John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

He ordered an Abita for himself and another mineral water for me.

“You want to tell me why you seized materials from the hotel?”

“Don’t look on it as a seizure, Bird. Consider it as borrowing.” He sipped at his beer and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

“You could just have asked,” I said.

“Would you have given it to me?”

“No, but I’d have discussed what was there.”

“I don’t think that Durand would have been too impressed with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been too impressed either.”

“Durand called it? Why? You have your own profilers, your own agents on it. Why were you so sure that we could add something?”

He spun around on his stool and leaned close to me, close enough that I could smell his breath. “Bird, I know you want this guy. I know you want him for what he did to Susan and Jennifer, to the old woman and her son, to Florence, to Lutice Fontenot, maybe even to that fuck Remarr. I’ve tried to keep you in touch with what’s been going down and you’ve walked all over this case like a fucking child in new boots. You’ve got an assassin staying in the room next door, God alone knows what his pal does, and your lady friend is collecting graphic medical imagery like box tops. You ain’t given me shit, so I did what I had to do. You think I’m holding back on you? With the shit you’re pulling, you’re lucky I don’t put you back on a plane to Noo Yawk.”

“I need to know what you know,” I said. “What are you holding back about this guy?”

We were almost head to head now. Then Woolrich grimaced and leaned back.

“Holding back? Jesus, Bird, you’re unbelievable. Here’s something: Byron’s wife? You want to know what she majored in when she was at college? Art. Her thesis was on Renaissance art and depictions of the body. You think that might have included medical representations, that maybe that was where her ex got some of his ideas?”

He took a deep breath and a long swig of beer. “You’re bait, Bird. You know it, and I know it. And I know something else too.” His voice was cold and hard. “I know you were at Metairie. There’s a guy in the morgue with a bullet hole in his head and the cops have the remains of a ten millimeter Smith & Wesson bullet that was dug out of the marble behind him. You want to tell me about that, Bird? You want to tell me if you were alone in Metairie when the killing started?”

I didn’t reply.

Then: “You screwing her, Bird?”

I looked at him. There was no mirth in his eyes and he wasn’t smiling. Instead, there was hostility and distrust. Whatever I needed to know about Edward Byron and his ex-wife, I would have to find out myself. If I had hit him then, we would have hurt each other badly. I didn’t waste any more words on him and I didn’t look back as I left the bar.

I took a cab to Bywater and stopped off right outside Vaughan ’s Lounge on the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps. I paid the five-dollar cover at the door. Inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers were lost in a rhapsody of New Orleans brass and there were plates of red beans scattered on the tables. Rachel and Angel were dancing around chairs and tables while Louis looked on with a long-suffering expression. As I approached, the tempo of the music slowed a little and Rachel made a grab for me. I moved with her for a while as she stroked my face, and I closed my eyes and let her. Then I sipped a soda and thought my own thoughts until Louis moved from his seat and sat beside me.

“You didn’t have much to say back in Rachel’s room,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s bullshit. All this stuff, the religion, the medical drawings, they’re all just trappings. And maybe he believes them and maybe he don’t. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with mortality, it’s to do with the beauty of the color of meat.”

He took a sip of beer.

“And this guy just likes red.”

Back at the Flaisance, I lay beside Rachel and listened to her breathing in the dark.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “About our killer.”

“And?”

“I think the killer may not be male.”

I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at her. I could see the whites of her eyes, wide and bright.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. There just seems to be something almost feminine about the sensibility of whoever is committing these crimes, a… sensitivity to the interconnectedness of things, to their potential for symbolism. I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking out loud, but it’s not a sensibility typical of a modern male. Maybe “female” is wrong-I mean, the hallmarks, the cruelty, the capacity to overpower, all point to a male-but it’s as close as I can get, at least for now.”

She shook her head and then was silent again.

“Are we becoming a couple?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“No, not really. It’s not one that I’m used to answering, or that I ever thought that I’d have to answer again. If you’re asking if I want us to stay together, then the answer is yes, I do. It worries me a little, and I’m bringing in more baggage than the handlers at JFK, but I want to be with you.”

She kissed me softly.

“Why did you stop drinking?” she asked, adding: “Since we’re having this heart-to-heart.”

I started at the question. “Because if I took one drink now, I’d wake up in Singapore with a beard a week later,” I replied.

“It doesn’t answer the question.”

“I hated myself and that made me hate others, even the people closest to me. I was drinking the night Susan and Jennifer were killed. I’d been drinking a lot, not just that night but other nights too. I drank because of a lot of things, because of the pressure of the job, because of my failings as a husband, as a father, and maybe other things as well, things from way back. If I hadn’t been a drunk, Susan and Jennifer might not have died. So I stopped. Too late, but I stopped.”

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t say, “It wasn’t your fault,” or, “You can’t blame yourself.” She knew better than that.

I think I wanted to say more, to try to explain to her what it was like without alcohol, about how I was afraid that, without alcohol, each day would now leave me with nothing to look forward to. Each day would simply be another day without a drink. Sometimes, when I was at my lowest ebb, I wondered if my search for the Traveling Man was just a way to fill my days, a way to keep me from going off the rails.

Later, as she slept, I lay on the bed, on top of the sheets, and thought about Lutice Fontenot and bodies turned into art, before I, too, faded into sleep.

I SLEPT BADLY that night, wound up by my conversation with Woolrich and troubled by dreams of dark water. The next morning, I had breakfast alone after tracking down what seemed to be the only copy of the New York Times in Orleans Parish, over at Riverside News, by the Jax Brewery. Later, I met Rachel at Café du Monde and we walked through the French Market, wandering between the stalls of T-shirts and CDs and cheap wallets, and on to the fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market. There were pecans like dark eyes, pale, shrunken heads of garlic, melons with dark red flesh that held the gaze like a wound. White-eyed fish lay packed in ice beside crawfish tails; headless shrimp rested by racks of “’gator on a stick” and murky tanks in which baby alligators lay on display. There were stalls loaded with eggplants and militones, sweet onions and elephant toe garlic, fresh Roma tomatoes and ripe avocadoes.

Over a century before, this had been a two-block stretch of Gallatin Street on the riverfront docks between Barracks and Ursuline. Outside of maybe Shanghai and the Bowery, it was one of the toughest places in the world, a strip of brothels and lowlife gin mills where hard-faced men mixed with harder women and anyone without a weapon had taken a wrong turning somewhere that he was bound to regret.