Burn- pigeon 16 (18 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

Anna called her brother-in-law, Frederick, late of the FBI. Her main concern was the questionable ethics of asking him to help her while keeping him in the dark for his own safety. She had forgotten how quick the man's mind was.

"David Sullivan, Daoud Suliman, the slain husband/father in Seattle?" he'd asked.

"The same," Anna admitted.

"And you want me to trace his business with a special focus on dealings with New Orleans."

"I do."

"You are in New Orleans on business?"

He knew she wasn't. Molly had been her favorite ear in the early days of her separation from the NPS, before she'd grown ashamed at her own whining and shut her out for a while.

"Vacation," Anna said.

"So, on vacation, wanting information on victim Sullivan . . . you've got a lead on where his wife is, the prime murder suspect."

Anna said nothing.

Frederick groaned. "No. Don't tell me you've actually got the wife?"

Again Anna said nothing.

"Is she . . ."

There was a sudden silence. As it ticked by, Anna resisted the temptation to say "Are you there?" into her cell phone.

Frederick came back on the line. "Right, never mind; tell me no more. But, and you listen to me this time, doggone it, what you are doing is so very dangerous. Not only knife-in-the-back kind of dangerous, but thirty-years-to-life kind of dangerous. Let's not discuss it further. I'll e-mail you."

"Thanks, Frederick," Anna said, relieved. Since the Bush administration had bent or broken all the rules about right to privacy, paranoia was the norm. If one didn't want it recorded, one didn't say it over America's phone lines, or airwaves, or whatever it was cell phones sent things over.

"I owe you," she said.

"Oh my yes, a bunch, a whole bunch. I'm talking you come to New York for Christmas and stay with your sister and go shopping with her," Frederick said without a trace of humor in his voice.

"Shopping?" Anna quailed. "At Christmas?"

"Put it on your calendar. Bring your Paul. We'll run background checks on each other and play chess."

"I will," Anna promised.

"Yes, you will," Frederick said. He added, "We love you. Stay out of dark alleys and the federal penitentiary." Then he hung up.

Walking down Bourbon, the sun long set and Friday night partiers thickening like soup left too long on the stove, Anna wished she'd been able to do more than she had. Clare's sense of time running out was contagious, she thought as she stepped into the street to cede the sidewalk to a knot of men too drunk to be trusted not to fall on her.

At CC's she'd accessed the Wi-Fi and gleaned as much about Clare, her husband, her children, the murders, and David's business from Google and Wikipedia as she could--whatever was public knowledge.

Clare had a Facebook account. Not being a hacker, Anna was limited only to the first page. It was about actors and acting and theater shop talk. Her daughters weren't mentioned. Whether this indicated she was not a good mother or was an exceedingly good mother, Anna didn't know.

David's business had a Web site, but it was sufficiently boring to dull her senses. Again, she could only access the first page. The business was strictly wholesale, and without a vendor number she was locked out.

Newspapers and magazines were more forthcoming. The murders were covered from every angle and rehashed from the
Times
to the tabloids. Clare Sullivan had murdered her sleeping spouse and his mistress and then set fire to the family home, killing both her children. Since she'd disappeared the night of the crimes and so could not be tried and convicted, the better rags were careful to say "alleged" murderer. The others didn't bother.

Information made public by the Seattle police and coroner's office made it look like an open-and-shut case. Anna's instincts told her Clare was innocent, but Anna's instincts, when it came to judging character, were notoriously untrustworthy.

Without using any names, she had talked with Molly about the schism in Clare, the part of her that seemed to be becoming Jordan.

"We all do it to some extent," her sister told her. "Just look at the headlines. Family values politicians having affairs, antigay preachers going to male prostitutes. We aren't the same person to our grandmother as we are to the cop who stops us for speeding. It's when we force a divide between these seemingly disparate parts that mental illness comes in. Most of us compartmentalize, make excuses, or suffer guilt, but we hold the good and the bad together in our skins and our skulls. Your nameless person has taken it to a new level, but I doubt she's crazy. Yet."

