Pattern of Wounds

by J. Bertrand

  “Your mama in there?” Gene asks.

  “No, she ain’t.”

  “How about your uncle, then?”

  The kid looks over his shoulder, then back. “Who wants to know?”

  “Who do you think?” Gene pushes the door wide, forcing the kid back and revealing a man frozen on the threshold of the hallway, still holding a finger over his lips. “Don’t make a big deal out of this, son. We only want to talk to you.”

  Wayne Bourgeois scratches his chin in thought, eyes darting, and for half a second I expect him to run. But then he sighs and motions us inside, telling his nephew to beat it into a back bedroom. The kid starts to argue until Bourgeois raises the back of his hand.

  “Go on,” Gene says. “And you put your hand down before I break it off. Now grab yourself some chair and get your vocal cords ready, because we’re gonna have ourselves a little chat—and by ‘little’ I mean as long as it takes.”

  Bourgeois lowers himself onto a plush recliner, the fabric all rubbed to a high shine. He’s barefoot with only his toes sticking out from the hem of his ragged jeans. His body is hidden by an oversized Saints hoodie that leaves the prison tats on his neck in full view. Judging from the stubble on his chin, he hasn’t shaved in days. And there’s a smell coming off him, a bouquet of body odor and marijuana.

  “Now, Mr. Bourgeois,” Gene says, “it seems you’ve got yourself a problem. My colleague here is from the state of Texas, and you know how them folks get when us Louisiana boys start running roughshod over their rules.”

  “This about my parole?”

  “It ain’t about collecting for the Policeman’s Ball.”

  He starts to rise. “Now, see, I got a paper somewheres—”

  “Park it, brother, or I’ll park it for you.”

  “It’s all cool, man. Stay chill.”

  “You gotta let me finish. What I was saying was, you got a problem, and me, I’m the solution. I can’t have these cowboys coming over the state line thinking they can snatch up my people without so much as a by-your-leave. Only to make ’em go away, there has to be something in it for them. Am I making myself clear? You answer the nice man’s questions, and the nice man goes away. You don’t answer, and the nice man goes away, but he leaves me here to continue the conversation.” He smiles. “And I ain’t nice.”

  Bourgeois glances toward the hallway where the kid disappeared. “I’m an open book, man. No secrets. You fire away and see if I’m lying.”

  I walk over to the side of his chair. “Tell me everything you know about Donald Fauk.”

  He looks up at me, confused, but all it takes is a shift of Gene’s weight and the knit eyebrows smooth away.

  “Oh,” Bourgeois says, “you mean that guy.” Like there’d been some doubt. “What you wanna know about him?”

  “Everything,” I say.

  “Well, he’s pretty rich, I can tell you that. Doing time for stabbing his wife to death. He’s got a lot of muscle around him, too. You can’t hardly get near the man unless he invites you.”

  “What did he want from you?”

  “Me? He didn’t want nothing”—another movement from Gene—“although, come to think of it, there was something. When I got out, he needed something done for him on the outside, and as a favor I volunteered.”

  “Were you compensated for this favor?” Gene asks.

  “Compensated?” He turns the word over in his mind. “I guess you could say that. There was some money in it for me.”

  “What did you have to do?”

  “Nothing much,” he says. “He gimme some letters, is all. ‘Go to the post office and mail these,’ he told me, ‘and when they arrive you’ll get a letter of your own.’ And I give him my sister’s address to send it to. That’s the only reason I had to come here. I wasn’t breaking parole or anything. I just wasn’t thinking when I give it to him, is all.”

  “Tell me more about the letters.”

  He shrugs. “There was four or five of ’em. All sealed up and the address written on. Two of ’em was real thick, filled up with papers, and the others seemed like there was just one or two pages inside.”

  “Where were they going to?”

  “The thick ones went to people in Houston, I think. There was one in Florida. I’m not sure about the rest. All of them but the one were to places in Texas, though. I do remember that.”

  “And the letter you got, where is that?”

  He smiles. “That one was filled with cash.”

  “That wasn’t what the man asked,” Gene says.

