TWENTY

At slow speed, Sergeant Pascal Dupree drove Everardo Flores away from the Hilton, where they’d met up, to St. Bernard Parish, a neighborhood heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina that in its comeback retained a mere semblance of its former impoverished self. Grace on spindly legs.

He coached him along the way.

“Y’all comprehend that you’re not on the job, right? Don’t ever say so. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough, Everardo. Where your ambitions lie is not a particular concern to me. What is a concern is this—y’all will not speak aloud to a single soul about doing police work, because nobody has your back. Not me especially.” With his hands low on the steering wheel where it swung over his belly, Dupree looked across at his new confederate. “I hope y’all are hearing me, Flores, because I’m not seeing the disposition of a man who appears to be listening.”

Flores was happily gazing out the window in the opposite direction. He smiled and turned his head around to answer Dupree’s challenge. “I’m not a cop, but you got to admit, I’m working for the cops.”

“Don’t go around saying that out loud! It’s not like we’re popular with folks.”

“Dupree, you’re hated less than you think. Chill. The time the force decked itself out in its powder blues—who can forget that day?—people on the street, they cheered.”

After Katrina, the NOPD underwent a change of uniform. To present a fresh public image, beat cops adopted the dark blues familiar to other cities. A few years later, revamped, wiser now, they returned to their original, distinctive powder blues. They showed them off on the first day of Mardi Gras. People welcomed the reversion. As if the worst of the past was put behind them by bringing back the familiar.

“Don’t anticipate nobody cheering you in the field. The contrary.”

“Airmen don’t throw flowers at the feet of military police neither. Been there. You know I found that out.”

Dupree offered a conciliatory nod, but he wasn’t finished. He had a way of emphasizing his words by squeezing the steering wheel, which highlighted the massive size and considerable strength of his hands. The action felt threatening, whether he meant it that way or not. “In the air force, Everardo, I take it y’all had genuine authority. Not make-believe like now. Some drunken flyboy gave lip, y’all whacked him over the head and took him in. Didn’t you? Admit it now.”

“Or, I whacked him over the head some more and left him where he lay. Depends on what kind of night it was. How much trouble he was worth.”

“There you go. See? That’s no longer a consideration.”

“I don’t aim to pick a fight. Will you let up on me or what, Dupree?”

The detective was not about to do that. Flores had to endure his initiation or have the rug pulled out from under this scheme. His choice. At a red light, the detective stared at the thin, spiffy man in the gray suit and the red tie and squeezed the wheel with his chubby fingers until Flores grimaced and pleaded for mercy. “All right, Dupree. I get you. I got you an hour ago. Chill, man.”

“What I’m telling y’all now, Émile Cinq-Mars himself don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“This is a damn near impossible assignment.”

He detailed why. Situated close to the 9th Ward and the district of Holy Cross, and similarly to those two forlorn neighborhoods, St. Bernard Parish had also been utterly ransacked by the storm. Hundreds of its former residents never came back. Countless others returned, saw that nothing awaited them there except ongoing misery, and decamped for good. For anyone to wander around the neighborhood and ask people to recall a double murder that happened shortly after the worst of that time—to even find someone who’d been through it who cared enough to share a memory—that was asking a lot, more than Émile Cinq-Mars realized. The Montreal detective didn’t grasp the factors at play. He thought he could waltz into the parish and parlez his français, chat up the neighbors, draw down a few opinions, jumble them together and find out what that concoction brewed. He didn’t know that chatting up a neighbor required luck, for starters, diligence, more time than he’d imagined or allotted for himself, and the good graces of many. He might be diligent, but luck and a good attitude were in failing supply throughout the parish.

“So you’re saying,” Flores countered, “that I’m just here to—”

“To appease that Montreal detective, to make it look good for us down here, or, if you’re really lucky, stumble across a miracle. I hope you got miracles stuck up your crack ’cause otherwise this is a major waste of everybody’s time, and I mean by that especially yours. Just so y’all know it.”

