City of the Dead Page 14

  “That’s normal?”

  “No. Not really. In fact, we never even tell our donors if their donations are successful. It is up to the recipient to decide if she wants to contact her donor. The vast majority of donors want no part in knowing. But Faith?” Dr Petit shrugged. “It was more personal to her than simply the money.”

  Yeah. Chastity just bet.

  “How do you get them in touch with each other?” she asked. “I mean, how does somebody contact a donor?”

  “Our Web page. We have a password-sensitive page for our clients with all the donors and all their information on it. The recipient chooses, and then we make the contact.”

  Chastity nodded. “Could I talk to any of the women who came in contact with Faith? They may be able to help me find her.”

  “I’m sorry.” Dr. Petit, settled back into her chair and picked up that much-worried pen. “Our files are completely confidential. I can’t give you any names at all.”

  But come to think of it, Chastity had Faith’s address book. Maybe some of the names she needed were tucked away in there in Faith’s precise, un-erased handwriting. Maybe one of them would offer up information to help the woman who’d given her children.

  Of course, would those women trust Chastity with their information? If the look on Eddie Dupre’s face had meant anything, Chastity wasn’t at all sure they would. Her sister might not have shared anything with her, but she’d evidently shared her loathing for her younger sister with her friends.

  “How long has it been since Faith’s been here?” she asked.

  Dr. Petit looked out the window onto the roof of another Victorian next door. “Oh, I’d say about four months. Like I said, after that last day, she just hasn’t been back.”

  “So you haven’t seen her since before Mother died?”

  “I know some of our people went to the funeral. She hasn’t been here, though. I made sure to ask when the police came to question us.”

  “One more thing, Doctor,” Chastity said, all but holding her breath. “Do you know if anyone from here has gone missing?”

  “Missing?”

  “Well, somebody in the last few weeks you’ve lost touch with. A client or donor who missed appointments. You know.”

  Who might look just like Faith.

  Dr. Petit looked seriously bemused. “No. Nobody’s missed any appointments.”

  “And of course, you don’t keep regular track of your donors. Since they’re on the Web page and all.”

  “Not unless they’re needed. No. Why?”

  “Because the police found an unidentified woman wearing my sister’s wedding ring. She’d been murdered.”

  “And you think…” There was serious outrage in the woman’s voice, as if the murder were a personal insult.

  Chastity shrugged. “I don’t think anything. I don’t want to overlook anything, either.”

  The kind, smiling Dr. Petit was suddenly very angry. “I can guarantee you it isn’t one of our clients.”

  “I hope you can,” Chastity said, wondering if she should suspect what could be perfectly legitimate anger. “Would you let me know if there is anybody?” she asked. “It might be important.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Then let the police know. Detective Dulane of Jefferson Parish, or Detective Gilchrist of the Eighth District.”

  The doctor just nodded, still not comprehending, still defensive. Left with nothing else to say, Chastity picked up her purse and stood to leave. Dr. Petit followed suit.

  They were all the way down to the front desk before the doctor spoke again. “She’s thirty-eight? You’re sure?”

  That brought Chastity to a stop. “I’m sure. It seems she shaved a few years when she moved down here. I’m sorry.”

  The doctor sighed. “So am I. I have to tell a few of her beneficiaries. It’s the honest thing to do.”

  Yeah, Chastity thought. We certainly all want to be honest.

  “Do you think I could talk to Mr. Dupre now?” she asked.

  Dr. Petit smiled again. “Of course.”

  But it seemed that Mr. Dupre had already gone to lunch. And Chastity had a feeling that they’d be ice-skating in Jackson Square before he let her find him again.

  Chastity had just reached the front salon when the door swung open and a stocky brunette strode in.

  “What is it, Jane?” she demanded of the receptionist. “I got a message—”

  Spotting Chastity, she stumbled to a halt. Her eyes widened. “Oh…’scuse me.”

