“How you doing?” I asked eventually.
He puffed his cheeks and breathed out, his head moving slightly from side to side like a nodding-dog figure on the backseat of a car. Gray was seeping through his hair from silver pools over his ears. There were lines like the cracks in fine china spreading from his eyes and the corners of his mouth.
“Not so good,” he said. “I got three hours’ sleep, if you can call waking up every twenty minutes to flashes of red ‘sleep.’ I keep thinking of Florence and the gun and the way it looked as it slid into her mouth.”
“Were you still seeing her?”
“Not so much. On and off. We got together a coupla times and I was out at the house a few days back to see if everything was okay. Jesus, what a mess.”
He pulled the newspaper toward him and scanned its coverage of the killings, his finger moving along the sides of each paragraph so that it became dark with print. When he had finished reading, he looked at his blackened fingertip, rubbed his thumb lightly across it, then wiped them both on a paper napkin.
“We got a fingerprint, a partial print,” he said, as if the sight of his own lines and whorls had only just reminded him of it.
Outside, the tourists and the noise seemed to recede into the distance and there was only Woolrich and his soft eyes. He drained the last of his coffee then dabbed at his mouth with the napkin.
“That’s why I was delayed. Confirmed it just an hour ago. We’ve compared it against Florence’s prints, but it’s not her. There are traces of the old woman’s blood in it.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Underside of the bed. He may have tried to steady himself as he cut, or maybe he slipped. Doesn’t look like there was an attempt to erase it. We’re comparing it against local files and our master fingerprint identification records. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him.” As well as criminals, the files covered federal employees, aliens, military personnel, and those individuals who had requested that their prints be retained for identification purposes. Over the next twenty-four hours, the print found at the scene would be checked against about two hundred million others on record.
If it turned out to be the Traveling Man’s print, then it would be the first real break since the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, but I wasn’t holding my breath. A man who took the time to clean my wife’s fingernails after he killed her was unlikely to be so careless as to leave his own fingerprint at a crime scene. I looked at Woolrich and knew he thought the same thing. He raised his hand for more coffee as he looked out at the crowds on Jackson Square and listened to the snorting of the ponies hitched to the touring carriages pulled up on Decatur.
“Florence’d been shopping in Baton Rouge earlier in the day, then returned home to change for some birthday party, one of her second cousins. She called you from some juke joint in Breaux Bridge, then went back to the house. She stayed there until maybe eight-thirty, then went to a cousin’s birthday party at Breaux Bridge at about nine. According to witness statements taken by the local cops, she was distracted and didn’t stay for long—seems that her momma insisted that she go, that Tee Jean could take care of her. She stayed one hour, maybe ninety minutes, then came back. Brennan, the bait shop owner, spotted her maybe thirty minutes after that. So we’re looking at a window of one to two hours, no more, for the killings.”
“Who’s dealing with the case?”
“Morphy’s bunch, in theory. In practice, a lot of it is likely to devolve mainly to us, since it matches the MO on Susan and Jennifer, and because I want it. Brillaud is going to hook up your phone, in case our man calls. It’ll mean hanging around your hotel room for a while, but I don’t see what else we can do.” He avoided my eyes.
“You’re cutting me out.”
“You can’t be too involved in this, Bird. You know that. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again: we’ll decide the extent of your involvement.”
“Limited.”
“Damn yes, limited. Look, Bird, you’re the link to this guy. He’s called once, he will call again. We wait, we see.” He spread his hands wide.
“She was killed because of the girl. Are you going to look for the girl?”
Woolrich rolled his eyes in frustration. “Look where, Bird? The whole fucking bayou? We don’t even know that she existed. We have a print, we’ll run with that and see where it takes us. Now pay the check and let’s get out of here. We’ve got things to do.”
I was staying in a restored Greek Revival house, the Flaisance House, on Esplanade, a white mansion filled with dead men’s furniture. I had opted for a room in the converted carriage house at the rear, partly for the seclusion but also because it contained a natural alarm in the form of two large dogs who prowled the courtyard beneath and growled at anyone who wasn’t a guest, according to the guy manning the night desk. In fact, the dogs just seemed to sleep a lot in the shade of an old fountain. My large room had a balcony, a brass ceiling fan, two heavy leather armchairs, and a small refrigerator, which I filled with bottled water.
When we reached the Flaisance, Woolrich turned on an early morning game show and we waited, unspeaking, for Brillaud to arrive. He knocked on the door about twenty minutes later, long enough for a woman from Tulsa to win a trip to Maui. Brillaud was a small, neatly dressed man with receding hair, through which he ran his fingers every few minutes as if to reassure himself that there was still some there. Behind him, two men in shirtsleeves awkwardly carried an array of monitoring equipment on a metal trolley, carefully negotiating the wooden external stairway that led up to the four carriage house rooms.
“Get cooking, Brillaud,” said Woolrich. “I hope you brought something to read.” One of the men in shirtsleeves waved a sheaf of magazines and some battered paperbacks that he had removed from the base of the trolley.
