Every Dead Thing

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 a

“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 ru

“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 wa

“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.