by Nevada Barr
“He said he wasn’t going to work for the man anymore—I just can’t say ‘the Magician,’ it’s too stupid!” Racine blurted out. Anna agreed but hadn’t thought a woman who was a self-proclaimed voodooienne would have such a low tolerance for street theater. “He said he was going to go back and work in his dad’s swamp tour business, but I left anyway.”
“What happened to the kids?”
“My husband sold them into prostitution,” Racine said with measured formality as if testing each word to see if it would hold, trying on each sound, knowing they were words she would be saying for the rest of her life either out loud or to herself.
“He told you this?”
“He said a couple of them had died—were dead when he and Dougie went to get them—and that he was glad they were dead because, if it was Laura, he’d rather see her half rotted and stinking than to see her after the Ma—the man’s clients had done with her. I didn’t listen to any more after that. I took Laura from her bed, and we came here. For a few days we slept in the shop. Then I rented these rooms.”
THIRTY-TWO
Racine didn’t know where Blackie took his imported “jewels”; nor did she know where the man who called himself the Magician conducted his business or what his real name was. She didn’t know where Dougie lived, or his last name, and Blackie Gutreaux was not answering at either number Racine had given.
Anna took a cab to the Gutreaux house in Jefferson Parish, a small bungalow half a block from the levee. She told the cabbie to wait, then knocked and rang and peeked in windows, but the place was deserted. Having no way of knowing when, or if, Blackie was going to return to the homestead, and doubting she’d have an easy time catching a cab from his neighborhood, she rode back into town with her cabbie.
Racine said Blackie had quit working for the Magician after the murders. She had also said two children died. Anna spent a good bit of the time wasted on the cab ride debating whether this was news she should share with Clare. Had she been certain the dead children were Vee and Dana, she would have done it immediately, but the story Blackie told Racine contained the words “rotted” and “stinking.”
If Blackie was an imaginative sort, he could have been speaking metaphorically. If not, he was describing decay, corpses more than a day or two dead, depending on the temperature where the bodies were kept.
Clare insisted she’d seen her daughters at 3:00 A.M. the morning the house burned down. Even if they had died moments after she left them to buy cough syrup, they would not have begun to smell for a while. It was possible Blackie hung around Seattle for a while after the killings and the bombing, but Anna doubted it. A man trucking cattle, whether two-legged or four-legged, has to keep to a tight schedule or he’ll lose too many head before he gets to market.
Dana and Vee could have died, then Blackie took their corpses with him and Dougie in the van, and the bodies began to get ripe somewhere between Washington and Louisiana. Carrying bodies around was dangerous business. The most likely scenario was that he and Dougie had dumped them where they wouldn’t be found, or at least not for a long time. If that was the case, they’d yet to turn up. The bodies of children always made national news.
If Dana and Vee still lived, as Clare and Mackie and Sleepy Dog attested, then whose were the little burned bodies carried from the fire? Had they been long dead when Blackie and Dougie stuffed them in the nursery? Had the Cajun and his sidekick killed them along with David Sullivan because it was easier than dealing with them? Were Dana and Vee collateral damage? Or had something gone terribly wrong with the delivery and the children meant for the whorehouse had arrived dead, dead long enough to begin to decompose, and upon discovering two little girls in a house they intended to torch, Dougie and Blackie had simply exchanged the dead for the living so they’d still get paid?
That was a miserable thought among a host of miserable thoughts. For a fierce vicious moment, Anna wished there were something to voodoo and that Racine would bring down a curse on her husband and Dougie that would peel the skin from their flesh and the flesh from their bones.
Arming herself with an aromatic muffuletta and a six-pack of Abita beer, Anna returned to Ursulines and knocked on Geneva’s French doors. The sun had long since set, and, limned by the silver of ambient city light, Geneva manifested out of the inner darkness, the cat, so black mere ambient light would not serve to illuminate it, draped over her shoulder like a sack, and opened the glass door.
“I come bearing gifts,” Anna said.
