Phelipeaux Inlet
An hour’s boat ride from New Orleans
3:00 a.m. today
Afterward, I thought of ways to save her. It’s an old man’s fantasy, you see. Going back. Playing what if. A way to keep yourself sane during the long unending years that follow losing a woman like that. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t go back. You can’t do things over. There is only, ever, right now.
And in this particular moment I’m standing at the edge of a mass grave, at three in the morning, flanked by adolescent boys. I paid them to bring me here. Half up front and half when we’re back at the Orleans Marina. And if they aren’t stoned already, I’m certain they will be by lunchtime. Two hundred dollars goes a long way on Bourbon Street.
As for me, I came here to find a body. But I can’t find the body until I find the burial manifest. And that will require a number of felonious acts, not the least of which includes breaking and entering. Thus the boys. Two of them. Carlos and Wyatt. Or Piss and Vinegar, as I came to think of them on our choppy ride up the Mississippi.
“It’s dark as shit,” Piss says behind me.
“It’s the middle of the night, dumbass.” Vinegar is scared, and that makes him loud. Brash. It also makes him dangerous, but beggars can’t be choosers.
“Vinny,” I say, searching out his tall, arrogant form in the darkness. “I’m calling you Vinny from now on. Vinegar is a stupid name.”
“My name’s Carlos,” Vinny says, and then turns to Piss. “Old man’s gone batshit crazy.”
I’m not so old that I don’t enjoy the hint of fear in his voice—a stutter at the end of each hard consonant.
Piss shrugs beside me. “Old man has the money. Who cares?”
“Old man has a name,” I say.
Neither of them asks.
Baker. Henri Baker. Detective Henri Baker, thank-you-very-goddamn-much-for-asking.
Vinny turns this way and that, peering into the varying shades of blackness, and asks, “Where we going?”
“That way.” I point toward the deeper shadows. Beyond them lie a road and a church, a building filled with decaying shoes, and our destination: an abandoned chateau turned insane asylum turned records depository.
Two things I required of Piss: that he secure the motorboat, and that he bring the flashlights. He passes them out now, handing mine to me rather than tossing it like he does to Vinny. I resent this and I yank it out of his hand. Then I turn and lead the way, carefully skirting the open trench that lies to our right.
I’ve grown accustomed to death over the last four decades, but still the bodies make me nervous. A row of coffins is stacked three deep and two wide at the bottom of the hole. Names are scrawled on the side of each pine box in the off chance that someone comes to claim them. They are covered, loosely, by sheets of plywood, waiting for a few more dearly departed to fill the trench so it can be covered over with the loamy soil. A work detail from the Louisiana State Penitentiary—or the Potter’s Navy, as they call themselves—won’t fill in the trench until it’s full, most likely tomorrow by the look of things.
Vinny makes the sign of the cross as he passes the coffins, and my heart clenches. Suddenly June is beside me. I can feel her as I navigate all this death. I can almost see her long, thin fingers flutter across her chest as she tiptoes through this eerie place, praying for the dead. God, our father, your power brings us to birth. My beautiful wife—nothing more than ghost and memory. Your providence guides our lives, by your command we return to dust. Pronounces blessing on the nameless dead beneath my feet. Lord, those who die still live in your presence, their lives change but do not end. Petitions for all the souls known to God alone. May they rejoice in your kingdom, all our tears are washed away.
If there’s a lonelier place on earth, I’ve never seen it. Phelipeaux Inlet is accessible only by water and boasts a population of twenty thousand: all of them dead. This is where New Orleans dumps her forgotten souls. The misfits are buried here. The drug addicts and prostitutes and runaways. Unclaimed. Abandoned. Misplaced. Don’t know what it means to sign papers for a “city burial” when you’re standing in the morgue, broke and desperate and trembling from the shock of identifying your loved one? This is it. Where they send the remains. You’ll never be able to lay flowers on the grave, however. Phelipeaux Inlet is not open to the public. As a matter of fact, admittance is forbidden without written permission from the Louisiana Department of Corrections.
Trespassing.
Add that to my list of crimes.
Forty years ago, a body was found by divers beneath the pier at Orleans Marina. It was chained to a fifty-pound cinder block. Poor bastard sunk like a stone. And he might have stayed there forever—little more than bones and rotted clothing—if city planners hadn’t decided that the marina needed some beautification. The skeleton was intact. Male. Middle-aged. And completely unidentifiable. The only thing they could determine for sure was cause of death: blunt-force trauma to the head. The body was sent here in a burlap sack marked John Doe. And I will not leave this cemetery until I learn exactly where they buried him.
