The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow (33 page)
Emmaline’s threat had done the trick. Tristan told his parents he wanted to do something else with his life. They said they didn’t understand. He could hardly look at their faces when he said he wanted a better life than the one that they had managed.
Remington Arrow came to call on the following Sunday, and the elder Molyneauxs regretted to say that Letice was ill but should be fine in a week or so. Hardly two months after her abortion, Letice stood at the altar as Remington’s bride. She went through the motions, she spoke the vows, but her heart was not in attendance.
During the reception, Emmaline made certain that Letice drank the tea as advised by Suville, all the while assuring her that everything had worked out for the best.
Letice played out her part. It was she who reached for Remington that night, and in the morning the sheets were stained with false virginity, just as Suville had said they would be.
The carved wooden box was kept in a locked drawer of her letter-writing desk for years, though she took it out and looked at it all the time. When her chapel had been completed, after Remington died, Letice placed that box in the niche she’d had built into the wall beneath the mosaic of the Angel Lailah, guardian of babies from conception to birth. But the ache of regret stayed with her.
Trinidad never forgot the beautiful eyes of the baby she’d seen cross over in that room on St. Philip Street. It was those eyes she saw so many years later in the face of Bonaventure Arrow, who’d inherited them from his paternal grandmother on the old-moneyed Molyneaux side.
C
OLEMAN
Tate laid out The Wanderer’s possessions on his desk in an effort to determine some sort of hierarchy, some meaningful strategy, some line of dominoes ready to fall. Had he been less inclined toward cold, hard facts, he might have seen them as a kind of gris-gris.
Since the man’s cash was still held in a vault at the asylum, Tate used a dollar bill of his own as stand-in. Given the amount the man had carried, he assumed he had closed a bank account. Tate figured that one did such a thing when one did not intend to return to that bank, either out of dissatisfaction or because one is moving on. In this case, he favored the moving-on theory. Tate also believed the absence of a wallet to be deliberate. The man did not want to carry proof of who he was, or perhaps he wished to forget his identity altogether.
The matchbook bearing the inscription
Zip’s Tavern—Melvindale, Michigan
seemed like half a clue, since there had been no package of cigarettes or even a cigar to go with it. And then of course there was the fact that none of the matchsticks had been burned. A souvenir perhaps? Tate consulted an atlas. Melvindale was near Detroit.
The newspaper was a common enough thing—people bought newspapers every day. The clue this one provided was the date. It placed the perpetrator in Chicago on December 1, 1949. It had been neatly folded as if to fit in an inner coat pocket and be taken out later to read.
The detective believed the killer had considered the button to be the most valuable of the objects he carried with him; it seemed a sentimental thing. The button was made of brass, had a shank inset into holes, and bore the Great Seal of the United States on its front and, on its back, the words Scovill Manufacturing Company, along with two stars. Coleman Tate had served in the army himself and knew it to be the button of an enlisted man. He deduced that the man had fought in World War II; perhaps that was where he’d suffered the injury to his face. Perhaps not.
The paper napkin struck Tate as a whimsical thing. The only characteristic that set it apart from any other paper napkin was the slogan printed on it:
Memphis—Home of the Blues
. It seemed to Tate that the man might have identified with the notion and general mindset of the blues. Maybe he was a killer with a soft spot for the sad side of romantic. Maybe he’d been jilted a time or two. Maybe he felt no one could love his ruined face.
It occurred to the detective that the objects had all come from different locations, and on the heels of that idea he began to arrange them geographically. He situated the dollar bill and the matchbook toward the top of the desk as if to place them near Detroit; he then placed the newspaper slightly lower and to the left as if sitting west of Detroit in Chicago. The napkin he placed southerly, where Memphis would be. He believed it likely that more trains or buses bound for New Orleans left from Chicago rather than Detroit, which didn’t explain the Michigan connection; he would have to come back to that. He deemed it a reasonable supposition that William Arrow’s killer had traveled from Chicago, thence to Memphis, which would have been a likely stop, and wound up in New Orleans, where he started to use the public library with a specific purpose in mind.
