by Linda Barnes
“Could have,” Rawlins said. “Might have.”
“But you can’t stop now,” Mary insisted. “You’ll see this preacher, this Archibald Renner?”
Rawlins studied the grain of the wooden table. “I have other cases. The taxpayers like it when I work on all of them, impartially. Your nephew can deal with Renner.”
“Or I can,” Mary said.
“Better leave it to—” Rawl began.
“Whoa. I have a clue of my own to follow.” Spraggue quickly displayed his folded newspaper clipping, hoping to forestall the blow-up that would inevitably follow if Rawlins suggested there was anything on God’s earth that Mary should leave to someone else. “It’s from the Times-Picayune. I won’t say where I got it, but it was someplace where Joe Fontenot used to keep important papers. And, by the way, all those papers have mysteriously disappeared, according to Fontenot’s undevoted and unreliable daughter. This got left behind. Go ahead, read it.”
MYSTERY SKELETON IN ST. LOUIS CEMETERY was the headline.
“Hmmph,” Mary said. “Mystery skeleton indeed. That’s all we need.”
“Read,” Spraggue said sternly. He knew the four brief paragraphs by heart.
MYSTERY SKELETON IN ST. LOUIS CEMETERY
The funeral of a member of one of Louisiana’s oldest families was marred yesterday by a gruesome discovery.
Thomas Despardieu, 78, of Jefferson Parish, last surviving son of Emile and Angela Despardieu, for whom Despardieu Square is named, was to be laid to rest in the family plot in St. Louis Cemetery, Number Three, yesterday. Burial was delayed and police were called to the location by the head of the cemetery workers when, in preparation for the event, workers opened the tomb.
According to archdiocesan records, the last burial in this vault of the Despardieu tomb, one of the most beautiful of the marble tombs in the cemetery, took place nineteen years ago, the year Despardieu’s sister died. Expecting a single skeleton in the vault, the cemetery workers were taken aback to find two skeletons where only one should have been.
The Medical Examiner for the parish was immediately called and examinations will be carried out on the unidentified body.
Rawlins pulled the clip closer, frowning over it. “I remember this,” he said. “Two day’s wonder, then no more information.”
“You found this at Fontenot’s home?” Mary asked.
“Skip the location and concentrate on the clipping. Two things intrigue me,” Spraggue said.
“What?” Rawlins said. “You break into the house?”
Spraggue ignored the second question. “Number one,” he said. “The word ‘nineteen’ has been circled. The tomb was last opened for a funeral nineteen years ago. Number two, the date on the corner of the clipping is July second. Of last year.”
“Doesn’t ring bells,” Mary said.
“On July tenth, Fontenot made a twenty-thousand-dollar deposit in a bank account. On July fifteenth, he made a sixty-thousand-dollar down payment on a new restaurant.”
EIGHTEEN
In his dream, Aimee Fontenot laughed contemptuously, her hidden lips mocking him behind that gaudy feather mask. She wore the mask and nothing else. Her imagined nakedness was bold, matter-of-fact, yet not unarousing. She was too shy to remove her mask, so her face became the truly erotic part of her. But when she took the mask off, her face had changed, and it was Dora under the mask. The body grew older, the breasts drooped. The miraculous logic of the dream clothed the altered, stretched body in chef’s white and turned it into a grim-faced Denise Michel. She was grasping something behind her back with a pressure that made the muscles in her forearm bulge, and Spraggue knew it was a butcher knife, crying for blood. Paul Armand and Henri Fiorici held Harris Hampton down on a wooden table, and Spraggue was relieved that Hampton was the chosen victim. Everything would be all right now because Fontenot would be alive again once Hampton had been sacrificed on the kitchen altar. It made sense. But the figure was masked again, not with the evil bird mask Aimee had worn, but with another one he had seen in a shop window, the massive face of some implacable wolf-God, yellow and purple, with staring holes for eyes. He tried to see the eyes beyond the holes, but the sockets were empty. The now sexless figure was robed in black, like some obscene priest. The knife whipped out from behind its back, the extension of cruel claws. Voices were wailing, screaming, crying—
The voices, at least, were real. Spraggue woke up sweating, clutching the pastel blue Imperial Orleans’ comforter like a shield. The clock said eight-thirty, and the fuzz on his tongue said he’d drunk too much brandy the night before.
