City of the Dead Read online

  “I think it’s somebody to rule out.” She was sitting there just staring at that young girl with the pale blond hair. She needed to call Kareena. See if there was a missing persons report on Willow Tolliver. She needed to call the coroner and find out if their victim was a natural blonde. As far as she knew, Faith still was. She wasn’t so sure about Willow.

  “I had the feeling Susan Reeves wasn’t telling us everything,” she said. “Or maybe that she was speaking in some code.”

  “Like telling you your brother-in-law gambles.”

  She looked over to see that James was watching her. He made her feel twitchy again. “You caught that, did you?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think she’s a great friend.”

  Chastity turned back to the screen. “I need to talk to her again. But first I need to talk to Kareena.”

  “Willow Tolliver,” Chastity said five minutes later. “Thirty-year-old white female, blond and blue. No scars or tattoos.”

  “From New Orleans?” Kareena asked in her professional voice.

  “Must be a transplant. This doesn’t give any contact info, and I’m sitting in an illegal Web page.”

  “Shut up, girl. I don’ need to know that.”

  “I have a couple other questions then. Can you find out if Max Stanton gambles? Oh, and could you check with Jefferson Parish and see if Dulane talked them into another post? I think it’s better coming from you. I’ve annoyed that man enough.”

  “Sure, girl. I got nothin’ else to do.”

  “I’ll buy you a drink, Kareena.”

  “Damn right you will. Especially since I’m gonna tell you that your crazy little Saints fan lives with his sister over on St. Patrick, out by Metairie Cemetery, you should happen to be that way. But Kareena didn’t tell you. That would also be illegal.”

  “Thanks, Kareena.”

  “Yeah, well, we got thunderstorms comin’ through. Wait till they pass before you go. Always floods for a while after.”

  Great. Another stressor. Chastity took a look out the kitchen window and saw the clouds churning up from the trees. “Floods? It floods here?”

  “Oh, yeah, girl. Every time. But you just wait till Bob. He come in, then you’ll see a flood.”

  Not what Chastity wanted to hear, either. Bob was already on the TV full-time. Chastity swore that Kareena had rigged the damn thing to show nothing but the Weather Channel. And she could smell James again, which was making all that pressure in her chest worse.

  “We go party tonight, girl,” Kareena said. “You feel better.”

  “Ya know what, Kareena? You’re on. I’ll even have a Hurricane and name it Bob.”

  She hung up and looked back at the screen. “I have a feeling this is getting more and more out of control.”

  James, scanning pages, just shrugged. “You didn’t expect to find your sister in a Wal-Mart buyin’ T-shirts, did you?”

  “I expected to find that she’d run away. The rest of this is just complicating things.”

  “Inconsiderate.”

  Chastity just glared.

  He took another sip of coffee. “You think she’s alive?”

  “Faith? I don’t know. I don’t seem to know anything anymore.”

  “Well then, let’s find some stuff out.” He leaned back over the donor page, scanning faces. “Elvis is here, ya know.”

  Chastity settled her chin atop her arms on the table, her energy suddenly spent. “He’s donating eggs?”

  “She is. That girl who was at the clinic yesterday.” Chastity just shook her head. “I really want to know what they’re looking for in their genetic material.”

  “She’s a Phi Beta Kappa working on her Ph.D. in history and political science.”

  “Yeah, fine. So she has some hobbies.”

  James just smiled. “She also looks hot in a jumpsuit.”

  The bitch was taking too long. What the hell did she think she was doing, wasting time like this? If she wanted to find her sister, she had to get out onto the streets. She had to talk to more people. She had to try. If she didn’t, he wouldn’t have a chance, either. He’d been so sure he’d taken care of it. So sure.

  He hated feeling this uncertain. He hated her. He hated all of them. But it was all right. He was back on the right track again. He just had to stick it out.

  The rain had passed, as it always did, right at rush hour. The streets were still awash, so that the traffic sounded like high waves on a beach. There wasn’t any fresh movement from the white house with the blue porches. Out in his black car, he made a decision and started the engine. If only the bitch wouldn’t take so long.