The "yet" haunted Anna. If Clare was not a murderess, there was still Jordan. Anna believed Jordan could easily become a killer, if he wasn't already. Her gut told her, if and when this happened, Clare would step over that line from knowing she was behaving bizarrely to simply being that other, bizarre person. Should Anna be in the vicinity when that happened, there could be deadly consequences.

Shaking off logical thoughts and sensible behavior, she cleared her mind. For whatever reasons, she believed in Clare. She had promised to help her as far as she could without committing any crimes--any more crimes. Second-guessing her decision or, worse, psychoanalyzing why she made it was a waste of time and energy. Opening her eyes to her surroundings, she soaked in the color, music, foolishness, and overindulgence that was Bourbon Street.

Without turning her head she could count half a dozen examples of Molly's contention that we all harbor other personalities within: the Minnesota businessman, sporting a new tattoo, a fleur-de-lis, that he would have to keep covered for the rest of his professional life; the acne-scarred middle-aged man in denim and flannel, flirting with a lovely boy when, at a guess, he was straight as an arrow when he was home; two women in their forties or early fifties, showing lots of leg and cleavage and having a wonderful time when, back in their normal skins, they probably wouldn't dream of wearing skimpy clothes and cavorting in high heels.

There was a part of Anna that occasionally had a yen to slither around in silk and heavy mascara, but she hadn't succumbed for some years. There was always a reason she wanted--or needed--to be comfortable, to be able to move freely, run quickly, and scramble through and over things that a dress could catch on. Tonight, for all the usual reasons, she was in baggy linen trousers--growing ever baggier in the humid air--a tank top, and Tevas. Her hair was in its customary braid. It occurred to her, should she make the Deep South her permanent home, she'd probably be driven to chop it off. It was a bit like wearing a coonskin cap in the middle of August.

Paul had fallen in love with her while she was in uniform and carrying a gun. Perhaps, before she left New Orleans, she would buy something sensuous and surprise him. Though he loved her in the green and gray, she didn't doubt for a moment he would love her in silk and heels just as much, and, probably, suddenly. She smiled thinking of his touch.

A thicket of boys on a wrought-iron balcony, each holding a beer, green and gold and purple Mardi Gras beads around their fists and necks, hollered down, "Show us your tits!" Never mind that it wasn't Mardi Gras and Anna was old enough to arrest their mothers. Anna smiled and waved, amused to be included in their revelry. She did not, however, flash her breasts.

Bourbon Street, New Orleans, a historically sinful tourist destination, reminded her of the carnival that Pinocchio was lured to, the dark place of noise and light and lurid shadows where bad little boys turned into animals. The main difference was that the carnival of animal-children in Pinocchio's colorful hell scared the bejesus out of the tiny Anna. She still couldn't recall the scene without a modicum of shiveriness visiting her spine. Bourbon Street did not have that same sense of true evil, of no turning back, of consequences that creep up on one unawares and, when one finally realizes what's happening, it's too late.

Dick's was the same gray and dreary bunker of the night before. The young barker behind the lectern was chatty and charming and welcomed Anna back with "Why am I not surprised that such a beautiful woman got lucky? May Bacchus bless your evening, darlin'."

Anna thanked him politely and stepped into the grimy darkness of the strip club. Star was onstage with the same young studly sort that had provided a hobbyhorse for Candy the previous evening. She was down to pasties, panties, and turquoise cowboy boots with matching hat. Her implants, tools of the trade, though seemingly not the requirement Anna would have expected, defied gravity as she lay on her back across a miserably uncomfortable-looking chair while her young costar did his best to keep his weight off of her and the rickety-looking set piece.

The plastic chairs around the battered black cube tables were full. Mostly men, mostly young, but a healthy smattering of guys in their forties and fifties. Too big for the knee-high cubes, they looked like huge toddlers hulking on playroom furniture. To further the illusion, most of them were sucking on a bottle.

Anna hesitated inside the short artificial hallway from the street, designed, she supposed, to give the customers a greater sense of having entered the devil's den.

Her eyes adjusted quickly, and she saw Betty at a table in the back of the room, past the bottleneck created by the bar and the stage, waving to her. Having threaded her way through the clumps of men, Anna sank gratefully into a chair beside her.

