Dr Mary's Monkey
by Edward Haslam
Chapter 4.
College Daze
In the fall of 1969 I went away to college. What a turbulent period! Each night the news brought frustrations. Daily footage from Vietnam showed the bleeding and the dead. Body bags of mounting American casualties swept the screen. The smog of an incomprehensible and undeclared war settled over our land. It's endless drifting nature, it's unbelievable cost, and it's potential for expansion flared anger throughout the country. College campuses rioted, ROTC buildings burned. Congress revoked the student draft deferment, exposing all male college students to potential slaughter.
Each night the drama was played out on the television. Police beat demonstrators with nightsticks and dragged them through the streets by their hair. Some applauded the protestor's, some the police. Angry words divided friends and families. The generation gap widened. Boomer disillusionment jelled into a sense of national betrayal and challenged the loyalty of the pre- Watergate generation. In return the Boomer's parents pondered their questions, " What's wrong with this new generation? Where is their patriotism? Why don't they rush to support our war?" The Supreme Court sat and watched as 58,000 Americans died in an undeclared war.
Then Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia. The Shock wave of this news rushed across the country. Campuses erupted. In Ohio, soldiers gunned down four college students at a demonstration on the Kent State campus. The second shock wave "They started killing us." Mass demonstrations broke out spontaneously, shutting down college campuses all across America. The protestors converged on Washington for a showdown demonstration. Tear gas flowed through the streets of our capital.
Those were crazy and bitter days, which were made even more difficult for me personally by the death of my father. I dropped out of college and waited for them to pass. And when they were over, I was anxious to forget about them. Completely free from any responsibility, I hitchhiked around the country just to see what was out there. During the summer of 1971, I returned to my home in New Orleans to re-group, and to plan my next steps.
On my travels I had developed an interest in writing and started working on a book about my hitchhiking experiences. As the summer wore on , the publicity about the trial of the Manson murders in California took root, and the image of hitchhiking changed. Charles Manson and his companions had hitchhiked their way to one of the most grotesque multiple murders in American history. Everyone became aware of the real and present danger that lurked on the shoulders of our highways. Jack Kerouac's romantic vision of hitchhiking from 'On The Road' was replaced by Jim Morrison's stark warning: "There's a Killer on the Road'. My "hitchhiking for the fun of it" perspective suffocated, and my book project died. I started looking for something else to write about.
Mary Sherman's murder still intrigued me, and I thought it might have good potential for a screenplay. So I decided to track down the real facts. My first call was to the public library to see if there were any newspaper articles. I was informed that the indexing system stopped in 1963. If I wanted a newspaper, I needed the exact date. But I did not know the date, so I decided to try to get a copy of the police report. Based on what I knew about Sherman's murder and her connection to Ferrie, I figured this might be difficult. So instead of calling the police department myself, I decided to call someone "in the inside" who might be able to help me get a copy of the report quietly. I called Big Mike.
He was known as Big Mike due to his enormous size. He stood six feet 5 inches and weighed close to 300 pounds. Big Mike worked in the Orleans Parish District Attorney's office, and was an investigator for the Grand Jury. I knew him socially,but not well. We lived in the same neighborhood, and his daughter had been a friend of mine during high school. It had been several years since I had been to his house, and I wasn't sure he would remember me. It was a Wednesday evening when I picked up the telephone to call him. His wife answered. Yes, she remembered me, and promptly called him to the phone.
Whe Big Mike came to the phone, I introduced myself and reminded him who I was. He was friendly, and greeted me with "yeah kid I remember you". Then he proudly detailed his daughters recent accomplishments at college. When he was finished, I told him the purpose of my call. I was doing research for a screenplay and wanted to know how I could get a copy of the police report on the Mary Sherman murder. He was accommodating and in a casual voice said ,"That seems easy enough". I'll see if I can get a copy for you. What was that name again?"
I repeated the name and spelled it for him. It was clear he did not recognize it. This concerned me, because it meant that he was not completely aware of what he was agreeing to. If the rumors I had heard about political heat and suppression of the investigation were true, it could mean trouble for him. But I did not know how to tell a gun toting ex-linebacker like Big Mike that he should keep his head down in his own office. Anyway, I had only asked "how" I could get a copy of the report. He had volunteered to get it for me. I offered to call him back in a week, but he said it wouldn't take that long. He told me to call him in two days. I thanked him and hung up.
