But that would be tomorrow, and tomorrow would be another day altogether.
And by the time darkness edged its cautious way towards morning the people who had crowded the sidewalks had forgotten the story, forgotten perhaps why they went down there in the first place, because here – here, of all places in the world – there were better things to think of: jazz festivals in Louis Armstrong Park, the procession from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, St Jude Shrine, a fire out on Crozat by Hawthorne Hall above the Saenger Theater that took the lives of six, orphaned some little kids, and killed a fireman called Robert DeAndre who once kissed a girl with a spider tattooed on her breast. New Orleans, home of the Mardi Gras, of little lives, unknown names. Stand. Close your eyes now and inhale this mighty sweating city in one breath. Smell the ammoniac taint of the Medical Center; smell the heat of rare ribs scorching in oiled flames, the flowers, the clam chowder, the pecan pie, the bay leaf and oregano and court bouillon and carbonara from Tortorici’s, the gasoline, the moonshine, the diesel wine: the collected perfumes of a thousand million intersecting lives, and then each life intersecting yet another like six degrees of separation, a thousand million beating hearts, all here, beneath the roof of the same sky where the stars are like dark eyes that see everything. See and remember . . .
The image evaporates, as transient as steam through subway grilles or from blackened copper funnels projecting from the back walls of Creole restaurants, steam rising from the floor of the city as it sweltered through the night.
Like steam from the brow of a killer as he’d worked his heart out . . .
Sunday. A hard, bright day. The heat had lifted as if to make room to breathe. Children were stripped to the waist, gathered at the corner of Carroll and Perdido and spraying each other with water from rubber snaking hoses that traipsed from the porches of clapboard houses set back from the street, behind low banks of hickory and water oaks. Their squeals, perhaps more from relief than excitement, scattered like streamers through the low, heady atmosphere. These sounds, of life in its infancy, were there as John Verlaine was woken by the incessant shrilling of the phone; and such a call at that time in the morning meant, more often than not, that someone somewhere was dead.
New Orleans Police Department for eleven years, somewhere in amongst that three and a half years in Vice, the last two years in Homicide; single, mentally sound but emotionally unstable; most often tired, less often smiling.
Dressed quickly. Didn’t shave, didn’t shower. More than likely there’d be a mess of shit to wade through. You got used to it. Perhaps you convinced yourself you got used to it.
Heat had been angry the past few days. Closed you up inside it like a fist. Hard to breathe. Sunday morning was cooler; the air lightened a little, the feeling that pressured storm clouds could break through everything now dissipated.
Verlaine drove slowly. Whoever had died was already dead. No point in rushing.
He felt it would rain again, that lazy, tail-end-of-summer rain that no-one took a mind to complain about, but it would come later, perhaps during the night. Perhaps while he slept. If he slept . . .
Away from his apartment on Carroll, heading a straight north towards South Loyola Avenue. The streets seemed vacant but for a thin scattering of humanity’s lost, and he watched them, their tentative advances, their laughing faces, their hungover redness that spread from the doorways of bars out onto the sidewalk and into the street.
He drove without thought, and somewhere near the De Montluzin Building he hung a right, and then past Loew’s State Theater. Twenty minutes, and he stood at the Loyola end of Gravier. Down here there were mimosas and hickory trees, the branches chased of bark, the remnants of their pecan yield stolen weeks before by grimy thieving hands. Pecan pie, he thought, and smelled his mother’s kitchen, and saw through the window his sister, a cool flannel draped over her head, her thin sapling arms red with the sun, peeling, spotted with calamine and cocoa butter, and thought If only we could all go backwards . . .
Verlaine looked away leftwards, away from Gravier, through the wisteria that had clung to the walls along this street since he could remember, their pendent racemes like clusters of grape hanging purple and delicate and sweet with perfume; past the grove of mimosas, their cylindrical heads like little spikes of color through the burgeoning light, out towards Dumaine and North Claiborne, the hum of traffic just another voice in this start-of-day humidity. Down among the water oaks and honey locusts, you could hear the cicadas challenging the distant sound of children who ran and played their catch-as-catch-can games on the sidewalks through air that sat tight like a drum, like it was waiting to be breathed.
