Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Because Jordan didn’t fit the profile of a pierced and tattooed traveler or hardcase old-timer, they figured he was on the run from the law for something serious. Which, in fact, was the case. To Clare’s surprise, this lent Jordan stature in their little group. Still, there were no beginnings of friendship, just a mutual understanding of sorts.

  Though she hadn’t thought it possible to feel more miserable than she did, she found the squat depressing, the filth, the drugs, and the vermin—two-, four-, six-, and eight-legged—too frightening. Her third night in the city, she hadn’t gone back but slept on a bench on the river walk. A schizophrenic man—that was her take on his mental state—had chased her off his bed with a broken bottle. There was a protocol to being homeless, and Clare did not know it. If it hadn’t been for Jordan’s reflexes, she might have been cut.

  The middle of the next day she saw the FOR RENT sign in Geneva’s window.

  Clare bought a secondhand laptop and a cell phone and started surfing the Web for any hint of her children. Jordan spent a lot of time with the punks. They hung out on Bourbon Street, panhandling for the most part and occasionally dragging out a guitar one had found in a squat in another town and learned to play a few chords on. It was a way to stay on the street and watch without being noticed by anybody. As odd as the punks were, they were human and they were company.

  Jordan found Dan and his gang on Chartres behind St. Louis Cathedral, leaning against the iron fence, enjoying the scowls of the artist who had set up there to sell her wares. Danny was the accepted leader. He was tall and bearded and in his thirties. Of the five of them, Danny was the only one who gave off the vibe of someone who would kill. The others, Jordan figured, would do violence only as a group. Taken one by one they were weak and pathetic and trying to cover it with rudeness and vandalizing their own bodies to spite an indifferent public. For them, Jordan felt little but disdain.

  “Got any smokes?” Danny said by way of greeting.

  Jordan slid down the fence till his bony butt rested on the sidewalk, fished a crumpled pack out of the pocket of his shirt, and shook one out. Danny took it, bummed a light, and then took the rest of the pack as if it were his due.

  “Fuck that shit,” Jordan said and snatched it back. He and Danny smoked in silence, letting the sun soak into their faces and the nicotine into their brains. Rain—not her real name, Jordan figured—played with the newest puppy.

  The bulls the railroads hired to keep the yards secure didn’t like to mess with punks with dogs. If they busted a punk with a dog, a city ordinance made them take that dog to the pound and, if it bit them or anybody, do a long rabies thing. Bulls didn’t want to do that much work. So the travelers collected dogs. When they left a town, sometimes they took them. Mostly they left them behind to fend for themselves.

  Rain had lost a dog in Sacramento when they’d jumped. It had fallen under the wheels of the train. At the squat she’d picked up a new puppy and was happy as a little girl playing with it, getting it to bite at a weed she’d pulled up. Rain was fifteen and had seven piercings in her face: both eyebrows, two through her lower lip, her tongue, her nose, and one through the middle of her left cheek. Her body and her hygiene were not able to support so much metal, and the nose and cheek wept all the time.

  The new dog couldn’t have been more than eight weeks old. It was a mutt, a bit of black Lab, Airedale mustache, retriever tail, paws that could have been given it by a St. Bernard. The paws were so big he tripped over them, and both girl and puppy grinned hugely.

  Darwin, Rain’s boyfriend and so called because he looked kind of like the missing link, was totally ripped on something and examining the end of one of his dreads. Jordan didn’t know where the other two were.

  “Where’s Peter and Stacy?” he asked, letting smoke trickle out with his question.

  “You working for the fucking Census Bureau now?” Danny asked.

  Jordan let it go. It was just noise. “I’m looking for a guy,” Jordan said finally, grinding out his cigarette on the cement, then tossing the butt into the gutter. Jordan hadn’t told them why he’d come to New Orleans; he hadn’t told them much of anything and didn’t plan to.

  “Peter swings both ways,” Danny said. “If you’re looking for an ugly guy.”

  Jordan didn’t laugh. With Danny’s punks laughing was a sign of weakness.

  “Give me another smoke,” Danny said.