Truth was, Dupree held higher hopes than that, but he wanted to douse Everardo Flores with Katrina floodwaters—to impress upon him that this was not an easy gig. If he expected otherwise, he might fold his tent before his first hour was up.

“I’ll drive by to pick up your carcass later. If I see some sign of life, if I detect a pulse, I’ll call for an ambulance. But next time y’all want to come out here, expect to drive your own vehicle in both directions. I’m revoking your limousine privileges.”

“No problem, Detective. It’s a pleasure riding with you though. More than that, it’s an honor. Good times.”

“This is business, you understand that, right? It’s not peaches and cream.”

“Listen, if I enjoy myself, you have to live with that. So brace yourself. I know this operation is not about making me a rich man.”

“Operation. It’s not an operation.” He turned to confront Flores again. “Base expenses,” he reminded him. “That’s it.”

“Like I said, life being what it is, wealth is bound to elude me in mine.”

“Keep your head up. Eyes and ears open.”

“That’s my style, Detective. You just said it. I keep my head up and my eyes down and my ears crossed and I get by with all that. You’ll see. Maybe you’ll recommend me to the academy one day soon. Help me get a badge to call my own.”

Dupree stopped the car. A squabble of men already were checking them out from across the street. Under ball caps and sunglasses, they moved their shoulders and limbs with a certain lassitude that claimed this block as indisputably their own. A young, obviously homeless woman checked the litter blown up against a car tire. “This is where I set you free.”

“So no badge today, huh?”

He didn’t know if Flores was deliberately trying to irritate him or was actually that naïve. Fortunately, the man chuckled happily as he disembarked.

“You have a good day, Detective,” Flores remarked.

“You, too, Everardo. Try to stay alive, all right? I got enough to do.”

He drove off, and Flores looked around the moonscape of St. Bernard Parish. He double-checked the street sign against the address in his notebook. He never looked at the men across the street, who were keeping an eye on him, as that would only invite trouble, and instead went up to a door and knocked. Walking on the porch provoked a nest of ants to march on down through gaps in the floorboards. Flores showed his hotel security badge to the wisp of an old woman who appeared behind the screen. “New Orleans Police, ma’am. Do you mind if I have a word with you on a matter of some dire importance here today?”

“What’s this about, Officer?” the diminutive frail dear inquired. Behind the thick lenses of her glasses she looked all but blind, the eyes magnified to saucer-size. Tiny, she flouted a tall stack of stiff hair dyed auburn and the brown skin of her arms hung loosely over skinny bones. Her shoulders poked up as raw, sharp nubs.

“Murder, ma’am. That plain, that simple, sorry to say. Don’t we live in a hardened old world?”

She opened the screen door to let him inside. “I try my darnedest to keep the flies out, Officer,” she told him.

Flores remarked, “Yes, ma’am. I will try not to admit any in myself.”

“They’re pesky.”

“They are.”

“What murder?” she asked, wide-eyed, trembling, as the door banged shut. She looked all around and above his head for flies.

“The killings next door, ma’am. Were y’all here for Katrina? Those ones. The killings next door.”

 

 

Émile Cinq-Mars did a measure of homework before initiating a few strategic calls. As a result of that he was heading for a farmer’s co-op some twenty kliks away. He telephoned the farmer who put in the actual work on Morris and Adele Lumen’s fields—planting a crop each spring and reaping the harvest while the couple took back a modest percentage for themselves, a sweetheart deal all around. The man sounded cheerful and friendly and indicated that he’d be happy to meet him, but at that moment he was heading to the co-op, partly to shop, mainly to hang out with friends, a weekly confab at a set time, which was why he needed to embark right away. The ex-cop couldn’t believe his luck. He wasn’t planning to set up a meeting that day, but now begged to join the man at his, unable to pass on an opportunity to quiz a gaggle of nearby farmers all at once. So he was off to meet those men, to whittle away at opinions they may have formed over the years about the deceased couple or to hear of anything unusual someone may have noticed around the time of the murders. Typically, men of their background might prove reticent around an official—they were bound to be territorial and wary of an outsider—so as he drove Cinq-Mars devised a plan to help open things up.

