Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 8

  When I found the faded yellow building, I made a point of memorizing some detail so I could find it more easily in the future. I settled on the two unusual columns flanking the front door, which were twisted like licorice sticks. I approached the building, found the door bell, and rang it.

  Barbara came down the stairs, opened the door, and greeted me. She was dressed appropriately for sailing, in cut-of blue jeans and a baggy shirt. As I entered the stairwell, I noticed a door to my immediate left which led to a basement. It was ajar, opened about one inch. But it closed suddenly when I looked at it, and then the sound of several locks clicked away, one after another. “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s the old woman who lives in the basement,” she responded as we started walking up the stairs. “I met her yesterday. She seemed like she had a really tough life.” I asked her what she meant. She continued, “It’s hard to describe. She looks like she might have been a stripper or maybe even a prostitute. She wears lots of make-up and has a real hard edge to her.” I laughed a little and said it sounded very New Orleans, pointing out that a club owner might take care of one of his ladies after she had grown too old to be useful to his business by letting her live in a place rent-free, even if it was a basement.

  One flight up we entered Barbara’s apartment. Despite the weather-worn exterior of the building, it was a nice apartment and the lack of furniture emphasized its space. In fact, the only furniture in it was a waterbed mattress which lay on the floor of one of the front rooms.

  I complimented her on the apartment and noted the great condition it was in. The walls were all freshly plastered and painted. The floors had been stripped and varnished. I had been in plenty of student apartments, but I had never seen one that was in such good condition. Since it was larger and in better condition that the apartment I lived in, I asked her about the rent. The rent seemed well below market value. I would have guessed about fifty percent higher based on what I had seen. So I asked her where she found it. (Good apartments were hard to find and were hardly ever advertised in New Orleans, because landlords did not want to invite inquiries from blacks.) She said it was on a bulletin board at Tulane. “In the University Center?” I asked.

  “No, in Social Sciences,” she responded, referring to the building where the anthropology, sociology, and political science departments were located.

  “Hmm, do you know who owns it?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “I only deal with an attorney.”

  My thoughts now turned to the sweet smell of freshly baked bread. I had noticed it when I first came in, but had not said anything about it yet. If you have ever been in New Orleans in August, you will understand that people without air-conditioning just do not bake bread then. It is much too hot. It was, indeed, a curious activity for a hot summer morning.

  “Baking bread?” I inquired.

  “Yes,” she said, explaining that the apartment had a “residual odor” in it and that she had heard that baking bread would help take the odor away. Then she asked if I thought it was safe to leave the windows open so the place could air out while we were sailing. I said, “Yes.” As she continued to talk about the apartment, it became clear that it had an unusual history to it. It had been vacant and off the market for several years before she rented it, and during that time it had been thoroughly re-conditioned. Yet despite the fresh paint and varnish, and after years of vacancy, a musty smell remained. I asked, due to the odor, if the previous tenant had cats.

  She said, somewhat mysteriously, that “they had animals.”

  I noticed the shift in the language from “cats” to “animals” and asked her, “What kind of animals?” Then her expression changed. The moment before she was a positive upbeat young woman about to go on a date; now she was suddenly serious and concerned.

  “She didn’t say what kind of animals.”

  I just looked at her for a minute, waiting for more. Then she started talking about the old woman who lived in the basement. She had been down to see her yesterday. She was stuck for words for a moment, and then releasing a tense breath, said, “It was so weird.”

  Something was obviously bothering her, and we weren’t going to get to the bottom with generalities like “weird.” So I asked her to be more specific. I offered, “Was the furniture weird?”

  She laughed, breaking the tension for a moment. “Yes, the furniture was weird all right, but that wasn’t the problem.” Then she described how the old woman talked to her in a tense suspicious voice and how she was genuinely frightened of something or someone. Her fear had obviously transferred to Barbara.

  Then Barbara said, “Ed, I got the feeling that something really bad happened here. Something terribly wrong, like maybe someone had been killed. You are from here, do you know what she might be talking about? She acted like it was something big, something everyone knew about. Maybe it was even on the news.”

  “What did she say about the animals?” I asked quietly.

  Barbara continued, “She was really upset about them and kept saying ‘those terrible men and the horrible things they did to those animals’ over and over.”

  The sentence hung in the air. I took it apart in my head and studied the words. “Terrible men” do “horrible things.” My mind flooded with images of laboratory animals I had seen — sad, sick, mice and monkeys suffering from horrifying diseases, their bodies covered with lesions and harboring tumors larger than their natural bodies. I was silent.

  Then she asked the question again, “Do you know what she might be talking about?”

  I shrugged and said, “The only thing that comes to mind is a secret laboratory that was discovered during the Garrison investigation. There was this political wacko and this woman doctor who had thousands of mice in cages. They were using monkey viruses to induce cancer in mice. Garrison thought they were trying to develop a biological weapon.”

  “What happened to the doctor?” she asked systematically in a serious voice devoid of any emotion.

  My answer was reluctant but straightforward. I had not planned on getting into this. “She was murdered,” I said as simply as I could.

