I know after thirty seconds that it’s a mistake. Anderton is less interested in what I’m telling him than he is angry at my deception and irritated that the documentary was a ploy. I blunder on, pleading for the name of the inmate who created the origami menagerie. I explain about finding the little rabbit on my son’s dresser. I spell out my theory that Charley Vermillion was not the real killer of the Ramirez twins, that the man who folded the rabbit was the real murderer.
He shakes his head. “That sounds like kind of a wild theory to me,” he says. “I mean, these showgirls and all? I don’t know how you can make all these connections.”
I tell him if my boys die, I’ll consider that he has blood on his hands.
But Anderton won’t budge. He cites “the sanctity” of medical records, the “holy pact” of patient confidentiality.
“Just tell me one thing,” I plead. “Whoever it was, he’s not still in custody, is he? How long was he here? When was he released?”
“That’s three things.”
I say nothing.
Anderton presses a finger against his chin and stares into space, as if searching for a reason to deny my request. In the end, either he can’t come up with one or he suffers a momentary spasm of compassion.
“No,” he tells me. “The inmate in question is not in custody. Came to us in 1983. Released in 1996.”
“What did he do? What was he in here for? What’s his name? We’re talking about my sons here. Please.”
Dr. Peyton Anderton wags his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Callahan.”
I want to throw him into the display cases and knock him out and then ransack his office. But I don’t. I get control of myself. “Thanks for your help,” I tell him, and step through the doorway. Two huge orderlies wait outside in the hall and I realize that at some point Anderton summoned help. A silent alarm or something.
“You do understand I’d like to do more,” Anderton says. He’s still behind me, still hitting the “my hands are tied” note as I head down the steps and push out through the big front door.
CHAPTER 29
I wait twenty minutes in the tiny Port Sulfur library for a shot at one of their three computers – which are occupied by kids checking their e-mail. I try chatting up the woman at the front desk, but she turns out to be not chatty. I ask her if she remembers the case involving Charley Vermillion.
“No,” she says.
I expand on it, identify him as a former patient at the asylum down the road.
“No,” she repeats, and returns to her magazine.
When time’s up for one of the kids, I use my allotted twenty minutes to snag a bargain room at the Crescent City Omni. Then I e-mail Muriel Petrich to request that photographs of the origami rabbit be either sent to me at the hotel, or scanned and e-mailed. In the few minutes left before the library closes, I use the copying machine to copy the listings for attorneys in the Plaquemines Parish telephone book, and I establish that the parish seat is in Pointe a La Hache.
Which is across the river. That’s where the courthouse is, and that’s likely where the petition for Charley Vermillion’s release was filed. When I ask one of the kids waiting to check out a book how to get to Pointe a la Hache, he tells me there’s a free ferry that goes across the river every half hour. I can catch it a few miles north. Look for the signs.
I sit in my car, cell phone in hand, and look at the list of attorneys-at-law. It may not be a good idea to pick a lawyer from the yellow pages, but I don’t have much choice. I call three of them before I get to Hawes, Halliday, and Flood. Lester Flood can fit me in at three forty-five tomorrow afternoon at his office in Belle Chasse. My intention is to petition the court for release of the identity of the man who made the origami rabbit in Peyton Anderton’s display case.
I head north toward the ferry, but once I get there, I realize there’s no point in making the crossing today. It’s too late. The courthouse will be closed. I drive back to New Orleans and check into the Omni.
My room is on an air shaft, but the price is right and the parking is free. Once I’ve checked into the hotel, I call Petrich. I don’t really expect her to be in, but I want to leave a phone message to reinforce my e-mail request for a copy of the photos of the rabbit. Turns out, she’s working late.
“Where are you, Alex? What’s up?”
“New Orleans.”
“New Orleans? You find something?”
I don’t know why, but I’m reluctant to tell her about Vermillion or the rabbit in the display case. It reminds me of how Liz didn’t want to tell anyone she was pregnant before she got past the three-month mark. As if announcing the news might tempt fate and put the pregnancy in jeopardy. “Maybe. I’ll let you know if anything pans out.”
“You do that,” she says. She promises to scan the photo and send it as a JPEG before she leaves work.
I head out for gumbo at a sandwich place down the block, watching my budget, and then take a walk through the Quarter. I end up on Bourbon Street. It’s very crowded and the heavy air smells faintly of decades of whiskey and vomit. I stand outside one club, and the music spilling out sounds so great I go inside. What the hell. A beer.
The blues. The guy up front is hunched into the microphone, his body a coiled instrument of woe. Oh, my heart it starts a-hammerin’, and my eyes fill up with tears.
It ought to be the perfect music for me, a conduit for my misery, but it isn’t. I sit there and drink, but nothing happens. I can’t feel the music. I can’t even taste my beer. I last about ten minutes and then I’m out the door.
When I get back to the hotel, it takes me a long time to fall asleep, and when I do, I have a dream in which everything I touch disappears.
In the morning, I grab some free coffee from the lobby, plug in my laptop, and log on using Liz’s AOL account. Her password is the twins’ birthday, 010497 and that stops me cold for a second. I check off five New Orleans area telephone numbers for AOL to try. It takes almost twenty minutes before the server finds a connection.
I go to my Yahoo! account and see that Petrich came through. I hit the key to download the JPEG file she attached to her message and wait for it to come up. The blue bar expands across the bottom of my screen, and then, there it is. Even in two dimensions, the rabbit is impressive and powerful. I made no mistake – it’s identical to the one in the display case in Anderton’s office. There’s an evidence tag affixed to the rabbit. A stamped rectangle on the page bears the words: Anne Arundel County Police Department Evidence Room. There’s a signature (Sgt. David Ebinger) and date (June 1, 2003).
At nine, when the hotel’s “office suite” is available to guests (for a fee), I print out a few copies of the photo of the rabbit.
My plan is to give one copy to the lawyer, Lester Flood, in hopes that he’ll be able to use the photo as evidence, that he’ll be able to compel the release of information from the Port Sulfur facility.
I’m about to leave when I decide to e-mail Judy Jones at the FBI. Maybe the Bureau can help. It takes me twenty minutes to hammer together a message about what I’ve learned, explaining how I came to discover a rabbit identical to the one found on my son Sean’s dresser in the display case of a Louisiana asylum.
When I’m finished, I look over what I’ve written. I’m dissatisfied. I know that the connections linking the Ramirez murders to the abduction of my sons (by way of the Gablers and the Sandling boys) are solid. I know that the “anonymous tip” was bogus, that the man held responsible for the murders of the Ramirez boys was not the man who actually killed them. I know that the man who made the rabbit in the Port Sulfur display case took my sons. But on paper, no matter how much I tighten and clarify my account, it all seems… insubstantial.