The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 29

I wait twenty minutes in the tiny Port Sulfur library for a shot at one of their three computers – which are occupied by kids checking their e-mail. I try chatting up the woman at the front desk, but she turns out to be not chatty. I ask her if she remembers the case involving Charley Vermillion.

“No,” she says.

I expand on it, identify him as a former patient at the asylum down the road.

“No,” she repeats, and returns to her magazine.

When time’s up for one of the kids, I use my allotted twenty minutes to snag a bargain room at the Crescent City Omni. Then I e-mail Muriel Petrich to request that photographs of the origami rabbit be either sent to me at the hotel, or scanned and e-mailed. In the few minutes left before the library closes, I use the copying machine to copy the listings for attorneys in the Plaquemines Parish telephone book, and I establish that the parish seat is in Pointe a La Hache.

Which is across the river. That’s where the courthouse is, and that’s likely where the petition for Charley Vermillion’s release was filed. When I ask one of the kids waiting to check out a book how to get to Pointe a la Hache, he tells me there’s a free ferry that goes across the river every half hour. I can catch it a few miles north. Look for the signs.

I sit in my car, cell phone in hand, and look at the list of attorneys-at-law. It may not be a good idea to pick a lawyer from the yellow pages, but I don’t have much choice. I call three of them before I get to Hawes, Halliday, and Flood. Lester Flood can fit me in at three forty-five tomorrow afternoon at his office in Belle Chasse. My intention is to petition the court for release of the identity of the man who made the origami rabbit in Peyton Anderton’s display case.

I head north toward the ferry, but once I get there, I realize there’s no point in making the crossing today. It’s too late. The courthouse will be closed. I drive back to New Orleans and check into the Omni.

My room is on an air shaft, but the price is right and the parking is free. Once I’ve checked into the hotel, I call Petrich. I don’t really expect her to be in, but I want to leave a phone message to reinforce my e-mail request for a copy of the photos of the rabbit. Turns out, she’s working late.

“Where are you, Alex? What’s up?”

“New Orleans.”

“New Orleans? You find something?”

I don’t know why, but I’m reluctant to tell her about Vermillion or the rabbit in the display case. It reminds me of how Liz didn’t want to tell anyone she was pregnant before she got past the three-month mark. As if announcing the news might tempt fate and put the pregnancy in jeopardy. “Maybe. I’ll let you know if anything pans out.”

“You do that,” she says. She promises to scan the photo and send it as a JPEG before she leaves work.

I head out for gumbo at a sandwich place down the block, watching my budget, and then take a walk through the Quarter. I end up on Bourbon Street. It’s very crowded and the heavy air smells faintly of decades of whiskey and vomit. I stand outside one club, and the music spilling out sounds so great I go inside. What the hell. A beer.

The blues. The guy up front is hunched into the microphone, his body a coiled instrument of woe. Oh, my heart it starts a-hammerin’, and my eyes fill up with tears.

It ought to be the perfect music for me, a conduit for my misery, but it isn’t. I sit there and drink, but nothing happens. I can’t feel the music. I can’t even taste my beer. I last about ten minutes and then I’m out the door.

When I get back to the hotel, it takes me a long time to fall asleep, and when I do, I have a dream in which everything I touch disappears.

In the morning, I grab some free coffee from the lobby, plug in my laptop, and log on using Liz’s AOL account. Her password is the twins’ birthday, 010497 and that stops me cold for a second. I check off five New Orleans area telephone numbers for AOL to try. It takes almost twenty minutes before the server finds a connection.

I go to my Yahoo! account and see that Petrich came through. I hit the key to download the JPEG file she attached to her message and wait for it to come up. The blue bar expands across the bottom of my screen, and then, there it is. Even in two dimensions, the rabbit is impressive and powerful. I made no mistake – it’s identical to the one in the display case in Anderton’s office. There’s an evidence tag affixed to the rabbit. A stamped rectangle on the page bears the words: Anne Arundel County Police Department Evidence Room. There’s a signature (Sgt. David Ebinger) and date (June 1, 2003).

At nine, when the hotel’s “office suite” is available to guests (for a fee), I print out a few copies of the photo of the rabbit.

My plan is to give one copy to the lawyer, Lester Flood, in hopes that he’ll be able to use the photo as evidence, that he’ll be able to compel the release of information from the Port Sulfur facility.

I’m about to leave when I decide to e-mail Judy Jones at the FBI. Maybe the Bureau can help. It takes me twenty minutes to hammer together a message about what I’ve learned, explaining how I came to discover a rabbit identical to the one found on my son Sean’s dresser in the display case of a Louisiana asylum.

