There was almost no blood, and what there was they worked quickly to clean up. Then they had another task.
Josephine had never been clear if Richard had envisioned everything from the start – the murder and then the concealment of the murder – or whether he had just been overtaken by his own rage and had improvised a solution afterward.
Whichever, in New Orleans, as nowhere else, there was a convenient way to dispose of dead bodies.
They packed Brad out through the former carriage house and into Richard's car. They drove to Lafayette Cemetery, only five blocks away, and carried the corpse quickly inside. Josephine moved the car away from the gate as Richard carried the body to the Lambert family tomb, deep in the center of the mazelike necropolis. When she rejoined him, they unbolted the crypt's marble front cover and used a small sledgehammer to batter away the bricks behind it. When they'd opened a hole big enough to squeeze the body through, they stuffed Brad onto the top of his mother's coffin, then bolted the cover back on.
So within half an hour of Brad's death, he had disappeared for good. Josephine and Richard knew no one would ever open the Lambert crypt to find the gap in the bricks or the remains atop the coffin. Because there would never be cause to open the grave: Brad was the last of the Lambert name. When her time came, Charmian would be buried in the Beauforte tomb. Anyway, in only a year and a day Bradford would be baked to dust and flakes of bone.
It wasn't yet sunrise when Richard dropped Josephine off at the house and went on down to the shack just as he and Brad had done so many times over the years. He came back two days later with a terrible story. The lie he'd told the police was that they'd separated in the cypress labyrinth, Brad taking a little pirogue he favored and Richard using the larger boat as they fished for black bass and flatheads. Later, when Richard arrived at their planned rendezvous, he'd been shocked to find the pirogue floating untethered and untended. Some accident must have happened. Police rescue teams combed the area, but no one could say for certain how far the pirogue might have drifted before Richard found it, and in the endless maze of cypress lanes, the tangle of roots groping down into coffee-dark water, it was no wonder they couldn't find his body. With all the alligators around, there probably wasn't much to find.
It made the newspapers as a tragedy for one of New Orleans's oldest and most respected families. At the church ceremony they eventually held, Brad's survivors – Charmian, Ron, Lila, Richard – appeared much distraught.
A family grieved.
41
The man who picked up Charmian wasn't from Crescent City Confidential Services. His two gold teeth, the checked shirt, those too-small oval sunglasses, and the posture of deliberate negligence showed him for what he was. As variously described by Ronald and the people he'd referred her to find him, he was a "fixer," a "hitter," a "handyman" – someone willing to do dirty work for pay. Just how dirty, Charmian wasn't sure, but the way he looked, slouched behind the wheel of his beat-up Cadillac, driving with one wrist, she wouldn't put much past him. He was a scrawny, chain-smoking, hatchet-faced Cajun swamp rat who leered when he told her his name was Pierre Lapin Peter Rabbit. When he'd first taken the driver's seat and tugged his jeans up, Charmian saw the end of a switchblade over the top of his pointy, ankle-high, bayou lounge-lizard boots.
She wasn't sure how you went about asking his type if murder was part of his resume. She wasn't sure she could bring it to that in any case. Three people had died already, her daughter had almost died yesterday – the swath of pain cut by that long-ago act was more than broad enough. But it was an outcome she was willing to accept if it proved necessary, and they'd have to discuss it before they got to Port Sulphur.
The Crescent City Confidential man she'd hired to watch Cree, after Charmian's last conversation with Paul Fitzpatrick, had phoned from Port Sulphur to say that Miss Black had located Josephine. As Paul had predicted. It infuriated her that in ten days this out of towner, a woman, a parapsychologist, a Yankee, could find a person the region's supposed top detective firm hadn't been able to. She let him hear her fury for a moment before telling him to wait there, that she would be there in just over one hour, that he was to follow Cree if she left Josephine's house and report in on the cell phone if she did.
Cree's finding Josephine meant that she would know the truth – most of it, anyway. There was only one fallback position now. If Cree didn't go for it, if she didn't agree on the solution, Pierre would be given an opportunity to become one very rich swamp rat.
It was bad enough that she had to spend over an hour with Pierre Lapin in his cigarette-reeking Cadillac. But the real problem was that there was nothing to say to such a lowlife, even if she did have need of his services, and the silence left time for her thoughts to whirl. The image of Lila, pathetically asleep in the hospital bed, her arms at her sides and bound to the bed, interposed itself between images of the past.
That night, and the following days, chiseled into her memory, replayed itself as it had so often in the past few months. It was becoming an obsession: searching every detail, every word said and every assumption made, in a hopeless quest to find ways she might have done it differently, done it better. With the wisdom of hindsight, she found many. But no amount of second-guessing or soul-searching could change what had happened.
It had been a particularly good party at the Hardings' that year, and the revelation of the ruse pulled by Richard and Brad had topped it off perfectly. Charmian had danced several times with her own brother, not knowing who it was, thinking only that Richard was affecting a different style of movement. She had watched the ostensible "Brad" stealing caresses from women old and young – only to shock them later by revealing himself as the ordinarily staid Richard! The only flaw in the otherwise perfect evening had been the way Brad looked, after they had taken off their masks: so sweaty and uneasy, his skin pasty. At the time, thinking she knew the reason for his poorly concealed misery, she'd felt a pang of sympathy for him. Susan Lattimore, Brad's most recent flame, had been noticeably absent from the party. Earlier, he'd confessed to Charmian that he was considering proposing to Susan, getting serious at last. Her absence, and Brad's appearance when he unmasked, suggested what her response had been.
And of course he'd been drinking heavily all night, lifting his boar's-head mask just enough to tuck tumblers of whiskey to his lips. They'd all had too much to drink. Excess was de rigueur at the Hardings'.
And then the nightmare of that morning: Josephine, storming into her bedroom study with a basket of laundry, her grave countenance afire with righteous anger. She was panting, so worked up that her voice came out more a scraping sound than a whisper: "Bradford come home crazy, he rape Lila when you's all still at Hardings'. He hurt that girl worse than any thin'."