The nondescript box store sat on the outskirts of a one-street hamlet, similar to other hardware stores across the continent except that it did not carry the name of a chain and was smaller than most of those that did. A cooperative, anyone was welcome to shop there, but the shareholders were local farmers who participated in the success of the enterprise.

Michel Chaloult was the fellow working the Lumens’ farm, not quite a next-door neighbor to them, but close enough that he could take a back road onto their property on his bouncy tractor in about thirty minutes. “Ten minutes the long way around on the roads by car.” His home was as far from the co-op as Émile’s, but each man was traveling from a different direction, one from the east, the other from the southwest. Cinq-Mars frequently shopped at the store for bulk supplies and farm implements, but he could discern upon entering that the place was akin to home for a few patrons. At least in the wintertime. For them it held the ambiance of a local pub, and they made it so with their gentle gab and laughter.

In the corner furthest from the entrance, men pulled up chairs in a widening of the aisle just off the hardware section. A heavy curtain guarded against drafts from the rear storage area where they sat amid a modest collection of basic American Standard toilets, sinks, and tubs. As each farmer arrived he reached behind the curtain to lay claim to his personal chair, a Windsor or a bent metal folding contraption or an old hardback with peeling paint or worn varnish. A man motioned to Cinq-Mars after he introduced himself and selected a chair for him.

“Here, sit on old Henri’s.”

A folding type with a soft seat. Wobbly. “Henri?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“Hospital,” the man murmured.

“Cancer,” another man revealed.

“Terminal,” added a third.

“Oh,” Cinq-Mars said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He sat. His weight steadied it.

“Prostate,” Michel Chaloult verified for him. Not a loquacious gang, initially. They seemed able to express themselves, and capably, with single words only.

The first farmer who had spoken remarked, “When it’s your time it’s your time,” and the others nodded in philosophical unison.

Sanguine, Cinq-Mars considered, taking note that they kept the chair of the ill man around, perhaps holding out for his miraculous recovery.

Most of the men, including Michel Chaloult, were in their fifties, although any one of them could pass for sixty-five. They possessed the weathered look of farmers, muscled, leathery, a resignation in their facial expressions as well as a brittle tenacity. Stiff wind in the crevices on their cheeks and brows, the dust of the soil around their eyes. Although they readily fell into shared, prolonged silences, and Cinq-Mars followed them into those communal meditations, when they got going they jumped over each other to speak—about cows, snow, acquaintances, politics, hockey—everyone percolating at once so that it seemed to a rank outsider impossible for a single voice to be heard.

And yet, he perceived at one juncture, as they emerged from a brief flurry, that they were willing to give him the floor. They wanted to know who he was and what he was doing there. Despite his big-city reputation, these fellows seemed not to know of him, although the youngest, in his early forties, believed that he had heard the name. His surname was rare enough that the farmer might well have caught it on the news one day, and he was correct to apply it to this former cop. That’s all it took for Cinq-Mars to acquire significant status.

He explained his intentions in vague terms. His remarks were failing to provoke any outpouring of commentary, and when he was interrupted by a fresh arrival, he was obliged to begin again.

On this second go-round, he made sure to emphasize that, like them, he lived on a farm and that he raised horses.

“To eat?” Michel Chaloult teased him. The men chuckled to themselves.

“To race?” asked another man, perhaps more seriously, but perhaps not.

He knew better than to answer this challenge by saying show jumping, or worse, dressage. “I raise horses,” Cinq-Mars stated, “for men with deep pockets to buy for their spoiled daughters.”

They liked that. They laughed a lot.

“We don’t have any at the moment, but from time to time we raise and train—and sell, of course—polo horses.”

