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Cuban, holding a paper program, fanning herself with it, gazing at the floor. She looked so small and sad and beautiful to Grove right then, she nearly stole his breath away. He almost hated to tell her what he was feeling. It would most certainly put up another wall between them, maybe even scare her away once and for all. He wanted so badly to tell her he was getting out of the game. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t change who he was.
    He went over to her and whispered in her ear, “I need to take care of something at the professor’s place. After the burial. Can you come with me?”
    A slight pause, a subtle knot over her eyebrows as she thought it over. “I guess ... I mean. Yeah, sure. My flight’s not till tomorrow.”
    â€œPerfect.”
    Grove took her hand, then led her through the crowded chapel to the entrance vestibule, where they stood waiting for the funeral procession to form.
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    After a series of eulogies, poetry readings, and eccentric musical numbers—including a performance by an obese drag queen singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” to the accompaniment of an accordion and a musical saw—the casket was finally sealed and carried out into the overcast day by pallbearers representing both Tulane’s distinguished faculty and the finer drag clubs of Bourbon Street.
    A horse-drawn hearse-carriage waited at the curb, flanked by the “grand marshal”—an old dapper black gentleman in a Salvation Army uniform. The coffin was loaded under a low, greasy sky. Then the procession made its way down Magazine Street—which still looked like a war zone, complete with boarded, swamp-stained buildings and empty shells of looted stores—creating an undulating snake of garish multicolored umbrellas sprouting like exotic blossoms in the mist.
    LaFayette Cemetery Number 1 is a New Orleans landmark, one of the great Cities of the Dead. Encompassing an entire square block from Prytania to Coliseum, and from Washington to Sixth, it is bordered by a high rampart of ancient marble the color of weathered gunmetal. All the grave sites are aboveground due to the vagaries of living below sea level, not to mention the shifting mud of a river delta. Inside Lafayette’s walls, the rows and rows of squat marble tombs and decorative family crypts—many of them containing remains dating back to the early nineteenth century—now lay in disarray like discarded dominoes. Last year, Katrina had had her way with Lafayette Number 1, ripping the tops off the sarcophagi and sending coffins sprawling every which way on the furious currents. The cemetery now resembled an ancient Greek ruin, a stony acropolis of broken stone markers, most of them beyond repair, a few scaffolds here and there where the NOLA Friends of the Cemeteries Association had been reconstructing historic tombs.
    Today a new resident was moving in.
    Professor De Lourde was laid to rest in a grand vault at the end of row seven. The band played “Amazing Grace” while the pallbearers slid the great steel coffin off the carriage runners and into the darkness of a gleaming marble crypt erected just six months ago by the Benevolent Society on the former plot of the orphans and homeless tomb. It was over within minutes.
    After a few hushed good-byes, Grove and Maura made their exit and took a trolley back into the French Quarter. En route, as the rickety streetcar snapped and sifted over ancient petrified rails, Maura looked at Grove, who was staring out the grimy window, deep in thought. “What’s wrong, Ulysses? What’s going on?”
    He looked at her, licked his lips, measured his words, and finally decided to tell her the truth. “Moses De Lourde was murdered, Maura.”
    She stared at him for a moment, then gazed out her window with a pained expression, her murmur barely audible above the clack of the streetcar. “Oh Jesus ... here we go again.”

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