Cities of the Dead (19 page)

“You're better than a tour guide,” Spraggue said.

“It's one of them tourist things, like the hoodoo charms. Folks always ask about the graveyards,” Flowers said. “And workin' the airport like I do, I consider myself a guide as well as a taxi service.”

“What happens if there's a disaster?” Spraggue asked. “A fire? Say three members of the family are killed at once. Or what if Uncle Alfred hadn't waited a year and a day?”

“Well, they rent one of the wall ovens then, until space is available in the family tomb. And sometimes space never gets available. Say you got a real black sheep in the family. Lots of them never end up in the family vault at all. If you have a fight with the family in New Orleans, you don't just get disinherited. You get tossed out of your eternal restin' place. And the tradition here is for the man to join his wife's family, in the tombs at least. So you got to get on with the folks, or your body's just gonna get chucked in one of the wall ovens, and you'll never mingle your bones with your mother-in-law's. It's real tricky 'round here, gettin' buried.”

They set off down one of the avenues of tombs. Spraggue read the names on the markers. French names. LaForge, and Fabre, and Darriere. La Famille Lafontaine. Danielle Lafontaine, 1882–1884. Two years of life distilled to a single line of carved print. Was Dora's nameless child alive? Or buried in such marble splendor?

The caretaker lived in a whitewashed shack smaller than some of the tombs. He was just finishing up lunch. A paper cup, dark with coffee, sat on a tiny desk near a dusty phone. The whiskey smell said the color was more camouflage than coffee. The man was dressed in coveralls that had started out white some years ago. He wore a billed cap pulled down over his eyes, was a shade or two lighter than his suspicious coffee, and had a wary cast to his eye as he looked up at his two unexpected guests.

“Yeah? So me, what can I do for you, eh?” he said, and Spraggue was reminded of a French-Canadian he'd known who'd lived for years in Maine and developed his own blend of Yankee French. This man's voice was softer. He blurred the edges of his words, sliding one into the other.

Spraggue displayed the
Times-Picayune
article. The man recognized it, and a smile spread over his face.

“More o' them news guys?” the man in coveralls said with satisfaction. “Long time gone by. Half year, maybe. Ain't it a dead issue yet?” He laughed, and Spraggue bet he had three hundred more dead jokes where that one came from. He steeled himself.

“You the one found the corpse?” Flowers asked quickly, as if he, too, wanted to ward off an avalanche of graveyard humor.

“Couldn't right call it a corpse, after all this time,” the caretaker said. “Say it a skeleton. But me, I be there sure enough. I be there.”

“I'm interested in hearing exactly what happened that day,” Spraggue said. “Very interested, Mr.…”

“Mr. Breaux. Jack Breaux.”

Spraggue folded a ten-dollar bill into the caretaker's hand.

“You not a cop,” the man said.

“It doesn't matter who I am.”

“I don't want get in no trouble.”

“How can you get in trouble talking about the dead?” Spraggue asked.

“You right 'bout that, okay. They don't care how much you gossip 'bout them, these guys.”

“Tell me about the day the extra body was found.”

“Want some coffee?”

“Thanks.”

Paper cups were filled with hot brown liquid from a pan that had been sitting on a portable electric ring. A paper sack containing a pint bottle of Southern Comfort was offered and refused.

It was too crowded for the three of them in the tiny office. They went outside in the mist, and sat on a bench in front of one of the tombs.

Breaux slurped his adulterated coffee, said, “Now let me go back to that day. Wasn't a good one, that I recall. Rainy an' gloomy, like this. Nothin' unusual 'bout the weather, an' not much unusual 'bout the day. We don' do a lot of funerals here no more. This cemetery mostly all filled up, an' so old we don' get much business no more. Few of the old families still use their tombs, all right, an' people come visit. Busy sometimes, but more wit' upkeep than wit' newcomers. Now that day we got a funeral fo' the Despardieu tomb, which is a real pretty one, on yo' left as you come in the gate—”

“Could we see it?” Spraggue asked.

“I'm s'posed to stay by the shack, okay, case the phone ring or somethin'.”

“But you have to leave it sometimes,” Flowers said. “Come on. This story needs pictures to go along with it.”

“Okay,
cher,
” Jack Breaux said. “Follow me.”

The ground was soggy from the drizzle. Jack didn't patronize the gravel pathways. He knew the place well enough to take all the shortcuts through the mud.

