Every Dead Thing (39 page)

“Why?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. There just seems to be something almost feminine about the sensibility of whoever is committing these crimes, a…
sensitivity
to the interconnectedness of things, to their potential for symbolism. I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking out loud, but it’s not a sensibility typical of a modern male. Maybe “female” is wrong—I mean, the hallmarks, the cruelty, the capacity to overpower, all point to a male—but it’s as close as I can get, at least for now.”

She shook her head and then was silent again.

“Are we becoming a couple?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“No, not really. It’s not one that I’m used to answering, or that I ever thought that I’d have to answer again. If you’re asking if I want us to stay together, then the answer is yes, I do. It worries me a little, and I’m bringing in more baggage than the handlers at JFK, but I want to be with you.”

She kissed me softly.

“Why did you stop drinking?” she asked, adding: “Since we’re having this heart-to-heart.”

I started at the question. “Because if I took one drink now, I’d wake up in Singapore with a beard a week later,” I replied.

“It doesn’t answer the question.”

“I hated myself and that made me hate others, even the people closest to me. I was drinking the night Susan and Jennifer were killed. I’d been drinking a lot, not just that night but other nights too. I drank because of a lot of things, because of the pressure of the job, because of my failings as a husband, as a father, and maybe other things as well, things from way back. If I hadn’t been a drunk, Susan and Jennifer might not have died. So I stopped. Too late, but I stopped.”

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t say, “It wasn’t your fault,” or, “You can’t blame yourself.” She knew better than that.

I think I wanted to say more, to try to explain to her what it was like without alcohol, about how I was afraid that, without alcohol, each day would now leave me with nothing to look forward to. Each day would simply be another day without a drink. Sometimes, when I was at my lowest ebb, I wondered if my search for the Traveling Man was just a way to fill my days, a way to keep me from going off the rails.

Later, as she slept, I lay on the bed, on top of the sheets, and thought about Lutice Fontenot and bodies turned into art, before I, too, faded into sleep.

I
SLEPT BADLY
that night, wound up by my conversation with Woolrich and troubled by dreams of dark water. The next morning, I had breakfast alone after tracking down what seemed to be the only copy of the
New York Times
in Orleans Parish, over at Riverside News, by the Jax Brewery. Later, I met Rachel at Café du Monde and we walked through the French Market, wandering between the stalls of T-shirts and CDs and cheap wallets, and on to the fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market. There were pecans like dark eyes, pale, shrunken heads of garlic, melons with dark red flesh that held the gaze like a wound. White-eyed fish lay packed in ice beside crawfish tails; headless shrimp rested by racks of “’gator on a stick” and murky tanks in which baby alligators lay on display. There were stalls loaded with eggplants and militones, sweet onions and elephant toe garlic, fresh Roma tomatoes and ripe avocadoes.

Over a century before, this had been a two-block stretch of Gallatin Street on the riverfront docks between Barracks and Ursuline. Outside of maybe Shanghai and the Bowery, it was one of the toughest places in the world, a strip of brothels and lowlife gin mills where hard-faced men mixed with harder women and anyone without a weapon had taken a wrong turning somewhere that he was bound to regret.

Gallatin is gone now, erased from the map, and instead tourists mix with Cajun fishermen from Lafayette and beyond, come to sell their wares surrounded by the thick, heady smell of the Mississippi. The city was like that, it seemed: streets disappeared; bars opened and, a century later, were gone; buildings were torn down or burned to the ground and others rose to take their place. There was change, but the spirit of the city remained the same. On this muggy summer morning, it seemed to brood beneath the clouds, feeling the people as a passing infection that it would cleanse from itself with rain.

The door of my room was slightly ajar when we returned through the courtyard. I motioned Rachel against the wall and drew my Smith & Wesson, keeping to the sides of the wooden stairway so that the steps wouldn’t creak. The noise of Ricky’s Steyr sending bullets raking past my ear had stayed with me.
“Joe Bones says hello.
” I figured that if Joe Bones tried to say hello again, I could spare enough powder to blow him back to Hell.

I listened at the door but no sounds came from inside. If it had been the maid in my room, she’d have been whistling and bumping, maybe listening to a blues station on her tinny portable radio. If there was a maid in my room now, she was either asleep or levitating.

I hit the door hard with my shoulder and entered fast, my gun at arm’s length, scanning the room with the sight. It came to rest on the figure of Leon sitting in a chair by the balcony, flicking through a copy of
GQ
that Louis had passed on to me. Leon didn’t look like the kind of guy who bought much on
GQ
’s recommendation, unless the
Q
had made a big play for the JCPenney contract. Leon glanced at me with even less interest than he gave to
GQ.
His damaged eye glistened beneath its fold of skin like a crab peering out of a shell.