He knew where the car had been, it was evident by its absence, and strung around the missing-tooth gap were crime scene tapes fluttering in the breeze. The body was found here, some guy beaten to death with a hammer. Ops told him as much as they knew on the phone, said he should go down there and see what he could see, and once he was done he should drive over to the ME’s office and speak to Emerson, check the scene report, and then on to the County Coroner to attend the autopsy. So he looked, and he saw what he could see, and he took some shots with his camera, and he walked around the edges of the thing until he felt he’d had enough and returned to his car. He sat in the passenger side with the door open and he smoked a cigarette.
Forty minutes later, the Medical Examiner’s office on South Liberty and Cleveland, back of the Medical Center. The day had grown in stature, promised a clear azure sky before lunch was over, promised a mid-afternoon in the late eighties.
Verlaine felt his head stretching as he walked from the car, trying to stay close to the store frontages beneath the awnings and out of the sun. His shirt was glued to his back beneath a too-heavy cotton suit, his feet sweated inside his shoes, his ankles itched.
Jim Emerson, youthful despite entering his early forties, Assistant Medical Examiner and very good at it. Emerson added a certain flair and insight to what would ordinarily have been a dry and factual task. He was sensitive to people, sensitive even when they were rigored and bloated and shattered and dead.
Verlaine stood in the corridor outside Emerson’s office for a moment. Here we go again, he thought, and then knocked once and walked straight in.
Emerson rose from his desk and reached out his hand. ‘Short time, plenty see,’ he said, and smiled. ‘You up for the trunk job?’
Verlaine nodded. ‘Seems that way.’
‘Nasty shit,’ Emerson said, and glanced to the desk. Ahead of him were three or four pages of detailed notations on a yellow legal pad.
‘A surgeon we have here,’ he went on. ‘A real surgeon.’ He looked back at Verlaine, smiled again, nodded his head back and forth in a manner that was neither a yes nor a no. He reached into his coat pocket, took out a packet of bad-smelling Mexican cigarettes and lit one.
‘You looked at the body yet?’ he asked Verlaine. ‘We sent it over to the coroner a couple of hours ago.’
Verlaine shook his head. ‘I’m going there in a little while.’
Emerson nodded matter-of-factly. ‘Well, sure as shit it’ll spoil your Sunday lunch.’ He returned to sit at his desk and looked over his own notes. ‘It’s interesting.’
‘How so?’
Emerson shrugged. ‘The car maybe. The thing with the heart.’
‘The car?’
‘A ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser. That’s over at one of the lock-ups. Helluva car.’
‘And the vic was in the trunk, right?’
‘What was left of him, yes.’
‘They got an ID?’ Verlaine asked.
Emerson shook his head. ‘That’s your territory.’
‘So what can you tell me?’ Verlaine reached for a chair against the wall, dragged it close to the desk and sat down.
‘Guy got the living hell knocked out of him. Smashed him up with a hammer and cut his freakin’ heart out . . . like the betrayal thing, right?’
‘That’s just rumor. That’s a rumor
based on one case back in ’68.’
‘One case?’
‘Ricki Dvore. You know about that one?’
Emerson shook his head.
‘Ricki Dvore was a hustler, a druggist, a pimp, everything. He shipped liquor back and forth out of Orleans with his own trucks, stuff that was stilled someplace out beyond St Bernard . . . place has grown since then though. You know Evangeline, down south along Lake Borgne?’
Emerson nodded.
‘Stilled the stuff down there and brought it in in trucks, regular-looking artics with tanks inside the bodies. He gypped some dealer, someone from one of those crazy families down there, and one by one his wife, his kids, his cousins, they were all beaten on somehow. Three-year-old daughter lost a finger. They sent it to Dvore and he just kept on screwing up. Eventually they dragged him from his truck one night, cut his heart out and sent it to his wife. Cops had Christ knows how many people answering up for that, more crank calls, more confessions than anything I’ve ever heard of. They didn’t have a hope; case folded within a fortnight and stayed that way. They never found Dvore’s body – weighted down and sunk in a bayou someplace I’m sure. They just had his heart. That’s where the whole thing about betrayal and cutting out people’s hearts came from. It’s just a story.’
