Page 59 of Cheater Slicks

Hand poised to knock on Rollo’s office door, I girded my loins for the conversation ahead of me.

“I can hear your teeth grinding through the wood,” he called out. “You might as well come in.”

After unclenching my jaw, I did just that and found him sitting at his desk with a ledger open. I scrounged for the best opening, debating how to convince him, but I kept drawing a blank. I couldn’t tell if it stemmed from general distaste in asking him for a favor or if it was my gut warning me the plan was doomed to fail.

“Well?” He spun his chair around and crossed one leg over the other. “What you want,maroquin?”

To smack him for the nickname, but that was old news. “To know what last night was about.”

“An acquaintance ran down the name of the saint to go along with your finger bone.”

An unexpected surge of hope had me ready to forgive him the nickname. “And?”

“Claude Tremé.” He noticed my eyebrows inching higher. “Yes, that Tremé.”

Back in the 1800s, Claude Tremé bought the Morand Plantation. He combined it, along with two forts—St. Ferdinand and St. John—into a project that would go on to become the iconic neighborhood many of New Orleans’s free people of color had called home.

The Storyville red-light district. Congo Square. St. Augustine Church. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

All those famous landmarks called Faubourg Treme home.

Tremé was also famous for its jazz funerals and second line parades.

But that was thanks to the people, the heart and soul of the community, not the founder.

A white French hatmaker, Tremé married a freed slave, true, but he also owned slaves. Some twenty years prior to subdividing the plantation, he was sentenced to five years in prison after killing an enslaved man. Not what I would call saintly behavior. “How certain is your source?”

“He was integral to founding a historic neighborhood that has been praised for its culture and immortalized in film and photographs since its creation.”

“Hmm.” I thought about what he wasn’t saying. “I didn’t realize the loophole could work that way.”

Similar to how death gods absorbed praise and prayers spoken in cemeteries and graveyards, he was implying historical figures could reap the benefits of their achievements long after their deaths. That, posthumously, their remains could become relics.

“Neither did I, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

“Someone must have seen the potential and decided to help themselves to his bones.”

“We’re careful with our dead here in the city, so it’s hard to grave rob. Nowadays, anyway. At the time of his death, Tremé hadn’t garnered enough fame to make his remains valuable, I wouldn’t think. But, if someone waited a few years for a good flood, and if bodies started floating to the surface, then anyone aiding with cleanup and reinternment could help themselves to what they wanted with a much lower risk of getting caught.”

The reason mausoleums, vaults, and crypts were popular in New Orleans was a practical matter, not an aesthetic one. The city was bowl-shaped, and when hurricanes struck, neighborhoods flooded. Much of the area was well below sea level, making natural drainage impossible.

Settlers learned quickly they couldn’t bury their dead, or every time a storm blew through, bodies would wash out of their graves into the streets. The solution was building aboveground structures to house the dead. Mausoleums were popular, though only the rich could afford private ones. Everyone else relied on crypts or vaults.

In the end, rich or poor, the result was the same.

Each corpse was sealed in for a year and a day, allowing the intense Southern heat and humidity to cook the flesh off the bones. Then, the next time a family member died, the remaining bones were bagged up and tossed in the rear of the chamber. Then a fresh body was slid in to begin the process over again.

Using that method, dozens of family members over generations could share a final resting place.

Tremé was buried in a sealed mausoleum with his wife, Julie Moro Tremé, in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.

The cemetery had been temporarily closed due to vandalism and negligence, creating the perfect atmosphere for a determined thief with the right tools to help themselves, but that was a recent problem. There were a whole lot of opportunities between 1828, when he died, and now to snatch one.

“What are the odds it’s actually Julie’s bone? She passed before him, right?”

Until he got me thinking about her, I had forgotten the Moreau Plantation had beenherinheritance. Claude came into possession of its title through their marriage. That gave her even stronger ties to it.

“Ten or fifteen years earlier, yeah.”

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