Every Dead Thing

  In their room, the bickering started again. Stacey Byron, a bottle blonde in her early forties who had kept her figure remarkably well for a woman of her age, had apparently come on to Louis in the course of their interrogation of her. Louis had, in a manner, responded.

  “I was pumping her for information,” he explained, his mouth twitching in amusement as he looked sideways at Angel. Angel was unimpressed.

  “Sure you wanted to pump her, but the only information you were after was her bra size and the dimensions of her ass,” he spat. Louis rolled his eyes in exaggerated bafflement and I thought, for a moment, that Angel was going to strike him. His fists bunched and he moved forward slightly before he managed to restrain himself.

  I felt sorry for Angel. While I didn’t believe there was anything in Louis’s courting of Edward Byron’s wife, beyond the natural response of any individual to the favorable attentions of another and Louis’s belief that, by leading her on, she might give away something about her ex-husband, I knew how much Louis mattered to Angel. Angel’s history was murky, Louis’s more so, but I remembered things about Angel, things that I sometimes felt Louis forgot.

  When Angel was sent down to Rikers Island, he attracted the attentions of a man named William Vance. Vance had killed a Korean shopkeeper in the course of a botched robbery in Brooklyn and that was how he ended up in Rikers, but there were other things suspected of him: that he had raped and killed an elderly woman in Utica, mutilating her before she died; that he may have been linked to a similar killing in Delaware. There was no proof, other than rumor and conjecture, but when the opportunity came to put Vance away for the killing of the Korean, the DA, to his credit, seized it.

  And for some reason, Vance decided that he wanted Angel dead. I heard that Angel had dissed him when Vance had tried to get it on with him, that he had knocked out one of Vance’s teeth in the showers. But there was no telling with a man like Vance: the workings of his mind were obscure and confused by hatred and strange, bitter longing. Now Vance didn’t just want to rape Angel: he wanted to kill him, and kill him slowly. Angel had pulled three to five. After one week in Rikers, the odds of him surviving his first month had plummeted.

  Angel had no friends on the inside and fewer still outside, so he called me. I knew that it pained him to do so. He was proud and I think that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have tried to work out his problems for himself. But William Vance, with his tattoos of bloodied knives on his arms and a spider’s web over his chest, was far from ordinary.

  I did what I could. I pulled Vance’s files and copied the transcripts of his interrogation over the Utica killing and a number of similar incidents. I copied details of the evidence assembled against him and the account of an eyewitness who later retracted after Vance made a call and threatened to fuck her and her children to death if she gave evidence against him. Then I took a trip to Rikers.

  I spoke to Vance through a transparent screen. He had added an india ink tattoo of a tear below his left eye, bringing the total number of tattooed tears to three, each one representing a life taken. A spider’s silhouette was visible at the base of his neck. I spoke to him softly for about ten minutes. I warned him that if anything happened to Angel, anything at all, I would make sure that every con in the place knew that he was only a hair’s breadth away from sexual homicide charges involving old, defenseless women. Vance had five years left to serve before he became eligible for parole. If his fellow inmates found out what he was suspected of doing, there were men who could ensure that he would have to spend those five years in solitary to avoid death. Even then, he would have to check his food every day for powdered glass, would have to pray that a guard’s attention didn’t wander for an instant while he was being escorted to the yard for his hour’s recreation, or while he was being brought to the prison doctor when the stress began to take its toll on his health.

  Vance knew all this and yet, two days after we spoke, he tried to castrate Angel with a shank. Only the force of Angel’s heel connecting with Vance’s knee saved him, although Angel still needed twenty stitches across his stomach and thigh after Vance slashed wildly at him as he fell to the ground.

  Vance was taken in the shower the next morning. Persons unknown held him down, used a wrench to hold his mouth open, and then pumped water mixed with detergent into his body. The poison destroyed his insides, tearing apart his stomach and almost costing him his life. For the remainder of his life in prison he was a shell of a man, racked by pains in his gut that made him howl in the night. It had taken one telephone call. I live with that too.

