Authors: John Connolly
I had been here only once before, when Susan and I were younger and happier. Along the Henderson Levee Road we passed the sign for McGee’s Landing, where I’d eaten tasteless chicken and Susan had picked at lumps of deep-fried alligator so tough even other alligators would have had trouble digesting it. Then a Cajun fisherman had taken us on a boat trip into the swamps, through a semisubmerged cypress forest. The sun sank low and bloody over the water, turning the tree stumps into dark silhouettes like the fingers of dead men pointing accusingly at the heavens. It was another world, as far removed from the city as the moon was from the earth, and it seemed to create an erotic charge between us as the heat made our shirts cling to our bodies and the sweat drip from our brows. When we returned to our hotel in Lafayette we made love urgently and with a passion that superseded love, our drenched bodies moving together, the heat in the room as thick as water.
Woolrich and I did not go as far as Lafayette. We abandoned the highway for a two-lane road that wove through the bayou country for a time before turning into little more than a rutted track, pitted by holes filled with dank, foul-smelling swamp water around which insects buzzed in thick swarms. Cypress and willow lined the road and, through them, the stumps of trees were visible in the waters of the swamp, relics of the harvestings of the last century. Lily pads clustered at the banks, and when the car slowed and the light was right, I could see bass moving languidly in their shadows, breaking the water occasionally.
I had heard once that Jean Lafitte’s brigands had made their home here. Now others had taken their place, killers and smugglers who used the canals and marshes as hiding places for heroin and marijuana, and as dark, green graves for the butchered, their bodies adding to the riotous growth of nature, their decay masked by the rich stench of vegetation.
We took one further turn, and here the cypress overhung the road. We rattled over a wooden bridge, the wood gradually returning to its original color as the paint flaked and disintegrated. In the shadows at its far end I thought I saw a giant figure watching us as we passed, his eyes white as eggs in the darkness beneath the trees.
“You see him?” said Woolrich.
“Who is he?”
“The old woman’s youngest son. Tee Jean, she calls him. Petit Jean. He’s kinda slow, but he looks out for her. They all do.”
“All?”
“Six of ’em live in the house. The old woman, her son, three kids from her second-eldest’s marriage—he’s dead; died with his wife in a car crash three years back—and a daughter. She has five more sons and three daughters all living within a few miles of here. Then the local folks, they look after her too. She’s kind of the matriarch around these parts, I guess. Big magic.”
I looked to see if he was being ironic. He wasn’t.
We left the trees and arrived in a clearing before a long, single-story house raised above the ground on stripped stumps of trees. It looked old but lovingly built, the wood on the front unwarped and carefully overlapped, the shingles on the roof undamaged but, here and there, darker where they had been replaced. The door stood open, blocked only by a wire screen, and chairs and children’s toys littered the porch, which ran the length of the front of the house and disappeared around the side. From behind, I could hear the sound of children and the splashing of water.
The screen door was opened and a small, slim woman appeared at the top of the steps. She was about thirty, with delicate features and lush dark hair drawn back in a ponytail from her light coffee-colored skin. Yet as we stepped from the car and drew nearer, I could see her skin was pitted with scars, probably from childhood acne. She seemed to recognize Woolrich for, before we said anything, she held the door open so I could step inside. Woolrich didn’t follow. I turned back toward him.
“You coming in?”
“I didn’t bring you here, if anyone asks, and I don’t even want to see her,” he said. He took a seat on the porch and rested his feet on the rail, watching the water gleam in the sunlight.
Inside, the wood was dark and the air cool. Doors at either side opened into bedrooms and a formal-looking living room with old, obviously hand-carved furniture, simple but carefully and skillfully crafted. An ancient radio with an illuminated dial and a band dotted with the names of far-flung places played a Chopin nocturne. The music followed me through the house and into the last bedroom, where the old woman waited.
She was blind. Her pupils were white, set in a huge moon face from which rolls of fat hung to her breastbone. Her arms, visible through the gauze sleeves of her multicolored dress, were bigger than mine and her swollen legs were like the trunks of small trees ending in surprisingly small, almost dainty, feet. She sat, supported by a mountain of pillows, on a giant bed in a room lit only by a hurricane lamp, the drapes closed against the sunlight. She was at least three hundred and fifty pounds, I guessed, probably more.
“Sit down, chile,” she said, taking one of my hands in her own and running her fingers lightly over mine. Her eyes stared straight ahead, not looking at me, as her fingers traced the lines on my palm.
“I know why you here,” she said. Her voice was high, girlish, as if she were a huge speaking doll whose tapes had been mixed up with a smaller model. “You hurtin’. You burnin’ inside. Little girl, you woman, they gone.” In the dim light, the old woman seemed to crackle with hidden energy.
