The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  ‘Exactly, or if he wanted to convince someone he was serious enough about it to dump some bricks there. I mean, swamp’s swamp. Assuming he could get permission to build, who wants to share the warm evening air with critters even God regrets making?

  ‘Anyway, the old woman wouldn’t sell. She was shrewd. Her people have been buried out there for generations. The original landowner, an old Southern type who traced his ancestry back to the Bourbons, died in sixty-nine. He stipulated in his will that the land should be offered for sale at a reasonable rate to the existing tenants.

  ‘Now most of the tenants were Aguillards and they bought that land with all the money they had. The old woman, she made all the decisions for them. Their ancestors are there and they have a history with that land going back to the time when they wore chains around their ankles and dug channels through the dirt with their bare hands.’

  ‘So Bonnano had been putting pressure on her to sell up, but she wouldn’t, so he decides to take things a step further,’ I said.

  Morphy nodded. ‘I figure maybe Remarr was sent out to put more than pressure on her – maybe he’s going to threaten the girl or some of the children, maybe even kill one of them – but when he arrives she’s already dead. And maybe Remarr gets careless from the shock, thinks he hasn’t left any traces and heads off into the night.’

  ‘Does Woolrich know all this?’

  ‘Most of it, yeah.’

  ‘You bringing Bonnano in?’

  ‘Brought him in last night and let him go an hour later, accompanied by a fancy lawyer called Rufus Thibodeaux. He ain’t movin’, says he ain’t seen Remarr for three or four days. Says he wants to find Remarr as much as anyone, something about money from some deal out in West Baton Rouge. It’s bullshit, but he’s sticking with the story. I think Woolrich is going to try to put some pressure on his operations through Anti-Racketeering and Narcotics, put the squeeze on him to see if he can change his mind.’

  ‘That could take time.’

  ‘You got a better idea?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  Morphy’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t be fuckin’ with Joe Bones, now, y’ hear? Joe ain’t like your boys back in New York, sittin’ in social clubs in Little Italy with their fingers curled around the handles of espresso cups, dreaming about the days when everyone respected them. Joe ain’t got no time for that. Joe don’t want folks to respect him, Joe wants folks to be scared to death of him.’

  We turned on to Esplanade. Morphy signalled and pulled in about two blocks from the Flaisance. He stared out of the window, tapping the index finger of his right hand against the steering wheel to some internal rhythm in his head. I sensed he had something more to say. I decided to let him say it in his own time.

  ‘You’ve spoken to this guy, the guy who took your wife and kid, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s the same guy? The same guy who did Tee Jean and the old woman?’

  ‘He called me yesterday. It’s him.’

  ‘He say anything?’

  ‘The feds have it on tape. He says he’s going to do more.’

  Morphy rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. I knew he was seeing Tante Marie in his head again.

  ‘You going to stay here?’

  ‘For a time, yes.’

  ‘Could be the feds ain’t gonna like it.’

  I smiled. ‘I know.’

  Morphy smiled back. He reached beneath his seat and handed me a long brown envelope. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said. I slipped the envelope under my jacket and stepped from the car. He gave a small wave as he drove away through the midday crowd.

  I opened the envelope in my hotel room. Inside were a set of crime-scene pictures and photocopied extracts of the police reports, all stapled together. Stapled separately was a copy of the ME’s report. One section had been emphasised with a luminous yellow felt-tip.

  The ME had found traces of ketamine hydrochloride in the bodies of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, equivalent to a dosage of one milligram per kilo of weight. According to the report, ketamine was an unusual drug, a special type of anaesthetic used for some minor surgical procedures. No one was too clear on its precise mode of action apart from the fact that it was a PCP analogue and worked on sites in the brain, affecting the central nervous system.

  It was becoming the drug of choice in the clubs of New York and LA while I was still on the force, usually in capsules or tabs made by heating the liquid anaesthetic to evaporate the water, leaving ketamine crystals. Users described a ketamine trip as ‘swimming in the K pool’ since it distorted the perception of the body, creating a feeling that the user was floating in a soft yet supportive medium. Other side-effects included hallucinations, distortions in the perception of space and time, and out-of-body experiences.

