buzz of worry intensified. She checked her watch and decided there was time to drive over there before her appointment with Bobby Guidry of the New Orleans PD's Cold Crimes Unit. Torn between outrage at Charmian and concern for Lila, she drove west on Robert E. Lee Boulevard, then turned into the maze of residential streets just below the lake.
Damned old buzzard, Cree kept thinking.
There were no cars in the Warrens' driveway, and when she rang the bell, no one answered. She couldn't decide why it concerned her so much. Lila had a life; maybe she was, wisely, having lunch with friends, or doing something else that would get her mind off her troubles.
Guidry's office was at the police and courts complex on Broad at Tulane, which according to her street map meant she had to drive half the north-south length of the city once more. It left her with plenty of time to think about Charmian Beauforte. The dowager's parting remarks made it hard to focus on anything she'd learned that might be relevant to the haunting.
Roses, widows. Once pierced, she found it hard to ignore the wound.
Was it so obvious? Charmian's exposure of her would seem sadistic if it weren't so accurate: Mustn't waste the bloom. A fleeting thing. Still very much a widow. Stopgap stratagems. Suddenly Cree's eyes stung and she winced back tears, teetering on the brink of a self-pity she could neither abide nor afford.
Damned old vulture, she cursed inwardly.
She shook out her rumpled city map, checked it, and headed south onto St. Bernard. As it angled away from the park, the shaded boulevard, passed through increasingly poor neighborhoods; Cree opened her window and drove slowly, looking out with desperate curiosity, inviting the buffeting breeze and the sights of the city to distract her.
Wholesome, plain-Jane girl-Columbo!
But there was some balm in watching the city flow by. Wherever you went in New Orleans, she decided, every area rich or poor, black or white, there was a consistent, distinctive texture. It was a look of dilapidation, decay, a kind of terminal funkiness she found irresistible: pale stucco crumbling off dusty red brick, sagging porch roofs held up by flaking pillars, trees grown close overhead and draping foliage onto roofs. Wooden walls painted in faded rainbow pastels, peeling to reveal generations of prior color schemes. Windows and doors gone to parallelograms, porch railings missing stiles, steps falling away with wet rot. Roofs shaggy with grass and even small bushes that sprouted from fallen leaves turned to loam. In some areas, formerly grand private houses had been converted into multi-unit apartments and now seemed to be settling into the soil like ornate steamboats abandoned and sinking in some lost bayou.
Behind every canted window, she could feel all the loving and warring that had ever taken place inside. The thousands of rooms, the millions upon millions of hours and days.
Somehow there was comfort there. Take me in, she called to it.
Spontaneously, she turned off St. Bernard onto a smaller street and then turned again, just to get deeper into it, to burrow in and nestle against its great, ragged bosom. Every building, every view, was jammed with color and detail, a visual density you seldom saw in Seattle or in New England, concocted from a mix of poverty, history, Delta humidity, and urban pollution. No wonder New Orleans was so aware of its past: It was always all around, reminding you – deep, richly textured.
Cree came to a section of particularly ravaged-looking one-story residences. From her reading, she knew they were called 'shotgun'houses because they were so long and narrow, one small room wide and four or five deep: Walk in the front door, and you'd pass through every room to get to the rear of the house. Put two of them side by side with a common wall between, and you had a 'double shotgun,' each unit only a dozen feet wide, both front doors sharing the same rotting porch.
It was a Monday, so most kids were at school and adults at work, but still the streets were active. All the residents here were black. Cree was startled to see an impossibly tiny woman struggling to push a baby carriage along the uneven sidewalk. She wore medium-heeled pumps and a pink dress belted awkwardly at the waist, a battered hat with fake flowers on it, a gaudy, old-fashioned necklace, and bracelets too loose on her spindle arms. A midget? And then Cree realized what she was seeing: a little girl, dressed in her mother's or grandmother's clothes, playing mom. Cree missed the twins with a sudden pang and then she had sailed past. On the porch a few houses down, a couple of women chatted animatedly, slapping their thighs as they laughed and hooted at something scandalous. A middle-aged, hugely fat woman tottered laboriously along lugging heavy clusters of plastic grocery bags in both hands. Beyond her, three men wearing tool belts dug around the base of a falling-down porch propped up by two-by-fours; one of them turned and shielded his eyes against the sun to watch her.
