Waking the Dead (44 page)

“For God’s sake, Fielding,” he said. “Let me go. You’re strangling me. Will you please let me go?”

I
WAITED THROUGH
the night for Sarah to call and the next morning I showered, shaved, and packed a suitcase. I called a taxi and was taken to O’Hare Airport and took the noon plane out to New Orleans. I sat near the window and watched the ground crew de-ice the wings. It was a fierce blizzard but the runways were open. We were already a half hour late. I had the morning papers. Both of them had editorials supporting Bertelli, characterizing him as an independent, new voice, free from the alliances and solutions of the past. The great lie had dug itself in. The stewardesses served breakfast; the fellow sitting next to me picked his eggs apart as if he was trying to remove shards of broken glass. It was a rocky ride. The captain never turned off the seat-belt sign. We hit an air pocket. A woman gasped. I dozed off and dreamed about walking through Madison Square Park with Danny and I was wearing my Coast Guard uniform and then I was awake and the plane was just a hundred feet above the runway in New Orleans. It was raining hard.

I took a taxi from the airport to Sarah’s parents’ house. The driver was an enormously fat light-skinned black with freckles the size of rivets on his face. He was listening to a rhythm and blues station. The dj was the R and B singer Ernie K. Doe and apparently his health or mortality was in question because he continually repeated the phrase, “And you know Ernie K. Doe is
never
gonna die.” And then there’d be a pause while you absorbed that and then he’d break in with something like, “You hear me, Martha? Now get yourself out of bed, girl. And come down here because I
need
you.”

Soon, we were at the Williamses’ rectangular brick house. It looked particularly cryptic in the rain. The cyclone fence was still there but the Chihuahuas it once enclosed were gone: now a sleek, red-eyed boxer paced slowly along the perimeters of the front yard. I paid the driver and took my overnight bag out of the taxi. As I approached the house, the dog got into position, as if it had just heard the bell signaling the next round. Its rib cage looked prehistoric through its soaked coat; its teeth were a dull pinkish white. But of course I’d come too far to be deterred by a mere dog. I figured I couldn’t be the first person to approach the Williams house with this dog on duty and so I just opened the gate and did my best to project an aura of confidence. The dog pressed its muzzle into my groin and growled; the reverberations of his anger turned my spine into a tuning fork. He followed me up the narrow pavement, up the porch, right to the door, and he remained there as I rang the doorbell. The porch had a tin roof and the rain sounded like stones in a coffee can.

The door opened. It was Sarah’s father, Eugene. His polar blue eyes had softened and dulled until they looked like old denim. He was unshaved, wearing a robe. He’d put on weight. The sound of big band music was swinging and swaying behind him and he was holding a pair of drumsticks. He had no idea who I was. “OK, Rocky, get off,” he said to the dog. The dog cringed, backed away. “Did he nail you?” Eugene asked me. He smiled and rubbed his chin whiskers.

“Well? What can I do you for?”

“Hello, Eugene. I’m Fielding Pierce.”

His first reaction was fast, a reflex. “What did you say?” he asked, as if I were a child who had mumbled something disrespectful. But then the confusion rolled in, no longer held at bay by his familiar habits of aggression. The color drained out of his face and his whiskers looked like iron filings floating in milk.

“I’m Fielding Pierce,” I said again. “Sarah’s friend.”

He nodded. He seemed to want to save face, as if showing too much surprise would put him at a disadvantage from which he could never recover. “That’s right,” he said. “What are … what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Talk to me?” he said, and his voice went suddenly jaunty, as if we were about to engage in something comic. “Well, there’s no charge for that.” He paused for a moment, as if to give time to the part of himself that was still reeling to gather in safety behind the front he was putting up. “Well, get the hell out of the rain, why don’t you. Come in.”

He stepped aside and I came into the house. It smelled warm, foul.The Music Minus One was lilting along, pausing now and then for a drum break—but the drummer was away from his post. “This is the third Saturday in a row my golf date’s been rained out,” Eugene was saying. “It’s so depressing.” I followed him into the living room.

His drum set was in the center of the room, next to the stereo console. And next to the drums was a female boxer with six pups on her. There were wet newspapers on the carpet. “Sorry about the mess. But the crazy bitch dropped her litter here and when Dorothy tried to move her she almost got herself bit.” With that, he went to the staircase and called up: “Dorothy?You decent? We’ve got a visitor from the past!” He turned back to me and smiled. “This ought to set her back a few paces,” he said. And then he grabbed the bottom of the banister and shouted upstairs, “Dorothy, now, for Christ’s sake,
now
.” He shook his head and gave me a shrug that was meant to imply male complicity. “It’s either that or be ignored,” he said.

