Bonavere Howl

by Caitlin Galway

  “With a mask over his face. That’s some eye you’ve got.” Detective Hudson smiled. His skin was pale with a plastic sheen, and bloodshot veins sprouted over his cheeks. He brought his finger to his mouth and absently rubbed his lower lip. “Forgive me, Miss Fayette, but you understand that Mr. Fields ain’t the only redhead in all of Louisiana.” His eyes darted between me and Fritzi, squished beneath his wrinkled brow. “You ladies goin’ to tell me what this here is really about?”

  “Sir, I’m not saying I know anything for certain, but surely this is cause to speak with Mr. Fields. We’re only trying to help.”

  “That’s awfully generous of you,” he said, dropping his notebook onto the table, “but we’re talkin’ about one of the most influential men in the city, and you want me to stroll up to his doorstep, embarrass him in front of his neighbours, harass him with a bunch of questions about gators and . . . masked men, was it? All ’cause you got a hunch. That ain’t how this is done, sweetheart.”

  Fritzi reached over and tapped Detective Hudson’s notebook. “Seems to me my sister’s been talking a lot more than you’ve been writing.”

  He raised his brow. “Princess, you got a man, an unidentified man, potentially huntin’ off season. Prolly he was there collectin’ old traps, whoever it was. We feel right awful ’bout what’s happened to your family, but y’all need to go home, maybe rest some. The whole lot of you needs to stop comin’ on down to the station every other day thinkin’ you’re dang Rocky King.”

  “The boy who was with me, his family’s fished for years, and he said this man didn’t look like a hunter at all. He didn’t even have the right boots. Now I was reading about patterns of missing people — ”

  Detective Hudson laughed, causing the whites of Fritzi’s eyes to flare.

  “Don’t laugh at my sister,” she said.

  His greying hair gave off a creamy shine, and he brought his fingers to it, exposing a patch of sweat under his arm. After an agitated pause, he rose from the table. “Girls, I’ve got a lot of work on my plate today. Miss Bonnie, see, you didn’t catch this man’s face. Did she tell you that ’fore you came here?” he asked Fritzi. “Because that there is what we call unreliable.”

  “We just want you to talk to him. We won’t go around tellin’ everybody, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I blotted the sweat above my upper lip with the flat of my hand. My chest was on fire, about to burn through the front of my dress. “The girl he was with,” I said, catching my sister’s confusion, “she looked directly at me, sir. She saw me, but she pretended as though she didn’t. That means something, it has to. She must have been scared.”

  The detective stroked his heavy-set jaw. “I suppose I wouldn’t want my daddy gettin’ caught by a couple of kids spyin’ in the bushes, neither.”

  “It wasn’t that at all,” I argued, wringing the urge to raise my voice. “You’re not taking any of this seriously. We can help.”

  Detective Hudson leaned toward us, rocking the table’s uneven legs. “Little lady, this is not the gardener you’re talkin’ to, so I’d watch y’self. I can’t go hasslin’ a man, ’specially the husband of the late Mrs. Apollina Lasalle, for dismantlin’ a trap we don’t even know belonged to him, on the instinct of a little girl. Now maybe I do intend to speak to him, but y’all need to calm y’selves. Comin’ down to the precinct by y’lonesome, a coupla young girls and no chaperone ’specially, with some of the creeps that crawl up in here? Where’s your daddy, anyhow? Who drove you, who knows y’here?”

  “No — ”

  “Our daddy knows just fine,” Fritzi said.

  He blinked down to where my foot was rapidly tapping the tiles.

  “Our sister’s been missing for weeks,” I said. “Nobody’s been able to tell us anything, not one single thing of any use as far as I know, but she knew Suzanna. They had class together. She knew her, and Mr. Fields knows them both.”

  My sister’s nails dug so deeply into my hand that the pain had dulled into a fiery throb. I looked down and found that I had scratched my thumb bloody past the cuticle.

  “I’d be more concerned about your sister knowin’ the DeClouet girl.” The detective’s voice had a high scratch to it as it rose. “Seems Suzanna had a bit of a loose reputation. Maybe your folks didn’t know that. She must’ve been out when she shouldn’t have been, where she shouldn’t have been, likely with kids she shouldn’t have been with, and got herself into some sorta trouble. That’s it. Y’all hearin’ me?”