The Despardieu family tomb was creamy, veined marble, and beautifully maintained. Two fluted columns framed the inscription plaque. A winged angel, eyes closed in ecstasy, played a lyre overhead. The tomb was set off by a wrought-iron fence, the kind that ran around the balconies of the finer houses in the French Quarter. On the narrow walkway around the tomb, crushed seashells substituted for gravel. Breaux opened the gate with a key from a huge bunch attached to his belt.

“Always keep it locked?” Spraggue asked.

“Yeah. 'Course I can't say what the policy was when that skeleton come aboard. I been here seven, eight years, that's all. Guys from the Coroner's Office, ones that took the pictures an' all, they seem to t'ink our extra stiff came here long before me.”

“Exactly what happened that day?”

“We were short-staffed, like usual, or a lotta t'ings woulda happen different. When we prep a place, we usually do it the day before, right, but we couldn't get it done, so we tried for the mornin' of the funeral. See, that's where the trouble was. We woulda had enough time, okay. There wouldn'a been no trouble wit' time, 'cause all we hadda do was burn the ol' wood coffin an' brush the bones back in the pit. We check the date on the oven we gonna open, an' that is fine. No action at that tomb fo' six years—no action on this vault for almos' twenny, see. We figure no trouble. Jus' bones after that long.”

“Six years and twenty years?”

“See right here.” Breaux pointed to the tablet blockin' the door to the lower oven. “This one been sealed up fo' six years. Hope they don' make us open it an' see if there's jus' one body in it. This top one's where the extra body was—an' the las' time it was open was fo' the eart'ly remains a Miss Evelyn Despardieu, on February 12, 1966. Nineteen years ago, right?”

“Go on.”

“I was the one made the discovery. Me an' Henry Wayne, we workin' a little quick-like, 'cause of the family's gonna come out at two in the afternoon, see, an' we wanna set out a few chairs for the old folks an' such. We ain't worried 'bout nothin'. All we got to do is remove the marble plate an' straighten out the matter of the remains.”

“How do you remove the plate?”

“Well, it ain't too hard. You jus' chip the mortar away, bein' careful not t' bung up the marble. Wrap a clot' 'round it, an' use a good chisel, an' you home free. Takes a while, but it ain't hard. After the plate's gone, the door's jus' bricked up, an' you can bang away pretty good. Bricks don' matter. Cheap.”

“Sounds noisy.”

“Hammer an' chisel make a good noise, yeah. But the neighbors don' complain, eh?”

“Is somebody always on guard here?” Spraggue asked,

“Oh, yeah. You bet,
cher
. If you're t'inkin' that somebody jus' come by an' open a vault an' nobody heard him, you're plenty wrong.”

“What do you think happened?”

“This is jus' my opinion, you know.” Breaux drained his coffee cup and set it on the edge of the tomb. “Cops didn't want my opinion none, and neither did the press.”

“I'd like to hear your opinion,” Spraggue said.

Breaux brightened and hitched up his coveralls. “Okay. I'd say the two skeletons was put in together. Like, if ol' Miss Despardieu was young Miss Despardieu—you know, eighteen an' gorgeous an' sexy an' all—an' killed in some car crash, I'd say her boyfriend jus' sneaked in here the night after the funeral and killed hisself to be wit' her.”

A graveyard romantic. Spraggue wondered if Breaux was familiar with
Romeo and Juliet
. Or
Hamlet. How long will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?

“You think the extra person died here?” Spraggue asked. “Killed himself?”

“I reckon.”

“How did he close the tomb up afterward?”

“Oh. Well, I don' know how they used t' do it. But sometimes, if we gotta lot to do, we jus' lean the tablet up 'gainst the oven, an' brick it up the next day or so. Caretakers woulda just bricked it up. No reason to look inside.”

“That's not unusual?”