Two days later, I called back. It was Friday about 3:30 in the afternoon. My plan was to call early and leave a message with his wife and then call back later that evening. I was surprised when he answered the phone himself. The stress and tension in his voice was immediately obvious. He was home early for a reason: It had been a bad day. He began with: "What the hell did you get me into?"
I asked naively, "Was there a problem getting the report?"
"A problem?" he said with gigantic sarcasm," I have never seen such a shit storm in my entire life. I have done nothing for two days except field flack and try to explain why I wanted to see that file."
"I guess that means I can't get a copy of the report" I tendered.
"No you can't! It's an open murder case, and I am not allowed to discuss it. Don't ask again." His voice was cold, his tone was final.
I said, "thanks for trying" waited for the click, and then slowly put the receiver down. Whatever was going on, it was clear to me that the rumors about "the heat" on this case were true. I knew that if Big Mike couldn't get a copy of the police report himself, then I wouldn't be able to get one through any other channel. I would have to wait for another day to find out what happened to Mary Sherman.
Then Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia. The Shock wave of this news rushed across the country. Campuses erupted. In Ohio, soldiers gunned down four college students at a demonstration on the Kent State campus. The second shock wave "They started killing us." Mass demonstrations broke out spontaneously, shutting down college campuses all across America. The protestors converged on Washington for a showdown demonstration. Tear gas flowed through the streets of our capital.
Those were crazy and bitter days, which were made even more difficult for me personally by the death of my father. I dropped out of college and waited for them to pass. And when they were over, I was anxious to forget about them. Completely free from any responsibility, I hitchhiked around the country just to see what was out there. During the summer of 1971, I returned to my home in New Orleans to re-group, and to plan my next steps.
On my travels I had developed an interest in writing and started working on a book about my hitchhiking experiences. As the summer wore on , the publicity about the trial of the Manson murders in California took root, and the image of hitchhiking changed. Charles Manson and his companions had hitchhiked their way to one of the most grotesque multiple murders in American history. Everyone became aware of the real and present danger that lurked on the shoulders of our highways. Jack Kerouac's romantic vision of hitchhiking from 'On The Road' was replaced by Jim Morrison's stark warning: "There's a Killer on the Road'. My "hitchhiking for the fun of it" perspective suffocated, and my book project died. I started looking for something else to write about.
Mary Sherman's murder still intrigued me, and I thought it might have good potential for a screenplay. So I decided to track down the real facts. My first call was to the public library to see if there were any newspaper articles. I was informed that the indexing system stopped in 1963. If I wanted a newspaper, I needed the exact date. But I did not know the date, so I decided to try to get a copy of the police report. Based on what I knew about Sherman's murder and her connection to Ferrie, I figured this might be difficult. So instead of calling the police department myself, I decided to call someone "in the inside" who might be able to help me get a copy of the report quietly. I called Big Mike.
He was known as Big Mike due to his enormous size. He stood six feet 5 inches and weighed close to 300 pounds. Big Mike worked in the Orleans Parish District Attorney's office, and was an investigator for the Grand Jury. I knew him socially,but not well. We lived in the same neighborhood, and his daughter had been a friend of mine during high school. It had been several years since I had been to his house, and I wasn't sure he would remember me. It was a Wednesday evening when I picked up the telephone to call him. His wife answered. Yes, she remembered me, and promptly called him to the phone.
Whe Big Mike came to the phone, I introduced myself and reminded him who I was. He was friendly, and greeted me with "yeah kid I remember you". Then he proudly detailed his daughters recent accomplishments at college. When he was finished, I told him the purpose of my call. I was doing research for a screenplay and wanted to know how I could get a copy of the police report on the Mary Sherman murder. He was accommodating and in a casual voice said ,"That seems easy enough". I'll see if I can get a copy for you. What was that name again?"
I repeated the name and spelled it for him. It was clear he did not recognize it. This concerned me, because it meant that he was not completely aware of what he was agreeing to. If the rumors I had heard about political heat and suppression of the investigation were true, it could mean trouble for him. But I did not know how to tell a gun toting ex-linebacker like Big Mike that he should keep his head down in his own office. Anyway, I had only asked "how" I could get a copy of the report. He had volunteered to get it for me. I offered to call him back in a week, but he said it wouldn't take that long. He told me to call him in two days. I thanked him and hung up.
