younger. They'd be in bed at night and think they saw something in the corner, so they'd be very careful not to look that way. Because if they did, it was going to be there.'
'So who's this cousin?'
'His name's Armantine Rauch, everyone calls him Army. And he's not a cousin, he's Shon's half brother-like I am. One of Shon's old man's other adventures.'
'You know him?'
'Much to my displeasure and misfortune, I do. Years back, Army showed up on our doorstep saying he had no other place to go. I was about Shon's age then-fifteen, sixteen. Mom's a pushover, as always. Has no idea how she's going to take care of the kids she already has but never even skips a beat before taking in this new one.'
'How long was he with you?'
'Less than a year. First, money started disappearing from the coffee can in the kitchen, then from Mom's purse. Never much money, mind you, because there wasn't much. Fifty cents here, a dollar. Then we heard neighbors start complaining. Mail was missing from their box, they'd say. A grill or a lawn chair left on the gallery had disappeared. One man said the gallon of gas he'd put in his moped the night before, to get to work on, was gone when he went out the next morning 'round five. Few clays later, a car got stolen from up the street. Not long after, police came knocking at the door. Wanted to know if an Armantine Rauch lived there.'
'This had happened before, then.'
'Every place he lived.'
'It's the kind of thing that usually escalates.'
'Did here too. Cops came by more than once, those last months. But then on one of the rare days Armantine actually went to school a teacher told him to do something he didn't feel much like doing and wound up with a pair of scissors in his chest. Kids said you could hear the air gushing out around them whenever the teacher, Mr. Sacher was his name, tried to talk, tell someone to please go get help.'
'Rauch get tried for that?'
'After about fifteen social workers and agencies and this-n-thats you never heaid of or saw before quit arguing, he did. Mama said we'd probably never see him again. Too goddamn bad. She used to visit, the firstyear or so, but it got to be way too hard on her and she stopped going. Funny. Maybe some ways, all that's why I'm in law school.' He paused. 'Almost in law school.'
'He was tried as a juvenile?'
'Yes. Sentenced to twenty years, but they told us he'd be out when he hit twenty-one.'
'And you haven't seen him since then, right? He didn't turn up at your mother's, you had no reason to think Shon might have taken up with him.'
'Not really. Just that thinking about it, Shon disappearing that way, then finding out how things'd started changing on him and how none of us knew that, it gave me a bad feeling. Made me wonder.'
'Okay, for the time being I guess that's it. Unless you have something else you forgot to tell me.'
'No. I'm sorry.'
'I'll get back to you.'
'What-' he began.
But I hung up and immediately dialed Don.
'What's the name again?' he said after I briefed him. 'This is local, right? We know where this kid was? Just a minute. Damn computer's just sitting here blinking at me.'
Too many people surfing on the Third Wave.
'I'm waiting… waiting… I said later,' he told someone. 'Here it is. Armantine 'Army' or 'R. M.' Rauch. Went up on attempted second-degree, twenty to thirty. Remanded to LTI by judicial order. That's Louisiana Training Institute, and I've no doubt he was trained there, though not quite the way society intended. On the street they call it going to college.'
'Plea-bargained? '
'Couldn't. They'd have tried to kick it down to manslaughter, even aggravated assault, but statutes say if the wound's to trunk or head it's gotta be second-degree. Evidence of past offenses, the usual escalation, was also entered.'
'He's out?'
'Nineteenth of August. Happy birthday.'
'Just like that.'
'Yeah, butterfly time. The weird thing is, we have an address. I guess Rauch was carrying on an extensive correspondence while he was in prison, wanted to be sure it got continued once he was outside.'
I climbed out of the cab in front of a tract house just across the parish line off Old Metairie Road. Almost certainly it had been military housing, later converted to fifties sub-suburban with accrual of screened-in porch, cinder-block utility room and partial second floor. Plywood nailed to the windows signaled a more recent conversion to abandoned building. The yard was ankle deep in rotting leaves, bright green clover, grenadelike pinecones.
Don's address had taken me to a poolroom-lounge on Jefferson Highway. The owner-bartender didn't appreciate my questions near as much as he had my business when I first came in and ordered a beer, and the whole thing quickly developed into one of those standard dialogues involving baseball bats produced from beneath the bar and bodies hauled across the top of it, after which he decided maybe it would be okay to tell me where R. M. was staying.
The front door gave with a sharp tug, nails pulling free of well-worn holes. Inside I found hard evidence of habitation: hot plate, pans, stack of dishes, aluminum percolator, canned goods, large tin of coffee, clothes that smelled of sweat hanging from nails in the wall. A plastic ice chest wi th two beer cans half afloat in tepid water and a pile of empty, crushed ones nearby.
In one comer, tucked under a sleeping bag, I found torn envelopes addressed to Armantine Rauch and letters beginning Dear Arm.
In another room I found, jammed into the wall behind broken paneling and swaddled in a canvas backpack, a long-barreled. 22 target pistol.
In the last room I found a body lying facedown.
10
For some time words had been dropping without apparent reason or provocation, refusing to be dislodged, into my mind. Once it was poshlost, another time sere. Often these were words whose meanings I knew, if at all, imperfectly, though they were familiar.
Coming upon the body was like that. It wasn't Shon Delany's, but for a moment, for no good reason, I became absolutely certain that it was, and couldn't shake the impression.
I spent a couple of hours at the sheriff's office out there. In Jefferson Parish, unlike Orleans, it's the sheriff who handles police work. Officers sat across tables from me staring and served me plastic cups of coffee foul enough to elicit confession from the staunchest wrongdoer. They refused to get too worked up over this. Their attitude told me it was the kind of death that belonged to New Orleans, just happened to stray over the line into their territory.
I gave my statement, survived coffee and stares and when they finally agreed to put a call through, spoke to Don Walsh.
'Lew,' he said, 'I've been giving this some thought. What you need to work on is finding live bodies for a change. Maybe even the ones you're actually looking for.'
'Good point.'
'Let me talk to whoever's running the show.'
His brief conversation gained my release and a ride home in one of the patrol cars. Nor did they make me drink any more coffee.
A note from Norm Marcus pushed under my door told me the kids on bikes had struck again, snatching a seventy-year-old woman's purse and pushing her off the curb. Her leg snapped when she went down. She'd managed to drag herself back up out of the street but had to lie there until someone driving by stopped to help