“When you’re finished, there are hairs in the shower and the closet door sticks,” I said.

“Room falls down around your ears, I could give a fuck,” he replied. That Leon, what a kidder.

He threw the magazine on the floor and looked past me to Rachel, who had followed me into the room. His eyes didn’t register any interest there either. Maybe Leon was dead and no one had worked up the guts to tell him.

“She’s with me,” I said. Leon looked like he could have keeled over from apathy.

“Ten tonight, at the nine-sixty-six junction at Starhill. You
et ton ami noir.
Anyone else, Lionel cornhole you both with a shotgun.”

He stood to leave. As I moved aside to let him pass, I made a pistol of my finger and thumb and fired it at him. There was a flash of steel in each of his hands and two barb-edged knives appeared inches from each of my eyes. I could see the tops of the spring loaders in his sleeves. That explained why Leon didn’t seem to feel the need to carry a gun.

“Impressive,” I said, “but it’s only funny until someone loses an eye.” Leon’s dead right eye seemed to gaze into my soul, as if to rot it and turn it to dust, then he left. I couldn’t hear his footsteps as he walked down the gallery.

“A friend of yours?” asked Rachel.

I walked out of the room and looked down at the already empty courtyard. “If he is, I’m lonelier than I thought.”

When Louis and Angel returned from a late breakfast, I went to their door and knocked. A couple of seconds went by before there was a response.

“Yeah?” shouted Angel.

“It’s Bird. You two decent?”

“Jeez, I hope not. C’mon in.”

Louis sat upright in bed, reading the
Times-Picayune.
Angel sat beside him outside the sheets, naked but for a towel across his lap.

“The towel for my benefit?”

“I’m afraid you might become confused about your sexuality.”

“Might take away what little I have.”

“Very witty for a man screwing a psychologist. Why don’t you just pay your eighty bucks an hour like everyone else?”

Louis gave us both bored looks over the top of his newspaper. Maybe Leon and Louis were related way back.

“Lionel Fontenot’s boy just paid me a visit,” I said.

“The beauty queen?” asked Louis.

“None other.”

“We on?”

“Tonight at ten. Better get your stuff out of hock.”

“I’ll send my boy.” He kicked Angel in the leg from beneath the sheets.

“The ugly queen?”

“None other,” said Louis.

Angel continued to watch his game show. “It’s beneath my dignity to comment.”

Louis returned to his paper. “You got a lot of dignity for a guy with a towel on his dick.”

“It’s a big towel,” sniffed Angel.

“Waste of a lot of good towel space, you ask me.”

I left them to it. Back in my room, Rachel was standing by the wall, her arms folded and a fierce expression on her face.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We go back to Joe Bones,” I said.

“And Lionel Fontenot kills him,” she spat. “He’s no better than Joe Bones. You’re only siding with him out of expediency. What will happen when Fontenot kills him? Will things be any better?”

I didn’t answer. I knew what would happen. There would be a brief disturbance in the drug trade, as Fontenot renegotiated existing deals or ended them entirely. Prices would go up and there would be some killing, as those who felt strong enough to challenge him for Joe Bones’s turf made their play. Lionel Fontenot would kill them; of that I had no doubt.

Rachel was right. It was only expediency that made me side with Lionel. Joe Bones knew something about what had happened the night
Tante
Marie died, something that could bring me a step closer to the man who had killed my wife and child. If it took Lionel Fontenot’s guns to find out what that was, then I would side with the Fontenots.

“And Louis will stand beside you,” said Rachel quietly. “My God, what have you become?”

Later, I drove to Baton Rouge, Rachel accompanying me at my insistence. We were uneasy together, and no words were exchanged. Rachel contented herself with looking out of the window, her elbow resting against the door, her right hand supporting her cheek. The silence between us remained unbroken until we reached exit 166, heading for LSU and the home of Stacey Byron. Then I spoke, anxious that we should at least try to clear the air between us.

“Rachel, I’ll do what I have to do to find whoever killed Susan and Jennifer,” I said. “I need this, else I’m dead inside.”

She did not reply immediately. For a while, I thought she was not going to reply at all.

“You’re already dying inside,” she said at last, still staring out the window. I could see her eyes, reflected in the glass, following the landscape. “The fact that you’re prepared to do these things is an indication of that.”

She looked at me for the first time. “I’m not your moral arbiter, Bird, and I’m not the voice of your conscience. But I am someone who cares about you, and I’m not sure how to deal with these feelings right now. Part of me wants to walk away and never look back, but another part of me wants, needs, to stay with you. I want to stop this thing, all of it. I want it all to end, for everybody’s sake.” Then she turned away again and left me to deal with what she had said.

