Chapter 22: The Unraveling
Things came to a head in the next forty-eight hours. When the Old Man learned of the fiasco his son had pulled at Louisiana State Mental Hospital he wasted little time in starting over to the Warehouse District to tear William a new asshole. His blind, raging anger stemmed primarily from Samuel’s mysterious absence, and he would have been a formidable opponent in his rage, despite his age, had he made his date.
But while waiting in his Lincoln Town Car (one he’d purchased only three weeks before; before this goddamn trouble with his ingrate sons! he fumed) at the intersection of Washington and Louisiana, a group of young black kids slid out from the shadows surrounding the remnants of a burnt-out liquor store. They came across the largely deserted lanes quickly, in the guise of washing windows. Franklin Sr. waved them off but when they paid him no heed he got nasty. He told them very pointedly to “get the fuck away from this car!” And whether it was this or simply the fitting of another piece inevitably into place, the end result came hard and fast.
As the Old Man raved from the luxurious confines of his finely-tuned automobile, the closest of the group pulled a cheap handgun from his waistband and stuck it in the Old Man’s ear. The shot came instantaneously, so much so that the youth would later swear to his posse in the Willanona Housing Project in Algiers that the fucker was still cussing them after his brains were splattered all over the passenger side window. Even when the group broke into a mad scramble for the alleys, the big Lincoln idled momentarily at the intersection before plowing forward, striking a curb, and barreling through a ten-foot section of wrought-iron fence before coming to a stop.
When the paramedics arrived fourteen minutes later, the engine was still running, the driver’s door was open, and the Old Man was stone dead. His wallet was gone, stolen not by one of the gang who’d shot him, but by a thin, twelve-year-old girl passing by no more than two minutes before the ambulance arrived.
Upon learning of his father’s murder, William locked himself away in his mansion by the waterfront, allowing no calls, no visitors, no servants. He cut himself off for the better part of three weeks, coked and boozed out of his mind every waking hour. He lost thirty pounds and absolutely forgot about Samuel’s disappearance. Calls to the home went unanswered until he finally stopped the incessant ringing by ripping every one of his five home phones out of the wall. The cell ended up at the bottom of the pool. Since there was no one willing, or capable it seemed, to go about the business of preparing the Old Man for his Last, Long Stay, the lawyers had no choice but to act (the body had lain in state at Ballenger’s Funeral Home until an open casket was out of the question and the undertaker was on the verge of ripping out what remained of his fringe of hair), and they finally sanctioned interring the body in the first floor of the Greenlawn Mausoleum before sitting back to wait, many somewhat nervously. Incredibly enough, the Old Man had owned no plot; perhaps like many other dead men, he’d thought he would live forever.
When William Franklin finally came out of his self-imposed seclusion, gaunt and stringy, nervous and disoriented, he was informed (only after a great deliberation by the standing team of company lawyers) that his mother’s stay at the institute was up. William laughed in the face of the man who told him so and said his own piece. “What the fuck do you want me to do about it?” he asked.
The lawyer reluctantly faced the man who put a hell of a lot of food on his table, cars in his garage, fancy dresses around his wife’s ass, and the first thing he felt was intense surprise and then desultory disgust at the twisted amusement in William’s mad eyes. “How’s that?” he managed, fumbling at his tie like a clown in a side show.
William leaned closer, carefully enunciating every word so there would be no mistaking this time. “I said, ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?’” he repeated.
“I-I’m not…sure, Mr. Franklin.” The lawyer cleared his throat. “I thought you should be…the, ah, first to know about the hospital’s…insistence that your mother find other…quarters.” When William said nothing more, the lawyer stumbled on, “I…we, the law firm, I mean, thought you should know this earlier, but with all that’s gone on….” He coughed into his hand. “Mr. Franklin, something really must be done. There is no time left.”
William held up his hands and made a face that shamed the man before him. He had never seen such hatred balled up into such a nice bundle before. “Right, okay,” William said through the smirk. “I’ll tell you what.” He leaned back in his chair and regarded his fingernails like a villain from a James Bond movie. “You, and I mean the law firm, put that old bitch wherever her worn-out ass lands her.” The look that was forthcoming gave no opportunity for discussion.
The firm found a suitable enough establishment in upstate New York, and Mrs. Franklin was transported in the middle of the night in a straitjacket after trying to pluck the eyes out of one of the orderlies unlucky enough to pull the shift.
Seemingly in an unrelated event, Dr. Marshall was found unconscious at her desk four days after the departure of their infamous patient. A pool of blood was found across the table and on the floor, and it was clear she was dead as soon as the first person entered her office. There was no gunshot, no other sign of foul play. The blood had run out of her mouth and ears, her nostrils were crusted with it by the time Mooney (the janitor who found her) tenderly picked her head out of the mess before praying to God for her soul, and then yelling for help. The cause of death was found to be an aneurysm. She’d been unmarried with no children, so there was only her mother and father left to mourn. They flew in from Chicago to stand beside their only child’s grave.