  So quickly it popped like a gunshot, Fritzi slapped her hand onto the table. “That’s it?” She was wide awake now, enough energy to consume the room.

  “Fritzi,” I said quietly, touching her elbow. The colour drained from Detective Hudson’s face. “Come on, calm down.”

  His lips formed a tight pinhole as he tempered his breath. “The girl smacked her head,” he said, flicking his fingers across his temple in a cold pantomime. “That’s what killed her. That’s what we know.”

  He turned for the door, but Fritzi shot out of her seat.

  “Wait, there’s something else.” She dropped my hand and spoke without looking at me. “Bonnie, wait outside a minute.”

  My shoes clipped the tile in an echoed metronome, my reflection swimming alongside me in a drizzle of red and gold. I dug the knuckle of my thumb into my palm and fidgeted with my hands until they ached and spasmed.

  The window to the gutted blue room was frosted, so I could not look inside. It rattled when the door finally opened.

  “You’ve got some sick mouth on you, missy.” The detective hauled Fritzi out by the arm, talking over her protests. “I ain’t got to listen to a twisted thing you say.” He stalked off down the corridor.

  Fritzi shouted after him, “Some detective!” I grabbed her arm.

  It was frail and shaking; she was like a skeleton coming loose. She fell onto a bench against the wall and held her dark head in her hands.

  “You never told me about seeing a girl on that boat.” Fritzi was fishing through the glove compartment of Theodore Zimmerman’s car, still parked across from the police station, looking for her matches. She nudged me to help and I stuck my hand into the greasy hash of stubs and fast food wrappers under the seat.

  “I didn’t want to worry you even more.” I handed her a matchbook. It was edged in grime, with a print of a nude woman in a champagne glass on the front. “What did you say to that detective?”

  She struck the match until a pale orange petal flickered out. She held it to her cigarette and puffed, then reclined her arm out the window, staring into the sleepy traffic.

  She did not answer.

  The vinyl of the seat burned my skin, and the suncooked buckle bit my fingertips as I fastened myself in.

  Fritzi jutted her chin forward. “Look. By the fire hydrant.”

  Beyond the windshield, at the corner of Royal and Bourbon, a group of boys loitered by a squat red hydrant. The tallest among them leaned against a Corvette’s glossy hubcap. He was fair-haired and wore a loose pinstripe sports jacket, and I recognized him immediately.

  “I know that boy,” I said. Fritzi rested her wrist on the dashboard and her smoke clouded the window. I squinted through it. “I’m sure of it. He helped find me in Red Honey.”

  “You mean to tell me Leopold Lasalle there got a little mud on his shoes traipsin’ through the swamp?” She gave a disbelieving laugh. “Well bless his heart.”

  So I had already met Leopold Lasalle. He was not the more traditional brute I had expected, but the slight, pretty thing from the boat, dispassion clicking away behind his shoal-green eyes.

  “He and his friends jumped Dalcour last week,” I said.

  “Saul’s brother?”

  “They beat him something awful.”

  Fritzi gave a harsh flick of her cigarette and lit a new one. “Now you see what your runnin’ away did?”

  She was still a moment, staring into the firefly-fuzz at the end of her cigarette, then started t
he engine.

  “Awful strange, Leopold hiking out to Red Honey, I’ll tell you that much.” She pulled the car onto the road. “The law won’t go after him, ’cause of how he flaunts that name of his like a badge, but he steals from shops left and right. Drove his daddy’s car into a tree in Jackson Square, and it was all hush hush, everybody actin’ like it was the mystery of Cleopatra’s tomb who could’ve done it, but Theo and I saw him.”

  The rattling Lincoln swerved, then steadied itself in a controlled, determined line far too close to the curb, all the way to the fire hydrant. The huddle of boys skittered back, but Leopold Lasalle sent a cola bottle crashing against our passenger window.

  Fritzi hit the brakes and the bottle dropped unshattered from the glass. Through the spray of foam, I could see Leopold walking toward us. He flipped up his starched collar, his big blond rockabilly hair carefully coiffed and falling a little loose over his forehead in what my mother would have called the hoodlum fashion.

