A Sunday afternoon in New Orleans in August, deep down in the delta, terrain as flat and hot as a cast-iron skillet, hazy heat like a steam bath, the old city rising up and closing in around them as they rolled down Canal Street, passing the La Salle Hotel and the Jung—famous for its rooftop ballroom, the shops and bars all in full swing as they got closer to the French Quarter.
The humid air was heavy with the greasy smoke from wood fires and the choking fumes of the cars and trucks rattling along beside them. Dark green streetcars, as heavy as Tiger tanks, packed with people, clanked and screeched down the rusty tracks, and from over the low roofs of the Old Quarter they heard the steam whistle blast from a riverboat pulling away from the landing and heading out onto the Mississippi. Now and then they picked up a burst of French horns and jazzy piano coming from the open windows of a passing bar, and the sidewalks were crowded, black and white and every shade in between.
There was a hum in the air itself, a high-pitched vibration, and under that a deeper rhythmic pounding that Jack finally realized was just the background thrum of New Orleans in the fifties.
He rolled the window down as far as it would go, shifting in the old leather bench seat, sweat dripping off him, his uniform shirt drenched. He looked at Clete, behind the wheel. He seemed to be handling this sauna of a city better than he was.
“I know I’m not supposed to tell you stuff about the future, Clete, but someday there’s going to be a thing for your car called air-conditioning, and it’ll keep your car cool and nobody will have to die from this fricking heat.”
Clete looked over at him, grinned around his cigarette. “Already got that on Cadillacs and Buicks and Oldsmobiles. Man, you do look like a boiled crawdaddy.”
“I feel like one.”
“Yeah well no offense but you smell like a dead bat. I’m gonna put us in a couple of rooms at the Monteleone. Place is air-conditioned. Mostly. You can have a shower, change your clothes, get that uniform cleaned.”
“What about my sidearm? I can’t wear a patrol belt with civilian clothing.”
“I’ve got spare shoulder rigs in the truck.”
“Are we going to meet your guy with the NOPD?”
“Court of the Two Sisters, just along Royal from the hotel. She’ll be there at five.”
“She?”
* * *
The Court of the Two Sisters turned out to be a wisteria-shaded courtyard filled with tables and lit by lanterns, a secluded garden that you reached by going through two ornate wrought-iron gates that, according to Clete, were a gift from Queen Isabella of Spain.
“How’d you know that?”
“Mary Alice. This is her favorite place in New Orleans. It was started by a couple of Creole sisters back in the 1850s. Supposed to be haunted. There she is.”
Clete was looking in the far corner of the courtyard where a young woman in a pale green sundress was sitting at a round table covered in pinkish linen, set out under a spreading canopy of flowery wisteria vines.
Her head was down and she was reading something on the table in front of her, possibly a file of some kind. She was very blonde and her hair glimmered like fire in the sunlight that filtered through the vines and lay in scattered pools on the cobblestone floors. Lanterns hung from the wisteria vines and the table, like all the others, was set with candles.
It was a lovely place, cool and quiet even in the steam heat of August. Barbara would have loved it, and Jack was wondering what, if anything, he could do about Barbara and Katy from here in 1957—shoot the bartender at the Alcazar was the only idea that had come to him—when the woman lifted her head, saw them, smiled and stood up as they reached the table. And, of course, the woman was Pandora Jansson.
Or at least her identical twin in another life. Jack managed not to stop dead in his tracks—thinking Anson Freitag and now Pandora—but he slowed so abruptly that Clete had to step around him to get to the table, giving Jack a look as he passed him. The woman—Pandora—was smiling at Clete as she shook his hand, obviously a meeting of good friends.
“Annabelle, thanks for coming. Jack, this is Annabelle Fontaine. Annabelle, this is Jack—”
A momentary hesitation, which she noted.
“Kearney,” Clete finished, giving Jack his wife’s maiden name.
Annabelle smiled at Jack and he saw a momentary flicker of an unidentifiable emotion in her eyes and the lines around them—although strong looking and tanned—just like Pandora—she wasn’t as young as he had first thought, now that he was seeing her clearly. Maybe in her midthirties, just like Pandora. The puzzled look was still there, although veiled now, as she gave his hand a strong masculine shake and said, “Kearney? Are you related to Clete’s wife?”
