Chapter
35
* * *
I arrived early at Moisant Field so I browsed around the bookstore for a while, taking care to avoid tripping over the piles of Anne Rice novels. I had been sitting in the arrivals terminal for about an hour when Rachel Wolfe walked through the gates. She was wearing dark blue jeans, white sneakers, and a red–and–white Polo Sport top. Her red hair hung loose on her shoulders and her makeup had been so carefully applied that it was almost indiscernable.
The only luggage she carried herself was a brown leather shoulder bag. The rest of what I took to be her belongings was being toted by Angel and Louis, who walked slightly self–consciously at either side of her, Louis in a cream double–breasted suit with a snow white dress shirt open at the neck, Angel in jeans, battered Reebok high–tops, and a green check shirt that had not felt an iron since it left the factory many years before.
“Well, well,” I said, as they stood before me. “All human life is here.”
Angel raised his right hand, from which dangled three thick piles of books, tied together by string. The ends of his fingers were turning purple. “We brought half the New York Public Library with us as well,” he groaned. “Tied with string. I ain’t seen books tied with string since Little House on the Prairie stopped reruns.”
Louis, I noticed, was carrying a lady’s pink umbrella and a cosmetics case. He had the look of a man who is trying to pretend that a dog isn’t screwing his leg. “Don’t say a word, man,” he warned. “Not a word.”
Between them, the two men also carried two suitcases, two leather traveling bags, and a suit carrier. “Car’s parked outside,” I said as I walked with Rachel to the exit. “Might be just enough room for the bags.”
“They paged me at the airport,” whispered Rachel. “They were very helpful.” She giggled and glanced over her shoulder. Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of Angel tripping on a bag and swearing loudly.
? ? ?
We ditched the luggage at the Flaisance, despite Louis’s stated preference for the Fairmont at University Place. The Fairmont was where the Republicans usually stayed when they hit New Orleans, which was part of its appeal for Louis. He was the only gay, black, Republican criminal I knew.
“Gerald Ford stayed at the Fairmont,” he lamented as he surveyed the small suite he was to share with Angel.
“So?” I countered. “Paul McCartney stayed at the Richelieu and you don’t hear me demanding to stay there.” I left the door open and headed back to my own room for a shower.
“Paul who?” said Louis.
? ? ?
We ate in the Grill Room of the Windsor Court on Gravier Street, in deference to Louis’s wishes, its marbled floors and heavy Austrian drapes strangely uncomfortable for me after the informal setting of the smaller eateries in the Quarter. Rachel had changed into dark pants and a black jacket over a red top. It looked fine but the hot night air had taken its toll on her and she was still pulling the damp cloth of her top away from her body as we waited for the main courses.
As we ate, I explained to them about Joe Bones and the Fontenots. They would be a matter for Angel, Louis, and me. Rachel remained silent for much of our conversation, interjecting occasionally to clarify things that had been said by Woolrich or Morphy. She scribbled notes in a small, wire–bound notebook, her handwriting neat and even. At one point her hand brushed my bare arm lightly and she left it there for an instant, her skin warm against mine.
I watched Angel pulling at his lip as he considered what I had said. “This Remarr must be pretty dumb, dumber than our guy at least,” he said eventually.
“Because of the print?” I said.
He nodded. “Careless, very careless.” He wore the dissatisfied look of a respected theologian who has seen someone bring his calling into disrepute by identifying Jesus as an alien.
Rachel spotted the look. “It seems to bother you a lot,” she commented. I glanced at her. She had an amused expression on her face, but her eyes were calculating and slightly distant. She was playing over in her mind what I had told her, even as she engaged Angel in a conversation that he would usually have avoided. I waited to see how he would respond.
He smiled at her and tilted his head. “I have a certain professional interest in these things,” he admitted. He cleared a space in front of him and held up his hands before us.
“Anyone doing a B&E job — that’s breaking and entering, for the benefit of our more respectable listener — needs to take certain precautions,” began Angel. “The first and most obvious is to make sure that he — or she, B&E being an equal opportunity profession — doesn’t leave any fingerprints. So what do you do?”
“You wear gloves,” said Rachel. She leaned forward now, enjoying the lesson and putting aside any other thoughts.
“Right. Nobody, no matter how dumb, enters a place he shouldn’t be without wearing gloves. Otherwise, you leave visuals, you leave latents, you pretty much sign your name and confess to the crime.”
Visuals are the visible marks left on surfaces by a dirty or bloody hand, latents the invisible marks left by natural secretions of the skin. Visuals can be photographed or lifted using adhesive tape, but latents need to be dusted, typically with a chemical reagent like iodine vapor or ninhydrin solution. Electrostatic and fluorescence techniques are also useful, and in the search for latents on human skin, specialized X–ray photography can be used.
But if what Angel had said was correct, Remarr was too much of a professional to risk a job without gloves and then to leave not merely a latent, but a visual. He must have been wearing gloves, but something had gone wrong.
“You working it through in your head, Bird?” smirked Angel.
