Floodgates (18 page)
Jodi stooped over the pile of worthless objects and trained her flashlight over the dirt around them, lighting a halo of dark dots half-buried in the dirt.
“What are those?” Faye asked.
Jodi flicked off her flashlight, leaving them with only streetlights and Dauphine’s candles to light the night.
“They’re coffin nails.”
Excerpt from
The Floodgates of Hell, The Reminiscences of Colonel James McGonohan
1876
I have told you the sad beginning of the story of Monsieur Deschanel, whose riches could not buy the lives of his wife and child. His end is sadder still.
It had long been whispered that he enjoyed working with his hands in a way that was not becoming to a gentleman. In fairness, he may have owed the great wealth that the whisperers envied to that menial labor. His facility with pumps and sluices and canals would doubtless have been useful in guiding the proper amount of water to his crops. And it is said that the levee guarding his plantation never failed during his lifetime.
City society did not mind that he amused himself like a peasant with these toys when he was on the plantation, out of sight. It was a different matter when he moved his gadgets into town, where delicate sensibilities could not ignore the sight of a gentleman in grease-stained clothing.
It did not take long for his wealth to attract another lovely young bride. That wealth made it possible for him to purchase menial labor and to hire an educated but impoverished young gentleman to help with the work that obsessed him.
Why did it obsess him? Because he refused to lose this cherished new wife as he had lost the first one. And he refused to bring children into a world where such things happened. Monsieur Deschanel would not rest until New Orleans was a clean, dry, and safe place to nurture a family.
Let us not forget that love of family was at the root of the man’s obsession. This fact renders his fate that much more poignant.
Every hour of daylight was spent in his workshop, and many candles were burned as he labored over intricate drawings of miraculous pumps that used the power of moving water to move more water. And, oh, how the municipal government tired of his public railing against the design of the city’s drainage system. Draining rainwater and human waste was not a proper job for a gentleman, and the government consisted entirely of gentlemen.
Never mind that he was right. Water does not run uphill and the government’s well-intentioned canals could not carry excess water to Lake Pontchartrain, which any fool can see is situated higher than the city. In particular, Monsieur Deschanel argued against the Carondelet Canal, which encroached on the city’s very ramparts, if you will, ending as it did at Rampart Street. He maintained that torrential rains or tropical cyclones could easily raise the lake until it flowed down the canal and into the city. He was ignored.
Fortunately—or unfortunately—Monsieur Deschanel’s expansive property abutted the canal to which he so objected. He was, as I have said so many times, a very wealthy man, and this property encompassed more than one full city block. Fortunately—or unfortunately—this gave him ample space for his experiment.
There were few passersby to watch as his vision took a mechanical shape. Those men who did pass walked hurriedly, and the women drew their skirts to them in their reflexive desire to have no contact with a man rumored to be mad. City dwellers shunned Monsieur Deschanel and his wife. When plantation business required them to leave New Orleans, they were more isolated still.
Is it any wonder that his young wife began to chafe under her loneliness? Her husband would not even give her children to occupy her time.
I can imagine Monsieur Deschanel, happy in his obsession, barking orders to the clever young man, Monsieur Beaulieu, who had become such a satisfactory assistant. In time, their contraption was complete, and there was nothing to do but wait for a torrential storm. Knowing the climate here as I do, the wait could not have been long.
The legends are vague about the machinery Monsieurs Deschanel and Beaulieu built. Descriptions of a flooded ditch and massive gates are all that survive, but my experience as an engineer gives me a concrete image of what they were trying to achieve.
I believe that Monsieur Deschanel’s laborers had dug a canal that cut deep into his property and stopped just feet from the Carondelet Canal. Across this dry canal, they had constructed gates that would swing shut when overflow from the Carondelet Canal threatened to flow into his small canal and onto his property. When the rains came, he intended to have his laborers breach the narrow dike between his canal and the public canal, then set his floodgates into motion.
If those floodgates functioned properly—and he was accustomed to his machinery functioning as designed—then they would serve as a prototype for the protection he had begged the city government to install. Scaled up to full-size, they could be installed at the mouth of the canal that he believed was a danger to the city. And that would be the first step to building a New Orleans where he was willing to rear a family.