She had the rolling cadences of the Deep South, and her voice was low and throaty, a whiskey baritone. Jack felt the sensual heat coming off her, almost a visible erotic radiation, like an aura, and his blood was rising up to her.
“Yes, in a roundabout way,” said Jack, controlling his voice because his throat was a little thick. Clete, taking a seat at the table, was watching them with interest, a little smile on his lips. Annabelle released his hand and took her seat, lifting the hem of her sundress a bit as she sat, and sunlight shimmered across her knees and a brief flash of strong white thighs.
Bare-legged, no stockings.
Christ, thought Jack, as he pulled in his chair, trying not to stare at her, I’m fucking doomed.
Apparently she had noted his accent.
“You’re not from around here?” she asked.
Clete stepped in.
“Jack’s with the Florida Highway Patrol, the Criminal Investigation Division. He’s based in Jacksonville too. We’re sort of...associates.”
“I know why Cletus is here, but what brings you to New Orleans?” she asked, looking at him with a disturbing intensity.
Clete put a hand up and said, “No, first some food and something to drink. We’ve driven all night and most of the day, and if I don’t get something to eat I’m going to fall over and die.”
Which they did, and a lot, platters of seafood and salad, crayfish in a spicy Cajun sauce, French bread with olive oil and oregano and, eventually, three bottles of Dom Pérignon, which Jack had never had before because it was insanely expensive, but here in this time period it was $25 a bottle.
They kept it light all through the first courses, Jack letting Annabelle and Clete do most of the talking since his grip on the current events of 1957 was pretty sketchy. He gathered that Annabelle had retired from Naval Intelligence at the end of the war and—after an apparently disastrous love affair with a Marine officer—had found herself in New Orleans, where an old friend from the Navy had persuaded her to come onto the NOPD in their Intelligence Division.
She had accepted the offer, and was now a detective in the plainclothes section of the 8th Division, which covered the French Quarter.
And no, she wasn’t married or currently engaged, questions Jack didn’t ask but he managed to infer from the table talk.
When the third bottle was sitting upside down in the silver bucket, the sun had set and the cool of the evening was sifting down through the wisteria canopy. Annabelle called for coffee all around, and she ordered a chocolate parfait for herself, which she ate with what seemed to Jack to be a wonderfully erotic appreciation.
After dessert the mood at the table became much more focused.
Jack realized then that they did everything differently in New Orleans in the fifties; they did it all slowly, and they savored it as it went drifting past. As far as he was concerned, right now at any rate, looking at Annabelle Fontaine, if he had to stay here, he’d be fine with that.
Clete took a sip of his coffee, sighed, offered cigarettes to Annabelle and Jack, both of whom accepted, lit Annabelle’s cigarette and flipped the Zippo to Jack.
“So, Annabelle, here’s the thing, why Jack is here. He’s looking at the same woman, this Aurelia DiSantis.”
She turned to Jack, eyebrow raised.
“And what has she done that has brought you into it?”
“Basically, I think she’s a serial killer.”
Both Clete and Annabelle gave him a puzzled look.
“What’s a serial killer?” she asked, and Jack realized the term hadn’t been invented yet.
“Sorry, I mean, I think she’s making her living going from victim to victim, getting close, getting access to money, jewels, bank accounts, and then she kills the victim and takes the money.”
“So, a serial killer, yes? And where has she been doing this serial killing?”
“Jacksonville. Amelia Island. St. Augustine. My own case with her involves kidnapping and the murder of two people at Amelia Island, and the poisoning death of a third, a young woman.”
“And you think this is the same woman that Cletus is investigating?”
Jack looked at Clete, who pulled two photographs out of his suit jacket and laid them side by side on the table. Annabelle picked them up, studied them by the candlelight.
One was the surveillance shot Clete had taken at the Monterey Court, and the other one was Jack’s photo of Diana Bowman at the Carousel Bar in the Monteleone.
