut the rope.”

“You’re a cynic.”

His mouth twitched again. “If the dead could speak, they’d call all cynics realists.”

“If the dead could speak, they’d tell us to have more sex while we can.” I picked at my fries. “The feds have anything on you?”

“Suspicions, maybe; nothing more. That’s not really what I’m getting at.”

His eyes were unblinking and there was no warmth in them now. I think that, if he had believed Woolrich was close to him, he would have killed him and it would not have cost him another thought afterward.

“Why is Woolrich helping us?” he asked, eventually.

“I’ve thought about that too,” I said. “I’m not sure. Part of it could be that he empathizes with the need to stay in touch with what’s going on. If he feeds me information, then he can control the extent of my involvement.”

But I knew that wasn’t all. Louis was right. Woolrich had his own agenda. He had depths to him that I only occasionally glimpsed, as when the different shifting colors on the surface of the sea hint at the sharp declivities and deep spaces that lie beneath. He was a hard man to be with in some ways: he conducted his friendship with me on his own terms, and in the time I had known him, months had gone by without any contact from him. He made up for this with a strange loyalty, a sense that, even when he was absent from their lives, he never forgot those closest to him.

But as a fed, Woolrich played hardball. He had progressed to assistant SAC by making collars, by attaching his name to high-profile operations, and by fixing other agents’ wagons when they got in his way. He was intensely ambitious and maybe he saw the Traveling Man as a way of reaching greater heights: SAC, assistant director, a deputy directorship, maybe even to eventually becoming the first agent to be appointed directly to the post of director. The pressure on him was intense, but if Woolrich were to be responsible for bringing an end to the Traveling Man, he would be assured a bright, powerful future within the Bureau.

I had a part to play in this, and Woolrich knew it and felt it strongly enough that he would use whatever friendship existed between us to bring about an end to what was taking place. “I think he’s using me as bait,” I said at last. “And he’s holding the line.”

“How much you think he’s holding back?” Louis finished his beer and smacked his lips appreciatively.

“He’s like an iceberg,” I replied. “We’re only seeing the ten percent above the surface. Whatever the feds know, they’re not sharing it with the local cops and Woolrich sure isn’t sharing it with us. There’s something more going on here, and only Woolrich and maybe a handful of feds are privy to it. You play chess?”

“In my way,” he replied dryly. Somehow, I couldn’t see that way including a standard board.

“This whole thing is like a chess game,” I continued. “Except we only get to see the other player’s move when one of our pieces is taken. The rest of the time, it’s like playing in the dark.”

Louis raised a finger for the check. The waiter looked relieved.

“And our Mr. Byron?”

I shrugged. I felt strangely distant from what was happening. Part of it was because we were players on the periphery of the investigation, but part of it was also because I needed that distance to think. In one way, what had taken place with Rachel that afternoon, and what it meant to my feelings of grief and loss about Susan, had given me some of that distance.

“I don’t know.” We were only beginning to construct a picture of Byron, like a figure at the center of a jigsaw puzzle around which other pieces might interlock. “We’ll work our way toward him. First, I want to find out what Remarr saw the night
Tante
Marie and Tee Jean were killed. And I want to know why David Fontenot was out at Honey Island alone.”

It was clear now that Lionel Fontenot would move against Joe Bones. Joe Bones knew that too, which was why he had risked an assault at Metairie. Once Lionel was back in his compound, he would be out of the reach of Joe Bones’s men. The next move was Lionel’s.

The check arrived. I paid and Louis left a deliberately overgenerous twenty-dollar tip. The waiter looked at the bill like Andrew Jackson was going to bite his finger when he tried to lift it.

“I think we’re going to have to talk to Lionel Fontenot,” I said as we left. “And Joe Bones.”

Louis actually smiled. “Joe ain’t gonna be too keen on talking to you, seeing as how his boy tried to put you in the ground.”

“I kinda figured that,” I replied. “Could be that Lionel Fontenot might help us out there.”

