THE TIMES-PICAYUNE — SUNDAY MAGAZINE
THE JAZZ MURDERS: ONE YEAR LATER
Four dead musicians. A missing detective. A French Quarter aristocrat who vanished without a trace. Delphine Arceneaux revisits the case that baffled New Orleans—and the people left behind.
The bullpen at NOPD's Eighth District station smells like burnt coffee and paperwork. It's half past ten on a Tuesday morning, and Detective Marcus Thibodeaux is at his desk, which is not where he wants to be. He wants to be anywhere else. He has made this abundantly clear in the first ninety seconds of our conversation.
"No comment," he says, not looking up from a file he is not reading.
"Detective Thibodeaux, it's been fourteen months since—"
"I know how long it's been."
"Your former partner is still listed as a missing person. Do you believe Cordelia Vireaux is dead?"
He looks up. The expression on his face is not anger. It's something more complicated. "I believe she's not here. That's all I've got."
"Do you think she was involved in the murders?"
He sets down the file. "Vireaux was the best detective I ever worked with. She noticed things nobody else noticed. She was right about this case from the beginning, and nobody listened to her, including me." He pauses. "Whatever happened to her, she didn't run. She wasn't dirty. She was in deeper than any of us understood, and we let her go there alone."
He won't say more. He returns to his file. The interview is over.
Captain Theodore Tureaud is harder to pin down. He's been with NOPD for thirty-one years and has the weary dignity of a man who has seen everything and liked very little of it. His office is sparse. There's a commendation on the wall from 1989 and a coffee mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST CAPTAIN. He didn't buy the mug. His daughter did.
"Vireaux," he says. "You're still chasing that story."
"The public deserves answers."
"The public deserves to know why four men are dead and their killer is still walking around. I agree." He folds his hands on his desk. "But I can't give you what I don't have. Vireaux was a good detective. One of the sharpest I'd seen in years. She was also—" He stops. Chooses his words carefully. "She was in a situation none of us were equipped to handle."
"What kind of situation."
"The kind that doesn't fit on a report."
He won't elaborate. He refers me to the official case file, which is incomplete. He thanks me for my time. At the door, he pauses.
"She came to see me once. Before she disappeared. She told me she was developing leads she couldn't share yet. I gave her a week." He looks at the commendation on the wall. "I should've given her more."
The records clerk who pulls the Vireaux file for me is a young man named Javier Reyes. He's been with the department for two years. He never met Cordelia Vireaux. But he remembers the file.
"It's thin," he says, handing it over. "Thinner than it should be for a four-victim homicide. Someone pulled things out before it got to us. Or never put them in."
"Who would have access to do that?"
He shrugs. The shrug is very careful. "Lots of people. This was a weird case."
"Weird how."
He lowers his voice. "Everyone who worked it got moved or quit or died. Thibodeaux caught a conduct review that went nowhere. Tureaud took early retirement three months ago—officially for health reasons, but people talk. A clerk from the assessor's office got arrested on unrelated charges and nobody would say what the charges were. And the Saint-Clair property on Rue Dauphine got sold to an LLC registered in Delaware two weeks after Vireaux disappeared." He pauses. "That's a lot of smoke for no fire, you know?"
"Are you saying there was a cover-up?"
"I'm saying I pull files for a living. I know what a complete one looks like. This ain't it."
Outside the precinct, I catch Officer Marie Delacroix on her smoke break. She's been with NOPD for six years. She worked a perimeter shift on one of the jazz murder scenes. She asked to remain off the record. She's using her grandmother's name.
"I saw her once," she says. "Vireaux. It was maybe two weeks before she vanished. She was coming out of the precinct at night. Looked like she hadn't slept in days. But she was—" She searches for the word. "Focused. Like she knew something. Like she was on the edge of breaking something open."
She takes a long drag of her cigarette.
"There was a guy waiting for her across the street. Tall. Dark coat. Didn't move like a normal person. She didn't see him. Or maybe she did and didn't care. He watched her get in her car and drive away. Then he just... walked off. Into the dark. Not toward anywhere. Just into it." She exhales smoke. "I didn't say anything at the time. I should have. That's the thing about this city—you see something strange, you tell yourself it's New Orleans. It's always New Orleans. Until it's not."
"Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"
"Probably not. I didn't see his face. Just the way he stood. Like he had all the time in the world." She drops her cigarette and crushes it under her heel. "Like time was something that happened to other people."
