Every Dead Thing

“It’s good to see you, Bird,” she said, her right hand resting lightly on my cheek, lines of anxiety on her brow giving the lie to the smile on her lips. She glanced at Walter and something passed between them. “I’ll be back later with some coffee.” She closed the door softly behind her on the way out.

“How are the kids doing?” I asked as Walter poured himself a glass of Redbreast Irish whiskey-the old stuff with the screw top.

“Good,” he replied. “Lauren still hates high school. Ellen’s going to study law in Georgetown in the fall, so at least one member of the family will understand the way it works.” He inhaled deeply as he raised the glass to his mouth and sipped. I gulped involuntarily and a sudden thirst gripped me. Walter noticed my discomfiture and reddened.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I responded. “It’s good therapy. I notice you’re still swearing in the house.” Lee hated swearing, routinely telling her husband that only oafs resorted to profanity in speech. Walter usually countered by pointing out that Wittgenstein once brandished a poker in the course of a philosophical argument, proof positive in his eyes that erudite discourse sometimes wasn’t sufficiently expressive for even the greatest of men.

He moved to a leather armchair at one side of the empty fireplace and motioned to its opposite number. Lee entered with a silver coffeepot, a creamer, and two cups on a tray and then left, glancing anxiously at Walter as she did. I knew they had been talking before I arrived; they kept no secrets from each other and their unease seemed to indicate that they had discussed more than their concerns about my well-being.

“Do you want me to sit under a light?” I asked. A small smile moved across Walter’s face with the swiftness of a breeze and then was gone.

“I heard things over the last few months,” he began, looking into his glass like a mystic examining a crystal ball. I stayed silent.

“I know you talked to the feds, pulled in some favors so you could take a look at files. I know you were trying to find the man who killed Susan and Je

I had nothing to say, so I poured some coffee for both of us, then picked up my own cup and sipped. It was Javan, strong and dark. I breathed deeply. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I want to know why you’re here, why you’re back. I don’t know what you’ve become if some of the things I’ve heard are true.” He swallowed and I felt sorry for him, for what he had to say and the questions he had to ask. If I had answers to some of them, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give them, or that Walter really wanted to hear them. Outside, the kids had finished their game as darkness drew in, and there was a stillness in the air that made Walter’s words sound like a portent.

“They say you found the guy who did it,” he said, and this time there was no hesitation, as if he had steeled himself to say what he had to say. “That you found him and killed him. Is that true?”

The past was like a snare. It allowed me to move a little, to circle, to turn, but in the end, it always dragged me back. More and more, I found things in the city-favorite restaurants, bookshops, tree-shaded parks, even hearts carved bone white into the wood of an old table-that reminded me of what I had lost, as if even a moment of forgetfulness was a crime against their memories. I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.

And so, with Walter’s question, I fell back to late April, back to New Orleans. They had been dead for almost four months.

Woolrich sat at a table at the rear of the Café du Monde, beside a bubble gum machine, with his back against the wall of the main building. On the table before him stood a steaming cup of café au lait and a plate of hot beignets covered in powdered sugar. Outside, people bustled down Decatur, past the green-and-white pavilion of the café, heading for the cathedral or Jackson Square.

He wore a tan suit, cheaply made, and his silk tie was stretched and faded so that he didn’t even bother to button his shirt at the collar, preferring instead to let the tie hang mournfully at half mast. The floor around him was white with sugar, as was the only visible part of the green vinyl chair upon which he sat.

Woolrich was an assistant SAC of the local FBI field office over at 1250 Poydras. He was also one of the few people from my police past with whom I’d stayed in touch in some small way, and one of the only feds I had ever met who didn’t make me curse the day Hoover was born. More than that, he was my friend. He had stood by me in the days following the killings, never questioning, never doubting. I remember him standing, rain-soaked, by the grave, water dripping from the rim of his outsized fedora. He had been transferred to New Orleans soon after, a promotion that reflected a successful apprenticeship in at least three other field offices and his ability to keep his head in the turbulent environment of the New York field office in downtown Manhattan.

He was messily divorced, the marriage over for maybe twelve years. His wife had reverted to her maiden name, Karen Stott, and lived in Miami with an interior decorator whom she had recently married. Woolrich’s only daughter, Lisa-now, thanks to her mother’s efforts, Lisa Stott-had joined some religious group in Mexico, he said. She was just eighteen. Her mother and her new husband didn’t seem to care about her, unlike Woolrich, who cared but couldn’t get his act together enough to do anything about it. The disintegration of his family pained him in a very particular way, I knew. He came from a broken family himself, a white-trash mother and a father who was well meaning but inconsequential, too inconsequential to hold on to his hellcat wife. Woolrich had always wanted to do better, I think. More than the rest, I believed, he shared my sense of loss when Susan and Je

He had put on more weight since I last saw him, and the hair on his chest was visible through his sweat-soaked shirt. Rivulets rolled down from a dense thatch of rapidly graying hair and into the folds of flesh at his neck. For such a big man, the Louisiana summers would be a form of torture. Woolrich may have looked like a clown, may even have acted that way when it suited him, but no one in New Orleans who knew him ever underestimated him. Those who had in the past were already rotting in Angola penitentiary.

“I like the tie,” I said. It was bright red and decorated with lambs and angels.

“I call it my metaphysical tie,” Woolrich replied. “My George Herbert tie.”

We shook hands, Woolrich wiping beignet crumbs from his shirtfront as he stood. “Damn things get everywhere,” he said. “When I die, they’ll find beignet crumbs up the crack of my ass.”

“Thanks, I’ll hold that thought.”

An Asian waiter in a white paper cap bustled up and I ordered coffee. “Bring you beignets, suh?” he asked. Woolrich gri

“How you doin’?” asked Woolrich, taking a gulp of coffee hot enough to scarify the throat of a lesser man.

“I’m okay. How’s life?”

“Same as it ever was: gift wrapped, tied with a red bow, and handed to someone else.”

“You still with…what was her name? Judy? Judy the nurse?”

Woolrich’s face creased unhappily, as if he’d just encountered a cockroach in his beignet. “Judy the nut, you mean. We split up. She’s gone to work in La Jolla for a year, maybe more. I tell you, I decide to take her away for a romantic vacation a couple of months back, rent us a room in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night i