The detective he had the meeting with had asked Eli whether or not he had an expense account and named a hotel bar in the Central Business District when he said that he did. “But let’s meet at three. If you order a Ramos Gin Fizz when they’re too busy, the bartender’ll spit in it.”
The man already sitting at a small table in the dark, cool room was surprisingly slight, his face and neck above his collar the nutty color of a gardener’s. He was fifty, maybe even toward sixty, but it seemed that the lines on his face had chosen the same grooves, for his face was mostly smooth but occasionally crossed by a deep crevice: two across his forehead, one on either side of his nose, pointing down toward his chin. Rivers instead of streams.
He shook Eli’s hand without standing.
“Detective,” Eli said.
“Mouton,” the detective said.
A waiter in a white jacket arrived immediately, and Mouton ordered a pair of gin fizzes without consulting Eli. “It’s what you order here.”
While they waited for the drinks, the cop made fairly aggressive small talk, asking Eli question after question about Los Angeles, about what he thought of New Orleans, about the quality of his accommodations. Too many years interrogating people, Eli decided, or maybe the urgent need for answers — any answers — was what had brought this man to his job in the first place.
Eli disliked the drink on first sip — like a child’s beverage spiked with gin — but the second was better. He liked the foaminess of it, at least, the effort that had gone into making something that would disappear so quickly.
The detective put away nearly half of his and then launched a defense against an accusation that had not been spoken. “Look, I don’t know where you come from originally or what’s going on there, but parts of New Orleans are a fucking war zone. There’s no way we’re going to solve all the murders that will happen today much less something that happened before the storm. Nearly half the cops who left never came back, and don’t even get me started about the cops indicted or in jail for the shit that went down during the storm. Sure, a lot of the dead is just drug dealers shot by drug dealers — nobody cares. But I also got a state senator’s son shot up, and I got a nice white lady killed right front of her nice husband and kid in the front door of her nice house, for Christ’s sake. These are crimes people want solved. Your guy? Your guy doesn’t even have a name.”
“But someone does want him found,” Eli said, “or at least the painting he might have. Someone hired me. Someone paid real money for that.”
“Then I’d suggest you try to find the painting and collect your paycheck. This isn’t a case the New Orleans PD is going to give a rat’s ass about. Not trying to be an asshole here — just telling you how it is. Better than false promises is what I figure.”
When he’d started the job, one of the training lectures had been on jurisdiction. “It’s generally not like what you see on a TV cop show,” Ted had told him. “Most law enforcement agencies are happy for you to take any crime off their books.”
But Eli figured that was mostly with old thefts, nonviolent crime, and not messing around in someone’s homicide case. “So you don’t mind my asking around some?”
Mouton polished off his drink in one long draw, tenderly touching the foam mustache it left before wiping his upper lip clean. “Look, what I’m going to do is tell you if I come across anything that’ll help you. And I’ll ask you to do the same, and if you find something, I’ll look into it. But the best thing I can do for your case — the only thing likely to make any difference at all — is when I’m kneeling at the Cathedral on Sunday morning, hoping Aaron Neville comes back and sings us some more ‘Ave Maria’ or whatever — you know he’s Catholic, right?”
Eli kind of shrugged and kind of nodded, as though he knew who Aaron Neville was and might even have guessed he was Catholic.
“So I’m going to kneel during Mass and pray that whoever offed your guy gets what’s coming to him in the afterlife if not here on this disastrous planet.” He paused as the waiter delivered the check, and longer to let Eli reach for it first. “Speaking of which, you know that whoever killed your guy may well have already gone to meet his maker. Sounds like he may not have got out of town before the storm hit, right? And if he did leave, there’s probably only a small chance he’s around here. Plenty of people aren’t ever coming back. Hell, my wife evacuated to some Buddhist monastery up in Mississippi — some New Age friend of hers told her about it or something — and now she won’t come home. She says she likes being in a place where people don’t talk to her. Says she’ll need the rest of her life just to figure out all the shit people’ve already said to her.”
Johanna
The artists’ house was in the Garden District on a much more modest street than Clay’s, on the Magazine side of St. Charles and not so far up as Audubon Place. The house on the corner of the block and one across the street looked wrecked, but the exterior of this one appeared undamaged, save for the roof shingles tiled across the yard in lines that looked almost intentionally patterned.
The couple had left their art and their pet under the protection of a house sitter and air conditioning, both of which had failed when the storm had hit. Johanna knew it was bad as soon as she opened the door. Bad for the art, at least; she did not smell a decomposing animal.
Though there was no pooled water, the wool rugs squished under her feet, and the floor surrounding them was surely ruined. Pervasive dampness, felt and smelled. The light switch produced nothing. Johanna opened the living room blinds and in the added light could sense the double leaving that had occurred: the first a carefully planned and temporary relocation that had left the place tidy and the more recent haphazard one, a hasty departure motivated by fear rather than desire. Or perhaps she could read what had happened simply because she already knew — the narrative in her mind informing her perceptions. After all, it was just a wet living room: furniture, books, objects, a few paintings.
Darkness is less dangerous than light, but not always. What might have been a good idea in better circumstances or a drier climate — closing the blinds to reduce ultraviolet exposure — might prove disastrous here. Less so for drawings on paper, more so for paint on any surface. It was the husband who drew, if Johanna remembered correctly.
Johanna climbed upstairs to where the couple had said their shared studio was. The studio was singular, yes, but divided by color and relative clutter almost as though someone had drawn a line down the middle. Not quite the middle: The painter’s side was smaller as well as more spare and, paints and paintings aside, less colorful.
She spotted signs of professional care: humidity and acidity strips, carpeted risers to lift wall-stacked paintings from the ground, good-quality storage units made of polyurethane-covered plywood to keep the plywood’s acidity from migrating to the artworks within, ample sheets of tissue between works on paper and yupo horizontally stacked on a large drafting table. These artists — one or both of them — had some eye on the future. They labored with at least a hope that how they spent their days would be of interest to another generation or maybe just to some person with money at a later date.
As she looked closer, though, she saw that it was the husband more than the wife who believed in the value of his work, whether to posterity or an investor. There was very little inherent vice on his side of the room, while the wife had created much of her art with cheaper materials. Given her academic position, this choice must have been willful rather than ignorant. Perhaps there was some artist’s statement explaining a preference for making works that would degrade.