  “How?” she countered, knowing I was holding out.

  “Cut up with a knife and set on fire,” I admitted.

  Her fear was now visible. She crossed her arms upon her chest and leaned up against the wall. By this point I realized that she was really frightened, and rightfully so. Her parents had warned her about living in New Orleans alone, and I had expressed my concerns about her neighborhood. And who is going to get a good night’s sleep in a place if you know the previous tenant was butchered in her bed. I realized our conversation was only making matters worse for her. She broke the silence by blowing out a short breath and said, “What part of town did that happen in?”

  At the time I did not know and, more importantly, I wanted to change the subject. I was getting frightened too, both for her and with her. I said that I did not know where these people had lived, but I had assumed that it was in the French Quarter, since that was where all “the weird stuff seemed to happen.” It would be years before I found out where we were standing.

  Our date was not going well. I had offered to take her sailing on Lake Pontchartrain, but we were standing around talking about brutal murders and monkey viruses. Knowing she was quietly wondering if her apartment was infected with a flotilla of bizarre diseases, I pointed out that viruses could not survive more than a couple of hours in the air. She shook her head in cautious agreement. It was time to shift tactics. I switched my tone to confident and our conversation to sailboats. She accepted my lead, and we left the apartment within minutes to go sailing. (How was I to know we were standing in David Ferrie’s shadow?)

  Classes started the next day, and we saw each other daily, exchanging comments about our classes and the people we had met. After about two weeks, we met for lunch at our usual spot in the cafeteria. Barbara said that she was really upset about something she had heard concerning Tulane�
��s “right-wing political orientation.” Specifically, she asked me if I had ever heard of Dr. Alton Ochsner. Of course, I had heard of Ochsner. Everybody in New Orleans had. An enormous hospital in town was named after him. Then she asked me what I knew about him. At the time all I knew was the standard pitch: He was one of the most respected people in New Orleans and was founder of the Ochsner Clinic, which took care of a lot of important people from Latin America. Then I added a personal comment: He was also an aggressive antismoking activist, which was something that I liked about him. On the other hand, rumor had it he was a Victorian moralist who held some controversial views about sex causing cancer.

  Then she told me what was bothering her. A fellow graduate student who had lived in South America had told her that Ochsner was part of an international fascist group and had been very close to Nazi scientists who fed to South America at the end of World War II, particularly in Paraguay.3 I did not think much of the story, quietly considering it to be a hysterical liberal rant. Yes, I had heard that he was very conservative. In fact, he was occasionally referred to as a “right-wing crackpot,” but I had never heard him referred to as a fascist, and had never heard anything about his helping Nazi scientists in South America. To my ears, it all sounded like overstatement.

  Anyway, it was widely known that Nazis had gone to South America at the end of the war and that the American military debriefed both German and Japanese scientists at the end of the war to find out what they were working on. Who would they ask to do that? Some Army doctor? Wouldn’t they get the best scientists in America to review what Germany’s top scientists were up to? I did not know if Ochsner spoke German fluently, but that would seem to be a prerequisite for the job. It’s hard enough to know what scientists are saying in your own language. Who knows? Maybe the U.S. government did get Ochsner to go to South America to debrief Nazi scientists. If so, that made him an important American scientist, not a Nazi sympathizer.

  She was defused. But I was curious about what she said, and made a mental note of it.

  WE CONTINUED TO SEE EACH OTHER throughout the fall. Before long there emerged the subject of her other neighbor, the man who lived in the apartment above her. He was a Hispanic who spoke Spanish as his first language. I think his name was Miguel, and I do remember two incidents clearly.

  In the first one, Barbara and I were at her apartment when she said she had met the man who lived upstairs. So I asked her what he was like?

  “He’s a Latin,” she said. I shrugged a “so what” in her direction. “I mean really, really Latin.” So I asked her where he was from.

  She laughed a little and said, “Funny you should ask. I asked him that same question, but never got a straight answer out of him. But he did say he spent a lot of time in Honduras.”

  I suggested to her that his evasiveness might be a sign he was a Cuban exile. There were many of them in New Orleans, and most found it convenient to keep the word “Cuba” out of the conversation. Then I asked her what he did for a living. She said Miguel claimed he was a mechanic, but that he only occasionally worked at a gas station out in Jefferson Parish. Most of his time was spent at one particular bar. I was not surprised to hear that he invited Barbara to go to the bar with him one evening “just to see what it was like.”4 She turned him down, saying she already had a boyfriend.

  Several things about Miguel did not add up. One is that it took money to pay rent and to hang out at a bar, and he did not have what you would call a visible means of support. Secondly, there were many service stations in New Orleans that could have used a good mechanic, and these were much closer to his apartment. Why would he only work occasionally at a service station in Jefferson Parish, a suburb thirty minutes away (and a cultural world apart) from uptown New Orleans?

  Then I asked her if Miguel was married. “No, he’s not,” she said with a smirk on her face. “He’s widowed.” She saw me notice her half-hidden smile and turned away to hide it. “What’s so funny about being widowed?” I asked.

