by Nevada Barr
"That's what you were wondering?" Danny asked, pretending to care. "You were wondering if we'd hang out and watch for some dude in a yellow coat? Maybe call you on a cell phone if we see this dude? Oh, right, we don't have a cell phone. So maybe you wondered if we'd jump up and run you down and tell you we see this guy? You spent all that time wondering this?"
Jordan guessed not asking for things was a rule.
"And you thought we'd do this why?"
"Money," Jordan said succinctly. "Drugs. Whatever you want." Jordan wished he hadn't added the last. He was negotiating in a world where seeming to have too much to bargain with could get a guy killed. Why jump through hoops when a brick to the back of his head and Danny could take it all?
Danny didn't miss it either. "Whatever I want," he said slowly, drawing the sentence out as if he were taking the time to dream a hundred sumptuous dreams in the duration of three words. "World peace? Nah, too easy. A million dollars?" He pretended to think about it for a while, then shook his head. "You know, a million used to be real money. Not so much these days."
Clare was getting scared.
Jordan was getting pissed off. "Forget it, man," he said and pushed his thin shoulders up the iron stakes. "I can buy half a dozen assholes for a six-pack of beer. I don't need your shit." Hands shoved deep in the pockets of his pants, spine curved in a slouch that was both lazy and cruel-looking, he headed down Chartres.
"Jordan!" Danny called after him. Jordan stopped and turned slowly enough that it could have been taken as an insult.
"Don't be such a sensitive prick. You travel with us, we help you. Right, Rain? We're family." Rain had picked the puppy up, and they were nuzzling each other, both strays finding joy in what love came their way.
"Bingo's family," Rain said, and she held the puppy's paw and waved it at Jordan.
Clare froze for a moment. She saw Dana and Vee and Mackie when he was no more than two pounds of fluff and bark. The girls were dancing around the new puppy, he was dancing around them. They were singing, "B-I-NGO, B-I-NGO, and Bingo was his name-O."
Jordan narrowed his eyes and the vision was blinked out.
"Get your ass back here," Danny said.
Jordan would have flipped him off and kept on going, but Clare made him slouch back. The return was out of character, but Danny'd never notice. Clare and Jordan didn't sit but stood, hands in pockets, looking around as if waiting for the Luftwaffe to begin their daily bombing runs.
"B-I-NGO, B-I-NGO, Bingo was his name-O," Rain sang softly to her puppy.
Clare felt hollow and strange, as if her memory of her daughters had been channeled into this damaged girl, as if the dead spoke to her through pierced lips. Tears started in her eyes. Jordan shook out another Camel and lit it.
"What do you want to find this guy for?" Danny asked.
"What the fuck do you care why I want to find him? I want to thank him for polishing my pew at church. That suit you?"
"You're all heart, man." Danny laughed. He didn't care, he was just making conversation. "And this Samaritan's got a yellow leather coat? Like in butter yellow or sunshine yellow or Yellow Submarine yellow?"
"Submarine on acid," Jordan said.
The smoke had cured Clare's tears. Clare had forgotten that. When she was young, not married, no kids, and smoked, she could always count on nicotine to stop tears. Odd but true.
"He's maybe thirty. Dark and wiry with hair greased like a fifties low rider," Jordan said. Danny looked blank. "Like the Fonz on Happy Days." That didn't do anything to clear it up. "Jesus, fuck, you some kind of cultural black hole, dude? Like that pimp that hangs around outside Dick's sometimes; the one that runs the old black whores, five bucks a shot."
Now Danny saw the light.
"He wears pointed shoes that should be shined but aren't and pants too tight with nothing in the package to show off."
Clare was startled at how much they remembered about the man Mackie had followed, the man the pigeon had chased into the alley. But he was there, as clear as if they'd spent hours studying him. Without pride, she knew she could step into his pointy shoes and play him down to the knife. Ratso Rizzo, but without heart.
"Sure, dude, we'll be on the lookout, punk BOLO for slime bag in pimp clothes. We should have about fifty-seven sightings before . . . oh, hey." Danny looked at a wristwatch that wasn't there. "Say fifteen minutes from now."
