The Lazarus Heart (9 page)

Lucrece stepped past Jared, still smiling her secret smile, taking his hand again, and the three of them walked together into the gloom.

Jared's eyes are closed and he hasn't spoken for almost an hour. He is letting the memories settle down over him like silt on a muddy river bottom, like the rain falling out on Ursulines, falling on the roof and windows of the apartment. Lucrece has found a silver comb and is combing his long hair out across her lap.

"You have to tell me everything you know," he says at last, and the teeth of the comb hesitate, lingering in their gentle progress across his scalp.

"It's not much," she says after a moment. "I expect it's not much more than you know already, Jared."

He opens his eyes and watches Lucrece's face carefully as he speaks. "Harrod knew that I wasn't the killer, didn't he?"

She flinches when he says the DA's name, summoning the image of the gray-eyed prosecutor, John Henry Harrod, as shrewd as a butcher's cleaver or the grin of a hungry cartoon wolf.

"I honestly don't think Harrod really gave a fuck one way or the other. He needed a murderer and you were convenient. Nothing personal..."

"Bullshit," Jared says, closing his eyes again, knowing the acid tone of his voice hurts her and not wanting to see more pain on her face, knowing he's a coward to look away and looking away anyway. "Harrod was taking care of two birds with one stone. Get rid of the faggot artist and make all the faggot voters happy at the same time."

Lucrece begins combing his hair again, long smooth strokes as if she might still have a chance to calm him, to bring some stingy bit of comfort. Very softly she says, "The killings haven't stopped, Jared."

Now he does open his eyes again, stares speechlessly up at her, unbelieving, as she continues.

"The television and newspapers aren't making much of it. They're trying to play it all down, I think, calling it a copycat killer. No one wants to think there could have been a mistake, especially since..." She pauses, turns her head toward the bed and the crow still perched on the footboard.

Jared finishes for her.

"Especially
since the man they already put in prison recently got three inches of sharpened spoon shoved in his guts and is buried in Lafayette Cemetery."

"Yeah," she whispers, and the black bird caws.

The twins lived on the entire upper floor of one of the two buildings that flanked the alley. Jared looked back the way they'd come, the dirty, dim light at the far end of the alley, while Lucrece unlocked a steel fire door with an old-fashioned brass key from her purse. Beyond that there was a staircase hardly wide enough for Jared to climb without having to turn sideways. There was another steel door at the top, this one with a small peephole and three deadbolts. Lucrece selected more keys, slid back the bolts one after another, and the door made a dry gritty sound as it swung slowly open. She felt along the wall just inside and flipped a switch, turning on a string of naked incandescent bulbs strung up high among the rafters.

"Jesus," Jared muttered as he followed Benny across the threshold. "Wow. You guys don't do things halfway, do you?"

"What would be the point in that?" Benny asked, but Jared wasn't listening to him, entirely too amazed at what they'd made of the second story of the old warehouse-the refuse of a city turned into impossible elegance, garbage molded into the most

unlikely opulence. There were pieces of junked cars and unidentifiable machinery welded into tables and cabinets, semitranslucent curtains of expertly pleated plastic hung for room dividers, broken glass mortared into the walls, glittering like jewels. The only piece of furniture in the place that seemed to be serving its originally intended purpose was a huge canopy bed near the center of the loft. Everything was lacquered in shades of black and red that glimmered wetly under the lights.

"Have a seat," Benny said, pointing Jared toward an armchair near the bed. "We'll get drinks." Jared obeyed, too drunk and stunned to do much else. The chair was upholstered in a deep crimson crushed velvet and its spindly frame had been fashioned from human-looking bones held together with epoxy and metal rods.

"Are these real?" he called after the twins, who were standing on the other side of one of the polyurethane curtains, indistinct, murky figures appearing to move beneath cold and oily waters.

There was the sound of ice cubes and Lucrece called out, "Yes, of course they're
real."
Jared stared down at the chair's armrests-long bones that ended in skeletal fists, one turned upward toward the ceiling, the other grasping for the bare floorboards.

