Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

The Code on the Door by Tony Fennelly

Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee Tony Fennelly came to New Orleans in 1969 and on her first night in town “spotted a beautiful French-speaking Cajun boy,” to whom she has now been married for over 30 years. Her Margo Fortier mystery series is set in NOLA, where the actress/writer returned after Katrina.

City officials are bragging that murders in New Orleans have gone way down since Katrina.

Yeah, big deal. Now, five months later, our population is still less than one-third of the pre-storm number. Fewer folks to kill and fewer ill-wishers to kill them. But while the crime rate has dropped here, it has hurtled upward in Houston and Baton Rouge where so many of our lowlifes landed.

With most of the drug dealers and gangsters still out of town, the usual shootings and stabbings over turf have given way to more sensible killings done by respectable people. I learned about one of those while waiting in line at a FEMA facility.

I chose the one in the Jewish Community Center on St. Charles Avenue because I could park nearby for free, and gathered documents proving my ownership of a once-great car, now a flooded-out derelict rusting in the driveway.

The door was guarded by a brawny employee of a private security contractor. I thought him overqualified for a job entailing no more serious a confrontation than, “Sir, would you please take that orange juice outside?” and was curious enough to elicit that he was only deployed here briefly between tours of Iraq. Well, good for him, I thought. I’d hate for all the muscles and military comportment to be wasted on the likes of us here.

I was settled in with a flier about sorting “hurricane-related debris” for pickup when I heard, “Hey, Margo Fortier!”

It was my Uptown friend, Caroline, waving her reptile purse from a middle row of chairs. She gave up her place in line to sit with me in the rear.

“Oh, Margo! I’m so glad you’re back!”

That’s the common greeting these days. We’re all glad anyone is back, even if we didn’t know them before.

“Almost two weeks,” I told her. “Julian is working at the LaBorde Gallery, cleaning flood-damaged artwork. — How did you ride out the storm?”

“Our insurance handled the damage, but it was awful for us.” Caroline fanned herself with a kidskin glove. “On August twenty-seventh, we saw the report that Katrina was coming and decided it was a good day to fly up to our summer place in Charlotte. Then we had to watch all that devastation on the cable news.” She clasped her hands. “We felt just terrible. — How about you and Julian?”

“Taillights on I-10, like the rest of the masses. We left the twenty-eighth with our dog and enough clothes for the three days we expected to be away.”

“That’s what everyone thought, three days. So where did you go when you couldn’t return to New Orleans?”

“We had a choice,” I said. “Julian’s Cajun cousin, Verbus, volunteered a camper on his farm in Turkey Creek. The road was a half-mile away through the cow field and we would always have to watch where we stepped.”

“That doesn’t sound very tempting.”

“It doesn’t. Then my brother Tom offered to put us up in New York City.”

“New York City!” Caroline clapped her hands. “Yes!”

“...in a two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and teenaged daughters. We would get the couch in the living room.”

“Oh.” Her hands dropped. “Well — how were those cows?”

“They mooed a lot.”

She shrugged. “You were safe and dry, anyway. — Wasn’t it terrible about old Angus Crawford?”

“Angus?” I sat up straight. “What happened to him?”

“The poor soul died in his house on Maya Street, like so many others.”

“But he had a two-story!”

“I know.”

“We tried to take him with us.”

Julian and I were on our way out early that Sunday morning, him at the wheel and me beside him with the map. Catherine, our Catahoula hound, panted over our shoulders. A city bus passed us with a loudspeaker exhorting residents to climb aboard and be taken to a shelter at no cost. I didn’t see anyone get on.

We stopped for some road food on Maya Street and happened to pass Angus Crawford’s place. The old man himself was in the front yard picking up his lawn furniture, his thick brush of hair looking whiter than the Greek Revival house behind him. We knew him from our Civic Pride meetings as the most vocal of the anti-development faction.

Julian pulled up to the curb and waved.

“Mr. Crawford?! Is your son coming to pick you up?”

“Doug?! That flowerpot?!” The old man screwed up his face and spat in the grass. “I haven’t talked to him in a year!”