  What the ME did note was that ketamine could be used as a chemical restrainer on animals, since it induced paralysis and dulled pain while allowing the normal pharyngeal-laryngeal reflexes to continue. It was for this purpose, he surmised, that the killer had injected both Tante Marie and Tee Jean Aguillard with the drug.

  When they were flayed and anatomised, the report concluded, Tante Marie and her son had been fully conscious.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  When I had finished reading the ME’s report, I put on my sweats and running shoes and did about four miles on Riverfront Park, back and forth past the crowds queuing to take a trip on the Natchez paddle steamer, the sound of its wheezing calliope sending tunes like messengers across the Mississippi. I was thick with sweat when I was done, and my knees ached. Even three years ago, four miles wouldn’t have troubled me to such a degree. I was getting old. Soon, I’d be looking at bath-chairs and feeling impending rain in my joints.

  Back at the Flaisance, Rachel Wolfe had left a message to say that she would be flying in later that evening. The flight number and the arrival time were listed at the bottom of the message slip. I thought about Joe Bones and decided then that Rachel Wolfe might like some company on the flight down to New Orleans.

  I called Angel and Louis.

  The Aguillard family collected the bodies of Tante Marie, Tee Jean and Florence later that day. A firm of Lafayette undertakers placed Tante Marie’s coffin into a wide-back hearse. Tee Jean and Florence lay side by side in a second.

  The Aguillards, led by the eldest son, Raymond, and accompanied by a small group of family friends, followed the hearses in a trio of pick-up trucks, dark-skinned men and women seated on pieces of sacking amid machine parts and farm tools. I stayed behind them as they slipped from the highway and made their way down the rutted track, past Tante Marie’s where the police tape fluttered lightly in the breeze, and on to the house of Raymond Aguillard.

  He was a tall, large-boned man in his late forties or early fifties, running to fat now but still an imposing figure. He wore a dark cotton suit, a white shirt and a slim black tie. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying. I had seen him briefly at Tante Marie’s the night the bodies were found, a strong man trying to hold his family together in the face of violent loss.

  He spotted me as the coffins were unloaded and carried towards the house, a small group of men struggling with Tante Marie. I stood out, since I was the only white face in the crowd. A woman, probably one of Tante Marie’s daughters, shot me a cold look as she passed by, a pair of older women at each shoulder. When the bodies had been carried into the house, a raised, slatted-wood building not unlike the home of Tante Marie herself, Raymond kissed a small cross around his neck and walked slowly towards me.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said, as I extended my hand. He paused for a moment before taking it in a short, firm grip.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘sorry about it all.’

  He nodded. ‘I know that.’ He walked on, past the white fence at the boundary of the property, and stood by the side of the road, staring out at the empty stretch of track. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wing-beats slowing
as they approached the water below. Raymond watched them with a kind of envy, the envy that a man deeply grieving feels for anything untouched by his sorrow.

  ‘Some of my sisters, they think maybe you brought this man with you. They think you got no right to be here.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  He didn’t answer. Then: ‘She felt him comin’. Maybe that’s why she sent Florence to the party, to get her away from him. And that’s why she sent for you. She felt him comin’ and I think she knowed who he was. Deep down, I think she knowed.’ His voice sounded thick in his throat.

  He fingered the cross gently, rubbing his thumb back and forth along its length. I could see that it had originally been ornately carved – it was still possible to discern some details of spirals at its edges – but for the most part it had been rubbed smooth by the action of this man’s hand over many years.

  ‘I don’t blame you for what happened to my momma and my brother and sister. My momma, she always done what she believed was right. She wanted to find that girl and to stop the man that killed her. And that Tee Jean . . .’ He smiled sadly. ‘The policeman said that he’d been hit three, maybe four times from behind, and there were still bruises on his knuckles where he tried to fight this man.’