"Real bones are a lot easier to come by in this city than artificial ones," Benny added.

"You know," said Jared, talking now because his voice was better company than his imagination, "there are people who would think this was some pretty sick shit."

Benny slipped through an invisible slit in the plastic, a drink in each hand. "And what about you, Jared
Poe?
Are
you
one of those people? Do
you
think this is some
pretty sick shit?"

Jared accepted his drink, straight whisky over ice, sipped at it tentatively. Benny sighed loudly and shook his head. "Go ahead, silly. It's not laced, and we didn't bring you here to poison you."

The amber whisky burned pleasantly going down, a brand he didn't recognize, probably something more expensive than the stuff he was used to drinking.

"It is very, very impressive," he said, taking another swallow from his glass. "Which?" asked Lucrece, who'd come up silently behind him. "Our apartment or your

drink?"

"Whichever," Jared answered.

"We made most of it ourselves," Benny said, sitting down on the corner of the big bed closest to Jared. "Oh, but not this, of course," and he patted the bed. "We found this in an antique store on Magazine Street. Saved up for months, but it's been worth it..." He let that last thought trail off ambiguously.

Lucrece sat down beside her brother and sipped from her own glass. Again Jared was struck by their resemblance, male and female reflections of the same exquisite face.

"So, Mr. Jared Poe, what is it you photograph?" Lucrece asked as she slipped an arm around her brother's waist.

"Well," he said, watching their every move. His erection was beginning to become uncomfortable, and he shifted in his chair of bones and velvet. "That depends on whether I'm trying to pay the bills or not. If the rent's due, it's mostly weddings and babies..."

Benny made a disgusted face and rolled his eyes. "And the rest of the time?" Lucrece prompted.

"The rest of the time, well... I've been putting together a portfolio of nineteenth- century cemetery sculpture and architecture." Jared paused, then went on almost reluctantly, an ashamed or guilty admission: "And sometimes the people I find hanging out

in cemeteries."

"Ah"
Benny said, his eyes suddenly brightening, eager. "See, Lucrece? I knew he wasn't just another loser art fag."

"Yeah, well, I wouldn't be quite so sure," Jared said, frowning. "You ever noticed how

many
people there are out there taking pictures of the local bone orchards?"

"The
question"
Lucrece said, speaking not to Jared but to her brother, "is whether or not he's any good."

"Whether or not his
heart
is in it," Benny added. He finished his drink, set the glass on the floor at his feet. The ice cubes clinked faintly against each other.

"What do you mean?" Jared asked, and Lucrece shrugged.

"Anyone can point a camera and click, Jared," she said. "Fucking Yankee tourists on the sightseeing buses do
that
every goddamn day of the week. The question is, whether or not you genuinely
understand
-"

"-the dead," Benny said, completing her thought. "After all, it's
their
houses that you're putting down on celluloid and paper, right?"

Jared watched Benny's eyes a second before answering, feeling suddenly lost and stupid, in too deep or maybe even completely out of his element. Benny's eyes were the same guarded, brilliant green as his sister's, the green of uncut emeralds.

"Right," he said at last, only half remembering the question. "Right."

"Because it isn't enough to
appreciate
the dead," Benny said. "To simply steal their likenesses and call it art. There has to be an-"

"-understanding," Lucrece said, and Jared realized their habit of finishing each other's sentences was beginning to give him the creeps.

"Any genuine aesthetic of the dead requires, no,
demands
that the artist treat them as something more than mere objects. They must be seen and portrayed as dynamic opposites of life, not empty vessels devoid of anything but the power to make us nervous, afraid of our own mortality."

"And he calls
me
the show-off," Lucrece said, distractedly stirring the ice cubes in her drink with one finger.

Jared was busy trying to process what Benny had said through the alcohol clouding his mind. He shook his head.

"No, I mean, that's really, um, articulate..."

"Yeah, ain't it amazing that someone can be this pretty
and
smart too?" Lucrece purred, smiling as she touched an index finger, wet with whisky and water, to her brother's lips.