Two days later, I called back. It was Friday about 3:30 in the afternoon. My plan was to call early and leave a message with his wife and then call back later that evening. I was surprised when he answered the phone himself. The stress and tension in his voice was immediately obvious. He was home early for a reason: It had been a bad day. He began with: "What the hell did you get me into?"
I asked naively, "Was there a problem getting the report?"
"A problem?" he said with gigantic sarcasm," I have never seen such a shit storm in my entire life. I have done nothing for two days except field flack and try to explain why I wanted to see that file."
"I guess that means I can't get a copy of the report" I tendered.
"No you can't! It's an open murder case, and I am not allowed to discuss it. Don't ask again." His voice was cold, his tone was final.
I said, "thanks for trying" waited for the click, and then slowly put the receiver down. Whatever was going on, it was clear to me that the rumors about "the heat" on this case were true. I knew that if Big Mike couldn't get a copy of the police report himself, then I wouldn't be able to get one through any other channel. I would have to wait for another day to find out what happened to Mary Sherman.
⏳⏳⏳
In 1972 I entered Tulane University. It was late August of that year, and the campus was buzzing with activity of another semester preparing to begin. I went to the University Center to buy books and to register for my courses. The matriculation was held in a large cavernous room filled with folding tables stacked with boxes of computer cards.Behind the tables sat graduate students who answered questions, gave advice on professors, and signed up undergraduates for classes. I was interested in taking an anthropology course and located the right table. There I met a brilliant and beautiful young woman named Barbara.2
She had just completed her undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and had excepted a fellowship from Tulane to get her Ph.D. Intrigued by her warmth, and her waist length brown hair. I invited her to go to a concert being held on campus that evening.She accepted the invitation, and we discussed plans. She did not have a car, and mine was in the shop. We agreed on a convenient place and time to meet and went our separate ways.
That night Barbara and I met as planned and walked to the concert. The performance was by the New Leviathan Oriental Fox Trot Orchestra, a camp revival troupe that played dance music of the 1890-1920 period. We had a lot of fun, and I felt very comfortable with her. This was a relationship that I wanted to pursue.
After the concert she told me she lived near Louisiana Avenue. I knew the area well. While it was not far from campus, it was in a marginal area near a high crime zone known as the Louisiana Avenue Housing Project. I did not think it was safe for a woman to be walking on the streets of that neighborhood at midnight, so I escorted her home on the bus.
Several days later I called her up, told her I had gotten my car out of the shop, and that I was itching to show her 'my city'. It was a Monday, but classes had not started. It was still early in the morning, and the weather was beautiful, so I invited her to go sailing. She accepted the offer and gave me her address again. I said I would be there in a half hour.
It was about ten o'clock in the morning when I turned off Claiborne Avenue into Louisiana Avenue Parkway. I remember my surprise at seeing this intriguing street for the first time in the daylight. Unlike Louisiana Avenue itself,which was a broad bustling boulevard. Louisiana Avenue Parkway was a quiet oasis, isolated from the activity and noise of city life. Only three blocks long and leading nowhere, this narrow bumpy street was shaded by massive oak trees which grew together at their tops , creating a canopy over the street and providing welcome protection from the oppressive August sun. The houses were modest, mostly two story rental units whose stucco facades made it easy to confuse one house with another. I pulled over and dug the slip of paper from my jeans to check the address: 3225 Louisiana Avenue Parkway.
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 off 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 an 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 waterbed mattress which lay on the floor of one 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 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 than 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 said anything about it yet. If you have ever been to 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,while we were sailing. I said "Yes". As she continued to talk about the apartment, it became clear it had a 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 tenants had cats.
She said somewhat mysteriously," they had animals."
I noticed the shift in 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 serious and suddenly concerned.
"She didn't say what kind of animal."
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 she 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 frighten of something or someone. Her fear had obviously transferred to Barbara.
Then Barbara said, "Ed, I got this 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 gently.
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 tone 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 I did not know where these people lived, but I had assumed it was in the French Quarter, since that is 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 then a couple of hours in the air. She shook her head in cautious agreement. It was time to shift tactic's. I switched my tone to confident and our conversation to sailboats. She accepted m lead, and we left the apartment within minutes to go sailing.(How was I 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 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 herd 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 the 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 anti-smoking 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 hd been very close to Nazi scientists who fled to South America at the end of WW II, particularly in Paraguay.3 I did not think much of the story, quietly considering it to be a hysterical liberal rant. Yes, I heard that he was very conservative . In fact, he was occasionally referred to as a "right wing crack-pot", 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 over statement.
