Chapter
50
* * *
Neat lawns mixed with thick growths of cypress as I drove back along the blacktop of 96 to St. Martinville, past a God Is Pro–Life sign and the warehouselike structure of Podnuh’s nightclub. At Thibodeaux’s Café, on the neat town square, I asked for directions to Judy Neubolt’s address. They knew the house, even knew that the nurse had moved to La Jolla for a year, maybe longer, and that her boyfriend was maintaining the house.
Perkins Street started almost opposite the entrance to Evangeline State Park. At the end of the street was a T–junction, which disappeared on the right into a rural setting, with houses scattered at distant intervals. Judy Neubolt’s house was on this street, a small, two–story dwelling, strangely low despite the two floors, with two windows on either side of a screen door and three much smaller windows on the upper level. At the eastern side, the roof sloped down, reducing it to a single story. The wood of the house had been newly painted a pristine white, and damaged slates on the roof had been replaced, but the yard was overgrown with weeds and the woods beyond had begun to make inroads on the boundaries of the property.
I parked some way from the house and approached it through the woods, stopping at their verge. The sun was already falling from its apex and it cast a red glow across the roof and walls. The rear door was bolted and locked. There seemed to be no option but to enter from the front.
As I moved forward, my senses jangled with a tension I had not felt before. Sounds, smells, and colors were too sharp, too overpowering. I felt as if I could pick out the component parts of every noise that came to me from the surrounding trees. My gun moved jerkily, my hand responding too rapidly to the signals from my brain. I was conscious of the firmness of the trigger against the ball of my finger and every crevice and rise of the grip against the palm of my hand. The sound of the blood pumping in my ears was like an immense hand banging on a heavy oak door, my feet on the leaves and twigs like the crackling of some huge fire.
The drapes were pulled on the windows, top and bottom, and across the inner door. Through a gap in the drapes on the door I could see black material, hung to prevent anyone from peering through the cracks. The screen door opened with a squeak of rusty hinges as I eased it ajar with my right foot, my body shielded by the wall of the house. I could see a thick spider’s web at the upper part of the door frame, the brown, drained husks of trapped insects shivering in the vibrations from the opening door.
I reached in and turned the handle on the main door. It opened easily. I let it swing to its fullest expanse, revealing the dimly lit interior of the house. I could see the edge of a sofa, one half of a window at the other side of the house, and to my right, the beginning of a hallway. I took a deep breath, which echoed in my head like the low, pained gasp of a sick animal, then moved quickly to my right, the screen door closing behind me.
I now had a full, uninterrupted view of the main room of the house. The exterior had been deceptive. Judy Neubolt, or whoever had decided on the design of the house’s interior, had removed one floor entirely so that the room reached right to the roof, where two skylights, now encrusted with filth and partly obscured by black drapes stretched beneath them, allowed thin shafts of sunlight to penetrate to the bare boards below. The only illumination came from a pair of dim floor lamps, one at each end of the room.
The room was furnished with a long sofa, decorated with a red–and–orange zigzag pattern, which stood facing the front of the house. At either side of it were matching chairs, with a low coffee table in the center and a TV cabinet beneath one of the windows facing the seating area. Behind the sofa was a dining table and six chairs, with a fireplace to their rear. The walls were decorated with samples of Indian art and one or two vaguely mystical paintings of women with flowing white dresses standing on a mountain or beside the sea. It was hard to make out details in the dimness.
At the eastern end was a raised wooden gallery, reached by a flight of steps to my left, which led up to a sleeping area with a pine bed and a matching closet.
Rachel hung upside down from the gallery, a rope attached from her ankles to the rail above. She was naked and her hair stretched to within two feet of the floor. Her arms were free and her hands hung beyond the ends of her hair. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, but she gave no indication that she saw me. A needle, attached to the plastic pipe of a drip, was taped to her left arm. The drip bag hung from a metal frame, allowing the ketamine to seep slowly and continuously into her system. On the floor beneath her was stretched an expanse of clear plastic sheeting.
Beneath the gallery was a dark kitchen area, with pine cupboards, a tall refrigerator, and a microwave oven beside the sink. Three stools stood empty by a breakfast nook. To my right, on the wall facing the gallery, hung an embroidered tapestry with a pattern similar to the sofa and chairs. A thin patina of dust lay over everything.