“Where will you be if we need you?” asked Brillaud.
“The usual place,” said Woolrich. “Around.” And then he was gone.
I had once visited, through Woolrich, an anonymous room in the FBI’s New York office. This was the tech room, where the squads engaged in long-term investigations—organized crime, foreign counterintelligence—monitored their wiretaps. Six agents sat before a row of reel-to-reel voice-activated tape recorders, logging the calls whenever the recorders kicked in, carefully noting the time, the date, the subject of the conversation. The room was almost silent, save for the click and whir of the machines and the sound of pens scratching on paper.
The feds do love their wiretaps. Back in 1928, when the FBI was called the Bureau of Investigation, the Supreme Court allowed almost unrestricted access to wiretaps of targets. In 1940, when the attorney general, Andrew Jackson, tried to end wiretapping, Roosevelt twisted his arm and extended taps to cover “subversive activities.” Under Hoover’s interpretation, “subversive activities” covered anything from running a Chinese laundry to screwing someone else’s wife. Hoover was the god of wiretaps.
Now the feds no longer have to squat by junction boxes in the rain trying to protect their notebooks from the elements. Judicial approval, followed by a call to the telephone company in order to have the signal diverted, is usually enough. It’s even easier when the subject is willing to cooperate. In my case, Brillaud and his men didn’t even have to sit in a surveillance van, smelling one another’s sweat.
I excused myself for five minutes while Brillaud worked to hook up both my own cell phone and the room phone, telling him that I was just heading for the kitchen of the main house. I left the Flaisance and strolled through the courtyard, attracting a bored glance from one of the dogs huddled in the shadows. I walked down to a telephone by a grocery store one block away. From there, I called Angel’s number. The machine was on. I left a message telling him the situation and advising him not to call me on the cell phone.
Technically, the feds are supposed to engage in minimization on wiretapping or surveillance duties. In theory, this means that the agents hit the pause button on the recorder and tune
out of the conversation, apart from occasional checks, if it becomes apparent that it’s a private call unconnected with the business at hand. In practice, only a moron would assume that his private business would remain private on a tapped line and it seemed unwise for me to have conversations with a burglar and an assassin while the FBI was listening. When I had left the message, I picked up four coffees in the grocery store, reentered the Flaisance, and went up to my room, where an anxious-looking Brillaud was waiting by the door.
“We can order coffee up, Mr. Parker,” he said disapprovingly.
“It never tastes the same,” I replied.
“Get used to it,” he concluded, closing the door behind me.
The first call came at 4 P.M., after hours of watching bad TV and reading the problem pages in back issues of Cosmo. Brillaud rose quickly from the bed and clicked his fingers at the technicians, one of whom was already tugging at his headphones. He counted down from three with his fingers and then signaled me to pick up the cell phone.
“Charlie Parker?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Yes?”
“It’s Rachel Wolfe.”
I looked up at the FBI men and shook my head. There was the sound of breath being released. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Hey, minimization, remember?” There was a click as the recorder was turned off. Brillaud went back to lying on my clean sheets, his fingers laced behind his head and his eyes closed.
Rachel seemed to sense that there was something happening at the other end of the line.
“Can you talk?”
“I have company. Can I call you back?”
She gave me her home number and told me she planned to be out until 7:30 P.M. I could call her then. I thanked her and hung up.
“Lady friend?” asked Brillaud.
“My doctor,” I replied. “I have a low tolerance syndrome. She hopes that within a few years I’ll be able to cope with idle curiosity.”
Brillaud sniffed noisily but his eyes stayed closed.
The second call came at six. The humidity and the sound of the tourists had forced us to close the balcony window, and the air was sour with male scent. This time, there was no doubt about the caller.
“Welcome to New Orleans, Bird,” said the synthesized voice, in deep tones that seemed to shift and shimmer like mist.
I paused for a moment and nodded at the FBI men. Brillaud was already paging Woolrich. On a computer screen by the balcony, I could see maps shifting and I could hear the Traveling Man’s voice coming thinly through the headphones of the FBI men.
“No point in welcoming your FBI friends,” said the voice, this time in the high, lilting cadences of a young girl’s voice. “Is Agent Woolrich with you?”
I paused again before responding, conscious of the seconds ticking by and the “number withheld” message on the cell phone display.
“Don’t fuck with me, Bird!” Still the child’s voice, but this time in the petulant tones of one who has been told that she can’t go out and play with her friends, the swearing rendering the effect even more obscene than it already was.
“No, he’s not here.”
“Thirty minutes.” Then the connection ended.
Brillaud shrugged. “He knows. He won’t stay on long enough to get a fix.” He lay back down on the bed to wait for Woolrich.
Woolrich looked exhausted. His eyes were red rimmed from lack of sleep and his breath smelled foul. He shifted his feet constantly, as if they were too big for his shoes. Five minutes after he arrived, the phone rang again. Brillaud counted down and I picked up the phone.
“Yes.”