  That was when Chastity realized that the girl was wearing a white sequined jumpsuit with a shoulder cape. And that: her hair was slicked high off her forehead, just like Elvis. Having absolutely no idea what to say to a girl dressed as Elvis, Chastity just nodded and pulled the door open. The cop on the porch, now rocking and smoking, waved her on by. James was again reading his newspaper in what was undoubtedly a no-parking zone under a big live oak. The straggling line of protesters caught sight of Chastity and renewed their efforts at vilification.

  “I know what you are called!” that young guy again shouted, pointing at Chastity’s chest.

  Well, she thought dryly, at least she wasn’t totally lost. She had absolutely no desire to see this guy naked and sweaty. Probably because he was already sweaty, and it wasn’t a good look for him. He was in a suit, for God’s sake. On a sidewalk in hundred degree heat with a protest sign in his hand. Hadn’t he ever read the etiquette books on protesting?

  “You know what I’m called, huh?” Chastity said, trying to stroll by as if he weren’t crowding her. “You must tell me. But be forewarned. If the words ‘whore of Babylon’ leave your lips, I’ll beat you to death with your own sign.”

  “I thought I’d dealt with you,” he accused her, his eyes intense and certain.

  Who was it Eddie Dupre had said this guy was? Lloyd Burgard? Chastity was going to have to Google him when she got back to her computer, see if he came up on any police beat items. He was seriously batshit. And the last thing she needed right now, while she was dealing with everything else, was seriously batshit.

  “Can we do this some other time?” she asked, trying to get by.

  “I thought you’d seen the light. But you haven’t, and your penance is nigh. Pestilence and storm and the wrath of the wind!”

  So God spoke to this guy in hurricane. Great.

  “Oh, hell, honey,” Chastity snorted. “My punishment has been commencing for twenty-six years. You got nothing to say to me.”

  Even so, a shiver snaked right down her back. Somehow that creepy little psycho had just walked across her grave.

  “I have the word of God to say to you,” he insisted, following her. “Vengeance is His, and he will mete it out to the wicked. And so he has judged you.”

  “Are you going to engage in pointless bickering all day, or are we going to get some lunch?” James asked, not looking up from where he was engrossed in the sports page.

  “I could have him accuse you of something, James. It might alleviate your boredom.”

  “Thanks, no. I’m sure that driving a hack through New Orleans is judgment enough.”

  Chastity opened the back door and slid in. After last night, there wasn’t a chance in hell she was sharing the front seat.

  “Where to?” James asked.

  “Food. Does that paper say what the Cardinals did last night?”

  “They won. They say they’re sorry to have done it without you.”

  “You have the eyes of Satan!” the weird little guy cried out.

  “Finally,” Chastity said, leaning back in her seat. “Something we agree on.”

  She was just about to close the door, when she heard his bemused voice as he turned away. “You were older last week.”

  “You okay back there?” James asked.

  Chastity didn’t so much as open an eye. “This gonna cost extra?”

  “Talk’s free, nurse. You look like you didn’t much enjoy your visit.”

&
nbsp; “I didn’t, fireman. I didn’t.”

  She just couldn’t shake that damn feeling of prescience. Some of the best prophets had been crazy, after all, crying out there in the desert where nobody believed them. She wondered if her crazy person had just prophesied for her. That she had, indeed, been judged, and this trip was just her personal route to hell.

  Via wind and water. Hotcha, this was sure her day.

  “‘By the pricking of my thumbs,’” she found herself saying.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Let’s go.”

  The rest of the quote was “something wicked this way comes.” Chastity closed her eyes because, oddly enough, sitting in the back of a cab on a hot summer day in New Orleans, she believed it. And she was afraid she wasn’t talking about hurricanes.

  The cab had reached the corner of Magazine when Chastity shot up in her seat. “Oh, shit, James! Turn around!”

  “You forget something?” James asked, throwing his cab into a quick U-turn.

