Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  “I guess,” she began, “I think…he bought her a cinnamon roll.”

  Blanton looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”

  “You said he raped her when she was alive. For the cinnamon roll to be in her system still, she must’ve eaten it just before…” She tailed off. “So I’d say it’s his mall, not hers.”

  “Yeah,” Blanton said. “That’s right. The mall wasn’t close to her house and I can’t imagine a girl running off to a frat party stopping for a cinnamon roll.”

  “So I guess,” Caroline continued, “the first thing I would do is see if there’s a photography shop at that mall.”

  Blanton cocked his head.

  “You said he poses the bodies more than usual. Maybe he takes pictures,” Caroline said. “Well, he can’t take those to One-Hour Photo, so he must run his own darkroom. And he must buy equipment somewhere. I mean, it’s a longshot, but…”

  Blanton stared blankly.

  “Then,” she continued, “I’d go to the camera shops around that area and check their credit card receipts to see which customers have a history of sex crimes.”

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “Should we do my guy now?” Caroline asked. “What did you say? Twenty-four to forty-eight. American sedan. Never married. Middle class. Some trauma involving the mother, maybe big, maybe small. Late through puberty. Classic insider/outsider.”

  Blanton stared at her, emotionless.

  Caroline continued. “But then, that describes every one of these guys, doesn’t it, Mr. Blanton? That’s the standard profile. Boilerplate four out of five times. No, I’ll be more curious to see what you think after you’ve read our files.”

  For the first time, he smiled. “All right, Ms. Mabry. I’ll read your files tonight. I have to meet with the medical examiner tomorrow morning. They fished a young woman out of Lake Pontchartrain and I need to make sure it’s not related to the killer down here. You-all wanna come?”

  He signed the bill and she caught a glimpse of the number he wrote, sixty-eight dollars. A lot of booze.

  He noticed her watching him. “I had some friends here, earlier,” he said. He stood and stared down at her. “Do you want to know my theory of why women don’t like baseball as much as men?”

  She found herself smiling at the word “theory” and thinking of Dupree. “Sure.”

  “Well, of course, women can be baseball fans, but they don’t inhabit the game the way men do. They don’t worship the numbers. We talked about it before, the importance of the numbers. Five, nineteen, forty-nine, fifty-six. The numbers mean nothing if the fantasy isn’t there. If you can’t imagine yourself as the baseball player. Men do that. They’re trained to do it, and even if they weren’t trained, it’s…natural. They can picture themselves playing the game. Do you understand? Even those of us who never played baseball…we understand the fantasy. The fantasy is all that matters. Do you see?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes drifted from hers to the floor. “I apologize if I made you uneasy, Ms. Mabry. At Quantico, we always had one woman in the Investigative Support Unit, but to be totally frank, I’ve never met a woman who contributed much to these kinds of cases. Fortunately for them, they don’t have the capacity for understanding this type of killer, for understanding the fantasy.”

  “And you think that’s essential.”

  He thought about it. “Yes. I do. Of course, there is a need for…cinnamon rolls. But in the end, you can’t catch these guys if you can’t conjure them up, if you can’t see them in your mind.” He looked up at her with the same expectant stare he’d had when she came in, and she had the feeling that every word was a test, a cruel game. “So, can you conjure him up, Detective Mabry?” His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Can y’all see your man?”

  She stood, exhausted, and looked around a bar that strived so hard to remain dark. In the darkness she saw that Lenny Ryan would forever push Burn into the river while she watched helplessly, that he would turn ever so slowly to stare at her, waiting for her to do something. “Yes,” she said, “I see him.”

