He was messily divorced, the marriage over for maybe twelve years. His wife had reverted to her maiden name, Karen Stott, and lived in Miami with an interior decorator whom she had recently married. Woolrich’s only daughter Lisa – now, thanks to her mother’s efforts, Lisa Stott – had joined some religious group in Mexico, he said. She was just eighteen. Her mother and her new husband didn’t seem to care about her, unlike Woolrich, who cared but couldn’t get his act together sufficiently to transfer his feelings into supportive actions. The disintegration of his family pained him in a very particular way, I knew. He came from a broken family himself, a white-trash mother and a father who was well meaning but inconsequential, too inconsequential to hold on to his hellcat wife. Woolrich had always wanted to do better, I think. More than the rest, I believed he shared my sense of loss when Susan and Jennifer were taken.
He had put on more weight since I last saw him and the hair on his chest was visible through his sweat-soaked shirt. Rivulets rolled down from a dense thatch of rapidly greying hair and into the folds of flesh at his neck. For such a big man, the Louisiana summers would be a form of torture. Woolrich may have looked like a clown, may even have acted that way when it suited him, but no one in New Orleans who knew him ever underestimated him. Those who had in the past were either already rotting in Angola penitentiary or, if you believed some of the rumours, rotting in the ground.
‘I like the tie,’ I said. It was bright red and decorated with lambs and angels.
‘I call it my metaphysical tie,’ Woolrich replied. ‘My George Herbert tie.’
We shook hands, Woolrich wiping beignet crumbs from his shirtfront as he stood. ‘Damn things get everywhere,’ he said. ‘When I die, they’ll find beignet crumbs up the crack of my ass.’
‘Thanks, I’ll hold that thought.’
An Asian waiter in a white paper cap bustled up and I ordered coffee. ‘Bring you beignets, suh?’ he asked. Woolrich grinned. I told the waiter I’d skip the beignets.
‘How you doin’?’ asked Woolrich, taking a huge gulp of hot coffee that would have scarified the throat of a lesser man.
‘I’m okay. How’s life?’
‘Same as it ever was: gift-wrapped, tied with a red bow and handed to someone else.’
‘You still with . . . what was her name? Judy? Judy the nurse?’
Woolrich’s face creased unhappily, as if he’d just encountered a hair in his beignet.
‘Judy the nut, you mean. We split up. She’s gone to work in La Jolla for a year, maybe more. I tell you, I decide to take her away for a romantic vacation a couple of months back, rent us a room in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night inn near Stowe, take in the country air if we left the window of the bedroom open, you know the deal. Anyway, we arrive at this place and it’s older than Moses’s dick, all dark wood and antique furniture and a bed you could lose a team of cheerleaders in. But Judy, she turns whiter than a polar bear’s ass and backs away from me. You know what she says?’
I waited for him to continue.
‘She says that I murdered her in the very same room in a previous life. She’s backed up against the door, reaching for the handle and looking at me like she’s expecting me to turn into the Son of Sam. Takes me two hours to calm her down and even then she refuses to sleep with me. I end up sleeping on a couch in the corner, and let me tell you, those goddamn antique couches may look like a million bucks and cost more but they’re about as comfortable to sleep on as a concrete slab.’
He finished off the last bite of beignet and dabbed at himself with a napkin.
‘Then I get up in the middle of the night to take a leak and she’s sitting up in bed, wide awake, with the bedside lamp upside down in her hand, waiting to knock my head off if I come near her. Needless to say, this put an end to our five days of passion. We checked out the next morning, with me over a thousand dollars in the hole.
‘But you know what the really funny thing is? Her regression therapist has told her to sue me for injuries in a past life. I’m about to become a test case for all those donut-heads who watch a documentary on PBS and think they were once Cleopatra or William the Conqueror.’
His eyes misted over at the thought of his lost thousand dollars and the games Fate plays on those who go to Vermont looking for uncomplicated sex.
‘You heard from Lisa lately?’
