City of Masks

14

Cree called again on her way out of Charmian's house, but there was still no answer at the Warrens'. The 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 up from the District Six office, and I can tell you it's basically been cold from day one."

"I read in some newspaper articles that you were looking into the possibility that Chase had organized crime connections. Have there been any developments in that area?"

"Wouldn't tell you if there had been." Guidry opened a drawer and found a stick of gum, which he peeled and folded into his mouth. "But to set the record straight, 'connections' may be the wrong term. You look at who Temp was talkin' to, who he knew, maybe he could be some of these guys' buddy. And maybe some favors got traded, highway contracts, with Temp's friends up in Baton Rouge – Southern Lou'siana social networkin' has a tendency to get more'n a little inbred. But then you ask his people at the TV station, they say, yeah, ol' Temp, about twice a year he liked to pick out a choice item for some investigative reporting, and he'd been workin' up a piece on organized crime influence in the legislature. So maybe Temp was on the up an' up after all. But I can't tell you more'n that."

"Were there – are there – any other suspects?"

"No comment."

"What about the wife?"

"Looked at her, cleared her one hundred percent. Verifiably with her family that night, they had a baby shower for her sister, they all spent the night. Murder broke that gal up, too. Poor kid."

"Were any of the Beaufortes ever considered suspects?"

A clever look of dawning comprehension came over his face. "That what this's about? Ron Beauforte, or that ol' Charmain, they got you checkin' up on me?" He eyes narrowed as he chewed his gum animatedly.

Cree avoided staring at the neat little gnawing teeth. "No one's got me checking up on you! Absolutely not. Why would -?"

" 'Cause we looked at the Beaufortes. Standard procedure – murder took place in their house. So we interviewed Ron and his sister and the old battle-ax. Especially Ron – everybody knew there were some sour feelin's between him and ol' Temp from back in '94."

"Can you tell me about that?"

"Oh, Ron got it into his head he'd give politics a try, maybe thought he could buy a good campaign for himself, ran in the Democratic House primary. Like I say, down here things get kind of looped around, family connections, money connections, hard to untangle. Ron and Temp kinda belonged to the same club, you know, but at some dinner party or other Temp let it be known that he preferred the other candidate. I never saw any harm in it, probably it was more Ron felt Temp had some kind of duty to support his landlord, maybe give his candidacy a boost. But Temp was a popular fella in this town, his word went a long way, the other guy got the nomination. Sure, we talked to Ron. But it sounded like they figured out how to get along afterward, Temp kept on rentin'his house. And anyway, Ron killin' a guy five years later, over somethin'like that – that's a bit of stretch."

Cree thought so, too. "How was he killed?"

"Bullet to the back of his head, close up."

"What kind of gun?"

"Some kind of forty-four. Can't tell just what 'cause we never found the gun, or any shell casings, either."

Cree was feeling that they'd drifted away from what she really wanted. She wasn't here to solve a murder but to get information that might help her identify a ghost. The more she learned about Temp Chase, the more she sensed he was irrelevant to the haunting that terrorized Lila.

But it was too soon to rule anything out. She plugged on.

What kind of person was Temp Chase? Guidry fished in a file cabinet and handed Cree photos of both Chases. Temp's was a studio shot of a man in his late forties: a hint of African ancestry in his cafe-au-lait skin and short black hair, a slight smile intruding charmingly on a look of journalistic sobriety. Jane- Chase's photo was also a studio production, showing a much younger woman with pale skin airbrushed to perfection, full red lips, big raven-black hair. Both handsome, a perfect media couple. According to Guidry, "Whites liked Temp because he was pale enough to mostly pass," and his success spoke flatteringly about how progressive New Orleans had become; blacks liked him because he was "one of us" and a local boy made good. Guidry described him as gregarious, a climber, still popular but maybe not aging as gracefully as he might've, putting on a little weight. Born in New Orleans but studied broadcasting out east. His wife had been a model he met at a commercial shoot at the station early in his tenure there; she was eleven years younger. From Ohio, moved to New Orleans as a teenager when her engineer daddy took a j ob at the NASA assembly facility up in Michoud. Their marriage seemed okay, she never seemed to mind giving up her career to be housewife and manager of their busy social calendar. As for Temp's state of mind at the time of his death, Guidry thought he had to be going through some trouble. For one thing, the bosses down at Channel 13 were considering replacing him with a younger anchor, or maybe the kind of male-female tag team you saw a lot of nowadays. When the organized crime thing had surfaced, Guidry had thought that with his career in broadcasting hitting a major bump, maybe Temp had gotten worried enough about his financial future to look for other opportunities, maybe with the wrong people. But whether that was how he'd managed to get himself killed or not, surely he'd known something was coming his way. Friends and relatives stated he'd seemed depressed and anxious in the weeks before his death.

A call must have gone out, because there was a flurry of activity in the parking lot as a couple of squad cars lit up and squealed away. Guidry watched disinterestedly until they were out of view, then looked back to Cree.

"What else you need?" he asked.

There was a lot more Cree would have liked to ask, but she sensed she was running out of time with the detective. "What happened when he was killed? I mean, the sequence of events that night?"

"Conjectural," Guidry said immediately. "Seems like the killer had the jump on Chase, he was shot close-range from behind, had a sandwich half eaten on the kitchen table. Pretty well taken by surprise, I'd say."

Surprise, Cree thought, a strong element in the gust that had blown past and through her in the kitchen. Of course, the experience of dying came as a surprise for almost everyone.

"I have just two more questions," Cree said. "When you interviewed Lila Warren, do you remember her state of mind? Was she very upset by the murder?"

Guidry had to think about that, chewing gum and staring into space. "Can't remember too well. Shocked, upset, not too happy to be involved, I guess, the way anybody would be. Cooperated fully but didn't have anythin' for me. She didn't know the Chases, didn't socialize with 'em. Nothin' any of the Beaufortes did or said rang my bells."

"If I wanted to get to know Temp better, how should I do it? I mean his personal style, the way he talked, dressed, that kind of thing?"

"The wife, of course, you could talk to her. But I wouldn't – I'd let her be. I wouldn't stir it up for that gal." Guidry's compassion seemed genuine. "Best bet'd be talk to Deelie Brown. She's the reporter did most of the stories in the Times-Picayune."

Cree made a note. "Any other advice for an out of towner wanting information on this?"

Guidry shoved himself away from the desk, indication it was time for Cree to leave. She stood and followed his thick, shiny hair toward the door.

"Sure, I got some more advice. Go ahead and write your article, but don't play amateur detective here. First of all, because you'll be wastin'your time – we been over this whole pile of bushwah with a fine-tooth comb every which way for two years, you won't find anything we didn't. Second, because if whoever did it notices you sniffin' around and thinks you might find somethin', then you've bought yourself a peck of trouble, haven't you? A word to the wise, is all."

Guidry looked up at her expressionlessly and extended a little, hard hand to shake. "And, hey – welcome to the City That Care Forgot," he said.