“Parker? It’s Morphy. Get your ass in gear. I’ll see you at La Marquise in an hour.”
I showered, dressed, and walked down to Jackson Square, following the early morning worshipers into St. Louis Cathedral. Outside the cathedral, a huckster tried to attract worshipers to his fire-eating act while a group of black nuns crowded beneath a yellow-and-green parasol.
Susan and I had attended mass here once, beneath the cathedral’s ornately decorated ceiling depicting Christ among the shepherds and, above the small sanctuary, the figure of the Crusader king Louis IX, Roi De France, announcing the Seventh Crusade.
The cathedral had effectively been rebuilt twice since the original wooden structure, designed in 1724, burned down during the Good Friday fire of 1788, when over eight hundred buildings went up in flames. The present cathedral was less than one hundred and fifty years old, its stained-glass windows, overlooking the Place Jean-Paul Deux, a gift from the Spanish government.
It was strange that I should have remembered the details so clearly after so many years. Yet I remembered them less for their own intrinsic interest than for their connections to Susan. I remembered them because she had been with me when I learned them, her hand clasped in mine, her hair pulled back and tied with an aquamarine bow.
For a brief moment it seemed that, by standing in the same place and remembering the same words spoken, I could reach back to that time and feel her close beside me, her hand in my hand, her taste still on my lips, her scent on my neck. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine her sauntering down the aisle, her hand in mine, breathing in the mingled smells of incense and flowers, passing beneath the windows, moving from darkness to light, light to darkness.
I knelt at the back of the cathedral, by the statue of a cherub with a font in its hands and its feet upon a vision of evil, and I prayed for my wife and child.
Morphy was already at La Marquise, a French-style patisserie on Chartres. He was sitting in the rear courtyard, his head freshly shaved. He wore a pair of gray sweatpants, Nike sneakers, and a Timberland fleece top. A plate of croissants and two cups of coffee stood on the table before him. He was carefully applying grape jelly to one half of a croissant as I sat down across from him.
“I ordered coffee for you. Take a croissant.”
“Coffee’s fine, thanks. Day off?”
“Nah, just avoided the dawn patrol.” He took the half croissant and stuffed it into his mouth, using his finger to cram in the last part. He smiled, his cheeks bulging. “My wife won’t let me do this at home. Says it reminds her of a kid hogging food at a birthday party.”
He swallowed and set to work on the remaining half of the croissant. “St. Martin’s been frozen out of the picture, ’part from running around looking under rocks for bloody clothes,” he said. “Woolrich and his boys have pretty much taken over the investigation. We don’t have a helluva lot to do with it anymore, legwork excepted.”
I knew what Woolrich would be doing. The killings of Tante Marie and Tee Jean now confirmed the existence of a serial killer. The details would be passed on to the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, the hard-pressed section responsible for advising on interrogation techniques and hostage negotiation, as well as dealing with VICAP, ABIS—the arson and bombing program—and, crucially for this case, criminal profiling. Of the thirty-six agents in the unit, only ten worked on profiling, buried in a warren of offices sixty feet below ground in what used to be the FBI director’s fallout shelter at Quantico.
And while the feds sifted through the evidence, trying to build up their picture of the Traveling Man, the police on the ground continued to search for physical traces of the killer in the area around Tante Marie’s house. I could picture them already, the lines of cops moving through the under-growth, warm green light shedding down upon them from the trees above. Their feet would be catching in the mud, their uniforms snagging on briars, as they searched the ground before them. Others would be working through the green waters of Atchafalaya, swatting at no-see-ums and sweating heavily through their shirts.
There had been a lot of blood at the Aguillard house. The Traveling Man must have been awash with it by the time his work was done. He must have worn overalls, and it would be too risky for him to hold on to them. They had either been dumped in the swamp, or buried, or destroyed. My guess was that he had destroyed them, but the search had to go on.
“I don’t have a helluva lot to do with it anymore, either,” I said.