  “Oh. You mean where is it? I done spent the money way back.”

  “What about the envelope?”

  “One of those big ones,” he says, drawing a box in the air. “Overnight.”

  “Which service? FedEx, UPS—”

  “I can show you. I still got it somewheres.”

  “Well,” Gene says, “that’s more like it.”

  Bourgeois hops out of his chair to go and fetch the envelope. Right then I see something in his eyes. Gene sees it too, putting a hand out to stop him. The ex-con ducks under the arm, though, springing straight into Gene. Pushing him off-balance. They lock up, staggering backward. Toward the exit.

  Gene topples onto the ground. Bourgeois scrambles over him, bolting out through the open door. I kick it into gear.

  As I try to cross over him, Gene rolls. My foot catches on the crook of his knee, nearly forcing me face-first into the walkway. But I regain my balance in time to see Bourgeois hoofing it across the boulevard.

  “Go get him!”

  I run after him. Over my shoulder I hear Gene struggling back to his feet.

  “I’ll get the truck,” he calls out, a note of pain in his voice.

  Bourgeois has a head start. And twenty years on me at least. At first it looks like he’s gonna leave me in the dust. I don’t even know why the boy’s running, but I run after him.

  I can’t remember my last foot pursuit. My legs can’t, either.

  Before long my chest is pounding and a wheezing sound is coming from my throat, and the distance between me and the ex-con keeps getting longer and longer. I expect the truck to roll up anytime, relieving me of the task, but I listen in vain for the roar of the engine.

  Bourgeois pauses, then zigzags back across the boulevard, heading for the houses on the far side. He turns to see where I’m at. I pick up some speed. He loses his footing and sprawls onto the pavement.

  I kick my legs harder, willing myself forward. As he gets up, I get a glimpse of his face under the streetlight, the features twisted with fear. Why is he running? He takes off down one of the driveways. As I reach the yard, I see him lifting himself over the back fence.

  There’s no telling where Gene is, but I yell as loud as I can, hoping he can hear me.

  “Fontenot! We’re going over the fence!”

  It takes me two tries to grip the top of the fence. I hook my leg over and roll across, landing awkwardly on one foot. I hit the ground. When I pick myself up, my side is damp with mud. I keep running, then climb a second fence, cursing the fact that I didn’t bring a change of clothes with me. And all for nothing. I can’t even see him anymore.

  I look around me and pause. I find myself standing at the end of a long row of aboveground sepulchers. The cemetery stretches out before me as far as the eye can see, pitted white marble crypts rising to eye level and higher, like an ancient city recessed into the mud.

  Bourgeois lopes between them maybe fifty yards ahead, one hand clamped to his side. He’s in some pain, too. That gives me satisfaction, anyway. I start after him, but my limbs turn to lead. My toe catches on the edge of a cobble and I’m on the ground again, this time for good.

  I lie there a second, breathing hard, then get up on one skinned knee. Gene is nowhere to be seen. Off in the distance, Bourgeois gives a cry of mingled pain and exhaustion. I’d yell back, but I can’t catch my breath.

  The mausoleums crowd around, and the night grows quiet excep
t for the sound of my breathing and the song of some far-off nocturnal bird.

  I retrace my steps and find Gene leaning against the truck with one leg tucked against the other, his hand clutching his raised knee.

  “I think I blew it out,” he says, panting.

  “Why’d he take off like that?”

  “I forgot to ask him on his way out.”

  I start toward the house. “We should take a look inside.”

  “Without a warrant?” he says, sneering through the pain.

  “I’m concerned about that minor in there.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The nephew is watching TV in his shoebox of a bedroom, knees tucked under his chin. I mutter a few reassurances, asking where his mother is, but the boy gives no reply. I pull the door shut. In the next bedroom, there’s a nude girl lying facedown on the bed, her outstretched wrist tied to the post with a knotted T-shirt. I crouch by her head, feeling her neck for a pulse. Her skin is feverishly warm to the touch.

  “Are you okay?”

  I switch on the bedside lamp, then lift her eyelid. Her pupil is just a pinprick. Her lips part and she whispers something.

