Cities of the Dead

by Linda Barnes

  It was too crowded for the three of them in the tiny office. They went outside in the mist, and sat on a bench in front of one of the tombs.

  Breaux slurped his adulterated coffee, said, “Now let me go back to that day. Wasn’t a good one, that I recall. Rainy an’ gloomy, like this. Nothin’ unusual ’bout the weather, an’ not much unusual ’bout the day. We don’ do a lot of funerals here no more. This cemetery mostly all filled up, an’ so old we don’ get much business no more. Few of the old families still use their tombs, all right, an’ people come visit. Busy sometimes, but more wit’ upkeep than wit’ newcomers. Now that day we got a funeral fo’ the Despardieu tomb, which is a real pretty one, on yo’ left as you come in the gate—”

  “Could we see it?” Spraggue asked.

  “I’m s’posed to stay by the shack, okay, case the phone ring or somethin’.”

  “But you have to leave it sometimes,” Flowers said. “Come on. This story needs pictures to go along with it.”

  “Okay, cher,” Jack Breaux said. “Follow me.”

  The ground was soggy from the drizzle. Jack didn’t patronize the gravel pathways. He knew the place well enough to take all the shortcuts through the mud.

  The Despardieu family tomb was creamy, veined marble, and beautifully maintained. Two fluted columns framed the inscription plaque. A winged angel, eyes closed in ecstasy, played a lyre overhead. The tomb was set off by a wrought-iron fence, the kind that ran around the balconies of the finer houses in the French Quarter. On the narrow walkway around the tomb, crushed seashells substituted for gravel. Breaux opened the gate with a key from a huge bunch attached to his belt.

  “Always keep it locked?” Spraggue asked.

  “Yeah. ’Course I can’t say what the policy was when that skeleton come aboard. I been here seven, eight years, that’s all. Guys from the Coroner’s Office, ones that took the pictures an’ all, they seem to t’ink our extra stiff came here long before me.”

  “Exactly what happened that day?”

  “We were short-staffed, like usual, or a lotta t’ings woulda happen different. When we prep a place, we usually do it the day before, right, but we couldn’t get it done, so we tried for the mornin’ of the funeral. See, that’s where the trouble was. We woulda had enough time, okay. There wouldn’a been no trouble wit’ time, ’cause all we hadda do was burn the ol’ wood coffin an’ brush the bones back in the pit. We check the date on the oven we gonna open, an’ that is fine. No action at that tomb fo’ six years—no action on this vault for almos’ twenny, see. We figure no trouble. Jus’ bones after that long.”

  “Six years and twenty years?”

  “See right here.” Breaux pointed to the tablet blockin’ the door to the lower oven. “This one been sealed up fo’ six years. Hope they don’ make us open it an’ see if there’s jus’ one body in it. This top one’s where the extra body was—an’ the las’ time it was open was fo’ the eart’ly remains a Miss Evelyn Despardieu, on February 12, 1966. Nineteen years ago, right?”

  “Go on.”

  “I was the one made the discovery. Me an’ Henry Wayne, we workin’ a little quick-like, ’cause of the family’s gonna come out at two in the afternoon, see, an’ we wanna set out a few chairs for the old folks an’ such. We ain’t worried ’bout nothin’. All we got to do is remove the marble plate an’ straighten out the matter of the remains.”

  “How do you remove the plate?”

  “Well, it ain’t too hard. You jus’ chip the mortar away, bein’ careful not t’ bung up the marble. Wrap a clot’ ’round it, an’ use a good chisel, an’ you home free. Takes a while, but it ain’t hard. After the plate’s gone, the door’s jus’ bricked up, an’ you can bang away pretty good. Bricks don’ matter. Cheap.”

  “Sounds noisy.”

  “Hammer an’ chisel make a good noise, yeah. But the neighbors don’ complain, eh?”

  “Is somebody always on guard here?” Spraggue asked,

  “Oh, yeah. You bet, cher. If you’re t’inkin’ that somebody jus’ come by an’ open a vault an’ nobody heard him, you’re plenty wrong.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “This is jus’ my opinion, you know.” Breaux drained his coffee cup and set it on the edge of the tomb. “Cops didn’t want my opinion none, and neither did the press.”