"But surely we didn't bring him all this way just to talk shop, did we?" Benny asked her, and she shook her head and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Jared's face felt suddenly hot, flushed, and he knew that he was blushing, and that the twins could probably see that he was blushing.

"That would be terribly,
terribly
rude," Lucrece said, and Benny turned his head, kissing her full on the lips now. The bulge in Jared's jeans responded as if an invisible line had been attached to the end of his penis and someone had just tugged at it sharply.

"I don't know," Benny said, pulling away. The stark light caught in a thin string of saliva linking their lips. "Maybe he's not up to it. Maybe we're wrong and he is just another poseur..."

Jared swallowed hard, his mouth and throat suddenly very dry. He wished his glass wasn't empty but wasn't about to break this moment by asking for a refill. He squirmed nervously in his strange chair.

"Or
maybe
he's not into boys," Lucrece said, her voice full of mocking regret, and her tongue flicked across Benny's lower lip. And then Benny whispered slyly, mischievously, "Or
maybe
he's not into girls."

"Bingo," Jared said. He'd set his glass in the upturned skeleton hand and covered his lap with his hands, embarrassed at his own embarrassment.

Lucrece sat back, scooting a couple of feet away from her brother, her face an almost comic mask of exaggerated rejection and disappointment. Benny let her go, but his eyes followed her retreat longingly. "Not even girls who used to be boys?" he said.

Jared caught the slicing, flinty edge of the question before Lucrece slapped her brother. It wasn't a playful slap, and the sound of her hand against his skin was very loud in the apartment.

"Bitch," she hissed, and Jared thought there was the faintest, calculated hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

"Touché," Benny said.

There are strings everywhere,
Jared thought,
not just on the end of my dick.
This scene was something the pair had rehearsed over and over again, he realized, perfected in privacy and practice.

"Never mind," Lucrece said, getting up off the bed. "Fortunately I like to watch. You don't mind if I
watch,
do you, Mr. Poe?"

"Then you are identical twins?" he asked, wondering if perhaps that was pushing her too far, if maybe this spot really was too sensitive for Lucrece and he was blowing his chance at Benny. But she just shrugged, tossed her hair to one side, and said, "Once upon a time."

"Sometimes," Benny said, removing his leather overcoat, "I think my sister will never forgive me for not making the transition with her. For ruining the set, as it were."

"You never had the balls," Lucrece said, and now she
was
smiling, a careful, secret smile that said there was so much here that Jared could never even hope to understand half of it. "You never had the fucking balls."

As Benny began unbuttoning his vest Jared got up from the bone chair, moving slowly, as if he was being scored on every action and reaction, and joined the male twin on the bed. Lucrece left them alone briefly to pour herself another drink, then returned with the bottle and took Jared's place in the chair.

Jared rubs at his temples, wishing it were anything as simple as pain throbbing there.

He stands above the crow and the bird looks back up at him with mindful, eager eyes. Lucrece is still sitting on the bedroom floor behind them, holding the silver comb.

"Where am I supposed to start?" he asks, the question posed to the bird or Lucrece, to himself or all three.

"I'm not sure," Lucrece says. When Jared turns around, she's holding strands of his dark hair between her fingers, staring at them.
The way someone might clutch a holy relic,
he thinks, and the thought makes him feel sick to his stomach.
What am I to her? What does she think I've become?

"I think you're supposed to find Benny's killer and stop him. I think that's what you've been brought back for."

"And Harrod and the cops and that fucking judge, what about them? Aren't they part of this as well?"

Lucrece's eyes reluctantly release their hold on the precious strands of his hair, refocus on Jared standing at the foot of the bed. The bed he shared with her twin brother. The bed Jared first saw in that warehouse apartment so long ago. Lucrece's eyes look as hard and old as New Orleans itself, as wet as the night.

"I'm not sure, Jared. Maybe. But maybe not. The
crow's
supposed to know what happens next, and for some reason it doesn't."

"They set me up," he says. The bird looks away, pecks at the dark wood of the headboard.

"I think we have to be
sure,
Jared, before you do anything that can't be undone." "Did the fucking cops bother to be
sure
before they arrested me? Before they told