Mean Woman Blues

there?” She asked, her voice high-pitched and pleading.
    “I wash my hands,” he said.
    “That’s all?”
    “Oh, no. Then I take a clean towel and wipe off the sink and the doorknob, and everything I’ve touched. Then I have to wash my hands again and then clean everything off again, and after that, if nothing’s strange, like the mirror got splashed or something, I can go.”
    She closed her eyes and opened them. “You
what
?” she said, and the tone of her voice was unfriendly.
    “I guess,” he said, “you’ve never heard of OCD.”
    “Uh…” she seemed to be searching her memory. “No.”
    “Obsessive-compulsive disorder. People who have it wash their hands a lot and check thirty times to see if they’ve locked the door. And count. I was counting the broom strokes awhile ago.”
    Her face wasn’t looking quite so blank. “Like that movie with Jack Nicholson?”
    “
As Good As It Gets
. Yeah, like that.”
    “But you don’t have OCD.”
    “I did. I used to. I got it under control with meds.”
    “And now it’s coming back?”
    “Seems to be.”
    “Why?”
    Yes. That was the question. Why indeed? He thought it was because he was having a crisis of faith in human nature. He had started life among dangerous humans. That he knew intellectually, and, unfortunately, he could remember a great deal as well.
    But he’d paid his dues. He’d gotten away from all that. He had been a monk; he had meditated hours and hours a day… oh, the things he’d done! He hadn’t spoken for weeks at a time.
    Now he’d made a new life, a completely new life as an art student with a girlfriend and a family (in the form of Lovelace). And suddenly this thing had happened to Terri. The arrest and then the falling apart. The cigarettes, the overeating, the whining, the worrying. She was suddenly a different person. He was shocked that this could happen to a person, that it could be done to a person. He wondered if he could say this to her. He decided he had to give it a try.
    “Why is my OCD coming back? It’s complicated, Terri. And it has a lot to do with you.”
    “Me?” she interrupted him, furious. “You’re accusing me?”
    “No, of course not. It’s just that the stress…”
    “The stress. You think I should plead out, don’t you? To something I didn’t do.”
    He wasn’t sure whether he did or not. “This thing is so hard on you, Terri…”
    “It’s unjust. It isn’t right. It’s something that only happens to poor people. The question just doesn’t come up if you never have to worry about covering a check.”
    The thought in the back of his head surged to the forefront:
Did she mean to defraud the bank? How can I be sure she didn’t?
    It was a completely unworthy thought. She was really a good person. But he couldn’t help thinking it. She looked at his face, and she read it there; he knew this because of what he saw on hers. The comprehension, the disappointment, the betrayal.
    He needed to wash his hands again, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t move and couldn’t speak, either. He was frozen and might have remained so for a long time if the silence hadn’t been ruptured by a ringing telephone.
    Terri answered her cell phone as if nothing had happened, and in a moment she squealed with delight. “You’re from the
Mr. Right
show? You’re kidding! You really want me to? I can’t believe it!”
    Nothing made her happy these days. He couldn’t imagine what the call could be.

CHAPTER NINE
    Because New Orleans is below sea level, its early citizens quickly learned that normal burials were impractical, as their dead relatives tended to float back up. Hence, they learned to build elaborate tombs above ground, miniature buildings in rows like streets, which earned the cemeteries the nickname “Cities of the Dead.” At the end of a year, the bones of the latest body could be swept to the back to make room for someone else; thus, once a family had its tomb, there was no need to keep buying cemetery plots.
    The older tombs tend to be ornate and decorated with gorgeous statues and urns— or at least they used to be. The day the task force took its field trip, it was sad to see the outlines of those that had been removed, and there were lots.
    On the whole, the field trip was a great success, like a perfect operation in which the patient dies.
    It gave the three officers more than ever a sense of the enormity of territory the thieves had to work from. It was easy to see how