“Yes, I smell you. Well, one hopes it is not you but a sandwich,” Geneva said and stepped back to let Anna and her gifts in. Clare’s dog trotted in at her heels. Mackie had been in the yard sleeping somewhere out of sight but had materialized at the smell of food. The cat showed no interest in Anna, the dog, or the sandwich and Anna thought of Hobbes from “Calvin and Hobbes” and how he reverted to a stuffed tiger when alien eyes were upon him.
“I was hoping for a favor,” Anna said as she set the sandwich halves, each enough to feed four hungry people, on paper towels on Geneva’s coffee table and uncapped a beer for each of them.
“Why am I not reeling with shock at that announcement?” Geneva drawled.
For a second Anna was nonplussed. A fleeting thought of manners and small talk withered on the vine, and she said, “Yes, well, that’s as may be, but I was hoping you could help me search for something.”
“I’m all ears,” Geneva said, emphasizing the word “ears,” as she spread herself on the sofa and the black cat across her knees. “Ears and hands,” she amended. “I am much more likely to grant favors if you put a beer in the latter.”
Anna did as she was asked, then joined the woman and the cat on the sofa. The whole point of a muffuletta is the olives, but Anna plucked hers out and left them on the paper towel just the same. “In the conducting of the situation of which you know nothing, about a person you’ve never met, I’ve come upon three clues as to the location of a place which, should you ever be called upon to testify, you’ve never heard of,” Anna said.
Geneva nodded, took a swig of her beer, and said, “I’m not listening.”
God, but Anna loved musicians. “Okay. One: a place that gives piano or singing lessons. Two: a place from which the sound pssssssst-chunk emanates. Three: a place in which you can smell lots of flowers at once.”
“The flower stall by the subway grate down from Juilliard,” Geneva said without hesitation.
“Yeah. Like that. But here.” Anna took a bite of her sandwich. She’d forgotten Geneva had studied music at Juilliard. She wondered if she’d ever seen the woman in white by Saks. Well, no, she wouldn’t have. She might have heard her, though, and, ten to one, if she did, the woman in white saw her. Geneva might even have been the inspiration for the singer’s blind/blues shtick. Reminding herself to think about that later, Anna concentrated on the issue at hand. There was little else she could tell Geneva without compromising her even further, so she said nothing, concentrated on her sandwich, and let Geneva mull over Candy’s three fractured memories.
“You can’t spit in the Quarter without getting a musician wet,” Geneva said around bread and olives. “A lot of them do lessons on the side to make ends meet. I know of four piano teachers for sure and three vocal coaches—the one I go to and a couple of others.”
Anna’s musical skills were dedicated to being an appreciative audience member. She didn’t even sing in the shower for fear the soap would make fun of her. “Do piano teachers sing scales, or have the students do it?”
“They do, but not so you’d hear it through walls—I’m assuming you are talking through walls or you’d know where you were at. But I have no interest in it, so never mind,” Geneva said and took a pull of the Abita.
“Will you show me where they are? Go with me so we can sniff and listen and, well . . . sleuth?”
Geneva laughed. “You are weird, Anna. With talent you would have made a fine musician.”
“Oh, and my informati
on is at least six months old,” Anna remembered.
Geneva groaned.
After they’d eaten, the two of them finishing less than a quarter of the gigantic sandwich, Anna let herself into Clare’s apartment, fed Mackie, tended to his important dog business, then shut him up for the night. The little guy wanted to go for a walk in the worst way and wagged his entire body and looked at her with beseeching brown button eyes, but Anna stayed strong. There would be enough distractions without Mackie along to pester Sammy and get underfoot.
She ruled out North Peters, Chartres, Royal, and Bourbon streets. The heart of the tourist district was noisy and crowded. The “fancy house” was the sort of establishment that would require privacy, and the four streets cutting through the heart of the French Quarter were alive with noise year around. Candy would have heard more than scales and pssssst-chunking.
