Every Dead Thing

I turned away. “Yeah, just a moment of weakness, that’s all. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going, Birdman?” There was doubt in his voice, and something else: a note of warning, of violence, and I wondered if my wife had heard it as she tried to escape, as he came after her, as he broke her nose against the wall.

“I have to go to the john,” I said.

I am still not certain why I turned away. Bile was rising in my throat, threatening to make me gag and vomit on the floor. A fierce, burning pain dug at my stomach and clawed at my heart. It was as if a veil had been pulled aside at the moment of my death, revealing only a cold, black emptiness beyond. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to turn away from it all, and when I returned, everything would be normal again. I would have a wife and a child who looked like her mother. I would have a small, peaceful home and a patch of lawn to tend and someone who would stand by me, even to the end.

The toilet was dark and smelled of stale urine from the unflushed bowl, but the tap worked. I splashed cold water on my face, then reached into my jacket pocket for my phone.

It wasn’t there. I had left it on the table with Woolrich. I wrenched the door open and moved around the bar, my right hand drawing my pistol, but Woolrich was already gone.

I called Toussaint but he had left the office. Dupree had gone home. I convinced the switchboard operator to ring Dupree’s home number and to ask him to call me back. Five minutes later he did. His voice was bleary.

“This had better be good,” he said.

“Byron isn’t the killer,” I said.

“What?” He was wide awake instantly.

“He didn’t kill them,” I repeated. I was outside the bar, gun in hand, but there was no sign of Woolrich. I stopped two black women passing with a child between them, but they backed off as soon as they saw the gun. “Byron wasn’t the Traveling Man. Woolrich was. He’s running. I caught him out with a lie about his daughter. He said he had spoken to her two or three months back. You and I both know that’s not possible.”

“You could have made a mistake.”

“Dupree, listen to me. Woolrich set Byron up. He killed my wife and daughter. He killed Morphy and his wife, Tante Marie, Tee Jean, Lutice Fontenot, Tony Remarr, and he killed his own daughter too. He’s running, do you hear me? He’s running.”

“I hear you,” said Dupree. His voice was dry with the realization of how wrong we had been.

One hour later, they hit Woolrich’s apartment in Algiers, on the south bank of the Mississippi. It lay on the upper floor of a restored house on Opelousas Avenue, above an old grocery store, approached by a flight of cast iron stairs, girded with gardenias, that led up to a gallery. Woolrich’s apartment was the only one in the building, with two arched windows and a solid oak door. The New Orleans police were backed up by six FBI men. The cops led, the feds taking up positions at either side of the door. There was no movement visible in the apartment through the windows. They had not expected any.

Two cops swung an iron battering ram with Hi, Y’all painted in white on its flat head. It took one swing to knock the door open. The FBI men poured into the house, the police securing the street and the surrounding yards. They checked the tiny kitchen, the unmade bed, the lounge with the new television, the empty pizza cartons and beer cans, the Penguin poetry editions which sat in a milk crate, the picture of Woolrich and his daughter smiling from on top of a nest of tables.

In the bedroom was a closet, open and containing an array of wrinkled clothes and two pairs of tan shoes, and a metal cabinet sealed with a large steel lock.

“Break it,” instructed the agent in charge of the operation, Assistant SAC Cameron Tate. O’Neill Brouchard, the young FBI man who had driven me to Tante Marie’s house centuries before, struck at the lock with the butt of his machine pistol. It broke on the third attempt and he pulled the doors open.

The explosion blew O’Neill Brouchard backward through the window, almost tearing his head off in the process, and sent a hailstorm of glass shards into the narrow confines of the bedroom. Tate was blinded instantly, glass embedding itself in his face, neck, and his Kevlar vest. Two other FBI men sustained serious injuries to the face and hands as part of Woolrich’s store of empty glass jars, his laptop computer, a modified H3000 voice synthesizer, a smaller, portable voice changer with the capacity to alter pitch and tone, and a flesh-colored mask, used to obscure his mouth and nose, were blown to pieces. And amid the flames and the smoke and the shards of glass, burning pages fluttered to the ground like black moths, a mass of biblical apocrypha disintegrating into ash.