John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

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.”