Authors: John Connolly
Bonanno bought her a place in the Garden District and began introducing her as his wife after Maria died. It probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. In the Louisiana of the late 1950s, racial segregation was a day-to-day reality. Even Louis Armstrong, who grew up in the city, could not perform with white musicians in New Orleans because the state of Louisiana prohibited racially integrated bands from playing in the city.
And so, while white men could keep black mistresses and consort with black prostitutes, a man who introduced a black woman, no matter how pale her skin, as his wife was just asking for trouble. When she gave birth to a son, Sal insisted that he bear his name and he took the child and his mother to band recitals in Jackson Square, pushing the huge white baby carriage across the grass and gurgling at his son.
Maybe Sal thought that his money would protect him; maybe he just didn’t care. He made sure that Rochelle was always protected, that she didn’t walk out alone, so that no one could come at her. But in the end, they didn’t come at Rochelle.
One hot July night in 1964, when his son was five years old, Sal Bonanno disappeared. He was found three days later, tied to a tree by the shore of Lake Cataouatche, his head almost severed from his body. It seems likely that someone decided to use his relationship with Rochelle Hines as an excuse to move in on his operation. Ownership of his clubs and bars was transferred to a business consortium with interests in Reno and Vegas.
As soon as her “husband” was found, Rochelle Hines vanished with her son and a small quantity of jewelry and cash before anyone could come after them. She resurfaced one year later in the area that would come to be called Desire, where a half sister rented a property. The death of Sal had destroyed her: she was an alcoholic and had become addicted to morphine.
It was here, among the rising projects, that Joe Bones grew up, paler yet than his mother, and made his stand against both blacks and whites since neither group would accept him as its own. There was a rage inside Joe Bones and he turned it on the world around him. By 1990, ten years after his mother’s death in a filthy cot in the projects, Joe Bones owned more bars than his father had thirty years before, and each month, planeloads of cocaine flew in from Mexico, bound for the streets of New Orleans and points north, east, and west.
“Now Joe Bones calls himself a white man, and don’t nobody differ with him,” said Morphy. “Anyway, how’s a man gonna talk with his balls in his mouth? Joe got no time for the brothers now.” He laughed quietly. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than a man who can’t get on with his in-laws.”
We stopped at a gas station and Morphy filled the tank, then came back with two sodas. We sipped them by the pumps, watching the cars go by.
“Now there’s another crew, the Fontenots, and they got their eyes on the projects too. Two brothers, David and Lionel. Family was out of Lafayette originally, I think—still got ties there—but came to New Orleans in the twenties. The Fontenots are ambitious, violent, and they think maybe Bonanno’s time has come. All of this has been coming to a head for about a year now, and maybe the Fontenots have a piece of work planned for Joe Bones.”
The Fontenots were not young men—they were both in their forties—but they had gradually established themselves in Louisiana and now operated out of a compound in Delacroix guarded by wire and dogs and armed men, including a hardcore of Cajuns from back in Acadiana. They were into gambling, prostitution, some drugs. They owned bars in Baton Rouge, one or two others in Lafayette. If they could take out Joe Bones, it was likely that they would muscle in on the drugs market in a big way.
“You know anything about the Cajuns?” asked Morphy.
“No, not beyond their music.”
“They’re a persecuted minority in this state and in Texas. During the oil boom, they couldn’t get any work because the Texans refused to employ coon asses. Most of them did what we all do when times are tough: they knuckled down and made the best of things. There were clashes with the blacks, because the blacks and the Cajuns were competing for the same few jobs, and some bad things went down, but most people just did what they could to keep body and soul together without breaking too many laws.
“Roland Fontenot—that’s the grandfather—he left all that behind when he came to New Orleans, following some other obscure branch of the family. But the boys, they never forgot their roots. When things were bad in the seventies, they gathered a pretty disaffected bunch around them—a lot of young Cajuns, some blacks—and somehow kept the mixture from blowing up in their faces.” Morphy drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “Sometimes I think maybe we’re all responsible for the Fontenots. They’re a visitation on us, because of the way their people were treated. I think maybe Joe Bones is a visitation too, a reminder of what happens when you grind a section of the population into the dirt.”