  27

  It wasn’t long after the drunk girls joined their table that Joel felt things getting out of hand. The waif—he would have carded her in his own place—had settled onto his knee and was pretending there was nothing strange about using a guy’s leg for a chair in a crowded bar. Across the table, the girl angling to be Derek’s was telling one of those long, anecdotal jokes, a string of implausible coincidences about a woman whose boyfriend drives them into a muddy ditch and must use her clothes as traction to get the car out of the mud. Derek was laughing like it was the funniest story he’d ever heard, his arm around the booth behind her. Jay, too, was listening to Derek’s girl’s story, turning every few seconds to laugh with the girl who had been assigned him. As her story built to its improbable climax, Derek’s girl slid out of the booth, stood, and removed her shoes. “So she walks up to the farmhouse and knocks on the door, buck naked.” The girl held her shoes over her crotch. “‘My boyfriend’s stuck. Can you help get him out?’”

  Joel laughed politely while the girl on his knee laughed harder, shifting her weight, catching his eye and smiling.

  “God, Sandy. That is disgusting,” said Jay’s girl, the only one of the three with dark hair. Jay put his hand on her leg.

  “That is so funny,” Derek said. “That is really funny.”

  “Hilarious,” Jay said. “Really hilarious.”

  They were crowded in this booth at the tail end of McCool’s, a long, narrow pub with predictable Irish decor—green walls and clovers and Irish flags and maps of the island and Notre Dame banners and the rest.

  “Really funny,” Derek said again.

  “Great,” said Jay. “My boyfriend’s stuck.”

  The laughter trailed into hums and smiles and then, like a football huddle that breaks to reveal the formation, the three girls turned separately to the guys they were sitting near and engaged in single conversations.

  “What do you do?” asked the girl on Joel’s knee.

  “Bartender.”

  “Really?”

  “No, I just say it to impress people.”

  “That’s cool.” She nodded at the leg she sat on. “You’re not married?”

  “No, but I’m seeing someone.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Out of town.” Joel wondered why he’d told her that. Why not She’s at home, or, We’re meeting her later? He felt transparent. Why did there have to be this gap between who you are and who you want to be? He finished his drink and moved the girl off his leg so he could stand. “I’m gonna get a drink,” he said. “You want something?”

  “A Manhattan?”

  Of course. These days, everyone drank martinis and martini derivations. Three years ago, Joel’s job had consisted of jerking beer taps, but now every college student wanted to drink like a salesman. Booze had come back because things just naturally come back, and so now you had frat boys lecturing you on what kind of gin they wanted and clear-eyed twenty-one-year-old girls ordering Manhattans. It was funny. That had been the thing about Caroline that first caught his attention, when she ordered a Gibson, one of the few booze drinks that hadn’t come back. When Joel mixed her a vodka Gibson, she spoke to him like he was a ten-year-old, instructing him on the proper mix of a Gibson, right down to the number of cocktail onions. So, when she asked for a refill, he brought a pint of gin in a beer pitcher with fifteen cocktail onions strung in a necklace, looped around the rim of the pitcher, like booze-soaked pearls.

  At the bar, Joel pulled his money roll from his pocket and peeled off a couple of bills. He watched the bartender, a bald guy with decent concentration, if not the best technique, fill a row of glasses with ice. He could tell from the moment the ice went in that this place short-poured, filled the glasses mostly with ice and mixer and went light on whatever booze they were serving up. He looked up at the better bottles, stacked along the bar like guys in bleacher se
ats. Usually if a place short-poured, it practiced other kinds of cheapness, too—watering down the booze or mixing the cheap brands with the good bottles, blending the plastic-bottled gin with the Bombay or the cheap whiskey with the Glenfiddich. Hell, some twenty-two-year-old kid ordering eighteen-year-old scotch isn’t going to know the difference. Maybe people get what they deserve.

  “What can I get you?”

  “A Manhattan, a shot of Knob Creek, and a glass of ice on the side.” Joel was going to make sure he got his entire shot of whiskey. “That is Knob Creek in that bottle, right? Or should I order something else?”

  The bartender considered him briefly. “No, that’s a good choice.”

  The drinks ordered, Joel turned his back and surveyed the bar, the same thing every other guy in the world did when he ordered a drink. More disappointment. As he turned to the left he saw a man at a small table staring at him and it took a minute to recognize Caroline’s friend Alan Dupree sitting by himself with a drink in front of him. Dupree raised his drink in a short salute.

