going to happen.”
“I want to go down to the Lower Nine.”
“Never think of me as the voice of reason. I couldn’t stand it,” he said.
He pulled a silver flask from the pocket of his slacks and unscrewed the cap and let it swing from its tiny chain. He took a sip, then another. I could see the warmth of the brandy spreading through his system, the tension going out of his face. He screwed the cap back on the flask and slipped the flask back into his pocket. He brushed at his nose and grinned.
“You’re not mad at me?” I said.
“Wouldn’t do any good. One day our luck is going to run out. I think you’re pushing that day closer to us than it should be, Dave. But that’s the way it is. You won’t ever change.”
IT WASN’T THE individual destruction of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward that seemed unreal. It was the disconnection of them from their environment that was hard for the eye to accept. They had been lifted from their foundations, twisted from the plumbing that held them to the ground, and redeposited upside down or piled against one another as though they had been dropped from the sky. Some were half buried in hardened rivers of mud that flowed out the windows and the doors. The insides of all of them were black-green with sludge and mold, their exteriors spray-painted with code numbers to indicate they had already been searched for bodies.
But every day more dead were discovered, either by search dogs or returning family members. The bodies were sheathed like mummies in dried nets of organic matter, compacted inside air ducts, and wedged between the rafters of roofs that had filled to the apexes. Sometimes when the wind shifted, an odor would strike the nostrils and cause a person to clear his throat and spit.
Feral dogs prowled the wreckage and so did the few people who were being allowed back into their neighborhoods. Clete and I found the church where Father Jude LeBlanc had probably died. It was made of tan stucco and had a small bell tower and an apse on it and looked like a Spanish mission in the Southwest. Before the storm, bougainvillea had bloomed like drops of blood on the south wall and a life-size replica of Jesus on the Cross had hung in a breezeway that joined the church to an elementary school. But the bougainvillea was gone and the replica of Jesus had floated out to sea.
I could find no one who had any knowledge of Jude LeBlanc’s fate. It was almost evening now, and the sky was purple and threaded with smoke that smelled like burning garbage. On a house lot behind the church I saw an elderly black man pulling boards from what used to be his house. I made my way across a chain-link fence that had been twisted into a corkscrew, my shoes breaking through an oily green crust that had dried on top of mud and untreated sewage.
I opened my badge holder. “I’m a friend of Father Jude LeBlanc,” I said. “He was at this church when the storm hit.”
“I know he was. I was on the roof yonder. I seen a woman dropping children out the attic window into the water,” he said. He had stopped his work to talk with me, one hand grasped on a weathered plank flanged with nails. His face was work-seamed, his eyes an indistinct blue, as though the sun had leached most of the color from them.
“You saw Father LeBlanc? You know what happened to him?”
“Mister, I ain’t had time to do nothing except get my wife out of my house. I ain’t pulled it off, either.”
“Sir?”
“I ain’t never found her. Whole house caved in under us. Water come squirting right out of the chimney, boiling up around us just like we was on a ship going down.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I come back looking for our t’ings. Po-lice said I ain’t s’ppose to be back here. If I ain’t s’ppose to be back here, who is? Two t’ings I don’t understand. How come nobody come for us and what was them lights in the water?”
“Pardon?”
“It was dark and a helicopter went by, high up. I seen the lights in the water and at first I t’ought it was a searchlight from the helicopter and the blades of the helicopters was blowing the water. But that wasn’t it. The lights was swimming around, like fish that could glow in the dark, except it was much brighter and these wasn’t no fish. I t’ink maybe my wife was down there.”
He stared into my face, waiting, as though somehow I possessed knowledge that he did not.
AT NOON WEDNESDAY Clete came by the office and asked me to have lunch with him. But something besides lunch was obviously on his mind. I asked him what it was.
“It’s Courtney,” he said.
“Who?”
“Come in, Earth. Courtney Degravelle, the lady who lives down the street from Otis Baylor. The lady whose house I left a note at yesterday.”
“Maybe she didn’t see it.”
“I left her three voice mails.”
“I’ll ask NOPD to send somebody by her place.”
“I already did that. They don’t even know where a third of their department is. Come on, let’s go to Victor’s.”
I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. My intuitions proved correct. At the cafeteria, Clete remained agitated and distracted and hardly touched his food.
“Better eat up,” I said.
“Last night Ronald Bledsoe came to my cottage and asked me to split a six-pack with him. This morning he invited me to breakfast. He said PIs need to network because Google is driving us out of business. I told him I didn’t have that problem, also that I lived in the motor court because of the privacy it gave me.”
“What do you think he’s up to?”
“He wanted me to know he was at the motor court late last night and early this morning. I tell you, Dave, we need to take this cocksucker out in a swamp and smoke him. That’s not a metaphor, either.”
The people at the next table stopped eating and looked at one another.
“I’ll get a box to go,” I said.
BUT MY CONCERNS with Clete’s use of profanity in a hometown restaurant should have been the least of my worries. The next morning, at sunrise, a game warden trying to save a stranded cow in a marshy area not far from the Gulf saw the bodies of two people lying on the edge of a sandbar in the middle of a deepwater lake. Cinder blocks were roped around their waists, and waves rippled across their legs and backs. Both bodies should have sunk to the bottom of the lake, but whoever threw them into the water probably did so in the dark, assuming his boat was in a deepwater channel. The game warden cut the motor of his outboard and let the keel scrape onto the sand.
He jumped into the shallows and grabbed the rope that held both bodies together and pulled them onto the sand. His hands were shaking when he called 911. “I’ve got two homicide victims here,” he said. “One is gunshot, one looks to have died from suffocation. Wait a minute. Jesus Christ, one of them is alive.”
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS EARLIER, Andre Rochon had awakened in his latest girlfriend’s FEMA trailer outside Baton Rouge, the free cell phone a man had given him resting on his sternum. All he had to do was punch in the number the man had written on a slip of paper for him. What had the dude said? “Provide a li’l information and make yourself rich, my brother.” What did Andre owe Bertrand, anyway? If Bertrand hadn’t gone into that garage after gas, if they had all just climbed out of the boat and waded back to St. Charles Avenue, Kevin and Eddy never would have been shot.
But Bertrand had to show he was in charge, that the rest of them were punks, while all the time he was ripping off their share of the loot.
Andre got up from the small bed on which he had been sleeping and sat down across the breakfast table from his girlfriend. He wore only a pair of slacks and flip-flops, and he kept fingering his navel, pinching his abs and love handles, staring out the window at the rows of tiny white trailers in the FEMA park.