He and Rain laughed. Rain sat cross-legged in her short denim skirt. Bingo was asleep in her lap, his funny, fuzzy body the only thing keeping her from flashing the dead people behind St. Louis Cathedral.
"You're fucking useless, man," Jordan said easily.
It had been a long shot. Clare could see the guy Mackie and the pigeon had followed so clearly that if she'd been an artist, she could have drawn him, but words were paltry things, and she knew Danny had no idea what he was looking for.
"A thousand bucks if you get him," Jordan said. "Fuck-all if you don't. I gotta go." Jordan stooped. Clare petted the sleeping puppy. "Feed him," she said and slid up into Jordan's stinking clothes to walk down Pirate's Alley and out onto Jackson Square where the tarot readers and living statues and artists were trying to make a buck off the tourists.
CARICATURES $5.00. AN EXTRA DOLLAR IF YOU'RE UGLY, an artist halfway down on the shady side advertised. On his chunk of the iron fence around the square were a slew of not-half-bad caricatures of famous faces: Elvis, Michael Jackson, Cher, De Niro, Shirley Temple, James Brown, Bob Dylan.
Jordan stopped. He shook out another cigarette and lit it. At six bucks a pack and counting, David Sullivan's cache of bills was going to go up in smoke. "You ever watch Law & Order?" he asked the artist, a saggy beanbag of a man who looked tired and cranky, with eyes that saw too much too often.
"Which part of the franchise?" he asked.
"The one where they have a police artist draw the bad guy from a description."
TWENTY-FOUR
Anna called her brother-in-law, Frederick, late of the FBI. Her main concern was the questionable ethics of asking him to help her while keeping him in the dark for his own safety. She had forgotten how quick the man's mind was.
"David Sullivan, Daoud Suliman, the slain husband/father in Seattle?" he'd asked.
"The same," Anna admitted.
"And you want me to trace his business with a special focus on dealings with New Orleans."
"I do."
"You are in New Orleans on business?"
He knew she wasn't. Molly had been her favorite ear in the early days of her separation from the NPS, before she'd grown ashamed at her own whining and shut her out for a while.
"Vacation," Anna said.
"So, on vacation, wanting information on victim Sullivan . . . you've got a lead on where his wife is, the prime murder suspect."
Anna said nothing.
Frederick groaned. "No. Don't tell me you've actually got the wife?"
Again Anna said nothing.
"Is she . . ."
There was a sudden silence. As it ticked by, Anna resisted the temptation to say "Are you there?" into her cell phone.
Frederick came back on the line. "Right, never mind; tell me no more. But, and you listen to me this time, doggone it, what you are doing is so very dangerous. Not only knife-in-the-back kind of dangerous, but thirty-years-to-life kind of dangerous. Let's not discuss it further. I'll e-mail you."
"Thanks, Frederick," Anna said, relieved. Since the Bush administration had bent or broken all the rules about right to privacy, paranoia was the norm. If one didn't want it recorded, one didn't say it over America's phone lines, or airwaves, or whatever it was cell phones sent things over.
"I owe you," she said.
"Oh my yes, a bunch, a whole bunch. I'm talking you come to New York for Christmas and stay with your sister and go shopping with her," Frederick said without a trace of humor in his voice.
"Shopping?" Anna quailed. "At Christmas?"
"Put it on your calendar. Bring your Paul. We'
ll run background checks on each other and play chess."
"I will," Anna promised.
"Yes, you will," Frederick said. He added, "We love you. Stay out of dark alleys and the federal penitentiary." Then he hung up.
Walking down Bourbon, the sun long set and Friday night partiers thickening like soup left too long on the stove, Anna wished she'd been able to do more than she had. Clare's sense of time running out was contagious, she thought as she stepped into the street to cede the sidewalk to a knot of men too drunk to be trusted not to fall on her.
At CC's she'd accessed the Wi-Fi and gleaned as much about Clare, her husband, her children, the murders, and David's business from Google and Wikipedia as she could--whatever was public knowledge.
Clare had a Facebook account. Not being a hacker, Anna was limited only to the first page. It was about actors and acting and theater shop talk. Her daughters weren't mentioned. Whether this indicated she was not a good mother or was an exceedingly good mother, Anna didn't know.