Joe Bones had a vicious streak, said Morphy. He once killed a man by slowly burning him with acid over the space of an afternoon and was thought by some to be missing part of his brain, the part that controlled unreasonable actions in most men. The Fontenots were different. They killed, but they killed like businessmen closing down an unprofitable or unsatisfactory operation. They killed joylessly, but professionally. In Morphy’s view, the Fontenots and Joe Bones were all bad. They just had different ways of expressing it.
I finished my soda and trashed the can. Morphy wasn’t the type to spin a yarn for its own sake. All of this was leading up to something.
“What’s the point, Morphy?” I asked.
“The point is, the fingerprint that was found at
Tante
Marie’s belongs to Tony Remarr. He’s one of Joe Bones’s men.” I thought about that as he started the car and pulled into the street, trying to match the name to any incident that might have occurred back in New York, anything that might connect me to Remarr. I found nothing.
“You think he did it?” Morphy asked.
“Do you?”
“No, no way. At first I thought, yeah, maybe. You know, the old woman, she owned that land. Wouldn’t have taken much drainage work to make something of it.”
“If a man was considering opening a big hotel and building a leisure center.”
“Exactly, or if he wanted to convince someone he was serious enough about it to dump some bricks there. I mean, swamp’s swamp. Assuming he could get permission to build, who wants to share the warm evening air with critters even God regrets making?
“Anyway, the old woman wouldn’t sell. She was shrewd. Her people have been buried out there for generations. The original landowner, an old Southern type who traced his ancestry back to the Bourbons, died in sixty-nine. He stipulated in his will that the land should be offered for sale at a reasonable rate to the existing tenants.
“Now most of the tenants were Aguillards and they bought that land with all the money they had. The old woman, she made all the decisions for them. Their ancestors are there and they have a history with that land going back to the time when they wore chains around their ankles and dug channels through the dirt with their bare hands.”
“So Bonanno had been putting pressure on her to sell up, but she wouldn’t, so he decided to take things a step further,” I said.
Morphy nodded. “I figure maybe Remarr was sent out to put more than pressure on her—maybe he’s going to threaten the girl or some of the children, maybe even kill one of them—but when he arrives she’s already dead. And maybe Remarr gets careless from the shock, thinks he hasn’t left any traces, and heads off into the night.”
“Does Woolrich know all this?”
“Most of it, yeah.”
“You bringing Bonanno in?”
“Brought him in last night and let him go an hour later, accompanied by a fancy lawyer called Rufus Thibodeaux. He ain’t movin’, says he ain’t seen Remarr for three or four days. Says he wants to find Remarr as much as anyone, something about money from some deal out in West Baton Rouge. It’s bullshit, but he’s sticking with the story. I think Woolrich is going to try to put some pressure on his operations through Anti-Racketeering and Narcotics, put the squeeze on him to see if he can change his mind.”
“That could take time.”
“You got a better idea?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
Morphy’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t be fuckin’ with Joe Bones, now, y’hear? Joe ain’t like your boys back in New York, sittin’ in social clubs in Little Italy with their fingers curled around the handles of espresso cups, dreaming about the days when everyone respected them. Joe don’t got no time for that. Joe don’t want folks to respect him; Joe wants folks to be scared to death of him.”
We turned onto Esplanade. Morphy signaled and pulled in about two blocks from the Flaisance. He stared out the window, tapping the index finger of his right hand against the steering wheel to some internal rhythm in his head. I sensed he had something more to say. I decided to let him say it in his own time.
“You’ve spoken to this guy, the guy who took your wife and kid, right?”
I nodded.
“It’s the same guy? The same guy who did Tee Jean and the old woman?”
“He called me yesterday. It’s him.”
“He say anything?”
“The feds have it on tape. He says he’s going to do more.”
Morphy rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. I knew he was seeing
Tante
Marie in his head again.
“You going to stay here?”
“For a while, yes.”
“Could be the feds ain’t gonna like it.”
I smiled. “I know.”
Morphy smiled back. He reached beneath his seat and handed me a long brown envelope. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. I slipped the envelope under my jacket and stepped from the car. He gave a small wave as he drove away through the midday crowd.
