The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (27 page)

Eugenia Babbitt seemed to recoil, or at least hold her guard. “I hope they are questions pertaining to library usage, sir; as you can see, I am working right now.”

“They are about a particular patron’s library usage. I was hoping that perhaps you were about to take your lunch. I promise it won’t take long.”

“Very well. Meet me outside in five minutes.”

Tate took her to be late-forties and the very picture of a librarian: sensible shoes, sweater worn around her shoulders with a cardigan chain to keep it from slipping, eyeglasses, hair in a bun.

“Thank you for agreeing to speak with me, Miss Babbitt. I’ll get right to the point. I have been retained by Mrs. Letice Arrow to investigate the murder of her son, William, who was shot to death over at the A&P back in December of 1949. There is no question as to who did it; the man was captured on the spot. However, he is uncommunicative and his identity has never been ascertained. Mrs. Arrow has commissioned me to find that information. You see, she has never been able to find peace since the loss of her son. Are you familiar with the incident?”

Eugenia Babbitt nodded. “I remember it, though not in detail.”

“That’s all right. It’s not exactly details I’m after; it’s more like general information.” At that point he reached into his suit pocket and removed the yellowish slip of paper that the perpetrator had in his pocket at the time of his arrest, the one that bore the notation F379.N5A182. “Can you tell me what this number might be, Miss Babbitt?”

It took less than two seconds for Eugenia Babbitt to blurt, “I would say that it’s a call number for a book. Every book has its own specific number, one that’s placed at the bottom of the spine for ease in locating it on the shelf.” She did not mention that she recognized the slip of paper; it was one of those details she claimed not to remember.

“Why, yes, now that you say it, I can see that that is exactly what it is. Can you tell me whereabouts in the library a book with this particular call number would be located, Miss Babbitt?”

“That one would be in the closed stacks,” she answered.

“And what sorts of books are found in the closed stacks?”

“Reference books, mainly,” the librarian said, rubbing at a twitch that had begun beneath one eye. “Is that all then, Mr. Tate?”

“If you’ll just bear with me, Miss Babbitt. The official report states that witnesses came forward placing William Arrow’s killer in this library for several days running before the crime. Police interviews show that librarians said the man would write down a note if he wanted to request a book.” Tate then held up that yellowish slip of paper. “I believe this might be one of those notes, Miss Babbitt.”

The librarian knew that Coleman Tate would smell a lie and decided that she’d best cooperate. “Now that you bring it up, I do remember something. Normally, the patron gives the call number to a staff member and that staff member retrieves the item. I happened to be the staff member in this case, but I did not follow procedure. You see, people were staring at him—as I’m sure you know, he suffers a deformity—and I felt he might be uncomfortable. He’d expressed an interest in back issues of the newspaper, and so I let him into the back stacks. I also let him into the closed stacks by himself. I thought perhaps he was doing research. I didn’t ask what specific book he was looking for.”

“I see. It was kind of you to consider his discomfort.”

“Have I answered all your questions, Mr. Tate?”

“Just one more thing, if you don’t mind, Miss Babbitt. William Arrow’s killer has been incarcerated in the state asylum for the criminally insane since December of 1949. You visit him there regularly,” Tate said. A slight blush came over the librarian’s face. “You had to show identification. You are the only Eugenia Babbitt in Louisiana. Had you known him before the time of the murder?”

Eugenia Babbitt looked down and then back into Coleman Tate’s face. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and stepped into her own fiction. When she opened her eyes, she was no longer a dull and plain-faced librarian but had become one half of a doomed pair of lovers.

“No, Mr. Tate, I did not know him prior to those days before the shooting. But he seemed so very alone that I felt sorry for him. Hence the visits.” She did not tell Tate that she had feelings for the killer because he was lonelier than she. Nor did she speak of the night she had taken the man into her home, where she cooked him a meal and placed a soft blanket over him when he fell asleep on her sofa. She did not mention that The Wanderer had gone before she awoke the next morning or that the blanket she’d put over him was neatly folded. She’d taken such thoughtfulness as a gesture of love.