‘Well, whoever the hell did this, he left the heart inside the chest.’
‘Seems to me we go with the car,’ Verlaine said. ‘The car is good, strong. Maybe it’s a red herring, something so out of character it’s designed to throw the whole pitch of the invest, but it’s such a big part I somehow doubt it. Someone wants to throw the course they do something small, something at the scene, some minor fact that’s so minor only an expert would recognize it. The guys who do that kind of thing are smart enough to realize that the people after them are just as smart as they are.’
Emerson nodded. ‘You go down to the coroner’s office and take a look yourself. I’ll get this typed up and file it.’
Verlaine rose from the chair. He set it back against the wall.
He shook Emerson’s hand and turned to leave.
‘Keep me posted on this,’ Emerson said as an afterthought.
Verlaine turned back, nodded. ‘I’ll send you an e-mail.’
‘Wiseass.’
Verlaine pushed through the door and made his way down the corridor.
Heat had risen outside. Sweated on the way to his car, maybe a pint a yard.
County Coroner Michael Cipliano, fifty-three years old, an irascible and weatherworn veteran. Now only Italian by name, his father from the north, Piacenze, Cremona perhaps – even he’d forgotten. Cipliano’s eyes were like small black coals burning out of the smooth surface of his face. Gave no shit, expected none in return.
The humid, tight atmosphere that clung to the walls of the coroner’s theater defied the air-conditioning and pressed relentlessly in from all sides. Verlaine stepped through the rubber swing doors and nodded silently at Cipliano. Cipliano nodded back. He was hosing down slabs, the sound of the water hitting the metal surface of the autopsy tables almost deafening within the confines of the theater.
Cipliano finished the last table nearest the wall and shut off the hose.
‘You here for the heartless one?’
Verlaine nodded again.
‘Printed him for you I did, like the blessed patron saint that I am. Paper’s over there.’ He nodded at a stainless steel desk towards the back of the room. ‘Gopher’s sick. Took off day before yesterday, figured he picked something up from one of those John Does over there.’ Cipliano nodded over his shoulder to a pair of cadavers, floaters from all visible indications, the grey-blue tinge of the flesh, the swollen fingers and toes.
‘Found ’em Thursday face down in Bayou Bienvenue. Users both of them, tracks like pepper up and down their arms, in the groin, between the toes, backs of the knees. Gopher figures there’s cholera or somesuch in the Bayou. These cats roll in here with it and he contracts. Full of shit, really so full of shit.’
Cipliano laughed hoarsely and shook his head.
‘So what we got?’ Verlaine asked as he walked towards the nearest table. The smell was strong, rank and fetid, and even though he breathed through his mouth he could almost taste it. God only knew what he was inhaling.
‘What we got is a fucking mess and then some,’ Cipliano said. ‘If my mother only knew where I was on a Sunday morning she’d roll over Beethoven right there in her grave.’ The lack of reciprocal love between Cipliano and his five-years-dead mother was legend to anyone who knew him. Rumor had it that Cipliano had performed her autopsy himself, just to make sure, to make really sure, that she was dead.
‘Aperitifs and hors d’oeuvres are done, but at least you arrived in time for the main course,’ Cipliano stated. ‘Whoever did your John Doe here knew a little something about surgery. It ain’t easy to do that, take the heart right out clean like that. It wasn’t no pro job, but there’s one helluva lot of veins and arteries connecting that organ, and some of them are the thickness of your thumb. Messy shit, and really quite unusual if I say so myself.’
The skin of the corpse was gray, the face distorted and swollen with the heat it must have suffered locked in the trunk of the car. The chest revealed the incisions Cipliano had already made, the hollowness within that had once held the heart. The stomach was bloated, the heap of clothes bloodstained, hair like clumps of matted grass.
