Dead Sleep

“Not nude sleeping men?” asks Kaiser.

“If only,” says Baxter. “By all reports, Smith is enormously talented, and paints in the style of the old masters. His paintings look like Rembrandt to me. Really unbelievable.”

“More like Titian, actually,” says Lenz, earning a snort from the SAC. “Frank Smith stretches his own canvases and mixes his own pigments. The mystery is what he’s doing in Wheaton’s program at all. He’s already famous in his own right. Wheaton has far more stature, of course, but I’m not sure what Smith could learn from him.”

“I’ll ask Smith tomorrow,” says Kaiser.

Lenz sighs and looks at Baxter, who gazes pointedly at the table. The blue light of the projector beam highlights the fatigue lines in the ISU chief’s face.

“Smith’s paintings now sell for upwards of thirty thousand dollars,” Lenz adds.

“Oh, I forgot,” says Baxter. “Wheaton’s currently working on a painting that takes up a whole room over at the Woldenberg Art Center at Tulane.”

“You mean a whole wall?” asks Kaiser.

“No, a whole room. Multiple canvases stretched over curved frames to form a perfect circle. He’s painted on curved canvases for years, to create a feeling that you’re walking into this clearing he’s painting. Monet tried this as well. But this new thing is a complete circle. Huge. Takes up half of a thirty-five- hundred-square-foot gallery.”

I know photographers who’ve tried this for exhibitions. It usually comes off as cheap and contrived, like some clunky diorama exhibit.

“Does Smith have a jacket?” asks Kaiser.

“He got popped a couple of times for unnatural acts in his twenties, during park sweeps. Nothing major. His parents made the sodomy charges disappear, but he’s mentioned the arrests in interviews. He seems proud of them. I got the old arrest records from New York to verify them.”

“What about alibis for these people?” I ask. “For all the disappearances? Is anybody checking that?”

“About two hundred cops,” growls Bowles. “Plus us. That’s something the police know how to do. But until they actually interrogate the suspects, they can only do so much. It’s all paper trails. Credit card charges, like that. So far, all the suspects appear to have been in the city during the kidnappings. After your interviews tomorrow, the gloves come off. These people will go under the hot lights. Then they’ll hire lawyers, and the whole thing will become a media nightmare.”

“What about the girl?” says Kaiser. “What’s her story?”

“Waste of time,” Lenz says. “There’s no precedent for a woman committing this type of murder.”

“We don’t know they are murders,” Kaiser says with restrained anger. “Until we find some bodies – even one definite – we don’t know what we’re dealing with. I’m not ruling out anybody based on standard profiling techniques. Look at Roger Wheaton. The guy is well over our age limit, but based on what I’ve heard, I have questions.”

“Thalia Laveau,” says Baxter, trying to tamp down the flaring tempers. “Born on Bayou Terrebonne in 1961. Father a trapper, mother a housewife.”

“What did he trap?” asks Kaiser.

“Anything that didn’t trap him first,” I answer.

Bowles belly-laughs again.

“You know about these people?” Baxter asks.

“We did a couple of stories down there when I was on the Times-Picayune. Troubles in the shrimp industry. It’s another world down there. The whole place smells like drying shrimp. You never forget it.”

“Chime in with anything relevant.” Baxter squints down at a file. “Racially, Laveau is part French, part African-American, and part Native American.”

“A redbone?” asks Bowles.

“No, that’s different,” I tell him.

“What’s a redbone?” asks Kaiser. “Like Leon Redbone?”

“Redbones are part black, part Indian,” I reply. “They’re settled all over western Louisiana and East Texas. Thalia Laveau is what’s called a Sabine.”

“That’s not right,” says Baxter, misunderstanding my pronunciation.

“Yes, it is. In Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes they say ‘Sob-een,’ not Say-been or Say-bine, like the ones you learned about in Roman history. I have no idea why, that’s just the way it is.”

“That girl didn’t look black to me,” says Bowles.

“Or Indian,” says Kaiser, who grew up in the West. “Put her picture back up.”

“Let’s have Laveau, Tom,” says Baxter.

In the next photo – this one color – Thalia Laveau is not merely attractive but beautiful. Her eyes and hair are so black and shiny they seem to float off the screen, while her skin has the look of buttermilk.

“You’re the expert,” Baxter says to me. “Tell us about these people.”

“The Sabines are trappers and fishermen,” I answer, thinking back. “Shrimpers. They live in shacks along bayous that lead to the Gulf of Mexico. They’re not Cajuns, but at her age she would have grown up speaking French. They used to have to be taught English at school. They’re Catholic, but they have strange superstitions. There’s some voodoo in there, I think. Inbreeding, too. They range from white-skinned like this woman to very dark. They can have kinky hair, or straight like hers. They’re tough people, but they love to dance and play music. They’re clannish. Not likely to go to the authorities over trouble. In the eighties they had problems with Vietnamese refugees coming into their shrimping grounds to compete. There were shootings and boat-rammings. It was big news.”

“That’s more than I have here,” says Baxter. “As far as we know, Thalia Laveau had no formal training as an artist. She just started drawing one day and showed a knack for it. Eventually she moved on to painting, mostly watercolors of the bayous and the Gulf. She quit school in the tenth grade and at seventeen went to New York.”

“Just like Wheaton,” I say quietly.

“Yes. And like Wheaton, she had no early success. She supported herself in various ways, from waitressing to working in art galleries. A female art professor thought she heard Laveau say something about stripping for money in New York, but later decided she’d misunderstood. Laveau has worked as a model for a graduate painting class at Tulane, and some of that is nude work. The most significant thing we’ve heard so far is that she’s a lesbian.”

“Is that rumor or fact?” I ask.

“Unconfirmed. We didn’t want to question students at this point. We’d like these people to be totally unprepared at their interviews tomorrow.”

“What does Laveau paint?” asks Kaiser. “Nude women?”

“No. She goes into the homes of strangers, lives there for a while, then starts painting their lives.”

“Like the documentary photographers of the sixties,” I think aloud. “Gordon Parks.”

“All her paintings are finished at one sitting,” Baxter goes on. “She’s attracted a lot of print media attention, but her work doesn’t sell for much. Not remotely in the class of Wheaton or Frank Smith.”

“How much?” asks Kaiser. “A thousand bucks apiece?”

“Ahh… Seven hundred is the highest sum paid to date.”

“Do Leon Gaines’s pictures sell?” I ask.

“Somebody paid five thousand for one. He could make a living at it, if he wasn’t so deep in debt. He’s borrowed to the hilt on student loans, and he owes bookies as well. One former cellmate said he picked up a serious heroin habit in prison.”

“I get the feeling Laveau and Gaines live pretty close to the bone,” says Kaiser. “So where are the millions earned from the Sleeping Women?”

“Good question.”

Dr. Lenz says, “Right now I like Wheaton or Frank Smith. They’re already wealthy, so they would have the knowledge to hide the money, or know people with that knowledge. Gaines is a violent, self-absorbed punk. The attempted rape is an indicator, but he’s too obvious. Too coarse for the crimes we’re dealing with. And Laveau… is a woman.”