Floodgates (3 page)
Faye had steeled herself against being dismissed. Ignored. Brushed off. Why would the police spend even a minute listening to her far-fetched suspicions? She was completely unprepared for Detective Jodi Bienvenu.
“I’m glad you shared your concerns with the responding officer—” Jodi had begun.
Faye had recognized this sentence as the opening salvo of a brush-off. She’d expected this, but it still stung.
But Jodi had kept talking, saying in her thick south Louisiana brogue, “—and I’m glad I was close enough by that I could come out before you got away.” She’d put a foot on the yellow tape cordoning off the ruined sun porch, so Faye could step over it. “Come on in here, you. Come and show me what you’re talking ’bout.”
Faye did what she was told, but she stood well back from the bones, trying not to touch anything. The technicians had only begun to unpack their gear. It was way too soon to risk letting an untrained civilian like Faye mess things up.
“Um…Detective Bienvenu, isn’t there some kind of rule against me being in here before your forensics team has a chance to…you know…do whatever it is they do?”
“It’s ‘Jodi,’ not ‘Detective Bienvenu.’ Anyway, why’d you have to go and talk about rules? This is New Orleans. We don’t have anything around here you could actually call a rule.” Jodi used her hands to encompass the entire room. “Besides, would you look at this pile of stinking garbage? Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say this poor soul had help in turning up dead. Even so, this crime scene was worthless yesterday. Today? After a dozen teenagers have tromped through it for hours? It’s worse than useless.”
Faye realized that the detective had a point. “Then why are you bothering to listen to me? Why not just call this an accidental drowning and be done with it?”
“Because you make sense when you talk. And because I pray at the shrine of Saint Anthony.”
Faye managed to avoid saying, “Huh?”, but she must have been doing a poor job of hiding her befuddlement, because Jodi explained herself. “You didn’t go to Catholic school, did you? Saint Anthony’s the patron saint of lost things and missing persons. He suits me a lot better than Saint Jude.”
Again, Faye cleverly avoided saying “Huh?”, and Jodi cooperated by explaining herself.
“Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. I don’t like my cases to get to the point where I have to run crying to Saint Jude, no. Lots of times, fighting a lost cause is unavoidable, but it’s never a good thing. Me, myself, I like to start with Saint Anthony.”
***
Detective Jodi Bienvenu felt a healthy disdain for civilians who thought they’d be a lot of help with a criminal investigation, simply because they’d watched several seasons of CSI. But she also had a healthy disdain for police officers who dismissed valuable insight merely because it came from a non-professional. Criminal investigations were about facts and rational detective work. They were about logic. She knew that. But Jodi Bienvenu knew they were also about intuition and feelings and ideas that just didn’t let go.
Perhaps her respect for things that were unprovable but still true was something she’d breathed in for her entire life. Such things permeated the air here in this illogical city. It was not unusual to meet people who held equally firm beliefs in the protective powers of Catholic saints and voodoo charms and benevolent ghosts. New Orleans was full to overflowing with ghosts these days. Jodi prayed that at least some of them were benevolent.
She was fortunate enough to work for people who shared her respect for the indirect path to truth. So she was unlikely to catch much heat for tackling this investigation in an unusual way.
This woman standing beside her, Faye Longchamp, had just spent ten minutes presenting a quietly passionate argument that this sad little affair was a murder, not a storm-induced drowning. She had marshaled her facts, presented them logically, and made a good case.
Jodi knew detectives who would dismiss Faye’s ideas because they came from a civilian. She knew others who weren’t capable of taking Faye seriously because she was a little tiny woman. And some Neanderthals at the department would ignore her because she wasn’t white.
There were fewer of those every day, as retirements and funerals cut heavily into their aging ranks, but Faye had a wariness that Jodi recognized. When your gender and your race had worked against you all your life, you knew deep-down that there was a heavy cost to being wrong. People like Faye made sure they were right before they opened their mouths, which made them very useful to have around.
The logical part of Jodi’s brain heard Faye speak and appreciated her cool intellect. But the illogical part of her brain, the part that took fragments of the truth and assembled them without conscious thought—that important part of her liked Faye intensely. Because as much as Faye might insist that she answered every one of life’s questions with a reasoned evaluation of the facts, Jodi didn’t believe her.
