Every Dead Thing (44 page)

Byron crooked the shotgun awkwardly beneath his right arm and moved forward, his eyes moving constantly. He advanced slowly toward the treeline, but the movement seemed to have stopped. Maybe he shook his head then to clear his sight, fearing the onset of the visions, but they didn’t come. Instead, death came for Edward Byron as the woods came alive around him and he was surrounded by dark figures. He loosed off one shot before the gun was wrenched from his grip and he felt a pain shoot across his chest as the blade opened his skin from shoulder to shoulder.

The figures surrounded him—hard-faced men, one with an M16 slung over his shoulder, the others armed with knives and axes, all led by a huge man with reddish brown skin and dark hair streaked with gray. Byron fell to his knees as blows rained down on his back and arms and shoulders. Dazed with pain and exhaustion, he looked up in time to see the big man’s axe scything through the air above him.

Then all was darkness.

We were using Dupree’s office, where a new PC sat ready to receive the dental records Holdman was sending. I sat in a red vinyl chair that had been repaired so often with tape that it was like sitting on cracking ice. The chair squeaked as I shifted in it, my feet on the windowsill. Across from me was the couch on which I had earlier caught three hours of uncomfortable sleep.

Toussaint had gone off to get coffee thirty minutes before. He still hadn’t come back. I was starting to get restless when I heard the sound of voices raised from the squad room beyond. I passed through the open door of Dupree’s office and into the squad room, with its rows of gray metal desks, its swivel chairs, and hat stands, its bulletin boards and coffee cups, its half-eaten bagels and donuts.

Toussaint appeared, talking excitedly to a black detective in a blue suit and open-collar shirt. Behind him, Dupree was talking to a uniformed patrolman. Toussaint saw me, patted the black detective on the shoulder, and walked over to me.

“Byron’s dead,” he said. “It was messy. The feds lost two men, couple more injured. Byron broke for the swamp. When they found him, someone had cut him up and split his skull with an axe. They’ve got the axe and a lot of boot prints.” He fingered his chin. “They think maybe Lionel Fontenot decided to finish things his way.”

Dupree ushered us into his office, but didn’t close the door. He stood close to me and touched my arm gently.

“It’s him. Things are still confused, but they’ve got sample jars matching the one in which your daughter’s”—he paused, then rephrased it—“the jar that you received. They’ve got a laptop computer, the remains of some kind of homemade speaker attachment, and scalpels with tissue remains, most of it found in a shed at the back of the property. I talked to Woolrich, briefly. He mentioned something about old medical texts. Said to tell you that you were right. They’re still searching for the faces of the victims, but that could take some time. They’re going to start digging around the house later today.”

I wasn’t sure what I felt. There was relief, a sense of a weight being lifted and taken away, a sense that it had all come to a close. But there was also something more: I felt disappointment that I had not been there at the end. After all that I had done, after all the people who had died, both at my hands and the hands of others, the Traveling Man had eluded me right until the end.

Dupree left and I sat down heavily in the chair, the sunlight filtering through the shades on the window. Toussaint sat on the edge of Dupree’s desk and watched me. I thought of Susan and Jennifer and of days spent in the park together. And I remembered the voice of
Tante
Marie Aguillard, and I hoped that she was now at peace.

A low, two-note signal beeped from Dupree’s PC at regular intervals. Toussaint hauled himself from the desk and walked around to where he could see the screen of the PC. He tapped some keys and read what was on-screen.

“It’s Holdman’s stuff coming through,” he said.

I joined him at the screen and watched as Lisa Stott’s dental records appeared, detailed in words, then as a kind of two-dimensional map of her mouth with fillings and extractions marked, and then in the form of a mouth X ray.

Toussaint called up the coroner’s X ray from a separate file and set the two images side by side.

“They look the same,” he said.

I nodded. I didn’t want to think of the implications if they were.

Toussaint called up Huckstetter, told him what we had, and asked him to come over. Thirty minutes later, Dr. Emile Huckstetter was running through Holdman’s file, comparing it with his own notes and the X-ray images he had taken from the dead girl. At last, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes.

“It’s her,” he said.

Toussaint let out a long, jagged breath and shook his head in sorrow. It was the Traveling Man’s last jest, it seemed, the old jest. The dead girl was Lisa Stott, or, as she once was known, Lisa Woolrich, a young girl who had become an emotional casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, who had been abandoned by a mother anxious to start a new life without the complication of an angry, hurt teenage daughter, and whose father was unable to provide her with the stability and support she needed.

She was Woolrich’s daughter.