  “What did you say?”

  “Is he gone?”

  She’s bleeding from one nostril. There’s blood on her legs, too. At the doorway, the nephew makes a sound. He stares at the girl, then at me.

  “Is this your mama?” I ask.

  “My mama ain’t no whore.” He goes back to his room.

  Gene hobbles in as I untie the girl’s wrist. He pulls a blanket over her, then goes back into the hallway to call an ambulance. The girl rubs her hand. She sits up, pushing her legs over the edge of the bed. She looks no more than seventeen, eighteen.

  “I gotta get going,” she says. “I’m gonna be in trouble.”

  “Just sit still. There’s an ambulance coming.”

  She tries to stand, but she can’t. I brush a sweat-damp curl out of her eyes and she recoils.

  “You gotta let me go, mister.”

  From the hallway, Gene snaps at her: “Don’t make the man repeat himself.”

  The girls goes docile, tugging the blanket around her, and I feel like giving Gene’s knee a kick. I step back from the bed, realizing that all this time I’ve been treading on the girl’s torn clothes. I bend down and start to gather them, but there’s no point. A couple of joints are stubbed out in the ashtray under the lamp, but there’s something more powerful in the girl’s system than weed.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” I tell her.

  “I am not.”

  The ambulance arrives, along with an NOPD patrol car. Gene stays put in the hallway, hiding his limp as he gives the uniforms a rundown. During the course of questioning, the suspect fled. Instead of pursuing, we secured the scene to ensure the minor’s safety, and in the course of this discovered the girl. One of the uniforms recognizes her and goes over while the paramedic is taking her vitals.

  “Remember me?” he asks. “I ran you off the corner last week.” He looks at me, noting the state of my clothes. “She’s got a couple of priors for solicitation, but she’s all right.”

  “I’m gonna get in trouble,” the girl says.

  “Don’t you worry about that, Cher. Just let the doctor have a look.”

  Gene motions me out of the room. In the yard, he checks his watch and gives me a gloomy look.

  “You gonna write on this, or am I?”

  “Your patch, your lead.”

  “I knew that was coming.” He hobbles over toward the back of the ambulance. “Let’s see if there’s anything stronger than aspirin in here.”

  “Gene.”

  “Just kidding,” he says, throwing up his hands. “Let’s get going. Those boys can handle everything from here on out.” He rustles in his pockets and tosses me the truck keys. “You’re gonna have to drive, I’m afraid.”

  Back on his patio with a homemade ice pack resting on his knee, Gene slurps the dregs of his fourth or fifth beer, tossing the bottle into the yard with a sigh. Beside me the grill still radiates heat. I stretch out, legs crossed at the ankle, feeling childish in Gene’s oversized sweat suit. My clothes are slowly revolving in his dryer, all except for my jacket, which hangs from a peg near the front door.

  “Not bad for one day, huh?” he asks. “If you’d known when you got up this morning you’d interrupt a rape in progress—maybe worse—and chase some degenerate through the St. Louis cemetery, I bet that would have put a spring in your step.”

  “At least I know now why he ran.”

  “We’ll pick him up soon enough.” He reaches into the cooler for another bottle, finds there aren’t any, and stares longingly toward the kitchen. “You gonna make me get up?”

  “What do you make of those letters?”

  “I think better with a cold one in hand.”

  “That’s a lot of trouble for Fauk to go through, don’t you think?”

  “Some people don’t like their mail being read. If there were five of those envelopes, at least one of them must’ve gone to his people, whoever arranges the payments. That’s how they’d know the others were sent. I could check with the carriers and see who made a delivery to that address, and where it came from . . . if you’ll do me a little favor and refill the cooler.”

  I ignore him. “I think I know where those fat envelopes were going: Brad Templeton.”

  “The writer?”

  “He let slip that he’d been in contact with Fauk, and he’s the one who primed the Sheriff’s Department with all these supposed serial killer victims.”

  “And you think they came straight from Fauk.”

  “Maybe. Something did.”

  “Now will you get me a beer?”