I am sure that you’ve guessed the nature of Monsieur’s Deschanel’s tragedy by now. His floodgates failed under the stress of tons of rushing water. Some say he was crushed under their weight. Others say that he drowned.
All accounts say that two of his laborers also lost their lives in the accident and that Monsieur Beaulieu was the sole survivor of the tragedy. It is only logical to presume that any description of the events that has come down to us can be traced back to him. Reason tells us that it is dangerous to make judgments on the word of just one witness. Perhaps this is why I instinctively doubt that the full story has survived.
In this engineer’s judgment, Monsieur Deschanel was right. The city needs those floodgates, and it didn’t get them. It doesn’t have them yet.
As clever young men often do after a tragedy, Monsieur Beaulieu landed on his feet. Monsieur Deschanel’s widow married him after a scandalously short period of mourning, but city society quickly forgot that impropriety. Attractive young couples blessed with great riches are easy to forgive.
Monsieur Beaulieu is said to have settled quickly into the life of his former employer, even to the extent of building and patenting marvelous inventions in his workshop. He was more handsome in his rich man’s clothes than Monsieur Deschanel had ever been, and he was much more skilled at making his wife smile.
Why does this bother me? Why does my damnable engineer’s logic taint this happy ending with the conviction that the collapse of those floodgates was no accident? Is it because Monsieur Deschanel’s reputation for skill has survived the centuries?
I find it difficult to believe that such a man would try to close those floodgates without being utterly sure they would hold. It is impossible to ignore the fact that their collapse brought Monsieur Beaulieu all that any man could want—a beautiful wife and fabulous riches. Monsieur Deschanel strikes me as a man who knew machinery, but not human nature. Was he unwise enough to trust his life to a man who knew the floodgates’ design well, but who had everything to gain from their destruction?
Is this why I look at a simple engineering failure and imbue it with the dark stain of murder?
Friday
“So…who was shooting at us yesterday?”
Faye knew that there were only a few answers Jodi could give to this question that would make her feel a single particle better. One of them was
Never fear. We’ve got the culprit locked up so far from daylight that he’ll never need sunscreen again.
Jodi kept munching on the breakfast burrito she’d just nuked in the police department’s microwave. Shuffling nonchalantly through the manila folder lying open on her desk, she mumbled, “Who was shooting at us?” Another piece of the burrito went in her mouth. “Hell if I know.”
This was far, far from Faye’s hoped-for answer. “Am I supposed to stop worrying, just because you’re so blissfully unconcerned about us both staying above-ground?”
“I’ll be above-ground, regardless. My family plot is in the Metairie Cemetery. It’s a mausoleum. We don’t bury our people.”
Faye spread her slender brown hand flat on top of Jodi’s paperwork. “My people like to plant their dead in the dirt. And I don’t think staying above-ground is worth much if I’m not breathing. How are you planning to make sure none of us acquires any bulletholes?”
Jodi nudged her hand aside and kept perusing the file. “You don’t think this was just another drive-by in just another crummy section of town? My supervisor does. Why don’t you?”
“For starters, I didn’t see any other targets standing around. Just us. Aren’t drive-by shootings usually related to gangs or drugs or something? It’s not like some drug dealer was shooting at a client who stiffed him, and we just got in the way. As far as I could see, we were alone.”
“As far as you could see. So maybe there was an obvious target standing around there somewhere—maybe in that woodsy area around the ditch that runs behind this row of houses—and maybe we got in the way of somebody trying to hit that target.”
Faye decided to let Jodi be obtuse. “Yeah. Maybe. If you say so.”
“You don’t think so? Just who do you think they were trying to plug? And why?”
“You? If they were after you, there could be a thousand reasons for a person to pull the trigger.”
Jodi finally looked up. “I’m glad you think I’m so popular.” After a few seconds, the detective’s deadpan face failed and she cracked a smile full of small, perfect teeth. Faye hoped the woman never took up poker.