“No! You are absolutely wrong! Mistaken—”
The voice was Dora’s, and because the words were the loudest he’d ever heard her speak, Spraggue yanked on a pair of jeans and defied the inner voice that told him getting up was not wise in his present state.
He was still sweating when he walked into the suite’s living room. The air-conditioning had no effect on the kind of perspiration that came from spinning nightmares.
Dora, wearing a shapeless white terry robe, sat crumpled on the sofa, bent so far forward her head almost touched her knees. Her wispy hair and cupped hands hid her face. Her shoulders jerked and shuddered, but her crying was soundless.
Aunt Mary was pacing, staring at her shoes as they traced a pattern in the gold carpet. She wore the same pale pink suit she’d worn last night, slightly rumpled and creased. No chance to change if she hadn’t slept at the hotel. Spraggue’s eyebrows arched in a quiet salute to Gorman Rawlins. One glance at Mary’s stern face told him a flippant remark was hardly in order.
Pierce was ineffectually patting Dora on the back, looking as uncomfortable as Spraggue had ever seen him.
Mary lifted her head when he came in. “I’m sorry if we woke you,” she said automatically. “My fault. I thought I ought to tell her. What they’ll say at the trial—about the child—what that awful Hampton man said.”
Spraggue winced. Mary charged where angels feared to tread.
“All I really made out was ‘No!’,” Spraggue said. “If she denies it, and they have the hospital records, it’ll look bad.”
Pierce said firmly, “I think the word is ‘repressed.’ I hardly think she can be blamed for repressing such an obviously unacceptable event as—”
“No!” Dora said too loudly. “You’re wrong.”
“Wrong about what, Dora?” Spraggue said it gently, dropping it into a vacuum.
“My baby’s not dead.”
Pierce patted her clumsily. Mary said softly, “I’ll call the hotel doctor. He can refer us to—”
“What do you mean?” Spraggue asked Dora, ignoring his aunt, who froze with one hand on the ornate phone.
“I hardly think we should cross-examine her now,” Mary said. “I’m sorry I brought the whole business up. I had no idea—”
“Maybe Dora’s not suffering from delusions, Aunt Mary,” Spraggue said. “Maybe she’s doing her best to answer your question. You know where you are, don’t you, Dora?”
“Of course. Why are you asking me that? I’m in a hotel room. I’m accused of killing a man, and now you say my baby died.”
“That’s what the hospital records show.”
“No. They don’t. I gave the baby up for adoption. I couldn’t take care of the baby by myself. Denise said I could, but I couldn’t. I did what was best for the baby. They told me, they promised me …”
“Who promised you?”
“The doctor, the nurse—I remember her name, Elise. The nurse was my friend. Once I thought I would name the baby for her if it was a girl. Elise—such a pretty name. She said it would be best, adoption. Find the baby a good home.”
“Oh, Dora,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Dora said. Her voice was soft now, clear but bewildered. “I can’t talk about this. I’ve talked about it to myself for twenty years, trying to decide if I did—did the right thing. I can’t change what I did then
. I can’t be what I was before. There’s no point to all this talking.”
She got up very carefully, as if she didn’t trust her bones to carry her weight. Her words were clipped and dry. Brittle. She walked to the door of her room, taking steps as tentatively as a toddler afraid to fall, small baby steps, falteringly slow. The door closed and the bolt twisted home.
“Well,” Mary said into a long silence, “I am heartily sorry I started that.”
Spraggue blew out his breath and slumped on the sofa. “I probably would have done the same thing. She shouldn’t have to face the fact that they know about the baby on the witness stand.”
“And it may come to that?”
“Rawl’s right. The grand jury will have plenty of reason to indict. It was her knife. All this other stuff is pie-in-the-sky. What if? Maybe? Fontenot may have lived a shady secret life, but hasn’t Dora? Hasn’t everybody?”