This was a woman whose intuition was so engrained into her being that she didn’t even know it was there. This was also a woman of an uncommonly brilliant mind, and Jodi knew that she, by comparison, was simply smart. Smart and cagey.
Intuition and maybe a little touch of voodoo were telling Jodi that she should keep Faye around. If anybody could help her make sense of this case, it was Faye Longchamp.
***
While the crime scene technicians began the delicate work of photographing the bones
in-situ,
Faye stood aside with Jodi, talking possibilities.
“Maybe someone drowned in this room during the storm or just afterward, then the floodwater left a pile of junk on top of the body as it receded…” Faye stopped talking and shook her head, because she still thought that scenario was so very unlikely.
She thrashed about for some better suggestions. “But that would mean that irons and sewing machines have learned to float. So maybe the person was already dead and the body got here later, on its own, by floating or something, and…um…the same thing happened—you know…floodwaters washing heavy stuff on top of it. Except I just keep coming back to the fact that dumbbells sink pretty fast. This scenario
could
have happened naturally, but it just doesn’t feel right.”
Jodi’s arms were crossed, and she was motionless, except for her right index finger tapping a steady rhythm on her left bicep. “I don’t know how all that stuff got there, but if there was enough of it piled on the corpse early on, I guess the weight would’ve held it down later, when it started to bloat up.”
Jodi was a dainty woman not much taller than five-foot-nothing Faye, but her brash, gregarious nature seemed bigger than she was. With honey-colored skin, and eyes and hair that were an only slightly darker shade of brown, she seemed too…well…too
pretty
to be talking about bloated corpses.
Faye squinted at the bone protruding from the heap of refuse. “I’d say an iron and a sewing machine and a couple of dumbbells would have been enough to keep a body underwater.”
“Probably, but you never know. After awhile, a dead person gets an awful lot of buoyancy on ’em.” Jodi grimaced. “You know, I wish I didn’t know so much about that.”
“I bet.” Faye considered the positions of the bone and the dumbbell. “Maybe somebody found this dead body in the water and…um…didn’t want it to float away. So he piled a bunch of stuff on it, planning to come back later.”
“Maybe. But then what? He got busy and forgot he left a corpse behind?”
“Maybe he died, too.”
Jodi pursed her lips and nodded her head a little. “Could be. Lotta people died that week, and not all of them during the storm. But that’s not what you really think happened. That’s not why you took my sad little routine body retrieval and turned it into an investigative nightmare. I know what you’re thinking. But I want you to say it out loud.”
Faye thought of her training in analyzing stratigraphy. If one thing is on top of another thing, then the thing that’s on top came later…unless the archaeologist doing the work can think of a damn fine reason why that isn’t true. She sifted through the explanations for the stratigraphy of this site. Her mind wouldn’t let go of the most disturbing option.
“Okay. I’ll say it.” Faye took a deep breath. “Maybe this person had human help in getting dead, getting here, and getting covered up. Maybe somebody needed to dispose of a corpse in late August 2005. What better solution than to take that body to a flooded-out house and sink it to the floor? It would be weeks before anybody found it and, when they did, nobody would look at it and think,
Murder victim
. Nope. The long list of lives taken by Hurricane Katrina would simply be inflated by one…and a murderer would walk away free.”
Faye hated it when people got away with murder. Judging by the look on Jodi’s face, she did, too.
Faye should have realized that Nina would come.
Calling Nina to tell her that she would be away from the dig for hours had been the considerate thing for Faye to do. She hadn’t burdened her assistant with troubling details like her suspicion that this was no accidental death. And she certainly hadn’t burdened her with the unsettling feelings she’d had since she first saw a denuded human bone protruding from a pile of flood debris. Still, Faye wasn’t one to gloss over unpleasant truths, so she’d given Nina a brief description of what she’d seen.
If she’d had her wits about her, she’d have known that Nina would come running. The woman had grown up near here, just like Matt. When she got word that someone had been found dead here, nothing was going to stop her from running home.
Not many minutes passed after Faye thumbed her cell phone off until she saw Nina bounding out of a still-rolling Ford. Charles hit the parking brake and caught up to her in seconds, running with an athlete’s easy grace.
Nina rushed to Faye, loping awkwardly like someone who hadn’t run a step since high school P.E. class. She looked uncertainly at the detective at Faye’s side, as if unsure which of the two women could answer her question. Finally, she blurted out, “Can one of you tell me who it is? Who’s dead?”
