It sounded pretty crazy the way she put it. “Yes,” I said. “The scent, that’s the way it started. At least at first. But maybe it’s changing.”
“You mean, now it’s different? You don’t have to smell them to see them?” More sarcasm in her voice.
I was thinking back to the incident the night before, on the beach. Seeing one of the monsters, but that time, minus the burning scent of rot and death.
“Look,” I said, “the technical details of my ability, that’s not important. What is important is about us. Maybe in one way, what you and I do in terms of stopping evildoers, we’re not that different. But I’ve had a soul shake-up. A complete spiritual realignment. And in that, we are different.”
“Different is . . . ,” she began, then let her voice trail off.
“Different is fine for a vacation,” I filled in, “but not for a lifetime.”
She blew on her cup of coffee to cool it down. “Nice closing argument.”
“Not a fun case to argue,” I said. “But then, I didn’t pick this case. It picked me.”
Ashley changed the subject and asked me about Heather. I was frank about the problems we were having. But I told her that I would never give up on my daughter.
Ashley took a sip of coffee. “She’ll come around.” She stood and stepped over to me, cup in hand, and planted a kiss on my forehead. As she stepped away, she said, exhaling, “Aw, crap. I don’t mind breakups with the bad boys. But it’s tough when it’s a good guy.”
An hour later, Ashley announced that she had booked an earlier flight out of Norfolk, just across the border in Virginia, departing late afternoon, and that she would have to leave shortly.
When she was behind the wheel of her rental car, window down, I leaned in to face her. I was trying to come up with something snappy or profound or tender to say. But it didn’t come. I was wordless.
“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Ashley said, breaking the silence. “It’s painted all over your face. This isn’t your fault. You don’t owe me a thing. And by the way, you’ve given me a lot.”
She turned on the ignition and added, “Besides, I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be talking. You’ll be calling me up with some outrageous favor I’m supposed to do for you. Some police intelligence you need. So you can break another case. So you can call another nasty murder the work of the devil. And who knows? Maybe it will be.”
I asked, “Will you answer when I make that call?”
“We’ll see,” she said. Seconds later, I saw her taillights heading away from me, down the sandy road.
When Ashley left, Heather didn’t bother to ask me why. She hit me with her own theory. “I know what happened,” she said. “It’s all that ‘I’m crazy for Christ’ stuff you’re into and Ashley’s not. All that ‘The devil made the homicidal maniac do it’ stuff. And that is really too bad, Trevor. I liked Ashley a lot.”
I listened but didn’t go into debating mode.
For the rest of the morning I took Heather out for a boat ride, cruising around Ocracoke Island. I gave her some of the local lore about the island’s most famous figure, Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, the eighteenth-century pirate, who scuttled ships and looted and murdered around those waters until he was finally hunted down by the English navy and killed not far from my place on the island.
She seemed interested. We kept the conversation light and breezy and off the personal topics, eating sandwiches out of my cooler as I motored my forty-footer. Heather was still keeping things at arm’s length. I had concluded it was going to be a marathon rather than a fifty-yard dash between us.
But my mind turned to other matters when we got back to the cottage and I found a voice message waiting on my cell phone. The call was from a young man named Kevin Sanders. He said he was a law clerk calling for his boss, a New Orleans lawyer by the name of Morgan Canterelle.
But when I returned the call, I was greeted by a message on the other end. While the voice sounded like the Kevin Sanders I’d just listened to, the message on his answering service began with a surprisingly freaky intro: “Hello, and welcome to Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo.”
5
I was midway into leaving a message of my own when Kevin Sanders picked up.
“Sorry, Mr. Black,” he said. “I was just closing up.”
“I’m not sure I’ve got this straight. I was under the impression I was calling the law clerk of an attorney.”
“Oh yeah,” he laughed. “So sorry. Yes, I’m the law clerk. Actually, I had to call you from this place, my job here at the museum, because the battery on my cell phone died. But yes, I do work for Attorney Canterelle when I’m not working part-time over here.”
“Are you studying law?”
He said he was and that he was a third-year law student at Tulane, all the while working two jobs. I had to give him credit for that. “A lot of us law students are working two jobs,” Kevin added. “It beats cleaning the toilets someplace like Six Flags.”
Kevin quickly got down to business, saying Morgan Canterelle wanted to speak to me, that it was a matter of urgency, and he wanted to know when could that happen. I gave him a time later that day.
I asked, “Who is this Marie Laveau you’re working for at the museum?”
He thought that was funny. “No, I don’t work for her. She died way back in 1881. Never heard of her?” I said I hadn’t. “She was a really famous New Orleans voodoo priestess.”
Considering the facts surrounding AUSA Forester’s death, he had my attention.
A few hours later, I was on the phone with Morgan Canterelle, who spoke in a deep baritone and slowly, in a born-and-bred-in-Louisiana manner. “I’m an admirer of y’all, Mr. Black. Which is the very reason I reached out.”
“Admirer in what way?”
