Every Dead Thing

“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.

“What’s the point, Morphy?” I asked.

“The point is, the fingerprint that was found at Tante Marie’s belongs to Tony Remarr. He’s one of Joe Bones’s men.” I thought about that as he started the car and pulled into the street, trying to match the name to any incident that might have occurred back in New York, anything that might co

“You think he did it?” Morphy asked.

“Do you?”

“No, no way. At first I thought, yeah, maybe. You know, the old woman, she owned that land. Wouldn’t have taken much drainage work to make something of it.”

“If a man was considering opening a big hotel and building a leisure center.”

“Exactly, or if he wanted to convince someone he was serious enough about it to dump some bricks there. I mean, swamp’s swamp. Assuming he could get permission to build, who wants to share the warm evening air with critters even God regrets making?

“Anyway, the old woman wouldn’t sell. She was shrewd. Her people have been buried out there for generations. The original landowner, an old Southern type who traced his ancestry back to the Bourbons, died in sixty-nine. He stipulated in his will that the land should be offered for sale at a reasonable rate to the existing tenants.

“Now most of the tenants were Aguillards and they bought that land with all the money they had. The old woman, she made all the decisions for them. Their ancestors are there and they have a history with that land going back to the time when they wore chains around their ankles and dug cha

“So Bona

Morphy nodded. “I figure maybe Remarr was sent out to put more than pressure on her-maybe he’s going to threaten the girl or some of the children, maybe even kill one of them-but when he arrives she’s already dead. And maybe Remarr gets careless from the shock, thinks he hasn’t left any traces, and heads off into the night.”

“Does Woolrich know all this?”

“Most of it, yeah.”

“You bringing Bona

“Brought him in last night and let him go an hour later, accompanied by a fancy lawyer called Rufus Thibodeaux. He ain’t movin’, says he ain’t seen Remarr for three or four days. Says he wants to find Remarr as much as anyone, something about money from some deal out in West Baton Rouge. It’s bullshit, but he’s sticking with the story. I think Woolrich is going to try to put some pressure on his operations through Anti-Racketeering and Narcotics, put the squeeze on him to see if he can change his mind.”

“That could take time.”

“You got a better idea?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

Morphy’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t be fuckin’ with Joe Bones, now, y’hear? Joe ain’t like your boys back in New York, sittin’ in social clubs in Little Italy with their fingers curled around the handles of espresso cups, dreaming about the days when everyone respected them. Joe don’t got no time for that. Joe don’t want folks to respect him; Joe wants folks to be scared to death of him.”

We turned onto Esplanade. Morphy signaled and pulled in about two blocks from the Flaisance. He stared out the window, tapping the index finger of his right hand against the steering wheel to some internal rhythm in his head. I sensed he had something more to say. I decided to let him say it in his own time.

“You’ve spoken to this guy, the guy who took your wife and kid, right?”

I nodded.

“It’s the same guy? The same guy who did Tee Jean and the old woman?”

“He called me yesterday. It’s him.”

“He say anything?”

“The feds have it on tape. He says he’s going to do more.”

Morphy rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. I knew he was seeing Tante Marie in his head again.

“You going to stay here?”

“For a while, yes.”

“Could be the feds ain’t go

I smiled. “I know.”

Morphy smiled back. He reached beneath his seat and handed me a long brown envelope. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. I slipped the envelope under my jacket and stepped from the car. He gave a small wave as he drove away through the midday crowd.

I opened the envelope in my hotel room. Inside were a set of crime scene pictures and photocopied extracts of the police reports, all stapled together. Stapled separately was a copy of the coroner’s report. One section had been emphasized with a luminous yellow felt tip.

The coroner had found traces of ketamine hydrochloride in the bodies of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, equivalent to a dosage of one milligram per two pounds of weight. According to the report, ketamine was an unusual drug, a special type of anesthetic used for some minor surgical procedures. No one was too clear on its precise mode of action apart from the fact that it was a PCP analogue and worked on sites in the brain, affecting the central nervous system.

It was becoming the drug of choice in the clubs of New York and L.A. while I was still on the force, usually in capsules or tabs made by heating the liquid anesthetic to evaporate the water, leaving ketamine crystals. Users described a ketamine trip as “swimming in the K pool” since it distorted the perception of the body, creating a feeling that the user was floating in a soft yet supportive medium. Other side effects included hallucinations, distortions in the perception of space and time, and out-of-body experiences.

What the coroner did note was that ketamine could be used as a chemical restrainer on animals, since it induced paralysis and dulled pain while allowing the normal pharyngeal-laryngeal reflexes to continue. It was for this purpose, he surmised, that the killer had injected both Tante Marie and Tee Jean Aguillard with the drug.

When they were flayed and anatomized, the report concluded, Tante Marie and her son had been fully conscious.