“All right.” Mary closed the issue with a sigh. “I’m going to shower and change. And then I’m going out to find this Archibald Renner. Don’t worry, I’ll take Pierce with me. Perhaps on rereading the scriptures Brother Archibald found he disagreed with the ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord’ part. Or maybe he sees himself as the Lord’s deputy.”
“He would still have had to get into the Imperial Orleans,” Spraggue said.
“Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
NINETEEN
The news media knew little more about the surplus skeleton than the initial article had disclosed. Spraggue, seated on a hard plank bench in a basement room of the Times-Picayune Building, read every word of the follow-up stories, and found one fact amid much speculation: the bones had been turned over to the coroner of Orleans Parish.
The Coroner’s Office occupied one wing of the big Criminal Court Building on Tulane Avenue. There, Spraggue ran full tilt into bureaucracy at its finest. The coroner was busy. What did it concern? Had he come to identify the remains? Was he with a newspaper? Ah, the police. And where was his identification? Certainly, they would call Detective Rawlins. Always glad to cooperate with the police. Oh dear, Detective Rawlins was not in, and not to be reached. Alas. So sorry, but there was no way the busy coroner could be disturbed for someone who might turn out to be no one. It was the relentless, phony politeness that got to him in the end. The smiles. The final “Have a nice day” that made him want to chip someone’s shiny front teeth.
Albert Flowers had parked his cab out front, blocking a fireplug. Spraggue handed him the clipping and waited while he read. “This cemetery,” Spraggue said, “St. Louis, Number Three. You know where that is?”
“’Course I do. Wanna lift?”
“Yeah.”
“You lookin’ pale this morning, but you look lively for a cemetery,” Flowers said.
“Drive the cab,” Spraggue said.
The entrance to St. Louis, Number Three, the newest of the old St. Louis cemeteries, was marked by heavy wrought-iron gates, arched and spiky. The dying afternoon light and the faint pattering rain gave the white tombs a pearly shine. They looked like crammed-together mansions in some grandiose city replicated in miniature.
“Cities of the Dead,” Flowers said softly.
“Huh?” Spraggue was surprised to find his thought spoken aloud.
“They look like your northern cemeteries?”
“Spookier,” Spraggue said.
“Because the water table is so high, we can’t bury under the ground,” Flowers said. “The grave fills with water as soon as you’re six inches down. The oldest tombs, like in this place and the other two St. Louis cemeteries, were made of brick and whitewashed. Then the rich folk got it into their heads that it would be fine to rest in fancy marble tombs for all eternity. For a while they had a real contest going. Imported marble and sculptors. And not just the rich families bought into it. The societies got involved, the benevolent societies and the Italian-American Society, and everybody had to have the best architect and the finest building materials. New Orleans is funny about burials. Down here, All Saints’ Day is a big holiday, and everybody goes to the graveyards with flowers.”
They stopped the car at the end of a narrow lane. The cemetery seemed deserted, a separate country cut off from the living city by high brick and stone walls. The walls were patchworked with carved tablets and dotted with tiny vases of pallid, wilted flowers.
“Are there tombs in the walls?” Spraggue asked.
“Yep. The old Creole families used to call those the ‘fours,’ the ovens. If your family ain’t so high-tone to warrant a big tomb, you can rent or buy one or two of the ovens. Some are rented for a year, ten years, some forever.”
“Rented?” Spraggue repeated, puzzled.
“Yeah. You see how these have sunk right into the ground here?”
Near one corner of the cemetery, the bottom of the wall had disappeared into the mud, taking with it the words carved on a crumbling marker. LYDIA, ÉPOUSE DE HU—was all that was left above ground. Most of the inscriptions were in French.
“What do you mean, ‘rent’ a tomb? ‘Rent’ means you can get evicted.”