  After he was released, Angel hooked up with Louis. I’m not even sure how these two solitary creatures met, exactly, but they had now been together for six years. Angel needed Louis, and in his way, Louis needed Angel too, but I sometimes thought that the balance of the relationship hinged on Angel. Men and men, men and women, whatever the permutation, in the end one partner always feels more than the other and that partner usually suffers for it.

  It emerged that they hadn’t learned much from Stacey Byron. The cops had been watching the house from the front but Louis and Angel, dressed in the only suit he owned, had come in from the back. Louis had flashed his fitness club membership and his smile as he told Mrs. Byron that they were just conducting a routine search of her garden and they spent the next hour talking to her about her ex-husband, about how often Louis worked out, and in the end, whether or not he’d ever had a white woman. It was at that point that Angel had really started to get annoyed.

  “She says she hasn’t seen him in four months,” said Louis. “Says that last time she saw him, he didn’t say much, just asked after her and the kids and took some old clothes from the attic. Seems he had a carrier bag from some drugstore in Opelousas and the feds are concentrating their search there.”

  “Does she know why the feds are looking for him?”

  “Nope. They told her that he might be able to assist them with information on some unsolved crimes. She ain’t dumb, though, and I fed her a little more to see if she’d bite. She said that he always had an interest in medical affairs; seems he might have had ambitions to be a doctor at one time, although he didn’t have the education to be a tree surgeon.”

  “Did you ask her if she thought he could kill?”

  “I didn’t have to. Seems he threatened to kill her once, while they were arguing over the terms of the divorce.”

  “Did she remember what he said?”

  Louis nodded deeply, once.

  “Uh-huh. He said he’d tear her fucking face off.”

  Angel and Louis parted on bad terms, with Angel retiring to Rachel’s room while Louis sat on the balcony of their room and took in the sounds and smells of New Orleans, not all of them pleasant.

  “I was thinking of getting a bite to eat,” he said. “You interested?”

  I was surprised. I guessed that he wanted to talk but I had never spent time with Louis without Angel being present as well.

  I checked on Rachel. The bed was empty and I could hear the shower running. I knocked gently on the door.

  “It’s open,” she said.

  When I entered, she had the shower curtain wrapped around her. “Suits you,” I said. “Clear plastic is in this season.”

  The sleep hadn’t done her any good. There were dark rings under her eyes and she still looked shaky. She made a halfhearted effort to smile, but it was more like a grimace of pain than anything else.

  “You want to go out and eat?”

  “I’m not hungry. I’m going to do some work, then take two sleeping pills and try to sleep without dreaming.”

  I told her that Louis and I were heading out, then went to tell Angel. I found him flicking through the notes Rachel had made. He motioned to my chart on the bedroom wall. “Lot of blank spaces on that.”

  “I still have one or two details to work out.”

  “Like who did it and why.” He gave me a twisted grin.

  “Yeah, but I’m trying
not to get too hung up on minor problems. You okay?”

  He nodded. “I think this whole thing is gettin’ to me, all this…” He waved an arm at the illustrations on the wall.

  “Louis and I are heading out to eat. You wanna come?”

  “Nah, I’d only be the lemon. You can have him.”

  “Thanks. I’ll break the bad news of my sexual awakening to the Swimsuit Illustrated models tomorrow. They’ll be heartbroken. Look after Rachel, will you? This hasn’t been one of her better days.”

  “I’ll be right along the hall.”

  Louis and I sat in Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. There weren’t too many tourists there; they tended to gravitate toward the Acme Oyster House across the street, where they served red beans and savory rice in a hollowed-out boat of French bread, or a classier French Quarter joint like Nola. Felix’s was plainer. Tourists don’t care much for plain. After all, they can get plain at home.

