Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  “Hey, sweet,” said the man, and he winked, as if he were not hosing down vomit, but playing the piano or bench-pressing. “What’s ya hurry fo’?”

  She moved along without making eye contact, without straying from the thought that had bewitched her all day: The French Quarter was below sea level. No matter how long Caroline contemplated that detail, she couldn’t comprehend it, not without forgetting everything she knew about water. The place was so languid she found it impossible to think of it as anything but under water. This afternoon, with an hour to kill, she had taken a passenger ferry across the mud-colored Mississippi and was surprised how forgettable the great river was, how it didn’t offer any relief to the world around it. It moved at the same pace and with the same murkiness as the city. The Spokane was a minor river, sure, but it carved a dramatic path through basalt and granite, in contrast to the city around it, provided a speed and severity that said a river was still a formidable thing—not exactly beyond human control, but a thing nonetheless to be feared. The Mississippi, on the other hand, was no more fearsome than this block. Less so, maybe.

  From behind she heard the sound of footsteps and sensed the maitre d’ following her. “Now, they ain’t no call fo’ rudeness,” he said.

  She waited until he was close and then spun on a heel and allowed his momentum to bring them face-to-face. She found that most men shrink away from a direct stare. This guy was no different, stopping suddenly, his body language changing completely as he pulled back into himself. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said clearly, careful not to apologize, “but I’m in a hurry.” And then she turned and walked away.

  She had about six steps on him before he answered. “Well,” he called after her, “y’all know where I live.”

  Caroline turned down St. Philip and found the bar on the corner: Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a dark-stained, wooden structure that still resembled the livery stable it had once been. A small sign declared it to be the oldest tavern in America. The building seemed to revel in its chipped-paint shabbiness, its darkness. The front was open to the street, but there were no windows and the interior opened like a shallow cave, as if it had been dug out of this old, stained hunk of dark primordial wood. Candles flickered on each of the tables and Caroline stood in the doorway, waiting for her eyes to adjust before she stepped inside. When she could see in the darkness, she encountered a narrow bar with a blending machine for hurricanes and zombies, a cash register, and a couple of domestic taps. Above the bar, the only obvious electric light was aimed at the cash register, along with a video camera to catch pilfering bartenders. The camera caught Caroline off guard and caused her to take another look around the place. There were more lights than she’d first seen, green neon exit signs along the ground and small lights illuminating the steps that led to the back of the bar. The owner of this business had gone out of his way to hide the lights and the camera, retaining for tourists the old darkness in the face of late-century zoning ordinances and emergency exits.

  “Ms. Mabry?” Curtis Blanton was heavier than in his jacket photo, mostly in his neck, which was pinched by his collar, even though his shirt was unbuttoned. His thick right hand swirled a mixed drink—bourbon and something—while he draped his left hand over that massive neck. He had a close-trimmed beard, round eyeglasses, and a blockish face that flushed red at the cheeks. He rose to shake her hand.

  “Thank you for meeting with me,” she said.

  She had expected to see the files they’d sent down spread out, or at least sitting on the chair next to him, but there was nothing on the table except his drink. She sat down across from him, and he raised his arm for the bartender.

  “Your first time to New Orleans?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s nice.”

  He stared for a moment. “Not too hot for you?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “But it’s hotter than Spokane,” he said, and she noticed that he pronounced it right, rhyming it with “can” and not “cane,” the way most people did.

  “You’ve been to Spokane?” As soon as she asked it, she knew it was a dumb question and, indeed, he smiled with disappointment, like a teacher who realizes his student hasn’t done her homework.

  “I worked on Green River,” he said. “One of our suspects lived in Spokane.”

  William Stevens. Caroline remembered. Stevens had been cleared by credit card receipts that established an alibi for him during some of the murders. And then he just up and died. Some people still believed he committed some of the murders. In one of his books Blanton wrote that he thought Stevens wasn’t the killer, although the methodology of Green River led him to believe that not all forty-nine murders were committed by the same killer. “I should’ve remembered that,” Caroline said. “I did read your books.”

  He emptied his drink and waved the glass at the bartender. “On the airplane.”

  For a moment, she considered lying. “Yes. On the plane.”

  He nodded. “When your lead detective up there…Dupree?”

  Caroline nodded.

  “When your Sergeant Dupree called me to consult on the crimes up there, I told him that I was too busy on this case. But I’d worked a little with your assistant chief on Green River, and he sent the case files anyway. I told him I didn’t have time to look over the files and he said no problem, they would send a detective down here with all the details to pick my brain. I said I didn’t want my brain picked. They said it would be no trouble. I told them I couldn’t guarantee that I’d have time to even look at the case files.”

  The bartender arrived with another drink for Blanton. He looked at Caroline, but she shook her head at him. “But you read the files?” she asked Blanton.

  He stared at her again, then looked down at his drink. “Your guy is white. Between twenty-four and forty-eight. Drives an American sedan. Never been married. Sexually dysfunctional. Comes from a fairly well-off family and seems easygoing, even smooth, but he isn’t. There will be trauma involving the mother, maybe something you can find, like a death or a divorce, maybe something you can’t, like him witnessing the mother having sex.” Blanton smiled. “He smiles at the wrong things. He may have moved a lot as a child or been beaten up or it may have been something as simple as his being a latecomer to puberty. But from the beginning, he is the classic insider/outsider, seeming to have his shit together, when in fact…” He tailed off and picked up his drink.