His face clouded over and he waved a hand at me. ‘Still with the Jesus huggers. Last time she rang me, it was to say that her leg was fine and to ask for more money. If Jesus saves, he must have had all his cash tied up with the Savings and Loan.’ Lisa had broken her leg in a roller-skating accident the previous year, shortly before she found God. Woolrich was convinced that she was still concussed.
He stared at me for a time, his eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not okay, are you?’
‘I’m alive and I’m here. Just tell me what you’ve got.’
He puffed his cheeks and then blew out slowly, marshalling his thoughts as he did so.
‘There’s a woman, down in St Martin Parish, an old Creole. She’s got the gift, the locals say. She keeps away the gris-gris. You know, bad spirits, all that shit. Offers cures for sick kids, brings lovers together. Has visions.’ He stopped and rolled his tongue around his mouth, and squinted at me.
‘She’s a psychic?’
‘She’s a witch, you believe the locals.’
‘And do you?’
‘She’s been . . . helpful, once or twice in the past, according to the local cops. I’ve had nothing to do with her before.’
‘And now?’
My coffee arrived and Woolrich asked for a refill. We didn’t speak again until the waiter had departed and Woolrich had drained half of his coffee in a steaming mouthful.
‘She’s got about ten children and thousands of goddamn grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some of them live with her or near her, so she’s never alone. She’s got a bigger extended family than Abraham.’ He smiled but it was a fleeting thing, a brief release before what was to come.
‘She says a young girl was killed in the bayou a while back, in the marshlands where the Barataria pirates used to roam. She told the sheriff’s office but they didn’t pay much attention. She didn’t have a location, just said a young girl had been murdered in the bayou. Said she had seen it in a dream.
‘Sheriff didn’t do nothing about it. Well, that’s not entirely true. He told the local boys to keep an eye out and then pretty much forgot all about it.’
‘What brings it up again now?’
‘The old woman says she hears the girl crying at night.’
I couldn’t tell if Woolrich was just embarrassed by what he was saying, or whether he was spooked, but he looked towards the window and wiped his face with a giant grubby handkerchief.
‘There’s something else, though.’ He folded the handkerchief and stuffed it back in his trouser pocket.
‘She says the girl’s face was cut off.’ He breathed in deeply. ‘And that she was blinded before she died.’
We drove north on 1–10 for a time, past the outlet mall and on towards West Baton Rouge with its truck stops and gambling joints, its bars full of oil workers and, elsewhere, blacks, all drinking the same rotgut whiskey and cheap, watery Dixie beer. A hot wind, heavy with the dense, decayed smell of the bayou, pulled at the trees along the highway, whipping their branches back and forth. Then we crossed on to the raised Atchafalaya highway, its supports embedded beneath the waters as we entered the Atchafalaya swamp and Cajun country.
I had only been here once before, when Susan and I were younger and happier. Along the Henderson Levee Road we passed the sign for McGee’s Landing, where I’d eaten tasteless chicken and Susan had picked at lumps of deep-fried alligator so tough even other alligators would have had trouble digesting it. Then a Cajun fisherman had taken us on a boat trip into the swamps, through a semi-submerged cypress forest. The sun sank low and bloody over the water, turning the tree stumps into dark silhouettes like the fingers of dead
men pointing accusingly at the heavens. It was another world, as far removed from the city as the moon was from the earth, and it seemed to create an erotic charge between us as the heat made our shirts cling to our bodies and the sweat drip from our brows. When we returned to our hotel in Lafayette we made love urgently and with a passion that superseded love, our drenched bodies moving together, the heat in the room as thick as water.
Woolrich and I did not go as far as Lafayette this time, with its motels and gas stations and the promise of the food in Prejeans, better than Randol’s but with less atmosphere, where the Cajun bands played while locals and tourists mixed, drinking cold beers from Abita Springs and picking at catfish.
Woolrich left the highway for a two-lane road that wove through the bayou country for a time before turning into little more than a rutted track, pitted by holes filled with dank, foul-smelling swamp water around which insects buzzed in thick swarms. Cypress and willow lined the road and, through them, the stumps of trees were visible in the waters of the swamp, relics of the harvestings of the last century. Lily-pads clustered at the banks and, when the car slowed and the light was right, I could see bass moving languidly in their shadows, breaking the water occasionally.