“I’m sorry to appear without any warning,” I said.

“So what brings you to New Orleans?” Eugene asked. “Here for Mardi Gras?”

“No. I need to talk to you about Sarah.”

“Great. My favorite topic. What do you want to know? The first day she decided to work against the interests of the USA, or the last?”

I heard the rustle of Dorothy Williams’s chiffon robe as she wove down the stairs. She was wearing a proper blue dress and large amber beads. She was holding a coffee cup that I could tell from the curl of her fingers was carrying alcohol. Her face was in total disarray, smeared like a watercolor left in the rain. She saw me when she was halfway down the stairs and she gripped the railing; there was something strange in her movements, almost as if she were trying to be grand, trying to act as if her life was just a part in a drama.

“Oh good, Dot,” said Eugene, “you’re just in time. Look who’s here. Sarah’s old fiancé, Fielding.”

“What is he doing here, Gene?” she asked.

“That’s the beauty part, Dot. Come on down here and make sure you don’t hurt yourself.”

She made her way down the stairs. She placed her cup on a heavily carved table in the hall and then took her place at her husband’s side. “Hello, Fielding,” she said. “This is a surprise.”

“Hello, Mrs. Williams,” I said. “I’m sorry to drop in like this. I’ve been very busy and … I don’t know. This is just how it worked out.”

“Well, to what do we owe this pleasure?” she asked, taking her husband’s arm and leaning on him. Eugene took the opportunity to walk away from her and turn off the stereo set. The room seemed to jolt forward like the passenger in a braking car.

“I have a question to ask you,” I said. We were still standing and I paused, thinking they would at that point suggest we sit. I wasn’t so far gone I didn’t know what this was going to sound like.

“You know what?” Eugene said, tapping his forehead. “I just remembered. I
liked
you. You were just like a normal person. You weren’t like—you know, the sort of boy I expected Sarah to choose. You were in the Coast Guard. You were going to law school. Did that pan out?”

“Yes, I’m a lawyer.”

“What side?”

“I’ve been working in the Cook County Prosecutor’s office. Now I’m running for Congress up in Chicago.”

“Really?” he said. “Chicago? Dorothy has a sister who lived in Chicago for many years.”

“Not really in Chicago, Gene. Emily lived many miles outside the city.”

Eugene snorted contemptuously. “Well, that’s a story that changes like the wind.”

“Well, we’re just standing here like a bunch of servants,” said Dorothy. “Why don’t we all sit down?” She put her hand to her throat and smiled.

Eugene walked over to his drum set and dropped the sticks on the snare and then we were all seated. The furniture I remembered from the time Sarah and I had stayed here was gone. I sat in a white wicker chair with lime green upholstery. Dorothy and Eugene sat on opposite ends of the lime and wicker sofa. Years ago, there’d been pictures of their daughters on the wall in this room. Now they’d been replaced by formal portraits of racehorses inherited from Sarah’s grandfather.

“This is not an easy visit for me,” I said. “I have something to ask you. It’s about Sarah.” A surge of exhaustion suddenly went through me. I covered my eyes for a moment.

“Before you go any further, Mr. Pierce,” said Dorothy, “with your questions and your dredging up old memories, I feel I ought to tell you that you come at a difficult time. Eugene had a stroke a few months ago and he is no longer working for his insurance company and my own health, as you may have noticed—”

“Let’s not go crying the blues, Dot,” said Eugene sharply. “Our troubles are no worse than anyone else’s. Isn’t that right, Fielding?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose not. Look—here’s what I want to say. I have reason to believe that Sarah is still alive.” I looked from Dorothy’s face to Eugene’s. I don’t know what I expected them to look like or to say, but they were looking at me as if I were something on TV.

Finally Eugene smiled. He raised his arms over his head and stretched extravagantly. “What do you mean by alive? You mean in your heart or something?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that’s all there is to it. There’s no sense going into it if you have no idea what I’m talking about. She hasn’t contacted you in any way?”

“Contacted us? What are you talking about?”

“Like in a séance?” asked Dorothy, furrowing her brow.

“No. Or yes. I don’t know, I don’t know. On the telephone. By letter. In person.”

