My grandfather took a sip of coffee from a blue tin mug and laid it down by his feet. Doc stirred slightly, opened one bleary eye to make sure he wasn’t missing anything interesting, and then went back to his dreams.
‘But Daddy Helms isn’t like that,’ he continued. ‘Daddy Helms just has something wrong with him, something I can’t figure. Only thing I wonder is what he might have made of himself if he weren’t so damn ugly. I reckon he could have been the President of the United States, if he’d wanted to be and if people could have beared to look at him, ’cept he would’ve been more like Joe Stalin than John Kennedy. You oughta have stayed outta his way, boy. You learned a hard lesson yesterday, a hard lesson at the hands of a hard man.’
I had come from New York with the idea that I was a tough guy, that I was smarter and faster and, if it came down to it, harder than those I would come up against in the Maine boondocks. I was wrong. Daddy Helms taught me that.
Clarence Johns, a kid who lived with his drunk father near what is now Maine Mall Road, learned that lesson too. Clarence was amiable but dumb, a natural sidekick. We had been hanging out together for about a year, firing off his air rifle on lazy summer afternoons, drinking beers stolen from his old man’s stash. We were bored and we let everybody know it, even Daddy Helms.
He had bought an old, run-down bar on Congress Street and was slowly working to transform it into what he imagined would be a pretty high-class establishment. This was before the refurbishment of the port area, before the arrival of the T-shirt shops, the craft stores, the arthouse cinema and the bars that serve free nibbles to the tourist crowd between five and seven. Maybe Daddy Helms had a vision of what was to come, for he replaced all of the old windows in the bar, put a new roof on the place and bought up furnishings from some old Belfast church that had been deconsecrated.
One Sunday afternoon, when Clarence and I were feeling particularly at odds with the world, we sat on the wall at the back of Daddy Helms’s half-finished bar and broke just about every goddamn window in the place, flinging stones with pinpoint accuracy at the new panes. Eventually, we found an old abandoned toilet cistern and, in a final act of vandalism, we hoisted it through the large arched window at the back of the premises, which Daddy Helms had intended would span the bar itself like a fan.
I didn’t see Clarence for a few days after that and thought nothing of the consequences until one night, as we walked down St John with an illicitly bought six-pack of beer, three of Daddy Helms’s men caught us and dragged us towards a black Cadillac Eldorado. They cuffed our hands and put duct tape over our mouths and tied dirty rags over our eyes, then dumped us in the trunk and closed it. Clarence Johns and I lay side by side as we were carried away and I was conscious of the sour, unwashed smell from him, until I realised that I probably smelt the same.
But there were other smells in that trunk beyond oil and rags and the sweat of two teenage boys. It smelt of human excrement and urine, of vomit and bile. It smelt of the fear of impending death and I knew, even then, that a lot of people had been brought for rides in that Cadillac.
Time seemed to fade away in the blackness of that car, so that I couldn’t tell how far we had travelled until it ground to a halt. The trunk was opened and I saw the stars shining above me like the promise of heaven. I could hear waves crashing to my left and could taste the salt in the air. We were hauled from the trunk and dragged through bushes and over stones. I could feel sand beneath my feet and, beside me, I heard Clarence Johns start to whimper, or maybe it was my own whimperings I heard. Then we were thrown face down on the sand and there were hands at my clothes, my shoes. My shirt was ripped from me and I was stripped from the waist down, kicking frantically at the unseen figures around me until someone punched me hard with his knuckles in the small of the back and I stopped kicking. The rag was pulled away from my eyes and I looked up to see Daddy Helms standing above me. Behind him, I could see the silhouette of a large building: the Black Point Inn. We were on the Western Beach at Prouts Neck, beyond Scarborough itself. If I had been able to turn, I would have seen the lights of Old Orchard Beach, but I was not able to turn.