“Y’all’s reputation as a criminal defense attorney pre-cedes,” he said. “Y’all’s cases would occasionally be the talk of the criminal law section of the ABA. By the way, I’m on the convention committee of the American Bar Association.”
I said all that was interesting to know but wondered silently where this was going.
“Which is why I’m calling. We would like y’all to be a pre-senter at our upcoming convention. Right here in New Orleans. How ’bout that?”
“You know that I no longer practice law.”
“Naturally, Mr. Black,” he intoned, “I know that y’all do not presently practice law. I am fully apprised of y’all’s disbarment.”
“Then why have me speak to a bunch of lawyers and judges?”
“An address from an ex-criminal de-fense lawyer from New York who investigates demons? That is something I would pay Broadway-ticket prices to hear.”
I waited for the gag line. That this whole phone call was a prank. But it didn’t come. So I said, “I’m reluctant, Mr. Canterelle. It sounds like a TV reality show, with me playing the part of the goblin-chasing, disbarred ex-lawyer.”
He shot back, “Lawyers need entertainment too.” Then an added thought. “And by the way, isn’t that what y’all are—a goblin-chasing, disbarred ex-lawyer?”
I couldn’t argue with that. Next, the New Orleans attorney sweetened the deal. “And we pay a very handsome honorarium.”
Despite my new career writing magazine articles about bizarre cases, I still had been dipping into my retirement fund. An extra cash injection sounded nice. I told him I would think about it. But I added, “When is the convention again?”
“Next week. The speaking slot would be four days from now.”
The dawn was breaking. “Oh, in other words, one of your other speakers bailed on you at the last minute. . . .”
“Not at all,” he boomed. “It took until now for me to con-vince the rest of the convention committee that y’all’s the right man for the slot.”
“A hard sell?”
“A little. But then, Mr. Black, I am a very convincing man.”
Canterelle must have sensed my foot was still dragging, because he
elaborated. “Look here, about that ‘convincing’ part, I got ahold of a speech y’all made once to the New York Bar Association dealing with the law on exculpatory evidence. I gave it to the members of our committee and told them, ‘Hey, this boy Trevor Black, he’s a fine speaker.’ And we all know about that magazine writing now, which makes y’all a round peg in a round hole because the plenary session is being sponsored by the American Institute of Legal Authors. See how that all fits together?”
I asked when he needed an answer. He said, “Midmorning tomorrow.”
After my call with the New Orleans lawyer, I checked the ABA convention website. The attorney general for the United States, George Shazzar, would be addressing the audience immediately after the slot where Canterelle wanted me to speak.
Shazzar had just rubber-stamped the decision of US Attorney Vance Zaduck to close the matter on the Forester death. A troublesome sign, I thought, particularly because the ABA Journal had also quoted “unnamed sources” at the US attorney’s office in DC who were complaining that the matter needed a more thorough investigation. I had a bad feeling about Shazzar and was growing more convinced that this incident needed a second look. The ABA convention could give me the chance to hit the whole issue with a huge, very public LED light.
But there was also the matter of Heather. She was scheduled to stay on with me at the cottage until well into the next week. That would conflict with my flying down to New Orleans for the ABA convention. I didn’t want to jeopardize our time together.
While it was still daylight, Heather and I took a walk from my cottage, along the sandy road past the lighthouse, and then down to the harbor that was usually filled with sailboats, fishing charters, and a few crabbing vessels at anchor. There was a fish market there. She wanted to make dinner for us, so I gave her carte blanche to choose anything she wanted and told her I’d pick up the tab.
Heather decided on sea bass, red potatoes, and corn on the cob, which sounded great to me. On the stroll back, as I carried the grocery bag, we didn’t talk much. I wanted to avoid the topic of my speaking at the ABA. I would save that for dinner.
After picking our plates clean at a good meal, I broke the news, talking about my dilemma regarding the ABA invitation. To my surprise she went ballistic with enthusiasm. “You’ve got to accept the offer, Trevor. Absolutely.”
I asked, “But wouldn’t you rather stay here at the cottage?”
“Uh, absolutely not. No way,” she said. “I want to go to New Orleans with you. See you in action. What a trip, hearing you address all those lawyers and judges. Besides, I had actually given some thought to visiting New Orleans myself. The timing’s perfect.”
On a chessboard, I would have been checkmated. But in a good way.
Of course, as I meditated on her reaction, there was another explanation. Perhaps my long-lost daughter wanted to judge for herself what the legal community really thought of me. To see whether her biological father really had stepped off the deep end.
But I couldn’t ignore one final factor, something completely off the chessboard. Maybe this trip to New Orleans was providential. The FedEx letter—the last thing AUSA Jason Forester looked at before he shuffled off this mortal coil, as the Bard would say—had been shipped out of a little express delivery shop. And of all the places in the world, that shop was located in New Orleans.
Yes, I would fly down to the ABA, and Heather with me. That much was certain. But before that, I decided to pursue one possible avenue on the Forester death. I e-mailed a note to a high-ranking official in the Justice Department whose name I knew, asking for a meeting on the subject. It was an ultra-long shot. The odds were slim that I would ever hear back from Paul Pullmen, assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division. Instead, I was betting that the call would come from an underling, if at all: “So sorry, Mr. Black, but a meeting with Mr. Pullmen is simply not feasible.”