“Tante,
tell me about the girl in the swamp, the girl with no eyes.”
“Poor chile,” said the old woman, her brow furrowing in sorrow. “She the fust here. She was runnin’ from sumpin’ and she los’ her way. Took a ride wi’ him and she never came back. Hurt her so, so bad. Didn’t touch her, though, ’cept with the knife.”
She turned her eyes toward me for the first time and I realized she was not blind, not in any way that mattered. As her hands traced the lines of my palm, my eyes closed and I felt that she had been there with the girl in her final moments, that she might even have brought her some comfort as the blade went about its business. “Hush, chile, you come with
Tante
now. Hush, chile, take my hand, you. He done hurtin’ you now.”
As she touched me, I heard and felt, deep within myself, the blade cutting, grating, separating muscle from joint, flesh from bone, soul from body, the artist working on his canvas; and I felt pain dancing through me, arcing through a fading life like a lightning flash, welling like the notes of a hellish song through the unknown girl in the Louisiana swamp. And in her agony I felt the agony of my own child, my own wife, and I was certain that this was the same man. Even as the pain faded to its last for the girl in the swamp, she was in darkness and I knew he had blinded her before he killed her.
“Who is he?” I said.
She spoke, and in her voice there were four voices: the voices of a wife and a daughter, the voice of an old obese woman on a bed in a wine-dark room, and the voice of a nameless girl who died a brutal, lonely death in the mud and water of a Louisiana swamp.
“He the Travelin’ Man.”
Walter shifted in his chair and the sound of his spoon against the china cup was like the ringing of chimes.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t find him.”
W
ALTER HAD BEEN
silent for a while, the whiskey now almost drained from his glass. “I need a favor. Not for me but for someone else.”
I waited.
“It has to do with the Barton Trust.”
The Barton Trust had been founded in his will by old Jack Barton, an industrialist who made his fortune by supplying parts for the aeronautical industry after the war. The trust provided money for research into child-related issues, supported pediatric clinics, and generally provided child-care money that the state would not. Its nominal head was Isobel Barton, old Jack’s widow, although the day-to-day running of the business was the responsibility of an attorney named Andrew Bruce and the trust’s chairman, Philip Kooper.
I knew all this because Walter did some fund-raising for the trust on occasion—raffles, bowling tournaments—and also because, some weeks before, the trust had entered the news for all the wrong reasons. During a charity fete held on the grounds of the Barton house on Staten Island, a young boy, Evan Baines, had disappeared. In the end, no trace of the boy had been found and the cops had pretty much given up hope. They believed he had somehow strayed from the grounds and been abducted. It merited some mention in the newspapers for a time and then was gone.
“Evan Baines?”
“No, at least I don’t think so, but it may be a missing person. A friend of Isobel Barton, a young woman, seems to have gone missing. It’s been a few days and Mrs. Barton’s worried. Her name’s Catherine Demeter. Nothing to link her with the Baines disappearance; she hadn’t even met the Bartons at that point.”
“Bartons plural?”
“Seems she was dating Stephen Barton. You know anything about him?”
“He’s an asshole. Apart from that, he’s a minor drug pusher for Sonny Ferrera. Grew up near the Ferreras on Staten Island and fell in with Sonny as a teenager. He’s into steroids, also coke, I think, but it’s minor stuff.”
Walter’s brow furrowed. “How long have you known about this?” he asked.
“Can’t remember,” I replied. “Gym gossip.”
“Jesus, don’t tell us anything we might find useful. I’ve only known since Tuesday.”
“You’re not supposed to know,” I said. “You’re the police. Nobody tells you things you’re supposed to know.”
“You used to be a cop too,” Walter muttered. “You’ve picked up some bad habits.”
“Gimme a break, Walter. How do I know who you’re checking up on? What am I supposed to do, go to confession to you once a week?” I poured some hot coffee into my cup. “Anyway, you think there might be a connection between this disappearance and Sonny Ferrera?” I continued.
“It’s possible,” said Walter. “The feds were tracking Stephen Barton for a while, maybe a year ago, before he was supposed to have started seeing Catherine Demeter. They were chasing their tails with that kid, so they let it go. According to the Narcotics file she doesn’t seem to have been involved, at least not openly, but what do they know? Some of them still think a crack pipe is something a plumber fixes. Maybe she could have seen something she wasn’t supposed to see.”
His face betrayed how lame he thought the link was, but he left me to voice it. “C’mon, Walter, steroids and minor coke? There’s money in it but it’s strictly Little League compared to the rest of Ferrera’s business. If he knocked off someone over musclehead drugs, then he’s even more stupid than we know he is. Even his old man thinks he’s the result of a defective gene.”