We walked back to the Flaisance. The streets of New Orleans aren’t the safest in the world but I didn’t think that anyone would bother us.

I was right.

I
SLEPT LATE
the next morning. Rachel had returned to her own room to sleep. When I knocked, her voice sounded harsh with tiredness. She told me she wanted to stay in bed for a while, and when she felt better, she would go out to Loyola again. I asked Angel and Louis to watch out for her, then drove from the Flaisance.

The incident at Metairie had left me shaken, and the prospect of facing Joe Bones again was unappealing. I also felt a crushing sense of guilt for what had happened to Rachel, for what I had drawn her into and for what I had forced her to do. I needed to get out of New Orleans, at least for a short time. I wanted to clear my head, to try to see things from a different angle. I ate a bowl of chicken soup in the Gumbo Shop on St. Peter and then headed out of the city.

Morphy lived about four miles from Cecilia, a few miles northwest of Lafayette. He had bought and was refurbishing a raised plantation home by a small river, a budget version of the classic old Louisiana houses that had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, a blend of French Colonial, West Indian, and European architectural influences.

The house presented a strange spectacle. Its main living quarters were on top of an aboveground basement area, which had once been used for storage and as protection from flooding. This section of the house was brick and Morphy had reworked the arched openings with what looked like hand-carved frames. The living quarters above, which would usually have been weatherboard or plaster-covered, had been replaced with timber slats. A double-pitched roof, which had been partially reslated, extended over the gallery.

I had called ahead and told Angie I was on my way. Morphy had just got home when I arrived. I found him in the yard at the rear of the house, benching two hundred in the evening air.

“What do you think of the house?” he asked as I approached, not even pausing in his reps as he spoke.

“It’s great. Looks like you still have some way to go before it’s finished.”

He grunted with the effort of the final rep as I acted as spotter, slotting the bar back onto its rest. He stood up and stretched, then looked at the back of his house with barely concealed admiration.

“It was built by a Frenchman in eighteen eighty-eight,” he said. “He knew what he was doing. It’s built on an east-west axis, with principal exposure to the south.” He pointed out the lines of the building as he spoke. “He designed it the way the Europeans designed their houses, so that the low angle of the sun in winter would heat the building. Then, in the summer, the sun would only shine on it in the morning and evening. Most American houses aren’t built that way, they just put ’em up whatever way suits ’em, throw a stick in the air and see where it lands. We were spoiled by cheap energy. Then the Arabs came along and hiked up their prices and people had to start thinking again about the layout of their houses.”

He smiled. “Don’t know how much good an east-west house does around here, though. Sun shines all the goddamn time anyway.”

When he had showered, we sat at a table in the kitchen with Angie and talked as she cooked. Angie was almost a foot smaller than her husband, a slim, dark-skinned woman with auburn hair that flowed down her back. She was a junior school teacher, but she did some painting in her spare time. Her canvases, dark, impressionistic pieces set around water and sky, adorned the walls of the house.

Morphy drank a bottle of Breaux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen pieces and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux.

Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into a cast iron skillet over a high flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn’t burn, gradually turning the roux from blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate color. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring.

While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper, and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and cayenne, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice onto plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. We ate in silence, savoring the flavors in our mouths.

When we had washed and dried the dishes, Angie left us and went to bed. Morphy and I sat in the kitchen and I told him about Raymond Aguillard and his belief that he had seen the figure of a girl at Honey Island. I told him of
Tante
Marie’s dreams and my feeling that, somehow, David Fontenot’s death at Honey Island could be linked to the girl.

Morphy didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t sneer at visions of ghosts, or at an old woman’s belief that the voices she heard were real. Instead, all he said was: “You sure you know where this place is?”

I nodded.

“Then we’ll give it a try. I’m free tomorrow, so you better stay here tonight. We got a spare room you can use.” I called Rachel at the Flaisance and told her what I intended to do the next day and where in Honey Island we were likely to be. She said that she would tell Angel and Louis, and that she felt a little better for her sleep. It would take her a long time to get over the death of Joe Bones’s man.