T
HE VOICE
on the telephone was heavy with tiredness and tension.

“Woolrich, it’s Bird.” I spoke as I drove; a St. Martin’s deputy had retrieved the rented car from the Flaisance.

“Hey.” There was no life to the word. “What have you heard?”

“That Byron’s dead, some of your men too. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, it was a mess. They call you in New York?”

“No.” I debated whether or not to tell him the truth and decided not to. “I missed the flight. I’m heading toward Lafayette.”

“Lafayette?
Shit, what you doin’ in Lafayette?”

“Hanging around.” With Toussaint and Dupree, it had been decided that I should talk to Woolrich. Someone had to tell him that his daughter had been found. “Can you meet me?”

“Shit, Bird, I’m on my last legs here.” Then, resignedly: “Sure, I’ll meet you. We can talk about what happened today. Give me an hour. I’ll meet you in the Jazzy Cajun, off the highway. Anyone will tell you where it is.” I could hear him coughing at the other end of the phone.

“Your lady friend go home?”

“No, she’s still here.”

“That’s good,” he said. “It’s good to have someone with you at times like this.” Then he hung up.

The Jazzy Cajun was a small dark bar annexed to a motel, with pool tables and a country music jukebox. Behind the bar, a woman restocked the beer while Willie Nelson played over the speakers.

Woolrich arrived shortly after I began drinking my second coffee. He was carrying a canary yellow jacket and the armpits of his shirt were stained with sweat. The shirt itself was marked with dirt on the back and sleeves, and one elbow was torn. His tan trousers were dark with mud at the cuffs and hung over mud-encrusted, ankle-high boots. He ordered a bourbon and a coffee, then took a seat beside me near the door. We didn’t say anything for a time, until Woolrich drained half of his bourbon and began sipping at his coffee.

“Listen, Bird,” he began. “I’m sorry for what went down between us this last week or so. We were both trying to bring this to an end our own way. Now that it’s done, well…” He shrugged and tipped his glass at me before draining it and signaling for another. There were black stains beneath his eyes and I could see the beginnings of a painful boil at the base of his neck. His lips were dry and cracked and he winced as the bourbon hit the inside of his mouth. He noticed my look. “Mouth ulcers,” he explained. “They’re a bitch.” He took another sip of coffee. “I guess you want to hear what happened.”

I shook my head. I wanted to put off the moment, but not like that.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Sleep,” he said. “Then maybe take some time off, go down to Mexico and see if I can’t rescue Lisa from these goddamn religious freaks.”

I felt a pain in my heart and stood suddenly. I wanted a drink as badly as I had ever wanted anything before in my life. Woolrich didn’t seem to notice my lack of composure, or even register that I was walking toward the men’s room. I could feel sweat on my forehead and my skin felt hypersensitive, as if I was about to come down with a fever.

“She’s been asking after you, Birdman,” I heard him say, and I stopped dead.

“What did you say?” I didn’t turn around.

“She asks after you,” he repeated.

I turned then. “When did you hear from her last?”

He waved the glass. “Couple of months back, I suppose. Two or three.”

“You sure?”

He stopped and stared at me. I hung by a thread over a dark place and watched as something small and bright separated from the whole and disappeared into the blackness, never to be found again. The surroundings of the bar fell away and there was only Woolrich and me, alone, with nothing to distract either of us from the other’s words. There was no ground beneath my feet, no air above me. I heard a howling in my head as images and memories coursed through my mind.

Woolrich standing on the porch, his finger on the cheek of Florence Aguillard.

“I call this my metaphysical tie, my George Herbert tie.”

A couplet from Ralegh, from “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage,” the poem from which Woolrich so loved to quote:
“Blood must be my bodies balmer/No other balme will there be given.”

The second phone call I had received in the Flaisance, the one during which the Traveling Man had allowed no questions, the one during which Woolrich was in attendance.

“They have no vision. They have no larger view of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it.”

Woolrich and his men seizing Rachel’s notes.

“I’m torn between keeping you in touch and telling you nothing.”

Cops throwing a bag of donuts he had touched into a trash can.

“Are you fucking her, Bird?”

You can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention.

Adelaide Modine.
“They can sniff each other out.”

And a figure in a New York bar, fingering a Penguin volume of metaphysical verse and quoting verses from Donne.

“Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.”

A metaphysical sensibility: that was what the Traveling Man had, what Rachel had tried to pinpoint only days before, what united the poets whose works had lined the shelves of Woolrich’s East Village apartment on the night he took me back there to sleep, on the night after he killed my wife and child.

“Bird, you okay?” His pupils were tiny, like little black holes sucking the light from the room.