“Never mind him, then.” I leaned out the window. “Throw a few things in a bag and ride with us!”

Catherine wagged a welcome, happy to have company in the backseat. I remember that Crawford just frowned and shook his head.

“We’re driving north and west,” Julian persisted. “We’ll take you anywhere you want to go: Gonzales?... Baton Rouge?... Alexandria?”

“I’m not going anywhere! I sat out Betsy and Camille right up there in my living room. I’ll do the same for Katrina.”

“But this will be three times the size,” I warned. “The mayor is calling it mandatory.”

“No bald-headed mayor is going to make me leave my home!”

Then we watched him stride up his steps, across the porch, and back inside.

As Julian turned the wheel to head down toward I-10, I looked out the rear window. “I’m glad the old buzzard isn’t coming along. He’s so disagreeable.”

“Yes, he could have ruined the disaster for all of us.”

“But what if there is a flood, and the water gets in his house?”

“Then he’ll just go upstairs.”

We spent the next nine hours in evacuation traffic, being “counter-flowed” all over creation, and didn’t think about Mr. Crawford again.

Now I turned back to Caroline. “We were hoping the old man’s son, Doug, would drive by and carry him to safety.”

“I’m sure he would have, but Doug Crawford was busy in Lakeview all week.” She fluttered her kidskin glove. “He and his friend Steve rode around in a flatbed boat, plucking people off their roofs. You might have seen them on the national news.”

“Maybe we did. We watched the network coverage on a portable TV in our camper.”

“That’s the saddest part. By the time he and Steve rode their boat to his father’s house, some National Guards from New Jersey had already been there. The code was on the door.”

“The code?”

“They had spray-painted a ‘1 D’ for ‘One Dead Inside.’ That’s how Doug found out about his father. Isn’t that the blackest irony? He had saved a hundred lives only to lose the one dearest to him.”

* * * *

I drove home by way of South Claiborne. Feel like stopping at one of the dozens of fast-food places that line the avenue for a roast beef sandwich? Milkshake? Fried chicken? Pizza? Nyah, nyah, you can’t have any of them. All of those franchises are closed and dark along with the drugstores, service stations, supermarkets... everything.

You know what I miss most? Miss more than electricity? More than my microwave? More even than phone service so I wouldn’t have to hike to the Fair Grinds cafe to read my e-mail? Traffic lights, that’s what I miss. Most of them in the city are still down, so we observe the protocol of a four-way stop. Whoever hits the intersection first gets to go. But what if it’s a tie to the intersection? What if it isn’t clear who was first? What if someone doesn’t want to wait his turn? I could get seriously killed around here.

I parked my car at the house, between piles of rubble, wrote out checks to pay some bills, and went walking through “Debris City” to the one post office that’s still open, built high up near Bayou St. John. Why not wait for the mailman, you ask? What mailman? I haven’t seen one on my block since August. Have you?

I waved to my neighbor, Thelma, who was still in her robe and sticking her head out her front door for a breath of fresh air. The flood didn’t cause her any structural damage, but the mold growing in her house is making her sicker by the day.

I passed the horrendously expensive coffee place where a giant yellow banner declares “NOW OPEN” in foot-high letters. If a thirsty believer parks his car and hurries over to grab a hot morning java, he will see the banner’s smaller print with the address of the company’s other franchise way across town that actually is open. This location is closed, locked, and bare to the walls.

As he fumes and curses, the thwarted customer can read that the place across town is hiring “barristas.” From the name, one might surmise a “barrista” to be a little lawyer, or maybe someone who builds prisons for Chihuahuas. But it’s actually a person who makes a living pouring horrendously expensive coffee.

Ubiquitous as blue tarps on roofs are the “NOW HIRING!” signs. With the city’s working poor scattered among forty-two states, there is no unemployment here anymore. Anyone willing to get up in the morning can have a job.

Most of the eager laborers who have poured into town are Hispanic, some in the country legally, others not. The change in the makeup of our population is audible. Streaming from screened doors and car radios are Mexican harmonies instead of rap rhythms.