  “Hey.” Joel walked over. Dupree likely had seen that girl sitting on his lap and Joel felt a moment of panic. “How’s it goin’?”

  “Good,” Dupree said. “How about you?”

  “You know. Buddies are gettin’ a little wild.”

  He looked back at the bar, but the bartender was still fussing with the limes in a couple of G-and-Ts. “I don’t know if you saw, you know, that girl, I mean…”

  “Yeah, I saw her. She’s cute.”

  “I didn’t do anything, she just sat on my knee.”

  Dupree nodded and Joel detected in the movement a kind of disappointment, as if he wished he’d seen Joel hitting on the girl. “Heard anything from Caroline?”

  “She’s not big on calling.” Joel looked over at the table, then back at Dupree. “Hey, do you want to join us?”

  Dupree looked over at the girls, and Joel thought he saw the older man sigh. “That’s nice. But I have kind of an important meeting in the morning. Thanks anyway. But if you talk to Caroline…” He stared at the empty drink in front of him. “Go on back to your friends. I’ll talk to her when she gets back.”

  Joel began to edge away. “Okay,” he said. “Well…take it easy.”

  Joel got his drinks and left a buck tip on the bar. On his way back to the table, he snagged a chair, disappointing the waif, who fanned a couple of singles in his direction. He shook her off and sat down on the new chair at the end of the table.

  When he looked back down the length of the bar, Joel saw Dupree edging through a crowd of people. The wiry detective reached the door, went outside, and stood beneath the streetlight, staring at the sidewalk. And in that moment, Joel pictured himself on that sidewalk, at forty-five, balding and losing his form. Suddenly the very struggle of Joel’s life seemed both predetermined and petty, like a lab mouse in blind pursuit of one of two paths, solitude or settlement. As he watched, Joel couldn’t imagine a way out and felt a chill inevitability, the claustrophobia of age.

  The door swung closed and Dupree was gone. Joel drank his shot of whiskey and turned back to the table, where Derek’s girl was starting another joke: “There was this girl who had fish for tits…”

  28

  Bourbon after midnight was a thin but enthusiastic stream of staggering idiots, listing down the center of the street in puddles of booze and water that bubbled up from overworked sewer grates. The crowd was overwhelmingly male. They took off their shirts, danced outside taverns, and formed lines in front of storefront windows where bartenders sold plastic “To-Geaux” cups containing every imaginable mixture of poisons. The street surged with men, the young and the old marked by their inability to handle alcohol, the rest blurring into one type, something between twenty-five and fifty, shuffling along with the same look of buzzed horniness, joints lubricated, eyes glazed, but their ability to function at least still arguable. One swerved in front of Caroline, bleary-eyed and weaving, his lips glistening with whatever he’d just drunk from the Big Gulp glass in his hand. “Hey, where we headed tonight?”

  Caroline stepped carefully around him and continued down Bourbon. When she’d checked in yesterday, the desk clerk had assured Caroline that June was “slow” in the quarter: no festivals, the college students either gone home for summer or still taking finals. The weather was too hot and muggy for sustained debauchery, the clerk said, and so New Orleans in June offered a kind of bucolic sentience, a sluggish old-South charm.

  “Show us your tits!” It came from a group of tall young men facing her from the street—possibly a team of some kind—and at first Caroline paused on the sidewalk, pondering it, the idea of shocking them and herself. Hell, she’d have done it when she was in college. But the fleeting thought was replaced by lingering disgust from her conversation with Blanton, which was replaced by the urge to shoot the young men. It took her a few minutes to realize they weren’t even talking to her, that the team was looking above her, to a balcony. Caroline stepped from underneath the balcony and looked up, to where, among twenty or so drunk revelers, a group of young women leaned over the balcony, dancing and holding their hands out for the Mardi Gras beads that served as currency even after the festival season.