He was different from them, but he lived off the land, like them. They welcomed him into their rather squared-off circle.

They were now eight. The clumping of chairs formed more of a rectangle than a circle. A path remained free should an unsuspecting paying customer slip in at the wrong time to price a toilet. Cinq-Mars suspected that that seeker-of-toilets might then be blitzed with advice, if not become the recipient of a subtle and good-natured mockery. He, on the other hand, was actually seeking information, which was moderately suspicious to them all, so it would not be readily forthcoming. He tried a new tangent.

“Did you hear? The property is going up for sale.”

“What property?”

“The couple who were shot. The Lumens. Their farm.”

“You heard that?”

“Yeah. I did. Of course, I asked.”

“Who’d you ask?”

“They left the farm to a charity.”

“No relatives to inherit it?”

“Do you know of any?”

“No. Can’t say—Nope. Never heard of any.”

“Neither has anyone else,” Cinq-Mars let them know. “They left the farm to a hospital in the States. I talked to them. The hospital plans to sell. What else would they do with a farm in Quebec, eh? They’ll be cashing in sooner rather than later.”

“We were wondering about that.”

“I thought you might be. Do any of you expect to buy?”

The question instigated a renewed quiet, but this time it did not feel the same as one of their odd mute progressions. An uneasiness traipsed through and among the men, and they shot indiscriminate glances at one another.

Finally, a man spoke up. He was the only one among them who made a point of dressing to the role of a farmer, in coveralls and a heavy plaid shirt, with a pipe poking out from a pocket, and he was a man who possessed in spades the sharp features of nose and chin, cheekbones and forehead, associated with the Quebecois. The look allowed for a smidgen of Indian blood, mixed as well with a generation of Irish settlers’ blood at a time in history. This man, despite his clothing style, struck Cinq-Mars as being the sage one in their midst, the thoughtful man behind his plow. To emphasize what he wanted to say, he withdrew his unlit pipe from its dedicated pocket—they couldn’t smoke in here—to utilize as a pointer.

“Think about this,” he declared, and Cinq-Mars noticed that, for once, no one was speaking concurrently, that as long as this gentleman was pontificating on an issue everyone listened. “Michel Chaloult, he’s been working that farm, so he has first dibs. We won’t create a competition, taking money out of my mouth or his mouth or your mouth to drive up the price of the property. Farming does not pay so well these days that a poor man can afford fantastic prices for a mediocre patch.”

Others were nodding, learning how the affair ought to be conducted. “If somebody comes from the outside—” and the sage cast a rather pointed glance at Cinq-Mars, “who wants the property, then we have a right to respond. Maybe four of us will chip in to bid the farm, split it into quarters later. But for now, if Michel wants it, he’s earned the right to bid on it without the rest of us jacking up the price.”

Émile Cinq-Mars was not concerned that the man had separated him out from the crowd and had voiced an underlying suspicion. He could work with that.

“That sounds like a good plan,” he said. “I’m personally not interested in the farm, but I’ll tell you something, I might be interested in the barn. So whoever buys the land, keep that in mind. If you already have a barn that’s good enough for you, you might have a buyer for this other barn. It’s not big, but I could use a well-built barn that’s not too big. And if you rent out the house to somebody from the city, they probably won’t need the barn either. So keep that in mind.”

The slight bobbing of heads continued as Cinq-Mars was being received into their enclave. He was here on police business, they knew, but they had also found common ground to share with him, which made him, if not one of their own, then at least one with whom they could exchange a laugh, or a covert drink, or an understanding. That made the whole police business a less formidable barrier.

They were not heavy drinkers, but a flask was passed around and Cinq-Mars joined the others for a nip. A Canadian whisky, he judged, nothing to write home about, but acceptable. Considering the environment, better than expected. He had anticipated nothing more than cider or coffee-flavored mud.

He finally got down to brass tacks. “I was wondering about Adele and Morris Lumen. Obviously, we want justice. But the police have discovered that it’s very hard to locate any information on them. They seem to have come out of nowhere. Is that your impression?”