Stacey Byron lived in a small white clapboard house with a red door and peeling paint, close to a small mall with a big supermarket, a photo shop, and a twenty-four-hour pizzeria. This area by the LSU campus was populated mainly by students, and some of the houses now had stores on their first floor, selling used CDs and books or long hippie dresses and overwide straw hats. As we drove by Stacey Byron’s house and pulled into a parking space in front of the photo shop, I spotted a blue Probe parked close by. The two guys sitting in the front seats looked bored beyond belief. The driver had a newspaper folded in four resting on the wheel and was sucking on a pencil as he tried to do the crossword. His partner tapped a rhythm on the dashboard as he watched the front door of Stacey Byron’s house.

“Feds?” asked Rachel.

“Maybe. Could be locals. This is donkey work.”

We watched them for a while. Rachel turned on the radio and we listened to an AOR station: Rush, Styx, Richard Marx. Suddenly, the middle of the road seemed to be running straight through the car, musically speaking.

“Are you going in?” asked Rachel.

“May not have to,” I replied, nodding at the house.

Stacey Byron, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail and her body encased in a short white cotton dress, emerged from the house and walked straight toward us, a straw shopping basket over her left arm. She nodded at the two guys in the car. They tossed a coin and the one in the passenger seat, a medium-sized man with a small belly protruding through his jacket, got out of the car, stretched his legs, and followed her toward the mall.

She was a good-looking woman, although the short dress was a little too tight at the thighs and dug slightly into the fat below her buttocks. Her arms were strong and lean, her skin tanned. There was a grace to her as she walked: when an elderly man almost collided with her as she entered the supermarket, she spun lightly on her right foot to avoid him.

I felt something soft on my cheek and turned to find Rachel blowing on it.

“Hey,” she said, and for the first time since we left New Orleans there was a tiny smile on her lips. “It’s rude to lech when you’re with another woman.”

“It’s not leching,” I said, as we climbed from the car, “it’s surveillance.”

I wasn’t sure why I had come here, but Woolrich’s remarks about Stacey Byron and her interest in art made me want to see her for myself, and I wanted Rachel to see her as well. I didn’t know how we might get to talk to her but I figured that these things had a habit of working themselves out.

Stacey took her time browsing in the aisles. There was an aimlessness about her shopping as she picked up items, glanced at the labels, and then discarded them. The cop followed about ten feet behind her, then fifteen, before his attention was distracted by some magazines. He moved to the checkout and took up a position where he could see down two aisles at once, limiting his care of Stacey Byron to the occasional glance in her direction.

I watched a young black man in a white coat and a white hat with a green band stacking prepackaged meat. When he had emptied the tray and marked off its contents on a clipboard, he left the shop floor through a door marked
Staff Only.
I left Rachel to watch Byron and followed him. I almost hit him with the door as I went through, since he was squatting to pick up another plastic tray of meat. He looked at me curiously.

“Hey, man,” he said, “you can’t come in here.”

“How much do you earn an hour?” I asked.

“Five twenty-five. What’s it to you?”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you lend me your coat and that clipboard for ten minutes.”

He thought it over for a few seconds, then said: “Sixty, and anyone asks I’ll say you stole it.”

“Done,” I said, and counted out three twenties as he took off the coat. It fitted a bit tightly across the shoulders, but no one would notice as long as I left it unbuttoned. I was stepping back onto the shop floor when the young guy called me.

“Hey, man, ’nother twenty, you can have the hat.”

“For twenty bucks, I could go into the hat business myself,” I replied. “Go hide in the men’s room.”

I found Stacey Byron by the toiletries, Rachel close by.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, as I approached, “can I ask you some questions?”

Up close, she looked older. There was a network of broken veins beneath her cheekbones and a fine tracery of lines surrounded her eyes. There were tight lines, too, around her mouth, and her cheeks were sunken and stretched. She looked tired and something else: she looked threatened, maybe even scared.

“I don’t think so,” she said, with a false smile, and started to step around me.

“It’s about your ex-husband.”

She stopped then and turned back, her eyes searching for her police escort. “Who are you?”

“An investigator. What do you know about Renaissance art, Mrs. Byron?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You studied it in college, didn’t you? Does the name Valverde mean anything to you? Did your husband ever use it? Did you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, leave me alone.” She backed away, knocking some cans of deodorant to the floor.

“Mrs. Byron, have you ever heard of the Traveling Man?”

Something flashed in her eyes and behind me I heard a low whistle. I turned to see the fat cop moving down the aisle in my direction. He passed Rachel without noticing her and she began moving toward the door and the safety of the car, but by then I was already heading back to the staff area. I dumped the coat and walked straight through and on to the back lot, which was crowded with trucks making deliveries, before slipping around the side of the mall where Rachel already had the car started. I stayed low as we drove off, turning right instead of passing Stacey Byron’s house again. In the side mirror I could see the fat cop looking around and talking into his radio, Byron beside him.