Chapter 45

 

Summer darkness comes late to the Big Easy. Nine-thirty, even ten. Long past dark I leaned against crumbling mortar, somewhere on the far end of Rue Bourbon, my eyes dimming from staring much too long at the front door of a Creole-style shotgun house. Gaylon LeBlanc finally appeared. Out the front door he waltzed, dressed in black with a cape that draped the ground. He moved slowly. After locking the deadbolt with care, he gazed around, listening to night sounds radiating from up on Canal Street. He didn’t seem to notice me standing in the adjacent alleyway.

Something had eaten away at my gut ever since I’d agreed to break into his house. Some nagging doubt I couldn’t quite identify. Shoving the thought to the back of my mind I quickly surveyed the area, finding everything dark and deserted—at least almost deserted, except for an old black wino stumbling like a misplaced apparition down the sidewalk. The old woman had wandered a long way from her usual haunts on the other side of Canal. Her unexplained presence disturbed me profoundly.

After adding the anomaly to my growing list of paranoia, I returned to the job at hand, retracing LeBlanc’s steps to the house where the door lock took less than ten seconds to open. A stray dog howled over by the Iberville Project, and the old house gasped when I entered. Breathing deeply of sticky, August air, I slipped into the darkness.

LeBlanc lived in a shotgun house, thirty feet wide and maybe twice as long. Such houses were, quite simply, nothing more than small rectangles probably worth a million dollars because of their location on prime real estate. Streetlights, reflecting through stained glass over the front door, cast dancing shadows and multicolored reflections off dull walls. The house was otherwise dark. When a cat knocked over a trashcan in the alleyway outside, his screech pulled a knot in my throat, backing me against a wall until my heart reset.

LeBlanc had raised the temperature of the air conditioning, and the place had already begun to steam. Outside, early rain had left cobblestone streets damp with humidity. Inside the narrow hallway reeked of must and antiquity. Shaking off my nerves, I proceeded through the first door in search of what I had come for.

My light cut a precise swath through the darkness. I found LeBlanc’s office, a small room dominated by a giant, mahogany desk. Side chairs, computer, and some three-drawer file cabinets completed the decor. After jimmying the desk drawer and rifling through it, I turned my attention to the nearest trashcan.

LeBlanc’s trash consisted mostly of wadded paper, and the contents of the can made my next job easier. With a disposable lighter borrowed from Bertram, I lit the edge of a crumpled newspaper. What followed took less than a second. Like Shirley’s hurricanes, dry paper ignited like kindling wood, exploded with a loud pop and lighted the room. For a moment, I stood there, hypnotized, staring at billowing smoke and growing flame until something behind me freed my gaze from the fire.

The sound sent my blood pressure racing toward the roof. In a moment of recognition induced by adrenaline rushing to my brain, I recalled specific answers to the questions still eating away at my gut. The sound came from the shuffling gait of a person with a limp scrapping across hardwood flooring. LeBlanc had a gimpy foot, and leg. It was a fact I should have remembered. Tony had watched his every movement since learning he was the killer.

Like everyone alive, LeBlanc had his routines. He probably went up the street for a latte every night and was away from the house for ten minutes or so. Tony had suckered me, and I had an idea why. I had little time to reflect on my faulty memory, or Tony’s duplicity as gloved hands caressed my neck, quickly slipping a garrote around it and tightening. I could smell LeBlanc’s breath when he spoke.

“Looking for something?”

I grabbed his strong hands, struggling to breathe as life quickly began to flow from my body. Billowing flames had already jumped from the trash, lighting papers on the massive, mahogany desk. LeBlanc needed to kill me quickly and put out the fire. But he had a problem. Sirens of approaching fire trucks screamed outside the window and someone was already in the process of kicking down the front door. With his hands still tight around my throat, he wheeled me around to face the noise of splintering wood. When two street cops burst through the door, pistols drawn, LeBlanc and I realized they weren’t there to admonish us for playing with matches.

Both cops dropped to their knees, raised their pistols, and began unloading them at us. Ten seconds of chaos that felt like an eternity followed. Pandemonium mingled with gunfire, muzzle flash and the stench of burning gunpowder and loosened bowels.

I opened my eyes long before my ears stopped ringing, cordite, and blazing paper joining with the pungent odor of blood as I struggled to pull myself off the floor. Gaylon LeBlanc was dead beside me, his body riddled with bullets. I touched the gris-gris around my neck when I realized I hadn’t even been nicked.

***

Fire trucks were arriving outside, blocking the streets. Firefighters quickly extinguished the flames while police cordoned the house and began dispersing the growing crowd. Anesthetized by a fresh bottle of cheap vodka, the old black wino stumbled through the broken front door followed by one of the cops that had shot LeBlanc. The old woman was a plant, brought from across town to provide the police a story. Now the pieces were coming together, and tomorrow the Picayune would sing a decidedly different tune from what had happened at LeBlanc’s townhouse.

It’d probably sound something like this: Seeing flames pouring from former U.S. Senator Gaylon LeBlanc’s house in the French Quarter, two police officers called the fire department then knocked to alert the Senator. Screams from inside the house indicated someone was in need of assistance. It had prompted them to break down the door. They unexpectedly encountered a wild LeBlanc in the process of slicing up an old wino—forced to use deadly force when he attacked them with the knife. A computer printout found on LeBlanc’s desk linked him to the murders committed by the now infamous Voodoo Strangler.

The story would appear almost plausible.

Tommy Blackburn materialized from the confusion, leading me out the back door to an unmarked police car. I joined Lieutenant Tony Nicosia in the back seat as Tommy took the wheel.

“You all right, Cowboy?”

“You set me up!”

Tony offered no apology. Instead, he said, “LeBlanc didn’t deserve to live through twelve years of appeals, even if we could have made the charge of murder one stick. And that’s a big if. The only way to handle a killer like that is to shoot him down like a mad dog.”

“At least you could have told me what was going down.”

“Would you still have done it?”

I didn’t have an answer to his question.

Tommy turned at Governor Nichols, stopping the car on Decatur. “You a real hero,” he said as I opened the door.

I didn’t respond to his comment, and Tony said, “Forget about it, Wyatt. It’s the Big Easy.”

As their taillights faded in the distance, I reflected on his deceit and my own complicity. I didn’t feel like a hero. Much like the city itself, I felt more like an old whore.

I walked toward the French Market where early morning sun was still hours from rising. It mattered little because the brick streets were already awash in activity—stall keepers sorting produce and stevedores unloading trucks filled with melons and plump, red tomatoes.

Dew, coating waxy magnolia blossoms, created a potent fragrance that wafted through the square, mingling with the ripe bouquet of fresh fruits, flowers, and pepper sauce. I stopped and took a deep breath.

Damp, night air began to revive me, and I thought about seagulls and seashores, trying desperately to store the night’s incident in that black repository hidden deep in all our souls. I headed for Café du Monde, hoping like hell a sugary beignet and cup of black, Creole coffee, might kick start my heart and help bastion my fleeting sanity. At least until the sun came up.