  “I’d like to hear your opinion,” Spraggue said.

  Breaux brightened and hitched up his coveralls. “Okay. I’d say the two skeletons was put in together. Like, if ol’ Miss Despardieu was young Miss Despardieu—you know, eighteen an’ gorgeous an’ sexy an’ all—an’ killed in some car crash, I’d say her boyfriend jus’ sneaked in here the night after the funeral and killed hisself to be wit’ her.”

  A graveyard romantic. Spraggue wondered if Breaux was familiar with Romeo and Juliet. Or Hamlet. How long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?

  “You think the extra person died here?” Spraggue asked. “Killed himself?”

  “I reckon.”

  “How did he close the tomb up afterward?”

  “Oh. Well, I don’ know how they used t’ do it. But sometimes, if we gotta lot to do, we jus’ lean the tablet up ’gainst the oven, an’ brick it up the next day or so. Caretakers woulda just bricked it up. No reason to look inside.”

  “That’s not unusual?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Well, it was the damnedest t’ing. Gimme the creeps, I guarantee. I open up the tomb, an’ there’s this skeleton, jus’ lyin’ flat out next t’ the coffin. You know what it made me t’ink of? Buried alive. I mean I t’ought the ol’ gal, somehow, she gets up outta the coffin, an’ she couldn’ get outta the tomb. Who’s that ol’ gal who’s buried wit’ her telephone so she can call everybody when the final trumpet sounds? Well, I t’ought maybe Miss Despardieu got outta her coffin, an’ it made me feel all creepy, an’ usually I don’ feel like that none. So we didn’ call the cops right away, or call the church even, ’cause we t’ought it was Miss Despardieu’s remains. We didn’ holler till we broke open the coffin and found the other corpse. Even then we t’ought ’bout it a little. Henry’s all for jus’ pushin’ the extra bones in the caveau. He t’ought it’s jus’ some member a the family got careless treatment last time ’round. But it didn’ look right to me, no. I mean, the guy’s wearin’ rags a blue jeans, not what people are mostly buried in. And, well, the whole t’ing jus’ wasn’t right—an’ it was kinda scary, you bet.”

  “You were right to call the police,” Spraggue said when Breaux paused and shook his head.

  “Well, I don’ know. They weren’ too happy ’bout it. I mean, they got more importan’ t’ings to do than trace an ol’ stiff. But you gotta wonder who he was—an’ how come nobody miss him. What kind a guy is it that nobody misses?”

  “You sure it was a man?”

  “Lot bigger than Miss Despardieu. Coroner’ll be able t’ tell you more than me. All I can say is he didn’ have no money in his pockets, didn’ have no wallet or nothin’.”

  “Nothing at all?” Spraggue asked, noticing an uncharacteristic hesitation in the man’s voice.

  “Well, I guess the cops’ll tell you, if you ask,” Breaux said, fingering the pocket where he’d stashed the ten-dollar bill.

  “You think it’s worth more?” Spraggue asked.

  “Me, how would I know a t’ing like that?” Breaux smiled broadly, showing stained tombstone teeth.

  Spraggue parted with another ten. He got more than he expected.

  TWENTY

  Breaux allowed a single phone call from his shack. Rawlins was back at the station.

  “I’ve got something,” Spraggue said quickly. “Can you meet me at the Coroner’s Office?”

  “Your aunt’s comin’ by in a few minutes,” the detective said, sounding pleased about it.

  “Bring her along,” Spraggue said. “She’s not squeamish.”

  The coroner’s waiting room was an
oddly shaped, partitioned section of a larger room, featuring a public telephone in the far corner, two doors leading off to lavatories, a battered sofa, and two metal chairs. A framed motto on one cracked off-white wall read, “Where death delights to serve the living.” It was the only attempt at decoration. The place smelled like a hospital ward.

  The coroner provided while-you-wait reading material in the form of a stack of yellow cards, headed THESE ARE CORONER CASES. About half the words on each card were typed in boldface. Spraggue had gotten as far as “all cases of alleged rape, simple and aggravated, carnal knowledge and crimes against nature,” when he heard his aunt approaching.

  Her voice was raised and argumentative, and got louder as she came up the stairs. “This man, Renner,” she was saying, “is probably certifiable.”