Anyway it was widely known that Nazi's 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 had 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 abover 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 Parrish. 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 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 those were much closer to his apartment. Why would he only work occasionally at a service station in Jefferson Parrish, a suburb 30 minutes away(and a cultural world apart) from uptown New Orleans?
Then I asked 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 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 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 time, but I didn't argue with her. It sounded good to me.
Miquel stood about five feet eight inches with black hair and a stocky build. He was in his mid 30's 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 is where I wanted him. I kept my tone polite and somewhat informal. My unspoken message to him was "I don't blame you for trying, but lets 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 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. 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 flames. Enormous flames were shooting out of the windows. A thick plume of dense black smoke had not yet reached more than a couple hundred feet above the roof, indicating the fire had just started. But the forty foot flames 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 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.
She had just completed her undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and had excepted a fellowship from Tulane to get her Ph.D. Intrigued by her warmth, and her waist length brown hair. I invited her to go to a concert being held on campus that evening.She accepted the invitation, and we discussed plans. She did not have a car, and mine was in the shop. We agreed on a convenient place and time to meet and went our separate ways.
That night Barbara and I met as planned and walked to the concert. The performance was by the New Leviathan Oriental Fox Trot Orchestra, a camp revival troupe that played dance music of the 1890-1920 period. We had a lot of fun, and I felt very comfortable with her. This was a relationship that I wanted to pursue.
After the concert she told me she lived near Louisiana Avenue. I knew the area well. While it was not far from campus, it was in a marginal area near a high crime zone known as the Louisiana Avenue Housing Project. I did not think it was safe for a woman to be walking on the streets of that neighborhood at midnight, so I escorted her home on the bus.
Several days later I called her up, told her I had gotten my car out of the shop, and that I was itching to show her 'my city'. It was a Monday, but classes had not started. It was still early in the morning, and the weather was beautiful, so I invited her to go sailing. She accepted the offer and gave me her address again. I said I would be there in a half hour.
It was about ten o'clock in the morning when I turned off Claiborne Avenue into Louisiana Avenue Parkway. I remember my surprise at seeing this intriguing street for the first time in the daylight. Unlike Louisiana Avenue itself,which was a broad bustling boulevard. Louisiana Avenue Parkway was a quiet oasis, isolated from the activity and noise of city life. Only three blocks long and leading nowhere, this narrow bumpy street was shaded by massive oak trees which grew together at their tops , creating a canopy over the street and providing welcome protection from the oppressive August sun. The houses were modest, mostly two story rental units whose stucco facades made it easy to confuse one house with another. I pulled over and dug the slip of paper from my jeans to check the address: 3225 Louisiana Avenue Parkway.
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 off 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 an 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 waterbed mattress which lay on the floor of one 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 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 than 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 said anything about it yet. If you have ever been to 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,while we were sailing. I said "Yes". As she continued to talk about the apartment, it became clear it had a 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 tenants had cats.
She said somewhat mysteriously," they had animals."
I noticed the shift in 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 serious and suddenly concerned.
"She didn't say what kind of animal."
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 she 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 frighten of something or someone. Her fear had obviously transferred to Barbara.
Then Barbara said, "Ed, I got this 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 gently.
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 tone 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 I did not know where these people lived, but I had assumed it was in the French Quarter, since that is 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 then a couple of hours in the air. She shook her head in cautious agreement. It was time to shift tactic's. I switched my tone to confident and our conversation to sailboats. She accepted m lead, and we left the apartment within minutes to go sailing.(How was I know we were standing in David Ferrie's shadow?)
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 hd been very close to Nazi scientists who fled to South America at the end of WW II, particularly in Paraguay.3 I did not think much of the story, quietly considering it to be a hysterical liberal rant. Yes, I heard that he was very conservative . In fact, he was occasionally referred to as a "right wing crack-pot", 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 over statement.
Anyway it was widely known that Nazi's 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 had 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 abover 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 Parrish. 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 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 those were much closer to his apartment. Why would he only work occasionally at a service station in Jefferson Parrish, a suburb 30 minutes away(and a cultural world apart) from uptown New Orleans?
Then I asked 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 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 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 time, but I didn't argue with her. It sounded good to me.