"Big crowd," Anna said just to be saying something.

"Southern Baptist convention's in town," Betty replied as if that said it all.

"Ah."

Betty watched the stage, and Anna watched Jordan hustling drinks. Dressed in black, emaciated and expressionless, it wouldn't be too hard to believe he was one of New Orleans's celebrated vampires. In a way he was, Anna thought, sucking the life out of Clare, turning her into a creature like himself.

Dramatic as these images were, Anna believed she could see the desperate woman beneath Jordan's skin in the shaking of the hands as beers were set down, the jerk of the shoulders at a sudden noise from the stage, the careful way of never looking at the dancers, as if that would somehow demean them.

If Jordan had seen Anna come in, he was ignoring her in an impressive fashion. Had she wanted a drink, she would have had to flag him down, and his eyes were always carefully elsewhere.

"Who all is working tonight?" she asked Betty after a few minutes had elapsed.

"Hah! Don't tell me you fell in love in the ladies' john last night?" Betty leaned across the table, her beer corralled between her hardworking hands, and grinned at Anna. The grin winked out. "Don't tell me you fell in love with Tanya," she said warningly.

"With you in the wings, I doubt I'd have a chance," Anna said gravely. Betty's grin returned. "Do you come here every night?" Anna asked. Perhaps Betty would know a thing or two about a thing or two.

"Most nights," Betty said, relaxing back as far as she was able in the stingy plastic chair. "If I'm going to grow on her, I've got to be around. And for little things to grow, they've got to be fed and watered." She rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the sign for cash. Betty was nobody's fool.

"As to who's working tonight, Candy's here--she's here pretty much seven days a week. I don't think she's got anyplace else to go, and she really likes the stage work and the people. She's a big star in Candy World. Uh, let's see, Star obviously, and my adorable Tanya--she has Mondays and Tuesdays off, so I'm not here those nights. I haven't seen Delilah, but I haven't been here all that long. She could be in back getting made up. Mostly she and Star don't work together, which is too bad. They've got a hot little girl-girl act they do once in a while. It goes over big. All the bozos picture themselves as the welcome third. Like that would ever happen. But they try and work different nights. Star's got a kid about nine, and they don't like to leave him with sitters if they can help it."

"Who's up after Star?"

"The single most beautiful woman ever about to fall in love with a wharf rat," Betty said and smacked her lips. Not metaphorically but literally, like a toothless sommelier trying to remember an exquisite vintage.

Betty was a font of information, and Anna was grateful. As Star finished her act and clumped off the stage, leaving the energetic young stud muffin slouching in sexy--and to Anna's eye totally gay--insouciance against a pole, Anna rose and followed her toward the ladies' toilet.

Some goddess or other had taken pity on Anna, and the cramped space was relatively free of smoke. Probably because Delilah wasn't there to add her nightly pack of Marlboro Lights to the dope smoke.

"You guys got a minute?" Anna asked. Star collapsed into the unpadded metal folding chair that she'd occupied the previous night.

"Geez, woman, how many minutes you need? Didn't you get your fill of bullshit last night? Whatever you're after, we're fresh out," Star said wearily. Shoving aside a blue towel that was probably older than her co-worker Candy, Star opened the lid of a plastic cooler and pulled out a beer. "You want one?" she asked.

Because breaking bread--or, in this case, yeast--with another was good for developing trust, Anna accepted. Being a woman of manners, Star unscrewed the cap and wiped the mouth of the bottle off on the old towel before handing it to her uninvited guest.

Candy, slumped in the other chair,
US
magazine open in her lap, her tummy looking bigger than it had the night before and her face rounder and younger, said, "Can I have one?"

"How many've you already had?" Star asked, eyes narrowed like a faro dealer peering through smoke.

"Just one. Honest," Candy said and crossed her heart with her fingers.

"Okay, but you go slow. You've got the rest of the night to get through, and the boss doesn't like it when you get too silly onstage." Star pulled out a third beer, twisted off the cap, wiped the mouth of the bottle, and handed it to the pregnant teen. She shot Anna a look that said as clearly as if she'd shouted it, "I dare you to say one thing, one fucking thing."