I believe Phelipeaux Inlet to be the final resting place of the missing and long-assumed-dead gangster Bertrand Guidry. He’s the one stuffed in that burlap sack. I’m certain of it. I know the date of his death: June 14, 1977. I know the murder weapon: a cast iron skillet. And I know why my wife killed him.
Shit.
“Don’t do that!” I holler at Vinny. He’s kicking a short, white burial marker. There are no headstones in this cemetery, only steel posts stuck in the dirt like Burma Shave signs for the dead. This one reads 173 and it’s listing heavily to the side after Vinny’s repeated attacks.
“Why do you care?” He stomps it again. In the beam from my flashlight I can see the soil around its base crumbling, showing the gnarled roots of a clump of grass.
“Have a little respect for the dead.”
“Fuck.” Kick. “The.” Kick. “Dead.” Kick. With every word Vinny smashes his boot against the post even harder.
Vinny is young and arrogant, and his back is turned to me. When he lifts his foot to deliver another blow, I knock his other leg out from under him. He lands, hard, on his back. I’m quicker than I should be, what with the age and arthritis and a general case of I-don’t-give-a-shit-anymore. I’ve got one foot pressed against his head, shoving it to the ground, before he can even roll onto his side.
The toe of my polished loafer digs into his temple. “You like that?” I ask.
Vinny thrashes on the ground, and Piss just looks at me, stunned. “You like messing with the dead? Go ahead. There’s one about twelve inches beneath your mangy skull.”
“Get the fuck off me, you fucking old man!”
“Stop using that word. It’s rude.”
“Fuck you.”
I press harder.
He screams, flailing his arms and legs. “Okay, I’ll stop. Shit. I’ll stop.”
“Say, ‘Please.’”
“Please.”
“Say, ‘Please, Detective Baker.’”
Both boys freeze. Piss takes a step backward and throws a look over my shoulder to where he dragged the boat onto the shore not long ago.
“You’re a cop?” Vinny whines. “You didn’t say you were a cop!”
“You didn’t ask. But since you’re curious, New Orleans PD. Retired. Does that bother you?”
His head shakes beneath my foot. “No. Not at all.”
“You want up?”
“Yes, please.” He pauses and then adds, “Detective.”
“You still want the rest of your money?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t get it until we’re back at the marina.”
“Right,” Vinny says.
“So no more problems?”
“None.”
I lift my foot and step away.
Vinny scrambles to his feet, shoulders squared, and turns back to the boat. He gives me the one-fingered salute and shouts over his shoulder, “Fuck you, old man! I did my part. I got you here. Find me when you’re done.”
Piss found the boat and brought the flashlights, but Vinny is the genius with maps. He’s the one who navigated the river and the estuaries and brought us to the inlet without a single wrong turn. I don’t need him for the next part. Let him sit and pout, for all I care.
“This way,” I say to Piss and turn my flashlight toward the overgrown road that leads into the cypress forest. The trees look humanoid in the dark, with their bulbous trunks and fingerlike roots, as if they might stand up and start moving toward us at any moment. The air smells of moss and river and damp soil. It smells like the sweat of a teenage boy.
Piss looks back toward the boat. Vinny sits in the prow, scowling at us. “What if he leaves without us?”
“He won’t.”
“But—”
“He won’t.”
“Whatever you say, old man. Now where are we going?”
“To commit a felony.”
Piss grins for the first time since we pulled ashore. There’s a gap between his front teeth wide enough to spit through, and I think this makes him look younger somehow. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I specialize in felonies.”
I’d be lying if I said this surprised me. He’s the sort of kid I’d have enlisted as an informant if I was still on the force.
It takes us less than ten minutes to hike across the quiet, overgrown inlet. We can see only as far as the beam of our flashlights will reach, but the road is clear enough. After a while we pass a redbrick chapel drowning in vines. It’s an empty nest of a building, front door boarded with plywood, stained-glass windows pitted by the straight aim of vandals. No one prays there anymore.
And yet June would have loved it, would have insisted on stopping. Isn’t it sad? Isn’t it lovely? she would whisper, and grab my hand. She’d climb through one of the low windows to inhale the scent of decaying wood and damp stone, kneel before the altar, and breathe prayers—for me, perhaps. God knows I need them.
My body aches, desperate for her phantom touch, the way she’d tug my earlobe between thumb and forefinger. Her cool hand at the base of my neck. Feet tucked between my calves as she slept. Anything. Everything. I miss the entirety of her. Forty years has not diminished this longing.
We move on, and the chapel is soon hidden behind a bend in the road. It’s a bit lighter now, getting closer to dawn, and the vision of my wife evaporates. Her departure is like pulling the scab from an aging wound, one I pick constantly to keep the pain fresh.