  He knocked on Fritzi’s door with the backs of his knuckles. “Bailing out that beau of yours again?”

  Her lips thinned and she motioned to steer the wheel, but I leaned over her lap and called out: “Nobody believes you about Dalcour Chiffree. Everyone knows he’d never hurt a fly and that you’re lower than a snake’s belly.”

  “Mornin’, little miss.” Leopold dipped his head to peer through the driver’s window. “Still a little scratched up, I see, but no worse for wear, right?”

  “Don’t be a creep, Leopold.” Fritzi relit her cigarette and exhaled in his face. “The Chiffrees are good people.”

  “Y’all their lawyers now?” Leopold stretched his arms out and clapped his hands against the Lincoln’s roof. “Quite the chariot you got here, girls.”

  Indignation ran hot shades across my face. Fritzi lifted her hand to shush me. “Always a pleasure, Leopold,” she said, her voice sharpened razor-thin.

  Once we pulled back onto the road, we flew up Royal, down Bourbon, down Wilkinson, the signs of every route to our house cruising by as we drew toward the watery edge of town.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, shifting in my seat. “We passed Toulouse.”

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Fritzi swatted the hair out of her eyes and clicked on the radio in the middle of a wailing pop number. “I had a feeling nobody in that dang precinct would listen to us. You seemed so sure, I was hoping . . .” Her arms sagged against the wheel, and the long, dirtied sleeves of the cocoon coat dripped in milky streams over her seat. “It’ll be a bit of a drive.”

  I could guess where we were going, and was going to go wherever Fritzi took us. I listened to the burbling radio as though it were transmitting a forlorn alien language. Each sugary note blew out into the smoky airwaves with all the absurdity of a waking voice interrupting a dream.

  Chapter 18

  THE CHIRPING OF crickets salted the air, which rested thick and unmoving over the tall grass beyond the open window. The blinds hung low to temper the mosquitoes, and it caused the midday sun to sneak through in slants about the unlit servants kitchen. We sat at a round rosewood table, where an orchid as sumptuously white as cake frosting spilled from a vase at the centre. Fritzi stirred a sugar cube into a glass of lemonade.

  “You have influence in this town,” she said.

  “I surely do, though in name more than anything.” Our host tugged his pants at the knees and lowered himself into a plain wooden chair. “Though I suppose that’s usually the case. My wife used to call it a key to the city.” There were swollen rims under his small, clear eyes, and lines across his brow. He was handsome, in a youthful way, with his hair playfully dishevelled though lightly greying at the temples, and he possessed a tender misfit quality, which might have put me at ease, were the circumstances different.

  I had not spoken to him, nor had I accepted his offer of lemonade or water, like my sister. I watched Fritzi stir the dissolving sugar cube, with my tongue fat in my mouth.

  She had driven us out of town to the eerie pillars and colonnades of River Road, until at last the sugar plantation known as Parisot stood out against the sky with old brick walls of deep Mediterranean blue, seeming to float in the faint rain mist on a bed of wild inflorescence. Its face was thriving with vines, and this did not give it the typical appearance of aged, acquiescent charm, but rather a look of sickly veins.

  The heat eased as the clouds gathered. Invisible drops had begun sprinkling down and filling the air with a cool softness, visible only once they hit the pavement, littering it in dark grey spots.

  Our host tapped his spoon against his glass. “I bet you hear this all the time, Miss Friederike, but you look exactly like your mama.”

  Dorian Fields continued smiling from behind his grizzly moustache.

  “Cyril,” he said, “that is, your daddy, told me years ago that his eldest would grow up to be the spittin’ image, but I didn’t believe it.” His hand swept out, up then down, in Fritzi’s direction. “And yet here you are, a vision of Holly Fayette herself.”

  Since he had sat down, his left hand had not lifted from the scratched-up book on the table. He thumbed the dusty pages in a mechanized motion, and his eyes wandered in fractured pathways, refusing to land in one place for too long.

  “My mama’s a beautiful woman, Mr. Fields, so thank you kindly.” Fritzi cleared her throat. “Like I said, now — with Suzanna DeClouet bein’ found and all, we think it’s in the best interest of everyone — not just our family, you see, but the city at large — to do another sweep of that swamp. A full one, every inch of it. Someone like you, Mr. Fields, you see, you could make that happen.”

