All the Devil's Creatures (2 page)

“I mean since Katrina …”

“I know.”

A long, sad silence. They had grown so far apart.

“Anyway, the sheriff wants to interview me.” Her voice had firmed up. “I’m flying up for that tomorrow, and to look at the site.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

“And we’ll talk.”

“Right. And Eileen? I’m so sorry.”

Pause. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Geoff.”

Geoff hung up the phone and thought again that retaining Eileen as his consultant had been a terrible idea—for his clients, for Eileen, and for his own mental health. Though, really, did he have a choice? As a full professor and a greenie at heart, she didn’t take work from the petrochemical industry, so she could work for him with no conflict of interest. She charged half the going rate for litigation experts of her caliber—whether out of a belief in the hardscrabble do-gooder lawsuit Geoff had brought, or due to their history together, Geoff couldn’t say. The more pertinent question that repeated in Geoff’s head each time he spent any time on this lawsuit:
What the hell was I thinking taking this disaster of case in the first place?

After sitting motionless at his desk for a while, and failing even more than before Eileen’s call to focus on the legal brief that awaited his written response, he gathered up his file and crammed it into his battered briefcase for the trip to East Texas. As he left the office/bedroom, the antique glass doorknob came off in his hand for what seemed like the millionth time. He sighed and screwed it back into place. Somehow his and Janie’s grand plans for the old house had kept slipping by since the accident.

The baby’s room
. He squelched the thought as he pulled the door to. He and Janie had started calling the bedroom that early in her third trimester, and by the time of the accident it had begun to sound natural. Now he could not, would not, allow himself to think of it as anything but his office. Otherwise the room threatened to bring to his mind a haunting sound, the sound of one first and last heartbeat.

He drank a beer while he packed to get his brain ready for the drive, turning up the stereo that had been playing in the background as he tried to work. Coltrane.

Geoff hardly knew Dalia Bordelon, had met her once at the refinery when Texronco first granted access for testing. She worked for Eileen, doing most of her grunt work. A grad student. Brilliant—Eileen always talked her up when they spoke. Now murdered shy of thirty out of no motive but blind hatred. Geoff felt a flash of anger, but it threatened to turn to something darker. He pushed it aside with the last of his beer, letting his thoughts drift with the modal jazz.

He left through the back door of the old bungalow—it stuck, another minor repair far down the list below the major ones Geoff had stopped thinking about—and drove his battered Mercedes east, just ahead of the rush-hour traffic pouring out of downtown Dallas behind him. After a while, the rolling prairie gave way to thick pine forest: the Piney Woods. He felt Dixie close in around him.

Arriving at the lake at sunset, he pulled into a cheap motor lodge in a tiny fishing town. Spring had fully sprung down here, and the smell of dogwood and new growth assaulted him as he stepped from the car. Beneath it all lay a musty odor that conjured in his mind the image of countless reptiles churning just beneath the algae at the murky water’s edge.

He walked over to the marina that doubled as the motel office, picked up a six pack, and ordered a cheeseburger. At a Formica table, he downed one of the beers while he waited and then washed his burger down with another. Dinner alone. Eileen would catch an early flight into Shreveport in the morning and fly back to New Orleans that afternoon. He bought a bag of ice on his way out.

As he crossed the road to the motel, a bright-orange lizard the size of his foot crossed his path. Its eyes glowed with an aquamarine shimmer in the harsh glare of the sodium arc light at the foot of the pier. He jumped, startled, then pushed the creature from his mind. He still practiced environmental law, but his curiosity about nature had long departed.

Inside, he pulled a fifth of bourbon from his bag and poured it into a plastic motel cup, over ice. The TV picked up five channels. PBS out of Shreveport featured a documentary about Hitler’s rise and the run-up to World War II—as good a thing as any to crash to.

•

Eileen knocked early. Geoff rolled out of bed and opened the door the amount the chain lock allowed. He saw her shadowy face and a shaft of morning light.

“You’re not even dressed,” she said. But she didn’t sound impatient to start the day.

“I feel like ass. Why don’t you go over to that place across the road. I’ll meet you—”

Then he saw a flash of color out of the corner of his eye. Eileen jumped as if someone had poked her with a hot stick.