“You know what I mean, Jodi. Every crook you’ve ever sent to jail could be gunning for you. And his brother. And every crook who’s afraid of someday crossing your path and being sent to jail.”
“I see. It’s an ordinary thing for me to be shot at. The rest of you, on the other hand…”
“Well, yeah. I’ve gotten crossways with some people in the past—”
“Crossways enough to get shot at?”
“Um, yeah, once or twice. Joe, too. But I can’t think of anybody in New Orleans who cares whether either of us lives or dies. And I certainly can’t imagine someone trying to kill Louie Godtschalk. I’m not so sure about Dauphine.”
Jodi shook her head. Her golden-brown curls kept moving a second after she stopped. “We take our voodoo practitioners seriously around here. I think most of New Orleans would be scared to put a bullethole in Dauphine. We all figure that mambos are just as dangerous when they’re dead as they are when they’re alive.”
“Did you find all three bullets? Can you tell where they came from?”
“They didn’t come from the street. It gave me great pleasure to tell that to my supervisor, who was hell-bent on pigeon-holing this as a garden-variety drive-by shooting. Bad neighborhood, stray bullets, lucky bystanders who didn’t catch any of those bullets in the gut…it’s an old story, and it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened on that block.”
Faye’s feeling of security left her, and it wouldn’t be back soon.
“So you’ve had drive-bys in that neighborhood, but this wasn’t one of them?”
“Nope. It came from a back yard somewhere north of where we were sitting.”
Faye had to picture a map of New Orleans in her mind, just to figure out which way was north. If the dang river would just flow in a straight line, then the city’s streets would be more likely to run straight, though such a logical thing still might never occur to people here in this city where logic slept. “In the direction of Dauphine’s house?”
“Correct. Could have been her back yard or the next yard over. Maybe even the next yard after that. None of them are fenced. Anybody could have been standing behind one of those big ol’ trees. There’s a little canal back there, too. Or maybe it’s just a big drainage ditch. Anyway. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for someone to sneak in, shoot, then fade into the night.”
Faye knew that Jodi hadn’t missed the obvious suspect. She had just elected not to mention her, so Faye did it, instead. “Or it could have been Dauphine. I’m not real crazy about the notion of someone leaving coffin nails under my doorstep or in the water where Nina nearly drowned. I like Dauphine, but she’s the only person I know who’s likely to have access to a steady supply of coffin nails. Do you see her as a plausible suspect?”
“That’s what I like about you, Faye. You never stop being an archaeologist. You never stop digging. And you never fail to look at facts, even when you don’t like them much. Dauphine is your friend and you don’t want her to be guilty of attempted murder, but you’re willing to weigh the evidence and look at the truth with an open mind.”
Faye looked at her expectantly and Jodi said, “Oh, yeah. I didn’t answer your question. Is Dauphine a plausible suspect? Hmmm. She’s being questioned right now—Louie, too—but I can’t imagine what either of them would have against you or me. Or Nina.”
“Or Shelly. Dauphine knew her, too.” An odd thought occurred to Faye, a thought that would have made no sense in any other American city. “Do you think the people questioning her are willing to cross swords with a mambo? Maybe she’ll threaten to put a hex on them. And don’t think I haven’t noticed that
you
aren’t doing the questioning.”
“Oh, Dauphine knows I’m the reason she’s being hassled. She’s perfectly capable of hexing me
in absentia
. Nevertheless, I was lily-livered enough to assign a couple of Yankees to the task. Besides, I want to find out what she’s going to say to people she doesn’t know, people who weren’t lounging like sitting ducks in the sights of that gun last night.”
Jodi leaned against her desk, legs crossed. Then she crossed her arms like a woman fending off a curse. “Those two Yankees may find themselves hexed so bad that their dogs die and their wives run off, but they don’t know diddly about mambos. They’ll never know what hit ’em. They’ll just write it off to bad luck. Nobody’s going to be blaming
me
for throwing them in the path of an avenging mambo.”
“So how’s Nina?” Faye asked anxiously, as Jodi hung up the phone.
She’d sat across the desk, listening to half the conversation as Jodi quizzed Nina’s doctor. Jodi’s reactions hadn’t told Faye nearly as much as she’d wanted to know.
