calling the industrial district these days. Where all those apartment complexes went up a few years back, the ones no one moved into. No one that paid, anyway. Block after block of doublegated entrances, intercoms, internal corridors, skylights. Empty as seashells.”
New Orleans has never had much luck with gentrification. Every few years the city grasps at some straw it’s become certain will save it: the 1984 World’s Fair, gambling casinos a decade or so later, or converting the blasted, abandoned ruins of downtown warehouses, on a New York model, into apartments. But the city always winds up in worse shape than before, deeper in debt and ever more desperate, its dreams like Matilda in the old Harry Belafonte song having took the money and run Ven’zuela.
“Squad pulls up. Earl Jackson, Tyra McIlvane. He’s been on the job a month or two, barely cleared ride-along. She’s got almost a year in, making her an old hand by today’s standards, way they come and go. The gate, they finally figure, is jammed shut, chewing gum or something like that in the lock, it looks secure but gives when they shove. They go up slowly, door to door. Garbage covers the stairs, sacks from McDonald’s, pizza cartons, quart bottles of Old Milwaukee, crack vials, cheap wine, lumpy, burned-out mattresses. On the third floor, in what might have been a choice apartment looking out over Lee Circle, only it’s not, it never got to be that and never will, they find the body.
“Been there a long time, they figure. Most of the features are gone and the whole thing’s puffed up like the bad spot on a tire, about to let go. Unbelievably this guy still has a wallet in his pocket. There’s close to sixty dollars in there. No driver’s license, no credit cards. And a social security card issued to David Griffin.”
“Lewis,” Dr. Bijur said.
“We know one another,” I told Santos, who had started to introduce us.
“You … were a great help … to Walsh.”
“We do what we can.”
“Some … of us do.”
The last time I saw her was when Don’s son Danny killed himself. We’d stood together beside the old clawfoot tub he lay in, half afloat, half submerged. Danny had overdosed and backed up the overdose by tying a plastic bag around his head the way the Hemlock Society people said to. Blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making them look like road maps with nothing but interstates.
At that time, years back, Dr. Bijur looked, herself, to be barely hanging on, living off Atrovent and Albuterol inhalers in lieu of air. She still was. I hoped to hell she got a professional discount on the things.
“As I told … Santos,” she went on, stringing words on double fenceposts of pauses for breath and hits off her inhalers, “we’re not … sure what’s happened.”
With each breath her shoulders lifted to help draw in air and her head thrust upward like a turtle’s to add that extra tiny pull. Her ankles were round as soccer balls. Cracked everywhere, her skin had gone gray and dry as parchment from constant steroid use. Back in Arkansas, creeks and rivers would recede, leaving behind mudflats that, baked in the sun, looked much like her skin.
“Someone could have taken a carving knife to him, from the look of it,” Santos said, “then followed up with a vegetable peeler. Mostly, the features are gone. Ears, toes. Not much skin left, either. Your son’s been gone how long?”
“Just over a week.”
“No word from him?”
“None.”
“No idea where he might have gone?”
“Not really.”
“And no recent change in habits? Suddenly talkative, stops talking altogether maybe, starts staying to himself?”
“I know the drill, Santos.”
“Sure you do. No one new in his life, then? Woman, male friend, lost parent?”
I shook my head. “I assumed he’d gone back to the streets.
“He’s got a history of this kind of thing, then. Dropping out. Disappearing.”
I nodded.
A morgue assistant in dreadlocks that looked as though they’d been pressed between hot rocks made his way through the minefield of gurneys, found one and, bent like a surfer over his board, rolled it towards us. When he pulled back the rough sheet, Santos and Dr. Bijur looked up at him. A young woman’s body lay there, face gray, lips and breasts pale and translucent as wax. He checked the toe tag.
“Sorry, man,” he said. “Wrong citizen.”
Moments later, he trucked another gurney and rider down the waves. From size and general build, the body under the sheet easily could be David’s, I thought. But when Smashed Dreadlocks pulled back the cover, the world you and I live in day to day went flying away. What lay underneath looked like a skinned deer, a
I told them so. “What happened?”
“First we thought some kind of compulsive, serial killer thing,” Santos said.
“Too many bad … movies.” This from Dr. Bijur.
“Yeah, but how’re you
Back home, in the hill country not far from where I was raised, poor folk lived off squirrels they nailed to trees then skinned in a single long tear. The meat went into skillets for frying and into pots for stew. The skins stayed behind on trees. Dozens of them, hundreds finally, ringing the homestead.
“Not much … I could put my finger on … a hunch…. Kind of thing happens … you do this all these years.” When she stopped to rest from that last headlong plunge, I realized that Santos and I were breathing hard ourselves. If this had been a musical, all the bodies on gurneys under sheets would start chugging right along with us.
“We have someone on call … for situations like … this. Professor at LSU … came right down. New York … one or two other major cities’ve … got them on staff … full-time.”
Santos and I exchanged glances.
“You told me on the phone it was bugs,” he said.
Taking a hit off one of her inhalers, Dr. Bijur decided it was empty. She tossed it backhand towards one of several tall galvanized cans sitting about (best not to think what might be in there), then started rummaging in the soft plastic cooler slung over her shoulder for a replacement. The discarded one fell short by a yard and hit the floor spinning. Santos walked over, picked it up, sank it.
“You’re supposed to float … the damn things. They tip over, whatever … they’re still good. Like we aren’t going to know … when they don’t … work anymore?”
Her eyes went wide with the fresh (concentrated?) hit. “Greevy’s a forensic … entomologist. Roaches were hard at work … he says. Man’d only been there … two, three days, not … weeks, like we’d thought.”
“And my son’s wallet? How’d that get there?”
Dr. Bijur shrugged her shoulders. At first I didn’t take it for what it was; it looked like all her other struggles for breath.
“He doesn’t drive and … there’s no … bus … for a while. Bill’d probably … be out at the site … if you wanted to go by.”
One of those typical New Orleans cul-de-sacs, city’s ancient soul pushing up through layers of attempts at refurbishment, this long-unused lot in the crook of old buildings extended half a block before it ended at a wall of cinder block serving no discernible purpose. Yet even here, on this bare, abandoned island, in the shade of automobile tires, shopping carts, shattered wine and antiseptic bottles, sacks of garbage bleached gray and dry as driftwood, life went on.
Dr. Greevy sat on the overturned ceramic tumbler of a Sixties washing machine. The console stood alongside,
