Twisted (4 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Nobody there.
Grove paused for a second. Breathing hard. Cocking his head and listening. The patter of rain, and the occasional wet gust rattling the street signs—and that was it. No footsteps. No shadowy movement. It was as though the ghostly intruder had beamed back on board the
Enterprise
.
The rain had already soaked through Grove's sweatpants, his sleeveless T-shirt adhering to his shiny brown shoulders. He wiped his face and turned, and regarded the facade of the Hotel Philippe de Champaigne. The leprous stucco wall rose above the front awning, crowded with scores of stained glass windows, many of them cracked or broken out from wind damage. It looked like a vandalized church.
Grove's window was on the third floor, right in the center of the building. Very few hand- or footholds existed. A flagpole about ten feet to the left of it, and half a story down. A few window-unit air conditioners. Squinting to see through the misty darkness, Grove noticed scuff marks six feet below his window, and twenty feet below that, a series of diagonal scratches. He looked back at the deserted street.
Something shiny lay on the sidewalk at his feet.
He knelt down and carefully picked it up with the barrel of the gun. He recognized the dull gleam of an aluminum carabineer. An oval ring about the size of a half dollar with a clip on one side, it was a piece of mountain climbing gear designed for quickly snapping together ropes during ascents or rappelling. It screamed significance at him.
Time to get inside.
He dropped the carabineer in the pocket of his sweatpants and went back inside the hotel. The lobby was deserted. A light burned near the front desk, and soft Muzak droned from some inner office, but nobody stirred at the muffled sounds of Grove crossing the carpeted lobby in his soaked skivvies.
Thank God
, he thought,
thank God nobody saw that
.
It was nearly dawn. He needed to get some sleep—at least an hour or two—before the funeral. He changed into dry underwear and lay down on the king-sized bed without even turning down the covers, and he lay there for endless minutes in the dark, thinking about what had just happened, thinking about De Lourde's mysterious death and the things that did not add up. The dull metal carabineer sat on the desk across the room, gleaming in the darkness.
Grove kept staring at that thing, and listening to the rain outside, and the endless sluicing of water running down the gutters of ancient paving stones. He could not sleep, and he could not take his eyes off that metal ring.
He didn't realize it then but a strange and deadly game had already begun.
2
The wake was held in the Garden District, a couple of miles upriver from the French Quarter, in a small Unitarian chapel on Magazine Street. Grove arrived at five minutes to eight and stood in line for nearly twenty minutes in the rain with the other mourners.
The modest little Georgian building—a stubborn survivor of Katrina, with its cracked faux-marble columns, its canopy of tattered live oaks, and its water-stained clapboards—could not begin to accommodate the eclectic throngs that had turned out for the beloved professor's send-off. There were distinguished professors with their blue-haired wives looking pained and regal under lacy Laura Ashley umbrellas. There were tattooed street punks in combat boots and leather, disheveled grad students in shopworn tweed jackets, and nattily dressed old queens from the gay enclaves along Bourbon Street. There were somber clergymen, obese politicians, and a gaggle of cherubic little black children splashing through puddles and darting under people's legs. There was even a heavyset Hispanic woman in spandex and feather boas who looked to be either a stripper or a prostitute.
Grove searched the crowd for one particular mourner. He wasn't sure if she would be there. She lived in San Francisco, and had spent very little time with the professor over the last year, and was also busy working on a book. But there was a slight chance she would be there. She was the type to show up to things such as this. It would be just like her to travel all those miles simply to honor a good and decent man such as De Lourde.
By the time Grove reached the doorway, he was as damp as a wrung-out rag from the rain and emotions.
The chapel smelled vaguely of mildew and body odor, the central aisle completely clogged with mourners. A small jazz combo was playing a slow blues up by the altar, the sniffling sound of a snare drum mingling with the whispered sobbing, the massive tarnished brass bell of a tuba reflecting the sad promenade. Grove glanced across the front of the room and saw familiar faces hovering beside the open casket.
Edith Endicott, the matronly Scottish scientist who had helped build a case against the Sun City Killer, now stood in her black mourning dress, her gray, wrinkled face downturned. Father Carrigan, another friend and mentor from the Sun City debacle, stood between her and the coffin. The old priest was hunched over with grief, his gnarled hands clasped respectfully as he gazed down at the coffin's pathetic contents.
Grove gently pushed his way forward.
“Ulysses,” Dr. Endicott whispered, her sad, hound-dog eyes brightening.