Jodi had said, “That’s good,” and “Can I come back in and talk to her again?” and “Do you think she’ll be in the hospital much longer?” She’d given an incongruous laugh, the kind that sounds like it hurts the person laughing. Then she’d thanked the doctor for his time, told him she’d be checking back again soon, and said good-bye.
From this, Faye had inferred that Nina hadn’t taken a turn for the worse. She also inferred that Nina wasn’t going to be back on the job with Faye any time soon, looking for treasures with her stupid-looking trowel.
The trowel…Faye didn’t even want to think about the trowel. She promised herself that she’d buy Nina a new trowel—any trowel, as long as it wasn’t snub-nosed—once her assistant was well enough to work again.
“I’d hoped for better news,” Jodi said, “but I guess we have to take what we can get. Nina’s been released from intensive care. She’s doing very well, physically—so well, in fact that her doctors say she’ll be going home soon, maybe this afternoon. But her speech is improving slowly, if at all.”
She shook her head and gave the same short ugly laugh Faye had just heard. “Remember how Nina seized her moment with a TV camera? Quiet people like her—they must feel like they have plenty to say and no one listens. Well, she really must feel that way now. The doctor says she talks all the time, but it’s all random nonsense. Or maybe not so random. Remember how he told us that brain injury patients sometimes fish for one word and come up with another that’s related to it somehow?”
Faye nodded.
“Well, Nina’s nephew came to visit her, and she talked about chocolate for an hour. The nephew went down to the vending machines and bought her a candy bar. That didn’t satisfy her. It’s frustrating to be misunderstood, so she got even more agitated. A nurse came in and asked if she’d like some hot cocoa. Nope.”
Jodi pursed her lips, took a big sip of coffee and swallowed it hard. “Nina was getting so stirred up that the nurse was thinking of asking the doctor-on-call for a sedative. Then somebody asked if she wanted a chocolate chip cookie, and Nina got so upset that the doctor heard her all the way down the hall and he
did
order a sedative. Good thing it took awhile for it to be delivered, or we still might not know what Nina wanted.”
Faye didn’t like this story. How awful it would be for someone to drug you, just because they couldn’t understand what you were saying. “What was it? What did she want?”
“Nina’s cousin came in the room about that time and called the nephew by his name, which was Chip. The nurse had worked with a lot of head injury patients. When she heard the cousin say ‘Chip,’ she nearly busted a gut laughing. Then she asked Nina if she’d been trying to call the boy by his name. Nina was so relieved that she cried.”
Faye heard herself give the same painful laugh she’d heard from Jodi. “Chocolate chip.”
“Yep. Her brain is still working and making associations, and she’s still a smart woman. Nina recognized the boy. She knew his name. But when she reached in her brain for his name, she got the word stored next door to it.”
It was funny, but it wasn’t. Faye wanted to hurt the person who hurt her friend this badly. “Why did somebody do this to her?”
“I keep asking myself that. Actually, I keep asking myself, ‘Why did somebody do these things to Nina
and
Shelly?’ We don’t know that the two attacks were related, but the two women knew each other and they knew a lot of the same folks. There’s a decent shot that solving Shelly’s murder will bring us Nina’s attacker. Or vice versa.”
“Strangulation’s not the same thing as crashing a heavy object onto somebody’s skull, but when I imagine doing such a thing, it feels…” Faye stopped herself. She didn’t like the way it felt to imagine such a thing. “Um, it feels creepy, but what I’m trying to say is that it feels the
same
. Stealthy. And impersonal. Somebody walked up behind two women and tried to kill them in such a way that they never really had to look them in the face.”
“Yeah. The two attacks have that in common. And your observation that Shelly could have seen something on her aerial photos that showed problems with the levees is interesting, because Nina had been ranting about problems with the levees just the day before she was attacked.”
“And she’s been blogging about the levee failures for a long time, or so I’m told.”
“Exactly.” Jodi rubbed a finger over the photo Faye had shown her, tracing the line of a long, slender sheet piling. “Don’t forget that Shelly had been calling around just before she died, trying to get somebody to listen to her concerns about the levees.”