  Caroline opened her purse to get out her tape recorder, but Blanton shook his head. “No,” he said. “Have a drink. I hate drinking by myself.”

  “I guess I’ll have a Gibson,” she said. Blanton waved his hand again and the bartender appeared. Then he drank his cocktail like it was water.

  “Bring the lady a Gibson and I’ll have another of these.” The bartender disappeared again. “I don’t work two cases at once, Ms. Mabry. It’s one reason I left the FBI. Each case has its own language and context. I couldn’t assist on your case from here any more than I could predict your weather. How many women victims have you?”

  She noticed the strange form of the question as the bartender arrived with her Gibson. “Four, for sure. Probably others we haven’t found.”

  “How many were whores?”

  She flinched at the word but didn’t break eye contact, thinking this must be some kind of test, seeing if she would flinch at his crude language. In his books he wrote in a kind of detached yet overheated, clinical voice—“the rage model taking over through the insertion of foreign objects,” and on and on.

  “All of them,” Caroline said. “They’re all prostitutes.”

  “Chronic drug users?”

  “All of them.”

  He stared at her again. “Profiling is fairly simple, Ms. Mabry. You examine the crime scene and build your man from the ground up. But therein…”

  He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a photograph. He handed it over to Caroline, the kind of school picture snapped in front of a glittery blue backdrop. The gir
l in the picture wore braces and looked all of twelve.

  He rattled off the numbers: “Nineteen victims in New Orleans over the past three years. Twelve prostitutes, five other women with histories of heroin or cocaine use, one college student, and this”—he tapped the picture—“fifteen-year-old girl who snuck out of her parents’ house planning to walk down to a fraternity party at Tulane and who, quite obviously, never made it.” He took the photo back from Caroline. “Each of these women got into a car of her own free will, was beat in the head and then driven into the swamp. About half died from the beating, the other half were still alive and quite possibly conscious for what must have been a terrifying drive. Can you see my guy arrive at the swamp, yeah?” Caroline thought she picked up a Cajun affectation at the end of the sentence but Blanton didn’t pause, just waved his empty glass at the bartender again. “Sometimes, the women, they’re alive. Other times, dead. Can you imagine that?”

  “I suppose,” Caroline said.

  “You think my guy treats the living ones different from the dead ones?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “He would have to,” she said.

  “You would think so. But he doesn’t. Just think of that one detail. He doesn’t even care whether they are alive or dead. Doesn’t care. Dead or alive, he drags them from his vehicle, by the hair. Then he has intercourse with them, sodomizes them, and then again with, I don’t know, something, a pipe, a tire iron…”

  Finally, Caroline had to look away.

  “And then he sets about beating them again, not with the tire iron either, with a rock, a stick, something at the scene. Now the ones who are still alive, this is when he kills them. And then the rape occurs again, in the same order. And finally, he poses them, spreads their legs or crosses their arms on their chests. So how long does my guy spend with each victim?”

  Caroline shook her head, unable to answer.

  “Come on,” he said. “How much time?”

  Again she shook her head.

  “Four to six hours. I mean, that’s a lot of activity, all that beating and fucking and posing. But four to six hours between the first sexual activity and the second?” The bartender arrived with another drink and Blanton paused to drink it in two long gulps. “A lot to do at the crime scene, but four to six hours? What’s he do the rest of his time?”

  Caroline felt too sick to answer, but he just stared at her, not letting her off the hook. She blinked. “He drives around, or just sits there. He lets the rage, whatever it is, he lets it build up. He takes pictures. Maybe he feels regret.”

  “Yeah,” Blanton said, nodding as if glad to have some agreement. “Yeah, that’s what I think.” He looked slightly embarrassed, as if he’d just realized he’d slipped from the “intercourse with the victim” of his books to the “beating and fucking” of this conversation. “Did they tell you what I said when they asked me to consult on your case?”

  “Sergeant Dupree said you weren’t interested unless our suspect killed someone other than hookers.”

  “What else?”

  “He said you might be interested if we got more bodies.”

  “Is that exactly what I said?”

  She looked down at her drink. “He told me that you were an arrogant prick who said not to even call back until we got to double digits.”

  He smiled and nodded at the better translation. “That’s right. That’s what I said. Double digits. Are you a fan of baseball, Ms. Mabry?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all statistics, baseball. That’s what I like about it. The numbers. You got a handful of bodies, that’s single A. I got nineteen down here. Triple A. Thirty-one waiting for me in Vancouver. Only twelve in Detroit, but two are housewives. And Seattle, Green River…shit, forty-nine bodies? Come on! That’s DiMaggio. A fifty-six-game hit streak. Ain’t no one gonna break that record. Not in the U.S.”

  Caroline looked down at the table, trying to keep her composure.