The next day Tate went to Union Station to check a schedule and see if there was such a route. There was.
PROGRESS REPORT
IN THE MATTER OF WILLIAM EVEREST ARROW (DECEASED)
Upon careful review and consideration of the items found in the possession of John Doe, I have determined that the perpetrator most likely took a train from Chicago to New Orleans on or shortly after December 1, 1949. I will continue pursuing this line of inquiry. Further findings to follow.
A couple of sounds had come to Bonaventure, and he’d saved them up for Tate: they were a motor sound and the sizzle of a match. While the investigator met with Letice to discuss his report, Bonaventure raced a small die-cast metal car on the floor of the foyer, sending it flying across the marble tiles until it spun out and crashed and flipped over on its top. When the detective reached for the doorknob upon leaving, Bonaventure placed the tiny car within Tate’s hand and wrapped his fingers around it as if to say, —Here. Take this. You can keep it.
That toy car had an official name: Matchbox. Bonaventure had given Tate a double clue.
That night, Coleman Tate turned the toy over and over in his hand while he ruminated about the case. He determined that Michigan, not Chicago, was the place to look; Melvindale, specifically, Zip’s Tavern to be exact, and he began to assemble a plan. The first thing he did was obtain the police photograph taken of John Doe at the time of the murder. Coleman Tate didn’t need to prove the man’s guilt; he merely needed to find out his name.
S
OMETIMES
the remains of a shared past unearth themselves; memories emerge from the crust that covers them and they are newly discovered by the mind. So it was for Letice and Trinidad when they were the only ones home, working out menus for the upcoming week.
The kindness on Trinidad’s face took Letice back to the quiet child who’d sat at her bedside while she’d cramped and bled and dreamed a bad dream. At the very same moment, Trinidad once again saw the frightened young woman who was white as the sheets, and the bloody little ghost with the beautiful eyes. Each woman suspected then that they had met in a room on St. Philip Street in New Orleans a long time ago. They recalled the how and the why of it, but a sense of politesse prevented either one from voicing the memory of what had gone on behind the dark green door.
Secret memories have the power to isolate, and even an unspoken sharing is soothing. Letice steered the conversation in a direction meant to uncover the past without bringing it up directly, and Trinidad followed her lead.
“Where are you from, Trinidad? Originally, I mean.”
“Well, I be born in Terrebonne Parish, but we call it by the Cajun, Paroisse Terrebonne. My mama and me we live about an hour’s walk outside Bayou Cane. There wasn’t no streets or anything like that where we lived; just a bunch of Negro families in cabins. We all work the fields for the man who own the land. Mama and me, we live there until right after my birthday when I turn nine years old.”
“You mention only your mother,” Letice said.
“Yes, ma’am. That because I don’t ever know my daddy. My mama say he die when I be a baby too young to remember. She say he be a fine man who had some education. His family name was Fontenaise.”
“How did your mother support you?”
“Well, like I say, we work in the fields outside Bayou Cane until Mama found us work in New Orleans. We worked for a woman on St. Philip Street.”
There it was. The first implied evidence.
“She found work for you too?” Letice asked.
“Yes, ma’am. We work together for a Creole lady. I did the washing and Mama help the lady with her work. Mama be in charge of the tea. See, this lady used certain teas in her work.”
Letice did not miss the second offering. As if propelled toward a full confrontation with her past, she asked, “What was it the lady did?”
“She doctored females is all I know; she say she put them back together. Some of them that come to her, they all excited to be there, and they fall all over theyselves thanking the Creole lady. But there be a terrible sadness on others. I feel real bad for the sad ones. Always when one of the sad ones go back out the door I think to myself, ‘Lord, that girl look like she still need help.’ Of course, I be only ten years old at the time, but I surely did feel bad for them what had come to the Creole lady and left all covered in sadness.”
Confirmation came over them all of a piece, and both were sure of the memory. Their eyes met long enough to acknowledge the truth, and then, as if by unspoken agreement, they wrapped that memory back up in quiet.