“Everything seems to come back to the levees. But then everything does, around here. If they stop holding back the water, then you’ve got no city, do you?”
Faye stuck out her mug, and Jodi poured her another cup of Louisiana-style coffee, as interpreted by the New Orleans Police Department. It was so strong it felt thick in the mouth. It was laced with enough chicory to completely confuse Faye’s palate, which was expecting…well,
coffee
. And it was as black as Satan’s heart.
“Damn, Faye. Can’t you think of something a little bit more politically charged than that? A conspiracy to assassinate a major public official, maybe? People around here are kinda sensitive about their levees.”
“People kill each other over ‘sensitive’ stuff. Well? Don’t they?”
“Yes, indeed.” Jodi stared deep into her cup and snickered.
“What’s so funny? Levee failures? The assassination of a major public official? Brain damage? Murder?”
“Nope. Charles Landry.”
Faye didn’t get the joke. “He’s insufferable, but he doesn’t exactly make me laugh.”
“I called him to ask whether Shelly had ever shared her concerns over the levees with him.”
“Had she?”
“I have no idea, because Charles went into immediate ass-covering mode. It seems that his firm has a finger in all aspects of flood control work—levee design and maintenance, for starters. They’ve also done some work on floodgates to protect against flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. They dredge canals. Right now, they’re bidding on a project to upgrade the pumping system. Charles did
not
want to hear me asking questions about why the levees failed. He handed me off to his assistant Leila the Bulldog, so she could put my call through to a so-called expert.”
Charles’ expert must emit an odor strong enough to travel through telephone lines, because Jodi’s nose was wrinkling at the thought of him.
“Not someone you’re itching to hire as the department’s engineering consultant?”
“Not just no, but hell, no. It was the company’s marketing flak, telling me not to believe all the stuff that the independent levee review team said in their report.”
“So now you’re gonna have to read that report?”
The question made Jodi reach for the coffee pot again. “Again…hell, no. The thing’s six-hundred-and-ninety pages long. I’ve gotta find me an impartial engineer to read it. Until then, I can’t even form an opinion on the issue.” She held out two sheets of paper. “But I sure wish I had me an opinion on these.”
Faye reached for the two pages. They were copies of the most intriguing things found in Shelly’s pocket. At least, Faye thought so.
In her right hand was the neatly inscribed list that started with Charles’ surname and ended with Shelly’s.
- Landry
- Martin
- Guidry
- Bergeron
- McCaffrey
- Johnson
- Dupuit
- Prejean
- Broussard
And in her other hand was a messy list, scrawled in handwriting even worse than Joe’s.
- Johnson
- Guidry
- Broussard
- McCaffrey
- Dupuit
- Bergeron
- Prejean
- Martin
- Landry
Jodi and Faye devoted a solid half-hour to brainstorming those names. They got exactly nowhere.
“Pontchartrain Engineering is an obvious link,” Jodi said, holding up the company’s flashy brochure. Charles Landry was one of the faces on the cover. Either he was a high muckety-muck with the company, or he was the most photogenic engineer they could find.
“
Shelly Broussard and Charles Landry both worked at Pontchartrain Engineering, and their surnames are on the list. Leila Caron’s name isn’t there, but Matt Guidry is her boyfriend, so there’s another link to the company.”
Jodi flipped thoughtfully through the colorful brochure. “I went to the company website and searched their directory. Charles Landry and Shelly Broussard were in it—Leila Caron, too—but none of the other names appears. I’ll get hold of a list from the time of the storm but we’ll have to wait a while for that information.”
“So what do we know for certain?”
“Neither list is alphabetical,” Jodi said, ticking off her observations by counting on her fingers. “We’ve checked professional organizations for a link between these nine names. Nothing.”
“We’ve got an engineer, a park ranger, and an administrative assistant,” Faye said. “I guess there might not be too many professional organizations that attract all three of those. Maybe something social, like The Royal Order of the Moose?”
“I already checked that.”
