Every Dead Thing

Someone handed me a cup of coffee in an alligator cup, and while I drank it, I tried Rachel’s room at the motel again. On the tenth ring the desk clerk interrupted.

“Are you…Do they call you the Birdman?” he said. He sounded young and uncertain.

“Yes, some people do.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Did you call before?”

I told him that this was my third call. I was aware of an edge in my voice.

“I was grabbing lunch. I have a message for you, from the FBI.”

He said the three letters with a sort of wonder in his voice. Nausea bubbled in my throat.

“It’s from Agent Woolrich, Mr. Birdman. He said to tell you that he and Ms. Wolfe were taking a trip, and that you’d know where to find them. He said he wanted you to keep it to just the three of you. He doesn’t want anyone else to spoil the occasion. He told me to tell you that especially, sir.”

I closed my eyes and his voice grew further away.

“That’s the message, sir. Did I do okay?”

Toussaint, Dupree and I lay the map across Dupree’s desk. Dupree took out a red felt-tip and drew a circle around the Crowley-Ramah area, with the two towns acting as the diameters of the circle and Lafayette as its center.

“I figure he’s got a place in there somewhere,” said Dupree. “If you’re right and he needed to be close to Byron, if not to the Aguillards as well, then we’re looking at an area as far as Krotz Springs to the north and, damn, maybe as far as Bayou Sorrel to the south. If he took your friend, that probably delayed him a little: he needed time to check motel reservations-not much, but enough if he was unlucky with the places he called-and he needed time to get her out. He won’t want to stay on the roads, so he’ll hole up, maybe in a motel or, if it’s close enough, his own place.”

He tapped the pen in the center of the circle. “We’ve alerted the locals, the feds, and the state troopers. That leaves us-and you.”

I had been thinking of what Woolrich had said, that I would know where to find them, but so far nothing had come to me. “I can’t pin anything down. The obvious ones, like the Aguillard house and his own place in Algiers, are already being checked, but I don’t think he’s going to be at either of those places.”

I put my head in my hands. My fears for Rachel were obscuring my reasoning. I needed to pull back. I took my jacket and walked to the door.

“I need space to think. I’ll stay in touch.”

Dupree seemed about to object, but he said nothing. Outside, my car was parked in a police space. I sat in it, rolled down the windows, and took my Louisiana map from the glove compartment. I ran my fingers over the names: Arnaudville, Grand Coteau, Carencro, Broussard, Milton, Catahoula, Coteau Holmes, St. Martinville itself.

The last name seemed familiar from somewhere, but by that point all the towns seemed to resonate with some form of meaning, which left them all meaningless. It was like repeating your name over and over and over again in your head, until the name itself lost its familiarity and you began to doubt your own identity. I started to drive out of town toward Lafayette.

Still, St. Martinville came back to me again. Something about New Iberia and a hospital. A nurse. Nurse Judy Neubolt. Judy the Nut. As I drove, I recalled the conversation that I had had with Woolrich when I’d arrived in New Orleans for the first time after the deaths of Susan and Je

The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. He had told me that Judy Neubolt had moved to La Jolla on a one-year contract after their relationship broke up. I doubted that Judy had ever got as far as La Jolla.

Judy Neubolt wasn’t in the current directory, or the previous year’s directory either. I found her in an old directory in a gas station-her phone had since been disco

As I drove, I thought of David Fontenot and the call from Woolrich that had almost certainly brought him to Honey Island, a promise of an end to the search for his sister. He couldn’t have known how close he was to her resting place when he died.

I thought of the deaths I had brought on Morphy and Angie; the echo of Tante Marie’s voice in my head as he came for her; and Remarr, gilded in fading sunlight. I think I realized, too, why the details had appeared in the newspaper: it was Woolrich’s way of bringing his work to a larger audience, a modern-day equivalent of the public anatomization.

And I thought of Lisa: a small, heavy, dark-eyed girl, who had reacted badly to her parents’ separation, who had sought refuge in a strange Christianity in Mexico, and who had returned at last to her father. What had she seen to force him to kill her? Her father washing blood from his hands in a sink? The remains of Lutice Fontenot or some other unfortunate floating in a jar?

Or had he simply killed her because the pleasure he took in disposing of her, in mutilating his own flesh and blood, was as close as he could come to turning the knife on his own body, to enduring his own anatomization and finding at last the deep red darkness within himself?

50

NEAT LAWNS mixed with thick growths of cypress as I drove back along the blacktop of 96 to St. Martinville, past a God Is Pro-Life sign and the warehouselike structure of Podnuh’s nightclub. At Thibodeaux’s Café, on the neat town square, I asked for directions to Judy Neubolt’s address. They knew the house, even knew that the nurse had moved to La Jolla for a year, maybe longer, and that her boyfriend was maintaining the house.

Perkins Street started almost opposite the entrance to Evangeline State Park. At the end of the street was a T-junction, which disappeared on the right into a rural setting, with houses scattered at distant intervals. Judy Neubolt’s house was on this street, a small, two-story dwelling, strangely low despite the two floors, with two windows on either side of a screen door and three much smaller windows on the upper level. At the eastern side, the roof sloped down, reducing it to a single story. The wood of the house had been newly painted a pristine white, and damaged slates on the roof had been replaced, but the yard was overgrown with weeds and the woods beyond had begun to make inroads on the boundaries of the property.

I parked some way from the house and approached it through the woods, stopping at their verge. The sun was already falling from its apex and it cast a red glow across the roof and walls. The rear door was bolted and locked. There seemed to be no option but to enter from the front.

As I moved forward, my senses jangled with a tension I had not felt before. Sounds, smells, and colors were too sharp, too overpowering. I felt as if I could pick out the component parts of every noise that came to me from the surrounding trees. My gun moved jerkily, my hand responding too rapidly to the signals from my brain. I was conscious of the firmness of the trigger against the ball of my finger and every crevice and rise of the grip against the palm of my hand. The sound of the blood pumping in my ears was like an immense hand banging on a heavy oak door, my feet on the leaves and twigs like the crackling of some huge fire.

The drapes were pulled on the windows, top and bottom, and across the i