It was after nine when they began their odyssey, and, though the streets between Royal and Rampart were by no means deserted, Anna was on alert. As one resident had put it, in New Orleans you were never more than two streets from trouble. It was a violent city, the young men running wild with guns and poverty and deep-seated anger. Even knowing this, it was hard to maintain her edge. The somnolent hum of the Crescent City, people talking quietly on their front stoops, smoking cigarettes, walking dogs, the murmur of a breeze off the river whispering in the palm fronds, belied the danger.
Geneva led Anna to the piano teachers’ homes, and they stood on the sidewalk in the drift of streetlights sniffing and listening. The smell of flowers existed, but, for the most part, it was only a whisper behind the more insistent odors of cooking, garbage, and automobile exhaust. Anna serving as guide dog for the night, Sammy padded complacently along at heel and selfishly kept his fabulous dog nose to himself, his main interest being in the news other dogs had left on fire hydrants and light poles.
Street by street and smell by smell, they left the residential part of the Quarter behind and were nearing Iberville and Rampart streets on the northwest corner. Shotgun houses had given way to industrial buildings with bricked-in blind windows, gaping parking maws, and dark doorways. On the far side of Rampart was one of the city’s many subsidized housing developments, acres of three- and four-story brick buildings around open areas that, one supposed, were intended to be green spaces but had the stomped and neglected appearance of fairgrounds after the carnival has moved on. The apartments, built in the thirties and forties and fifties, housed generations of people with little hope for better and a lot of fear of losing what they had.
Two streets from trouble.
Slouching and pushing down the sidewalk from the direction of the projects was a group of boys in their teens. None was old enough to buy cigarettes, but that didn’t make them any less deadly. All wore the uniform of the streets: a T-shirt so big it came nearly to the knees, shorts so baggy the crotch was at about a level with the hem of the shirt, and oversized sneakers with the tongues hanging out. The horseplay was limited to what could be done one-armed. Each had a hand that was apparently dedicated solely to keeping the trousers from falling around the ankles.
The noisy lads might be on their way to late, late choir practice, or to help a friend in need, but still Anna was thinking about turning around and calling it a night. Two middle-aged women, one blind and one too small to scare anybody, might be a greater temptation than nocturnal predators could resist, might even be sufficiently attractive to make, as she’d once heard an apologist claim, good boys go bad.
“Geneva,” she said, laying a hand on her friend’s arm.
“Wait,” Geneva said and tilted her head back as if listening or remembering or, maybe, just about to sneeze. “Where’re we at exactly?”
Anna told her.
“Okay, this is it. This was where the opera singer had a studio. Third floor. Piano. Nilla was her name. Nilla something. Nobody could ever remember because she was so white everybody called her Nilla Wafer, but she had a big black voice. I think she went with an opera company out west. That was a year or so ago.”
“The sound of scales sung loud. Good. That’s one out of three of our clues. I’m not seeing a dry cleaner’s—or whatever might be the pssssst-chunk part of our equation—and we’re not exactly in a big flower-growing neighborhood,” Anna said, her hand still on Geneva’s arm. “Diesel, more like. Let’s head back.”
The boys had seen them and were focusing the way a pack of dogs will when a rabbit is scented but has not yet broken cover. They hadn’t noticed, then ignored, the way most kids will when crossing paths with adults. They’d stopped shoving and closed ranks.
Had she been on her own, Anna would have taken to her heels and run for less isolated environs. If these were nice boys, out for a night ramble, they could have their fun laughing at her and she could have her fun not having to hear most of it. As it was, running wasn’t an option. She glanced at her watch. It was after eleven. Was she hoping the violence hour had not yet begun?
“What’s happening?” Geneva whispered sharply.
“Boys,” Anna said succinctly. “Curb,” she added as, taking Geneva’s arm, she steered her into the street and toward the far sidewalk. Perhaps the boys would be happy with this evidence of their power; maybe they’d be too lazy to bother crossing. “Sammy isn’t a Green Beret attack dog by any chance, is he?”
“Sammy is 4-F due to an amiable disposition,” Geneva said. There was still most of a short New Orleans block between them and the boys. “They’re crossing,” Geneva said.