Ferrera senior, sick and decrepit but still a respected figure, had been known to refer to his only son as “that little prick” on occasion. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“As you say, we’re the police. No one tells us anything useful,” he replied dryly.
“Did you know Sonny is impotent?” I offered.
Walter stood up, waving his empty glass in front of his face and smiling for the first time that evening. “No. No, I didn’t. I’m not sure I wanted to know, either. What the hell are you, his urologist?” He glanced over at me as he reached for the Redbreast. I waved my fingers in a gesture of disregard that went no farther than my wrist.
“Pili Pilar still with him?” I asked, testing the waters.
“Far as I know. I hear he pushed Nicky Glasses out of a window a few weeks back because he fell behind on the vig.”
The World Bank had loans out that attracted lower interest than Sonny Ferrera’s financial operations. Then again, the World Bank probably didn’t throw people out of the tenth floor because they couldn’t keep up with the interest, at least not yet.
“Tough on Nicky. Another hundred years and he’d have had the loan paid off. Pili’d better ease up on his temper or he’s gonna run out of people to push through windows.”
Walter didn’t smile.
“Will you talk to her?” he asked as he resumed his seat.
“MPs, Walter…” I sighed. Fourteen thousand people disappear in New York every year. It wasn’t even clear if this woman was missing—in which case she didn’t want to be found or someone else didn’t want her found—or simply misplaced, which meant that she had merely upped sticks and moved off to another town without breaking the news to her good friend Isobel Barton or to her lovely boyfriend, Stephen Barton.
Those are the kinds of issues PIs have to consider when faced with missing persons cases. Tracing missing persons is bread and butter for PIs, but I wasn’t a PI. I had taken on Fat Ollie’s skip because it was easy work, or seemed to be at the time. I didn’t want to file for a PI license with the state licensing services in Albany. I didn’t want to get involved in missing persons work. Maybe I was afraid it would distract me too much. Maybe I just didn’t care enough, not then.
“She won’t go to the cops,” said Walter. “The woman isn’t even officially missing yet, since no one has reported her.”
“So how come you know about it?”
“You know Tony Loo-Loo?” I nodded. Tony Loomax was a small-time PI with a stammer who had never graduated beyond skips and white trash divorces.
“Loomax is an unusual candidate for Isobel Barton’s patronage,” I said.
“It seems he did some work for one of the household staff a year or two back. Traced her husband, who’d run off with their savings. Mrs. Barton told him she wanted something similar done, but wanted it done quietly.”
“Still doesn’t explain your involvement.”
“I have some stuff on Tony, mild overstepping of legal boundaries, which he would prefer I didn’t act on. Tony figured I might like to know that Isobel Barton had been making low-key approaches. I spoke to Kooper. He believes the trust doesn’t need any more bad publicity. I figured maybe I could do him a favor.”
“If Tony has the call, then why are you approaching me?”
“We’ve encouraged Tony to pass it on. He’s told Isobel Barton that he’s passing her on to someone she can trust because he can’t take the case. Seems his mother just died and he has to go to the funeral.”
“Tony Loo-Loo doesn’t have a mother. He was brought up in an orphanage.”
“Well,
someone’s
mother must have died,” said Walter testily. “He can go to
that
funeral.”
He stopped and I could see the doubt in his eyes as the rumors he had heard flicked a fin in the depths of his mind. “And that’s why I’m approaching you. Even if I tried to do this quietly through the usual channels, someone would know. Christ, you take a drink of water at headquarters and ten guys piss it out.”
“What about the girl’s family?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know much more but I don’t think there is one. Look, Bird, I’m asking you because you’re good. You were a smart cop. If you’d stayed on the force the rest of us would have been cleaning your shoes and polishing your shield. Your instincts were good. I reckon they still are. Plus you owe me one: people who go shooting up the boroughs don’t usually walk away quite so easily.”
I was silent for a while. I could hear Lee banging around in the kitchen while a TV show played in the background. Perhaps it was a remnant of what had taken place earlier, the apparently senseless killing of Fat Ollie Watts and his girlfriend, the death of the shooter, but it felt as if the world had shifted out of joint and that nothing was fitting as it should. Even this felt wrong. I believed Walter was holding back on me.
I heard the doorbell ring and then there was a muffled exchange of voices, one of them Lee’s and the other a deep male voice. Seconds later there was a knock on the door and Lee showed in a tall, gray-haired man in his fifties. He wore a dark blue double-breasted suit—it looked like Boss—and a red Christian Dior tie with an interlocking gold
CD
pattern. His shoes sparkled like they’d been shined with spit, although, since this was Philip Kooper, it was probably someone else’s spit.
