The Lazarus Heart (20 page)

"And the next fucking day Vince Norris cuts his throat. Vince Norris was Jim Unger's partner."

"Vincent Norris was also as crazy as a loon, Frank." Wallace makes circles around one ear with an index finger.

"Then we get the body in the park this morning . . ."

"If you wanna call that a body," Wallace says, and swipes at the windshield with his hand again.

". . . along with a line from 'The Raven,' and barely an hour later we hear that Jim Unger's dead."

"So now you're thinkin' maybe it wasn't Colonel Mustard in the library with the wrench after all."

The cigarette lighter pops and Frank lights the Lucky Strike from its glowing red- orange coil.

"You're the most sarcastic fuck I've ever met, Wally," he says, trying to sound as though he isn't afraid, as though none of this shit's getting through his defenses.

Frank exhales and looks out

at the storm, the clouds, and the wind-tossed trees. The wind buffets the Ford and he can tell Wallace is having trouble keeping the car on the road.

"It's one of my finer qualities," Wallace says with a grin. "Keeps me from havin' to go suckin' on my own rod, like the recently deceased Detective Unger back there."

Frank takes another deep drag off his cigarette and watches the clouds, remembering what the storm looked like on the Weather Channel satellite photos.

When Jared opens his eyes the crow is still huddled on his shoulder, crouched close to his face as if maybe she can steal body heat he doesn't have to give.

"Where are we?" he asks her. The crow makes a soft bird sound deep in her throat.

It's still raining. Jared is starting to think that maybe it's been raining forever and his memories of sunlight are as unreal as his memories of life. He hasn't been asleep, but he feels as though he has dreamed. He doesn't remember leaving the row of oleander bushes in Metairie, but the street signs tell him that he's back in the French Quarter. The cobblestone street shimmers under an inch of water, a straight and narrow river fed by the sky and gutters and the crystal cascades falling from the roofs.

He wants to lie down in the street, imagines the water carrying him away in small bits and pieces, taking apart his body and mind, all the pain, until there's nothing left but a greasy, iridescent stain. Before long that would be gone as well.

"Hey, mister!" someone yells. Jared sees a black face gazing out from an upstairs window. The face floats and bobs inside a rectangle of shadow framed in pink stucco, and then the man shouts at him again.

"Ain't you got the sense to come in outta the rain? Ain't you heard there's a hurricane comin'?"

I ain't even got the sense to stay dead,
Jared thinks.
What do you expect from a zombie that ain't even got enough sense to stay dead?

"And why you dressed like that? This ain't Mardi Gras, you know! Hey! Your bird's gettin' wet!"

Jared waves at the man, turns away from the window. Rain rolls off Benny's black latex frock coat and is lost in the downpour, drips from the jester mask that Jared doesn't remember putting back on. He wades to the sidewalk and stands in the minimal shelter of an awning outside a shop that sells herbs and voodoo potions. There are no lights on inside the shop. Jared stands there a moment, staring at his reflection in the shop's display window.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing.. .

Jared touches the sharp chin of the leather face hiding his own. His reflection follows his example.

"You gonna get washed away, mister!" the man shouts behind him, and then laughs, a hoarse braying laugh. "Michael gonna wash you
both
all the way to the sea!"

A long black car rolls by, parting the river that flows down Toulouse Street, spraying the sidewalk and Jared as it passes. He turns, catching a brief glimpse of the driver through the Oldsmobile's window. The face is narrow, pinched, with hollow, hungry cheeks; that face tugs at his lazy memory and now Jared knows why he's come back to the French Quarter. Knows a name to put with the face: John Henry Harrod, the district attorney who personally handled his prosecution, the man who sat on the other side of the courtroom and nailed together his doom from scraps of coincidence and lies while Benny's murderer walked the streets somewhere, unpunished, exonerated by default, and free to kill again.

The Oldsmobile turns into a private driveway and Jared and the crow are alone again. For the moment, at least, the man in the window seems to have lost interest in them.

"I bet that son of a bitch isn't on the agenda either, is he?" Jared asks the crow.

He already knows the answer before she replies.