  Jordan shook one out and another for himself. This time Danny didn’t try to take the pack. They both leaned back their heads and pulled in deep lungfuls of smoke.

  Clare hadn’t smoked for so many years she’d thought the addiction was gone. It wasn’t. It had been waiting for that first drag. She’d only quit because she knew it would be bad for the fetus, then for the children. Unless she could again be a mother, there was no need to live a long life.

  Smirking, Jordan took another drag. “This guy I’m looking for was on the river walk the other day, the one with the yellow coat that my dog ran after.”

  “That why you cut out? I thought you had the runs.”

  “Maybe it was something you ate,” Rain said, still teasing the puppy with the weed.

  “I followed him to an alley off Dumaine—I think it was Dumaine. He pulled a knife on me and I lost him,” Jordan said.

  “Sounds like you got lucky.” Danny scratched in his beard with a thoroughness that bordered on lewd.

  “I was wondering if you guys would watch for him, let me know if you see him, maybe where he goes.”

  Danny and his punks never asked for anything but cigarettes and money, not even so much as “Please pass the salt” or “Will you watch my dog?” Whether it was an unwritten rule or nobody had needed anything in the time Jordan been in their company, he didn’t know.

  “That’s what you were wondering?” Danny asked, pretending to care. “You were wondering if we’d hang out and watch for some dude in a yellow coat? Maybe call you on a cell phone if we see this dude? Oh, right, we don’t have a cell phone. So maybe you wondered if we’d jump up and run you down and tell you we see this guy? You spent all that time wondering this?”

  Jordan guessed not asking for things was a rule.

  “And you thought we’d do this why?”

  “Money,” Jordan said succinctly. “Drugs. Whatever you want.” Jordan wished he hadn’t added the last. He was negotiating in a world where seeming to have too much to bargain with could get a guy killed. Why jump through hoops when a brick to the back of his head and Danny could take it all?

  Danny didn’t miss it either. “Whatever I want,” he said slowly, drawing the sentence out as if he were taking the time to dream a hundred sumptuous dreams in the duration of three words. “World peace? Nah, too easy. A million dollars?” He pretended to think about it for a while, then shook his head. “You know, a million used to be real money. Not so much these days.”

  Clare was getting scared.

  Jordan was getting pissed off. “Forget it, man,” he said and pushed his thin shoulders up the iron stakes. “I can buy half a dozen assholes for a six-pack of beer. I don’t need your shit.” Hands shoved deep in the pockets of his pants, spine curved in a slouch that was both lazy and cruel-looking, he headed down Chartres.

  “Jordan!” Danny called after him. Jordan stopped and turned slowly enough that it could have been taken as an insult.

  “Don’t be such a sensitive prick. You travel with us, we help you. Right, Rain? We’re family.” Rain had picked the puppy up, and they were nuzzling each other, both strays finding joy in what love came their way.

  “Bingo’s family,” Rain said, and she held the puppy’s paw and waved it at Jordan.

  Clare froze for a moment. She saw Dana and Vee and Mackie when he was no more than two pounds of fluff and bark. The girls were dancing around the new puppy, he was dancing around them. They were singing, “B-I-NGO, B-I-NGO, and Bingo was his name-O.”

  Jordan narrowed his eyes and the vision was blinked out.

/>   “Get your ass back here,” Danny said.

  Jordan would have flipped him off and kept on going, but Clare made him slouch back. The return was out of character, but Danny’d never notice. Clare and Jordan didn’t sit but stood, hands in pockets, looking around as if waiting for the Luftwaffe to begin their daily bombing runs.

  “B-I-NGO, B-I-NGO, Bingo was his name-O,” Rain sang softly to her puppy.

  Clare felt hollow and strange, as if her memory of her daughters had been channeled into this damaged girl, as if the dead spoke to her through pierced lips. Tears started in her eyes. Jordan shook out another Camel and lit it.

  “What do you want to find this guy for?” Danny asked.

  “What the fuck do you care why I want to find him? I want to thank him for polishing my pew at church. That suit you?”

  “You’re all heart, man.” Danny laughed. He didn’t care, he was just making conversation. “And this Samaritan’s got a yellow leather coat? Like in butter yellow or sunshine yellow or Yellow Submarine yellow?”

