City of the Dead

by Eileen Dreyer

  Chastity nodded. Finally, a question answered. “Do you know anything else, Tante?” she asked, facing the little woman once more. “Anything at all that might help find my sister? Something she or Willow might have said? Something that didn’t seem to make sense, or didn’t fit?”

  “I know how it’s done, girl. And no. I can’t remember anything unusual. Except, maybe, Willow saying something about what I didn’t know about fertility clinics would surprise me. I asked what she mean, and she just shook her head. ‘There are some not nice people out there, Tante’ was all she said. I tol’ her to take care.” Tante huffed a bit, shook her head. “She didn’t, did she? Oh, and she said once your sister hated cameras. Didn’t make sense to me, but it seemed to make a lot of sense to Willow.”

  “Cameras? At the fertility clinic?”

  “I don’t know that, child. Seemed to have somethin’ to do with it, though.”

  Chastity’s head was beginning to spin. She was ready to leave. To meet Kareena for some playtime. To rest from the relentless energy in that little woman’s hands.

  Evidently Tante Edie wasn’t ready to let her go.

  “You’ll find her,” she said, her voice suddenly flat. “I don’ know if you’ll find her good or find her bad. But you will. There’s somethin’, though….”

  Chastity just waited. Tante tilted her head again, frowned.

  “Huh. It’s usually fire you got to wade through to get to the end. With you, it’s water.”

  Chastity opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “You got to deal with your daddy,” Tante said. “You don’t, you got no chance to get through.”

  Chastity stared. “How do you know that?”

  Tante huffed again. “Didn’t you read the sign? What do you think I do here?”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I just don’t understand.”

  “No,” Tante agreed. “I don’ think you do. I’m not sure you gonna make it, girl. I’m just not sure at all. But face your daddy. It’s all you can do.”

  And then, like pulling a plug, Tante took her hands back and waved one at James. “Now take this girl dancin’, James. And not to those jazz places, where they only sing about bad times and lost things. You take her to Mulate’s or that bowlin’ place so she can do some happy dancin’ with a good Cajun boy.”

  Chastity was climbing to suddenly uncertain legs when Tante swung back around on her. “And you. This boy can give you good ya-ya, you want.”

  Chastity thought she might have actually blushed. She didn’t bother to tell Tante that there was no such thing as good ya-ya.

  “You don’t know somebody named Lloyd Burgard, do you?” she asked instead, trying so hard not to laugh.

  Tante glared as if insulted. “Ain’t no jokes here, girl,” she said, pointing a sharp finger at Chastity. “You balanced on the edge of somethin’ fierce. But it don’t matter what your name is. You deserve a good time. Let him give it to you.” Then she snorted like an overheated horse, startling her dog. “If he can remember how, that is.”

  Chastity did not let James give her good ya-ya.

  But only barely. And it made her sweat like a suspect, just thinking about it.

  She did, however, try to get hold of detectives Gilchrist and Dulane. She called them from the square so she could pass on what information she’d gathered. All except that last part from Tante Edie, of course. Hell, she didn’t even want to think about that.

  She got no further with either than their answering machines. So sitting there in the still shadows at the edge of the square, she left them three nominations: Willow Amber Tolliver as possible ID for their beringed body, Lloyd Burgard as psych detainee of the week, and the Arlen Clinic as possible coconspirator in whatever was going on.

  She could just imagine their reactions when they played back the messages. Well, at least she hadn’t told them that she’d have to wade through water to deal with her father.

  Did that nasty old woman just live to terrify her customers? Chastity shook all the way to Mulate’s.

  Then, her first gin at Mulate’s neatly dispatched, she called Susan Wade Reeves.

  “Yes?” Susan asked after the preliminaries.

  “Willow Tolliver,” Chastity retorted, a finger in her ear to hear over the fiddles and accordions. “You knew she was missing.”

  Chastity couldn’t swear to it, but she was pretty convinced there was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

  “We need to talk, Susan.”