When I’m finished, I look over what I’ve written. I’m dissatisfied. I know that the connections linking the Ramirez murders to the abduction of my sons (by way of the Gablers and the Sandling boys) are solid. I know that the “anonymous tip” was bogus, that the man held responsible for the murders of the Ramirez boys was not the man who actually killed them. I know that the man who made the rabbit in the Port Sulfur display case took my sons. But on paper, no matter how much I tighten and clarify my account, it all seems… insubstantial.

I fire off my final version, but in the end I know it doesn’t make it. Showgirls? Magic? Calling into question a double murder that was solved to everyone’s satisfaction? The little folded rabbit doesn’t seem strong enough to support the weight of all that.

In the car, I take a look at the map. Plaquemines Parish is a peninsula divided by the Mississippi River. The courthouse in Pointe a La Hache is on the west bank. I plan to go there first, looking for the petition for release that freed Charley Vermillion. I’ve done courthouse document searches before. It’s time-consuming work, and tedious. It can take days. But I should be able to get a few hours in before it’s time for my appointment with the lawyer.

My guidebook confirms what the kid in the Port Sulfur library told me: Ferryboats run back and forth across the river. I head for the one that crosses from Belle Chasse to Dalcour.

My guidebook also noted that the courthouse in Pointe a la Hache is more than a hundred years old, having survived any number of hurricanes. Old as the courthouse is, I just hope the place has air-conditioning.

It takes me less than an hour to get to Belle Chasse, and I’m lucky, catching the ferry five minutes before it leaves. Every other vehicle on board is a pickup truck. The river is wide, the water a turbulent roil of chop and current. The ferryboat’s powerful engines point the craft upstream against the drag as it muscles its way toward the far shore.

The houses on this bank seem older and more refined, but otherwise the drive is much like yesterday’s. Small towns remarkable mainly because the speed limit plummets for a mile or so. A levee concealing the river. Citrus groves. And not much else.

In twenty-four minutes, I arrive in Pointe a la Hache. It ’s not hard to find the courthouse – which is by far the largest structure I’ve seen in Plaquemines. But it’s a burned-out shell, surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape, much of which is lying around on the ground tangled in the weeds. A grove of skeletonized live oaks hulk above the ruined building like so many demons, their ropy trunks and gnarled branches charred black.

A construction trailer sits to the side, bearing a sign that reads PLAQUEMINES PARISH PUBLIC WORKS. A rap on the door summons a red-faced man in a battered yellow hard hat.

He looks me up and down as if I’m from another planet. “Yup?”

“What happened to the courthouse?”

He fails to keep the smirk off his face. “Burned down.”

“When did that happen?”

“January twelve, two thousand three.”

“What a shame.” The sight of the fine old building in ruins depresses me. Where are the records now? Did they survive?

“Shame and a half is what it was,” Hardhat says. “Stood more’n one hundred years. Lasted through I don’t know how many hurricanes. Served its citizens well. Betsy came through here at a hundred forty miles an hour and that wind brought half the river with it when it got to this bank. Lots of folks rode out the storm in the courthouse, up top there. It was the high ground, you understand. A hundred years and then-” He snaps his fingers. “Gone.”

“Is there a new courthouse?”

But he’s not finished.

“Nature couldn’t destroy the place, but man could. And did.”

“You mean it was arson?”

“Right,” he says, with a knowing nod. “And that’s according to none other than the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They found accelerant residue. Big-time.”

Arson. “But why?”

He wags his head. “They’s a hundred years of history in them files. Least there was. Some say that’s it, some old record somebody wanted permanently lost. Deed or some-ut.”

“But there must be electronic records.”

He laughs. “For the past few years, they is. But for the other ninety-five or whatever, nossir. Those records is solid gone.”

Maybe I can still find out the name of Vermillion’s lawyer. That case is recent enough to fall within the time frame of “the past few years.”

“Myself,” Hardhat says, “I’m partial to ’tother theory about the arson.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, they been tryin’ to move the courthouse for years, to some more convenient location. But the dang pop-u-lace keep votin’ the idea down.” A laugh. “I think it gon’ move now.”

“Move the courthouse? Why?”

“Your lawyers, judges, court reporters, and what all. Long time they been wantin’ it on the east bank, in Belle Chasse. Belle Chasse an easy drive from N’Awlins. Not like gettin’ down here where you got to hassle with the ferry and all. Rumor is, the lawyers got tired of haulin’ they ass way down here to conduct they bidness. How much money it take to get somebody throw some kerosene in there and toss a match? This is Louisiana.”

“They going to rebuild it?”

“Don’t think so.”

“So where do they conduct court business now?”

“Temporary courthouse,” he says. “Bunch of trailers.”

“Where are they?” I ask, looking around.

“Oh, that’s why I think they gon’ get their way. They didn’t even bother to put the temporary courthouse here. Those trailer – they over there in Belle Chasse,” he says with a chuckle. “It more convenient, you see, for the interim.”