  Raymond coughed before he spoke again and then breathed deeply through his mouth, his head tipped back slightly like a man who has run a great distance in pain.

  ‘He took your woman, your child?’ he said. It was as much a statement as a question, but I answered it anyway.

  ‘Yes, he took them. Like you said, Tante Marie believed that he took another girl too.’

  He dug the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the corners of his eyes and blinked out a tear.

  ‘I know. I seen her.’

  The world around me seemed to grow silent as I shut out the noise of the birds, the wind in the trees, the distant sound of water splashing on the banks. All I wanted to hear was Raymond Aguillard’s voice.

  ‘You saw the girl?’

  ‘That’s what I said. Down by a slough in Honey Island, three nights ago. Night before my momma died. Seen her other times too. My sister’s husband, he got himself some traps down there.’ He shrugged. Honey Island was a nature reserve. ‘You a superstitious man, Mista Parker?’

  ‘I’m getting there,’ I replied. ‘You think that’s where she is, down in Honey Island?’

  ‘Could be. My momma’d say she didn’t know where she was, just that she was. She knew the girl was out there somewhere. I just don’t know how, Mista Parker. I never did understand my momma’s gift. But then I seen her, a figure out by a cypress grove and a kinda darkness over her face, like a hand was coverin’ it, and I knowed it was her.’

  He looked down and, with the toe of his shoe, began picking at a stone embedded in the dirt. When he eventually freed it, sending it skidding into the grass, tiny black ants scurried and crawled from the hole, the entrance to their nest now fully exposed.

  ‘Other people seen her too, I hear, folks out fishin’ or checkin’ the hooch they got distillin’ in a shack somewheres.’ He watched as the ants swarmed around his foot, some of them climbing on to the rim of his sole. Gently, he lifted his foot, shook it, and moved it away.

  There were seventy thousand acres of Honey Island, Raymond explained. It was the second-biggest swamp in Louisiana, forty miles long and eight miles wide. It was part of the flood plain of the Pearl river, which acts as a boundary line between Louisiana and Mississippi. Honey Island was better preserved than the Florida Everglades: there was no dredging allowed, no draining or timber-farming, no development and no dams, and parts of Honey Island weren’t even navigable. Half of it was state-owned; some was the responsibility of the Nature Conservancy. If someone was trying to dump a body in a place where it was unlikely to be discovered, then, tourist boats apart, Honey Island sounded like a good place to do it.

  Raymond gave me directions to the slough and drew a rough map on the back of an opened-out Marlboro pack.

  ‘Mista Parker, I know you’re a good man and that you’re sorry for what happened, but I’d be grateful to you if you didn’t come out here no more.’ He spoke softly, but there was no mistaking the force in his voice. ‘And maybe you’d be kind enough not to turn up at the burial. My family, it’s gonna take us a long time to get over this.’

  Then he lit the last cigarette from the pack, nodded a goodbye and walked back to his house trailing smoke behind him.

  I watched him as he walked away. A woman with steel-grey hair came out on to the porch and placed her arm around his waist when he reached her. He put a big arm around her shoulders and held her to him as they walked into the house, the screen door closing gently behind them. And I thought of Honey Island, and the secrets that it held beneath its green waters, as I drove away from the Aguillard house, the dust rising behind me.

  As I drove, the swamp was already preparing to reveal its secrets. Honey Island would yield a body within twenty-four hours, but it would not be the body of a girl.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I arrived early at Moisant Field so I browsed around the bookstore for a while, taking care to avoid tripping over the piles of Anne Rice novels.

  I had been sitting in the arrivals hall for about an hour when Rachel Wolfe walked through the gates. She was wearing dark blue jeans, white sneakers and a red and white Polo Sport top. Her red hair hung loose on her shoulders and her makeup had been so carefully applied that it was almost indiscernible.