Daddy Helms held the butt of his cigar in his deformed hand and smiled at me. It was a smile like light flashing on a blade. He wore a white three-piece suit, a gold watch chain snaking across his vest and a red and white spotted bow-tie arranged neatly at the collar of his white cotton shirt. Beside me, Clarence Johns’s shoes scuffled in the sand as he tried to gain enough purchase to raise himself up, but one of Daddy Helms’s men, a blond-haired savage called Tiger Martin, placed the sole of his foot on Clarence’s chest and forced him back on to the sand. Clarence, I noticed, was not naked.
‘You Bob Warren’s grandson?’ Daddy Helms observed after a time. I nodded. I thought I was going to choke. My nostrils were filled with sand and I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs.
‘You know who I am?’ asked Daddy Helms, still looking at me.
I nodded again.
‘But you can’t know who I am, boy. You knew me, you wouldn’ta done what you did to my place. ’Less you’re a fool, that is, and that’s worse than not knowin’.’
He turned his attention briefly to Clarence, but he didn’t say anything to him. I thought I caught a flash of pity in his eyes as he looked at Clarence. Clarence was dumb, there was no doubt about that. For a brief instant, I seemed to be looking at Clarence with new eyes, as if he alone was not part of Daddy Helms’s gang and all five of us were about to do something terrible to him. But I was not with Daddy Helms and the thought of what was about to happen brought me back again. I felt the sand beneath my skin and I watched as Tiger Martin came forward, carrying a heavy-looking black refuse sack in his arms. He looked to Daddy Helms, Daddy Helms nodded and then the bag was tipped upside down and the contents poured over my body.
It was earth, but something else too: I sensed thousands of small legs moving on me, crawling through the hairs on my legs and groin, exploring the crevasses of my body like tiny lovers. I felt them on my tightly closed eyes and shook my head to clear them away. Then the biting started, tiny pinpoints of pain on my arms, my eyelids, my legs, even my penis, as the fire ants began to attack. I felt them crawling into my nostrils, and then the biting started there as well. I twisted and writhed, rubbing myself on the sand in an effort to kill as many of them as I could but it was like trying to remove the sand itself, grain by grain. I kicked and spun and felt tears running down my cheeks and then, just as it seemed that I couldn’t take any more, I felt a gloved hand on my ankle and I was dragged through the sand towards the surf. My wrists were freed and I plunged into the water, ripping the tape from my mouth, ignoring the pain as the adhesive tore my lips in my desire to rub and scratch myself. I submerged my head as the waves crashed above me, and still it seemed that I felt thread-like legs moving on me and felt the final bites of the insects before they drowned. I was shouting in pain and panic and then I was crying too, crying in shame and hurt and anger and fear.
For days afterwards, I found the remains of ants in my hair. Some of them were longer than the nail on my middle finger, with barbed pincers that curved forward to embrace the skin. My body was covered in raised bumps, almost an imitation of those of Daddy Helms himself, and the inside of my nose felt tender and swollen.
I pulled myself from the water and staggered on to the sand. Daddy Helms’s men had gone back to the car, leaving only Clarence and me on the beach with Daddy Helms himself. Clarence was untouched. Daddy Helms saw the realisation in my face and he smiled as he puffed on his cigar.
‘We found your friend last night,’ he said. He placed a thick, melted-wax hand on Clarence’s shoulders. Clarence flinched, but he didn’t move. ‘He told us everything. We didn’t even have to hurt him.’
The pain of betrayal superseded the bites and the itching, the lingering sensation of movement on my skin. I looked at Clarence Johns with new eyes, adult eyes. He stood on the sand, his arms wrapped around his body, shiveri
ng. His eyes were filled with a pain that sang out from the depths of his being. I wanted to hate him for what he had done, and Daddy Helms wanted me to hate him, but instead I felt only a deep emptiness and a kind of pity.
And I felt a kind of pity, too, for Daddy Helms, with his ravaged skin and his mounds and folds of heavy flesh, forced to visit this punishment on two young men because of some broken glass, punishing them not only physically but by severing the bonds of their friendship.
‘You learned two lessons here tonight, boy. You learned not to fuck with me, ever, and you learned something about friendship. In the end, the only friend you got is yourself, ’cos all the others, they’ll let you down in the end. We all stand alone, in the end.’ Then he turned and waddled, through the marram and dunes, back to his car.