‘A clean-edged knife,’ Cipliano stated. ‘Something like a straight razor but without the flat end, here and here through the left and right ventricles at the base, and here . . . here across the carotid we have a little chafing, a little friction burn where the blade did not immediately pass through the tissue. Subclavian incisions and dissections are clean and straight, swift cuts, quite precise. Perhaps a scalpel was used, or something fashioned to the accuracy of a scalpel.’
‘Was the whole thing done in one go, or was there time between opening up the chest and severing the heart?’ Verlaine asked.
‘All in one go. Tied him up, beat his head in, opened him up like a jiffy bag, severed some of the organs to get to the heart. The heart was cut out, replaced inside the chest. The vic was already lying on the sheet, it was wrapped over him, dumped in the car, driven from wherever, and transferred to the trunk, abandoned.’
‘Lickety-split,’ Verlaine said.
‘Like the proverbial hare,’ Cipliano replied.
‘How long would something like that take, the whole operation thing?’
‘Depends. From his accuracy, the fact it was obvious he had some idea of what he was doing, maybe twenty minutes, thirty at best.’
Verlaine nodded.
‘Seems the body was moved, tilted upwards a couple of times, maybe even propped against something. Blood has laked in different places. Struck with the hammer maybe thirty or forty times, some of the blows direct, others glancing towards the front of the head. Tied initially, and once he was dead he was untied.’
‘Fingerprints on the body?’ Verlaine asked.
‘Need to do an iodine gun and silver transfers to be sure, but from what I can tell there seem to be plenty of rubber smudges. He wore surgical gloves, I’m pretty sure of that.’
‘Can we do helium-cadmium?’
Cipliano nodded. ‘Sure we can.’
Verlaine helped prepare. They scanned the limbs, pressure points, around each incision, the gray-purple flesh a dull black beneath the ambient light. The smears from the gloves showed up as glowing smudges similar to perspiration stains. Where the knife had scratched the surface of the skin there were fine black needle-point streaks. Verlaine helped to roll the body onto its front, a folded body bag tucked into the chest cavity to limit spillage. The back showed nothing of significance, but Verlaine – bringing his line of vision down horizontally with the surface of the skin – noticed some fine and slightly lustrous smears on the skin.
‘Ultra-violet?’ he asked.
Cipliano wheeled a standard across the linoleu
m floor, plugged it in and switched it on.
The coal black eyes squinted hard. ‘Shee-it and Jesus Christ in a gunny sack,’ he hissed.
Verlaine reached towards the skin, perhaps to touch, to sense what was there. Cipliano’s hand closed firmly around his wrist and restrained the motion.
A pattern, a series of joined lines glowing whitish-blue against the colorless skin, drawn carefully from shoulder to shoulder, down the spine, beneath the neck and over the shoulders. It glowed, really glowed, like something alive, something that possessed an energy all its own.
‘What the fuck is that for Christ’s sake?’ Verlaine asked.
‘Get the camera,’ Cipliano said quietly, as if here he had found something that he did not wish to disturb with the sound of his voice.
Verlaine nodded, fetched the camera from the rack of shelves at the back of the room. Cipliano took a chair, placed it beside the table and stood on it. He angled the camera horizontally as best he could and took several photographs of the body. He came down from the chair and took several more shots across the shoulders and the spine.
‘Can we test it?’ Verlaine asked once he was done.
‘It’s fading,’ Cipliano said quietly, and with that he took several items from a field kit, swabs and analysis strips, and then with a scalpel he removed a hair’s-width layer of skin from the upper right shoulder and placed it between two microscope slides.
Less than fifteen minutes, Cipliano turning with a half-smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘Formula C2H24N2O2. Quinine, or quinine sulphate to be precise. Fluoresces under ultraviolet, glows whitish-blue. Only other things I know of that do that are petroleum jelly smeared on paper and some kinds of detergent powder. But this, this is most definitely quinine.’
R. J. Ellory Page 2