  “Well, I’m deeply moved that you came to me,” Dorian said. His nail swept against a small, square coaster with a terrible vermin-scratching sound. “A sweet girl, Constance. Certainly among the brightest of my students. Ever, really, I mean that.” He took a sip from his glass and ran his hand down his beard. His marigold hair shone its reddest at the curls along his neck, where they crept over the back of his collar. “I’ll do what I can, ladies. Truly, you can depend on it.”

  “We’d be mighty gracious, Mr. Fields,” Fritzi said.

  “Well, I’m much obliged to be included. It just ain’t safe out anymore, we’ve got to help one another, work together.” His eyes skidded across the tablecloth and onto me. “I’ll be keepin’ a close eye on your family from now on. You can be sure.”

  I waited for the sounds of maids, of footsteps in the rooms beside us. Shuffling feet or voices travelling muffled through the ceiling. I should have asked to use the restroom by now, and begun my prying, as we had agreed, but I did not want to leave Fritzi alone with Mr. Fields. I saw in the tightening of her gestures that my hesitation was agitating her.

  You could smell the wind blowing off the surface of the Mississippi, and the centuries-old Southern magnolias wrapping around the house like a gate. The heat rolled through the open kitchen door, stirring up the musty scent of antebellum-age wood. I had never been in a house so large and quiet and far from the city.

  It was a peculiar place, too, decorated like a museum. Travel findings covered the walls: pinned slippers of crimped silk, nude statuettes, dishes painted in ancient dogs with amber manes and paws broad enough to crush a person’s skull. It brought to mind museum visits with Connie, where we chose our favourite gemstones and brushed sand off mock dinosaur bones, and the riot we had when ancient Greek sculptures, white and cold with preservation, arrived on loan from the British Museum. A guard had yelled at Connie that day for stepping too close to a little marble frog.

  A chill set in. I looked around Dorian Fields’ kitchen and thought how much Connie would have loved a room like this.

  He and Fritzi were still speaking, sorting out the particulars of a swamp search I was certain neither believed would come to pass. Other than the side entrance, there were two other doors slightly ajar and leading out of the kitchen; one opened onto a small area of enclosed stone, with only the sky overh
ead — an old wine cellar, perhaps — and given that whoever had once toiled in this kitchen would have needed access to the house’s more formal, familial interior, I imagined the second door was the one I needed. Its white paint appeared sanded off with age, and beyond it there was little light. I could see only the beginnings of its wallpaper, where white flowers lay tattered and curled away against the sooty brick underneath.

  “You have a magnificent house, Mr. Fields,” I said, rather suddenly. “I hope it isn’t too lonely for you. I’ve never seen such a quiet home.”

  He looked at me as though he had thought all of this time I was mute.

  Fritzi laughed in her pretty manner. “I think it’s right elegant. I’m sure there are people bustling around, but in such a grand house we wouldn’t hear it.” She had a smile stitched on like a doll’s, her hands clasped like they were glued together. The anger rolling through her body pulsed in the corner of her eye, invisible to Dorian, but I knew it by the rapid flutter of her lashes, a desperate attempt to blink it away. “You have a son, do you not?”

  “A boy,” Dorian said after a moment. “Leopold.”

  “I thought I heard you had a daughter, as well,” I said.

  Fritzi’s hands unclasped and she slid one firmly over my knee.

  “I have a niece,” Dorian said. “She moved up here ’bout four years ago after Ruth and her husband died.” He loosened his tie. “Beg y’pardon, Ruth was my sister.”

  “I’ve never seen her at school, your niece,” I said.

  Fritzi’s back had straightened flat against her chair and the stirring of her spoon had stopped. She held it, frozen in place, against the glass.

  “No, she preferred a school more like the one she was attendin’ back home.” He rolled his hand in the air and puffed his mouth out. “Durango somethin’ or other. Up in Vegas. Long time since she lived with me, though. She’s stayin’ with her grandfolks now.”

  Fritzi’s spoon returned to its concentric circles, the occasional loud ting.