“Thank you, Miss Babbitt. I know I speak for the Arrow family when I tell you how much your cooperation is appreciated.”

Eugenia Babbitt walked away from the detective. She had entered a new chapter in her personal novel, one in which she was a woman who could not warn her tragic lover that a dangerous man was after him.

Coleman Tate went back into the library, where he asked the librarian at the circulation desk to please retrieve F379.N5A182, which turned out to be the New Orleans Social Register for 1949. What could the killer have wanted with that? The book contained public information, not family secrets. Was he trying to find someone? Prove that he was related to them? What?

And then the sounds of a sliding finger and thumping arrow found their way into Coleman Tate’s mind. On a hunch, he turned to a certain page and slid his finger down it. The detective stared at the entry for Arrow, but found no immediate clue. The listing that came before it was that of a family named Arndt, noteworthy as brewers who’d made a fortune in beer. The one that came after was Artemus, the founding family of Artemus, Tennessee. Tate was absorbing the Register, getting a feel for it and hoping it would share something more.

And then he saw the mark. He had not seen it at first; it was fine and faint, perhaps the breadth of a human hair. Under William’s name was a very slight pencil line. Anyone at any time could have put it there, Tate thought; William himself might have done it. Or maybe Dancy Arrow had gone looking for proof of his pedigree before she made the commitment. Such a thing was not unheard of.

The detective read the complete entry and saw that it gave Letice’s name as Letice Arrow (née Molyneaux). He consulted the page for Molyneaux and saw that it too had been underlined. This was no coincidence. William Arrow had been a target. Perhaps if the killer had not been apprehended, he would have gone after Letice as well. It did not pay to be newsworthy, thought Detective Coleman Tate.

In fact, The Wanderer had done just as Tate supposed: He’d read all about the Molyneaux and Arrow families, their births and deaths and club affiliations. He’d read about marriages, fêtes, and charity events. He’d traced William Arrow to Tulane, and law school, and his eventual employment at the law firm of Robillard & Broome. And then The Wanderer had firmed up his plans.

PROGRESS REPORT
IN THE MATTER OF WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW (DECEASED)

PREVIOUS FINDING:

Miss Eugenia Babbitt, a librarian at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library, has at various times over the years visited the subject of this investigation.

FOLLOW-UP:

An interview of Miss Babbitt revealed that said subject spent time in the back stacks where he read stored copies of local newspapers. He also requested an item that was stored in the closed stacks. Under normal procedure, a request is made and the material brought out, but in this case that procedure was not followed. Miss Babbitt stated that she believed he was conducting research, and since the closed stacks contain reference books and journals, she let him in that locked room and left him there alone. She felt it the courteous thing to do, since it appeared that other patrons were staring at him.

The perpetrator had in his possession at the time of the crime a slip of paper bearing the notation: F379.N5A182. I have confirmed that this is the call number assigned to the 1949 New Orleans Social Register, which is held in the aforementioned closed stacks visited by the perpetrator. There is a faint pencil line under the name Arrow and one under Molyneaux as well. Further findings to follow.

Letice looked at one particular sentence of Tate’s report over and over and over:
There is a faint pencil line under the name Arrow and one under Molyneaux as well.

Bonaventure heard the determination behind The Wanderer’s library deed. It sounded like a thousand marching boots.

The Scary Story Champion of Southern Louisiana

D
ANCY
had recently been thinking about Bayou Deception Island. Part of her wondered if maybe the loup-garou really did exist as a claw-and-fang belief that would kill you if you talked about it. She went to the library and checked out a book about spells and charms. She read about gris-gris meant to give protection and gris-gris that brought harm and bad luck. She fantasized about seeking out William’s killer, tearing off a piece of his shirt, and making it into a gris-gris bag. And into that bag she would put a snake’s rattler to cause him terror, and a poisonous leaf to make him scratch his skin raw, and salt to put in his wounds, and muddy water to fill up his lungs and make him suffocate, and maggots to eat into his brain. She wanted to fashion some very powerful wanga that would bring unbearable pain on the man, as he had done to her. She would call it a justice wanga.