I opened the envelope in my hotel room. Inside were a set of crime scene pictures and photocopied extracts of the police reports, all stapled together. Stapled separately was a copy of the coroner’s report. One section had been emphasized with a luminous yellow felt tip.
The coroner had found traces of ketamine hydrochloride in the bodies of
Tante
Marie and Tee Jean, equivalent to a dosage of one milligram per two pounds of weight. According to the report, ketamine was an unusual drug, a special type of anesthetic used for some minor surgical procedures. No one was too clear on its precise mode of action apart from the fact that it was a PCP analogue and worked on sites in the brain, affecting the central nervous system.
It was becoming the drug of choice in the clubs of New York and L.A. while I was still on the force, usually in capsules or tabs made by heating the liquid anesthetic to evaporate the water, leaving ketamine crystals. Users described a ketamine trip as “swimming in the K pool” since it distorted the perception of the body, creating a feeling that the user was floating in a soft yet supportive medium. Other side effects included hallucinations, distortions in the perception of space and time, and out-of-body experiences.
What the coroner did note was that ketamine could be used as a chemical restrainer on animals, since it induced paralysis and dulled pain while allowing the normal pharyngeal-laryngeal reflexes to continue. It was for this purpose, he surmised, that the killer had injected both
Tante
Marie and Tee Jean Aguillard with the drug.
When they were flayed and anatomized, the report concluded,
Tante
Marie and her son had been fully conscious.
W
HEN
I
HAD FINISHED
reading the coroner’s report, I put on my sweats and running shoes and did about four miles on Riverfront Park, back and forth past the crowds lining up to take a trip on the Natchez paddle steamer, the sound of its wheezing calliope sending tunes like messengers across the Mississippi. I was thick with sweat when I was done, and my knees ached. Even three years ago, four miles wouldn’t have troubled me to such a degree. I was getting old. Soon, I’d be looking at wheelchairs and feeling impending rain in my joints.
Back at the Flaisance, Rachel Wolfe had left a message to say that she would be flying in later that evening. The flight number and the arrival time were listed at the bottom of the message slip. I thought about Joe Bones and decided then that Rachel Wolfe might like some company on the flight down to New Orleans.
I called Angel and Louis.
The Aguillard family collected the bodies of
Tante
Marie, Tee Jean, and Florence later that day. A firm of Lafayette undertakers placed
Tante
Marie’s coffin into a wide-back hearse. Tee Jean and Florence lay side by side in a second.
The Aguillards, led by the eldest son, Raymond, and accompanied by a small group of family friends, followed the hearses in a trio of pickup trucks, dark-skinned men and women seated on pieces of sackcloth amid machine parts and farm tools. I stayed behind them as they slipped from the highway and made their way down the rutted track, past
Tante
Marie’s, where the police tape fluttered lightly in the breeze, and on to the house of Raymond Aguillard.
He was a tall, large-boned man in his late forties or early fifties, running to fat now but still an imposing figure. He wore a dark cotton suit, a white shirt, and a slim black tie. His eyes were red rimmed from crying. I had seen him briefly at
Tante
Marie’s the night the bodies were found, a strong man trying to hold his family together in the face of violent loss.
He spotted me as the coffins were unloaded and carried toward the house, a small group of men struggling with
Tante
Marie. I stood out, since I was the only white face in the crowd. A woman, probably one of
Tante
Marie’s daughters, shot me a cold look as she passed by, a pair of older women at each shoulder. When the bodies had been carried into the house, a raised, slatted-wood building not unlike the home of
Tante
Marie herself, Raymond kissed a small cross around his neck and walked slowly toward me.
“I know who you are,” he said, as I extended my hand. He paused for a moment before taking it in a short, firm grip.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “sorry about it all.”
He nodded. “I know that.” He walked on, past the white fence at the boundary of the house, and stood by the side of the road, staring out at the empty stretch of track. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wing beats slowing as they approached the water below. Raymond watched them with a kind of envy, the envy that a man deeply grieving feels for anything untouched by his sorrow.
“Some of my sisters, they think maybe you brought this man with you. They think you got no right to be here.”