Letice was the first to reach for idle conversation. “You mentioned once that you spent time in an orphanage, but you didn’t say how you got there. What happened?”
“My mama die when I be eleven. Don’t nobody know for sure what it was killed her, though. Bibelot was the one saw it come on. Bibelot shared a room with us, and as I look back on it, I think Bibelot maybe a prostitute, cuz sometimes there be a man the other side of the curtain with her, and it not always the same man. And Bibelot, she make sweet talk to whatever man be with her, and she wear a plain dress when one of them not there, and nothing but her chemise when one of them was. That’s when Mama would grab my arm and rush us out the door.
“Anyway, Bibelot say Mama die from a spider bite on the soft side of her ankle. I remember she got a blister there, and then a rash come and her whole foot swell up real big and her skin split open and her foot and leg turn real, real dark. I begged her to show the Creole lady cuz the Creole lady know about medicines, but Mama say no. She say she got a curse on her and she hide that swelling. I think she afraid we lose our jobs if the Creole lady think Mama been cursed. So Mama wrap her foot and leg in a bandage and go to a voodoo woman name of Pleasance who give her a amulet. That amulet don’t do no good. The fever come on and an awful terrible sickness. Three days later, she die.”
“How did you get to the orphanage?”
“Well, don’t nobody know exactly what to do with a colored girl who got no mama or daddy left, so Bibelot take me to the Creole lady and ask her what to do, and the Creole lady say to take me to Charity Hospital. Bibelot take me there and tell me to sit nice and quiet until somebody ask me my name and then I supposed to tell how I never know my daddy and how my mama be dead from a poison bite. It seem like most of the day go by, and my stomach just about turn inside out I be so hungry, when this woman come up and ask me who I waiting for. I tell her just like I supposed to, and before I knew what was what them folks send me to the Providence Asylum. But I be too old for there, so somebody from that place take me up to Lafayette Parish where the Sisters of the Holy Family look out for colored children who got nobody else. I remember then about my Auntie Henriette here in Bayou Cymbaline—she the one to leave me the house out on the Neff Switch road. The Sisters send her a letter, but she couldn’t find a way to take me in, so they kept me at the orphanage and it all work out for the good because that’s where I met the boy I married; his name be Jackson Prefontaine.”
“Ah, and that’s where you learned about Mary,” Letice said.
“Yes, ma’am. That be where I learn about Mary. And where I learn how to sew, and how to read, and how to write with a pencil. The only thing I didn’t learn real good be how to talk like a white girl.”
And so the two spoke of things long past, but not of the bloody little baby with the beautiful brown eyes.
You Need to Give Me a Little More to Go On
W
HAT’LL
it be, mister?” the bartender asked.
“Scotch, neat,” was Coleman Tate’s response.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, early yet for the rush. Tate took in the details of the working man’s bar: dishes of peanuts, metal ashtrays, and memorabilia tied to baseball glories. It was a shrine to the Detroit Tigers and that team’s anointed: Ty Cobb, Goose Goslin, Bobo Newsom, and Schoolboy Rowe. A 1945 World Series pennant graced the mirror behind the cash register. The place reeked of cigars and cigarettes and beer as well as the unmistakable smell of danger. People ran out of luck in places like Zip’s; they got roughed up and rolled in the alley or worse—Zip’s was a little too close to a river, a little too easy to disappear from.
Tate raised one hand up off the bar to signal for another drink. “How’s business?” he asked the bartender.
“Seen better, seen worse,” was the reply.
“I was wondering if you might help me out with something,” Tate said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m trying to find out about a guy who was a patron at your bar a while back. I believe he might have been coming around here sometime after the war, probably up until late 1949.”
The bartender said, “That’s a long time ago. I might be able to help, but then again I might not.”
Tate inched a twenty-dollar bill in the man’s direction.
“What’s his name?” the barkeep asked.
“Well, now, that’s the problem. I don’t have a name. I was hoping you might remember the guy by his looks.” Tate pulled the photograph from his suit pocket. “As you can see, he was missing part of his face—the jaw on the right side.”