  Another silence, longer. Then a half laugh, almost a nervous sound. “Okay, Faith’s sister. I’ll tell you what. Noon tomorrow. Saint Roch’s Cemetery, the Campo Santo. Somebody ought to be able to direct you to it. We’ll meet there.”

  “Why there?” Chastity asked.

  Another laugh. This one surer, more wry. “Because I’m going to give you something, but I’m taking something away. Bye.”

  And she hung up.

  “We’re meeting Susan tomorrow,” Chastity announced, shutting her phone away. She saw her velvet bag in there, nestled right in the bottom of her purse. The urge to open it and spill her treasure out on that plastic red-checked tablecloth was overwhelming. She shut her purse instead.

  “At her house?” Kareena asked. “Can I come this time?”

  “At Saint Roch’s Cemetery. Something about giving and taking away.”

  James laughed, his face lighting in its dust-dry delight. “Ah, Saint Roch’s. Perfect. It’s one of my favorite places.”

  “Of course it is, James.”

  “Well, if it’s a cemetery,” Kareena said, “I’ll let you two handle it. Kareena, she only like her dead people fresh, yeah?”

  “There’s a great story to Saint Roch’s,” James offered.

  “Which you can tell her on the way there at noon tomorrow,” Kareena insisted. “Tonight is for live people.”

  “Amen,” Chastity agreed, and ordered her next drink.

  The band started a new set, something nasal that involved lots of accordion and foot-stomping, and the waitress took orders.

  “A fertility clinic,” Chastity mused a minute later, raising her new drink for a taste. “What could go on at a fertility clinic that could scare my sister into disappearing?”

  Kareena considered the question. She sipped her beer, wincing when she saw a guy on stage running a spoon up and down his washboard tie in rhythm to the accordion and fiddle. “You don’ think fertility clinics couldn’t cheat people jus’ like everybody else in medicine?”

  “Like everybody else in the free world,” James amended.

  “There was that one guy,” Kareena added, “ran a clinic using all his own sperm instead of the husbands’, remember? He only got caught ’cause so many of his bebes got cystic fibrosis from him.”

  Chastity nodded, elbows on the table. “My sister was too old to donate. Maybe they knew all along.”

  “Bad eggs. Oh, that’s a good one. What about all those extra bebes? What they do with ’em?”

  “Put ’em in a tin can under the sink.”

  “Read up on the Web,” Kareena suggested. “You know there’s somebody out there postin’ stuff about how bad fertility clinics are.”

  “Yeah. I think I’ll do that. Maybe I should do it now.”

  “Not now. You need to have some fun now. Didn’t that Tante Edie tell you that?”

  “She told me to wade through water to deal with my father. I’m not listening to that crazy old woman.”

  “She told me to give her good ya-ya,” James said.

  Kareena hooted. “You gotta stop givin’ that ole lady bribes, James. Tante wanted you to dance, girl. We gonna make you dance.”

  Not only did Chastity dance, but Kareena ended up singing, right up there with the washboard player and a fiddler she seemed to know from home, some song called “Jolie Blonde” that was evidently sung entirely through the nose. Chastity found herself clapping and whistling along.

  And with Tante Edie’s words hanging rig
ht over her shoulder, she forced herself to have a good time. She danced, she laughed, she talked about anything but what was important, and she let the place and the music seduce her. She inhaled the smell of James like pot at a rock concert and hung on to her control by her fingernails. She beat her fears back and she did her best not to make too much of the fact that James seemed to like to dance with her.

  But she did have fun. She made friends with people she didn’t know and danced down the street like a tourist and almost forgot what awaited her in the morning. She even splashed in a puddle without wetting her pants.

  Damn, she loved this city.

  James was right. She had ghosts in her pocket and a murderer at her periphery. She had to find one sister and exorcise another. She had to deal with her daddy and rescue her sanity. But for right now, for this few hours in the dark with people she didn’t know who smiled at her, she could celebrate it all. The night and the music and the friends she’d gathered here in foreign climes.

  Even that whiff of decay in the corner.