  The only luggage she carried herself was a brown leather shoulder bag. The rest of what I took to be her belongings were being toted by Angel and Louis, who walked slightly self-consciously at either side of her, Louis in a cream double-breasted suit with a snow-white dress shirt open at the neck, Angel in jeans, battered Reebok hi-tops and a green check shirt that had not felt an iron since it left the factory many years before.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said, as they stood before me. ‘All human life is here.’

  Angel raised his right hand, from which dangled three thick piles of books, tied together by string. The ends of his fingers were turning purple. ‘We brought half the New York Public Library with us as well.’ He groaned. ‘Tied with string. I ain’t seen books tied with string since Little House on the Prairie stopped reruns.’

  Louis, I noticed, was carrying a lady’s pink umbrella and a cosmetics case. He had the look of a man who is trying to pretend that a dog isn’t screwing his leg. ‘Don’t say a word, man,’ he warned. ‘Not a word.’

  Between them, the two men also carried two suitcases, two leather travelling bags and a suit-carrier. ‘Car’s parked outside,’ I said, as I walked with Rachel to the exit. ‘Might be just enough room for the bags.’

  ‘They paged me at the airport,’ whispered Rachel. ‘They were very helpful.’ She giggled and glanced over her shoulder. Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of Angel tripping on a bag and swearing loudly.

  We ditched the luggage at the Flaisance, despite Louis’s stated preference for the Fairmont at University Place. The Fairmont was where the Republicans usually stayed when they hit New Orleans, which was part of its appeal for Louis. He was the only gay, black, Republican criminal I knew.

  ‘Gerald Ford stayed at the Fairmont,’ he lamented, as he surveyed the small suite he was to share with Angel.

  ‘So?’ I countered. ‘Paul McCartney stayed at the Richelieu and you don’t hear me demanding to stay there.’ I left the door open and headed back to my own room for a shower.

  ‘Paul who?’ said Louis.

  We ate in the Grill Room of the Windsor Court on Gravier Street, in deference to Louis’s wishes, its marbled floors and heavy Austrian drapes strangely uncomfortable for me after the informal setting of the smaller eateries in the Quarter. Rachel had changed into dark trousers and a black jacket over a red blouse. It looked fine but the hot night air had taken its toll on her and she was still pulling the damp cloth of her blouse away from her body as we
waited for the main courses.

  As we ate, I explained to them about Joe Bones and the Fontenots. They would be a matter for Angel, Louis and me. Rachel remained silent for much of our conversation, interjecting occasionally to clarify things that had been said by Woolrich or Morphy. She scribbled notes in a small, wire-bound notebook, her handwriting neat and even. At one point her hand brushed my bare arm lightly and she left it there for an instant, her skin warm against mine.

  I watched Angel pulling at his lip as he considered what I had said. ‘This Remarr must be pretty dumb, dumber than our guy at least,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Because of the print?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Careless, very careless.’ He wore the dissatisfied look of a respected theologian who has seen someone bring his calling into disrepute by identifying Jesus as an alien.

  Rachel spotted the look. ‘It seems to bother you a lot,’ she commented. I glanced at her. She had an amused expression on her face, but her eyes were calculating and slightly distant. She was playing over in her mind what I had told her, even as she engaged Angel in a conversation that he would usually have avoided. I waited to see how he would respond.

  He smiled at her and tilted his head. ‘I have a certain professional interest in these things,’ he admitted. He cleared a space in front of him and held up his hands before us.

  ‘Anyone doing a B & E job – that’s breaking and entering, for the benefit of our more respectable listener – needs to take certain precautions,’ began Angel. ‘The first and most obvious is to make sure that he – or she, B & E being an equal-opportunities profession – doesn’t leave any fingerprints. So what do you do?’

  ‘You wear gloves,’ said Rachel. She leaned forward now, enjoying the lesson and putting aside any other thoughts.

  ‘Right. Nobody, no matter how dumb, enters a place he shouldn’t be without wearing gloves. Otherwise, you leave visuals, you leave latents, you pretty much sign your name and confess to the crime.’