"Then we'll just take another little detour while you're figuring out exactly who the hell
is,"
Jared says. The bird responds with an earsplitting
caw-caw
that makes Jared's head ache.

"Fine with me. Thanks for finding the asshole-I can take care of the rest myself." He reaches up and brushes the bird off his shoulder. She flutters under the awning for a second before flying away through the rain toward the rooftops.

"Hey, man! There go your bird!" the face in the window shouts. Jared ignores him, walks to the spot where the car turned in, a black iron gate set into a high brick wall. Jared grips the bars and presses his face to them, stares through a thick grove of windblown banana plants and rhododendrons. He can see the Olds, parked and empty now, in front of a cottage almost completely hidden by the garden. The storm makes wet flapping sounds in the big leaves of the tropical plants, sounds like the desperate flippers of deep-sea things beached and drowning in air.

Just like prison,
he thinks. The thought makes him take a step back from the bars.

No, sir.
Not
just like prison. Nothing is ever going to be just like prison again.

And scaling the wall is more of an idea than an effort, a problem he solves without knowing or caring precisely how. But he lands slightly off balance, slips, and realizes too late that someone has taken the precautionary measure of studding the top of the wall with jagged shards of broken glass, translucent teeth secure in cement gums, glass that slices his hands as he falls. Jared lands in one of the rhododendrons and clutches his injured hands to his chest. There's a deep gash across his right palm and a puncture straight through his left. The blood flows out as if from stigmata and is immediately thinned by the rain, diluted before it drips to the broad green leaves and the dark and muddy earth.
A ghost that bleeds,
he thinks.
What fucking good is that supposed to be?
He squeezes his palms shut, squeezes hard against the pain. The big leaves overhead bestow a little shelter from the storm and Jared lies there until he finds the will to get up, the will to keep going. It helps to recall the thin face from the black Oldsmobile, the face from the courtroom, so he stares up into the angry sky and thinks about John Harrod.

Eventually, inevitably, they put Lucrece on the stand.

Early on, when his own attorneys had suggested her as a character witness, Jared had flatly refused. When they'd asked again, he had threatened to change his plea to guilty unless they shut up about her. No way he was going to put her through that. "And besides," he'd added bitterly, "she's just another freak for this fucking sideshow. What good is one freak's word in defense of another freak? We're all in this together, you know?"

So it was the prosectrtion who finally put Lucrece in the center ring, District Attorney John H. Harrod, who'd backed former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke in his

1991 bid for the governorship of Louisiana. Who'd more recently made political allies of Ralph Reed and his Christian Coalition and who'd gone as far as pledging to "clean up" the Quarter. Of course, he hadn't actually done much in the way of fulfilling that pledge: just a couple of porno busts staged for the media, the arrest of one shopkeeper who sold glass pipes, more hookers and hustlers spending the night in lockup.

Harmless token gestures amplified by the press and nothing much more, until one of the highest-profile homicide cases in the city's murder-haunted history had fallen into his lap. A string of brutal killings apparently committed by a man one local radio pundit had already labeled "a pornographer of the sickest sort, masquerading as an
artiste."

The fact that all the killer's victims were drag queens, cross-dressers, or transsexuals made the matter a little delicate. After all, Harrod couldn't very well be seen as defending the sort of perverts he'd promised to rid the city of. But it had taken only a little semantic footwork to fix that. The very fact that New Orleans harbored the sort of deviant individuals who attracted sexual predators like Jared Poe was surely proof in and of itself that the city needed to be cleaned up.

And Lucrece had been only a little more grist for his political mill, one more life he could ruin in the name of wholesome family values. So he put her on the stand, the prosecution's last witness before they rested their case against Jared Poe. His lawyers objected, claiming Lucrece was irrelevant and prejudicial and still too grief-stricken by her brother's death to possibly be of any help to anyone. The judge overruled the defense's objection. Lucrece did as she was told, swore on the Bible she didn't believe in, sat up straight, and tried to make a brave face for John Harrod.