“I hear that.” He ate some more croissant and finished off his coffee. “You finished, we’ll get going.” He left some money on the table and I followed him outside. The same battered Buick that had followed us to Tante Marie’s was parked half a block away, a hand-lettered cop-on-duty sign taped to the dashboard with duct tape. A parking ticket flapped beneath the wiper.
“Shit,” said Morphy, tossing the ticket in a trash can. “Nobody got respect for the law no more.”
We drove to the Desire projects, a harsh urban landscape where young blacks lounged by rubbish-strewn lots or shot hoops desultorily in wire-rimmed courts. The two-story blocks were like barracks, lining streets with bad-joke names like Piety, Abundance, and Humanity. We pulled in near a liquor store, which was barricaded like a fortress, causing young men to skip away from us at the smell of cop. Even here, Morphy’s trademark bald head appeared to be instantly recognizable.
“You know much about New Orleans?” said Morphy after a time.
“Nope,” I replied. Beneath his fleece top, I could see the trademark bulge of his gun. The palms of his hands were callused from gripping dumbbells and barbells, and even his fingers were thickly muscled. When he moved his head, muscles and tendons stood out on his neck like snakes moving beneath his skin.
Unlike most bodybuilders, there was an air of suppressed danger about Morphy, a sense that the muscle wasn’t just for show. I knew that he had killed a man once in a bar in Monroe, a pimp who had shot up one of his girls and the john she was with in a hotel room in Lafayette. The pimp, a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Creole who called himself Le Mort Rouge, had stabbed Morphy in the chest with a broken bottle and then tried to choke him on the ground. Morphy, after trying punches to the face and body, had eventually settled for a grip on Le Mort’s neck, and the two men had remained like that, locked in each other’s grip, until something burst in Le Mort’s head and he fell sideways against the bar. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.
It had been a fair fight, but sitting beside Morphy in the car, I wondered about Luther Bordelon. He had been a thug, that much was certain. He had a string of assaults stretching back to his years as a juvenile and he was suspected of the rape of a young Australian tourist. The girl had failed to identify Bordelon in a lineup and no physical evidence of the rapist had been left on the girl’s body because her assailant had used a condom and then made her wash her pubic region with a bottle of mineral water, but the NOPD cops knew it was Bordelon. Sometimes, that’s just the way things are.
On the night he died, Bordelon had been drinking in an Irish bar in the Quarter. He was wearing a white T-shirt and white Nike shorts, and three customers in the bar, with whom he had been playing pool, later swore statements that Bordelon had not been armed. Yet Morphy and his partner, Ray Garza, reported that Bordelon had fired on them when they attempted to routinely question him and that he had been killed in their return of fire. A gun, an old S&W Model 60 that was at least twenty years old, was found by his side with two shots fired. The serial number of the gun had been filed away from the frame under the cylinder crane, making the gun difficult to identify, and Ballistics reported that it was clean and had not been previously used in the commission of a crime in the city of New Orleans.
The gun looked like a throwdown and the NOPD’s Police Integrity Division clearly felt that was the case, but Garza and Morphy stuck by their story. One year later Garza was dead, stabbed to death while trying to break up a brawl in the Irish Channel, and Morphy had transferred to St. Martin, w
here he had bought a house. That was it. That was how it ended.
Morphy gestured toward a group of young blacks, the asses of their jeans around their knees and oversized trainers slapping the sidewalk as they walked. They returned our gaze unflinchingly, as if daring us to make a move on them. From a boom box they carried came the sound of the Wu-Tang Clan, music to kick start the revolution. I felt a kind of perverse pleasure from recognizing the music. Charlie Parker, honorary homeboy.
Morphy grimaced. “That is the worst goddamn racket I ever heard. Shit, these people invented the blues. Robert Johnson heard that crap, he’d know for sure that he’d sold his soul to the devil and gone straight to hell.” He turned on his car radio and flicked through the channels with an unhappy look. Resignedly, he pushed in a tape and the warm sound of Little Willie John filled the car.