I had heard that Jean Lafitte’s brigands had made their home here. Now others had taken their place, killers and smugglers who used the canals and marshes as hiding places for heroin and marijuana, and as dark, green graves for the butchered, their bodies adding to the riotous growth of nature, their decay masked by the rich stench of vegetation.
We took one further turn, and here the cypress overhung the road. We rattled over a wooden bridge, the wood gradually returning to its original colour as the paint flaked and disintegrated. In the shadows at its far end I thought I saw a giant shadow watching us as we passed, his eyes white as eggs in the darkness beneath the trees.
‘You see him?’ said Woolrich.
‘Who is he?’
‘The old woman’s youngest son. Tee Jean, she calls him. Petit Jean. He’s kinda slow, but he looks out for her. They all do.’
‘All?’
‘There’s six of ’em in all in the house. The old woman, her son, three kids from her second eldest’s marriage – he’s dead, died with his wife in a car crash three years back – and a daughter. She has five more sons and three daughters all living within a few miles of here. Then the local folks, they look after her too. She’s kind of the matriarch around these parts, I guess. Big magic.’
I looked to see if he was being ironic. He wasn’t.
We left the trees and arrived in a clearing before a long, single-storey house raised above the ground on stripped stumps of trees. It looked old but lovingly built, the wood on the front unwarped and carefully overlapped, the shingles on the roof undamaged but, here and there, darker where they had been replaced. The door stood open, blocked only by a wire screen, and chairs and children’s toys littered the porch, which ran the length of the front of the house and disappeared around the side. From behind, I could hear the sound of children and the splashing of water.
The screen door was opened and a small, slim woman appeared at the top of the steps. She was about thirty, with delicate features and lush, dark hair drawn back in a ponytail from her light coffee-coloured skin. Yet as we stepped from the car and drew nearer, I could see her skin was pitted with scars, probably from childhood acne. She seemed to recognise Woolrich for, before we said anything, she held the door open so I could step inside. Woolrich didn’t follow. I turned back towards him.
‘You coming in?’
‘I didn’t bring you here, if anyone asks, and I don’t even want to see her,’ he said. He took a seat on the porch and rested his feet on the rail, watching the water gleam in the sunlight.
Inside, the wood was dark and the air cool. Doors at either side opened into bedrooms and a formal-looking living room with old, obviously hand-carved furniture, simple but carefully and skilfully crafted. An ancient radio with an illuminated dial and a band dotted with the names of far-flung places played a Chopin nocturne, which flowed through the house and into the last bedroom where the old woman waited.
She was blind. Her pupils were white, set in a huge moon face from which rolls of fat hung to her breastbone. Her arms, visible through the gauze sleeves of her multicoloured dress, were bigger than mine, and her swollen legs were like the trunks of small trees ending in surprisingly small, almost dainty, feet. She sat, supported by a mountain of pillows, on a giant bed in a room lit only by a hurricane lamp, the drapes closed against the sunlight. She was at least three hundred and fifty pounds, I guessed, probably more.
‘Sit down, chile,’ she said, taking one of my hands in her own and running her fingers lightly over mine. Her eyes stared straight ahead, not looking at me, as her fingers traced the lines on my palm.
‘I know why you here,’ she said. Her voice was high, girlish, as if she were a huge speaking doll whose tapes had been mixed up with a smaller model. ‘You hurtin’. You burnin’ inside. Little girl, you woman, they gone.’ In the dim light, the old woman seemed to crackle with hidden energy.
‘Tante, tell me about the girl in the swamp, the girl with no eyes.’
‘Poor chile,’ said the old woman, her brow furrowing in sorrow. ‘She the fu’st here. She was runnin’ from sumpin’ and she loss her way. Took a ride wi’ him and she never came back. Hurt her so, so bad. Didn’t touch her, though, ’cept with the knife.’