Jodi’s voice slipped from the conversational tone she’d been using with Faye, all the way down into the range that said
I’m-an-officer-of-the-law-and-I’ve-got-everything-under-control.
“We’ve got our people working on that identification.”
Nina turned her eyes back to Faye, and they showed a naked need for reassurance. Charles still stood beside her, with his arm cupped around her elbow. Faye wondered why Nina didn’t look to him for comfort. He slipped an arm around her waist, but she never took her stricken eyes off Faye.
Because the situation apparently wasn’t painful enough, a television van pulled up to the curb and disgorged a cameraman who couldn’t have been over twenty-five, a graying man who hadn’t seen twenty-five in a long time, and a crisply dressed young woman. Faye could tell that the woman was the newscaster because she was carrying a microphone.
The oldest member of the party carried a notepad, which he was rapidly filling with notes. He stooped over the pad, squinting like a man who rarely worked in unfiltered sunlight, but his obvious discomfort didn’t slow his frenetic scribbling.
Jodi walked toward the TV crew, maneuvering their position so that the exposed human bones remained out of view of the camera. Faye heard her talking to them, but she didn’t say much.
Yes, a body had been uncovered.
Yes, it was buried under debris that seemed to have been undisturbed since shortly after Hurricane Katrina.
No, there had been no identification of the victim.
“Can we talk to the person who discovered the remains?”
“That person is fifteen years old. I’d suggest that you talk to her minister.”
Adroitly maintaining control of what the camera did and did not see, Jodi beckoned to the minister, then backed away in Faye’s direction while he was interviewed.
“It’s been a long time since we found a hurricane victim,” Jodi said. “This could be the last one, I guess. I hope. I imagine the TV station will give this some serious air time, with a very serious title like
Closing the Door on Katrina
.”
The reporter finished with the minister, then beckoned to the gray-haired man, who was still scribbling on his pad.
Faye edged closer, because the man’s scholarly air seemed out-of-place in this setting. She wondered why he was riding around with a TV crew.
The reporter pointed her microphone at him, saying, “This is Louie Godtschalk, author of an upcoming book on the Katrina levee failures. He’s here today to do research on the book, and we’ve asked him to tell us about—”
Godtschalk held up a pale hand. “No. The levee failures prompted this book, but that’s not my topic. I’m writing a history of New Orleans, told in terms of water. The city is here because of the river—our country desperately needed it to be here—but many, many people have had to work for their entire lives to keep it dry. New Orleans is an engineering marvel, really, and I don’t think that story has ever been told—not the mechanical side and certainly not the human side.”
He cleared his throat nervously and cocked his head to the left, as if his collar were too tight. He clearly didn’t like being on the air. Faye wondered if he was prepared for the wave of media attention that could accompany a successful book on the flooding of New Orleans.
“After Katrina…when the flood came…I began to wonder whether the lives of those brilliant innovators might make an interesting story. When people started asking questions like, ‘Should we rebuild New Orleans, now that we’ve seen what can happen here? Do we want to fight a losing battle, again and again?’, that’s when I knew that I had a story that was important enough to—”
As the author spoke, Faye was shocked to see Nina rush at him like an avenging mouse.
“A losing battle? Don’t you say that! Don’t you ever say that! If you say that on television, then people will believe it’s true.”
Nina kept moving until she was nose-to-nose with the man. “This was no losing battle. And it was no natural disaster. This was a travesty that didn’t have to happen.”
The author didn’t even try to finish his sentence. He just stood gaping, on-camera, at a woman who seemed to have simply taken all she could stand.
“They told us that our levees were solid, and we believed them. They told us that they would hold up under a hurricane that was plenty worse than Katrina. Hell, Katrina didn’t even give us a direct hit. God help us, if she had.”
She raised a trembling fist. Faye couldn’t imagine that Nina had raised a fist to anybody in her life, ever. “Have you read the independent report on the levee failures? Have you read it?”
Faye could tell that the author was trying to say that, yes, he’d read it, but Nina’s frustration had been bottled up too long for anything or anybody to stop it from spewing out.
“Did you know that the design engineers used the same safety factor for our levees that they use for protecting cow pastures? Wouldn’t you build a little bigger safety factor into something that protected a million people and billions of dollars of their stuff? I would, but I’m not an engineer, am I?”
