Then, in September, Owen Bramley came for a visit and quite by accident, almost as an afterthought, everything changed.
He arrived by train on the afternoon of the fifth and, after a brief meeting with the hotel management, joined us on the balcony outside our suite. The heat was stifling. He wore a three-piece suit, but within minutes had removed his jacket, tie, and vest and resembled the Owen Bramley I remembered, wiping his glasses on his white shirt and complicating the obvious.
“Much warmer here than it should be,” he said. “I’ve talked with several meteorologists and they all agree there is some sort of bulge in the Gulf — overlapping lows or something to that effect.”
“Drink some iced tea,” Ray said and he poured out a tall glass and handed it to Owen Bramley. “It seems to help.”
He drank the entire glass, asked for another, and got right down to business.
“I brought the photographs and negatives of the man who shot Baju. I would have delivered them sooner, but I wanted a friend of mine, a detective of sorts in San Francisco, to see what he could find out first. He found out two things — the man is nearly a ghost and he is not freelance; he works for a single person, a woman, although her identity is unknown.”
My pulse jumped and quickened. Maybe the Fleur-du-Mal had told the truth, maybe the man was working for Opari.
“The problem is,” he went on, “the photographs are ten years old. The damn man has disappeared.”
“Does he have a name?” I asked.
“No, not a proper one, anyway. Evidently, several years ago in Macao, he did some particularly nasty work that the locals referred to as ‘the work of the Weeping Widow.’ He is half Portuguese and half Chinese and supposedly an ex-eunuch, if that is even possible.”
I took the photographs and stared at the fuzzy image of the man with the razor-thin eyes, caught in the act of murder. I was hoping to find some reason or truth hidden somewhere in the picture, but I saw none of that. I only saw a killer.
Ray asked about Eder and Nova and Owen Bramley assured him they were doing fine. He said Eder, and especially Nova, did wonders for Carolina, keeping her spirits high and rejoicing in the new baby. Owen himself, though he masked it well in his speech, showed new lines of concern in his face around the eyes and mouth, and there were streaks of gray in his red hair. I couldn’t help but think that if I had been Giza, I would have shown the same lines and streaks.
At one point, he happened to notice the five phonograph players crowded together in my room and he asked about them. I glanced at Ray, who shrugged, and I had to tell him they were “gifts” from the Fleur-du-Mal, part of a game of psychological torture he was playing where the “gifts” served as a reminder that he could find us, but we could not find him.
Owen Bramley asked if they had come with any notes or messages of any kind and I told him about the discs and the same woman singing from different operas. Then, after we had exhausted every angle and nuance as to what they might mean, he asked if he could take one of the discs with him, “just for the hell of it,” he said. I carefully packed three of them and the next day they left with Owen Bramley and his luggage on his return to St. Louis.
Exactly two weeks later, on September 19, I was awakened by two loud raps on my door and told there was an urgent telephone call for me at the desk. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The temperature had dropped at least twenty-five degrees overnight and gusts of wind were blowing in through the open doors to the balcony. Ray was nowhere in sight. I closed the doors and dressed as quickly as possible, then ran down to the lobby and the telephone. There was static on the line, but I could hear Owen Bramley shouting at the other end.
“Z! Is that you? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “You’re breaking up, but I can hear you.”
“Good. Listen to me. I have amazing news.” He was excited. His voice was a full octave higher. “The girl’s name is Lily Marchand. Do you hear me? Lily Marchand,” he repeated.
“What? Who? What girl?”
“The girl on the disc, the girl singing the operas. Carolina even knows her, for God’s sake.”
“What? You’d better start at the beginning, Owen. I don’t understand.”
The static on the telephone line was getting worse. I glanced out of the front of the hotel where anything loose in the street was blowing away.
“I was playing the discs,” he said. “I was alone in Carolina’s office, Georgia’s room she calls it, and Scott Joplin burst in shouting, ‘I know that voice! I know that girl!’ He was visiting Carolina, you see, and just happened to be there, he just happened to hear it, Z. Well, of course, I said, ‘Who is it?’ and he said, ‘That’s Lily, Lily Marchand. She used to work for Carolina and disappeared right before the World’s Fair. I been lookin’ for her for two years!’ I asked him if he knew where she lived and he said he had only heard it was somewhere around New Orleans, but, and this is why I called, Z, this could be a break, he said a woman named Willie Piazza had known the family for years and might know how to find her. Do you know of this woman, Z, do you know Willie Piazza?”
“Yes,” I shouted. The line was almost all static.
“Find her,” he yelled back. “Find her and you might find—” The line went dead and Ray burst through the front door of the hotel, out of breath, which I’d never seen him, and soaking wet. Outside, sheets of rain were blowing sideways.
“Damn, Z, I missed this one,” he said and shook the water off his bowler. “I didn’t see it, feel it, nothin’!”
“Missed what?”
“The hurricane,” he said. “And she’s comin’ right now.”
The manager of the St. Louis Hotel was standing nearby and overheard. He turned to Ray.
“Did you say hurricane, son?”
“That’s right, sir,” Ray answered. And she’s a big one — still ain’t hit landfall, but she will soon and if I was you, I’d get all them shutters shut around this place.”
The manager glanced out of the window, then back at Ray. Ray held his gaze, stone-faced, and even though he wasn’t sure why, the man did as the “Weatherman” requested, clapping his hands and scrambling the staff to close the shutters and prepare for a hurricane.
I grabbed Ray by the arm and told him, hurricane or not, we had to find Willie Piazza now. Without asking me why, he slapped on his bowler and said, “Come on.”
We made our way to Storyville as best we could, corner to corner, street to street. The wind was fierce, blowing in gusts of seventy to eighty miles an hour, but it was the rain that caused the most havoc and danger. I had never seen so much rain fall so hard. Whole streets turned into rivers within minutes. Abandoned carts and automobiles were picked up and washed into buildings, causing balconies to tumble, lampposts to splinter, and windows to crash and break into shards, which were swept away in the water like flashing knives.
Somehow, we found Willie. She was hanging on to what was left of her double front doors, standing in two feet of swirling water and debris, and yelling at three men in two different languages. The men were bound together by a long rope that was anchored to the main building. All three were trying to save Willie’s big sign, which had toppled from the roof to the street and was being sucked into the rushing waters. They were fighting a losing battle.
When we got close enough, I tried to get her attention. “Willie!” I shouted. “Willie, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Not now, honey,” she shouted back. “We got a world of trouble here.”
I kept on. I was only a few feet from her, but I still had to yell. “Do you know Lily Marchand?” I asked. “Please, tell me if you do, I’ve got to find her.”