“You’re right. That’s the same woman.”
“We think so.”
“And what name do you know her by?”
“Diana Bowman.”
Annabelle shook her head as if confused, uncertain, looked down at the file folder she’d been reading when they arrived, picked it up and took out several sheets of paper.
“Cletus asked me to see what I could learn about this person. Apparently he’s asking for...a friend.”
She said this with a sly smile.
Clete said nothing, and so did Jack. Annabelle took that in, noted it and went on.
“Okay. So, I went into the Parish Registries and other city records looking for an Aurelia DiSantis, born on the date that Cletus got from her Louisiana driver’s license. You won’t be surprised to hear that there was no such person born on that date, or on any date within five years either way. Nor was she ever issued a Louisiana driver’s license, so what she has must be a forgery. Which was useful, since there are only three places you can get a convincing forgery of a Louisiana driver’s license. I went to all three places, one in Metairie, one in Slidell and the third in Angola Prison.”
“Angola?” said Jack.
She sighed.
“I’m afraid so. The facility has all the equipment needed, and the prison has all the forgers you could ever hope for.”
“Angola Prison deals in forgeries?”
Clete laughed.
“Jack, you think Florida is corrupt. We’ve got nothing on Louisiana.”
“And I am afraid that the NOPD is the most corrupt police force in Louisiana,” said Annabelle, with a sideways smile. “Which is saying a great deal. But, in a way, things are much easier when almost everyone is corrupt.”
“How?”
“You can get things done, if you are willing to pay, and Cletus’s...ahh...friend...was very willing to pay for what we would call...special consideration.”
“Meaning you bribed the hell out of a whole bunch of people?”
She smiled again, but now it was not so kindly.
“Precisely. And who I bribed is none of your affair, is it? Any more than it is my affair to ask Clete who his wealthy friend really is, or why I am being told that you are a Kearney when you are so obviously related to Cletus by blood. You could be his grandson, if he ever lives long enough to have one, which I doubt. But I do not ask, do I?”
Although deeply shaken by the comment—why grandson instead of son or even brother?—Jack smiled back. “Hey. No offense.”
“Then don’t be offensive,” she said, her voice a low throaty purr.
“And what did you get?” said Clete, leaning into the tension. Annabelle held Jack’s look for a heartbeat longer, long enough to make her point, and then she turned to Clete.
“It is not necessary to actually go to Angola to arrange for the forgery. That would have been foolish under any circumstances. Especially for a woman. There is a place here in town where the Angola forgeries may be arranged. I will not tell you where that place is since it is in an NOPD-controlled building. The woman who commissioned the forgery did not leave her name, but she paid so much money for it that the person who met with her...”
“So a woman?” asked Jack.
“Yes, and yes, she answers the description of the woman you are both interested in. So, the person thought it worthwhile to have her followed when she left the building...just in case she might have been an agent of some higher level of law enforcement.”
“Like the FBI or Treasury?” said Clete.
“Exactly.”
“And...”
“And the woman wandered through the streets of the French Quarter for a very long time, moving erratically, stepping into shops and then back out again quickly, changing directions, and once even entering a bar and leaving by the back door.”
“Shaking a tail,” said Jack.
“Yes. But not successfully. She was an amateur. Finally, after much walking about, she arrived at what appeared to be her residence, where she used a key to enter an apartment on the upper floor.”
“And where was this apartment?”
“The Pontalba, on St. Peter Street, next to Jackson Square. Apartment nine. The woman remained until the next morning, when she reappeared, wearing different clothing, looking quite refreshed, and went for coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde. Where she sat for two hours, reading an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The Great Gatsby.”
“So she was out of her apartment for two hours?”
“Yes.”
“During which time your...person...had apartment number nine at the Pontalba searched.”
“Yes. It is the natural course of such things.”
“And what was found?”
Her confusion returned here, and she was quiet for a while. They waited. From the street came the sound of a jazz quartet, and the crowds were building up as the evening came on. The courtyard was full of customers and the chatter and clatter of the place was growing louder.