“They left everything to a hospital, you said?” one guy asked. He stuck Cinq-Mars as being a hale man, without a lazy bone in his body. He suspected that the man had endured some stresses over time, probably a few sad losses, although he could not readily define why he thought that way, just a look around and within the eyes. A hunch, maybe. His teeth were his oddest feature, notable for the width of the gaps between so many of them even though he was not missing any. “I mean, that makes a kind of sense in a way. We never saw no family. No kids. Or grandkids. No parties. Never nothing like that.”

“They stuck to themselves, but they were friendly, too,” another man recalled. “The wife never entered the contests for the fair, you know, for the pies and that, but she came out to see the ladies just the same, to find out how they did, that sort of thing. She cheered them on.”

“The woman in particular, she liked to laugh.”

“She did. She had a big belly laugh.”

“She had a big belly.”

“You could hear her laughing across a room.”

“Across town.”

“He was quiet though, the man. Morris, his name.”

“Like a mouse.”

“He never laughed much. Don’t get me wrong. He smiled. Sometimes he even had a big grin on him. Like he was laughing on the inside. But he never came right out with it. He just kind of looked away when other people—or his wife herself—were laughing away.”

Cinq-Mars had the impression that these men discussed these matters previously, probably soon after the couple were killed, so in a way they were running down their remarks as if following a familiar script. He interrupted their loop. “So, you never saw people with them, other than folks from around here?”

They had to puzzle through the question.

“I wouldn’t never say never,” Michel Chaloult submitted. “When they first got here, you know we were checking them out. I was checking them out.”

“Only natural,” the sage man concurred.

“What did you see?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“At first, some men came around regular. Three guys once. A couple of guys quite a few times. Don’t know who they were. Haven’t seen them since.”

“They weren’t movers? Or tradesmen, fixing the place up?”

“In suits?” Chaloult asked, and he was pleased to draw a few chuckles from his pals.

“Okay, they were in suits,” Cinq-Mars noted, and to make it official he wrote that down on his pad. Suits.

“They drove black cars. Not trucks or pickups. Newer cars. Fancy ones. The kind you don’t see plumbers or electricians driving to work.”

“Or movers,” another added, getting less of a laugh than Chaloult.

Black cars, Cinq-Mars wrote down. “Only men. No women. Do you ever meet these guys?” he asked.

“Once,” Michel Chaloult told him. “That’s the time I started talking to him about working his farm. The wife—mine, I mean—she baked them a pie, and a dinner, some kind of casserole. New neighbors, we don’t get those too often, so that’s what you do. You bring over a casserole and you say hello.”

“You were introduced to these other men?” Cinq-Mars asked, trying both to keep him on point and to moderate his own rising excitement.

“Don’t ask me their names. But yeah, we were introduced. Nobody said what they were there for and I didn’t ask. I’m polite that way. I just presumed they were friends. They smiled. They were friendly in a way, but they didn’t stick around.”

“French names? English?”

“English. But the Lumens were English.”

“Could you describe the men?”

He could, and Cinq-Mars wrote the descriptions down, but he might as well have been describing any men on earth who had short hair, in one instance, or were bald, in the other. The bald guy had biggish ears, as Chaloult had noticed their size at the time. Big lips, too. Cinq-Mars worried that, over time, the image in his head had become a caricature or even a full-blown cartoon. The second man, the one with short hair, sounded remarkably indistinguishable from the majority of forty-year-old Caucasians on earth, but he looked rugged, he had a good stout chest.

“Anything at all that was unique?” Cinq-Mars pressed him.

Chaloult thought about it some more, rubbing the right side of his jaw and drawing his hand down over his Adam’s apple. “One thing,” he considered, and Cinq-Mars grew hopeful again. “He hadn’t shaved in maybe a day.” The former policeman fell back into a mild despair. “Oh!” the farmer chimed. Cinq-Mars looked up again, not wanting to become overly expectant, but not being able to help himself either. The man was poking at the side of his face. “He had this like—” He didn’t know how to describe it or the word was eluding his lips.