  One girl, earnest in the face and Thanksgiving plump, hoisted her shirt eagerly, and the team whooped and hollered, pelting her bare chest with two-dollar strings of beads. Another girl made more of a production, swinging her hips and teasingly revealing one breast at a time, then both in a flair of showmanship. She got even more beads.

  What am I doing out here? Caroline wondered. After the meeting with Blanton she hadn’t been able to sleep, too haunted by his photograph of the fifteen-year-old victim, and so at 2 A.M. she’d gotten out of bed and opened the phone book, looking for cinnamon roll shops at the local malls. She wrote down three of them on hotel stationery and cross-referenced these malls with photography shops.

  She’d gone back to bed, but still couldn’t sleep. She’d gotten up, put on a pair of sweatpants, and gone outside, planning to walk along the river. But outside her hotel she heard the music and cheers of Bourbon Street two blocks away and had walked down here, merging into the crowd along a stretch of storefronts that promised live sex shows. Was it simply her cop training that drew her to the sound of an out-of-control party or was it something else, something connected to this thing she was chasing, this troubling idea that had begun to form inside her head?

  It had started with the fatalism of the prostitute Jacqueline, and now found voice in the unflinching depravity that Curtis Blanton described. Police, like popular culture, liked to imagine serial killers as a nonnegotiable evil. There was a book on these guys, containing the details that Blanton had quoted to her: single, twenty-four to forty-eight, and so on. These things, in combination with other factors, created a monster, a thing out of the norm, superhuman, the bogeyman: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Hannibal Lecter. Ghost stories to keep your fifteen-year-old from going out at night.

  But the book itself troubled Caroline. Twenty-four to forty-eight? Single? Problems with relationships, with intimacy? Unresolved issues involving their mothers? Every man that Caroline had ever known had the urge to be single, had problems with intimacy, and wouldn’t meet her eyes when talking about his mother.

  What had Jacqueline said when Caroline asked which guys gave her the creeps? “Ma’am, they all give me the creeps.” Caroline recalled the list of bad dates, guys who bit and punched and pulled hair and forced themselves on her. These were just men, not monsters. Bankers and salesmen and ranchers and biology teachers. Cops, presumably, and bartenders.

  It was that list of bad dates that haunted Caroline as she thought about Curtis Blanton’s conviction that only a man could catch a serial killer. The ramifications of what Blanton was saying were inescapable: A serial killer was not an aberration, but an amplification of male fantasy. Maybe there were no monsters. Maybe every man who looked at a Penthouse was essentially embarking on the same path that en
ded with some guy beating a woman to death and violating her with a lug wrench. No wonder Blanton was dubious of Caroline’s role in the investigation. If she couldn’t imagine the violent fantasy, what could she imagine? The victim. The fear. And what good were those?

  Caroline watched the team of young men stare at the balcony, their mouths open slightly, their bodies taut and expectant. On the balcony a new girl had emerged, or rather had been pushed: young and thin, in jeans and T-shirt, her head lolling to the side, her body limp. Behind her, an older guy—maybe twice her age—propped her up, one arm around her waist, the other lifting her arm to wave at the crowd. The girl opened her eyes and smiled back at the man holding her, but then her head fell back against his chest, her eyes closed. The man lifted her shirt and ran his hand along her small breasts, and the team went crazy. The cheers awoke the girl and she smiled again at the man holding her on the balcony, then looked down at the boys on the street, then allowed her head to fall back into his chest. The boys threw beads and the man reached down and grabbed a handful, draped them over her chest. Then he lifted her shirt and rubbed her breasts again. The girl grinned sleepily, eyes closed, head moving in small circles.

  “Show us her pussy!” yelled one of the boys on the team.

  Caroline began walking down the street, but stopped and looked back over her shoulder at the group of boys standing in the middle of the street. Finally, she turned and made her way purposefully through the crowd into the bar beneath the balcony. It was packed and it took a couple of minutes to negotiate the pawing hands to the back of the building, where the staircase was blocked by a red velvet rope. Next to the rope, a huge man in a wooden chair waved his fingers up and down like he was fanning her.