Every Dead Thing (30 page)

“You want something to eat?” asked Joe Bones. His voice was low, with only a faint trace of Louisiana in it. He looked at me until I responded.

“No, thanks,” I said. I noticed that he didn’t offer any to Louis. I think Louis noticed too.

Joe Bones helped himself to some shrimp and salad, then motioned to the two guards to help themselves to what was left. They took turns to do so, each eating a breast of chicken with his fingers.

“Those Aguillard murders. A terrible thing,” said Joe Bones. He waved me toward the only empty seat left after he sat down. I exchanged a look with Louis, shrugged, and sat.

“Excuse me for presuming on an intimacy with you,” he continued, “but I hear that the same man may have been responsible for the deaths of your family.” He smiled almost sympathetically. “A terrible thing,” he repeated. “A terrible thing.”

I held his gaze. “You’re well informed about my past.”

“When someone new comes to town and starts finding bodies in trees, I like to make it my business to find out about them. They might be good company.” He picked a piece of shrimp from his plate and examined it briefly before starting to eat.

“I understand you had an interest in purchasing the Aguillards’ land,” I said.

Joe Bones sucked at the shrimp and placed the tail carefully to one side of his plate before responding. “I have a lot of interests, and that wasn’t Aguillard land. Just because some senile fuck decides to make up for a bad life by slipping land to the niggers doesn’t make it nigger land.” He spat the word “nigger” each time. His shell of courtesy had proved remarkably fragile and he seemed intent upon deliberately provoking Louis. It was an unwise course of action, even with guns around him.

“It seems that one of your men, Tony Remarr, may have been in the house the night that the Aguillards died. We’d be interested in talking to him.”

“Tony Remarr is no longer part of my operation,” said Joe Bones, returning to his formal mode of speech after the burst of profanity. “We agreed a mutual parting of the ways and I haven’t seen him in weeks. I had no idea he was in the Aguillard house until the police told me.”

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“Did Remarr have anything to do with David Fontenot’s death?”

Joe Bones’s jaw tensed but he kept smiling. “I have no idea. I heard about David Fontenot on the news this morning.”

“Another terrible thing?” I suggested.

“The loss of a young life is always terrible,” he responded. “Look, I’m sorry about your wife and kid, I truly am, but I can’t help you. And frankly, now you’re getting rude, so I’d like you to take your nigger and get the fuck off my property.”

The muscles in Louis’s neck rippled, the only sign he gave that he had heard Joe Bones. Joe Bones leered at him, picked up a piece of chicken, and tossed it toward the beast on the chain. It ignored the tidbit until his owner snapped his fingers, when it fell on the chicken and devoured it in a single bite.

“You know what that is?” asked Joe Bones. He spoke to me, but his body language was directed at Louis. It expressed utter contempt. When I didn’t respond, he continued.

“It’s called a
boerbul.
A man named Peter Geertschen, a German, developed it for the army and antiriot squads in South Africa by crossing a Russian wolf with an Alsatian. It’s a white man’s watchdog. It sniffs out niggers.” He turned his gaze on Louis and smiled.

“Careful,” I said. “He might get confused and turn on you.” Joe Bones jerked in his chair as if he had been hit by a jolt of electricity. His eyes narrowed and searched my face for any indication that I was aware of a double meaning in what I had said. I stared right back at him.

“You better leave now,” said Joe Bones, with quiet, obvious menace. I shrugged and stood up, Louis moving close to me as I did so. We exchanged a look.

“Man got us on the run,” said Louis.

“Maybe, but if we leave like this he won’t respect us.”

“Without respect, a man got nothing,” agreed Louis.

He picked a plate from the stack on the table and held it above his head. It exploded in a shower of china fragments as the .300 Winchester cartridge impacted and buried itself in the wood of the house behind. The woman in the chair dived to the grass, the two goons moved to cover Joe Bones, and three men appeared running from the side of the house as the shot echoed in the air.

Ricky, the Lizard Man, was the first to reach us. He raised the pistol and his finger tightened on the trigger, but Joe Bones struck out at his gun arm, pushing it upward.

“No! You dumb fuck, you want to get me killed?” He scanned the treeline beyond his property, then turned back to me.

“You come in here, you shoot at me, you scare my woman. The fuck do you think you’re dealing with here?”

“You said the N-word,” said Louis quietly.

“He’s right,” I agreed. “You did say it.”

“I hear you got friends in New Orleans,” said Joe Bones, his voice threatening. “I got enough troubles without the feds crawling on me, but I see you or your”—he paused, swallowing the word—“friend anywhere near me again and I’ll take my chances. You hear?”

“I hear you,” I said. “I’m going to find Remarr, Joe. If it turns out that you’ve been holding out on us and this man gets away because of it, I’ll come back.”

“You make us come back, Joe, and we gonna have to hurt your puppy,” said Louis, almost sorrowfully.

“You come back and I’ll stake you out on the grass and let him feed on you,” snarled Joe Bones.

We backed away toward the oak-lined avenue, watching Joe Bones and his men carefully. The woman moved toward him to comfort him, her white clothes stained with grass. She kneaded gently at his trapezius with her carefully manicured hands, but he pushed her away with a hard shove to the chest. There was spittle on his chin.