I turned away. “Yeah, just a moment of weakness, that’s all. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going, Birdman?” There was doubt in his voice, and something else: a note of warning, of violence, and I wondered if my wife had heard it as she tried to escape, as he came after her, as he broke her nose against the wall.

“I have to go to the john,” I said.

I am still not certain why I turned away. Bile was rising in my throat, threatening to make me gag and vomit on the floor. A fierce, burning pain dug at my stomach and clawed at my heart. It was as if a veil had been pulled aside at the moment of my death, revealing only a cold, black emptiness beyond. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to turn away from it all, and when I returned, everything would be normal again. I would have a wife and a child who looked like her mother. I would have a small, peaceful home and a patch of lawn to tend and someone who would stand by me, even to the end.

The toilet was dark and smelled of stale urine from the unflushed bowl, but the tap worked. I splashed cold water on my face, then reached into my jacket pocket for my phone.

It wasn’t there. I had left it on the table with Woolrich. I wrenched the door open and moved around the bar, my right hand drawing my pistol, but Woolrich was already gone.

I called Toussaint but he had left the office. Dupree had gone home. I convinced the switchboard operator to ring Dupree’s home number and to ask him to call me back. Five minutes later he did. His voice was bleary.

“This had better be good,” he said.

“Byron isn’t the killer,” I said.

“What?” He was wide awake instantly.

“He didn’t kill them,” I repeated. I was outside the bar, gun in hand, but there was no sign of Woolrich. I stopped two black women passing with a child between them, but they backed off as soon as they saw the gun. “Byron wasn’t the Traveling Man. Woolrich was. He’s running. I caught him out with a lie about his daughter. He said he had spoken to her two or three months back. You and I both know that’s not possible.”

“You could have made a mistake.”

“Dupree, listen to me. Woolrich set Byron up. He killed my wife and daughter. He killed Morphy and his wife,
Tante
Marie, Tee Jean, Lutice Fontenot, Tony Remarr, and he killed his own daughter too. He’s running, do you hear me? He’s running.”

“I hear you,” said Dupree. His voice was dry with the realization of how wrong we had been.

One hour later, they hit Woolrich’s apartment in Algiers, on the south bank of the Mississippi. It lay on the upper floor of a restored house on Opelousas Avenue, above an old grocery store, approached by a flight of cast iron stairs, girded with gardenias, that led up to a gallery. Woolrich’s apartment was the only one in the building, with two arched windows and a solid oak door. The New Orleans police were backed up by six FBI men. The cops led, the feds taking up positions at either side of the door. There was no movement visible in the apartment through the windows. They had not expected any.

Two cops swung an iron battering ram with
Hi, Y’all
painted in white on its flat head. It took one swing to knock the door open. The FBI men poured into the house, the police securing the street and the surrounding yards. They checked the tiny kitchen, the unmade bed, the lounge with the new television, the empty pizza cartons and beer cans, the Penguin poetry editions which sat in a milk crate, the picture of Woolrich and his daughter smiling from on top of a nest of tables.

In the bedroom was a closet, open and containing an array of wrinkled clothes and two pairs of tan shoes, and a metal cabinet sealed with a large steel lock.

“Break it,” instructed the agent in charge of the operation, Assistant SAC Cameron Tate. O’Neill Brouchard, the young FBI man who had driven me to
Tante
Marie’s house centuries before, struck at the lock with the butt of his machine pistol. It broke on the third attempt and he pulled the doors open.

The explosion blew O’Neill Brouchard backward through the window, almost tearing his head off in the process, and sent a hailstorm of glass shards into the narrow confines of the bedroom. Tate was blinded instantly, glass embedding itself in his face, neck, and his Kevlar vest. Two other FBI men sustained serious injuries to the face and hands as part of Woolrich’s store of empty glass jars, his laptop computer, a modified H3000 voice synthesizer, a smaller, portable voice changer with the capacity to alter pitch and tone, and a flesh-colored mask, used to obscure his mouth and nose, were blown to pieces. And amid the flames and the smoke and the shards of glass, burning pages fluttered to the ground like black moths, a mass of biblical apocrypha disintegrating into ash.

As O’Neill Brouchard was dying, I sat in the detective squad room in St. Martinville as men were pulled in from holidays and days off to assist in the search. Woolrich had switched off his cell phone but the phone company had been alerted. If he used it, they would try to pinpoint a location.

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 Jennifer. Judy the Nut.
“She said I murdered her in a past life.”
Was the story true, or did it mean something else? Had Woolrich been toying with me, even then?

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.