Over Tumbled Graves (18 page)

Bourbon after midnight was a thin but enthusiastic stream of staggering idiots, listing down the center of the street in puddles of booze and water that bubbled up from overworked sewer grates. The crowd was overwhelmingly male. They took off their shirts, danced outside taverns, and formed lines in front of storefront windows where bartenders sold plastic “To-Geaux” cups containing every imaginable mixture of poisons. The street surged with men, the young and the old marked by their inability to handle alcohol, the rest blurring into one type, something between twenty-five and fifty, shuffling along with the same look of buzzed horniness, joints lubricated, eyes glazed, but their ability to function at least still arguable. One swerved in front of Caroline, bleary-eyed and weaving, his lips glistening with whatever he’d just drunk from the Big Gulp glass in his hand. “Hey, where we headed tonight?”

Caroline stepped carefully around him and continued down Bourbon. When she’d checked in yesterday, the desk clerk had assured Caroline that June was “slow” in the quarter: no festivals, the college students either gone home for summer or still taking
finals. The weather was too hot and muggy for sustained debauchery, the clerk said, and so New Orleans in June offered a kind of bucolic sentience, a sluggish old-South charm.

“Show us your tits!” It came from a group of tall young men facing her from the street—possibly a team of some kind—and at first Caroline paused on the sidewalk, pondering it, the idea of shocking them and herself. Hell, she’d have done it when she was in college. But the fleeting thought was replaced by lingering disgust from her conversation with Blanton, which was replaced by the urge to shoot the young men. It took her a few minutes to realize they weren’t even talking to her, that the team was looking above her, to a balcony. Caroline stepped from underneath the balcony and looked up, to where, among twenty or so drunk revelers, a group of young women leaned over the balcony, dancing and holding their hands out for the Mardi Gras beads that served as currency even after the festival season.

One girl, earnest in the face and Thanksgiving plump, hoisted her shirt eagerly, and the team whooped and hollered, pelting her bare chest with two-dollar strings of beads. Another girl made more of a production, swinging her hips and teasingly revealing one breast at a time, then both in a flair of showmanship. She got even more beads.

What am I doing out here? Caroline wondered. After the meeting with Blanton she hadn’t been able to sleep, too haunted by his photograph of the fifteen-year-old victim, and so at 2
A.M
. she’d gotten out of bed and opened the phone book, looking for cinnamon roll shops at the local malls. She wrote down three of them on hotel stationery and cross-referenced these malls with photography shops.

She’d gone back to bed, but still couldn’t sleep. She’d gotten up, put on a pair of sweatpants, and gone outside, planning to walk along the river. But outside her hotel she heard the music and cheers of Bourbon Street two blocks away and had walked down here, merging into the crowd along a stretch of storefronts that promised live sex shows. Was it simply her cop training that drew her to the sound of an out-of-control party or was it something else, something connected to this thing she was chasing, this troubling idea that had begun to form inside her head?

It had started with the fatalism of the prostitute Jacqueline, and now found voice in the unflinching depravity that Curtis Blanton described. Police, like popular culture, liked to imagine serial killers as a nonnegotiable evil. There was a book on these guys, containing the details that Blanton had quoted to her: single, twenty-four to forty-eight, and so on. These things, in combination with other factors, created a monster, a thing
out of the norm
, superhuman, the bogeyman: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Hannibal Lecter. Ghost stories to keep your fifteen-year-old from going out at night.

But the book itself troubled Caroline. Twenty-four to forty-eight? Single? Problems with relationships, with intimacy? Unresolved issues involving their mothers? Every man that Caroline had ever known had the urge to be single, had problems with intimacy, and wouldn’t meet her eyes when talking about his mother.

What had Jacqueline said when Caroline asked which guys gave her the creeps?
“Ma’am, they all give me the creeps.”
Caroline recalled the list of bad dates, guys who bit and punched and pulled hair and forced themselves on her. These were just men, not monsters. Bankers and salesmen and ranchers and biology teachers. Cops, presumably, and bartenders.