I passed piles of debris ten feet high: dented “white goods” (refrigerators and washing machines, not sheets and pillowcases), soggy Sheetrock, faded furniture, muddy children’s toys, and felled giant live oaks that would make enough firewood to power the whole city till summer if only Entergy could burn it for fuel.

I passed a skeleton propped up in a window holding a crude cardboard sign: “WAITING FOR FEMA.”

I smelled something dead, bigger than a cat, smaller than a person, and crossed the street.

The supermarkets are boarded up for miles around, but a mom-and-pop Italian grocery is back in business on a cash-only basis. They can’t process credit cards without a phone.

Walking along Orleans Avenue, I trod on multiple stencils of an invective directed toward a certain public figure. The public figure’s name has four letters and so did the invective.

I detoured down narrow side streets looking for watermarks. The one at our house is about the height of the front porch. But this neighborhood was considerably below sea level and the grainy brown lines were almost as high as the rafters. I passed blocks of abandoned houses and stopped at one to decode the graffiti on the door. There was spray-painted a large X. The space on top had the date, “9–6.” To the left were the initials or ID number of the rescuers. “AZ” for the Arizona National Guard, for example. Or “TX”: There’s Texas. “NJ”: Yay, New Jersey!

The right space designated “NE” for “No Entry” or “LE” for “Limited Entry.” At the six-o’clock position was the number of people found, living or dead. Usually this number was zero. The zero always had a slanting line through it so it wouldn’t be mistaken for the letter “O,” as in “OK,” for the Oklahoma National Guard. Two blocks over, the messages included “TFW,” for “Totally Full of Water” and if you don’t believe the words, note that they appear at an elevation of eight or ten feet and the scribe had to be sitting in a boat at the time.

SPCA volunteers had made the rounds soon after the Guardsmen and left their own messages: “Two Dogs Under House” or “One Cat Outside” and “Dog Food Drop” or “Cat Food Drop.” Someone had left a pan of dry cat food and fresh water in a clean and sparkling glass bowl. A thoughtful amenity for a fastidious feline refugee.

I saw a little yellow house spray-painted in red: “SPCA: Need F/W” (food and water) “2 Pit Bulls, 1 Baby.”

Oh dear! There was a baby in there with those pit bulls? (“Wah! Wah!”) I think they probably meant “puppy.” A human baby wouldn’t live very long in the custody of a pair of ravenous pits.

We have a strong dog and cat culture in this town. One of the stirring images of the Katrina coverage was that of a young black man kneeling on the I-10 overpass, clinging to his dog’s neck. He had probably been up there without food for days but refused all offers to ride to a shelter. The dog wouldn’t have been allowed to go with him. It was only a mutt of no real value, but the man declared that it had saved his life and he wouldn’t abandon it no matter what. Then the TV cameraman who was supposed to be neutrally recording the episode did an unprofessional thing. He took the pooch aboard his news helicopter and taped the reunion in Baton Rouge two days later, the man in tears, the dog wagging and licking.

Multiply this situation by thousands of New Orleanians who stayed behind in the city, enduring terrible hardship, even dying, because they wouldn’t leave their pets to drown or starve.

I walked three blocks down to see Angus Crawford’s house with its grisly message on the door. The date on top was “9–5.” The figure at the six-o’clock position was that chilling “1 D” for “One Dead.” Looking closer, I was surprised that the waterline was only halfway up the window frames on the first floor. The old cuss could have just walked upstairs.

Why didn’t he just walk upstairs?

I saw a man-shaped shadow move across a front window and decided it must be Angus’s son, Doug. One of the heroes of the storm.

On reaching the post office, I picked up a flier — “Get Rid of Mold” — and got into line. While reading the cleaning formula (one cup of bleach to one gallon of water) and trying to figure out what an N95 mask was, I eavesdropped on two postal workers. The letter carrier said he was living in a tent until the sodden, crumbling Sheetrock in his house could be replaced. The clerk behind the counter said he was still waiting for his FEMA trailer.

“I was five days on the neutral ground. The water was all around us.”

“You spent five days sleeping in your car on the neutral ground?”