“Dame Edith,” Grove said as he approached the woman. They embraced. Grove could smell the woman's fatigue, the acrid tang of her sweat and perfume. This woman had come a great distance to be here, to say good-bye to a man she hardly knew. Grove realized right then that De Lourde had bonded with Edith Endicott the same way he bonded with all his friends: instantly and permanently.
Grove turned to Father Carrigan. “Hello, Padre.”
The old man raised his grizzled face toward Grove and managed an anguished smile. “Young man.”
Grove put an arm around the priest. Carrigan's body was trembling faintly. Grove's eyes filled up. “I wish I knew what to say.”
“We'll all see him again someday, Ulysses,” Carrigan said, his milky eyes twinkling suddenly, and all at once Grove saw the true man inside the old Irish priest—the mercurial demon hunter, the man who had sparred with the Vatican, and, more recently, the one who had helped exorcise Grove's own demons at the culmination of the Sun City case. This same charismatic figure had now somehow reverted to his natural state: a loving, fatherly, neighborhood clergyman, equally at ease counseling an alcoholic father as he was baptizing an immigrant baby. A scalding tear tracked down Grove's chiseled brown features as he turned reluctantly, inexorably, toward the open casket.
He was just about to look down at the professor's remains when a familiar figure shuffled awkwardly toward him in his peripheral vision. He glanced up and saw her, his stomach immediately clenching with emotion. “Hey,” he whispered at her, hardly getting the word out.
“Hey, stranger,” Maura County whispered back at him, an inscrutable little smile on her face as she approached with her arms outstretched. Her eyes were hollow and wet. A small, pale, girlish woman in her late thirties, the journalist wore a black dress with sedate pearls, and her mousy blond hair was pulled back in a French braid.
They embraced, only inches away from the coffin, both of them shaking slightly.
She still smokes
, Grove thought as he hugged her.
Still smokes, and I still feel terrible about losing her
.
They clung to each other as the air around them filled with sniffling sounds and the low shuffling drums of funeral blues. They hadn't seen each other since the Sun City case, and had only talked on the phone once—and
that
was simply to confirm that their relationship would never work—but now it felt to Grove that their time together had never ended.
It was hard for Grove to believe that they had yet to consummate
anything
, had yet to even kiss, but that didn't matter to him. The way she felt to him right then—the way her diminutive five-foot-two-inch frame fit into the center of his chest like a nesting doll—seemed good and true.
Their embrace lasted for an absurdly long time, like the embrace of two old veterans of foreign wars reuniting after a long convalescence. Grove had dreamed of this moment. For weeks he'd anticipated this very greeting. Would they kiss? Would they shake hands? Would the tension and awkwardness sour the moment? It turned out that the truth was none of the above. In the wake of all the unexpected sorrow, this simple hug was a salve, a balm on his soul. It lasted maybe sixty seconds in real time—at the most—but for Grove it passed in a single heartbeat. He had not felt this happy to see a woman since he lost Hannah.
“God, it's good to see you,” he murmured when they finally stepped back and looked at each other at arm's length.
“You too, Uly.”
“Wish it could have been—” He stopped, feeling ridiculous, feeling as though every word was a cliché now.
“I know.” She looked at the casket. “I know, he was ... what can you say?”
“He was a pain in the ass ... and I guess I loved him. I can't believe I only knew him for ... what? A year?” Grove glanced at the coffin. He didn't know if he was ready to take a closer look. He didn't know if he was ready for that.
The sound of whispering tugged at Grove's attention, and he looked up.
Behind Maura, along the front of the choir nave, a motley assortment of De Lourde's old cronies stood side by side like a formation of colorful, exotic birds. Some of them, like Delilah, looked like old silent movie stars decked out in their black regalia and dark Joan Crawford sunglasses. Others wore eccentric, southern dandy mourning coats and top hats as though garbed for a parade.
Miguel Lafountant, the stout little Cuban, stood at the end of the row, nodding a tearful greeting at Grove. “Hello, Mr. Ulysses,” he uttered in a broken voice.
Grove turned to Maura and gently offered his hand. “Some people you should meet.”
They went over to the Cuban.
“Miguel, this is Maura County.” Grove spoke in a low, respectful tone. “She worked with the professor off and on. She was writing a book with him. Maura, this is Miguel Lafountant, a fellow professor at Tulane.”
“Pleasure,
cheri
,” Miguel said with a sad little nod.
“We'll miss him a lot,” Maura said.
“That's a fact.”
A painful pause as the Cuban looked down, a single tear dripping off his swarthy cheek. Then he looked up. “Where's my manners?” He nodded to a young man next to him. “This handsome young man is Michael Doerr, one of Professor De Lourde's star graduate students. Michael, say hello to a couple of Moses's illustrious associates.”