Another building comes into view—a workhouse where the female inmates of Bergeron Asylum were put to work re-soling shoes. I am told that the floor is piled with hundreds of rotting shoes, that it looks like a cobbler’s nightmare inside. But I don’t care about the workhouse tonight. I’m looking for the asylum itself, the former Bergeron Chateau. A century-old, three-story brick manor built to look like a sprawling home in the French countryside. It became an asylum when its owner, Sabine Bergeron, began seeing snakes on the walls. Until her death, she was the only patient. Afterward, her family realized they could make a fortune housing New Orleans’ psychotic upper crust. Then, decades later, the city bought the entire three-hundred-acre estate and turned it into a taxpayer-funded cemetery.
Another bend in the road and the Chateau looms before us, dark and imposing. At one point the house was blocked by heavy, wrought-iron gates, but these have come loose from their posts and hang lopsided at either side of the driveway. Weeds have choked out the lawn, and vines cover much of the building.
Once burials became the primary function of Phelipeaux Inlet, the Chateau fell into disrepair. It is, apparently, bad form to house the mentally ill in the same location they will most likely be buried after one too many shock treatments. I have elected not to tell Piss most of what has happened here over the years. Adolescent boys are famous for their lack of courage. So it is with complete ignorance that he struts down the driveway, up the crumbling steps, and picks the single padlock barring us from the Chateau.
The doors swing open with a groan and reveal a cavernous entry hall filled with cobwebs, scattered leaves, and the smell of mildew. Beneath the clutter I can see patches of a large tile mosaic on the floor. Swirling bits of green and yellow tile are illuminated in the beam of my flashlight. I think they might be vines or a wreath, and I understand why Sabine Bergeron lost her ever-loving mind. I’d start seeing snakes on the walls, too, if I spent the better part of my life trapped in this house staring at something like that.
“There,” I say, pointing to a set of closed doors on the right. “The records room.”
The heavy French doors are swollen shut, and it takes both of us yanking on them with all our strength before they wheeze outward. Inside are tables and file cabinets and crates piled high with leather-bound books. There is no apparent order, no rhyme or reason to where things are placed. Unlike most archives, you will not find a card catalog or sections of any kind. There are only piles and piles of log books.
“You’re kidding me?” Piss says.
“Surely you weren’t expecting the Library of Congress?”
He gives me a blank, clueless glance, then reaches toward the crate nearest him. He lifts a logbook from the stack and waves it in front of me. “We came here for this? I thought we’d find something valuable.”
“It’s valuable to me. You’re welcome to wait at the boat until it’s time to go.”
Piss hooks a thumb behind him. “Out there? With the bodies?”
“I won’t be long.”
He grips his flashlight a little tighter and slides out the door. I wait until I can’t hear the soft thump of his footsteps or his muttered curses. I wait until the crashing in my chest slows and I’ve caught my breath. I wait until I can almost feel June’s phantom breath on the back of my neck, urging me on. She would want me to do this, I think. Her choice wasn’t so dissimilar in the end. But God, I wish she could see me finish it on her behalf. She was the reason for it then, and she’s the reason for it now. At least that’s what I tell myself. Because if I don’t finish this, Guidry will eventually be found. John Doe will be identified. And I can’t let that happen. Not after all this time.
Trouble is, it would be hard to find the burial manifest even if I knew what I was looking for. But this… this is a rat’s nest. Yet there has to be some sort of order. So I step back, slowly illuminating the room with the beam of my flashlight. Dozens of file cabinets are shoved up against the wall. Each cabinet has the year stamped on a metal plaque at the top. But they aren’t in numerical order after 1960, and they stop altogether after 1981.
I can tell from the occasional open drawer that each cabinet is stuffed with book after book of burial manifests. A quick glance at the nearest one shows that each logbook has one hundred pages and there are five names per page, listing occupant, age, relatives, plot number, and any other pertinent information. So, math. That’s what this will take. Math and a reason and patience. All things I possess in abundance. It’s clear that the boxes and crates stacked on the tables are the newest arrivals to Phelipeaux Inlet, which means the file cabinets hold the earlier residents. 1977 is shoved into a far corner.
I find Bertrand Guidry as the sun comes up. He’s in the third drawer down, fifth book in. John Doe. Remains found beneath the pier at Orleans Marina. Brought to Phelipeaux on June 14, 1987. Buried under plot marker 185. No other information available.
The irony of this notation makes me snort. Guidry was brought here ten years to the day after he died. No wonder I don’t remember. I observed that particular anniversary by listening to Louis Armstrong on vinyl and marinating my liver in cheap bourbon.