Bonaventure found Dancy lost in one such gris-gris reverie and signed, —You angry?

“No, sugar. I’m not angry. I was just thinking.”

—You look angry. What you thinking?

She didn’t want to tell him the truth, so she said she was thinking about those summers she spent on Bayou Deception Island.

—Can we go there?

“Someday we just might,” she said.

During Adelaide’s next every-other-Saturday hair appointment, Dancy brought up Bayou Deception Island, and Grandma and Grandpa Cormier and Mama Isabeau.

“I think I’m gonna take Bonaventure back there sometime so he can see where you come from. I wish he could have known Grandma and Grandpa. He would’ve loved them to bits. I did,” Dancy said, knowing this would irritate the bejesus out of her mother.

Adelaide Roman couldn’t believe her ears. “Now why would you go and do a thing like that? As God is my witness, I have no idea what gets into you sometimes, Dancy. It’s bad enough you don’t praise the Lord and seek salvation, but why you want to fill Bonaventure’s head with all that pagan stuff is beyond my understanding, just as sure as it is beyond the understanding of every God-fearing man, woman, and child on the face of this earth. I haven’t thought about those people in years, and I’m not gonna start up now.”

“Who are you calling ‘those people’? They were your family, Mama.”

“They were heathens. And if you ask me, that mother-in-law of yours isn’t far off from one, with her statues and candles, her foreign incantations, and those damn rosary beads she’s got stashed all over the house.”

“You don’t need to curse, Mama. It’s low class.” Dancy couldn’t resist the dig.

“You’re right. She’ll curse herself. She don’t need any help from me.”

Adelaide Roman held that the righteous would be saved by memorizing the Bible, chapter and verse, and being able to spout it at will. Letice Arrow’s Catholicism, with its statues and holy water, was just as bad as the omens and cautionary tales of voodoo as far as Adelaide was concerned.

“Hey, Adventure Arrow, did I ever tell you about the loup-garou?” This was Dancy making conversation on a Friday night after dinner when they were too full even to move.

Headshake side to side. —Nope.

“Well, there’s this creature, see, and he looks like a wolf and he’s got red eyes and he skulks around in the woods . . .”

Written note: —Like Little Red Riding Hood?

“Oh, the loup-garou is much more serious than that. The loup-garou would eat the big bad wolf for breakfast and use his bones for toothpicks.”

And so began a sort of contest in which Dancy and Bonaventure tried to out-do each other with the telling of gruesome tales. Every Friday night, they would make a tent out of bedsheets, use the stub of a candle for a flickering light, and then they were ready to go.

When Dancy had dug up her entire repertoire of scary bayou stories, she said her brain had gone and shriveled up like a raisin, and she was throwing in the towel. She then declared the competition over and Bonaventure to be the Scary Story Champion of Southern Louisiana.

—Now what we do Friday nights? he signed.

“Well, let’s see. I suppose we could talk about gris-gris and work out what we would use to make some.”

—What is that?

“It’s a kind of lucky charm. You put it on somebody or put it in their house. Some gris-gris looks like a doll, but the kind I’m thinking about would be in a little bag people could wear on a string around their necks or carry in their pockets. You can make the bags out of anything, but the best thing is to make it out of something that belongs to the person you’re making the gris-gris for.”

Quick sign: —What is in bag?

“Stuff you gather up, usually small things. My Grandma Cormier said people used to put in things like herbs or stones or maybe even bits of hair or bones.”

Open-mouthed look of total surprise. —Bones?

“You heard me. But that was in the olden days. You don’t really have to use stuff like that. You can use ordinary things. Like if you wanted someone to never be hungry, you might put in a peanut or something that’s connected to food. Or if you wanted a person to be happy and laugh a lot, you would put in a tickling feather. Get it?”

Nod.

“Well, all right, then, that’s what we’ll do instead of tell scary stories. We’re not really going to make gris-gris, though; we’re just going to think it up.”