David's business had a Web site, but it was sufficiently boring to dull her senses. Again, she could only access the first page. The business was strictly wholesale, and without a vendor number she was locked out.
Newspapers and magazines were more forthcoming. The murders were covered from every angle and rehashed from the Times to the tabloids. Clare Sullivan had murdered her sleeping spouse and his mistress and then set fire to the family home, killing both her children. Since she'd disappeared the night of the crimes and so could not be tried and convicted, the better rags were careful to say "alleged" murderer. The others didn't bother.
Information made public by the Seattle police and coroner's office made it look like an open-and-shut case. Anna's instincts told her Clare was innocent, but Anna's instincts, when it came to judging character, were notoriously untrustworthy.
Without using any names, she had talked with Molly about the schism in Clare, the part of her that seemed to be becoming Jordan.
"We all do it to some extent," her sister told her. "Just look at the headlines. Family values politicians having affairs, antigay preachers going to male prostitutes. We aren't the same person to our grandmother as we are to the cop who stops us for speeding. It's when we force a divide between these seemingly disparate parts that mental illness comes in. Most of us compartmentalize, make excuses, or suffer guilt, but we hold the good and the bad together in our skins and our skulls. Your nameless person has taken it to a new level, but I doubt she's crazy. Yet."
The "yet" haunted Anna. If Clare was not a murderess, there was still Jordan. Anna believed Jordan could easily become a killer, if he wasn't already. Her gut told her, if and when this happened, Clare would step over that line from knowing she was behaving bizarrely to simply being that other, bizarre person. Should Anna be in the vicinity when that happened, there could be deadly consequences.
Shaking off logical thoughts and sensible behavior, she cleared her mind. For whatever reasons, she believed in Clare. She had promised to help her as far as she could without committing any crimes--any more crimes. Second-guessing her decision or, worse, psychoanalyzing why she made it was a waste of time and energy. Opening her eyes to her surroundings, she soaked in the color, music, foolishness, and overindulgence that was Bourbon Street.
Without turning her head she could count half a dozen examples of Molly's contention that we all harbor other personalities within: the Minnesota businessman, sporting a new tattoo, a fleur-de-lis, that he would have to keep covered for the rest of his professional life; the acne-scarred middle-aged man in denim and flannel, flirting with a lovely boy when, at a guess, he was straight as an arrow when he was home; two women in their forties or early fifties, showing lots of leg and cleavage and having a wonderful time when, back in their normal skins, they probably wouldn't dream of wearing skimpy clothes and cavorting in high heels.
There was a part of Anna that occasionally had a yen to slither around in silk and heavy mascara, but she hadn't succumbed for some years. There was always a reason she wanted--or needed--to be comfortable, to be able to move freely, run quickly, and scramble through and over things that a dress could catch on. Tonight, for all the usual reasons, she was in baggy linen trousers--growing ever baggier in the humid air--a tank top, and Tevas. Her hair was in its customary braid. It occurred to her, should she make the Deep South her permanent home, she'd probably be driven to chop it off. It was a bit like wearing a coonskin cap in the middle of August.
Paul had fallen in love with her while she was in uniform and carrying a gun. Perhaps, before she left New Orleans, she would buy something sensuous and surprise him. Though he loved her in the green and gray, she didn't doubt for a moment he would love her in silk and heels just as much, and, probably, suddenly. She smiled thinking of his touch.
A thicket of boys on a wrought-iron balcony, each holding a beer, green and gold and purple Mardi Gras beads around their fists and necks, hollered down, "Show us your tits!" Never mind that it wasn't Mardi Gras and Anna was old enough to arrest their mothers. Anna smiled and waved, amused to be included in their revelry. She did not, however, flash her breasts.
Bourbon Street, New Orleans, a historically sinful tourist destination, reminded her of the carnival that Pinocchio was lured to, the dark place of noise and light and lurid shadows where bad little boys turned into animals. The main difference was that the carnival of animal-children in Pinocchio's colorful hell scared the bejesus out of the tiny Anna. She still couldn't recall the scene without a modicum of shiveriness visiting her spine. Bourbon Street did not have that same sense of true evil, of no turning back, of consequences that creep up on one unawares and, when one finally realizes what's happening, it's too late.