“Several items that indicated that the person living in the apartment was named Selena D’Arcy, and that her family had lived in this apartment since the early 1900s. The original names on the lease—dated the seventh of November, 1903—were Beatrice and William D’Arcy.”
D’Arcy, thought Jack, remembering their talk with Gerald Walker in his hospital room. The name that Diana Bowman had been looking for.
D’Arcy, not Dorsey.
D’Arcy.
And the locket’s inscription.
To Bea from Will Xmas 1909.
But Annabelle was still talking.
“According to the records—at least the records as they were last week...”
Here she paused, gave a strange look, as if to say, Remember that point.
“The—the apartment has been vacant since September 8, 1914. Rent all paid up, decade after decade, but unoccupied.”
“But that’s wrong, isn’t it?” said Jack. “The records were wrong? Had to be.”
She shook her head.
“It’s much more complicated than that. Let me tell you in my own way. No interruptions, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, the apartment itself looked as if it had remained untouched since 1914. It was neat and well maintained, very clean and well-ordered, but there was nothing in it that looked newer than the early 1900s. And the clothes in the closets were all decades out of date. The person searching the apartment was...unsettled...by the way it looked. The person described it as a well-preserved tomb, a kind of mausoleum. The person also observed that all of the mirrors in the apartment had been covered with linen cloth.”
Clete heard that.
“That’s a Creole superstition, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Yes. They believe that the spirits of the dying will confuse the mirror for the gates of eternity, and so will pass into the mirror instead of going through to eternity.”
“And their souls will remain trapped in the mirror?” said Jack, who had heard of this superstition years ago.
“Yes. That is their belief.”
“Okay. Got all this,” said Clete. “But something’s bothering you, Annabelle. I can see it in your eyes. What is it?”
She looked down at the file, but not because she was reading it. She was looking for time.
After a while, she looked up.
“Well, yes, there is something very strange here. Will you listen, and try not to say anything?”
“I’ll try,” said Clete.
“Try harder,” she said, softening it with a hand on his wrist. “Well, in this place, apartment nine of the Pontalba, according to the police reports, something very bad happened on the afternoon of September 7, 1914. The people down in Jackson Square hear screaming, and the sound of breaking glass, and then the kind of silence that comes after something terrible has been finished. So the neighbors arrive, they knock at the door, and there is no answer. So they break it down.”
Silence, finally, from Jack and Clete, and Annabelle paused, took some coffee. The jazz band had moved off down Royal Street, and the evening had gradually become night.
“In the parlor, two dead people, Beatrice and William, both stabbed many times, stabbed with a big knife, and by someone very strong. Beatrice is on the divan, very much mutilated, torn as if by wolves, and the husband, William, it looks as if he died first, in the hall, and they think maybe he was the one to open the apartment door, because the first wound is in his belly, as might happen if you were to open the door—you stand there, one hand on the doorknob, you are exposed, open, and so the knife goes in. And he is down, in the hall, and the killer slices him up, the throat, the belly...the eyes are gone, so the report says, stabbed out, gouged, and then the killer goes for Beatrice, catches her on the divan, and so she dies too.”
Jack and Clete said nothing, but Jack thought, This woman feels this, as if she had been there to watch. Pandora had that gift too.
A sigh, and then...
“So there is also a little girl, a five-year-old, we are told, since there is a birthday cake on the parlor table, with five candles, all blown out, and three slices taken from it, and the plates with silver forks set down. The little girl is in the second bedroom, a lovely room, all white—or at least it was—with windows that open onto Jackson Square. And she has been killed also, stabbed many times, in her bed, twisted into the sheets. You can see this? I do not have to go on?”
She was speaking in a whisper now, living it. Jack and Clete waited. She shook herself, lifted her head, came back into the present.
“So we have the three dead—Beatrice, William and the little girl. The little girl, according to her birth certificate, is Selena D’Arcy. She died on the seventh day of September in 1914. It was her fifth birthday.”
A long silence.
Finally, Jack had to ask.
“Did they catch the killer?”
Annabelle looked at her file.
“The D’Arcys also had a ward, apparently a relative of Will D’Arcy’s. Her name was Philomena. Last name not recorded. Her age is uncertain, because the record is confused. I will return to that in a moment.”