  “Submarine on acid,” Jordan said.

  The smoke had cured Clare’s tears. Clare had forgotten that. When she was young, not married, no kids, and smoked, she could always count on nicotine to stop tears. Odd but true.

  “He’s maybe thirty. Dark and wiry with hair greased like a fifties low rider,” Jordan said. Danny looked blank. “Like the Fonz on Happy Days.” That didn’t do anything to clear it up. “Jesus, fuck, you some kind of cultural black hole, dude? Like that pimp that hangs around outside Dick’s sometimes; the one that runs the old black whores, five bucks a shot.”

  Now Danny saw the light.

  “He wears pointed shoes that should be shined but aren’t and pants too tight with nothing in the package to show off.”

  Clare was startled at how much they remembered about the man Mackie had followed, the man the pigeon had chased into the alley. But he was there, as clear as if they’d spent hours studying him. Without pride, she knew she could step into his pointy shoes and play him down to the knife. Ratso Rizzo, but without heart.

  “Sure, dude, we’ll be on the lookout, punk BOLO for slime bag in pimp clothes. We should have about fifty-seven sightings before . . . oh, hey.” Danny looked at a wristwatch that wasn’t there. “Say fifteen minutes from now.”

  He and Rain laughed. Rain sat cross-legged in her short denim skirt. Bingo was asleep in her lap, his funny, fuzzy body the only thing keeping her from flashing the dead people behind St. Louis Cathedral.

  “You’re fucking useless, man,” Jordan said easily.

  It had been a long shot. Clare could see the guy Mackie and the pigeon had followed so clearly that if she’d been an artist, she could have drawn him, but words were paltry things, and she knew Danny had no idea what he was looking for.

  “A thousand bucks if you get him,” Jordan said. “Fuck-all if you don’t. I gotta go.” Jordan stooped. Clare petted the sleeping puppy. “Feed him,” she said and slid up into Jordan’s stinking clothes to walk down Pirate’s Alley and out onto Jackson Square where the tarot readers and living statues and artists were trying to make a buck off the tourists.

  CARICATURES $5.00. AN EXTRA DOLLAR IF YOU’RE UGLY, an artist halfway down on the shady side advertised. On his chunk of the iron fence around the square were a slew of not-half-bad caricatures of famous faces: Elvis, Michael Jackson, Cher, De Niro, Shirley Temple, James Brown, Bob Dylan.

  Jordan stopped. He shook out another cigarette and lit it. At six bucks a pack and counting, David Sullivan’s cache of bills was going to go up in smoke. “You ever watch Law & Order?” he asked the artist, a saggy beanbag of a man who looked tired and cranky, with eyes that saw too much too often.

  “Which part of the franchise?” he asked.

  “The one where they have a police artist draw the bad guy from a description.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Anna called her brother-in-law, Frederick, late of the FBI. Her main concern was the questionable ethics of asking him to help her while keeping him in the dark for his own safety. She had forgotten how quick the man’s mind was.

  “David Sullivan, Daoud Suliman, the slain husband/father in Seattle?” he’d asked.

  “The same,” Anna admitted.

  “And you want me to trace his business with a special focus on dealings with New Orleans.”

  “I do.”

  “You are in New Orleans on business?”

  He knew she wasn’t. Molly had been her favorite ear in the early days of her separation from the NPS, before she’d grown ashamed at her own whining and shut her out for a while.

  “Vacation,” Anna said.

  “So, on vacation, wanting information on victim Sullivan . . . you’ve got a lead on where his wife is, the prime murder suspect.”

  Anna said nothing.

  Frederick groaned. “No. Don’t tell me you’ve actually got the wife?”

  Again Anna said nothing.

  “Is she . . .”

  There was a sudden silence. As it ticked by, Anna resisted the temptation to say “Are you there?” into her cell phone.

  Frederick came back on the line. “Right, never mind; tell me no more. But, and you listen to me this time, doggone it, what you are doing is so very dangerous. Not only knife-in-the-back kind of dangerous, but thirty-years-to-life kind of dangerous. Let’s not discuss it further. I’ll e-mail you.”