“I grew up in Metairie, before the projects really took hold in this city,” he began. “I can’t say any of my best friends were black or nothing—most of the blacks went to public schools, I didn’t—but we got along together.
“But when the projects went up, that was the end. Desire, Iberville, Lafitte, those were places you didn’t want to end up, ’less you were armed to the teeth. Then fucking Reagan came along and the place got worse. You know, they say there’s more syphilis now than there was fifty years ago. Most of these kids ain’t even been immunized against measles. If ya have a house in the inner city, might as well abandon it and let it rot. It ain’t worth shit.” He shook his head and slapped the steering wheel.
“When you got that kind of poverty, a man can make a lot of money from it if he puts his mind to it. Lot of people fighting for a slice of the projects, fighting for a slice of other things too: land, property, booze, gambling.”
“Like who?”
“Like Joe Bonanno. His crew’s been running things down here for the past decade or so, controlling the supply of crack, smack, whatever. They been trying to expand into other areas too. There’s talk that they want to open a big leisure center between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, maybe build a hotel. Maybe they just want to dump some bricks and mortar there and write it off as a tax loss, launder money through it.”
He cast an appraising eye around the projects. “And this is where Joe Bones grew up.” He said this with a sigh, as if he could not understand how a man would set out to undermine the place in which he had grown and matured. He started the car again, and as he drove, he told me about Joe Bones.
Salvatore Bonanno, Joe’s father, had owned a bar in the Irish Channel, standing up against the local gangs who didn’t believe that an Italian had any place in an area where people named their children after Irish saints and an “oul sod” mentality still prevailed. There was nothing particularly honorable about Sal’s stance; it was simply born out of pragmatism. There was a lot of money to be made in Chep Morrison’s postwar New Orleans, if a man was prepared to take the knocks and grease the right palms.
Sal’s bar was to be the first in a string of bars and clubs that he acquired. He had loans to pay off, and the income from a single bar in the Irish Channel wasn’t going to satisfy his creditors. He saved and bought a second bar, this time in Chartres, and from there his little empire grew. In some cases, only a simple financial transaction was required to obtain the premises he wanted. In others, some more forceful encouragement had to be used. When that didn’t work, the Atchafalaya Basin had enough water to hide a multitude of sins. Gradually, he built up his own crew to take care of business, to make sure the city authorities, the police, the mayor’s office were all kept happy, and to deal with the consequences when those lower down the food chain tried to better themselves at Sal’s expense.
Sal Bonanno married Maria Cuffaro, a native of Gretna, east of New Orleans, whose brother was one of Sal’s right-hand men. She bore him one daughter, who died of TB at the age of seven, and a son, who died in Vietnam. She died herself in ’58, of breast cancer.
But Sal’s real weakness was a woman named Rochelle Hines. Rochelle was what they called a high yellow woman, a Negress whose skin was almost white following generations of interbreeding. She had, as Morphy put it, a complexion like butter oil, although her birth certificate bore the words “black, illegitimate.” She was tall, with long dark hair framing almond eyes and lips that were soft and wide and welcoming. She had a figure that would stop a clock and there were rumors that she might once have been a prostitute, although, if that was the case, Sal Bonanno quickly put an end to those activities.
Bonanno bought her a place in the Garden District and began introducing her as his wife after Maria died. It probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. In the Louisiana of the late 1950s, racial segregation was a day-to-day reality. Even Louis Armstrong, who grew up in the city, could not perform with white musicians in New Orleans because the state of Louisiana prohibited racially integrated bands from playing in the city.
And so, while white men could keep black mistresses and consort with black prostitutes, a man who introduced a black woman, no matter how pale her skin, as his wife was just asking for trouble. When she gave birth to a son, Sal insisted that he bear his name and he took the child and his mother to band recitals in Jackson Square, pushing the huge white baby carriage across the grass and gurgling at his son.
