Twisted (3 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Miguel spoke up then in a ragged voice: “Delilah, this is not the time!”
“Shush up, Miguel. I'm just talkin' to our handsome, illustrious friend here.” He looked at Grove. “The truth is, Mr. Grove, our dear rebellious Moses would not have been caught dead in Algiers.”
“Why's that?”
“Because he was allergic to Jefferson Parish.”
Grove still didn't get it and said so.
Miguel spoke up. “He had a nasty-ass experience out there one time. Back when he was a young associate professor at Tulane. Tell him the story, Delilah.”
Delilah sighed. “S'pose he
was
still working out the ways of the world for queers down here. Place he came from, Old Birmingham, they was a lot more closed down for faggots. Especially back in the 1960s. Hell, round here Black folks were still contending with Jim Crow laws. And you don't even want to
know
what it was like to be a queer little Black boy. But that's another story.”
“Tell him about the muggin',” Miguel urged.
“
You
tell him,
cheri
, I ain't got the energy.”
The Cuban shrugged sadly. “Ain't much to tell. One night Moses took a walk on the wrong side of the tracks—or should I say, wrong side of the
river
? I remember it was a swelterin' spring night, and we was holdin' court down at Old Napoleon's Saloon, havin' our customary evening tonics. I was tired that night and decided to go home early. But Moses, he wanted to stroll some. He loved to walk with that silly cane, like some kind of French nobleman. Anyhow ... that night, he walked all the way down to Spanish Plaza, then decided to ride the last ferry across the river into Algiers. To this day, I ain't real clear on why he went over there. He did, though, he sure enough did. And he wound up in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time for a man of Moses De Lourde's ...
propensities
.”
Lafountant shook his head a little as he drove, as though the memory itself weighed down on him.
Delilah spoke up from the back in a low, outraged tone: “Truck full of crackers coming home late from a drunk nearly ran him off the sidewalk. They circled around and jumped him. But they didn't just rough him up and steal his money. They beat him pretty near to death. All on account of him being queer and all.”
“Maybe Moses said something that set 'em off,” the Cuban mused. “He was like that, bless his heart—he could make a cutting remark as quick and easy as spit.”
“That's nonsense, Miguel, and you know it!” Delilah flicked the back of his hand at the Cuban. “Them rednecks was just out for some fun that night, and poor Mose was
it
.” Then the drag queen fixed his makeup-caked eyes on Grove. “They found him in an alley the next morning, pants around his ankles, word ‘fag' spray-painted on his ass. Had about a dozen broken bones and he pretty near bled to death.”
Grove asked if the attackers were ever caught.
“Moses never pressed charges,” Delilah said with an exhausted sigh.
Now Grove was turning something over in his mind. He looked at Delilah. “So this all happened in roughly the same place they found him on Sunday?”
“That's right.”
“Hmm.”
“What is it?” Miguel asked Grove.
“Excuse me?”
The Cuban smiled. “You said ‘
Hmm
.'”
“Did I?”
“Yessir, you surely did.”
“I'm sorry, it's nothing.”
“That's funny, it didn't sound like nothin',” he murmured, pulling the van over to the curb in front of the Hotel Philippe de Champaigne on Dauphine Street. He put it in park and stared down at his lap. “Anyway ... whatever happened, old Moses's number done come up and that's all there is to it.”
And with that, the old Cuban grabbed his ivory cane, got out of the car, and hobbled around to the rear hatchback to began the business of helping Grove with his luggage.
 
 
That night, well into the small hours, Grove sat in his dark hotel room, staring out the rattling, rain-dappled windowpane, thinking about the late, great Moses De Lourde.
The old man had been a true character in the Old South style, a sort of academic Oscar Wilde, and a veritable institution on the lecture circuit. He had enjoyed teaching positions at several venerable institutions of higher learning across the South. But to the intelligentsia, De Lourde would become known primarily for his
avocation
: the obsessive study of “foul play” through the ages. Through his mysterious fieldwork, the occasional macabre article in scientific journals, and his investigations of the occult, the professor became both controversial and renowned. Which was precisely why Professor Moses De Lourde had been destined to cross paths with Ulysses Grove.
Pacing that lonely motel room, turning all this over in his mind, Grove finally decided to do a little impromptu Web search for any further information about De Lourde's death. He plugged his laptop into the hotel's DSL and found two new links under De Lourde's name. One of them was a straightforward news item from the
Times-Picayune:
Esteemed Professor: A Likely Victim of Cassandra
NEW ORLEANS—The body of a New Orleans man found on Algiers Point near Seguin Street Sunday morning has been identified as Tulane Professor Emeritus Moses A.J. De Lourde of 748 Dumaine Street.
“It appears the storm caught the victim by surprise,” said Captain Grayson Capps of the Jefferson Parish Police Department at a press conference held yesterday. “Flying debris from the wharf combined with high water can be a deadly combination.” The captain went on to remind reporters that the medical examiner is withholding the official cause of death pending notification of next of kin.
De Lourde's lifeless remains were found by a dockworker some time before dawn on Sunday—only hours after Cassandra's eye passed over central New Orleans. The professor may be the first official death in Cassandra's wake. There are already 73 reported injuries directly connected with the category-one hurricane. Damage estimates range from two to four million dollars. A mere gulley-washer compared to Katrina. But not without its own deadly irony when the lives of Katrina survivor's such as De Lourde are lost.
Grove wondered about an autopsy. The article left many questions unanswered.