Miquel stood about five feet eight inches with black hair and a stocky build. He was in his mid 30's 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 is where I wanted him. I kept my tone polite and somewhat informal. My unspoken message to him was "I don't blame you for trying, but lets 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 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. 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 flames. Enormous flames were shooting out of the windows. A thick plume of dense black smoke had not yet reached more than a couple hundred feet above the roof, indicating the fire had just started. But the forty foot flames 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 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. Her husband worked in the Lamplighter Club. Yes, she knew about the fire. Someone 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's 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. Local bankers and developers congregated around this seat of power to be close to the pulse, and 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 15th floor. Flames leapt out of 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 flames leapt up above the roofline of the building, Rault must have wondered if he had made the right decision. He also must have thought what happened to the three floors of "fireproof" paneling that he had bought for the Lamplighter Club which was burning like a blowtorch. 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 to alive or would have to jump to their deaths from the 17th floor roof. The seven women trapped in a window on the 15th 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.
It was the greatest of fortunes that a helicopter carrying an oil executive happened to be flying over downtown New Orleans at the moment of the explosion. The pilot dropped his passenger on the grassy field in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court building and headed for the roof of the flaming building. Nine people were trapped there, but his small helicopter could only carry three passengers at a time. Some would have to wait for the next trip. The rest would have to wait for the third trip. So three separate times, this determined pilot landed on the roof surrounded by onyx smoke and orange flames. Rault was the last person to leave the roof. He was lucky. The women trapped in their beauty salon on the 15th floor were not. Fire investigators estimated the bomb contained five gallons of gasoline, and had exploded in the utility closet right outside the door of the salon. The hallway was immediately filled with flames, blocking the women's exit. The helicopter could not help them. Faced with certain death by fire, or jumping to their deaths, seven women jumped. There was no net. No air bag, six died on impact. The camera crews were there. They filmed it all. That night veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite warned his viewers that he was about to show the "grimmest footage" of his career. The nation watched helplessly. I turned off the television and went back to the library, trying to concentrate on thousand year old hieroglyphs buried in a Mayan grave. One question has smoldered since the fire: Was the Rault Center firebombing the result of Rault's financing of Garrison JFK investigation?
When Christmas break came, Barbara gave me a key to her apartment and asked me to keep an eye on it while she flew home to see her family. A couple of days after she left, I dropped by for a routine check and found that her waterbed mattress, which was resting on the hardwood floor without a frame, had started to leak. I quickly went outside, borrowed a hose from a neighbors lawn, and drained the mattress. But the damage had already been done. The wooden floors were severely buckled. It was hundreds of dollars of damage. The landlord would certainly flip. That night I called her at her family's farm and told her about the leak. She said that she would call the landlord in the morning and tell him.
Several days later, New Orleans woke up to yet another incredible event: Someone had set fire to the Howard Johnson Motel. It was directly across the street from the Rault Center, but theses arsonists were not experts. And the fire was small in comparison, one smoky hotel room. But in light of what happened at the Rault Center, the hotel guests panicked and ran to the street. And having recently been humiliated in the national news by their inability to do anything to help the seven women who jumped, the New Orleans Fire Department rushed to the scene, hoping to redeem its reputation. The longest ladder was raised to reach the fifth floor window.The bravest firemen rushed up the ladder with no other thought than trying to save someone's life. As they approached the window, a rifle barrel slid through the opening. The sniper squeezed off round after round, murdering the very men who had come to save him.
The police department broke into a fit of rage. Nearly 600 policemen swarmed to to the building in pre- SWAT chaos. Two snipers were reported. The Deputy Chief of Police grabbed several men and led them into a stairwell to find the snipers. Somebody thought he saw something. Somebody fired a high powered rifle in the concrete and steel stairway. When the bullet finished ricocheting,the Deputy Chief of Police was dead.
On the roof, one of the snipers rushed to get a better position. A police rifle team in the Rault Center overlooking the roof shot him with a high powered rifle and killed him. The second sniper was believed to be at large in the building.
Police sealed the building. As the situation developed, a police spotter thought he saw something in the blockhouse on the roof. Twelve police fanned out and approached the blockhouse like they were going to a western shootout. Standing in a semicircle in front of a steel door cemented into a concrete wall, they opened fire. As one might expect, the bullets ricocheted off the concrete wall and steel door, right back at the very men who fired them. Yes, live on national television, they shot themselves. Several policemen fell wounded on the building's roof. One officer charged the blockhouse, it was empty.