Nina shook the still-upraised fist. “Did you know that there were
trees
growing on some levees? How could that be allowed to happen? Levees are made of dirt. How can a pile of dirt hold up under that much water pressure when it’s full of tree roots? But I’m not trained to look after levees. What the hell do I know?”
Faye was thinking that Nina seemed to know a lot. Charles was still standing where Nina had left him, with his hand sticking awkwardly into the air where her elbow had been just seconds before. He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before.
Faye hoped he’d appreciate her friend Nina a little better from here on out. Some men were so busy charming women that it never occurred to them to wonder what was going on in their heads. Well, now he knew what was going on inside Nina’s head. He knew that she was strong and passionate and interesting. And, after that evening’s newscast, so would the rest of New Orleans. Maybe Charles would find that he had competition.
The newscaster looked like she wanted to ask a question. It didn’t look good for her to lose control of the moment so completely, but a little deft editing could probably fix that. Nina clearly had no intention of giving up her audience. Faye had the definite sense that she was now talking to the viewing public, though her eyes were still boring into the hapless author.
“Did you know that there was a two-hundred-foot hole in the Orleans Canal levee, because nobody could agree on who was supposed to finish that levee? Don’t you tell me we shouldn’t rebuild our homes! Not when our money—everybody’s money—was being poured down a rat hole. You can build a levee that’s a million miles long, but if there’s a 200-foot hole in it, then you just spent that money on exactly nothing. Doesn’t it make you angry that your money was wasted that way?”
Godtschalk smoothed his thinning hair off his forehead, and nodded. He tried to speak, but Nina was having none of it.
“Not rebuild New Orleans? Will we rebuild San Francisco and Los Angeles when the next big earthquake takes one of them out? Let me answer that one. We will. And neither of those cities will look like this, years after the fact.” She spread her arms wide and spun slowly in place, gesturing at the ruined houses spreading out around her, one desolate block after another.
Slowly, she let her arms drop to her sides and, tears on her face, turned to gaze mutely at the camera for a moment. Then she raised a hand and pointed at a spot somewhere behind the camera. “My home was three blocks in that direction. If the levees that my tax dollars…and yours, Mister Book Author…if the levees that our money built had held, then I’d be living there, instead of sleeping on my cousin’s couch. Don’t you be telling these people that my home’s not worth rebuilding.”
Nina started slowly backing away from the camera. The newscaster slashed her hand across her throat, and the cameraman quit filming after Nina’s first few steps. Faye could see her friend shrinking back into herself, and she missed the new, fiery Nina.
Within three steps, Nina had stumbled over a curb and dropped to one knee, but the news audience wouldn’t see that. They wouldn’t see a clumsy, dowdy woman willing to make herself look stupid, if that’s what it took to be heard. No. They would see a prophet weeping for a lost city.
Jodi sighed like a woman who’d lived through too many surprises for one day. She asked the reporter, “Was that live?”
The newscaster didn’t have to say yes. Her I’m-going-to-get-a-Pulitzer smirk said it all. Faye reflected that the woman had done exactly nothing. The Pulitzer people might very well respond to what she just saw, but Nina was the one who had done her research and gotten her point across to the masses.
She
was the one who deserved a Pulitzer.
***
Louie Godtschalk tucked his notepad under his arm, and decided to forget the academics and politicians that he was scheduled to interview. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t forget them. He’d just set them aside for the day or two it would take him to draw this passionate woman’s story out of her. Because she unquestionably had a story. No writer worth his salt could possibly look at her face and fail to see that.
The detective, too, looked like a woman with things to say
,
and he’d wager that those things were worth hearing. And the biracial woman standing next to her, the tiny thing wearing army-green pants and heavy boots—she looked like someone worth knowing. She also looked like someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly.
Louie Godtschalk came from Louisiana Creole stock, and the men in his family were routinely coaxed and bullied into their best selves by the women in their lives—women with guts and heart. The frothy little girl who had thrust her microphone in his face was not one of those women, but these three were.
Louie knew that he was pushing the tolerance of American readers with his esoteric little book on the making of New Orleans. How many pages about drainage and levees and (God help him) sewage could he expect people to read, when they had access to all the mindless drivel in the world? Not many. But these women might be his answer. If he followed them around for awhile, they might lead him to stories that would hold the attention of even the flightiest American.