  The whitewashed walls of Saint Roch’s Cemetery rose like battlements against the decay of the surrounding streets. Angels guarded the wrought-iron gates, and a late model Lexus sat at the curb. Susan’s, Chastity hoped. James parked the cab behind it and ushered her out.

  “This is a great little cemetery,” James enthused. “A veritable jewel in the middle of the hood.”

  James was right. The cemetery was a tidy, well-worn cement city crowded with classic, flower-bedecked New Orleans tombs and crowned by a tall, narrow chapel at the rear. A tall crucifix bisected the main avenue and shared a berm with a cement child who rested on an eternal bed.

  “My favorite place is the side altar in the chapel,” James said as they walked through the gates. “See, people leave all kinds of things for Saint Roch there. Mementos of prayers answered. Some of them are pretty…unique.”

  Chastity had never seen James move with so much purpose. He waved at the caretaker, who waved back from his shack by the gate, and marched down the cement boulevard to the chapel as if on his way to a football game. It was hot and bright out so that the tombs seemed to gleam white and hard against the eyes.

  Inside the chapel, the darkness pressed right in on them. Chastity didn’t like it. With few windows, high walls, and no air, it redefined the term claustrophobic. There were four pews inside and a glass coffin bearing a beaten Christ to hold up the altar.

  But again, James was right. It was the side alcove that was really eerie. It was gated and closed, arched, with a grilled window at the back. After all the rain, mildew claimed the corners and peeled the paint so that it smelled stale and small and close.

  It wasn’t just that, though. There was something else. Something that resonated from all those plaster casts that hung from the walls and cluttered up the floor. Arms, legs, hearts, hands. Eyes and ears and faces, all haphazardly piled up as if displayed at a flea market. Remembrances from people who were so wretched that in a town that teemed with grant-giving saints, they’d finally come to one who might give a boon, but then took something away again. The room reeked with the smell of desperation.

  “Where is she?” Chastity asked, sweating to be gone, her gaze skittering away from all that futile hope nailed to a wall.

  “Did you see the army of baby angels on the floor?” James asked, his attention still on something back in the chapel. “All ranked there on their bellies, hands folded, with their little gold wings tucked up? You know what those are for, don’t you?”

  Chastity only saw one, tucked into the left corner beneath a bouquet of crutches. It was facing the wall, as if being punished.

  She so didn’t want to be here. She couldn’t breathe in a place like this. She didn’t want to look at what people had left. She didn’t want to identify with any of them. And she sure didn’t want to spend any time with those statues.

  There were three of them, crammed in like second-class passengers in steerage. Saint Roch, she guessed, a grim-looking guy with a dog. Some big woman in black who looked like Kate Smith. And Saint Lucy, a saint any girl with a working knowledge of Lives of the Saints would recognize. After all, nobody else held her eyes out on a plate. Another one of those ancient martyrs who’d died protecting her virtue. Which, it seemed, was the only way women got their martyrdom in those days. Chastity would have told ole Luce to let him have at it, then bash his brains in with a rock.

  But only one angel baby. Left alone amid the dust and mold.

  “I don’t see….”

  Then she did see. There on the floor behind the statues.

  A pile of wings. A pyre of angel babies glinting in the dusty sun.

  A cairn of hope and prayer piled up like refuse in the corner.

  Chastity instinctively wanted to turn away. She knew just by catching a glimpse of them that they were wrong. In the wrong place, in the wrong shape, tumbled about where no seeking penitent would place them.

  She was a forensic nurse, after all. She knew how to recognize disaster. And she knew damn well she was looking at disaster.

  And then she saw the shoe.

  The foot.

  Sticking out from beneath those fat little cherubim, a leg that belonged to no statue Chastity had ever seen.

  Ah, there it was, she realized. That familiar perfume of decay. But this time, Chastity knew what it was from.

  “James?”

  “Do you like the statues?” he asked, still not paying attention. “My favorite is Kate Smith over there. I keep expecting her to sing ‘God Bless America.’”

  “James?”