An effeminate young man of mixed race stepped forward and gave a little bow. He wore a crisp tuxedo shirt under his velveteen jacket, and his sculpted caramel face was runny with tears. “Pleasure, ma'am ... sir,” he murmured in a soft, deep southern accent, his voice trembling slightly. He was painfully shy and refused to even look at Grove.
Miguel gazed at the young man like a proud father. “Michael was part of the team that went to the Yucatan with Moses, smack dab in the middle of that
other
terrible hurricane.”
Grove's ears perked. “No kidding.”
“Yes, it was quite an expedition.”
Grove was confused. “This was recently?”
Miguel shrugged. “Couple of years ago ... March of '04, I believe. Is that correct, Michael?”
The shy young man nodded, gazing down, wringing a shredded Kleenex in his hands.
Miguel then gestured at the tall, willowy young woman next to Michael Doerr. “And this lovely specimen is Ms. Sandi Loper-Herzog, the Queen of Darkness and all things metaphysical. Another one of Moses's star pupils.”
The girl was draped in goth finery, all gangly arms and legs, her dark, sunken eyes stained with lampblack. “How ya doin'?” she croaked, her voice saturated with grief.
“Pleasure,” Grove said and then found himself suddenly at a loss for words, his mouth feeling as though it were cast in concrete. What could he say? What can anybody say at a funeral other than empty, pathetic platitudes? Grove let out a pained breath as he looked at the floor for a moment. In his peripheral vision he sensed the young man in the tuxedo, Michael Doerr, fighting a wave of sobs.
Grove wanted to say something but could not muster a single word. He turned and looked at the coffin. Almost imperceptibly, Maura County stepped back to a respectable distance. Miguel Lafountant stepped back as well, and Grove felt an inexorable tug drawing him toward the coffin.
At last he went over, and he spent one last moment with his friend.
 
 
That's not Moses De Lourde.
That was the first impression that struck Grove as he stared down at the shriveled husk of a human being that lay nestled in the elaborate sarcophagus, wrapped in seersucker and silk, painted in grease pencil and rouge. But of course, it
was
De Lourde, or at least what was left of him. Offerings of all sorts had been tucked around the slender remains—a package of pastel cigarettes, a small volume of Rilke poems, a packet of chickory coffee, a broken 78 rpm recording of Louis Armstrong's “Basin Street Blues.” But the professor's kind, regal face—still full of cavernous wrinkles and baggy flesh—now looked empty, barren, antithetical to the vigorous De Lourde whom Grove had known and loved. Caked with so much concealing powder and reconstructive putty that it looked papery and hollow, the faux face simply broke Grove's heart. The real De Lourde would have been appalled at such a mediocre makeup job. It would not even have been worthy of an after-hours Mardi Gras party.
A wave of sorrow sliced through Grove, as sudden and sharp as a blade thrust through him. How could they do this to him? How could they take him to his final soiree looking so déclassé? Tears burned Grove's eyes, and he took out his handkerchief and held it to his mouth, when the second impression struck him:
His eye is gone.
Sure enough, the old man's papery, wrinkled left eyelid—upon closer scrutiny—appeared
concave
. It was a detail most people would certainly have missed. But Grove was not most people. To Grove, the missing eyeball was as glaring as if they had put his nose on his forehead. The other eye was clearly apparent beneath its drawn lid. But the left was conspicuously absent, which led Grove to make a third observation:
Those bumps on the professor's chin and forehead look suspicious.
The sad fact was, Grove could not shut off his forensic mind, his morbid expertise. He knew death the way a botanist knows the rings of a tree trunk, and now he began to profile the poor bundle of remains.
Grove had initially thought the bumps were moles but now realized they were wounds—appearing like small bubbles spackled over with heavy mortician's powder—and they combined with the missing eye to begin to strum the chords of Grove's nervous system. The regularity of the abrasions under the makeup—especially the fissures around his mouth and brow—called out to Grove, screamed in his brain, and sent high-voltage signals across his synapses.
Without even knowing it, Grove was doing what he always did, what he was
born
to do: sniffing something out, adding up seemingly disparate facts of an event or a situation to form the early skeletal outlines of a deduction. Over the last twenty-four hours he had absorbed enough random detail to fill an entire file.
But there was something
else
now adding to his frisson of suspicion. Grove had first noticed it when he had entered the chapel. Initially he had written it off as mere nervous tension, perhaps some kind of residual angst from attending Hannah's funeral. But he noticed it again when he had approached the coffin for his final communion with De Lourde's remains—a powerful feeling of being watched.

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