Behind us, I heard the gate open as we retreated beneath the oaks. I hadn’t expected much from Joe Bones, and had got less, but we had succeeded in rattling his cage. My guess was that he would contact Remarr and that might be enough to flush him from wherever he was holed up. It seemed like a good idea. The trouble with good ideas is that nine times out of ten someone has had the same idea before you.

“I didn’t know Angel was such a good shot,” I said to Louis as we reached the car. “You been giving him lessons?”

“Uh-huh,” said Louis. He sounded genuinely shocked.

“Could he have hit Joe Bones?”

“Uh-uh. I’m surprised he didn’t hit me.”

Behind us, I heard the door open as Angel slid into the back seat, the Mauser already back in its case.

“So, we gonna start hangin’ out with Joe Bones, maybe shoot some pool, whistle at girls?”

“When did you ever whistle at girls?” asked Louis, be-mused, as we pulled away from the gate and headed toward St. Francisville.

“It’s a guy thing,” said Angel. “I can do guy things.”

I
T WAS LATE
afternoon when we got back to the Flaisance, where there was a message waiting from Morphy. I called him at the Sheriff’s Office and got passed on to a cell phone.

“Where you been?” he asked.

“Visiting Joe Bones.”

“Shit, why’d you do a thing like that?”

“Making trouble, I guess.”

“I warned you, man. Don’t be screwing with Joe Bones. You go alone?”

“I brought a friend. Joe didn’t like him.”

“What’d your friend do?”

“He got born to black parents.”

Morphy laughed. “I guess Joe is kind of sensitive about his heritage, but it’s good to remind him of it now and then.”

“He threatened to feed my friend to his dog.”

“Yeah,” said Morphy, “Joe sure does love that dog.”

“You got something?”

“Maybe. You like seafood?”

“No.”

“Good, then we’ll head out to Bucktown. Great seafood there, best shrimp around. I’ll pick you up in two hours.”

“Any other reason for seeing Bucktown other than seafood?”

“Remarr. One of his exes has a pad there. Might be worth a visit.”

Bucktown was pretty in a quaint sort of way, as long as you liked the smell of fish. I kept the window up to try to limit the damage but Morphy had his rolled right down and was taking deep, sinful breaths. All in all, Bucktown seemed an unlikely place for a man like Remarr to hole up, but that in itself was probably reason enough for him to choose it.

Carole Stern lived in a small camelback house, a single-story at the front against a two-story rear, set in a small garden a few blocks off Bucktown’s main street. According to Morphy, Stern worked in a bar on St. Charles but was currently serving time for possession of coke with intent to supply. Remarr was rumored to be keeping up the rental payments until she got out. We parked around the corner from the house and we clicked off the safeties of our guns in unison as we stepped from the car.

“You’re a little out of your territory here, aren’t you?” I asked Morphy.

“Hey, we just came out here for a bite to eat and decided to check on the off chance,” he said, with an injured look. “I ain’t steppin’ on no toes.”

He motioned me toward the front of the house while he took the back. I walked to the front door, which stood on a small raised porch, and peered carefully through the glass. It was caked with dirt, in keeping with the slightly run-down feel of the house itself. I counted five and then tried the door. It opened with a gentle creak and I stepped carefully into the hall. At the far end, I heard the tinkle of glass breaking and saw Morphy’s hand reach in to open the rear door.

The smell was faint, but obvious, like meat that has been left in the sunlight on a warm day. The downstairs rooms were empty and consisted only of a kitchen, a small room with a sofa and an old TV, and a bedroom with a single bed and a closet. The closet contained women’s clothes and shoes. The bed was covered only by a worn mattress.

Morphy took the stairs first. I stayed close behind, both of us with our guns pointing toward the second floor. The smell was stronger here now. We passed a bathroom with a dripping showerhead, which had stained the ceramic bath brown. On a sink unit beneath a small mirror stood some shaving foam, blades, and a bottle of Boss aftershave.

Three other doors stood partially open. On the right was a woman’s bedroom. It had white sheets on the bed, potted plants, which had begun to wither, and a series of Monet prints on the walls. There were cosmetics on a long dressing table and a white fitted closet ran the length of one wall. A window opposite looked out on a small, overgrown garden. There were more women’s clothes in the closet, and more shoes. Carole Stern was obviously funding some kind of shopping addiction by selling drugs.

The second door provided the source of the smell. A large open pot sat on a camper stove by a window facing on to the street. It contained scummy water in which a stew of some kind was cooking on a low heat. From the stench, the meat had been allowed to simmer for some time, probably most of the day. It smelled foul, like offal. Two easy chairs stood in the room on a new red carpet. A portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial sat blankly on a small table.

The third room was also at the front of the house facing onto the street, but its door was almost closed. Morphy took one side of the door. I took the other. He counted three and then nudged the door open with his foot and went in fast to the right-hand wall. I moved in low to the left, my gun level with my chest, my finger resting on the trigger.