It was early morning, barely ten before seven, when we prepared to leave. Morphy wore heavy steel-toed Caterpillar work boots, old jeans, and a sleeveless sweatshirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt. The sweat was dappled with paint and there were patches of tar on the jeans. His head was freshly shaved and smelled of witch hazel.

While we drank coffee and ate toast on the gallery, Angie came out in a white robe and rubbed her husband’s clean scalp, smirking at him as she took a seat beside him. Morphy acted like it annoyed the hell out of him, but he doted on her every touch. When we rose to go, he kissed her deeply with the fingers of his right hand entwined in her hair. Her body instinctively rose from the chair to meet him, but he pulled away laughing and she reddened. It was only then that I noticed the swelling at her belly: she was no more than five months gone, I guessed. As we walked across the grass at the front of the house, she stood on the gallery, her weight on one hip and a light breeze tugging at her robe, and watched her husband depart.

“Been married long?” I asked, as we walked toward a cypress glade that obscured the view of the house from the road.

“Two years in January. I’m a contented man. Never thought I would be, but that girl changed my life.” There was no embarrassment as he spoke and he acknowledged it with a smile.

“When is the baby due?”

He smiled again. “Late December. Guys held a party for me when they found out, to celebrate the fact that I was shooting live ones.”

An old Ford truck was parked in the glade, with a trailer attached on which a wide, flat-bottomed aluminum boat lay covered in tarpaulin, its engine tilted forward so that it rested on the bed. “Toussaint’s brother dropped it over late last night,” he explained. “Does some hauling on the side.”

“Where’s Toussaint?”

“In bed with food poisoning. He ate some bad shrimp, least that’s how he tells it. Personally, I think he’s just too damn lazy to give up his morning in bed.”

In the back of the truck, beneath some more tarpaulin, were an axe, a chain saw, two lengths of chain, some strong nylon rope, and a cooler. There was also a dry suit and mask, a pair of waterproof flashlights, and two air tanks. Morphy added a flask of coffee, some water, two sticks of French bread, and four chicken breasts coated in K-Paul’s Cajun spices, all contained in a waterproof bag, then climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck and started her up. She belched smoke and rattled a bit, but the engine sounded good and strong. I climbed in beside him and we drove toward Honey Island, a Clifton Chenier tape on the truck’s battered stereo.

We entered the reserve at Slidell, a collection of shopping malls, fast food joints, and Chinese buffets on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain named for the Democratic senator John Slidell. In the 1844 federal election, Slidell arranged for two steamboats to carry a bunch of Irish and German voters from New Orleans to Plaquemines Parish to vote. There was nothing illegal about that; what was illegal was letting them vote at all the other polling stations along the route.

A mist still hung over the water and the trees as we unloaded the boat at the Pearl River ranger station, beside a collection of run-down fishing shacks that floated near the bank. We loaded the chains, rope, chain saw, the diving gear, and the food. In a tree beside us, the early morning sun caught the threads of a huge, intricate web, at the center of which lay, unmoving, a golden orb spider. Then, with the sound of the motor blending with the noise of insects and birds, we moved onto the Pearl.

The banks of the river were lined with high tupelo gum, water birch, willows, and some tall cypress with trumpet creeper vines, their red flowers in bloom, winding up their trunks. Here and there trees were marked with plastic bottles, signs that catfish lines had been sunk. We passed a village of riverside homes, most of them down-at-the-heel, with flat-bottomed pirogues tied up outside them. A blue heron watched us calmly from the branches of a cypress; on a log beneath him, a yellow-bellied turtle lay soaking up the sun.