  “I wasn’t paying attention. Didn’t you hear what he just said? He thinks I’m Faith. He thinks he’s been visiting judgment from God on Faith. And he was doing it last week.”

  But by the time they made it back to the clinic, Lloyd Burgard was gone.

  “Please,” Chastity asked one of the kinder-looking women out on the sidewalk. “Can you tell me where he went? It’s important. My sister’s missing, and he may be able to tell me something.”

  “One of the other clinics,” the woman said, resting her Genetic Monsters sign on her shoulder. “Lloyd always makes the rounds in the afternoon.”

  Well, at least he’d really been there. Not some figment of her imagination or angel of death sent to seriously annoy her. For a minute there, Chastity had actually wondered.

  “Do I look familiar to you?” she asked the woman.

  She looked, smiled, and shook her head. “Afraid not.”

  Nobody else recognized her, so Lloyd must have been the only one out to save Faith. The protesters all knew him, but nobody really claimed him. All they could tell Chastity about him was that he was sincere, devoted, and addicted to digital photography.

  “And he was trying to save my sister only last week,” Faith said, climbing back into the cab. “And evidently not here.”

  “What do you think?” James asked, tossing his cigarette out the window and starting the car. “That this guy is taking the vengeance of the Lord into his own hands?”

  She thought she shouldn’t have the shivers over this guy.

  “Well, they think he tried to break into the lab to steal the babies this morning. That’s what the cops were here for.”

  “My horizon is expanding by the minute. What next?”

  She thought about it. “Do you do computers?”

  “I don’t even go through the self-serve lane at the grocery store.”

  Chastity sighed, looking out at the passing storefronts as James turned onto Magazine and headed downriver. She knew she had to meet Faith’s friends sooner or later. She had their addresses in her backpack. But first, she thought she’d try familiar territory.

  “Do you know where the Jefferson Parish coroner’s office is?”

  He did. It was back over the river, which Chastity hated all over again. Tucked back in an industrial park, the coroner’s office was new, clean, and well designed. Chastity wished she could have said the same for Dr. Martin Willis. A short, portly man with a tonsure of ginger hair and eyes like a Boston terrier, he looked as if he slept on his couch and bathed in the office bathroom.

  One look at him sent Chastity’s spirits skidding. His attitude finished the job. Kareena had been right. Dr. Martin Willis wasn’t going to win any awards for his work or his attitude.

  “You want me to what?” he demanded.

  Chastity had been very careful in presenting her credentials. She had questioned him carefully about his findings on the woman in the bayou. She’d been deferential, no matter how slipshod she thought his approach. She’d been appalled, but she’d been quiet.

  “A full autopsy,” she said, hands curled in her lap where she sat in a very uncomfortable straight-back chair, “with X-Rays.” She wasn’t going to tell him that it hadn’t done a damn bit of good to do only the head, as he had. Hell, Ray Charles could have told them how that woman died. But there might just be a clue to who the woman was.

  Like whether she’d had children or not.

  “My sister was para one gravida one,” she said, telling him that her sister had delivered a live pregnancy. “I’d like to know if this is she.”

  “Well, so would I, missy. But I have other things to do. Other people die down here, you know. Besides, why bother when we’re already waiting for the DNA?”

  “Because with the best effort in the world it will still take a good three weeks to get results back. It would really be helpful to find out sooner if there’s a match.”

  Dr. Willis climbed to his feet. “The parish coroner is satisfied with my findings. You might as well be, too.”

  And he walked out.

  Chastity rubbed her forehead where her chronic doctor headaches lived and went in search of James.

  “Do you know where the homicide cops live?”

  “Sure,” he said, looking up from the paper. “Climb in.”

  And he drove her to the other side of the parking lot.

  “Yes, Ms. Byrnes?” Detective Dulane asked. He had school art taped to the wall behind his desk and family shots scattered on his desk. Chastity wished he had her sister’s case.

  “How much pull do you have with the coroner’s office, Detective?” she asked.

  There was a slight, stunned silence. “I’m sorry….”