They never found the second sniper. Some believe he walked out the front door before the building was sealed. Others think there was only one sniper. The FBI seemed to know all about these guys, and had apparently been tracking them since Kansas City. Militant black radicals they claimed.
I turned off the television and drove to the airport to pick up Barbara, who was returning from Christmas break. It seemed like she had been gone a long time. Her flight was early and I found her entering the terminal. Knowing that I had worked at the Rault Center, she asked if I had heard anything new about the fire. I told her I heard it was bomb. Somebody was trying to kill someone. As we rode the escalator leading down to the baggage claim, she noticed a big lighted sign advertising the Howard Johnson Motel rising above our heads. She had been traveling most of the day but had heard rumors of something happening at Howard Johnson 's in New Orleans.
I filled her in as quickly as possible, and then asked her if she had called her lawyer landlord about the floor damaged by her leaky waterbed. Yes she had, but he said it was not a problem. "In fact" she continued in an astonished voice, " he didn't seem concerned about it at all."
I had seen a lot of strange things in the past months. But it all made some kind of twisted sense. In the Rault Center fire, somebody was mad. They were either mad at Rault for some reason and were trying to destroy him,or they were mad at society and chose his building and his success as a target. In the Ho-Jo massacre, an angry and frustrated black man(or men) decided to strike back at a white racist society. He died venting his anger. Others died with him.
But this? A lawyer holding a damage deposit did not care about hundreds of dollars of damage done by a tenant to his clients building? It didn't make sense. Whatever was going on, it was clear that this was no ordinary apartment. All I could think of was "those terrible men and the horrible things they did to those animals." One month later, when she moved out of the apartment, Barbara got her full security deposit back. The person or persons pulling the strings on this building had succeeded in their objective, and that was a lot bigger than Barbara security deposit. They got a real live human being to live in a virtually haunted apartment.
And not just any human being. They had placed a naive and studious graduate student from out of town, who would not know any of the local history and who would not have the time or inclination to find it out. Now that the apartment was warmed up, they could put it back on the market for real.
I scratched my head about this apartment for years. Frankly I was afraid to understand it. It was so close and so strange that it scared me. I could have gone back and talked to the old woman who lived in the basement, but I didn't. I was afraid of what she might tell me. I was afraid of what I might learn. I denied it. I didn't go find out where Mary Sherman lived, or where David Ferrie lived. I just went sailing, played music, and worried about things like Mayan hieroglyphs from Guatemala.
It was not until 1992 when I realized the possibility that the Ferrie and Sherman cancer experiments might have something to do with the most deadly epidemic in history, that I finally woke up. At that point my choices narrowed. It was time to find out everything I could. I started by reading everything on the shelf about AIDs and then everything that was written by or about Jim Garrison. It was then that I realized that David Ferrie on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. A sick feeling came over me as Garrison described the smell of white mice in Ferrie's apartment. "The special fetid smell of hundreds of unattended white mice in the dining room added to the unique rank odor of the dwelling, making it difficult for visitors to enter. Then he described Ferrie's medical books and laboratory equipment and the medical treatise he had written on the viral theory of cancer.
But Garrison did not give the exact address. For a brief time , I pondered the possibility that my girlfriend had lived in David Ferrie's apartment, perhaps on the spot where the plot to kill Jack Kennedy was hatched. It was more than I wanted to wonder about. I had to find out the exact address. So I called the library in New Orleans. Ferrie was not listed in the phone book, but they found the address in his obituary, 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway. For a brief moment I was relieved. That must be a block away from 3225. But what to make of everything I had seen and heard myself. What about the smell in Barbara apartment? What about the old lady in the basement? What about "those terrible men and the horrible things they did to those animals?" What about Garrison's estimate of nearly 2000 mice?
Now that was worth thinking about! Nearly 2,000 mice! Say 5 mice per cage. That 400 cages of mice. What would an apartment look like with 400 cages of mice in it ? It would be wall to wall cages! And consider the mice. Consider the food. Consider the excrement. Consider the smell. Consider the diseases!" No one could live in such a place." Four hundred cages would take a dedicated facility.
Then it hit me: Ferrie's underground medical laboratory was not in his apartment, and he did not live in the lab. No one could. He lived near the lab, so he could manage it's day to day operations, and kept a small number of mice back at his apartment for convenience. No I had not been in Ferrie's apartment: I had been in his laboratory!
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A Bishop in his Heart
PART4
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