Kooper was an unlikely figure to act as chairman and spokesman of a children’s charity. He was thin and pale faced, and his mouth managed the unique trick of being simultaneously slim and pursed. His fingers were long and tapering, almost like claws. Kooper looked like he had been disinterred for the express purpose of making people uneasy. If he had turned up at one of the trust’s kids’ parties, all of the children would have cried.
“This him?” he asked Walter, after declining a drink. He flicked his head at me like a frog swallowing a fly. I played with the sugar bowl and tried to look offended.
“This is Parker,” nodded Walter. I waited to see if Kooper would offer to shake hands. He didn’t. His hands remained clasped in front of him like a professional mourner at a particularly uninvolving funeral.
“Have you explained the situation to him?”
Walter nodded again but looked embarrassed. Kooper’s manners were worse than a bad child’s. I stayed seated and didn’t say anything. Kooper sniffed and then stood in silence while he looked down on me. He gave the impression that it was a position with which he was entirely familiar.
“This is a delicate situation, Mr. Parker, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Any communication in this matter will be made to me in the first instance before you impart any information to Mrs. Barton. Is that clear?”
I wondered if Kooper was worth the effort of annoying and decided, after looking at Walter’s look of discomfort, that he probably wasn’t, at least not yet. But I was starting to feel sorry for Isobel Barton and I hadn’t even met her.
“My understanding was that Mrs. Barton was hiring me,” I said eventually.
“That’s correct, but you will be answerable to me.”
“I don’t think so. There’s a small matter of confidentiality. I’ll look into it, but if it’s unconnected with the Baines kid or the Ferreras, I reserve the right to keep what I learn between Isobel Barton and myself.”
“That is not satisfactory, Mr. Parker,” said Kooper. A faint blush of color rose in his cheeks and hung there for a moment, looking lost in the tundra of his complexion. “Perhaps I am not making myself clear: in this matter, you will report to me first. I have powerful friends, Mr. Parker. If you do not cooperate, I can ensure that your license is revoked.”
“They must be very powerful friends because I don’t have a license,” I said. I stood up and Kooper’s fists tightened slightly. “You should consider yoga,” I said. “You’re too tense.”
I thanked Walter for the coffee and moved to the door.
“Wait,” he said. I turned back to see him staring at Kooper. After a few moments, Kooper gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders and moved to the window. He didn’t look at me again. Kooper’s attitude and Walter’s expression conspired against my better judgment, and I decided to talk to Isobel Barton.
“I take it she’s expecting me?” I asked Walter.
“I told Tony to tell her you were good, that if the girl was alive you’d find her.”
There was another brief moment of silence.
“And if she’s dead?”
“Mr. Kooper asked that question as well,” said Walter.
“What did you say?”
He swallowed the last of his whiskey, the ice cubes rattling against the glass like old bones. Behind him, Kooper was a dark silhouette against the window, like a promise of bad news.
“I told him you’d bring back the body.”
In the end, that’s what it all came down to: bodies—bodies found and yet to be found. And I recalled how Woolrich and I stood outside the old woman’s house on that April day and looked out over the bayou. I could hear the water lapping gently at the shore, and farther out, I watched a small fishing boat bobbing on the water, two figures casting out from either side. But both Woolrich and I were looking deeper than the surface, as if, by staring hard enough, we could penetrate to the depths and find the body of a nameless girl in the dark waters.
“Do you believe her?” he said at last.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“There’s no way we’re gonna find that body, if it exists, without more than we’ve got. We start trawling for bodies in bayous and pretty soon we’re gonna be knee deep in bones. People been dumping bodies in these swamps for centuries. Be a miracle if we didn’t find something.”
I walked away from him. He was right, of course. Assuming there was a body, we needed more from the old woman than she had given us. I felt like I was trying to grip smoke, but what the old woman had said was the closest thing yet to a lead on the man who had killed Jennifer and Susan.
I wondered if I was crazy, taking the word of a blind woman who heard voices in her sleep. I probably was.
“Do you know what he looks like,
Tante?”
I had asked her, watching as her head moved ponderously from side to side in response.
“Only see him when he comes for you,” she replied. “Then you know him.”
I reached the car and looked back to see a figure on the porch with Woolrich. It was the girl with the scarred face, standing gracefully on the tips of her toes as she leaned toward the taller man. I saw Woolrich run his finger tenderly across her cheek and then softly speak her name: “Florence.” He kissed her lightly on the lips, then turned and walked toward me without looking back at her. Neither of us said anything about it on the journey back to New Orleans.