“Geoff, did you see that?”

“Orange lizardy thing?”

“Yes … something like that.” She craned her neck all around in the direction the thing had scurried.

“I think I saw it last night.”

“What is it?”

“A big orange lizard—I dunno.”

“It’s remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s …”

“Hey. I need a shower.”

She left and Geoff closed the door and stumbled his way back in past a stack of empty beer cans and the much depleted whiskey bottle
.
His tired suit was a rumpled mess from having spent the night in his suitcase. He hung it up in the bathroom as he took a hot shower, making it a little more presentable when he got out, if a little damp.

At the marina, they sipped coffee and picked at their food. Geoff tried to discuss their plan for the day. Not the best day on the lake he could imagine. Eileen’s excitement over the lizard had faded.

“Senseless, senseless,” she kept repeating.

“This interview should be just a formality. Dalia’s murder was a hate crime, and the investigation will lead a long way from her work on the case.”

Eileen snarled a little and fought back tears. “A
formality
.”

She remained dazed and distant, hardly speaking. The coffee did little to lift the fog shrouding her, and Geoff wondered if not just shock and sadness but also a healthy dose of Xanax was involved. Geoff noticed a front tooth stained yellow, almost brown. Not like the left-brained Eileen to let her hygiene go. He feared that she had slipped back into the depression that had taken her after Katrina, and which had never quite seemed to lift fully. Geoff himself was too broke to hire a regular secretary, and now his consultant was under-staffed and depressed—far from an optimal litigation team.

As far as the lawsuit went, the biggest impact of all this would be on the schedule. “How much time do you need for the report?” he asked.

Eileen shook her head and ran a hand through her once-silky black hair, now gone ashy. “I looked through all of Dalia’s notes last night. She did a thorough job. But I’ll need to educate myself and shuffle some staff.” She gestured at her bag, overstuffed with work papers; a Geological Survey map of the bayou on which the refinery sat stuck out at an angle like some ineffectual weapon. “I can pull it together for you in three weeks.”

“I’ll ask for thirty days. That should give us time to review it together and make sure everything is consistent from a legal standpoint before I send it to the other side. Then I’ll start up on the motion for summary judgment. Texronco will file its own MSJ—I’ll need you to do a supplemental declaration in response. All this assuming the company doesn’t make a reasonable settlement offer.”

She closed her eyes. “Geoff, after this, you might have to find someone else.”

“Okay—”

“I mean, with us being, you know,
us
—”

“Uh-huh.”

“And now this …”

“Listen—”

“No, wait. I’m not going to do any consulting anymore. At least for a while. I need to get my head straight.”

Katrina had blown through nine months before—the Seventeenth Street Canal levee breach had destroyed her Lakeview home, and she was renting a place in the Irish Chanel. Geoff knew he should be impressed Eileen was working at all. But he felt only resignation. He knew he could feel more, but he did not let himself.

He said, “Okay. But can you stick with me just through the trial? Again, assuming I don’t settle the case. And Lord knows I want to settle. Christ, I want this case to go away.” He tried to meet her gaze over his coffee mug. “Honestly, I only took it to get Kincaid out of my office. He was stinking up the place with his moss and catfish funk.”

Eileen didn’t smile. Instead, she chewed her lip and looked at the table as if trying to decide how to tell him something.

“What?”

She sighed. “There’s one more thing. I don’t think it has anything to do with the lawsuit. Or Dalia’s murder. But she left me a voicemail the day she died …” She fumbled through her purse for her cell phone. “Here, just listen.”

Eileen called up the voicemail and handed the phone to Geoff. He heard Dalia’s voice: “Eileen, it’s Dalia. I found something at the lake. There’s another facility. With things going on … I probably shouldn’t say much more over the phone, but it’s bigger than pollution. Weird science. I told T-Jacques about it last night. And I left a … sample, leave it at that, in the safe in the lab. I’m on my way back up there now to learn more. Call me.”

“I tried to call her back but never got through. And I was out of town at a conference, so I didn’t see her between her trips up here.”

“What’s the sample she left you? And who’s T-Jacques?”