Maybe Sal thought that his money would protect him; maybe he just didn’t care. He made sure that Rochelle was always protected, that she didn’t walk out alone, so that no one could come at her. But in the end, they didn’t come at Rochelle.
One hot July night in 1964, when his son was five years old, Sal Bonanno disappeared. He was found three days later, tied to a tree by the shore of Lake Cataouatche, his head almost severed from his body. It seems likely that someone decided to use his relationship with Rochelle Hines as an excuse to move in on his operation. Ownership of his clubs and bars was transferred to a business consortium with interests in Reno and Vegas.
As soon as her “husband” was found, Rochelle Hines vanished with her son and a small quantity of jewelry and cash before anyone could come after them. She resurfaced one year later in the area that would come to be called Desire, where a half sister rented a property. The death of Sal had destroyed her: she was an alcoholic and had become addicted to morphine.
It was here, among the rising projects, that Joe Bones grew up, paler yet than his mother, and made his stand against both blacks and whites since neither group would accept him as its own. There was a rage inside Joe Bones and he turned it on the world around him. By 1990, ten years after his mother’s death in a filthy cot in the projects, Joe Bones owned more bars than his father had thirty years before, and each month, planeloads of cocaine flew in from Mexico, bound for the streets of New Orleans and points north, east, and west.
“Now Joe Bones calls himself a white man, and don’t nobody differ with him,” said Morphy. “Anyway, how’s a man gonna talk with his balls in his mouth? Joe got no time for the brothers now.” He laughed quietly. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than a man who can’t get on with his in-laws.”
We stopped at a gas station and Morphy filled the tank, then came back with two sodas. We sipped them by the pumps, watching the cars go by.
“Now there’s another crew, the Fontenots, and they got their eyes on the projects too. Two brothers, David and Lionel. Family was out of Lafayette originally, I think—still got ties there—but came to New Orleans in the twenties. The Fontenots are ambitious, violent, and they think maybe Bonanno’s time has come. All of this has been coming to a head for about a year now, and maybe the Fontenots have a piece of work planned for Joe Bones.”
The Fontenots were not young men—they were both in their forties—but they had gradually established themselves in Louisiana and now operated out of a compound in Delacroix guarded by wire and dogs and armed men, including a hardcore of Cajuns from back in Acadiana. They were into gambling, prostitution, some drugs. They owned bars in Baton Rouge, one or two others in Lafayette. If they could take out Joe Bones, it was likel
y that they would muscle in on the drugs market in a big way.
“You know anything about the Cajuns?” asked Morphy.
“No, not beyond their music.”
“They’re a persecuted minority in this state and in Texas. During the oil boom, they couldn’t get any work because the Texans refused to employ coon asses. Most of them did what we all do when times are tough: they knuckled down and made the best of things. There were clashes with the blacks, because the blacks and the Cajuns were competing for the same few jobs, and some bad things went down, but most people just did what they could to keep body and soul together without breaking too many laws.
“Roland Fontenot—that’s the grandfather—he left all that behind when he came to New Orleans, following some other obscure branch of the family. But the boys, they never forgot their roots. When things were bad in the seventies, they gathered a pretty disaffected bunch around them—a lot of young Cajuns, some blacks—and somehow kept the mixture from blowing up in their faces.” Morphy drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “Sometimes I think maybe we’re all responsible for the Fontenots. They’re a visitation on us, because of the way their people were treated. I think maybe Joe Bones is a visitation too, a reminder of what happens when you grind a section of the population into the dirt.”
Joe Bones had a vicious streak, said Morphy. He once killed a man by slowly burning him with acid over the space of an afternoon and was thought by some to be missing part of his brain, the part that controlled unreasonable actions in most men. The Fontenots were different. They killed, but they killed like businessmen closing down an unprofitable or unsatisfactory operation. They killed joylessly, but professionally. In Morphy’s view, the Fontenots and Joe Bones were all bad. They just had different ways of expressing it.
I finished my soda and trashed the can. Morphy wasn’t the type to spin a yarn for its own sake. All of this was leading up to something.