They left us to walk back, my clothes torn and soaked through from the seawater. We said nothing to each other, not even when we parted at the gate to my grandfather’s property and Clarence headed off into the night, his cheap plastic shoes slapping on the road. We didn’t hang out together after that and I largely forgot Clarence until he died in a failed robbery attempt at a computer warehouse on the outskirts of Austin fifteen years later. Clarence was working as a security guard. He was shot by the raiders as he tried to defend a consignment of PCs.
When I entered my grandfather’s house I took some antiseptic from the medicine cabinet, then stripped and stood in the bath, rubbing the liquid into the bites. It stung. When I had finished, I sat in the empty bath and wept, and that was where my grandfather found me. He said nothing for a time, then disappeared and came back with a red bowl containing a paste made from baking soda and water. He rubbed it painstakingly across my shoulders and chest, my legs and arms, then poured a little into my hand so I could rub it into my groin. He wrapped me in a white cotton sheet and sat me down in a chair in the kitchen, before pouring each of us a large glass of brandy. It was Remy Martin, I remember, XO, the good stuff. It took me some time to finish it, but neither of us spoke a word. As I had stood to go to bed, he’d patted me lightly on the head.
‘A hard man,’ repeated my grandfather, draining the last of his coffee. He stood and the dog rose with him.
‘You want to walk the dog with me?’
I declined. He shrugged his shoulders and I watched him as he walked down the porch steps, the dog already running ahead of him, barking and sniffing and looking back to make sure the old man was following, then running on further again.
Daddy Helms died ten years later of stomach cancer. When he died, it was estimated that he had been involved, directly or indirectly, with over forty killings, some of them as far south as Florida. There was no more than a handful of people at his funeral.
I thought of Daddy Helms again as Rachel and I made our way from the killings in Metairie. I don’t know why. Maybe I felt there was something of his rage in Joe Bonnano, a hatred of the world that stemmed from something rotten inside him. I remembered my grandfather, I remembered Daddy Helms and I recalled the lessons they had tried to teach me, lessons that I still had not yet fully learned.
Chapter Forty-One
Outside the main cemetery gate, the New Orleans police were corralling witnesses and clearing the way for the injured to be carried to waiting ambulances. TV crews from WWDL and WDSU were trying to talk with survivors. I stayed close to one of Lionel Fontenot’s men, the one who had been entrusted with the care of the M16, as we approached the gates at an angle. We followed him until he arrived at a portion of ruptured fencing by the highway, then made his way through it to a waiting Lincoln. As he drove away, Rachel and I climbed over the fence and walked back to our car, unspeaking, approaching it from the west. It was parked away from the main centre of activity and we were able to slip off without attracting any attention.
‘How did that happen?’ asked Rachel, in a quiet voice, as we drove back into the city. ‘There should have been police. There should have been someone to stop them . . .’ Her voice trailed away and she remained silent as we drove back to the Quarter, her hands clasped across her upper body. I didn’t disturb her.
One of a number of things had happened. Someone in charge could have screwed up by assigning insufficient police to Metairie, believing that Joe Bones would never try to take out Lionel Fontenot at his brother’s funeral in front of witnesses. The guns had been stashed either late the previous night, or early that morning, and the cemetery had not been searched. It could also have been the case that Lionel warned off the cops, just as he had warned off the media, anxious not to turn his brother’s funeral into a circus. The other possibility was that Joe Bones had paid off or threatened some or all of the cops at Metairie and they had turned their backs while his men went about their business.
When we reached the hotel, I took her to my room – I didn’t want her surrounded by the images she had pinned to the walls of her own room. She went straight to the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I could hear the sound of the shower starting up. She stayed there for a long time.
When she eventually emerged, she had a big white bath towel draped around her from her breasts to her knees and was drying her hair with a smaller towel. Her eyes were red as she looked at me, then her chin trembled and she began to cry again. I held her, kissing the top of her head, then her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. Her mouth was warm as she responded to the kiss, her tongue darting around my teeth and entwining with my own tongue. I felt myself become aroused and pressed hard against her, pulling the towel from her as I did. Her fingers fumbled at my belt and my zipper, then reached inside and held me tightly. Her other hand worked at the buttons on my shirt as she kissed my neck and ran her tongue across my chest and around my nipples.