“Don’t interrupt, just listen.” It sounded like a woman’s voice, the voice of someone who was about to tell her lover one of her secret fantasies, but distorted, inhuman. “I’m sorry about Agent Woolrich’s lover, but only because I missed her. She was supposed to be there. I had something special planned for her, but I suppose she had ideas of her own.”
Woolrich blinked hard once, but gave no other indication that he was disturbed by what he heard.
“I hope you liked my presentation,” continued the voice. “Maybe you’re even beginning to understand. If you’re not, don’t worry. There’s plenty more to come. Poor Bird. Poor Woolrich. United in grief. I’ll try to find you some company.”
Then the voice changed again. This time it was deep and menacing.
“I won’t be calling again. It’s rude to listen in on private conversations. The next message you get from me will have blood on it.” The call ended.
“Fuck,” said Woolrich. “Tell me you got something.”
“We got nothing,” said Brillaud, tossing his headphones on the bed. “Number keeps changing. He knows.”
I left the FBI men to pack away their equipment in a white Ford van and walked down through the Quarter to the Napoleon House to call Rachel Wolfe. I didn’t want to use the cellular. For some reason, it seemed soiled by its role as the means of contact with a killer. I also wanted the exercise, after being cooped up in my room for so long.
She picked up on the third ring.
“It’s Charlie Parker.”
“Hi…” She seemed to struggle for a time as she tried to decide what to call me.
“You can call me Bird.”
“Well spotted.”
There was an awkward pause, then: “Where are you? It sounds incredibly noisy.”
“It is. It’s New Orleans.” And then I filled her in as best I could on what had taken place. She listened in silence, and once or twice, I heard a pen tapping rhythmically against the phone at the other end of the line.
“Any of those details mean anything to you?” I asked, when I had finished.
“I’m not sure. I seem to recall something from my time as a student but it’s buried so far back that I’m not sure that I can find it. I think I may have something for you arising out of your previous conversation with this man. It’s a little obscure, though.” She was silent for a moment. “Where are you staying?”
I gave her the number of the Flaisance. She repeated the name and the number to herself as she wrote them down.
“Are you going to call me back?”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to make a reservation. I’m coming down.”
I looked around the Napoleon after I hung up. It was packed with locals and vaguely bohemian looking visitors, some of them tourists staying in the rooms above the dimly lit bar. A classical piece I couldn’t identify was playing over the speakers and smoke hung thick in the air.
Something about the Traveling Man’s calls bothered me, although I wasn’t sure what. He knew I was in New Orleans when he made his calls. He knew where I was staying, too, since he was aware of the presence of the feds, and that awareness meant that he was familiar with police procedures and was monitoring the investigation, which matched Rachel’s profile.
He had to have been watching the crime scene as we arrived, or shortly after. His reluctance to stay on the line was understandable, given the feds’ surveillance, but that second call…I played it back in my mind, trying to discern the source of my unease, but it yielded nothing.
I was tempted to stay in the Napoleon House, to breathe in the sense of life and gaiety in the old bar, but instead I returned to the Flaisance. Despite the heat I walked to the large windows, opened them, and stepped out onto the balcony. I looked out at the faded buildings and wrought iron balconies of the upper Quarter and breathed deeply of the smells of cooking coming from a restaurant nearby, mingled with smoke and exhaust fumes. I listened to the strains of jazz music coming from a bar on Governor Nicholls, the shouts and laughter of those heading for the rip-off joints on Bourbon Street, the singsong accents of the locals blending with the voices of the out-of-towners, the sound of human life passing beneath my window.
And I thought of Rachel Wolfe, and the way her hair rested on her shoulders, and the sprinkling of freckles across her white neck.
33
T HAT NIGHT, I d
reamed of an amphitheater, with rising aisles filled with old men. Its walls were hung with damask, and two high torches illuminated its central rectangular table, with its curved edges and legs carved like bones. Florence Aguillard lay on the table, the exterior of her womb exposed while a bearded man in dark robes tore at it with an ivory-handled scalpel. Around her neck and behind her ears was the mark of a rope burn. Her head lay at an impossible angle on the tabletop.
When the surgeon cut her, eels slithered from her uterus and tumbled to the floor and the dead woman opened her eyes and tried to cry out. The surgeon stifled her mouth with a burlap sack, then continued to cut until the light went from her eyes.
Figures watched from a twilight corner of the amphitheater. They came to me from the shadows, my wife and child, but now they were joined by a third, one who stayed farther back in the dimness, one who was barely a silhouette. She came from a cold, wet place and brought with her a dense, loamy smell of rotting vegetation, of flesh bloated and disfigured by gas and decay. The place where she lay was small and cramped, its sides unyielding, and sometimes the fish bumped against it as she waited. I seemed to smell her in my nostrils when I woke and could still hear her voice…
help me
as the blood rushed in my ears
I’m cold, help me
and I knew that I had to find her.
I was awakened by the sound of the telephone in my room. Dim light lanced through the curtains and my watch glowed the time at 8:35 A.M. I picked up the phone.