An older, more connected, doctor was awarded the vacant position, after being coaxed out of retirement by a promise that no more than six months at most would be expected until the Board of Directors could fully interview and prepare for a successor. His quick eye for an extra dollar made him a unanimous choice after the flamboyant irritations of the recently deceased Yankee.
Sarah Franklin lived on in solitude, her living arrangements much more spartan even than that of her Louisiana confinement. No one visited, checks were sent faithfully each month stamped with impersonal authority by a Louisiana law firm, and no family member ever presented himself at the hospital’s doors. At times, her incoherent screams and tirades would check even the boldest and most pagan of orderlies, and if bedsores were frequently left unattended, it was considered just as well for everyone involved. Her presence was a plague and only huge sums of money secured her in even the cooler climes of the hospital’s basement where a room had been hacked out, well away from any of the other patients.
Lincoln’s remains sunk deeper into the muddy Mississippi River bed, picked at by all manner of fish. Cleaned to the bone in a short time, the skeleton was torn to pieces by the suction of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving only two, barnacled shards of shin bone to poke above the sludge. Stuck in their twin barrels of cement.
William regained himself slowly. For several months after his exile he didn’t show at the warehouse very often. He kept to himself in his lakefront home, sunning in the afternoon by the pool though he never actually got in. He was timelessly lost in his thoughts. He cut his house staff down to one and had everything in the way of food, alcohol, and drugs delivered personally to his maid in the front of the house. Sometimes late in the night, the woman would hear William screaming, or at other times, talking in a hoarse Spanish dialect to someone on the telephone. Always outgoing calls. At times his cursing would fill the hall near his room, and she would venture her services no more for that night. When she left she took his car, and stayed gone until she finally felt safe. He simply did not care.
The Bull went on a vacation of sorts. When he didn’t hear from his employer after the Old Man’s wake, he hung around the warehouse for a couple of weeks. He tried to tell himself it was a good thing, this time to himself, a time when he could get his own house in order, although he’d never even lifted a finger to fix so
much as a sprung faucet. Every time the phone rang he’d sit nervously in his chair while Gretchen spoke to whomever it was on the other end. It was never William though, and the Bull began to hold his wife personally responsible. They’d been married forever and she wasn’t much to look at. He got tired of how she was always underneath his feet. More than once she got his fists.
After three weeks without a word, he decided it was time to take action before he ended up killing her. He could see the fear building in Gretchen as well. Everything was crashing down, his contact with the outside world had cut him adrift. All he knew for certain was that he was beginning to be afraid. His hands crept mindlessly into grappling hooks, taking an extraordinary act of will to straighten them out again, and the headaches piled one on top of the other until he could actually see red.
He took to breaking things in the house. Nothing could satisfy him: food ended up on the floor, Gretchen lost another tooth. His calls to the Franklin Warehouse went unanswered. In desperation he found that William had changed his home phone number. He knew Samuel was still missing, and that was really the thing that had served to fuck everything else up. The little secretary up there had actually told William himself the Bull had called, but he never heard anything. He questioned the little bitches’ honesty. This, above all else, was the key to the headaches, the violence.
The fact that he wasn’t needed anymore.
In a short period of weeks his life fell apart. The only person capable of pulling him free was unavailable. What had he done to exact this hatred from a man he had loyally served? He could come upon nothing. Nothing but a plan.
He prepared to drive to Thibodaux to prove his loyalty. He’d prove it every time the blade came down.
The Bull left on a Wednesday while Gretchen was away at the grocery store. She’d left with her biggest pair of sunglasses barely hiding the shiner he’d pasted on her the night before, and the Bull knew if he didn’t go now he’d wind up behind bars. His drinking had escalated and his hands shook constantly. As he crawled into the truck’s cab, he breathed a sigh of relief, feeling that he was narrowly averting disaster. Little did he know.
Once in Thibodaux it didn’t take long to locate the airfield. It was night when he pulled onto the gravel drive, and he heard the crunch beneath the Ford’s Mag wheels at the same time he noticed the lone shaft of light coming from the shack’s door. A shadow of mosquitoes danced in its depths. He got out of the truck with the blade riding against his hip. He didn’t know how the show would go, but felt assured it would be big. He pressed himself flat to the side of the building, pricked up his ears. The darkness was once again a friend. St. Martien’s unfamiliar voice reached him as he neared the doorway, and when the Bull peeked around the jamb he found the ludicrous shape of the overweight, balding idiot squawking away at a tin box.