I could see perfectly well in Eugene’s eyes that he was now regarding me in a different way: he was trying to calculate as quickly as possible if I was dangerous. He had large, carnivorous teeth and he showed them to me as he leaned forward. “This is a lot of goddamned nonsense, sailor. And I’m asking you once, like a gentleman, to leave this house right now.”

Dorothy was patting her husband’s hand, petitioning for the right to speak. “Are you saying you’ve seen her?” she asked me.

“I think so.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Pierce,” said Eugene, rising from the sofa.

I got up as well. “How about her sisters? Have they mentioned anything about this?”

“No,” said Dorothy. Her eyes suddenly shifted and I glanced behind me to see what she was looking at: it was the cup she’d left on the foyer table.

“I’d like your permission to go to the graveyard and have that vault opened up,” I said, as reasonably as possible.

The sextet of boxer puppies were sleeping now; the emaciated-looking mother crept away from them, her tail dragging, head down. Eugene watched the dog as she staggered into the dining room and then he turned back toward me.

“How can you come into this house and speak this way in front of my wife?” he asked. “You got your head up your ass? Is that it? You on dope or something? You think I didn’t see you when we buried her? Sitting in the back of our church with your eyes half closed and your big ugly mouth hanging open? It just so happens, sailor boy, that I took a six-week course with the New Orleans Police Department on how to spot drug abusers so it’s been your misfortune to run into someone who’s aware of all the signs, all the little tricks.”

“I know what it’s like, Mr. Pierce,” said Dorothy, “to love someone and lose them.”

“Oh,” said Eugene, “so we’re back to that, are we?”

“All I’m saying is I understand his pain.”

“Well, don’t be so goddamned understanding, Dot.” He pointed his finger at me. “If you get anywhere near that cemetery, anywhere near where my family is buried, I’ll have you arrested.”

“Don’t you care?” I asked. “I’m here to tell you the woman in that car wasn’t Sarah. The body was so destroyed—no one could tell. Anyhow, no one stopped to think it could be someone else.” I stopped and looked at Sarah’s mother. She was staring at me, her face utterly passive, helpless, her mind blasted beyond any real usefulness. And as I paused I realized I had been shouting. My voice was not the voice of a strong person. Eugene was walking toward the table upon which was their telephone—a sleek, gray, push-button phone with a built-in note pad. He rested his hand on it and looked at me, nodding.

“OK, OK,” I said. “You don’t have to call anyone.”

“You’d be doing yourself a big favor if you got out of my house,” he said.

“I’ll go. I don’t have time for any trouble.” I put my hands up, as if trying to appease a violent child. “But Jesus Christ, don’t you care? Don’t you want it to be true?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he said.

“She is your daughter.”

“She was a fool,” he said, and with that he picked up the receiver and started dialing.

I
WALKED THE
streets in the cool rain until I found St. Charles Avenue and a taxicab.The driver took me to the airport and from there I called Washington, D.C. I was phoning a fellow named Richard Donahue, whom I had gotten to know a few years ago while the investigation of the Minneapolis bombing was still ongoing.

Rich Donahue was an FBI agent. He and his partner, John W.Walton, had been in contact with me off and on over the course of a couple of years. The bombing was an act of terrorism and they seemed reasonably anxious to find and arrest whoever had been responsible for it. But they knew and I knew too that the killers were probably no longer in the country and that the Immigration records would be of no use since there was no telling when they had come to the United States, or if they had come with false documents, or if they had gone through Immigration at all. It was not a case receiving the attention I felt it deserved. There may have been points in the development of the crime where the paths of the assassins and the path of U.S. officials crossed. Who knew? We had clearly lent a hand in the destruction of Allende; perhaps our policy extended to the murder of Allende ministers, no matter where they were, or with whom; or perhaps the policy, once begun, knew no logical ending place, but just gobbled up victims like a shark in a feeding frenzy. Neither Donahue nor Walton found much usefulness in my theories or my doubts, though they were always solicitous of my opinions and seemed to like drawing me out— as if they were jotting down notes for a future dossier, if I were ever to dare to become an enemy of the state. The truth was, I liked them. They were methodical, firm, seemingly uninterested in the ephemera of modern life—no fancy clothes, no up-to-the-minute attitudes, nice solid personal lives, modest homes with comfortable furniture, a sense of virtue, at peace with themselves. Walton had been in the beginning stages of multiple sclerosis; a year ago I got a card from him saying he was retiring from the FBI. “I’ll be home watching
Ironsides,
” the card said, “but Richie will still be handling the Minneapolis case and one day we’ll have our man. Keep well and if you’re ever in Potomac, Maryland, give me a holler.”