Dick's was the same gray and dreary bunker of the night before. The young barker behind the lectern was chatty and charming and welcomed Anna back with "Why am I not surprised that such a beautiful woman got lucky? May Bacchus bless your evening, darlin'."
Anna thanked him politely and stepped into the grimy darkness of the strip club. Star was onstage with the same young studly sort that had provided a hobbyhorse for Candy the previous evening. She was down to pasties, panties, and turquoise cowboy boots with matching hat. Her implants, tools of the trade, though seemingly not the requirement Anna would have expected, defied gravity as she lay on her back across a miserably uncomfortable-looking chair while her young costar did his best to keep his weight off of her and the rickety-looking set piece.
The plastic chairs around the battered black cube tables were full. Mostly men, mostly young, but a healthy smattering of guys in their forties and fifties. Too big for the knee-high cubes, they looked like huge toddlers hulking on playroom furniture. To further the illusion, most of them were sucking on a bottle.
Anna hesitated inside the short artificial hallway from the street, designed, she supposed, to give the customers a greater sense of having entered the devil's den.
Her eyes adjusted quickly, and she saw Betty at a table in the back of the room, past the bottleneck created by the bar and the stage, waving to her. Having threaded her way through the clumps of men, Anna sank gratefully into a chair beside her.
"Big crowd," Anna said just to be saying something.
"Southern Baptist convention's in town," Betty replied as if that said it all.
"Ah."
Betty watched the stage, and Anna watched Jordan hustling drinks. Dressed in black, emaciated and expressionless, it wouldn't be too hard to believe he was one of New Orleans's celebrated vampires. In a way he was, Anna thought, sucking the life out of Clare, turning her into a creature like himself.
Dramatic as these images were, Anna believed she could see the desperate woman beneath Jordan's skin in the shaking of the hands as beers were set down, the jerk of the shoulders at a sudden noise from the stage, the careful way of never looking at the dancers, as if that would somehow demean them.
If Jordan had seen Anna come in, he was ignoring her in an impressive f
ashion. Had she wanted a drink, she would have had to flag him down, and his eyes were always carefully elsewhere.
"Who all is working tonight?" she asked Betty after a few minutes had elapsed.
"Hah! Don't tell me you fell in love in the ladies' john last night?" Betty leaned across the table, her beer corralled between her hardworking hands, and grinned at Anna. The grin winked out. "Don't tell me you fell in love with Tanya," she said warningly.
"With you in the wings, I doubt I'd have a chance," Anna said gravely. Betty's grin returned. "Do you come here every night?" Anna asked. Perhaps Betty would know a thing or two about a thing or two.
"Most nights," Betty said, relaxing back as far as she was able in the stingy plastic chair. "If I'm going to grow on her, I've got to be around. And for little things to grow, they've got to be fed and watered." She rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the sign for cash. Betty was nobody's fool.
"As to who's working tonight, Candy's here--she's here pretty much seven days a week. I don't think she's got anyplace else to go, and she really likes the stage work and the people. She's a big star in Candy World. Uh, let's see, Star obviously, and my adorable Tanya--she has Mondays and Tuesdays off, so I'm not here those nights. I haven't seen Delilah, but I haven't been here all that long. She could be in back getting made up. Mostly she and Star don't work together, which is too bad. They've got a hot little girl-girl act they do once in a while. It goes over big. All the bozos picture themselves as the welcome third. Like that would ever happen. But they try and work different nights. Star's got a kid about nine, and they don't like to leave him with sitters if they can help it."
"Who's up after Star?"
"The single most beautiful woman ever about to fall in love with a wharf rat," Betty said and smacked her lips. Not metaphorically but literally, like a toothless sommelier trying to remember an exquisite vintage.
Betty was a font of information, and Anna was grateful. As Star finished her act and clumped off the stage, leaving the energetic young stud muffin slouching in sexy--and to Anna's eye totally gay--insouciance against a pole, Anna rose and followed her toward the ladies' toilet.