She turned her eyes towards me for the first time and I realised she was not blind, not in any way that mattered. As her hands traced the lines of my palm, my eyes closed and I felt that she had been there with the girl in her final moments, that she might even have brought her some comfort as the blade went about its business. ‘Hush, chile, you come with Tante now. Hush, chile, take my hand, you. He done hurtin’ you now.’
And I heard and felt, deep within myself, the blade cutting, grating, separating muscle from joint, flesh from bone, soul from body, the artist working on his canvas, and I felt pain dancing through me, arcing through a fading life like a lightning flash, welling like the notes of a hellish song through the unknown girl in the Louisiana swamp. And in her agony I felt the agony of my own child, my own wife, and I felt certain that this was the same man. Even as the pain faded to its last for the girl in the swamp, she was in darkness and I knew he had blinded her before he killed her.
‘Who is he?’ I said.
She spoke, and in her voice there were four voices: the voices of a wife and a daughter, the voice of an old obese woman on a bed in a wine-dark room, and the voice of a nameless girl who died a brutal, lonely death in the mud and water of a Louisiana swamp.
‘He the Travellin’ Man.’
Walter shifted in his chair and the sound of his spoon against the china cup was like the ringing of chimes.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t find him.’
Chapter Four
Walter had been silent for a time, the whiskey now almost drained from his glass. ‘I need a favour, not for me but for someone else.’
I waited.
‘It’s to do with the Barton Trust.’
The Barton Trust had been founded in his will by old Jack Barton, an industrialist who made his fortune by supplying parts for the aeronautical industry after the war. The Trust provided money for research into child-related issues, supported paediatric clinics and generally provided childcare money that the state would not. Its nominal head was Isobel Barton, old Jack’s widow, although the day-to-day running of the business was the responsibility of an attorney named Andrew Bruce and the Trust’s chairman, Philip Kooper.
I knew all this because Walter did some fund-raising for the Trust on occasion – prize draws, bowling competitions – and also because, some weeks before, the Trust had entered the news for all the wrong reasons. During a charity fête held in the grounds of the Barton house on Staten Island a young boy, Evan Baines, had disappeared. In the end, no trace of the boy had been found and the c
ops had pretty much given up hope. They believed he had somehow strayed from the grounds and been abducted. It merited some mention in the newspapers for a time and then was gone.
‘Evan Baines?’
‘No, at least I don’t think so, but it may be a missing person. A young woman, friend of Isobel Barton, seems to have gone missing. It’s been a few days and Mrs Barton’s worried. Her name’s Catherine Demeter. Nothing to link her with the Baines disappearance; she hadn’t even met the Bartons at that point.’
‘Bartons plural?’
‘Seems she was dating Stephen Barton. You know anything about him?’
‘He’s an asshole. Apart from that, he’s a minor drug pusher for Sonny Ferrera, grew up near the Ferreras on Staten Island and fell in with Sonny as a teenager. He’s into steroids, also coke, I think, but it’s minor league stuff.’
Walter’s brow furrowed. ‘How long have you known about this?’ he asked.
‘Can’t remember,’ I replied. ‘Gym gossip.’
‘Jesus, don’t tell us anything we might find useful. I’ve only known since Tuesday.’
‘You’re not supposed to know,’ I said. ‘You’re the police. Nobody tells you things you’re supposed to know.’
‘You used to be a cop too,’ Walter muttered. ‘You’ve picked up some bad habits.’
‘Gimme a break, Walter. How do I know who you’re checking up on? What am I supposed to do, go to confession to you once a week?’ I poured some hot coffee into my cup. ‘Anyway, you think there might be a connection between this disappearance and Sonny Ferrera?’ I continued.
‘It’s possible,’ said Walter. ‘The Feds were tracking Stephen Barton for a time, maybe a year ago, long before he was supposed to have started seeing Catherine Demeter. They were chasing their tails with that kid, so they let it go. According to the Narcotics file she doesn’t seem to have been involved, at least not openly, but what do they know? Some of them still think a crack pipe is something a plumber fixes. Maybe she could have seen something she wasn’t supposed to see.’