  “It’s just something he said,” she tentatively admitted. After a pause she added, “He said he had not been able to come since his wife died.”

  “What a great line!” I roared.

  “What do you mean?” She asked, trying for an innocent voice.

  “Let me ask you a question,” I asked in a slow, counseling voice. “When he said that to you, did it make you wonder if you could make him come?”

  She blushed. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it did.”

  “There it is. It’s a line and a good one at that. The man is a cad. I’d stay away from him.”

  The second incident occurred several days later. Miguel knocked on Barbara’s back door and called out her name in his accented voice. She motioned for me to come with her to the door, whispering, “I want him to see that I have a boyfriend.” When she opened it, he stepped inside confidently. When he realized I was standing there looking at him, he was embarrassed. Barbara introduced me with, “Have you met my boyfriend?” Actually our relationship seemed new and tentative at the time, but I didn’t argue with her. It sounded good to me.

  Miguel stood about five-feet eight-inches with black hair and a stocky build. He was in his mid-thirties and was common looking. His shifty personality glistened. It was an awkward moment. Another rooster in the hen house. And to be caught coming in the back door! He was obviously uncomfortable with the situation, but that was where I wanted him. I kept my tone polite and somewhat formal. My unspoken message to him was, “I don’t blame you for trying, but let’s not have this happen again.” His unspoken message to me was, “You lucky devil, you beat me to it.” He mumbled through a couple of social courtesies trying to portray his presence as a concerned neighbor just stopping by to see if she was all right. Then as quickly as he had appeared, he said good-bye and went on his way. I never saw him again, but we heard his footsteps coming and going down the back stairwell for months.

  As the fall semester progressed, Barbara and I saw a lot of each other. I was in and out of her apartment repeatedly, though we spent less and less time there and more time over at my place. Shortly after Thanksgiving, I forced myself to begin writing a term paper that I had been ignoring. It was for my Pre-Columbian Art course, and I had chosen a comparison of two Mayan carvings from Guatemala as the subject. Much of the information I needed was in the Middle American Research Institute, located on the fourth floor of the Tulane’s main library. I ate an early lunch and headed to the library about noon. Little did I know what lay ahead?

  As I entered the glass doors of the Middle American Research Institute, I was greeted with the unmistakable look of terror on the faces of two women.5 Both were staring wide-eyed and slack-jawed out the window. One mumbled “My God” as she shook her head in disbelief. I turned to see what they were looking at. Out the window and across the tree tops there was an unobstructed view of the downtown skyline seven miles away. One of the tall buildings had just exploded into fames. Enormous fames were shooting out of the windows. A thick plume of dense black smoke had not yet reached more than a couple of hundred feet above the roof, indicating the fire had just started. But the forty foot fames indicated a massive sudden explosion, probably a firebomb. I recognized the building immediately, it was the Rault Center. The top three floors of the building were the Lamplighter Club, where I had worked in the summer of 1968. The building was owned by Joseph M. Rault, Jr., an independent oil man and real estate entrepreneur. Rault was very close to U.S. Senator Russell Long, and was sitting in an airplane next to both Senator Long and New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison when Long originally proposed the JFK investigation to Garrison. To facilitate the secret investigation, Long asked Rault to form an organization, now known as “Truth and Consequences,” to finance trips so Garrison and his staff could investigate the murder of the President quietly.

  I grabbed the phone and called my friend Claire, who lived around the corner from the library.6 Her husband worked in the Lamplighter Club. Yes, she knew about the fire. So
meone just called. Did she need a ride down there? Yes, she did. I ran to my car, rushed to her house, and drove her downtown.

  Down at the Rault Center all hell was breaking loose. Rault had been at his normal post on the sixteenth floor, meeting and greeting local dignitaries who had come to the club for lunch. Congressman Hale Boggs, Senator Russell Long, and New Orleans Mayor Vic Schiro were just a few who frequented this club, though none were there that day.7 Local bankers and developers congregated around this seat of power to be close to the pulse and to see the right people. At noon, the club was packed with its normal lunch crowd from the Central Business District.

  Suddenly, there was a loud explosion from down below. The building shook violently. A firebomb had exploded on the fifteenth floor. Flames leapt out the window. The crowd panicked and stampeded for the exits. For some reason Rault headed for the roof. Others headed for the ground. Seven people followed Rault to the roof. As the forty-foot fames leapt up above the roofline of the building, Rault must have wondered if he made the right decision. He must have also wondered what happened to the three floors of “fireproof” paneling that he had bought for the Lamplighter Club, which was now burning like a blowtorch.8 The concrete and steel stairwells quickly became ovens. No one could pass now. The eight people trapped on the roof knew that unless someone descended from the sky, they would either be burned alive or would have to jump to their deaths from the seventeenth-floor roof. The seven women trapped in a window on the fifteenth floor faced the same situation. I got as close to the building as I could, but the roads were blocked off. Claire jumped out of the car and ran the final few blocks. I turned my car around and headed for a television set.