  Twelve

  On the stroke of six the rain swept off in a burst of sun and a rainbow. The humidity didn’t ease, but the streets glistened in the slanting sun, and the floods Kareena had predicted shrank to puddles. Sitting in James’s backseat as they splashed their way up Canal toward Metairie Cemetery, Chastity fought a monster headache. She was on the phone with Max, and he wasn’t cooperating.

  “I’m exhausted, Chastity,” he said when she’d tried to offer him an update. “I came home about noon and crashed. I’m not working tomorrow, though. You can come out here then, can’t you?”

  Which meant that she was going to have to go back to Faith’s house after all. “Yeah. Fine, Max.”

  Hanging up the phone, she slammed down three Excedrin and the rest of the go-cup of coffee she’d liberated from Kareena’s kitchen.

  “The Burgard home,” James announced as he pulled to a stop before a faded, unattractive little tract house with molting trees and a sagging porch.

  Chastity sighed. “I hope Lloyd’s home.”

  He wasn’t. His sister was. Older than Lloyd, she was a thin, tense woman who seemed to have had the color all sapped out of her. She never opened the screen door more than a few inches.

  “Lloyd isn’t here,” she kept saying as she stood half hidden in the shadows of her foyer.

  “Please, ma’am, do you know where he is?” Chastity asked, leaning closer. “It’s very important.”

  Chastity saw Lillian’s posture stiffen. Heard the intake of breath, and understood. Lillian Burgard knew disaster when it showed up at her door. Lloyd was off his medication again. Lloyd was causing problems, maybe violent ones. Lillian was about to go another round with the medical system, just to lose. Again.

  Chastity reached out to Lillian’s hand where it wrapped white-knuckled around the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. Willing Lloyd’s sister to know that she understood. That she hurt for her, because she knew what kept Lillian in the shadows. Chastity might have had to deal with her own demons. Lillian Burgard would spend her life consumed by her brother’s. “I really don’t mean any trouble for Lloyd, Miss Burgard. It’s just that he might have seen my sister.”

  Lillian Burgard did no more than nod, the tears too close now.

  So Chastity pulled out another card. “My cell number,” she said, wishing this woman would let her stay. Let her offer comfort, because she had a feeling nobody was left who would bother. “If there’s anything I can do. You can call me anytime.”

  Another nod. A struggle for control.

  “He has the car,” Lillian Burgard finally said. “My Toyota Corolla. I haven’t seen him for three days.”

  Not good news on any front.

  “Has he mentioned the name Faith Stanton?” Chastity asked.

  Her stricken eyes said it all. “Nothing specific,” Lillian insisted. “Just that he thought for sure that God’s justice had been meted out. That it was her fault, and the fault of her kind.”

  “It’s okay,” Chastity assured her. “We’ll find him, Miss Burgard. We’ll do our best to help him.”

  “We’re finding your sister,” James reminded her a few minutes later when they were back in the cab. “Isn’t that more than enough for one day?”

  Chastity rubbed at her neck and sighed. “Not when they’re connected, it isn’t. Where should we go next?”<
br />
  “I can give you a lovely tour of the cemeteries up here. There’s Metairie, which used to be a racecourse, and Greenwood and Cypress Grove, where the trees are growing up right through the graves…that’s one of my favorites. It’s shady and cool, and you can smell the cypress and magnolias—”

  “And dead people. I thought Kareena was kidding when she said you were obsessed with death. She wasn’t, was she?”

  James looked seriously affronted. “Nobody should leave without seeing the cemeteries. They probably say more about this city than the Quarter. They’re sure as hell better cared for. God knows the art’s better. Some of our best statues are on tombs.” He grinned then, a mischievous twinkle that was suspicious. “Why, out at Lake Lawn, you can have them take your ashes and make pictures with ’em for you. Kinda like an eternal Etch A Sketch, yeah?”

  Chastity sighed. “And you find this amusing?”

  “You know that picture in my backseat? The Marine Corps?”

  Chastity all but climbed out of the car. “Oh, no.”