I tap his name—handwritten in a blockish script—and then rip the page from the book. It’s impulse, really. I could fold the paper and take it with me, a memento. But instead I wad it in my hand, overcome by sudden, raging emotion. If not for this bastard, I might still have June. She might have lived long enough to bear us a child or get lines around her eyes or complain of fat thighs and gray hair. She might not have died so young and so horribly, and I wouldn’t have spent the last forty years of my life alone.
So I crush the paper in my fist, and I clutch it like I’m squeezing the life out of Guidry’s very heart. And damn if it doesn’t feel good.
I draw a lighter from my pocket and strike it with my thumb. Yes. There. Just a spark. A tiny curve of flame. But it’s all I need. I hover Guidry’s burial record over the lighter with my trembling hand. And it catches, like the most glorious kindling. A bright, lazy flame licks its way up the edge of the paper, and I’m so mesmerized by this moment of triumph that I don’t turn my hand in time to shift the fire away from my wrist. It only takes one searing bite before I drop the paper. I watch it fall as though in slow motion. Turning, tumbling toward the nearest table and its pile of teetering logbooks. It collapses in a shower of sparks.
At first I think the flame has gone out. But a dozen tiny embers have burrowed deep within the dry and brittle pages on the table. A dozen little fires erupt. It only takes a few seconds of beating at them frantically with my coat before I realize I’m standing in a tinderbox.
I’ll have to repent for a dozen things when I leave this place. My parish priest will accommodate me. He always does. But it’s the sin of arson, and how I’ll phrase those words in the confessional, that I’m pondering as I watch the fire spread.
I am struck by a brief remorse for what I’ve done as I see the names of strangers—men, women, and children—blacken before my eyes. I have ruined any chance of them ever being found. But as I stumble backward toward the door, I realize what an idiot I am. No one is fool enough to come here, looking for the lost. No one but me.
I turn and run from the Chateau.
The entire records room is an inferno by the time I stumble, breathless, to the gates. The fire is beautiful and horrible at once, giving the dilapidated Chateau its first semblance of warmth in decades. It almost looks as if the lights are on in that room, as if a merry fire is burning in the fireplace. And then the windows explode and the flames rush outward with a greedy scream, sucking up the air, licking the exterior walls, engulfing all the tangled, climbing vines. It is mesmerizing, and I want to watch it burn to the ground.
But the Potter’s Navy will arrive soon with their daily delivery of the dead. We only have a short time to get away. So I turn off my flashlight and leave the Chateau, her secrets, and this all-consuming fire behind me.
I find Piss and Vinny at the boat. They don’t see me at first. Their eyes are on the billowing smoke and climbing flames that now stretch well above the tree line.
“He burned it down,” Piss says. “I didn’t know he was going to burn it down.”
Vinny’s eyes are huge and his hands shake. “Like I said. Batshit crazy.”
“We gotta get out of here.”
“Can’t,” Vinny says. “That old fucker has the boat keys.”
“Well, I’m not stupid,” I say as I draw the keys from my pocket and jingle them for effect. They startle so badly, I’m worried Piss might live up to his moniker. I climb into the boat and hand him the keys. “Stop staring. Let’s go. We don’t have all day.”
Vinny wastes no time pushing the boat into the water, and then the outboard motor roars to life and we’re off, back the way we came.
I watch the malevolent, hellish glow of the fire until the river bends and the current drags us out of sight. But even then the acrid scent lingers. It is the smell of charred memory. Names, dates, lives all turning to ash.
“Another hundred bucks when we reach the marina,” Vinny shouts over the roar of the motor. “Don’t forget!”
I am many things, but forgetful is not one of them. It is the curse I live with. A clear and perfect memory. For decades, I’ve prayed that I will lose this gift, that the edges of my mind will blur and crumble. They don’t. My punishment is to remember. June, mostly. The high, soft curve of her breasts. The deep black of her hair. The sweet lilt to her laugh. The elegant arch of her hands as they work the beads on her rosary. I remember it all.
And I remember the night I came home from a double shift to find my wife, frying pan in hand, standing over a dead body. I remember the blood on the linoleum and the splintered bone of his skull. I remember the look of horror on June’s face, how she dropped the pan and backed away.
“He propositioned me at the restaurant. I didn’t see him follow me home.” I remember the lump in her elegant throat as she swallowed, hard. “He tried to—”
I pulled June into my arms and pressed her face to my chest. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Things might have ended differently if I’d called the precinct before I checked his wallet. Neither of us recognized him. We had no idea he was Bertrand Guidry. Corrupt. Legendary gangster. Connected. Lecherous. Vengeful. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered that she was defending herself. It wouldn’t matter that I was a detective. Hell, that might have made it worse. There was no getting out of it.
So I took care of everything. The chains. The cinder block. The early morning trip to the marina. I just couldn’t take care of June.
Guidry’s men did that three weeks later.
The next body I find will be June’s.