The file is thin, as promised. But there's one document that catches my attention. An evidence log from the initial crime scene—the first body, Jean-Luc Batiste, found in a French Quarter alley on a rainy night in February. The log notes that Detective Vireaux was the first detective on scene. Under "Initial Observations," she wrote:
Wound pattern inconsistent with knife or animal attack. Two punctures, precisely spaced. Body arranged post-mortem. Victim identified as musician. Pattern developing. Recommend cross-reference with missing persons — dark-haired women, last five years.
Below that, in a different handwriting: Request denied. Signed by Captain Tureaud.
Below that, in Vireaux's handwriting again, almost too small to read: Re-submitting.
There is no record of the second submission.
I try to reach the Saint-Clair household. The number is disconnected. The house on Rue Dauphine is empty—sold six months ago to a development company that has since gone bankrupt. The neighbors don't want to talk. One of them, an elderly woman who's lived on the block since 1962, says only: "That house has always been strange. People come and go. The name on the deed doesn't change." She closes the door before I can ask what she means.
Detective Thibodeaux calls me back. I didn't expect him to. I gave him my card at the end of our interview and assumed he'd throw it away.
"There's something I didn't tell you," he says. His voice is different on the phone. Quieter. "About Vireaux. About why I covered for her."
I wait.
"She came to me a few days before she disappeared. Asked me to pull files on a clerk in the assessor's office. Asked me to open a sealed envelope if she didn't call by a certain time." He pauses. "She called. Barely. She told me she was fine. She told me to burn the envelope."
"Did you?"
Another pause. "No."
"What was in it."
"A name. Philippe Moreau. An address. A set of instructions for what to do if she turned up dead." His voice tightens. "And a letter. Not to me. To someone else. I didn't open it."
"Do you still have it."
Silence on the line.
"I have to go," he says, and hangs up.
The B&B on Burgundy Street is still operating. The sign above the door reads La Maison Moreau — Chambres & Café. The hand-lettered addition underneath— Toujours ouvert pour les âmes perdues —has been painted over. The building was sold three months ago. The new owner has never heard of Philippe Moreau.
"He left in a hurry," she tells me. "Didn't take much. A few clothes. Some books. There was a folder in the back room with a bunch of old documents in it. Financial stuff. I threw it out. Should I not have thrown it out?"
I ask her if she remembers anything about him.
"Nice man," she says. "Very polite. Made good tea. Always had time to talk." She pauses. "Looking back, I don't think I ever saw him eat anything."
Cordelia Vireaux's apartment has been rented to someone else. The new tenant didn't know about the previous occupant until I told her. She let me stand in the doorway. The kitchen is small. The window faces a brick wall. There's a scratch on the floor near the stove that might be from furniture being moved, or might be from something else entirely.
I don't know what happened to Cordelia Vireaux. The official file says "Missing Person — Open." The unofficial consensus among her former colleagues is that she's dead. Some think Louis Saint-Clair killed her. Some think she ran. A few, the ones who worked closest to her, don't say anything at all. They get a look in their eyes when her name comes up. The look of people who have seen something they can't explain and have made peace with not explaining it.
Marcus Thibodeaux called me one more time. Late at night, from a number I didn't recognize. He sounded tired. He sounded like someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time.
"I found the letter," he said. "The one in the envelope. I opened it."
"What did it say."
"It wasn't for me." He paused. "It was for Saint-Clair. It said: I'm still your prey. "
"Did you keep it?"
"No." A pause. "I burned it. Like she asked."
"Why?"
"Because it wasn't for me." He hung up. He hasn't called again.
Sometimes I walk through the Quarter at night. Past the clubs where the dead men played their last sets. Past the alley where Jean-Luc Batiste was found in the rain. Past the corner where a street preacher used to sit on a milk crate and mutter warnings that no one understood until it was too late. The preacher is gone now. Nobody knows where.
The case is cold. The files are incomplete. Four men are dead, and the woman who tried to solve their murders has vanished from the record like so many women before her—dark—haired, sharp-eyed, the kind of person a room reorganizes itself around without noticing.
I don't know what happened to Cordelia Vireaux. But sometimes, when I'm walking through the Quarter at night, I feel like someone is watching me. I turn around. There's never anyone there.
Just the city. Just the dark.
Just the sense that some stories don't end. They just go underground.