I checked the hallway behind me. It led into a second bedroom, this one empty but for a bare mattress on which lay a military green sleeping bag. A green knapsack lay open beside the bed and I could see some jeans, a pair of cream trousers, and some men’s shirts inside. The room, with its low, sloping roof, took up about half the width of the house, which meant that there was a room of similar size on the other side of the wall.
I moved back toward the main room, all the time keeping Rachel in sight. There was no sign of Woolrich, although he could have been standing hidden in the hallway at the other side of the house. Rachel could give me no indication of where he might be. I began moving slowly along the tapestried wall to the far wall of the house.
I was about halfway across when a movement behind Rachel caught my attention and I spun, my gun raised to shoulder level as I instinctively assumed a marksman’s stance.
“Put it down, Birdman, or she dies now.” He had been waiting in the darkness behind her, shielded by her body. He stood close to her now, most of his body still hidden by her own. I could see the edge of his tan pants, the sleeve of his white shirt, and a sliver of his head, nothing more. If I tried to shoot, I would almost certainly hit Rachel.
“I have a gun pointing at the small of her back, Bird. I don’t want to ruin such a beautiful body with a bullet hole, so put the gun down.”
I bent down and placed the gun gently on the ground.
“Now kick it away from you.”
I kicked it with the side of my foot and watched it slide across the floor and spin to rest by the foot of the nearest chair.
He emerged from the shadows then, but he was no longer the man that I had known. It was as if, with the revelation of his true nature, a metamorphosis had occurred. His face was more gaunt than ever and the dark shadows beneath his eyes gave him a skeletal look. But those eyes: they shone in the semidarkness like black jewels. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light, I saw that his irises had almost disappeared. His pupils were large and dark and fed greedily on the light in the room.
“Why did it have to be you?” I said, as much to myself as to him. “You were my friend.”
He smiled then, a bleak, empty smile that drifted across his face like snow.
“How did you find her, Bird?” he asked, his voice low. “How did you find Lisa? I gave you Lutice Fontenot, but how did you find Lisa?”
“Maybe she found me,” I replied.
He shook his head in slow disappointment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said softly. “I don’t have time for those things now. I got a whole new song to sing.”
He was fully in view now. In one hand he held what looked like a modified, wide–barreled air pistol, in the other a scalpel. A SIG was tucked into the waistband of his pants. I noticed that they still had mud on the cuffs.
“Why did you kill her?”
Woolrich twisted the scalpel in his hand. “Because I could.”
Around us, the light in the room changed, darkening as a cloud obscured the slivers of sunlight filtering through the skylights above us. I moved slightly, shifting my weight, my eye on my gun where it lay on the floor. My movement seemed exaggerated, as if, faced with the potential of the ketamine, everything shifted too quickly by comparison. Woolrich’s gun came up in a single fluid moment.
“Don’t, Bird. You won’t have long to wait. Don’t rush the end.”
The room brightened again, but only marginally. The sun was setting fast. Soon there would only be darkness.
“It was always going to end this way, Bird, you and me in a room like this. I planned it, right from the start. You were always going to die this way. Maybe here, or maybe later, in some other place.” He smiled again. “After all, they were going to promote me. It would have been time to move on again. But, in the end, it was always going to come down to this.”
He moved forward, one step, the gun never wavering.
“You’re a little man, Bird. Do you have any idea how many little people I’ve killed? Trailer park trash in penny–ass towns from here to Detroit. Cracker bitches who spent their lives watching Oprah and fucking like dogs. Addicts. Drunks. Haven’t you ever hated those people, Bird, the ones you know are worthless, the ones who will never amount to anything, will never do anything, will never contribute anything? Have you ever thought that you might be one of them? I showed them how worthless they were, Bird. I showed them how little they mattered. I showed your wife and your daughter how little they mattered.”
“And Byron?” I asked. “Was he one of the little people, or did you turn him into one of them?” I wanted to keep him talking, maybe work my way toward my gun. As soon as he stopped, he would try to kill both Rachel and me. But more than that, I wanted to know why, as if there could ever be a why that would explain all of this.
“Byron,” said Woolrich. He smiled slightly. “I needed to buy myself some time. When I cut up the girl at Park Rise, everyone believed the worst of him and he ran, all the way back to Baton Rouge. I visited him, Bird. I tested the ketamine on him and then I just kept giving it to him. He tried to run once, but I found him. In the end, I find them all.”