The setting sun cast a golden glow over the contents of the room: an unmade bed, a suitcase open on the floor, a dressing table, a poster on the wall advertising a concert by the Neville Brothers in Tipitina’s, with the brothers’ signatures scrawled loosely across their images. The carpeted floor felt damp beneath my feet.

Most of the plaster had been removed from the ceiling and the roof beams lay exposed. I guessed Carole Stern had been considering some sort of remodeling before her prison sentence put her plans temporarily on hold. At the far end of the room, a series of what looked like climbing ropes had been strung over the beams and used to hold Tony Remarr in position.

His remains glowed with a strange fire in the dying sunlight. I could see the muscles and veins in his legs, the ten-dons in his neck, the yellow mounds of fatty deposits seeping at his waist, the muscles in his stomach, the shriveled husk of his penis. Huge masonry nails had been driven into the far wall of the room and he hung partially on them, one beneath each arm, while the ropes took the main weight of his body.

As I moved to the right I could see a third nail in the wall behind his neck, holding his head in place. The head faced to the right, in profile, supported by another nail beneath his chin. In places, his skull gleamed whitely through the blood. His eye sockets were almost empty and his gritted teeth were white against his gums.

Remarr had been totally flayed, carefully posed, and hung against the wall. His left hand stretched diagonally outward and down from his body. A long-bladed knife, like a butcher’s filleting tool but wider, heavier, hung from his hand. It looked like it had been glued in place.

But the viewer’s gaze was drawn, like Tony Remarr’s own blind stare, to the figure’s right hand. It stood at a right angle to his body until it reached the elbow. From there, the forearm was raised vertically, pulled upward by a rope around the wrist. In the fingers of his right hand and draped over his right arm, Tony Remarr held his own flayed skin. I could see the shape of the arms, the legs, the hair of his scalp, the nipples on his chest. Beneath the scalp, which hung almost at his knees, there were bloody edges where the face had been removed. The bed, the floor, the wall, all were shaded in red.

I looked to my left to see Morphy cross himself and softly say a prayer for the soul of Tony Remarr.

We sat against Morphy’s car drinking coffee from paper cups as the feds and the New Orleans police milled around the Stern house. A crowd of people, some local, some on their way to eat in Bucktown’s seafood joints, hung around the edges of the police cordon waiting to see the body being removed. They were likely to be disappointed: the crime scene was highly organized by the killer, and both the police and the feds were anxious to document it fully before allowing the body to be taken away.

Woolrich, his tan suit now restored to its former tarnished glory, came over to us and offered us the remains of a bag of donuts from his suit pocket. Behind the cordon, I could see his own Chevy, a red ’96 model that shone like new.

“Here, you must be hungry.” Both Morphy and I declined the offer. I still had visions of Remarr in my head and Morphy looked pale and ill.

“You speak to the locals?” asked Woolrich.

We both nodded. We had given lengthy statements to a pair of Homicide detectives from Orleans Parish, one of whom was Morphy’s brother-in-law.

“Then I guess you can go,” said Woolrich. “I’ll want to talk to both of you again, though.” Morphy wandered around to the driver’s side of his car. I moved to open the passenger door but Woolrich held my arm.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“It was a good hunch that Morphy followed, but he shouldn’t have brought you along. Durand’s gonna be on my back when he finds out that you were first on another crime scene.” Durand was the FBI’s special agent in charge in New Orleans. I had never met him but I knew what most SACs were like. They ruled their field offices like kingdoms, assigning agents to squads and giving the go-ahead to operations. The competition for SAC posts was intense. If nothing else, Durand was a tough customer.

“You’re still at the Flaisance?”

“Still there.”

“I’ll drop by. There’s something I want to bounce off you.”

He turned and walked back toward the Stern house. On his way through the gate, he handed the bag of crushed donuts to a pair of patrolmen sitting in their car. They took the bag reluctantly, holding it like it was a bomb. When Woolrich had entered the house, one of them climbed out of the car and threw the donuts in a trash can.

Morphy dropped me at the Flaisance. Before he left, I gave him my cell phone number. He wrote it in a small black notebook, bound tightly with a rubber band. “If you’re free tomorrow, Angie’s cooking dinner. It’s worth the trip. You taste her cooking and you won’t regret it.” The tone of his voice changed. “Besides, there’s some things I think we need to discuss.”

I told him it sounded okay, although part of me wanted never to see Morphy, Woolrich, or another cop again. He was about to pull away when I patted the roof of the car with my palm. Morphy leaned over and rolled down the window.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. Morphy had gone to considerable lengths to involve me, to keep me posted on what was happening. I needed to know why. I think I also needed to know if I could trust him.

He shrugged. “The Aguillards died on my beat. I want to get the guy who killed them. You know something about him. He’s come at you, at your family. The feds are conducting their own investigation and are telling us as little as they can. You’re all I got.”

“Is that it?” I could see something more in his face, something that was almost familiar.

“No. I got a wife. I’m starting a family. You know what I’m sayin’?”

I nodded and let it go, but there was something else in his eyes, something that resonated inside me. I patted the roof of the car once again in farewell and watched as he drove away, wondering how badly Morphy wanted absolution for what he might have done.