  Chastity laughed and sat. The detective’s chair was much more comfortable than the pathologist’s. “No. I am. I was just hoping you could convince Dr. Willis to complete his autopsy on that floater from the bayou. I was just there, and he doesn’t seem to know she has anything from the neck down. I’m grateful that he found out the lady had no drugs or alcohol on board, and that she died of a surfeit of double-ought buckshot and had no calluses on her feet. But it would sure be nice to know if she’d given birth.”

  “Your sister…”

  “Had a child, according to the fertility clinic where she donated her eggs.”

  “You’ve been busy, Ms. Byrnes.”

  “I suck at wailing and wringing my hands, Detective. Now, what do you say?”

  Again, that silence as he doodled on his desk blotter. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you. I know I’m dipping my toe in your pool, but I just can’t let this go unquestioned.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Detective.”

  She noticed that the detective did not thank her back.

  For the rest of the day Chastity and James sought out the people in Faith’s directory. It was an alphabetical journey, from Ardoin to Cadro, where they had to stop because they ran out of time. Chastity met with Suzies and Emilies and Mary Catherines. She made it a point to visit them in person because she wanted to see these women’s reactions. She had James drive her to their homes in the Garden District, in Lakeside, and in Metairie. The women wore tennis attire, or pearls and slacks, or designer T-shirts and shorts.

  To a woman, they were the friends Max had talked about who had met Faith through the hospital auxiliary or through the boys’ schools. They had helped Faith plan charity functions and bridge tournaments and Mardi Gras parties. They smiled when her name was mentioned and looked bemused when asked about her whereabouts. Not one had seen Faith anywhere but Gallatoire’s in at least six months. “Her mother, you know. Faith didn’t want to leave her.”

  The more Chastity heard that tune, the less she liked it. There were new snakes crawling up her back, and Chastity couldn’t quite get a name on them yet. But there’d been something wrong long before Faith had decamped. As if those pictures in Faith’s bathroom didn’t say that ve
ry thing.

  When Chastity got back to Kareena’s she called Moshika. She got an answering machine and left a few pathetic “woofs” on it for Lilly, feeling homesick and unsettled. Then she logged on to her computer for a little investigative time.

  First she accessed the Arlen Clinic Web page to find that the design matched the clinic’s. Pastel comfort and quiet support. Miracles performed for a fee. She found the donor page, but couldn’t come up with a password.

  Next she Googled Lloyd Burgard, but he was even more of a bust than the clinic. If Lloyd was his real name, he was either a rookie at rabble-rousing or an ineffectual one. Not only had he not made the news, he’d wasted his digital photography. Lloyd had no Web page. Hell, everybody had a Web page these days. Either Lloyd was too crazy to have figured that out, or not crazy enough.

  As a last resort Chastity called Detective Gilchrist, to ask him if he’d check up on Lloyd. She could hear from the detective’s tone of voice that he had already consigned her sister to the circular “ran-away-from-home” file, and she couldn’t say she blamed him much. But there was something here that didn’t fit. Something that tugged at Chastity’s sense of impending disaster.

  She wanted to know about that baby. She wanted to know why Faith had moved so far not to move at all. She mostly wanted to know what place their father had in Faith’s bathroom, and that wasn’t something she could make Detective Gilchrist understand.

  They met at the back of Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon, a building purporting to be the actual blacksmith shop owned by Jean Lafitte. It certainly looked as if it had survived that long. The roof sagged, the walls peeled, and the doors didn’t square. The only light in the place came from candles on the tables. It was a convenient place for somebody who didn’t want to be noticed.

  They bent over their drinks in the back where the air was cooler and the shadows deep.

  “We have to move now.”

  “She agrees?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We simply have to take over.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the police went to see Eddie.”

  “Eddie? Good God. Why?”

  “They found a body. With the ring on it.”

  A small sound, like the flutter of a bird against a cage. “They can’t know for sure who it is.”