She sighed, went inward, took some coffee, organizing her thoughts.
Neither man interrupted her.
“Well, Philomena, last name unknown, age unknown, was confined for a time to a mental hospital. She was violent, and dangerous, and was taken away by the authorities after she had begun to set fires, and they think she also killed some animals, cats and stray dogs. Birds when she could trap them. The authorities had to do something, since the D’Arcys could not control her. She was committed to East Louisiana State Hospital, in the town of Jackson, in East Feliciana Parish. On the third of September of that year she escaped by hiding herself inside an ice delivery wagon. She was believed to have made her way to New Orleans, and it was also believed that she broke into apartment nine of the Pontalba on September 7, and it is believed that she killed every person in it, Beatrice and William and Selena, who was five at the time. As I have said.”
She sighed, picked up her cup and took a sip.
“What did they do with the ward? Philomena?”
“What did they do? They did nothing.”
“Why?”
“She was never caught. She was never seen again.”
“So who is living in apartment nine right now?”
Annabelle shrugged, a very French gesture, but it was also very much a Pandora Jansson expression.
“According to the records, at least as they were last week, no one is in the apartment. I am coming to that. I have a theory. But you’re not going to like it.”
She took some more coffee, lit another cigarette.
“Well, as I have said, apartment nine at the Pontalba has been under the control of the D’Arcy family for many years. So the records tell me. But there is something very wrong with the records. For several years after the killings of September 7, 1914, the apartment was listed as sealed and unoccupied. Yet the rent continues to be paid, not regularly, but consistently over the years, by drafts from various banks, handled by one law firm after another. And this goes on for a very long time, decades, from after the Great War, through the Depression, through the Second World War. So mysterious, yes, but not unheard of, especially for New Orleans.”
“So what is it that caught your eye?” asked Jack, caught up in the story and her voice as she told it. She smiled at him, a secret element in it meant only for him. Or so he hoped. She looked down at her notes, and then sighed again, a cop confronting something not easily explained, and harder still to convey.
“Well, now we come to it. I searched the records very thoroughly—Cletus’s friend was paying a great deal of money—and I came across something I can’t explain. Understand that I went through these records over a period of several days. I had to return to the Parish Registry because you cannot take the books out of the building. Last week, the record was quite clear. Apartment nine had been vacant from September 8, 1914, to October 2, 1943. You understand me?”
They did.
“So yesterday I go back to confirm, and the records have changed.”
“They’ve been changed, you mean?” said Clete. She shook her head.
“No. That’s impossible. The record pages are in bound books, a series of huge ledgers, kept over many years, very old, the pages are yellowed with age, brittle, the script of many clerks, all writing in ancient green ink, all written by hand. Different hands. It would be impossible to alter them without it being detected.”
“But...?”
“But the registries have changed. Physically changed! This is impossible. But it is also true. Now the records in the Parish Registry show that apartment nine of the Pontalba has been occupied continually from October 2, 1943, to the present day. This is impossible. But it is also true. The records have changed. They changed—as far as I can see—perhaps two days ago.”
“Apartment nine is occupied. By whom?”
She shrugged, letting her frustration show.
“By a woman named Selena D’Arcy. According to her birth certificate, she was born in Plaquemine Parish on the seventh of September in 1909.”
“So she’d be...forty-eight now?”
“Yes.”
“But Selena D’Arcy was killed? Stabbed to death. At the age of five, on September 7 in 1914.”
She smiled, closed the file folder, pushed it across to Clete, patted it with her hand.
“That was then, my friend. This is now.”
* * *
They gathered to go, since there was nothing left to say. Clete went to pay the bill, and Annabelle caught Jack’s arm, a gentle touch, and she leaned in close to him.
“You are at the Monteleone.”
Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Your room?”
“Room 319.”
“Tonight, I will come to you.”
“Yes, please.”
“Do you know why?”
“I think so.”
“Good,” she said and kissed his cheek, and then she turned and walked away down Royal. She didn’t look back, but then she didn’t have to.