The Bull flung back the screen door, and when St. Martien turned and saw the big man coming inside his breath stopped, his eyes bugged out, and his hand went to his chest. The Bull came across in a short arch with the knife, splitting the earphone cord and opening a gaping wound across the bald man’s neck. The fat ass slid out of his chair, gasping and holding his throat as the blood began to spurt. He managed no sound save for a low bubbling gurgle that grew lower and lower as he sank to the floor. Blood foamed on his chin.
The Bull pitched the bloody knife onto the table by the ham set, and walked over to give his boots a workout. After a two minute dance, the man on the ground before him was thoroughly dead. The Bull snorted and wheezed above him like an engine long overdue for a tune-up. Regardless, he’d not felt better in weeks.
He was finally smiling as he skirted the body, figuring on the best way to get it out of here, when he thought he heard the faint protest of hinges. He never had a chance to turn around. The shotgun Jelly had trained on him blew him completely off his feet and shoved him across the table amid the electrical equipment. One arm smashed through the window overlooking the airfield and hung there bleeding.
Jelly had waited diligently for days for this. It was just his fucking luck that he’d picked the now lost minutes to go to the liquor store. The pint of Jim Beam had cost St. Martien his life.
But now it had finally happened.
Jelly had been frantic ever since the plane disappeared; there had been nothing. No word at all. Now this crazy fucker was sprawled out the window, bleeding all over the fucking place. If it was hard ball they wanted, then goddammit, it was hard ball they’d get.
By morning Jelly and a few of his boys had gotten rid of the two bodies. They cleaned up the mess and let the proper ‘authorities’ in on what had gone down. Or as little as could be managed. Time passed and the Lincoln collected dust, now sitting in the empty airplane bay. Eventually it was sold for scrap to a demolition worker Jelly knew from his oil field days. The Bull’s truck was crushed at the same scrap yard in Des Almandes less than a week later.
William, charmed as usual, received little blow-back from the fuck-up the Bull had pulled. In fact, it was almost two more weeks before a fisherman found the huge, stinking body washed up on a cypress stump just off the main highway twenty miles out of town. Dental records finally pinned a name to the corpse, and by that time there was no way his dear wife, meek and stupid Gretchen, would have recognized him at all. The name ‘Franklin’ surfaced simply on principle. It was known the man worked for them, but that was about it. At least as far as proof went.
The New Orleans PD was informed of the decomposed body. Jelly was never mentioned in anything. However, there was something of an empasse. NOPD readily admitted that the Franklin’s were connected, and also that several of the family had histories of mental disorders. However, the family had made no ripples as of late; there were no more accusations like the one that had sent Samuel away years before. Besides, the Old Man had been gunned down by hoodlums in the street himself. William hadn’t been seen since. At least, publicly.
When the Thibodaux inquiries got to the District Five Sergeant’s desk they stopped. Sergeant Riggish had personally been in the Old Man’s back pocket for years, and his oldest daughter could thank her college tuition at Ole Miss on the gaff he’d taken. It was all common knowledge. Everyone was on the take these days, but a little bit of loyalty did go with the territory as far as Riggish was concerned. He wouldn’t let some small town horseshit get his jock in a knot. He’d let the Franklin bunch have their time for grieving, and then he’d play it by ear. With nothing further on his mind he flipped to The Times Picayune Sports section to see who the Saints would get their asses whipped by next.
William, meanwhile, remained at home. Two more months passed before he showed at the warehouse. And even then, never for very long, usually just a quick check in the books, or a downtown meeting with the lawyers. Then it was always straight back to his cave. Messages could only be left with the receptionist. He could not be reached at home. But with the devil’s luck, he continued; their contracts were time honored and followed to the letter; the business continued on, just a faint drone in the background.
His real business became the search for Frederick Paol. He no longer expected to see his brother again, but he wasn’t so sure about the fucking pilot. If the drug-runner was alive in Colombia, the United States, or the Valley of the Kings, he’d find the sonofabitch.
And he burned up the phone lines trying.
For many weeks there was nothing. Then, early one morning in the spring he got a call. It was placed by an illegal prescriptions ‘link’ he had in Bogota who had recently become aware of William’s wishes. The man called to say he’d seen an article in the paper the morning before about some white man recently found in the jungle. The story he forwarded to William said this person had been found someplace south of the capitol in a section close to the Pan American Highway. An area called Siphoe, known for its choking vegetation and lack of human contact. The only reason this cast off story had reached any paper whatsoever, was because of its slight dose of intrigue. The village in wh
ich the man had been loosed from the jungle was inhabited by people who swore the man was a demon. Sketchy details told of his heated removal by a private militia unit for his interment elsewhere. That was it.
When William read the article (his plan already formulating in his head), he’d visualized a pagan crowd huddled in a village, his brother waxen and grotesque, lording over all. Because a nagging itch had begun, what if he wasn’t dead? Perhaps he was still out there.