  Louis ordered an oyster po’boy and doused it in hot sauce, sipping an Abita beer between bites. I had fries and a chicken po’boy, washed down with mineral water.

  “Waiter thinks you’re a sissy,” commented Louis as I sipped my water. “The ballet was in town, he’d hit on you for tickets.”

  “Shows what he knows,” I replied. “You’re confusing things by not conforming to the stereotype. Maybe you should mince more.”

  His mouth twitched and he raised his hand for another Abita. It came quickly. The waiter performed the neat trick of making sure we weren’t left waiting for anything while trying to spend as little time as possible in the vicinity of our table. Other diners chose to take the scenic route to their tables rather than pass too close to us and those forced to sit near us seemed to eat at a slightly faster pace than the rest. Louis had that effect on people. It was as if there was a shell of potential violence around him, and something more: the sense that, if that violence erupted, it would not be the first time that it had done so.

  “Your friend Woolrich,” he said as he drained the Abita halfway with one mouthful. “You trust him?”

  “I don’t know. He has his own agenda.”

  “He’s a fed. They only got their own agendas.” He eyed me over the top of the bottle. “I think, if you were climbing a rock with your friend and you slipped, found yourself dangling on the end of the rope with him at the other end, he’d cut the rope.”

  “You’re a cynic.”

  His mouth twitched again. “If the dead could speak, they’d call all cynics realists.”

  “If the dead could speak, they’d tell us to have more sex while we can.” I picked at my fries. “The feds have anything on you?”

  “Suspicions, maybe; nothing more. That’s not really what I’m getting at.”

  His eyes were unblinking and there was no warmth in them now. I think that, if he had believed Woolrich was close to him, he would have killed him and it would not have cost him another thought afterward.

  “Why is Woolrich helping us?” he asked, eventually.

  “I’ve thought about that too,” I said. “I’m not sure. Part of it could be that he empathizes with the need to stay in touch with what’s going on. If he feeds me information, then he can control the extent of my involvement.”

  But I knew that wasn’t all. Louis was right. Woolrich had his own agenda. He had depths to him that I only occasionally glimpsed, as when the different shifting colors on the surface of the sea hint at the sharp declivities and deep spaces that lie beneath. He was a hard man to be with in some ways: he conducted his friendship with me on his own terms, and in the time I had known him, months had gone by without any contact from him. He made up for this with a strange loyalty, a sense that, even when he was absent from their lives, he never forgot those closest to him.

  But as a fed, Woolrich played hardball. He had progressed to assistant SAC by making collars, by attaching his name to high-profile operations, and by fixing other agents’ wagons when they got in his way. He was intensely ambitious and maybe he saw the Traveling Man as a way of reaching greater heights: SAC, assistant director, a deputy directorship, maybe even to eventually becoming the first agent to be appointed directly to the post of director. The pressure on him was intense, but if Woolrich were to be responsible for bringing an end to the Traveling Man, he would be assured a bright, powerful future within the Bureau.

  I had a part to play in this, and Woolrich knew it and felt it strongly enough that he would use whatever friendship existed between us to bring about an end to what was taking place. “I think he’s using me as bait,” I said at last. “And he’s holding the line.”

  “How much you think he’s holding back?” Louis finished his beer and smacked his lips appreciatively.

  “He’s like an iceberg,” I replied. “We’re only seeing the ten percent above the surface. Whatever the feds know, they’re not sharing it with the local cops and Woolrich sure isn’t sharing it with us. There’s something more going on here, and only Woolrich and maybe a handful of feds are privy to it. You play chess?”

  “In my way,” he replied dryly. Somehow, I couldn’t see that way including a standard board.

  “This whole thing is like a chess game,” I continued. “Except we only get to see the other player’s move when one of our pieces is taken. The rest of the time, it’s like playing in the dark.”

  Louis raised a finger for the check. The waiter looked relieved.

  “And our Mr. Byron?”