“Go on, Sherlock, baffle us with your brilliance,” I responded.
His smirk widened to a grin, and he continued. “It’s possible to get a fingerprint from inside a glove, assuming you have the glove. Rubber or plastic gloves are best for obtaining prints: your hands get sweaty under them.”
“But what most people don’t know is that the exterior surface of a glove can act like a fingerprint as well. Say it’s a leather glove, then you got wrinkles, you got holes, you got scars, you got tears, and no two leather gloves are gonna be the same. Now, in the case of this guy Remarr, what we have is a print and no gloves. Unless Remarr can’t tie his shoelaces without falling over, we know that he was probably wearing gloves, but he still manages to leave a print. It’s a mystery.” He made a small, exploding gesture with his hands, like a magician making a rabbit disappear in a puff of smoke, then his face became serious.
“My guess is that Remarr was wearing only a single pair of gloves, probably latex. He imagined this was going to be an easy job: either he was gonna off the old lady and her son, or he was gonna put the frighteners on her, maybe leave a calling card in the house. Since the son, from what I hear, wasn’t the kind of guy to let anyone frighten his momma, I’d say Remarr went in there thinking that he might have to kill someone.”
“But when he arrives, they’re either dead or they’re in the process of being killed. Again, my guess is they were already dead: if Remarr stumbled in on the killer, Remarr would be dead as well.”
“So Remarr is going in, his one pair of gloves on, and maybe he spots the kid and it throws him. He probably starts to sweat. He goes into the house and finds the old lady. Bam! Second shock, but he goes to take a closer look, steadying himself as he leans over her. He touches blood and maybe considers wiping it away, but he figures wiping it away will only attract more attention to it and, anyway, he’s got his gloves.”
“But the problem with latex gloves is that one pair isn’t enough. You wear them for too long and your prints start coming through. You get thrown, you start to sweat, the prints are gonna come through faster. Could be Remarr has been eating before he came out, maybe some fruit or some kind of pasta with vinegar. That causes extra moisture on the skin, so now Remarr is in real trouble. He’s left a print he doesn’t even know about, and now the cops, the feds, and difficult people like our good selves want to ask him about it. Ta–da!” He gave a small bow from the waist. Rachel gave him a round of applause. Louis just raised an eyebrow in resignation.
“Fascinating,” said Rachel. “You must read a lot of books.” Her tone was heavily ironic.
“He does, then Barnes and Noble gonna be grateful that their stolen stock being put to good use,” remarked Louis.
Angel ignored him. “Maybe I dabbled in these things, in my younger days.”
“Did you learn anything else, in your ‘younger’ days?” Rachel smiled.
“Lot of things, some of them hard lessons,” said Angel with feeling. “Best thing I ever learned: don’t hold on to nothin’. If you don’t have it, can’t nobody prove you took it.”
“And I have been tempted. There was this figure of a knight on a horse once. French, seventeenth century. Gold inlaid with diamonds and rubies. About this tall.” He held the palm of his hand flat about six inches above the table. “It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” His eyes lit up at the memory. He looked like a child.
He sat back in his chair. “But I let it go. In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.”
“So is nothing worth holding on to?” asked Rachel.
Angel looked at Louis for a while. “Some things are, yeah, but they ain’t made of gold.”
“That’s so romantic,” I said. Louis made choking noises as he tried to swallow his water.
Before us, the remains of our coffee lay cold in the cups. “Do you have anything to add?” I asked Rachel when Angel had finished playing to the gallery.
She glanced back through her notes. Her brow furrowed slightly. She held a glass of red wine in one hand and the light caught it, reflecting a streak of red across her breast like a wound.
“You said you had pictures, crime scene pictures?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Then I’d like to hold off until I’ve had a chance to see them. I have an idea based on what you told me over the phone, but I’d prefer to keep it to myself until I’ve seen the pictures and done a little more research. I do have one thing, though.” She took a second notebook from her bag and flicked through the pages to where a yellow Post–it note stuck out. “ ‘I lusted for her, but that has always been a weakness of my kind,’ ” she read. “ ‘Our sin was not pride, but lust for humanity.’ ”
She turned to me, but I already recognized the words. “They were the words this Traveling Man said to you when he called,” she said. I was aware of Angel and Louis moving forward in their chairs.
“It took a theologian in the archbishop’s residence to track down the reference. It’s pretty obscure, at least if you’re not a theologian.” She paused, then asked, “Why was the devil banished from heaven?”
“Pride,” said Angel. “I remember Sister Agnes telling us that.”
“It was pride,” said Louis. He glanced at Angel. “I remember Milton telling us that.”
“Anyway,” said Rachel pointedly, “you’re right, or partially right. From Augustine onward, the devil’s sin is pride. But before Augustine, there was a different viewpoint. Up until the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was considered to be part of the biblical canon. Its origins are a matter of dispute — it may have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, or a combination of both — but it does seem to have provided a basis for some concepts that are still found in the Bible today. The Last Judgment may have been based on the Similitudes of Enoch. The fiery hell ruled by Satan also appears for the first time in Enoch.”