It was that list of bad dates that haunted Caroline as she thought about Curtis Blanton’s conviction that only a man could catch a serial killer. The ramifications of what Blanton was saying were inescapable: A serial killer was not an aberration, but an amplification of male fantasy. Maybe there were no monsters. Maybe every man who looked at a
Penthouse
was essentially embarking on the same path that ended with some guy beating a woman to death and violating her with a lug wrench. No wonder Blanton was dubious of Caroline’s role in the investigation. If she couldn’t imagine the violent fantasy, what could she imagine? The victim. The fear. And what good were those?

Caroline watched the team of young men stare at the balcony, their mouths open slightly, their bodies taut and expectant. On the balcony a new girl had emerged, or rather had been pushed: young and thin, in jeans and T-shirt, her head lolling to the side, her body limp. Behind her, an older guy—maybe twice her age—propped her up, one arm around her waist, the other lifting her arm to wave at the crowd. The girl opened her eyes and smiled back at the man
holding her, but then her head fell back against his chest, her eyes closed. The man lifted her shirt and ran his hand along her small breasts, and the team went crazy. The cheers awoke the girl and she smiled again at the man holding her on the balcony, then looked down at the boys on the street, then allowed her head to fall back into his chest. The boys threw beads and the man reached down and grabbed a handful, draped them over her chest. Then he lifted her shirt and rubbed her breasts again. The girl grinned sleepily, eyes closed, head moving in small circles.

“Show us her pussy!” yelled one of the boys on the team.

Caroline began walking down the street, but stopped and looked back over her shoulder at the group of boys standing in the middle of the street. Finally, she turned and made her way purposefully through the crowd into the bar beneath the balcony. It was packed and it took a couple of minutes to negotiate the pawing hands to the back of the building, where the staircase was blocked by a red velvet rope. Next to the rope, a huge man in a wooden chair waved his fingers up and down like he was fanning her.

“Let’s see ’em,” he said.

Caroline’s hands were pulled tight into fists. “What?”

He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “That’s my balcony.” He pointed to her chest. “People expect me to put on a good show. So let’s see what you got.” He had several strands of beads in his lap and he held one up for her.

Caroline just stared at him.

He reached for her shirt. “Come on. If you afraid to show me, then what good you gonna do me up there?”

She pushed his hand aside and spoke clearly and plainly. “There’s a girl up there who looks about sixteen years old.”

The guy just stared at her.

“And there’s a forty-year-old guy undressing and fondling her for the crowd.”

Still, he stared.

“I’m an off-duty police officer and I’m hoping to stay off-duty. So what do you say we take care of this and you keep me from making a phone call?”

The guy sighed, got off his chair, and lowered the rope. They climbed the steps and emerged in a dark hallway with ornate
wooden doors on each side. At the end of the hallway she could see the silhouettes of swaying dancers and hear the cheering below.

The doorman chattered as they moved down the hall. “I can tell ya, they ain’t no underage females in here. We card very aggressive, ma’am, very aggressive.”

They emerged on the narrow balcony, crowded with people swaying and swinging mugs of beer and daiquiris, the women lifting their shirts and reaching for strings of beads thrown from the street. Caroline pushed past the doorman and through the tightly packed group of people. She found the plump girl and her friend, but couldn’t find the girl who just a minute ago had been on the verge of passing out.

She glanced down at the team, still gathered on the street. Down there, they were so tall, their body language so insistent and demanding. But from this angle, their upturned faces were the simple faces of boys. She turned away.

“Har!” A thin guy in glasses stepped in front of her, revealing the wide smile of the hopelessly drunk. “Har-rar-u?” Caroline squeezed past him.

“I don’t see no sixteen-year-olds,” the doorman said stupidly.

Caroline looked around the hallway. “What’s behind these doors.”

“Hotel rooms, ma’am.”

“You have a master key?”

He grinned out one side of his mouth. “You wanna go into all them rooms, I ’spect you gonna have to make that phone call.”

Caroline left the doorman and returned to the balcony. She found the plump girl, who had adopted the more patient dance of her friend, one breast at a time. Caroline grabbed her arm and she turned nervously, as if she expected to see her mother.

Caroline yelled into her ear above the music. “There was a girl standing next to you! Wearing jeans and a T-shirt! Very drunk, like she was going to pass out!”

