TVA BABY and Other Stories (18 page)

“Now that I’m on retainer,” I said, folding the bills as I followed her out onto Bourbon Street, “perhaps you can tell me what this is all about.”

“As we go,” she said, unlocking a sleek BMW with a keychain beeper. The 740i. I had seen it in the magazines. Butter leather seats, a walnut dash with an inset GPS map display, and an oversized V-8 that came to life with a snarl. As we roared off, she lit another Camel off the last. “As I mentioned, I am the Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art and Antiquities.”

“Didn’t you just run a red light?”

“Two years ago, we began a dig on the Gulf Coast of Mexico,” she continued, accelerating through an intersection, “opening a pre-Columbian tomb.”

“Wasn’t that a stop sign?”

“We made a remarkable find—a large statue innearly perfect condition, which the natives knew of by legend as the Vera Cruz Enormé, or Giant. We contacted the Louvre.”

“The Louvre?” We were approaching another intersection. I closed my eyes.

“Our sister institution was called in because the statue had rather remarkable features for an artifact from the East Coast of Mexico. As you can see.”

She was handing me a photograph. I opened my eyes just wide enough to see a picture of a statue, half again as tall as the man standing next to it. Its bulging eyes, hunched shoulders, and feral, sneering face looked familiar.

“A gargoyle?”

“Indeed,” said Prang. “Very similar in fact to the gargoyles on the cathedral of Notre Dame.”

I was beginning to get it—I thought. “So you assumed there was a supernatural connection?”

“Certainly not!” Prang spat. “Our first assumption was that this was perhaps created by the French during the brief rule of Emperor Maximilian in the nineteenth century. A forgotten folly, or hoax.”

“You’re supposed to slow down for the school zones,” I said, closing my eyes again.

“But even then, it would be of great value, historically. The Enormé was placed in a warehouse, under guard, since Mexico is rife with thieves who know perfectly well the value of antiquities, even bogus ones.”

I could hear sirens. Though I am no friend of the cops, I rather hoped they were after us. Though I wondered how they would catch us.

“That was almost a month ago, the night of the full moon. The next morning, both guards were found with their heads missing. The Enormé was back in its tomb.”

“I see,” I said. “So you realized you were dealing with an ancient curse…”

“Certainly not!” Prang said, over the wail of tortured tires. “I figured somebody was trying to spook the peasants so they could blackmail us. I spread around enough cash to keep the authorities quiet, and crated the Enormé for shipment to New Orleans.”

“You covered up a murder?”

“Two,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not hard to do in modern Mexico.”

The BMW skidded smoothly to a stop. I opened my eyes and saw that we were in the parking lot of the museum. I never thought I would be so glad to get out of a 740i, after only one ride.

Prang paused on the steps to light a new Camel off the old. “The Louvre is sending a specialist to look at the Enormé, which arrived here yesterday.”

I followed her through the museum’s wide front door. We raced through the halls and down a short flight of stairs.

“And then, last night…”

“What happened last night?”

“You’re the Private Eye,” she said, pushing through a door that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “You tell me.”

We came out in a large, ground floor lab with one wall of windows. The windows were smashed. The room wascrawling with cops. There was a sickening, slightly sweet smell in the air.

Two uniformed cops wearing rubber gloves were standing over a crumpled wad of clothing and flesh by the door. Two forensics in white coats were taking pictures and making notes on handheld computers.

I joined them, curiosity and nausea fighting within me. As a private eye you see a lot of things, but rarely a man with his head pinched off.

Nausea won.

“Our former Security Exec,” said Prang, nodding toward the headless body on the floor as I returned from throwing up in the men’s room. “He was keeping watch over the Enormé after it was uncrated last night. I rushed you here so you could learn what you can before the police totally muddy the crime scene. I didn’t tell them what happened in Mexico. I don’t want then confiscating the Enormé before we learn what it is.”

“I see,” I said.

“What the hell is he doing here?” Ike Ward, the city’s shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions Chief of Police walked over, scowling at me. “I don’t need a ghost-buster underfoot. This is a crime scene.”

“Mr. Villon is our new Security Exec,” said Prang. “He’ll be representing the museum in the investigation.”

“Just keep him out of my way!” Ward said, turning his broad back.

“You didn’t tell me you knew Chief Ward,” Prang said after he had stalked off.

“You didn’t ask. Nor did you tell me I was an executive.”

“It’s an interim appointment,” she said. “But it gives you a certain standing with the police.”