Cree glided on, feeling like a voyeur, wishing she were invisible so that she could look and look and absorb and not be seen, not disturb or intrude. Here in the dense center of the neighborhood, she could feel its hum: a penetrating, warm, steady vibration like the muffled buzz of a honeybee hive deep inside the trunk of a hollow tree. The ghost of New Orleans. Of the living and the dead alike.
Yes, Charmian, she thought, pleasant feelings have a life just as much as the awful, the unendurable ones. Here it all mixed together, a patchwork quilt of rainbow colors as rich and dense as the decaying facades all around. Every dark and terrible thing was lived here: the frustration of poverty, numbing resignation, anger and resentment, cruelty and violence, jealousy and hatred, hopelessness and helplessness, madness. But also humor, joy, aspiration, love, tenderness, anticipation, glee, desire, celebration, strength – even here in the poorest corner of the decaying city, the light did not yield. It all poured together and did not cease.
Take me in, she called to it again. And it seemed to.
She pulled over to the curb and just stared up at a row of beat-up houses, feeling inundated and comforted. She couldn't recall a more seductive place, one that drew her into resonance so easily and thoroughly.
Of course, it occurred to her, maybe it wasn't so much New Orleans that had caught her in its web. Maybe it was just more of what Edgar had pointed out: her unaccountable susceptibility right now.
Her eye fell on the face of her watch and she got a sudden jolt. If she didn't hurry, she'd be late for her appointment with Investigator Bobby Guidry.
She had to mask her surprise when she met him. When she'd talked to him on the phone, his deep voice and strong accent had conjured the image of a tall, big-bellied bubba, with a gun on his hip and a wooden matchstick in his teeth. But Bobby Guidry was a tiny man who looked less like a classic Southern sheriff than a race-horse jockey at a wedding. He was dressed fastidiously in a dark charcoal gray suit with faint pinstripes, tie, and mirror-shined shoes, and though his black hair was probably natural, it was so thick and glossy it looked like a toupee. His small, blue-stubbled face wore what had to be a permanent frown of suspicion.
Guidry led her into the labyrinthine interior of the building and brought her to a metal desk in a big room with six identical desks in it, only two of them occupied. Windows lined one wall, and through them Cree could see one of the facility's parking lots, mostly full of white-and-blue police cruisers. Institutional beige walls, shiny linoleum floor, uniformed and plainclothes police coming and going: all in all, an atmosphere of industrious professionalism that was a good antidote for the stuff Charmian had stirred up.
Guidry gestured to a chair and asked Cree if she wanted some coffee. She looked at the half-full paper cup of curdled-looking mud on his desk and declined. Guidry remained standing, arms folded as he leaned back against his desk; even when she was sitting, Cree's face was nearly on a level with his.
'Well, you got exactly two minutes to explain why in hell I should tell you even one thing about the Chase murder.' Guidry tapped the face of his watch as if marking the beginning of Cree's time. 'You can start with who y'are, and why ya'll're down here all the way from See-attle.'
Cree had anticipated this question. Telling Guidry she was a parapsychologist would be a good way to get the bum's rush out of here. Anyway, the Beaufortes had been very clear about their desire for confidentiality. So she opted for a small lie – a misleading truth, really.
'I'm a freelance writer, and I'm working on an article about the case. I've started my interviews with the Beaufortes because I needed their permission to get into the house. But everyone tells me you're the guy who can really help.' Guidry looked doubtful, so she added quickly, 'I don't think I need to know anything that will compromise your investigation.'
'We'll have to see about that.' Guidry's frown pinched his narrow forehead. 'Hell, okay, shoot. But if I say no, you gotta take me at my word it's somethin' I can't tell you. Don't push on it.'
Cree nodded gratefully and got out her pad and pen. 'So I take it the case is still open.'
'Oh, yeah, case's still open. But the name of my unit should tell you something – cold. I rode this damn thing