The girl turned to face Caroline, her cheap plastic beads jangling. “Is she in trouble or something?”

“I don’t know!” Caroline said. “Did you see her leave? With an older guy?”

“They went downstairs for another drink!” The girl smiled. “To loosen her up!”

Caroline left the balcony again and ran past the doorman, who was now bored with the whole thing. “That it, ma’am?”

Caroline spoke to him without slowing down. “If that girl is harmed in any way, I’ll have this place shut down.”

The doorman hurried to catch up but didn’t say anything.

At the top of the stairs, Caroline paused and took in the crowded bar. Thick wooden beams held up the ceiling and made it hard to see the whole room. She finished descending the stairs and pressed through the crowd, from table to table, until she reached a small booth on the wall facing Bourbon Street. Sitting at the booth were two couples, facing each other, including the man and woman that Caroline had seen on the balcony. The woman was older than Caroline had imagined, maybe twenty-five, the man younger, maybe thirty-five. They were both laughing as they related for their friends their brief moment of balcony stardom. The woman was covered in Mardi Gras beads. Her head bobbed drunkenly as she spoke and a white string of spittle connected her lips, but she was very much conscious, very much an adult.

“It made me seasick being up there,” she said, slurring the words to something like
thea-thick
. “Fucker hasn’t been that interested in my tits since our honeymoon!”

The man defended himself. “Hey, you’re the one who wanted to go up there…”

“I’m kiddin’, babe.” The drunk woman fell against her husband’s shoulder and he kissed her gently on the top of her head.

The husband noticed Caroline then, standing at their table. He turned toward her. “Hey,” he said, “can we get another round?”

Caroline nodded, then walked away from the table and left the bar. Outside, she made her way down the sidewalk until she hit the first cross street, left Bourbon, and walked with her hands in her pockets down an increasingly quiet side street, past pawnshops and bookstores, the noise and grate of Bourbon Street fading behind her. She walked until she’d reached the Cafe du Monde, the all-night coffee shop in the French Market, where she sat and caught her breath and had a cafe au lait, thinking about the unreliability of human perception and memory. She thought of a robbery victim
she’d once interviewed: The woman spent ten minutes describing the man who’d broken into her house, and it wasn’t until Caroline held up the police artist’s sketch that she realized it matched almost perfectly a photograph on the mantel of the woman’s dead son. She supposed some people see what they want, others what they dread.

Caroline sat in the wrought-iron chair, watching the waiters in their dirty paper hats. The air was moist and smelled slightly septic. About twenty people were in the cafe—groups of men taking the edge off good drunks, couples in serious conversation, lonely men with newspapers and novels and sketchbooks. Men. Not monsters.

Caroline finished her coffee and left, walking until she reached the levee along the northwest bank of the Mississippi. A light wind moved with the river, seemingly at the same pace, stirring the thick, soupy air. She was relieved to be along a river, even one as broad and languid as this. Maybe she could stay here the rest of the night.

After her father had left the family, Caroline’s mother suffered bouts of insomnia that became progressively worse. Caroline remembered the heightened anxiety of her mother’s 2
A.M
. phone calls. She would begin speaking before Caroline even answered, so that it seemed her mother was starting mid-sentence, some hyperspeed version of herself, apologizing for a long-forgotten remark, obsessing over the menu for an approaching holiday meal at which it would just be she and Caroline, offering names—boy names and girl names—for Caroline’s future children. Maxwell and Corinna. Blake and Sandra. Caroline would listen patiently as her mother exhausted two or three topics and then started on television programs or something she’d seen that day in the newspaper. “Go to sleep,” Caroline would say.

“Can’t,” her mother would answer, “too tired to sleep,” her voice pained and manic, “too much to do.”

Caroline’s own insomnia had begun after her mother died, when she awoke one morning at three and imagined the phone was ringing. In her confusion, Caroline imagined it was her mother on the phone, asking whether Caroline thought soup could be served in the pasta bowls she’d brought home from Genoa, or whether Tracy was a better name for a boy baby or a girl baby. But when she got up the phone wasn’t ringing, and she couldn’t help thinking she’d missed the call somehow.