  “This appeal has been a long time coming. Somehow they managed to get the DNA evidence to disappear so it can’t be retested. Then they planted the serial killer theory—or at least got the ball rolling, trusting Templeton’s creative mind to connect the dots. Before tonight, I assumed they cooked up this false confession angle, too. Now I don’t know.”

  He shifts in his chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You admitted it, didn’t you?”

  “Now listen here, brother. You and me just turned in a sterling piece of police work, and in record time, too. Don’t go ruining the moment.”

  “It was special, you’re right. But did you not sit in that very chair a couple hours ago and confess to beating a confession out of someone?”

  “A guilty someone.”

  “What about Donald Fauk? He was guilty.”

  “Are you for real, March? You’re honestly gonna ask me if I forced a confession from that man? You and me both know he was dying to give it up. That guy was touched in the head, and he was only too happy to admit what he’d done.”

  “Did he admit it to you?”

  He glances away.

  “Gene, don’t lie to me.”

  “Listen, while you and your partner were gone, you think I sat with the man and asked what he’d been up to? In case you don’t remember, there were more pressing concerns at the moment. Does 9/11 ring any bells? Excuse me if I don’t take a piece of wife-murdering scum like Fauk too seriously on the same day somebody flies jets into the Twin Towers. I guess I lost a little perspective.”

  “So he didn’t say anything to you?”

  “It’s been ten years. I don’t remember what was said.”

  “But something was?”

  He throws the ice pack at my feet, sending half-melted cubes skittering across the concrete. The chair creaks under his weight as he rises.

  “You’re worse than fish,” he says. “You stink from day one.”

  He goes inside, slamming the door behind him. A tiny slice of moon hovers in the sky overhead. In the far distance the lights on a jetliner twinkle red. I wait for him to come back, but he doesn’t. I relax and let my eyes close.

  There’s no point in staying longer than I have to. First thing in the morning
I’ll make the drive back to Houston and try to forget this little episode ever occurred. Gene’s confession. The cemetery. The prostitute on the bed. It takes a toll, seeing all that. Like Charlotte said. My legs are like rubber, my arms sore, my neck and shoulders tight from carrying unseen weight. I could sleep right here under the hiding moon if I didn’t know Gene would be back any moment, flush with bottles, holding himself up to me like a mirror. A reflection of what I might have been, and what in the eyes of the people closest to me I am either becoming or already am.

  “Last chance,” he says, coming through the door and depositing a bottle in my lap. The cap is already off, sloshing amber fluid onto the sweats.

  I lift the bottle, measuring its heft in my hand. Before he can stop me, I send it spinning across the yard, thumping to a halt at the base of the fence where the contents gurgle out into the grass.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 14 — 4:46 A.M.

  I wake up on the couch, sticky with sweat, the sound of Gene’s snoring in my ears. He lies sprawled in a recliner surrounded by bottles, his leg elevated, a deflated rag still dripping across his swollen knee. The blanket, now coiled around my ankles, must have been kicked off during sleep, during my muddled recurring dreams. The girl on the bed was there, but she was dead now and her face didn’t belong anymore to the teenage New Orleans prostitute. That one I saved, but the girl in the dream I didn’t. As far as I know, the dream girl lies at the bottom of the Gulf, left there by two policemen, one of whom I killed.

  The green Ford was there, too. Leaving the bedroom, I walked out onto the churning pavement, where the silent dog barked and the gleaming car from thirty years ago made its circuit around the park, a recurring thump buckling the metal trunk lid, like something wanted out.

  My bones ache as I hoist myself up, padding across the carpet toward the bathroom, where I borrow Gene’s cheap space-age-looking Gillette to hack at my face, then dress in my clothes from yesterday sitting cold and wrinkled in the dryer.

  There’s a can of chicory in Gene’s pantry and an electric kettle on the counter, but instead of settling for a pot of instant, I gather my things and slip out the front door. Café du Monde, open twenty-four hours, beckons from across the river. Coffee and beignets, and then I’ll start the seven-hour drive home. As I climb into my car, the horizon glows in anticipation of sunlight.