Harrod lingered over his papers a moment, pretending to ponder some detail or another, giving the jury time to get a good look at Lucrece. She'd dressed as conservatively as her wardrobe permitted: a plain black dress with a long skirt, her hair pulled back into a neat chignon. She had removed the omnipresent black from her nails and lips and wore none of her usual jewelry except a simple garnet ring that Benny had given her years ago.

It made Jared sick and furious to see her put on display like that, straining to pass as normal for a lot of norm motherfuckers who had already made up their narrow minds about her. To see her going through hell to try to save his ass when this trial was just a nicety anyway. He stood up, wrestling free of one of his lawyers.

"Please don't do this, Lucrece," he said, but the judge was already banging his gavel, calling for order. There were hands on Jared, pulling him back down into his seat.

"It doesn't matter
what
you say, Lucrece," Jared pleaded. "They'll make it mean whatever they want! Whatever they need it to mean! You can't save me!"

"Oh, Jared," she whispered, close to tears, and then the judge threatened to have Jared removed from the courtroom if he couldn't control himself That was enough to shut him up, the thought of Lucrece being left alone with Harrod, alone with his manipulating questions and innuendo and no one there who gave a shit what he said or did to her.

Harrod glanced at Jared and smiled, and Jared bit a ragged hole in his bottom lip to keep himself from telling the DA to go fuck himself.

"So," Harrod said, straightening his tie, "Ms. DuBois. You're the
sister
of the deceased, correct?"

Lucrece swallowed once and said, "Yes," very quietly.

"Excuse me, Ms. DuBois, but I didn't quite hear you and I'm afraid the rest of the court may not have heard you. Could you please repeat your answer?"

"I said yes," Lucrece said, and Harrod nodded.

"Thank you, Ms. DuBois. But the truth is that you weren't always Benjamin DuBois's sister, isn't that correct? You weren't
born
his sister."

Lucrece didn't answer this time, looked nervously down at her hands and then out at the crowded courtroom.

"Ms. DuBois? Do you need me to repeat the question?" "No," she said. "I heard you."

"But you didn't answer me, Ms. DuBois." Harrod took a step closer to the bench. "Were you
born
Benjamin DuBois's sister?"

"I guess that's a matter of opinion," Lucrece replied.

"Isn't it true that the name your mother gave you at birth, your
Christian
name, is Lucas Wesley DuBois?"

"I changed my name. Legally," Lucrece said.

"When you stopped being Benjamin DuBois's brother and decided to be his sister," Harrod said, looking toward the jurors' box as he spoke.

"Mr. Harrod,
I am a
transsexual. I underwent sex reassignment surgery years ago.

Is that what Jared's on trial for? My sex change?"

There was tense laughter from the crowd and Harrod smiled again, nodded, and turned to face Lucrece.

"No, Ms. DuBois. I just wanted to be sure that these men and women understood your relationship to the deceased, that's all."

"I was always Benny's sister," she said.

Speaking straight to the jury, Harrod responded, "I guess that's a matter of opinion." He was rewarded with a second round of laughter.

"Now, Ms. DuBois, how would you characterize your relationship with the accused?"

Lucrece hesitated a moment, aware that every question was a snare, every answer a weapon to be used against Jared.

"Jared is my brother-in-law and friend," she said. "He's your brother-in-
law
?"

"He was..." and Lucrece stopped, took a breath, and continued. "He is my brother's husband."

"But not
legally,
Ms. DuBois," Harrod said. "Because marriage between two men, two
homosexual
men, is not legal in the state of Louisiana. So Jared Poe cannot possibly be your brother-in-
law
, now can he?"

Harvey Etienne, one of Jared's two attorneys, stood up and objected. He tapped the eraser end of a pencil against the table as he spoke.

"Your Honor," he said, "this line of questioning is immaterial. Unless I'm mistaken, homosexual marriage is not on trial this afternoon."

The judge frowned gravely, peered down at Harvey Etienne through his thick bifocals.

"I see no particular harm in allowing counsel for the prosecution to pursue this line of inquiry as long as Mr. Harrod does eventually get to the point."

"As I will shortly, Your Honor," John Harrod assured the judge.

"Then proceed, Mr. Harrod," the judge said, and Harvey Etienne sat down again. "So . . . your brother and Mr. Poe were
not
married-"