Every Dead Thing

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 begi

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.”

Louis actually smiled. “Joe ain’t go

“I kinda figured that,” I replied. “Could be that Lionel Fontenot might help us out there.”

We walked back to the Flaisance. The streets of New Orleans aren’t the safest in the world but I didn’t think that anyone would bother us.

I was right.

42

I SLEPT LATE the next morning. Rachel had returned to her own room to sleep. When I knocked, her voice sounded harsh with tiredness. She told me she wanted to stay in bed for a while, and when she felt better, she would go out to Loyola again. I asked Angel and Louis to watch out for her, then drove from the Flaisance.

The incident at Metairie had left me shaken, and the prospect of facing Joe Bones again was unappealing. I also felt a crushing sense of guilt for what had happened to Rachel, for what I had drawn her into and for what I had forced her to do. I needed to get out of New Orleans, at least for a short time. I wanted to clear my head, to try to see things from a different angle. I ate a bowl of chicken soup in the Gumbo Shop on St. Peter and then headed out of the city.

Morphy lived about four miles from Cecilia, a few miles northwest of Lafayette. He had bought and was refurbishing a raised plantation home by a small river, a budget version of the classic old Louisiana houses that had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, a blend of French Colonial, West Indian, and European architectural influences.

The house presented a strange spectacle. Its main living quarters were on top of an aboveground basement area, which had once been used for storage and as protection from flooding. This section of the house was brick and Morphy had reworked the arched openings with what looked like hand-carved frames. The living quarters above, which would usually have been weatherboard or plaster-covered, had been replaced with timber slats. A double-pitched roof, which had been partially reslated, extended over the gallery.

I had called ahead and told Angie I was on my way. Morphy had just got home when I arrived. I found him in the yard at the rear of the house, benching two hundred in the evening air.

“What do you think of the house?” he asked as I approached, not even pausing in his reps as he spoke.

“It’s great. Looks like you still have some way to go before it’s finished.”

He grunted with the effort of the final rep as I acted as spotter, slotting the bar back onto its rest. He stood up and stretched, then looked at the back of his house with barely concealed admiration.

“It was built by a Frenchman in eighteen eighty-eight,” he said. “He knew what he was doing. It’s built on an east-west axis, with principal exposure to the south.” He pointed out the lines of the building as he spoke. “He designed it the way the Europeans designed their houses, so that the low angle of the sun in winter would heat the building. Then, in the summer, the sun would only shine on it in the morning and evening. Most American houses aren’t built that way, they just put ’em up whatever way suits ’em, throw a stick in the air and see where it lands. We were spoiled by cheap energy. Then the Arabs came along and hiked up their prices and people had to start thinking again about the layout of their houses.”

He smiled. “Don’t know how much good an east-west house does around here, though. Sun shines all the goddamn time anyway.”

When he had showered, we sat at a table in the kitchen with Angie and talked as she cooked. Angie was almost a foot smaller than her husband, a slim, dark-ski

Morphy drank a bottle of Breaux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen pieces and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux.

Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into a cast iron skillet over a high flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn’t burn, gradually turning the roux from blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate color. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring.

While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper, and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and caye

When we had washed and dried the dishes, Angie left us and went to bed. Morphy and I sat in the kitchen and I told him about Raymond Aguillard and his belief that he had seen the figure of a girl at Honey Island. I told him of Tante Marie’s dreams and my feeling that, somehow, David Fontenot’s death at Honey Island could be linked to the girl.

Morphy didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t sneer at visions of ghosts, or at an old woman’s belief that the voices she heard were real. Instead, all he said was: “You sure you know where this place is?”