The second item was from what Grove assumed was a college Web site, an underground arts and culture e-zine called
Synapse
whose home page was now emblazoned with a photograph of a dashing young De Lourde from decades ago:
ONE OF TU'S TREASURES PASSES
Tulane lost an institution on Sunday. Whether you passed him in the dreary halls of the anthropology building ... or saw him holding court down at Antoine's ... or witnessed him playing his clarinet (badly) with the Dixie Jammers in front of St. Louis Cathedral ... he was always one of kind. Sui generis. A true American original. Professor Moses De Lourde—sustaining a fatal injury Sunday in the hurricane—leaves us in body only. His spirit lives on in the late-night bull sessions over at Dinwiddie Hall, or the endless discussions over cheeseburgers at the Camellia Grill, or the drunken reveries of “graddies” down at Jimmy's. De Lourde had that one ineffable thing that students require to be inspired—mystery. You never knew what outlandish theory he was going to postulate next. With apologies to Steinbeck, Professor Moses De Lourde will never truly leave us. Whenever some pothead babbles some cosmic theory into the wee hours ... he'll be there. Or whenever some underclassman is on fire with intellectual curiosity ... he'll be there. Rest in peace, Moses, we love ya!
Grove's eyes got a little wet at that one. But the questions lingered, nagged at him. Why would the old man go back to that hated place? What was he doing in Algiers in the middle of a hurricane? And what was the significance of that mysterious last phone call?
It had come late last Saturday night, while Grove was dozing fitfully on the couch of his log cabin in the Virginia woods. The remote A-frame belonged to Tom Geisel, Grove's section chief and best friend at the bureau. Grove had been living there for the past year while he recuperated from the wounds—both external and internal—sustained during the Sun City case. For many months the cabin had been a welcome refuge, but lately Grove had been getting restless. Restless to get back on the job. Restless to see that journalist, Maura County, again. Restless to rekindle his relationship with her.
Maybe this was why Grove had been having trouble sleeping lately. He had been having nightmares of that deranged accountant from the Sun City case, Richard Ackerman, and the way he had metamorphosed into ghastly permutations. There also had been dreams of Africa, dreams of his own birth. In fact, Grove had been dreaming of his mother the very night his cell phone chirped so unexpectedly on the coffee table next to him, displaying the Orleans Parish area code:
Ffffftt!
“Dreadfully sorry to call at this hour”—
zzzzzht!
—“Hello? Ulysses!”
The voice had been instantly recognizable to Grove, even in his drowzy stupor, and he had tried and tried to hear what the problem was, but the connection had been miserable, wrought with crackling interference and lightning bursts. “Ulysses, can you hear me?”—
zzzssshht!
—“Hello! Frightfully sorry, dear heart, but I believe I have a situation on my hands”—
ffhhht
!—“need your help!”—
ffssshhhhhtt!
The call had suddenly crapped out then, like a switch being thrown, leaving Grove to wonder for the rest of that week what the hell the “situation” was, and why the professor needed his help. These were questions that would probably never be answered, and maybe that was a fitting legacy for a man such as De Lourde, a man so inextricably linked with—
Grove looked up.
A noise
.
Outside his hotel window, just under the sound of the rain, a metal clicking noise had pierced his ruminations, raising the hackles on the back of his neck like the arched spine of a cat. Grove was hypersensitive to certain noises—the cocking mechanism on a gun, the creak of a floorboard. But
this
. For some reason this noise was just ... wrong. Right outside his window—which he had raised a few inches earlier that night to let in the breeze—in the middle of the night, in the rain: a hollow metal
click!
Grove rose slowly, all his defensive instincts kicking in now. He reached over and turned off the desk lamp, plunging the room into utter darkness. He moved cautiously toward the window. The streetlamps outside filtered through the mist, painting watery shadows on the walls behind him. He paused and considered going for his weapon.
Why so tense right now? It was just a noise, for God's sake. Why all the nerves?
The truth was, Grove had felt this vague undercurrent of tension from the moment he had arrived in New Orleans, tension that had only been magnified by Miguel's and Delilah's odd story. It sounded corny but Grove actually felt as though he were being watched. He got that feeling sometimes. He had a sixth sense for this kind of thing. And now his inner voice was screaming,
Houston, we have a problem!
He looked out the window.
Several things flickered through the rain—a metal ring bouncing on the cobblestone sidewalk three stories down, directly below his window, and a flash of something falling to the left, on the hotel's outer wall. But it was only when Grove heard the accompanying sound of feet landing with a muffled thud on the ground, followed by the blur of a shadowy human form darting away, that he realized somebody had been scaling the wall outside his window.
He whirled back toward his room, his heart jumping now in his chest. His Charter Arms .357 Tracker was nestled inside his coat, snug in its case. Safety on. Chamber empty. He moved quickly, silently, with a dancer's grace. His brown face and bare legs shimmered with sweat as he grabbed the gun and the speed-loader.
He was out the door and halfway down the hall before he realized he was in his ratty sweatpants.
It didn't matter. His heart thumped with nerves as he took the stairs at the end of the corridor, barefoot, two at a time, down the antique runner, the risers creaking like crazy. It took him less than a minute to reach the lobby level, which was musky with mold and water damage. Less than sixty seconds: all the while calculating how far the intruder could have gotten down Dauphine Street, or the adjacent alley, while he slammed six rounds into the cylinder—
Bam
!
Ssnap!
—hollow-point loads, liquid tip.
Then he was outside in the stink.
Hands cradling the weapon, the barrel raised and ready, he scanned the shadows north and south, east and west. His bare feet on the cold, slimy, wet cobbles. The fishy-rotten mist in his face. Who the hell was that? How far could they have gotten? He made his way down the walk to the mouth of the alley. A pause. Then ...
whap!
Swung the barrel around the corner. Aimed it at the empty darkness.

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