  The door lurched open and she entered, wrapped in a shiny yellow slicker. Rawlins followed, pausing in the doorway to shake off a huge black umbrella.

  “You made good time,” Spraggue said, motioning them both into the waiting room. “First, tell me about Renner and then I’ll tell you what I’ve got.”

  Rawlins helped Mary out of her raincoat. It dripped a pattern of dots onto the linoleum floor.

  “Archibald Renner,” Mary said firmly, “was a great disappointment to me. Brother Archibald, I should call him. That’s what he calls himself. I had imagined some grim, austere cleric, and instead I got Friar Tuck. Archie Renner is fatter than Friar Tuck. He has something wrong with one foot, and wears a very noticeably built-up shoe. He could no more have made an unnoticed appearance at that banquet, disguised as a waiter or a cook, than I could pass for Sophia Loren.”

  “He could have hired someone,” Rawlins said.

  “Oh, Rawl.” The argument was about to start again. “If you could have seen him! So awkward and silly and sort of lost. An adult child—”

  “Okay, okay,” Rawlins said. “He’s a wash out.” He turned to Spraggue, said. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “I’ll show you,” Spraggue said.

  With Rawlins’ shield to intimidate the smiling but hostile receptionist, they zipped past the administrative desks in the lobby and got clear through to a comfortable office furnished with a huge, old-fashioned walnut desk and leather furniture. Tanks of tropical fish burbled along one wall. Spraggue had expected an old man to be coroner—the very word seemed to summon a vision of the faithful family doctor, side-whiskered and bespectacled. The white-coated man behind the desk looked like a first-year medical student, possibly an undergraduate. When he smiled, the tiny crinkles under his eyes made Spraggue think that he might be old enough to get served in a bar.

  Dr. Noonan was excited and enthusiastic, which meant he hadn’t been on the job long. His freshness made Spraggue feel jaded.

  He also had the gift of concentrating completely on the issue at hand. Once his interest was piqued, he shoved away a mound of paperwork, sat back in his swivel chair, and really listened.

  “Yeah,” he said, tapping a pencil on his blotter, “that’s kind of a neat one, a neat case, you know. I haven’t had that much chance to play with old bones, and these are like a gift, being as how nothing’s known about who they came from. I got a chance to do tests I’d only read about in books before. I’ll be glad to tell you about them, but let me get the file. I hate to trust my memory. I get the cases mixed up.”

  Dr. Noonan’s white coat had a nameplate on the breast pocket. Dr. G. Noonan.

  “Now all this stuff is ‘iffy,’ if you know what I mean,” the coroner said, pulling papers triumphantly from a filing cabinet. “Approximate. I hollered for help on this one, called in a forensic pathologist from Tulane. We got enough so that if you ask me, ‘Is this the body of Judge Crater?’ I can say, definitely, no. But if you ask me to pick out an identity for our guy, say from a list of all the people who disappeared between the years 1960 and 1970, I can’t really help you. You get me a name and a set of dental records, and I can tell you if they match.”

  “Could we whittle down that list of missing persons?” Spraggue asked. “Eliminate the women? Narrow it down by height, by age …”

  “Sure,” Noonan said. “Height is easy. That’s just measuring a thigh bone and looking it up in a table. This guy fits into your average group, though. Not much help. He’s five foot ten. He was.”

  “Age?”

  “We determine age by the hardness of the skull, and the formations on the top of it, which put our man in his late twenties, early thirties. So far he fits your profile of a standard murder victim.”

  “How did he get killed?”

  “I can show you that, if you’d like.”

  Spraggue could recognize an enthusiast when he saw one. Rawlins glanced questioningly at Mary, but she eagerly accepted the invitation.

  The autopsy room and the morgue were in the basement, two large connecting squares, cool and smelling faintly of dampness, strongly of disinfectant. Two walls of the morgue were comprised of refrigerated units, divided into drawers. The floor was blotchy linoleum, stained and scrubbed colorless. In the next room, the floor of the autopsy room was white tile, with central drainage. Two rectangular steel tables were spotlighted by arching overhead beams. One corner held a forklift. Another was filled with scales and weights.