I kicked off my shoes and leaned over awkwardly to try to take off my socks. Damn socks. She smiled a little as I almost fell over while removing the left one and then I was on top of her as she pushed down my pants and shorts.
Her breasts were small, her hips slightly wide, the small triangle of hair at their centre a deep, fiery red. She tasted sweet. When she came, her back arched high and her legs wrapped around my thighs, I felt like I had never been held so tightly, or loved so hard.
Afterwards, she slept. I slipped from the bed, put on a T-shirt and jeans and took the key to her room from her bag. I walked barefoot down the gallery to the room, closed the door behind me and stood for a time before the pictures on the wall. Rachel had bought a large draughtsman’s pad on which to work out patterns and ideas. I took two sheets from it, taped them together and added them to the images on the wall. Then, surrounded by pictures of the anatomised Marsyas and photocopies of the crime-scene photos of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, I took a felt-tip and began to write.
In one corner I wrote the names of Jennifer and Susan, a kind of pang of regret and guilt hitting me as I wrote Susan’s name. I tried to put it from my mind and continued writing. In another corner I put the names of Tante Marie, Tee Jean and, slightly to one side, Florence. In the third corner I wrote Remarr’s name and in the fourth I placed a question mark and the word ‘girl’ beside it. In the centre I wrote ‘Trav Man’ and then, like a child drawing a star, I added a series of lines emanating from the centre and tried to write down all that I knew, or thought I knew, about the killer.
When I had finished, the list included: a voice synthesis program or unit; the Book of Enoch; a knowledge of Greek myths/early medical texts; a knowledge of police procedures and activities, based on what Rachel had said following the deaths of Jennifer and Susan, the fact that he had known that the feds were monitoring my cellphone, and the killing of Remarr. Initially I thought that if he had seen Remarr at the Aguillard house, then Remarr would have died there and then, but I reconsidered on the basis that the Travelling Man would have been reluctant to remain at the scene or to engage an alerted Remarr, and had decided to wait for another chance. The other option was that the killer had found out about the fingerprint and, somehow, the killer had also later found Remarr.
I added other elements based on standard assumptions: white male killer, probably somewhere between his twenties and forties; a Louisiana base from which to strike at Remarr and the Aguillards; a change of clothing, or overalls worn over his own clothes, to protect him from the blood; and access to and knowledge of ketamine.
I drew another line from Trav Man to the Aguillards, since the killer knew that Tante Marie had been talking, and a second line connecting him to Remarr. I added a dotted line to Jennifer and Susan, and wrote Edward Byron’s name with a question mark beside it. Then, on impulse, I added a third dotted line and wrote David Fontenot’s name between those of the Aguillards and Remarr, based only on the Honey Island connection and the possibility that, if the Travelling Man had lured him to Honey Island and tipped off Joe Bones that David Fontenot would be there, then the killer was someone known to the Fontenot family. Finally, I wrote Edward Byron’s name on a separate sheet and pinned it beside the main diagram.
I sat on the edge of Rachel’s bed and smelt the scent of her in the room as I looked at what I had written, shifting the pieces around in my head to see if they would match up anywhere. They didn’t, but I made one more addition before I returned to my own room to wait for Angel and Louis to return from Baton Rouge: I drew a light line between David Fontenot’s name and the question mark representing the girl in the swamp. I didn’t know it then, but by drawing that line I had made the first significant leap into the world of the Travelling Man.
I returned to my own room and sat by the balcony, watching Rachel in her uneasy sleep. Her eyelids moved rapidly, and once or twice she let out small groans and made pushing movements with her hands, her feet scrabbling beneath the blankets. I heard Angel and Louis before I saw them, Angel’s voice raised in what seemed to be anger, Louis responding in measured tones with a hint of mockery beneath them.
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