  “Do you see why I’m telling you this, Ms. Mabry? There are active serial murderers in a couple dozen American cities, preying on the kind of women that your guy is hunting. Drug users, hookers, the homeless. These women are fodder, the trash we throw out so these sick bastards won’t go around picking up our secretaries and our housewives and our fifteen-year-old daughters.

  “It sounds coarse, but you need to know, I don’t have time to do all of them. I don’t have time to talk nice.” He looked perturbed, as if he were having trouble making his point. “Your first prostitute who died up there, tell me again…”

  Caroline was confused by the way his language went back and forth: hooker to whore to prostitute, from Cajun to something vaguely Midwestern to East Coast clinician. “Rebecca Bennett,” she said.

  He shook a meaty hand in front of her face. That wasn’t what he’d wanted. It was as if names were some sort of violation of his rules. “I didn’t ask who. How?”

  “Strangled, then shot. Dumped along the river.”

  He nodded. “And what did you do, what did the police in Spokane do with this horrible crime?” Now he mispronounced the word, Spo-CANE.

  “It was before I was involved.”

  He stared at her, clearly disappointed.

  “Not much,” she said. “One investigator. Regular crime scene work-up.”

  “And if it had been a housewife?”

  She sighed. “We would’ve gone door-to-door for a month.”

  “That’s right. And the last one?” He answered for her. “You form a task force, the FBI gets involved—lasers and carpet fibers and computers and the whole Quantico road show. You offer a big reward, beat the bushes for meaningful interviews. What would you say, ten times the effort as the first victim? Twenty times?”

  Caroline felt sluggish, as if she’d been boxing with Blanton rather than interviewing him. “I don’t…sure, twenty times.”

  “That’s right,” he said, tilting his glass toward her as if he’d just proven some point. “So the fifth victim is twenty times as important as the first. Now imagine how important the fifteenth victim is, or the nineteenth. And housewives are twenty times as important as hookers, right? Now what about a fifteen-year-old girl? Huh? Do y’all see what I’m saying, Ms. Mabry? Do y’all understand the concept of triage?”

  Again, he’d slipped into a Louisiana drawl. “Yes,” Caroline said.

  “Because if y’all can’t even get past the triage, then the surgery itself…” He didn’t finish. He picked up the candle between them and swirled the melted wax in the glass so that the light flickered and almost went out. Then he set the candle down and again he was the professor. “How do we catch a murderer, Ms. Mabry? A run-of-the-mill killed-my-wife-over-an-argument murderer. Where do we start?”

  Caroline thought about it. “Motive.”

  “Right,” he said. “So when we get a serial murder, we assign our best homicide detective—for the sake of argument, let’s say your man Dupree—and he launches into it the way he does all his other simple little cases, looking for motive. But that won’t work. It’s different with these guys. Motive is only the surface. Sex. Control. Every one of these cases, the motive is sex and control. So you have to go deeper, to inhabit these guys, to find the thing that lives beneath the motive.”

  “Beneath the motive?”

  “The fantasy. With these guys, it all goes back to fantasy. You piece the fantasy together, you start to piece your guy together. Everything—location, weapon, staging, appearance of the victims—fits into the fantasy.” He leaned forward across the table, engaging Caroline’s eyes. “You go to the crime scene and you imagine what he’s thinking—why the bite marks on the shoulder, why the body is facedown. What is the fantasy? By the third or fourth body, you look for the pattern. By the tenth, you look for the aberration. Because in the end, that’s where you’ll catch him. In the aberration. In the one that’s different. That’s where he’ll reveal himself.”

  Blanto
n stared at the table for a long moment, then began speaking without looking up. “We found her forty-eight hours after he finished with her. The others, it was as much as a year later, because they were whores or crack addicts and no one noticed they were gone. We needed forensic dentists to tell us who they were. But this girl was fifteen and when she went missing, people noticed. We broke out da hounds and went out into the swamp and found her. I’d been here three weeks…

  “He only had sex with this victim once. The rest was the same, the beating, the tire iron, dragging her by the hair, the posing. But only one sexual assault. And only while she was alive. Why? What’s different?”

  Again, Blanton seemed to lose his concentration. “We tested the contents of her stomach. You know what we found?”

  Caroline shook her head no.

  “One of them cinnamon rolls from the mall. You got them up in Spokane, them cinnamon roll shops?” He pronounced it Spok-UN this time. She thought he did it without thinking, as if screwing around with people was a habit, like chewing his nails. He waved his empty glass at the bartender again, and when the bartender brought another drink he handed over a credit card. “That’s it for me.” He raised his eyebrows to Caroline, but she still hadn’t finished her Gibson, and she shook her head no.

  “So tell me about my guy,” he said.

  Her throat was hoarse. “Your guy?”

  “Yeah. Why did he only have sex with this victim once? What was the difference? The aberration? What went wrong with the fantasy?”

  Caroline searched her mind for details from his book, trying to come to the kind of conclusions about the guy’s psychology that Blanton seemed to draw so effortlessly from the evidence. But she felt so tired, so overwhelmed all of a sudden, so weary from trying to stand up to it, that she couldn’t picture anything from his book, just a cloud of assumption and bad science. All she could think about was movements, patterns, currents of flow, where people had been and where they were going.