“I didn’t have the luxury of a car.”

“What did you sleep in?”

“My clothes. I had two women with me — my wife and our daughter — so we couldn’t go to the Superdome.”

No, they couldn’t. What happened to some women and girls up there was much worse than staying outdoors during a category-three hurricane.

“Then they put us all on different buses,” the man went on. “My wife and daughter wound up in Houston and Dallas. I got a cot in a skating rink in Mamou.”

Our cow-pasture accommodation was starting to look like the Paris Ritz.

When I got home, I joined Julian in the backyard and helped him refill the generator with gasoline, my mission being to hold the funnel. “Good day at the gallery?”

“Not really. It was so cold this morning that I wanted to keep the windows shut.”

“But you’re working with strong solvents. Don’t the fumes...?”

“Right. I almost fainted on top of this moldy wizard painting.”

“Wear your warm sweater and keep the windows open... I passed by Angus Crawford’s place today.”

“I heard about poor old Angus.” Julian emptied one can and picked up another. “The water filled his house?”

“No, it only flooded the first floor.”

“Then why didn’t he just walk upstairs?”

“That’s what I wondered.”

Julian stopped pouring, adjusted the choke, and pulled the crank to start the noisy roar of our power source.

“He could have slipped on the wet steps and fallen, hit his head, drowned.”

“Could have.”

Our generator, from which extension cords snake all throughout the house, runs the washing machine but not the dryer, so Julian had to string a clothesline across our back porch.

Living a lot more like my grandmother than I ever wanted to, I carried our wet laundry outside and started pinning it up. At least I had those new-fangled clothespins with the wire hinges.

We’re slogging through the usual rainy New Orleans January and I have to take clothes down and hang them back up several times to get enough cumulative sunlight to dry them. Pinning up our towels, I sang, “No phone, no lights... not a single luxury...”

The Gilligan’s Island theme refers to “Robinson Caruso.” Of course “Caruso” was a tenor. The stranded guy was “Crusoe,” but the song required a three-syllable name. Also, the sitcom was about a bunch of ignoramuses who never heard an opera or read Defoe.

Except maybe for “the professor,” who was brilliant and handsome. If I had been “Ginger” or “Mary Ann,” I would have set up hut-keeping with the professor. I wonder why they never thought of it.

Julian opened the door behind me. “Let’s pay a condolence call on Doug Crawford.”

Young Doug Crawford and his friend Steve Marks were both wearing nothing but jeans and bronzer. They looked like an ad for a “Meet Friends” phone line.

“Margo and Julian!” They swung the door open wide. “We’re so glad you’re back.”

“We’re glad you’re back, too.”

“I can’t say we ever left, really.” Steve stepped around one of the dozen scented candles illuminating the living room. “Our apartment in Lakeview was totaled, so we slept at the deputy station for a month. Then, when the water receded, we moved here. Upstairs, of course.”

“The first floor must have been ruined,” I said. “But I see you’re bringing it back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Doug agreed. “We tore out the old Sheetrock the first week and put up new the second.”

“We’re going to enclose the back porch and make it into a sunroom.” Steve waved. “The whirlpool tub will be right over there.”

“That old kitchen table will be gone, gone, gone, replaced by an island, with stainless-steel sinks. And our copper-pot collection will hang up there. You see that?” Doug pointed to three paint cans on the counter. “My father was about to redo this kitchen in white. Zinc white! Can you imagine? It’s all going to be ‘Prudent Primrose’ now.”

Steve picked up a brush and fanned the bristles. “We’ll get ourselves a spread in New Orleans magazine. Bet on it.”

“We were trying to understand your father’s terrible accident,” Julian said. “We asked ourselves, why didn’t he just walk upstairs?”

“Oh, but he did. Let me show you.” Doug pointed to the staircase and we all followed him up to the second floor. “Dad must have lived up here by himself for three or four days. He had a generator out on that balcony off the bedroom. He’d stocked jugs of gas, bags of freeze-dried food and bottled drinks.”