Wow. Jodi was thorough. Faye had only suggested the Moose because their name made her smile.
Jodi kept counting on her fingers. “We thought they might have gone to church together, but Shelly, Matt, and Charles didn’t live close enough together to belong to the same parish. I even did a web search for all of those names together. Nothing came up but a bunch of genealogies, and none of them showed a family tree that included all those names.”
“Have you just come out and asked Charles and Matt about the lists? It’d be interesting to hear their explanations of why their names might have been in Shelly’s pocket.”
“I asked Matt, the next day after we found Shelly. As for Charles, I was saving that question, so I’d have an excuse to call him again, if it suited me.”
“Does it suit you now?”
“Yeah. It’s time to bother my least favorite engineer, just one more time. Okay, two more times. Hell. I don’t like the man. I’ll bother him as many times as I like.”
Jodi downed another big gulp of her coffee and an evil, caffeine-fueled grin lit her face. “You know what? That conversation would be a lot more effective in person, don’t you think? I can wave these lists around. Make him look at the handwriting. Tell him to look real close at both lists, so he can be good and sure that he’s never seen them before. Why don’t we go make Mr. Charles Landry miserable, face-to-face?”
***
Jodi put the car in park and would have jumped out of it, ready to annoy the life out of Charles Landry, but Faye stopped her with a hand on her forearm.
“Before we go in there, you’d better tell me how your last interview with Leila the secretary went.”
“She’s not a secretary. She’s an administrative assistant. She reminded me about that pretty loudly. A couple of times. And she had a valid point. The nameplate on her desk does say she’s an ‘Administrative Asst.’ Me, I woulda left off that last ‘t’.”
Faye heard a little guilt speaking to her. “You know, my mama spent forty years making her jerk of a boss look good, and he never gave her any title other than ‘secretary.’ I shouldn’t laugh at Leila, just because she wants to be taken seriously.”
“No. You should laugh at her because she’s a pretentious snob. Let me see…within the first five minutes, she’d asked me how long I’ve lived in New Orleans, where I went to grade school, and who my people were. She made sure I knew that her mother ruled a particularly choice Garden Club with an iron hand. I also learned that, just this past Mardi Gras season, her father was King of Some Mystic Krewe or Other. I believe she was about to ask me what regiment my great-great-great-grandfather served in during the Civil War. Excuse me—the War Between the States. Also my mother’s maiden name.”
Faye motioned to Jodi to flip the car key toward “auxiliary” long enough for her to roll the window down and let some air into the stuffy car. “If I’d been in your shoes, I’d have told her I was a descendant of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen. Your mother’s maiden name is none of her damn business.”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty important damn business around here. The social circles you can enter, the exclusive Mardi Gras balls you attend…‘who your people are’ is a critical component of those things, and your mama’s maiden name figures into all that. I’d say it was more important than what color your mama was, and you can’t say that for most places in America.”
Faye, whose parents’ skin colors couldn’t have been more different from each other, wondered why nobody was asking about anybody’s daddy’s family. She figured it was because people’s last names revealed enough information for the asker to go poking around in their father’s genealogy, unaided.
“A big, fat civil rights lawsuit or two might fix those social circles and Mardi Gras balls…”
“Did I say any laws were being broken?” Jodi asked. “I’m pretty darn white, and I wouldn’t be comfortable at society balls around here. I could attend. You could attend. But if nobody knew who our people were, we might be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to have more than a brief, polite conversation. It would be nothing personal. They just wouldn’t be able to think of anything to say to us.”
Faye knew these things. Bobby Longchamp had been as obsessed with family relationships as Leila. It had just bothered her less, because she liked him more.
***
“We only want a few minutes with Mr. Landry.”
Jodi was making every effort to use her most official detective’s voice on Leila Caron, and she could see that it was working. She liked it when people respected her badge. She liked it better when people respected her as a person, but Leila seemed to be one of those who just respected the badge.
It seemed that she was also more than a little intimidated by the badge. Or maybe it was guilt that was keeping her bright black eyes fastened on Jodi, as she carefully answered questions without really saying anything at all. It was as if Faye wasn’t even in the room.