“What is interesting for us is that Enoch takes a different view of the devil’s sin.” She turned a page of her notebook and began to read again.
“ ‘And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose …’ ”
She looked up again. “Now that’s from Genesis, which derives from a similar source as Enoch. The ‘sons of God’ were the angels, who gave in to sexual lust against the will of God. The leader of the sinning angels, the devil, was cast into a dark hole in the desert and his accomplices were thrown into the fire for their punishment. Their offspring, ‘evil spirits upon the earth,’ went with them. The martyr Justin believed that the children of the union between angels and human women were responsible for all evil on the earth, including murder.”
“In other words, lust was the sin of the devil. Lust for humanity, the ‘weakness of our kind.’ ” She closed the notebook and permitted herself a small smile of triumph.
“So this guy believes he’s a demon,” said Angel eventually.
“Or the offspring of an angel,” added Louis. “Depends on how you look at it.”
“Whatever he is, or thinks he is, the Book of Enoch is hardly likely to turn up on Oprah’s book choice,” I said. “Any idea what his source might have been?”
Rachel reopened the notebook. “The most recent reference I could find is a nineteen eighty–three New York edition: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Enoch, edited by a guy called Isaac, appropriately enough,” she said. “There’s also an older translation from Oxford, published in nineteen thirteen by R.H. Charles.”
I noted the names. “Maybe Morphy or Woolrich can check with the University of New Orleans, see if anyone local has been expressing an interest in the obscure end of biblical studies. Woolrich might be able to extend the search to the other universities. It’s a start.”
We paid the bill and left. Angel and Louis headed off toward the lower Quarter to check out the gay night life while Rachel and I walked back to the Flaisance. We didn’t speak for a time, both of us conscious that we were on the verge of some intimacy.
“I get the feeling that I shouldn’t ask what those two currently do for a living,” said Rachel, as we paused at a crossing.
“Probably not. It’s best to view them as independent operators and leave it at that.”
She smiled. “They seem to have a certain loyalty to you. It’s unusual. I’m not sure that I understand it.”
“I’ve done things for them in the past, but if there ever was a debt, it was paid a long time ago. I owe them a lot.”
“But they’re still here. They still help when they’re asked.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely because of me. They do what they do because they like it. It appeals to their sense of adventure, of danger. In their own separate ways, they’re both dangerous men. I think that’s why they came: they sensed danger and they wanted to be part of it.”
“Maybe they see something of that in you.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they do.”
We walked through the courtyard of the Flaisance, stopping only to pat the dogs. Her room was three doors down from mine. Between our rooms were the room shared by Angel and Louis and one unoccupied single room. She opened the door and stood at the threshold. From inside, I could feel the coolness of the air–conditioning and could hear it pumping at full power.
“I’m still not sure why you’re here,” I said. My throat felt dry and part of me was not certain that it wanted to hear an answer.
“I’m still not sure either,” she said. She stood on her toes and kissed me gently, softly on the lips, and then she was gone.
? ? ?
I went to my room, took a book of Sir Walter Ralegh’s writings from my bag, and headed back out to the Napoleon House, where I took a seat by the portrait of the Little Corporal. I didn’t want to lie on my bed, conscious of the presence of Rachel Wolfe so near to me. I was excited and troubled by her kiss, and by the thought of what might follow.
Almost until the very end, Susan and I had enjoyed an incredible intimacy together. When my drinking truly began to take its toll on us, that intimacy had disintegrated. When we made love it was no longer totally giving. Instead, we seemed to circle each other warily in our lovemaking, always holding something back, always expecting trouble to rear its head and cause us to spring back into the security of our own selves.
But I had loved her. I had loved her until the end and I still loved her now. When the Traveling Man had taken her he had severed the physical and emotional ties between us, but I could still feel the remains of those ties, raw and pulsing at the very extremity of my senses.
Maybe this is common to all those who lose someone whom they have loved deeply. Making contact with another potential partner, another lover, becomes an act of reconstruction, a building not only of a relationship but also of oneself.
But I felt myself haunted by my wife and child. I felt them, not only as an emptiness or a loss, but as an actual presence in my life. I seemed to catch glimpses of them at the edges of my existence, as I drifted from consciousness to sleep, from sleep to waking. Sometimes, I tried to convince myself that they were simply phantoms of my guilt, creations born of some psychological imbalance.
Yet I had heard Susan speak through Tante Marie, and once, like a memory from a delirium, I had awakened in the darkness to feel her hand on my face and I had caught a trace of her scent beside me in the bed. More than that, I saw traces of Susan and Jennifer in every young wife, in each female child. In a young woman’s laughter, I heard the voice of my wife. In the footsteps of a little girl, I heard the echo of my daughter’s shoes.
I felt something for Rachel Wolfe, a mixture of attraction and gratitude and desire. I wanted to be with her but only, I thought, when my wife and child were at peace.