I still had Raymond Aguillard’s map but it took us two attempts to find the trevasse, the trappers’ channel that he had marked. There was a stand of gum trees at its entrance, their swollen buttresses like the bulbs of flowers, with a sole green ash leaning almost across the gap. Further in, branches weighed down with Spanish moss hung almost to the surface of the water and the air was redolent with the mingled scents of growth and decay. Misshapen tree trunks surrounded by duckweed stood like monuments in the early morning sun. East, I could see the gray dome of a beaver lodge, and as we watched, a snake slithered into the water not five feet from us.

“Diamondback,” said Morphy.

Around us, water dripped from cypress and tupelo, and birdsong echoed in the trees.

“Any chance of ’gators here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t bother people much, though, unless people bother them. There’s easier pickings in the swamps. If you see any while I’m down there, fire a shot to let me know what’s happening.”

The bayou started to narrow until it was barely wide enough to allow the boat passage. I felt the bottom scrape on a tree trunk resting below us. Morphy killed the engine and we used our hands and a pair of wooden paddles to pull ourselves through.

It seemed then that we might somehow have made a mistake in our map reading, because we were faced with a wall of wild rice, the tall, green stalks like blades in the water. There was only one narrow gap visible, big enough for a child to pass through. Morphy shrugged and restarted the engine, aiming us for the gap. I used the paddle to beat back the rice stalks as we moved forward. Something splashed close by us and a dark shape, like a large rat, sliced through the water.

“Nutria,” said Morphy. I could see the big rodent’s nose and whiskers now as it stopped beside a tree trunk and sniffed the air inquisitively. “Taste worse than ’gators. I hear we’re trying to sell their meat to the Chinese since no one else wants to eat it.”

The rice blended into sharp-edged grass that cut at my hands as I worked the paddle, and then the boat was free and we were in a kind of lagoon formed by a gradual accumulation of silt, its banks surrounded mainly by gum and willows that dragged the fingers of their branches in the water. There was some almost firm ground at the eastern edge, near some arrowroot lilies, with wild pig tracks in the dirt, the animals attracted by the promise of the arrowroot at the lilies’ base. Further in, I could see the rotting remains of a T-cutter, probably one of the craft that had originally cut the channel. Its big V-8 engine was gone, and there were holes in its hull.

We tied the boat up at a sole red swamp maple that was almost covered with resurrection fern, waiting for the rains to bring it back to life. Morphy stripped down to a pair of Nike cycling shorts, rubbed himself down with grease, and put the dry suit on. He added the flippers, then strapped on the tank and tested it. “Most of the waters around here are no more than ten, maybe fifteen feet deep, but this place is different,” he said. “You can see it in the way the light reflects on the water. It’s deeper, twenty feet or more.” Leaves, sticks, and logs floated on the water, and insects flitted above the surface. The water looked dark and green.

He washed the mask in the swamp water then turned to me. “Never thought I’d be looking for swamp ghosts on my day off,” he said.

“Raymond Aguillard says he saw the girl here,” I replied. “David Fontenot died up the river. There’s something here. You know what you’re looking for?”

He nodded. “Probably a container of some sort, heavy, sealed.”

Morphy flicked on the flashlight, slipped on his mask, and began sucking bottled air. I tied one end of the climbing rope to his belt and another to the trunk of the maple, yanked it firm, then patted him on the back. He raised a thumb and waded into the water. Two or three yards out, he began to dive and I started to feed the rope out through my hands.

I had had little experience of diving, beyond a few basic lessons taken during a holiday with Susan on the Florida Keys. I didn’t envy Morphy, swimming around in that swamp. During my teens, we went swimming in the Saco River, south of the Portland city limits, during the summer. Long, lean pike dwelt in those waters, vicious things that brought a hint of the primeval with them. When they brushed your bare legs, it made you think of stories you had heard about them biting small children or dragging swimming dogs down to the bottom of the river.

The waters of Honey Island swamp were like another world compared to the Saco. With its glittering snakes and its cowens, the name the Cajuns give to the swamp’s snapping turtles, Honey Island seemed so much more feral than the backwaters of Maine. But there were alligator gar here too, and scaled shortnoses, as well as perch and bass and bowfins. And ’gators.