  Spraggue found himself taking inventory of what he’d eaten recently. As a precaution, he switched from “real person” to “actor,” excising himself neatly from the scene. This had nothing to do with him. It was scripted, fantasy. He could turn the lights on at any time. He was still in control. He wished.

  Dr. Noonan stopped near one of the drawers so suddenly that his shoes made a skidding sound on the linoleum.

  “We’re playing it by the book,” he said solemnly. “Even though we don’t think there’ll be any relatives to identify the bones, we decided we’d better put them in a viewing drawer, just like any other body. He’s not much to look at, but better than some we get. Not so fresh as some, but a lot fresher than others. He’s been dead so long he doesn’t even stink.”

  Rawl made a face, but Mary came closer, fascinated.

  The skeleton seemed so small, so diminished, in a drawer designed for holding a body. It had been partially wired together. The torso and pelvis were connected, the ribs in place. Leg and arm bones were appropriately placed, but totally separate from the trunk. The teeth were shocking, so white and prominent.

  “He was on his back,” Noonan said, referring to his notes. “Laid out sort of for burial, except that he was on top of the coffin instead of in it. Damp as it is in Louisiana, his organs and fleshy parts would have rotted away in a couple of years, and he’s been dead a lot longer than that.”

  “How long?”

  “Over fifteen years.”

  “What killed him?” Rawlins asked. He spoke in a normal tone, but the hush of the place magnified it, made it echo.

  “Well,” Noonan said, “this man could have been shot to death and the bullet could have passed through the body without striking a bone. He could have been stabbed. He could have been poisoned with some arcane substance. If he’d been strangled, I probably would have found a broken hyoid bone.”

  “Could he have just died?” Mary asked. “Of the proverbial natural causes?”

  Noonan had gloves on his hands, thin plastic gloves so tight they disappeared against his skin, leaving his hands shiny. He touched the skeleton now, turning the skull, displaying a fissure in the back, near the right side.

  “He didn’t die any natural death,” he said. “Not with this crack in his skull. He wouldn’t have been walking around with this.”

  “That little crack is enough to cause death?” Rawl peered into the drawer. His hand went out as if to touch the bones, then drew back.

  “A blow strong enough to cause that crack would have done a great deal of damage. You don’t crack your skull by knocking your heard against a wall. A lot of force was applied to this guy’s head.”

  Rawlins paced slowly to the othe
r side of the room. “This is all damned interestin’,” he said, nodding to Spraggue to join him over in the far corner while Dr. Noonan readjusted the bones and closed the drawer. “But I don’t see what the hell it has to do with Joe Fontenot.”

  “Hang on,” Spraggue said. He turned back to Noonan. “What was found on the skeleton in the way of clothing? Odds and ends?”

  “‘Odds and ends’ is good. Cloth has its own rotting cycle. Cotton goes fast, linen lasts longer, nylon and synthetics stick around quite a while. We sent the stuff to the FBI forensic lab. They’re good, but slow.”

  “Could we see the articles?” Spraggue asked.

  “Sure. I’d say they’d be back from Atlanta in a couple of weeks, probably.”

  “A couple of weeks!” Spraggue echoed.

  “This guy has been dead a while,” Noonan said defensively. “I couldn’t exactly put a priority rush on it.”

  “Was there any unusual object found with the bones?” Spraggue asked.

  “Unusual … Now, let me think. Yeah, yeah. I remember. I don’t even have to look it up. One of those leather bags full of mumbo jumbo. We find them on a lot of corpses. Mostly blacks, but a few whites. This one was a real good one, I’d say. Seemed old. Fine leather bag.”

  “A fine leather bag …” Rawlins repeated.

  “You think you know who the skeleton is? Who it might be?” Dr. Noonan’s enthusiasm made him look even more like a gawky, excited teenager.

  “I think we have to talk,” Rawlins said to Spraggue.

  “Dr. Noonan,” Mary said, flashing her most tactful smile, “you have been so helpful. Is there somewhere the three of us could go to have a little private discussion?”

  “I’ll go get a cup of coffee.” Noonan said, polite but wistful. “I could use one. But,” he turned and looked back from the doorway, “I sure would like to know what’s going on.”

  “So Would I,” Rawlins said as soon as the coroner’s footsteps petered out. “You’re connecting this skeleton to Fontenot because both of ’em had a gris-gris bag?”