“Not a bit.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Well, it was the damnedest t'ing. Gimme the creeps, I guarantee. I open up the tomb, an' there's this skeleton, jus' lyin' flat out next t' the coffin. You know what it made me t'ink of? Buried alive. I mean I t'ought the ol' gal, somehow, she gets up outta the coffin, an' she couldn' get outta the tomb. Who's that ol' gal who's buried wit' her telephone so she can call everybody when the final trumpet sounds? Well, I t'ought maybe Miss Despardieu got outta her coffin, an' it made me feel all creepy, an' usually I don' feel like that none. So we didn' call the cops right away, or call the church even, 'cause we t'ought it was Miss Despardieu's remains. We didn' holler till we broke open the coffin and found the other corpse. Even then we t'ought 'bout it a little. Henry's all for jus' pushin' the extra bones in the caveau. He t'ought it's jus' some member a the family got careless treatment last time 'round. But it didn' look right to me, no. I mean, the guy's wearin' rags a blue jeans, not what people are mostly buried in. And, well, the whole t'ing jus' wasn't right—an' it was kinda scary, you bet.”

“You were right to call the police,” Spraggue said when Breaux paused and shook his head.

“Well, I don' know. They weren' too happy 'bout it. I mean, they got more importan' t'ings to do than trace an ol' stiff. But you gotta wonder who he was—an' how come nobody miss him. What kind a guy is it that nobody misses?”

“You sure it was a man?”

“Lot bigger than Miss Despardieu. Coroner'll be able t' tell you more than me. All I can say is he didn' have no money in his pockets, didn' have no wallet or nothin'.”

“Nothing at all?” Spraggue asked, noticing an uncharacteristic hesitation in the man's voice.

“Well, I guess the cops'll tell you, if you ask,” Breaux said, fingering the pocket where he'd stashed the ten-dollar bill.

“You think it's worth more?” Spraggue asked.

“Me, how would I know a t'ing like that?” Breaux smiled broadly, showing stained tombstone teeth.

Spraggue parted with another ten. He got more than he expected.

TWENTY

Breaux allowed a single phone call from his shack. Rawlins was back at the station.

“I've got something,” Spraggue said quickly. “Can you meet me at the Coroner's Office?”

“Your aunt's comin' by in a few minutes,” the detective said, sounding pleased about it.

“Bring her along,” Spraggue said. “She's not squeamish.”

The coroner's waiting room was an oddly shaped, partitioned section of a larger room, featuring a public telephone in the far corner, two doors leading off to lavatories, a battered sofa, and two metal chairs. A framed motto on one cracked off-white wall read, “Where death delights to serve the living.” It was the only attempt at decoration. The place smelled like a hospital ward.

The coroner provided while-you-wait reading material in the form of a stack of yellow cards, headed
THESE ARE CORONER CASES
. About half the words on each card were typed in boldface. Spraggue had gotten as far as “
all cases of alleged rape, simple and aggravated, carnal knowledge
and crimes
against nature
,” when he heard his aunt approaching.

Her voice was raised and argumentative, and got louder as she came up the stairs. “This man, Renner,” she was saying, “is probably certifiable.”

The door lurched open and she entered, wrapped in a shiny yellow slicker. Rawlins followed, pausing in the doorway to shake off a huge black umbrella.

“You made good time,” Spraggue said, motioning them both into the waiting room. “First, tell me about Renner and then I'll tell you what I've got.”

Rawlins helped Mary out of her raincoat. It dripped a pattern of dots onto the linoleum floor.

“Archibald Renner,” Mary said firmly, “was a great disappointment to me. Brother Archibald, I should call him. That's what he calls himself. I had imagined some grim, austere cleric, and instead I got Friar Tuck. Archie Renner is fatter than Friar Tuck. He has something wrong with one foot, and wears a very noticeably built-up shoe. He could no more have made an unnoticed appearance at that banquet, disguised as a waiter or a cook, than I could pass for Sophia Loren.”

“He could have hired someone,” Rawlins said.

“Oh, Rawl.” The argument was about to start again. “If you could have seen him! So awkward and silly and sort of lost. An adult child—”

“Okay, okay,” Rawlins said. “He's a wash out.” He turned to Spraggue, said. “Tell me what you've got.”

“I'll show you,” Spraggue said.

With Rawlins' shield to intimidate the smiling but hostile receptionist, they zipped past the administrative desks in the lobby and got clear through to a comfortable office furnished with a huge, old-fashioned walnut desk and leather furniture. Tanks of tropical fish burbled along one wall. Spraggue had expected an old man to be coroner—the very word seemed to summon a vision of the faithful family doctor, side-whiskered and bespectacled. The white-coated man behind the desk looked like a first-year medical student, possibly an undergraduate. When he smiled, the tiny crinkles under his eyes made Spraggue think that he might be old enough to get served in a bar.