  He must have heard it that time, because he turned. Chastity pointed. She could see the hair now, not so tidy anymore, flowing out from beyond Kate Smith’s feet, beneath angel elbows and knees.

  And beyond that, blood.

  Susan Wade Reeves had been killed and buried right there beneath the angel babies.

  Thirteen

  “I knew I shouldn’t have wasted my time being happy last night,” Chastity said.

  At least two hours had passed. The sun had come out and now beat down on the half-dozen police units blocking the north lanes of St. Roch Avenue. The crime scene van was pulled right up into the cemetery proper, and yellow tape ringed the chapel. The coroner’s investigator had come and gone, leaving the evidence unit to try and pull something from the thousand or so artifacts that crowded that tiny room.

  Right now orange-jumpsuited prisoners from the city lockup were preparing to transport Susan Reeves’s body down to the city morgue. Chastity and James and the cemetery caretaker sat out on the cemented mound of stone that held up a ten-foot crucifix in the center walkway, waiting out in the sun to be questioned again.

  “Bein’ happy’s never a waste of time,” James assured her as he sucked on his fifth or sixth cigarette. “It’s more of a luxury, you ask me.”

  “Great. I’ll go cross-stitch that for my living room.”

  James just smiled.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” the caretaker protested yet again. “I would have heard!”

  Susan had been shot in the face. Her purse, watch, and cell phone were missing. Her 2004 Lexus waited for a tow.

  The caretaker knew her, of course. Susan had been coming to the Campo Santo for years. She’d even left a baby angel behind once. But the caretaker swore he hadn’t seen her since he’d opened the gates at eight that morning.

  Chastity felt sick. Not because of the dead body. Dead bodies were her business. The minute she recognized Susan, she’d pulled open that gated door, squeezed past the saints, and knelt down, pressing her fingers against Susan’s cold throat to make sure there was no pulse left. She’d assessed the body just as she would in her ER, for injuries beyond the obvious.

  There had been no struggle to speak of. Susan’s hands and arms were free of defensive wounds. Her clothes, except for the fall, were tidy. No rips, not so much as a hair out of place, no obvious blowback on her hands or arms. There wasn’t any
room for movement in the alcove, and all the statues were in place, the floor free of scuff and drag marks.

  All the same, Susan Reeves had been terrorized.

  She’d been shoved up against the wall. There was dust and plaster in her hair and across her back. There was a defect in the plastered wall where a bullet had probably passed through Susan’s brain, and a splatter of blood and brain across the dusty plaster behind Saint Kate Smith’s broad shoulders. There was soot at the edges of the wound, which meant that the shot had been point-blank.

  But worse, much worse, there was the clear imprint of a muzzle against what was left of Susan’s cheek. A laceration, the skin tearing in an almost perfect semicircle, the ridge that was the sight pointing to one o’clock. No pulling or tearing. Simple, straight-on pressure.

  Susan hadn’t just been shot. She’d been forced back against the wall and had that gun pushed so hard against her that it had cut her. And it had been done deliberately enough that bruising had been raised.

  Her murderer had pushed against her so close that he would have seen her pupils dilate. He would have smelled the sweat that still pearled on her upper lip. He would have heard the rasp of her breath in the close, fetid air of that tiny room. And then, while those cold saints looked on, he’d pulled the trigger.

  Susan’s face was gone, from lip to ear. The back of her head was mush, and her eyes still stared at nothing in stunned silence.

  She’d been shoved in the corner and buried in angel babies. And then, as if to punctuate the act, she’d been left with one right in the center of her forehead.

  The dead body didn’t upset Chastity. The fact that it was Susan Reeves did. The fact that she’d died so terrified it still resonated off the walls. The fact that nobody seemed to wonder why.

  “Please,” Chastity had begged the Fifth District homicide detective when he’d arrived. “Just talk to Detective Gilchrist from the Eighth. He knows I’m looking for my sister. I think Ms. Reeves was going to give me some information.”

  The detective, a tired, blunted, middle-aged guy, obviously did not want his life complicated more than it was. “You’re telling me Ms. Reeves was murdered because of some fertility clinic.”