Ever positive, Cinq-Mars asked, “Scar?”

“No.”

“Wine-stain?” He knew that he was being excessively optimistic.

“What’s that?” Chaloult asked.

“A kind of birthmark, purple. Never mind. What do you remember seeing?”

“I forgot the word for what you call it.”

“Pimple?” someone in the group suggested.

Chaloult got upset with him. “I wouldn’t tell him about a pimple a man had four years ago! What the hell good is that?”

“What the hell good is it saying he didn’t shave for a day?”

Thank you, Cinq-Mars thought.

“Oh shut up!”

“Describe it, Chaloult!”

The man didn’t want to do that. He knew the word and he wanted to bring it to the surface on his own. The other farmers seemed as frustrated with him as the investigator in the room. Cinq-Mars counseled, “Take your time.”

A man shot out, “Dimple!” and Chaloult just fumed.

“Relax,” quietly, Cinq-Mars encouraged him.

He was now squeezing his cheeks as if raising an idea flush to the surface.

Then he said, “I know what it was.”

Everyone waited.

“Rosacea.”

A few farmers were clueless.

“The curse of the Celts,” Cinq-Mars explained. “It’s called that sometimes. Red cheeks, as if the person has been drinking. But he hasn’t been, necessarily.”

“Splotchy skin, he had a case of it,” Chaloult recalled.

Of course, the man could’ve been drinking the night before or had his skin reddened by the sun or the wind, but Cinq-Mars faithfully wrote down rosacea on his pad. He asked for the men’s relative sizes and received back what he had already suspected, that they were of average height and build, although one was big through the chest.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

He sat there listening to the others discuss whatever came to mind. An exercise in random association. The couple came from the Maritimes, they all heard that, but no one heard either of the Lumens say it, yet one man was certain that they came from New Brunswick and another said Nova Scotia, which prompted a third to say that he was pretty damn sure they arrived from Prince Edward Island. One farmer’s daughter who worked as a waitress reported that the couple tipped more generously than most people. That instigated a discussion on what constituted a fair tip and Cinq-Mars let it play out. The longer they talked the poorer their prospective tips became. He waited for the right moment before asking his next crucial question.

“They lived on a farm,” he mentioned. “But Monsieur Chaloult, you did the work. Do you think they knew anything about farming? Or were they city folk who wanted to live in the countryside for a change?”

Michel Chaloult surprised him, and perhaps surprised them all, for the others seemed unaware that he held to this opinion. “They were farmers,” he declared emphatically. “Morris Lumen knew crops. Morris knew corn, for sure. I’d say that Morris knew as much if not more about farming than I do. For some reason I don’t understand, he decided not to do it anymore. Why does any man quit farming?”

Everyone proffered an answer to the question. “A physical infirmity, I suppose,” the sage man said, as if this was occurring to him for the first time.

“Or a physical calamity.”

“Stroke. Heart attack.”

“I hate those.”

“Doctor’s orders,” the man with the sadder eyes surmised. Then he issued swift invective. “Fuck doctor’s orders, I say! Up the arse!”

The passionate antipathy took Cinq-Mars by surprise, but the men gathered in the rectangle seemed to have anticipated the volley, as if it was inevitable or at least common. They laughed and those closest to the sadder-eyed man offered him a pat on the shoulder and others in his proximity reached across and lightly tapped his knee. He exchanged a glance with Cinq-Mars, and, ceremoniously, it seemed, rather than apologetically, he shrugged.

The oldest among them, the former policeman offered his thanks and departed. He came away with one more puzzling notation, namely that the murdered man who lived in the farmhouse had been a farmer who had chosen not to engage in his profession despite living on a farm. This case, if anyone could call it that, seemed increasingly strange no matter which way it turned.