“Terence Jacques Rubell—T-Jacques. He’s Dalia’s boyfriend. I talked to him yesterday. He’s distraught. He said what Dalia found was big enough to drown a lot of bad people—he was more colorful—’just like they drowned New Orleans.’”

“What the hell does that mean?” He rubbed his eyes, dreading further complications in this case. He could hear the irritation rising in his own voice but felt powerless to tamp it.

“Who knows. He’s angry. And grieving. And I never met him before last night, so I don’t know—”

“And ‘weird science?’ What the fuck is that?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Come on Eileen. You haven’t answered my first question—what did Dalia leave in the safe?” He gave up trying to keep his annoyance at bay. Eileen had always been secretive by nature, even before the rage and paranoia Katrina had wrought within all New Orleanians to some degree. She liked to act alone as much as possible, to not let others in on her machinations. She was especially protective of her work. But in this case, she was supposed to be working for him.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with water pollution. But beyond that … I don’t want to discuss it until I understand its significance.” Geoff recognized her solid tone, the hard eyes; nothing he said would budge her.

He stirred his coffee, watching the dark swirl, feeling her eyes on him.

“Well then what are you going to tell the sheriff?”

“Nothing.”

“
Nothing?
This is a murder investigation, Eileen. You can’t withhold—”

“Racist rednecks killed Dalia. Whatever she found has nothing to do with the sheriff’s investigation.”

Geoff stared at her across the table, matching her glare. Her eyes betrayed her recalcitrance. His mind formed the words to prove the absurdity of her intentions.
Make full disclosure—if it’s nothing, no problem; if it’s something, you’ve covered your hide.
Then his stomach lurched and he tasted something sour in his throat and the fight went out of him. He pushed his mug away and shook his head. “Fine. But then what did you tell me for? What do you want from me?”

“Talk to T-Jacques. He says Dalia explained the whole deal to him, gave him proof of some, I don’t know, conspiracy, on a flash drive. He talked her out of going to the authorities, didn’t even want her to talk to me. He had no idea she had gone back to the site—but she was like that; she was too good a scientist not to follow through with an investigation if she thought it could yield something interesting. But now T-Jacques thinks that if the wrong people find out what he knows, he could ‘wind up dead or in Gitmo’—his words.”

“Great. A paranoiac. Forget it.”

“Forget it?”

“Forget it. This is a straightforward water pollution case. No conspiracy. No weird science. Regular science, cut and dried, nothing more. I don’t have time for the irrational ravings of bitter, enraged boyfriends. I mean it sounds like this T-Jacques is crazy. Or Dalia was.”

He regretted the words.

Angry tears welled in Eileen’s eyes, but she did not avert her gaze; she kept her voice calm. “Here’s the problem with T-Jacques. He’ll only share Dalia’s story with you.”

“What?
Why?
I don’t know him. I hardly knew Dalia.”

“Because he knows from Dalia that you’re up here ‘fighting the man,’ he says. You have a connection to Dalia, and he thinks you know what’s going on at this lake. And you’re a lawyer. He thinks that anything he says to you will be privileged—”

“Good Lord. I mean, sure, if he were my client—but I don’t need any more lunatic clients, Eileen.”

“And since you need my services in your lawsuit …”

In that moment, he hated her. For her intransigence. For her gall in attempting to use him to retrieve information while keeping him in the dark. Using him, manipulating him, as she had in the months after Janie’s death.

He closed his eyes, stepping back, realizing that he had come close to taking this discussion down a road he could not bear to travel. Instead, he said: “You have a professional duty—to me, to our client, to the court—”

“
You
have a duty. A duty to wake up and start living again, Geoff.”

He glared at her as she picked up her phone.

“I’m e-mailing you T-Jacques’ number.”

•

They drove in tense silence to the county seat. At an annex to the old courthouse, a receptionist with big red hair showed them into Sheriff Seastrunk’s inner chamber.

“Have a seat, folks,” Seastrunk said, settling into his own leather chair behind his big oak desk. The desk was neat, with no computer, just a few stacked papers and decorative paper weights and plaques voicing honors from various fraternal organizations and the state Democratic Party—many dating from the days when it was the only party in the state that mattered. Behind the desk, a window overlooked the courthouse lawn where the Saint Augustine grass had begun greening up and furious redbuds screamed in full bloom.