“Is that what you think?”
He didn’t answer. Then: “She felt him comin’. Maybe that’s why she sent Florence to the party, to get her away from him. And that’s why she sent for you: she felt him comin’ and I think she knowed who he was. Deep down, I think she knowed.” His voice sounded thick in his throat.
He fingered the cross gently, rubbing his thumb back and forth along its length. I could see that it had originally been ornately carved—it was still possible to discern some details of spirals at its edges—but for the most part it had been rubbed smooth by the action of this man’s hand over many years.
“I don’t blame you for what happened to my momma and my brother and sister. My momma, she always done what she believed was right. She wanted to find that girl and to stop the man that killed her. And that Tee Jean…” He smiled sadly. “The policeman said that he’d been hit three, maybe four times from behind, and there were still bruises on his knuckles where he tried to fight this man.”
Raymond coughed and then breathed deeply through his mouth, his head tipped back slightly like a man who has run a great distance in pain.
“He took your woman, your child?” he said. It was as much a statement as a question, but I answered it anyway.
“Yes, he took them. Like you said,
Tante
Marie believed that he took another girl too.”
He dug the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the corners of his eyes and blinked out a tear.
“I know. I seen her.”
The world around me seemed to grow silent as I shut out the noise of the birds, the wind in the trees, the distant sound of water splashing on the banks. All I wanted to hear was Raymond Aguillard’s voice.
“You saw the girl?”
“That’s what I said. Down by a slough in Honey Island, three nights ago. Night before my momma died. Seen her other times too. My sister’s husband, he got hisself some traps down there.” He shrugged. Honey Island was a nature reserve. “You a superstitious man, Mista Parker?”
“I’m getting there,” I replied. “You think that’s where she is, down in Honey Island?”
“Could be. My momma’d say she didn’t know where she was, just
that
she was. She knew the girl was out there somewhere. I just don’t know how, Mista Parker. I never did understand my momma’s gift. But then I seen her, a figure out by a cypress grove and a kinda darkness over her face, like a hand was coverin’ it, and I knowed it was her.”
He looked down and, with the toe of his shoe, began picking at a stone embedded in the dirt. When he eventually freed it, sending it skidding into the grass, tiny black ants scurried and crawled from the hole, the entrance to their nest now fully exposed.
“Other people seen her too, I hear, folks out fishin’ or checking the hooch they got distillin’ in a shack some-wheres.” He watched as the ants swarmed around his foot, some of them climbing onto the rim of his sole. Gently, he lifted his foot, shook it, and moved it away.
There were seventy thousand acres of Honey Island, Raymond explained. It was the second-biggest swamp in Louisiana, forty miles long and eight miles wide. It was part of the floodplain of the Pearl River, which acts as a boundary line between Louisiana and Mississippi. Honey Island was better preserved than the Florida Everglades: there was no dredging allowed, no draining or timber farming, no development and no dams, and parts of Honey Island weren’t even navigable. Half of it was state owned; some was the responsibility of the Nature Conservancy. If someone was trying to dump a body in a place where it was unlikely to be discovered, then, tourist boats apart, Honey Island sounded like a good place to do it.
Raymond gave me directions to the slough and drew a rough map on the back of an opened-out Marlboro pack.
“Mista Parker, I know you’re a good man and that you’re sorry for what happened, but I’d be grateful to you if you didn’t come out here no more.” He spoke softly, but there was no mistaking the force in his voice. “And maybe you’d be kind enough not to turn up at the burial. My family, it’s gonna take us a long time to get over this.”
Then he lit the last cigarette from the pack, nodded a good-bye, and walked back to his house trailing smoke behind him.
I watched him as he walked away. A woman with steel-gray hair came out to the porch and placed her arm around his waist when he reached her. He put a big arm around her shoulders and held her to him as they walked into the house, the screen door closing gently behind them. And I thought of Honey Island and the secrets that it held beneath its green waters as I drove away from the Aguillard house, the dust rising behind me.
As I drove, the swamp was already preparing to reveal its secrets. Honey Island would yield a body within twenty-four hours, but it would not be the body of a girl.