It took him three days to find the whereabouts of the man from the strange newspaper story. He phoned hospitals, nursing homes, heath units, institutions and all manner of other related interests in his search, getting nothing substantial, only laconic replies and short service no matter how much money he promised. Amid this series of dead-ends his trail eventually led to a morgue, a last card played on a whim. As if by providence, the first person he talked to (the only person who was actually there at the time since it was a week-end) had indeed seen the creature, as he put it. Very often the fast-speaking man would run away from William’s ability to understand, so the call was long and somewhat painful at times. The janitor referred to the man from the jungle not as a demon, but as the Devil himself. While he relayed his information (as if just being able to speak of the horrible man would take him back into grace), William visualized him, standing in some dank corridor, nervous at every sound while he spoke about the thing that plagued him. Maybe he had many gods to protect him; perhaps he had none at all.
In a pidgin mash of English and Spanish William was able to piece the story together. The strange white man had been brought to a hospital in the vicinity (one William had phoned and been told nothing), but his condition had been so grave that he’d soon died. The voice on the other end of the line was muffled, as if in deference to this point of legend, of myth. The dead man’s skin had spoiled, he’d been told. He said it was unlike anything else he’d ever smelled, but William didn’t have to understand every word to understand the man’s intent. William had witnessed the rites of demons before; he knew the scent of the Depths. The janitor’s voice shrunk to a whisper (William was sure he could make out a rushed rosary fragment) when he spoke of the dead thing attaining movement, of the way the eyes had flashed. This was the part of the story that haunted him obviously, and when he got to it he didn’t want to go on, but the American on the other end had a persuasiveness that eventually got the janitor to tell all. William knew before hanging up that the man had been far too afraid, unable to hang up on one demon without relaying the Other’s whereabouts. That was fine; the game was almost up.
The next morning William booked a first-class flight to Bogota, Columbia. When he got there and had packed his belongings away in his suite, he went to the local car rental and got the only one available. If he’d had to, he would have taken a bicycle. He was alone when he left the hotel and he had a lot of American cash sitting beside him in a locked suitcase.
The fence was as nondescript as the informant had told him it would be. It was no more than six feet high, but even on the forested side, trees were cut back at least twenty feet from the fence. It had not been hard to find; the informant had been very plain. And if the fence was nondescript the signs warning High-Voltage Electricity in five different languages, spaced at intervals of fifteen feet up and down its length, were not. He knew he had the right place even before he saw the guard house. William pulled up and talked to one of the two men at the booth. They soon had him in touch with the administration, and within twenty minutes he walked into an office where three other nicely-dressed men awaited him. He brought the suitcase of money with him when he entered, but it was mysteriously absent when he left with one of the men an hour later. No tour of the facility was necessary and no more introductions were made to any other staff members. The two men simply worked their way to the back of a small cluster of buildings, and when they reached the end, the administrator took out a key and opened the door in front of him. They descended a flight of forty steps that brought them down to a much chillier and poorly-lit nest of catacombs. Neither one spoke as they made their way to the cell in question. The one from the morgue was here.
They’d said he wouldn’t eat but the smell of shit seemed to disprove the statement. They’d said the man never spoke and hardly moved, and that was not hard to believe either. As the administrator pulled back the rusty bolt so that the two could peer inside, fighting the darkness for a glimpse of the man they said was there, William suddenly got his first true dose of hell.
There had been something in the room. Something that appeared both naked and dead, illuminated ever so faintly through piped lighting which leaked in through a grate in the ceiling. There was no cot or toilet within; the room was simply six by six feet with a sloped stone floor leading down to a plumbing grate. The thing lay next to it, motionless.
But as William stared, his eyes glued to the figure on the wet stone, he began to hear a scratching, and only after several moments was he able to make out the movements of the thing’s left hand. Long nails raked furrows through the filth clotting the grate. The smell surrounding them now was almost unbearable. When the thing turned its head and set its eyes on William, he hurriedly back away, leaving the administrator to run the bolt home, shutting away the demon. William’s hands were at his mouth and he said nothing.
At least it was not Samuel, he thought, as the fresh madness stirred.
But it was Paol. William grabbed the administrator by the elbow and they hurried back down the corridor, talking in fevered Spanish whispers. Several calls were placed to the law firm in New Orleans. The thing’s departure from the cell was cleared. The remainder of the week William spent in the suite, smoking continuously and eating little. But he drank great amounts of whiskey. Regardless, his head never stopped hurting.
Finally, with everything set, the headache began to ease off, if only a little. He wondered how effective his act of containing the beast would be, and constantly pictured his new-found vision of hell always close in his mind.
He guessed it would be like a homecoming of sorts.