Julian stepped out onto the balcony and leaned over the gas cans. “Your father’s generator is like ours. It wouldn’t take more than eight gallons a day, even running constantly.”

Doug and Steve looked at each other. “So?”

“I see three empty twenty-gallon cans. He could not have used all that gasoline in three or four days.”

Doug’s Adam’s apple moved. “Then the cans couldn’t have been full when he started.”

“That would explain it.”

Once back on the sidewalk, Julian stepped up to examine the scrawled writing. He opened our car doors with the remote.

“Margo, the glove compartment. Get the flashlight and my kit from work.”

“Check.”

The “kit from work” is just a box with nothing in it but cotton swabs and a bottle of paint solvent. Julian opened the solvent, which smelled strong enough to make me dizzy even out in the fresh air, and addressed himself to the code on the door. I stepped back to the car as he dipped the swab in and applied it to the center of the “D” for “Dead.” He dabbed carefully in a tight circle and in less than a minute, a black smear emerged from beneath the white.

I held my breath and came in for a close look.

“That was the slanted center line of a zero!”

Julian heaved a sigh and knocked on the door twice, above the “1 D.” In a few seconds, we heard running footsteps. Doug pulled open the door, then saw Julian’s smear and gasped. Steve appeared behind his shoulder and went pale.

“We can reconstruct the events here.” Julian capped his bottle. “The Guardsmen came on September fifth, but Angus wouldn’t have let them rescue him in any case. When they rode their boat down this block, calling for survivors to carry to safety, he would have turned off his generator, hidden upstairs, and kept mum. The Guardsmen would mark the house empty and move on.”

Doug nodded slowly, as if in a trance.

“Your father was still alive when you got here a few days later. You killed him and left him in the water. Who would notice one more drowning victim during the greatest natural disaster in the country’s history?”

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it as Julian continued.

“Crawford already had some white paint in the kitchen. You used some of it to paint over the line in the zero, which you turned into a ‘D,’ and wrote the number one beside it.”

“That was taking some chance, doing it out in the open,” I put in.

“The neighborhood was still troubled. The lights were all out and there was no one around to see them but maybe a cat.”

“It was me!” Steve stepped out on the porch. “I did it.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“No, Dougie. I want to tell the truth.” He beckoned us back into the vestibule and lowered his voice. “Please try to understand. We had been thirty hours without sleep, living on coffee and donuts, pulling people off their roofs and carrying them to dry land. I wanted to sack out, but Dougie just had to steer the boat over this way and make sure his father was all right. ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Your old man doesn’t care if you live or die.’”

“I thought he would be proud of me. Everyone else told us we were heroes.” Doug rubbed his eyes. “We saw the code on the door, the zero meaning no one was inside. But I knew Dad was just hiding. He wouldn’t leave. So I used my old key to get in and he heard us and came down the stairs. I was so glad to see he was all right. I ran to him but...”

“He just started blasting at Doug.” Steve made two fists. “Got red in the face like a monster. Kept cursing and screaming how he was ashamed of his miserable excuse for a son. And poor Dougie was...”

“Yeah, I was breaking down,” Doug admitted weakly. “I was so exhausted, I could hardly stand up, and then I expected him to welcome me with open arms, but with all that...”

“Hollering filthy names at him, how he was praying to God that Dougie had drowned.”

“I had always told myself that my father really loved me no matter what. But now I knew...”

“I had the heavy police-issue flashlight we were using to search the houses,” Steve interrupted. “I just hit that vicious old man on the head with it, only to shut him up so he would stop hurting Dougie! That’s all I wanted to do, shut him up. But he fell like a stone.”

“Dead before he hit the water,” Doug said. “Whiting out the code on the door was my idea. I used Dad’s paint to cover the zero, then sprayed on the ‘1 D’.”

Then he began to cry. “I loved my father. Why did he hate me so much? What’s so terrible about me?”

His friend held him in a protective hug. Julian gave me the raised-eyebrows sign and we left them to assail their demons.

Getting back into the car, I asked, “Where are we headed now?”

“I could use a good night’s sleep.”

“Me too.”

Copyright © 2006 Tony Fennelly