  I shrugged. I felt strangely distant from what was happening. Part of it was because we were players on the periphery of the investigation, but part of it was also because I needed that distance to think. In one way, what had taken place with Rachel that afternoon, and what it meant to my feelings of grief and loss about Susan, had given me some of that distance.

  “I don’t know.” We were only beginning to construct a picture of Byron, like a figure at the center of a jigsaw puzzle around which other pieces might interlock. “We’ll work our way toward him. First, I want to find out what Remarr saw the night Tante Marie and Tee Jean were killed. And I want to know why David Fontenot was out at Honey Island alone.”

  It was clear now that Lionel Fontenot would move against Joe Bones. Joe Bones knew that too, which was why he had risked an assault at Metairie. Once Lionel was back in his compound, he would be out of the reach of Joe Bones’s men. The next move was Lionel’s.

  The check arrived. I paid and Louis left a deliberately overgenerous twenty-dollar tip. The waiter looked at the bill like Andrew Jackson was going to bite his finger when he tried to lift it.

  “I think we’re going to have to talk to Lionel Fontenot,” I said as we left. “And Joe Bones.”

  Louis actually smiled. “Joe ain’t gonna be too keen on talking to you, seeing as how his boy tried to put you in the ground.”

  “I kinda figured that,” I replied. “Could be that Lionel Fontenot might help us out there.”

  We walked back to the Flaisance. The streets of New Orleans aren’t the safest in the world but I didn’t think that anyone would bother us.

  I was right.

  42

  I SLEPT LATE the next morning. Rachel had returned to her own room to sleep. When I knocked, her voice sounded harsh with tiredness. She told me she wanted to stay in bed for a while, and when she felt better, she would go out to Loyola again. I asked Angel and Louis to watch out for her, then drove from the Flaisance.

  The incident at Metairie had left me shaken, and the prospect of facing Joe Bones again was unappealing. I also felt a crushing sense of guilt for what had happened to Rachel, for what I had drawn her into and for what I had forced her to do. I needed to get out of New Orleans, at least for a short time. I wanted to clear my head, to try to see things from a different angle. I ate a bowl of chicken soup in the Gumbo Shop on St. Peter and then headed out of the city.

  Morphy lived about four miles from Cecilia, a few miles northwest of Lafayette. He had bought and wa
s refurbishing a raised plantation home by a small river, a budget version of the classic old Louisiana houses that had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, a blend of French Colonial, West Indian, and European architectural influences.

  The house presented a strange spectacle. Its main living quarters were on top of an aboveground basement area, which had once been used for storage and as protection from flooding. This section of the house was brick and Morphy had reworked the arched openings with what looked like hand-carved frames. The living quarters above, which would usually have been weatherboard or plaster-covered, had been replaced with timber slats. A double-pitched roof, which had been partially reslated, extended over the gallery.

  I had called ahead and told Angie I was on my way. Morphy had just got home when I arrived. I found him in the yard at the rear of the house, benching two hundred in the evening air.

  “What do you think of the house?” he asked as I approached, not even pausing in his reps as he spoke.

  “It’s great. Looks like you still have some way to go before it’s finished.”

  He grunted with the effort of the final rep as I acted as spotter, slotting the bar back onto its rest. He stood up and stretched, then looked at the back of his house with barely concealed admiration.

  “It was built by a Frenchman in eighteen eighty-eight,” he said. “He knew what he was doing. It’s built on an east-west axis, with principal exposure to the south.” He pointed out the lines of the building as he spoke. “He designed it the way the Europeans designed their houses, so that the low angle of the sun in winter would heat the building. Then, in the summer, the sun would only shine on it in the morning and evening. Most American houses aren’t built that way, they just put ’em up whatever way suits ’em, throw a stick in the air and see where it lands. We were spoiled by cheap energy. Then the Arabs came along and hiked up their prices and people had to start thinking again about the layout of their houses.”