6
Heather and I flew into New Orleans just as the sun was going down. Through the window we could see the Mississippi River bathed in crimson. An hour later we were driving past the venue where I would be speaking the following day, the million-square-foot Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, with the glittering symbol of the French fleur-de-lis on the facade. I saw crowds of lawyer types streaming out of the place as we passed. Little did they know the fireworks I would soon be springing on the ABA.
As we stood in line in the lobby of the Hyatt to check in, Heather gave me a nudge. “So, when’ll you tell me about your speech tomorrow?”
I just smiled.
“Come on, this isn’t a state secret. I’m your daughter. Give me a hint. What’s the topic?”
I tried my best to dodge her questions artfully.
“Wow, Trevor,” she said with a smirk. “Anybody tell you that you’re emotionally closed?”
I ignored that one and booked us separate, adjoining rooms, and we parted in the hall to drop our bags.
Morgan Canterelle had promised that he would be in touch with me when I arrived in the city, but the desk had no message, and there was no voice mail from him on my cell phone, so I called his office. The receptionist transferred me to Kevin Sanders, who answered in a chipper voice and asked how my flight was.
“Good, thanks, but I was wondering if your boss might want to connect with me before my speech tomorrow.”
“I tell you what, Mr. Black, Mr. Canterelle isn’t in the office right now, but I will be sure and tell him you called.”
Figuring that the lawyer’s invitation to meet with me personally in New Orleans had merely been a courtesy, I thanked his clerk and forgot about it.
Heather and I took the elevator down for a quick dinner. As we ate, she was surprisingly chatty and had given up trying to pry into my upcoming ABA address. We drifted into a conversation about her master’s thesis. She described it as “Dealing with cultural and religious syncretism. Modern-day belief systems that have their roots in older practices and then get melded together.”
Then she quickly asked if I had ever been to New Orleans before.
I told her, “Long time ago. Last time was when I argued a criminal case before the Fifth Circuit, in the US Court of Appeals. Before that, I attended the ABA. And before that, a criminal case I handled in the local courthouse here in New Orleans. All of that was before Katrina hit, of course. That changed everything.”
She looked pensive. “What’s the legal term?”
“For what?”
“For hurricanes. Storms. Those kinds of natural disasters. One of my professors used it once.”
“I think you mean force majeure,” I said.
“Right, that’s it. What does it mean?”
“An unanticipated, extraordinary, devastating natural occurrence. ‘Act of God’ is what the old phrase used to be.”
“So, God brings destruction?”
“There’s a difference between allowing it and causing it. Nature, humanity—the whole earth is out of whack. Enter chaos. Whatever his reasons, God lets the world take its course sometimes.”
“And the devil? Do you believe he brings hurricanes?”
“He can. If God allows it.”
“So you think God has, like, this ultimate veto power over everything?”
“That’s a good way of looking at it.”
“Does he let the devil get away with murder? Like your voodoo case?”
I stopped eating. “I take it Ashley told you about it?”
“Just a few things. Sounds creepy.”
“Yes, very.”
“I suppose you’re not going to tell me why a New York policeman wants you to investigate a creepy murder of a government attorney in Washington?”
“Not yet. I’m still at the front end of that case. Wait till things get a bit clearer. Then I’ll tell you more.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“About whether you believe that God allows the devil to get away with murder.”
&nbs
p; I took my time answering. Then, “It sounds like you’re blaming God for not stopping bad things from happening.”
It was her turn to take her time. Finally she said, “No, not every bad thing. Just some things.”
“Like?”
“Like Marilyn dying before I got a chance to even meet her. The only thing I know about my biological mother now is the one letter she wrote to me.”
“I’m sorry it happened that way.”
“She really said some nasty things about you in the letter.” Heather looked me in the eye when she said that.
“I’m sure some of them were true,” I said. “I made mistakes.”
“Like you demanding that she abort me?”
In a flash, everything seemed to change between us. One minute, a good dinner conversation that actually seemed to be opening up the relationship. Then, a minute later, I was teetering on a precipice. Please, God, I thought, help me through this. How could I tell my daughter that her mother—whom she never had a chance to meet and who had put her up for adoption and who lied to the adoption officials by telling them she didn’t know who the father was—had also lied in that letter to Heather, spinning a story that I was demanding she abort the pregnancy?
Heather was still waiting for a response. She cocked her head. “Well?”
I wanted a relationship with my daughter. Desperately. So much distance between us. The whole thing seemed daunting. Even so, I wasn’t about to bridge the gap by slandering her dead mother—even if she had lied about me in that letter. It was Marilyn who mentioned the abortion, not me. At the same time, though, I had played the part of the complicit coward. I had been willing to allow it. I had to live with that.
“The truth is,” I finally said, “I should have fought for you when I learned that Marilyn was pregnant. And I didn’t. And that was the terrible failure on my part.”
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