  “My friend Boots. Great old cabdriver. Fought at Tarawa.”

  There was nothing to do but laugh. “I should have known.”

  “And did I tell you that there’s a cemetery founded by the Fireman’s Benevolent Society? Now how thoughtful is that? I felt it was a sign I should never have left home.”

  Chastity just shook her head. “Do you realize that that is the greatest number of words I’ve ever heard out of your mouth?”

  James was still smiling, his face pulling oddly on his burns. “Come on, trauma nurse. You gotta admit that it’s elegant. Cradle to grave and beyond, all in the same six-mile radius. We celebrate everything in this city. You want, we can get beer and sandwiches and have a picnic on my plot. It’s right at the top of the rise under a big ole magnolia tree. Or by the big fireman statue at the entrance to Greenwood. It’s a particular favorite of mine.”

  “Maybe when we have time, fireman. As you so eloquently reminded me, we have to find my sister.”

  “And Lloyd Burgard.”

  “And Lloyd Burgard. And Willow Tolliver, and Eddie Dupre.”

  “You do put in a full day, nurse.”

  “I’m just keeping you honest, fireman.”

  Just to make sure, they made another pass at the fertility clinics. The rain, it seemed, was mightier than civil protest, because nobody was out. Eddie Dupre had already left Arlen for the day, but evidently hadn’t made it yet to his house on Royal. Just one more dead end in a maze that kept on growing.

  Chastity and James didn’t make it to Jackson Square until well after dusk. The air was still close and hot, the sky low with scudding clouds. On the streets beyond, Chastity knew there was light and noise and music, but here at the edge of the Quarter, a kind of hushed quiet reigned. The cathedral, white and spectral in the dusk, seemed to hold the rest of the revelry back, and the trees in the square sheltered them from the traffic on Decatur.

  Chastity stopped at the edge of the square, enchanted. She wasn’t really a mystical person. She’d given up her faith with her virginity, long before she could comprehend either. If she could, though, she thought, she might look for it again here in the dark, where the trees dripped shadows and the church bells tolled into the night. Where usually raucous voices quieted to a murmur, and the only real lights were the candles that flickered on the psychics’ tables.

  If there was magic, she thought, it was here. And damn it, she didn’t have the time for it tonight.

  “Willow?” an older, tattooed white man said as he peered up from beneath a big straw hat. “Went home to Mobile, didn’t she?”

  “Biloxi,” the woman at the next table said.

  A city ordinance that restricted the psychics to one side of the square kept them bundled up here right across from the cathedral doors. The tattooed guy sat two tables in, where he advertised communion with the spirits and Indian fetishes. The woman, bedecked in flowers and enough beads to string a curtain, advertised psychic healing. She had nothing more to offer on Willow, though. Willow, it seemed, had wandered into their midst and then wandered back out. Nothing unusual about that. Half the people here had done the same, time to time.

  “You want to know where she went,” the psychic healer said with lots of teeth and kohl-rimmed eyes, “ask Tante Edie, down at the other end. She and Willow kinda became friends.”

  Chastity had already turned, James on her heel, when the woman coughed.

  “But be careful.”

  James laughed. Chastity hesitated only a moment before heading on down the line.

  She really liked it here, she thought, feeling the unbearable tension of the day begin to writhe away into the air like the humidity.

  “See dat card dere?” a harsh, deep voice demanded at the far corner of the fence. “It da Deat’ card. Mean change. Mean you gotta change you dead-end, waste-o’-you-life job, you pea brain. You a Pisces, what da hell you bein’ an accountant for? You got no head for detail, do you? Well, do you?”

  It didn’t take Chastity long to track down the voice. Some poor schlump in Hawaiian shirt and jeans was sitting at the end table like a first grader getting his knuckles rapped.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Sit up straight! I know you jus’ a fish, but even fish got a spine! Go back to school. Fin’ a job doin’ research in a jungle somewhere you don’ have to sit in no office. Now get outta here!”