I took advantage of that standing, following at a seemingly respectful and hopefully non-antagonistic distance behind Ward’s homicide squad as they examined and secured the crime scene, in their fashion.

The broken windows faced east. Through what was left of them, I could see a spray of glass on the parking lot, telling me that the window had been smashed from the inside. Someone had apparently gained access, then knocked out the window so they could get the Enormé out, into a waiting vehicle. Probably a truck.

I went outside. There was a smear of blood on the asphalt, then tracks that faded as they crossed the parking lot toward the street.

They weren’t the tire tracks I was looking for. They were footprints. Prints that chilled my blood, or would have, had I really believed in the supernatural that was supposedly my specialty.

Huge, three-toed footprints.

Back inside, I watched Ward’s forensics scoop my predecessor up into two bags, one large, one small; then I located Prang, who was busy opening her second pack of Camels.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Upstairs.”

Her office overlooked the parking lot. I took her to the window and showed her the footprints.

“So it’s true,” she whispered. “It’s alive!”

I have never figured out why people want to believe in the supernatural. It’s as if they find the existence of the irrational somehow reassuring. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Ms. Prang,” I said. “Tell me, what exactly was the Aztec legend of the Enormé?”

“Olmec,” she corrected. “The usual stuff. Full moon, headless victims, human sacrifice, etc. We did find a pile of bones in the tomb, mostly of young girls. According to the legend, the Enormé had to be fed once a month. A virgin, of course.” She smiled and lit yet another Camel. “So I felt safe. I thought it was all a tale to scare the simple-minded. Until now.”

“And now?”

“You tell me, you’re the private eye. Aren’t you supposed to have a hunch or something?”

“I’m hunchless so far,” I said. “Though I’m certain this is some kind of hoax. An elaborate and deadly one, to be sure.”

“Whatever it is,” said Prang, “I want the Enormé back. Hoax or not, it’s the find of the century, and it belongs to my museum. That’s why you’re here. Unless we find it before the police, I’ll never get it back.”

“They see it as stolen property,” I said. “And we can count on Ward to keep the press away from those footprints, at least until he comes up with an explanation. He doesn’t like to look stupid.”

“Neither do I,” Prang pointed out. “So where do we begin? What do we do?”

“We begin,” I said, starting for the door, “by figuringout where we would hide a statue if we wanted people to think it was a legendary monster come to life. Then we go and get it.”

“Wait!” said Prang. “I’m coming with you.”

New Orleans’s cemeteries are called the “Cities of the Dead,” because they are all tombs, in long rows like little stone houses. No one is buried in the ground because the water table is so high.

The nearest was La Gare des Morts, only a quarter of a mile from the museum. “Paydirt,” I said, when I saw that the ancient rusted gate had been forced open.

“Why are you so certain that this is all a hoax?” Prang asked, as we slipped between the twisted bars.

“Ninety-seven percent of all supernatural events are crude hoaxes,” I said.

“What about the other three percent?”

“Clever hoaxes,” I said.

From the gate, narrow “streets” between the tombs led off in three directions. I was trying to decide where to begin the search when my cell phone rang.

“Jack Villon. Supernatural Private Eye.”

“Kill me…” It was a man’s voice, a hoarse, sleepy whisper.

“Who is this?”

“Tree …”

Click. Dial tone.

“Who was that?” Prang asked.

“My hunch,” I said, folding my phone.

There was only one tree in the cemetery, a large live oak festooned with Spanish moss. Underneath it, a tomb had been opened—violently. The iron door was twisted off its hinges. Two headless bodies lay outside, clothed in rotted rags, flung in a ghoulish twisted pile. They were so old and desiccated that they no longer smelled. The heads lay nearby, both turned up, eyeless, toward the sky.

But dead bodies, even headless ones, were not what interested me. Two enormous three-toed stone feet stuck out of the tomb, pointing skyward.

We had found the Enormé.

With Prang at my side, I crept forward and felt the three-toed feet, then the thick short legs, each as smooth as granite, and cold: cold as any stone.

The light inside the tomb was dim. The statue lay on its back between two opened coffins, the source, I was sure, of the bodies outside. The smell was worse for being faint. The big stone eyes were blank, looking straight up.

I touched the Enormé’s wolf-like snout. Stone. Cold dead stone.

“What now?” Prang whispered.

“You have recovered your stolen property,” I said. “Now we call Ward and report it. That makes everything legal.”

“Now do you believe?” Prang asked, as we headed back to the museum, after watching Ward’s minions dust the area for prints, the cemetery groundskeepers refill and close the tomb, and the museum crew load the Enormé onto a flatbed truck.