“Right,” Flowers said. “They use a single vault for a lot of burials here. I guess that’s one reason why family’s so important in New Orleans. You really are going to spend eternity in the company of your folks. See, these family tombs, even the real rich tombs, they got two, three ovens, two, three vaults, in ’em, that’s all. So let’s say old Granny Money dies and she’s the first Money to go, and they build this grand tomb for her. And they have a nice coffin, and they chuck it in the oven, and they seal it up with a marble plaque, and oops, ’fore you know it, Granpa Money is gone, too. Big funeral. They put him in the bottom oven. Now you might say the tomb is full, but the very next year, Uncle Alfred Money kicks the bucket. Now are these rich people gonna commission another architect and haul another load of Italian marble over here when they’ve already got a perfectly good family tomb? No way. So what they do is, if a year and a day’s passed since Granny’s funeral, they open up her oven, and they burn the casket and stuff. And they sweep old Granny’s bones to the back of the tomb, into what the Creoles call the caveau—sort of a pit down below—and Uncle Alfred gets her spot, for at least a year and a day, until the next family funeral comes along.”
“You’re better than a tour guide,” Spraggue said.
“It’s one of them tourist things, like the hoodoo charms. Folks always ask about the graveyards,” Flowers said. “And workin’ the airport like I do, I consider myself a guide as well as a taxi service.”
“What happens if there’s a disaster?” Spraggue asked. “A fire? Say three members of the family are killed at once. Or what if Uncle Alfred hadn’t waited a year and a day?”
“Well, they rent one of the wall ovens then, until space is available in the family tomb. And sometimes space never gets available. Say you got a real black sheep in the family. Lots of them never end up in the family vault at all. If you have a fight with the family in New Orleans, you don’t just get disinherited. You get tossed out of your eternal restin’ place. And the tradition here is for the man to join his wife’s family, in the tombs at least. So you got to get on with the folks, or your body’s just gonna get chucked in one of the wall ovens, and you’ll never mingle your bones with your mother-in-law’s. It’s real tricky ’round here, gettin’ buried.”
They set off down one of the avenues of tombs. Spraggue read the names on the markers. French names. LaForge, and Fabre, and Darriere. La Famille Lafontaine. Danielle Lafontaine, 1882–1884. Two years of life distilled to a single line of carved print. Was Dora’s nameless child alive? Or buried in such marble splendor?
The caretaker lived in a whitewashed shack smaller than some of the tombs. He was just finishing up lunch. A paper cup, dark with coffee, sat on a tiny desk near a dusty phone. The whiskey smell said the color was more camouflage than coffee. The man was dressed in coveralls that had started out white some years ago. He wore a billed cap p
ulled down over his eyes, was a shade or two lighter than his suspicious coffee, and had a wary cast to his eye as he looked up at his two unexpected guests.
“Yeah? So me, what can I do for you, eh?” he said, and Spraggue was reminded of a French-Canadian he’d known who’d lived for years in Maine and developed his own blend of Yankee French. This man’s voice was softer. He blurred the edges of his words, sliding one into the other.
Spraggue displayed the Times-Picayune article. The man recognized it, and a smile spread over his face.
“More o’ them news guys?” the man in coveralls said with satisfaction. “Long time gone by. Half year, maybe. Ain’t it a dead issue yet?” He laughed, and Spraggue bet he had three hundred more dead jokes where that one came from. He steeled himself.
“You the one found the corpse?” Flowers asked quickly, as if he, too, wanted to ward off an avalanche of graveyard humor.
“Couldn’t right call it a corpse, after all this time,” the caretaker said. “Say it a skeleton. But me, I be there sure enough. I be there.”
“I’m interested in hearing exactly what happened that day,” Spraggue said. “Very interested, Mr.…”
“Mr. Breaux. Jack Breaux.”
Spraggue folded a ten-dollar bill into the caretaker’s hand.
“You not a cop,” the man said.
“It doesn’t matter who I am.”
“I don’t want get in no trouble.”
“How can you get in trouble talking about the dead?” Spraggue asked.
“You right ’bout that, okay. They don’t care how much you gossip ’bout them, these guys.”
“Tell me about the day the extra body was found.”
“Want some coffee?”
“Thanks.”
Paper cups were filled with hot brown liquid from a pan that had been sitting on a portable electric ring. A paper sack containing a pint bottle of Southern Comfort was offered and refused.