“You got it,” I said. Then I opened the door and yelled down the corridor at the turnkey, “On the gate, here!” Chapter 19
E ARLY TUESDAY I collected Clete Purcel at his motor court and headed for New Orleans. When we drove down I-10 into Orleans Parish, the city was little changed, the ecological and structural wreckage so great and pervasive that it was hard to believe all of this destruction could come to pass in a twenty-four-hour period. I had been on the water when Audrey hit the Louisiana coast in 1957 and in the eye of Hilda in 1964 when the water tower in Delcambre toppled onto City Hall and killed all the Civil Defense volunteers inside. But the damage in New Orleans was of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible, or at least it was for me.
Perhaps I carried too many memories of the way the city used to be. Maybe I should not have returned. Maybe I expected to see the streets clean, the power back on, crews of carpenters repairing ruined homes. But the sense of loss I felt while driving down St. Charles was worse than I had experienced right after the storm. New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn’t belong to a state; it belonged to a people.
When Clete and I walked a beat on Canal, music was everywhere. Sam Butera and Louis Prima played in the Quarter. Old black men knocked out “The Tin Roof Blues” in Preservation Hall. Brass-band funerals on Magazine shook the glass in storefront windows. When the sun rose on Jackson Square, the mist hung like cotton candy in the oak trees behind the St. Louis cathedral. The dawn smelled of ponded water, lichen-stained stone, flowers that bloomed only at night, coffee and freshly baked beignets in the Café du Monde. Every day was a party, and everyone was invited and the admission was free.
The grandest ride in America was the St. Charles streetcar. You could catch the old green-painted, lumbering iron car under the colonnade in front of the Pearl and for pocket change travel on the neutral ground down arguably the most beautiful street in the Western world. The canopy of live oaks over the neutral ground created a green-gold tunnel as far as the eye could see. On the corners, black men sold ice cream and sno’balls from carts with parasols on them, and in winter the pink and maroon neon on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glowed like electrified smoke inside the fog.
Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it. The city might have been the Great Whore of Babylon, but few ever forgot or regretted her embrace.
What was its future?
I looked through my windshield and saw fallen trees everywhere, power and phone lines hanging from utility poles, dead traffic lights, gutted downtown buildings so badly damaged the owners had not bothered to cover the blown-out windows with plywood. The job ahead was Herculean and it was compounded by a level of corporate theft and governmental incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside the Third World. I wasn’t sure New Orleans had a future.
I turned off St. Charles and drove into Otis’s old neighborhood. The sun was up in the sky now, and the lawns along the street were stacked with debris and hazed with patches of bright green where blades of St. Augustine grass had grown through the netlike film of dead matter left behind by the receding water. Clete wanted to stop by the home of his new girlfriend. I waited while he knocked on the door. When no one answered, he wrote a note and stuck it in the jamb.
“You told her to meet us?” I said.
“No, I told her I’d call her later. I want to keep her separate from this stuff.”
I pulled away from the curb and continued toward Otis’s house.
“I’ve been giving this guy Bledsoe some thought,” Clete said. “I think he needs a Bobbsey twins invitation to leave the area.”
“I think that’s a bad idea.”
“The guy doesn’t sleep. His lights are on all night. He had a hooker in Saturday night. She left ten minutes later, looking like somebody had scared the shit out of her.”
“Leave him alone, Clete. Helen and I will handle it.”
“The guy’s got ice water in his veins. He’s a psychopath and he’s got a grudge against Alafair. I say we break his wheels before he gets into gear.”
“Why tell me this now?”
“Because this guy bothers me. Because I don’t want Alafair hurt. Because you didn’t see that hooker hauling ass.”
“Were you drinking last night?”
He paused before he spoke again, this time without heat. “I came back to the Big Sleazy to help you look for the stones. But I think this is a mistake. Those are Sidney’s goods. If he thinks you know where they are…Christ, Dave, use your imagination. Even the greaseballs kiss his ring.”
I had told Otis Baylor almost the same thing but had not followed my own advice. I hoped Clete did not read my face. “I finally hit home with something?” he said.
We probed Otis’s flower beds with sticks and pried up the flagstones in the backyard. We searched the garage rafters and under his back porch and used a ladder to climb on top of the porte cochere in case Bertrand had thrown the stones up there. We shoveled up the bricking in the patio and dismantled the chimney on the stone barbecue pit, broke apart birdhouses, raked out an ancient compost dump thatched with morning glory vine, crunched through the remnants of a greenhouse that had been flattened by a pecan tree, and dumped the impacted dirt in three huge iron sugar kettles that had been used as flower planters.
Nothing.
“What are you all doing over there?” a voice called from next door.
Tom Claggart stood on his back porch, straining to get a clear look through the border of broken bamboo that separated his property from Otis Baylor’s.
“It’s Dave Robicheaux, Mr. Claggart,” I said.
“Where’s Otis?”
“If you need to contact him, you can call his home in New Iberia,” I replied.
“I was just wondering if you had permission to be here,” Claggart said.