  “Thanks, Frederick,” Anna said, relieved. Since the Bush administration had bent or broken all the rules about right to privacy, paranoia was the norm. If one didn’t want it recorded, one didn’t say it over America’s phone lines, or airwaves, or whatever it was cell phones sent things over.

  “I owe you,” she said.

  “Oh my yes, a bunch, a whole bunch. I’m talking you come to New York for Christmas and stay with your sister and go shopping with her,” Frederick said without a trace of humor in his voice.

  “Shopping?” Anna quailed. “At Christmas?”

  “Put it on your calendar. Bring your Paul. We’ll run background checks on each other and play chess.”

  “I will,” Anna promised.

  “Yes, you will,” Frederick said. He added, “We love you. Stay out of dark alleys and the federal penitentiary.” Then he hung up.

  Walking down Bourbon, the sun long set and Friday night partiers thickening like soup left too long on the stove, Anna wished she’d been able to do more than she had. Clare’s sense of time running out was contagious, she thought as she stepped into the street to cede the sidewalk to a knot of men too drunk to be trusted not to fall on her.

  At CC’s she’d accessed the Wi-Fi and gleaned as much about Clare, her husband, her children, the murders, and David’s business from Google and Wikipedia as she could—whatever was public knowledge.

  Clare had a Facebook account. Not being a hacker, Anna was limited only to the first page. It was about actors and acting and theater shop talk. Her daughters weren’t mentioned. Whether this indicated she was not a good mother or was an exceedingly good mother, Anna didn’t know.

  David’s business had a Web site, but it was sufficiently boring to dull her senses. Again, she could only access the first page. The business was strictly wholesale, and without a vendor number she was locked out.

  Newspapers and magazines were more forthcoming. The murders were covered from every angle and rehashed from the Times to the tabloids. Clare Sullivan had murdered her sleeping spouse and his mistress and then set fire to the family home, killing both her children. Since she’d disappeared the night of the crimes and so could not be tried and convicted, the better rags were careful to say “alleged” murderer. The others didn’t bother.

  Information made public by the Seattle police and coroner’s office made it look like an open-and-shut case. Anna’s instincts told her Clare was innocent, but Anna’s instincts, when it came to judging character, were notoriously untrustworthy.

  Without using any names, she had talked with Molly about the schi
sm in Clare, the part of her that seemed to be becoming Jordan.

  “We all do it to some extent,” her sister told her. “Just look at the headlines. Family values politicians having affairs, antigay preachers going to male prostitutes. We aren’t the same person to our grandmother as we are to the cop who stops us for speeding. It’s when we force a divide between these seemingly disparate parts that mental illness comes in. Most of us compartmentalize, make excuses, or suffer guilt, but we hold the good and the bad together in our skins and our skulls. Your nameless person has taken it to a new level, but I doubt she’s crazy. Yet.”

  The “yet” haunted Anna. If Clare was not a murderess, there was still Jordan. Anna believed Jordan could easily become a killer, if he wasn’t already. Her gut told her, if and when this happened, Clare would step over that line from knowing she was behaving bizarrely to simply being that other, bizarre person. Should Anna be in the vicinity when that happened, there could be deadly consequences.

  Shaking off logical thoughts and sensible behavior, she cleared her mind. For whatever reasons, she believed in Clare. She had promised to help her as far as she could without committing any crimes—any more crimes. Second-guessing her decision or, worse, psychoanalyzing why she made it was a waste of time and energy. Opening her eyes to her surroundings, she soaked in the color, music, foolishness, and overindulgence that was Bourbon Street.

  Without turning her head she could count half a dozen examples of Molly’s contention that we all harbor other personalities within: the Minnesota businessman, sporting a new tattoo, a fleur-de-lis, that he would have to keep covered for the rest of his professional life; the acne-scarred middle-aged man in denim and flannel, flirting with a lovely boy when, at a guess, he was straight as an arrow when he was home; two women in their forties or early fifties, showing lots of leg and cleavage and having a wonderful time when, back in their normal skins, they probably wouldn’t dream of wearing skimpy clothes and cavorting in high heels.