  The person taking up the other chair at the table made Chastity want to laugh. She was a human hummingbird, all bright colors and quick movement. No, Chastity decided, she was in hummingbird disguise. Beneath all that color lived a walnut doll. Wrinkled, hard, and brown, with black eyes that glittered from the flickering candle she’d put before her on the bare card table.

  She had a classic layout of tarot cards spread out before her, old, big cards that seemed well used. She had twenty rings on her tiny fingers, all flashing and gleaming as she moved. She had a brindled Great Dane draped across her feet and a big cardboard sign resting against the table that said TANTE EDIE SEES ALL.

  “James,” the little woman announced in her deep voice without looking up, “you come back for more abuse, did you? I’m not gonna tell you again you got no place up on dat hill wit’ dose other dead people.”

  Her chortle was the kind Disney used to frighten children.

  James just smiled. “I brought somebody to meet you, Tante.”

  “What, don’ you like her or somethin’? You do have a tormentin’ soul in you, boy.”

  Tante was smiling to herself as she raked in the tarot cards. She’d just made a deck when she looked up.

  Then she stood up.

  It was hard to tell the difference. She still barely topped the table. The Dane, displaced, rolled on his back and watched.

  “What are you doing here?” Tante demanded, her musical accent: noticeably absent.

  Chastity felt a definite frisson slither down her back. “You know me?”

  Tante squinted in the shadows, her head tilted. “No,” she admitted. “But I know your twin. I seen her here.”

  Chastity sat herself down in the folding chair the guy in the Hawaiian shirt had just vacated. “She’s my sister,” she said.

  Tante sank back into her own chair, her dark eyes wide and staring, her tarot forgotten. “She’s dead, then. Isn’t she?”

  “My sister?”

  The little woman looked truly distressed. “My Willow. You’re here to tell me she’s dead.”

  “I don’t know. Is she missing?”

  “These last two weeks and more. Just didn’t show up one day. I told the police, but you know how it is. Wasn’t even sure it was her real name. I mean, who the hell’d name their kid Willow, ’cept somebody in a commune?” Tante shook her head and sighed. “But she’s dead. Looking at you here, I can tell.”

  Chastity couldn’t take her eyes off that sharp black gaze. She couldn’t say why she didn’t laugh at the certainty in them. “Willow was friends
with my sister?” she asked. “Faith Stanton.”

  “I know who she is. She came here one day, after lunch with her friends. Takin’ a little time for herself away from her mama. Met Willow, and ended up helping her get the money to get back to her kids. Willow thought the moon hung on that woman.”

  “You’re sure Willow didn’t get back to Mobile.”

  “Biloxi. I’m sure. And her cell been disconnected.”

  “My sister is missing, too, Tante,” Chastity said.

  Tante sat quietly a moment, just watching Chastity. Then, without a word, she reached across the table and grabbed Chastity’s hands. Chastity would swear to anyone who asked that she felt nothing. She wouldn’t lie to herself. She tried twice to pull away.

  “Did you know any of Willow’s friends from the clinic?” James asked from where he stood at Chastity’s shoulder.

  Tante never blinked. “Yeah. Some. Girl did shows at the Lotusland. Don’t know her name, though. Guy named Eddie, looks like a big gay Frankenstein fresh from the tanning bed. He’d make sure Willow ate sometimes. And Frankie Mae, of course.”

  James stilled. “Frankie?”

  Chastity was still trying to ignore the shock of contact with those gnarled little hands.

  Tante pulled her gaze from Chastity and dropped it on James. “James, sure you already talked to the cabbies. Didn’t you talk to Frankie Mae Savage?”

  “She said she didn’t know nothin’ ’bout no missing white girls.” James didn’t sound pleased.

  Tante’s grin was more frightening than her chuckle. “Where you think she got her baby boy? Ain’t no cabbage patch in Bywater. And no matter how much you pray to Yamaya and all them other pagan people Frankie got in the front of her cab, you ain’t gonna get a baby after you has your ovaries taken out. Frankie had hers yanked, she was twenty.”

  Chastity turned to James. “You know her?”

  He was not smiling. “I do.”

  “Is she by chance a black woman with short hair and a cab full of statues?”

  “That would be her.”