Anna glanced up. She’d been avoiding eye contact the same way she would with a wild animal or a paranoid schizophrenic. Eye contact was an act of aggression under certain circumstances. The boys were crossing. They looked older and bigger than when she’d first noticed them. The rodeo clown clothes no longer looked as funny as they had.
Gangs were not unknown to Anna. In New York they were white and Puerto Rican and black; in Texas, white and Mexican; in small towns, redneck white boys and whoever they found to fight. What she didn’t know was how to stop the momentum of a gang event in the making. These kids might be mean to the bone, but she guessed they were more bored and drunk, egging each other on and out to have a little “fun.” What defused a group who thought tormenting or robbing or killing was “fun”?
As the boys reached the sidewalk, they made sure they took the full width of it. To miss them, Anna and Geneva would have to step back into the street. They didn’t. Given that showing humility—fear—in ceding the sidewalk hadn’t appeased them the first time, there was no reason for Anna to think it would the second.
Stopping, Geneva at her side, Anna waited, letting the boys close the distance. A faint click, then a snicking sound, made her glance down. Geneva had taken the leash from Sammy’s collar, then pulled her segmented and folded white cane from some pocket in her skirts and flicked it into a narrow staff. Not much striking power, but the stings could be diverting.
Leaving her the cane, Anna took the leash with its metal clasp from Geneva’s hand and, surreptitiously wrapping the strap around her knuckles, stepped a bit away from her friend.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” she said when the boys were half a dozen yards away. “Geneva and I were hoping you could help us. Do you know your way around the French Quarter?” She smiled as if she truly believed they’d come to earn their merit badges by helping a couple of little old ladies back across the street.
“You ladies looking for something special?” the boy marginally in the lead asked. He’d taken an unlit cigarette from behind his left ear and, holding it between thumb and forefinger, was stroking the length of it in an unsubtle gesture.
“Yes,” Anna gushed. “Friends of our said one of the city’s best restaurants was on this street, but, gosh, if it is we sure didn’t see it. It’s called Grandma’s.” Why that name popped off her tongue, Anna wasn’t sure. Possibly because the kids looked like big bad wolves and she was feeling Red Ridinghoodish.
For a moment, she thoug
ht they were going to play the game, at least for a while. Then a shorter boy elbowed the cigarette stroker to one side. “What you got in the backpack, bitch?” He snaked an arm out to try to grab hold of the daypack Anna carried.
“Okay, then,” Anna said flatly. “I guess we aren’t going to be friends. What will it take to get you to leave us alone?”
“Oooooh,” one of the wingmen crooned. “Tough mama! Maybe we got to tenderize your ass ’fore you go home to the hubby. Fact he prob’ly be thankin’ us for breaking that broomstick you got up your butt.”
So much for civilized negotiations. Her cell phone was in the daypack. She doubted she could dig it out and dial 911 before she was stopped, so she didn’t try. Anna sensed Geneva tensing up. The singer hadn’t survived childhood trauma and gotten to where she was by backing down or begging. Even Sammy came up from his obedient sitting position and lowered his head as if he were trying to remember where it was best to bite people he didn’t like.
They were going to fight: a small middle-aged ranger, a blind woman, and an amiable dog, against five streetwise thugs coming into the strength of men. They would lose, of course, but now wasn’t the time to think about that.
Headlights raked the seven of them, and Anna threw her arm across her eyes to keep from being blinded. A cab pulled to the curb under a streetlight fifty feet beyond the boys. A door opened, and a man climbed out.
“Hey!” Anna shouted, waving both arms. “Cabbie!” Sidestepping into the street, she kept waving. The cab’s IN SERVICE light blinked out, and the car picked up speed. “Hey!” she yelled again, stepping farther into the street. The cabbie floored it, swerved around Anna, and cut the corner at the end of the block so sharply his tires screamed.
“I guess he don’t want your sorry white ass in his pretty black cab,” the speaker of the gang said.