Louisiana Fever

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Louisiana Fever Page 4

by D. J. Donaldson


  The house was a two-story gray stone Italianate villa with Palladian windows and life-size stone figures strategically placed along a stone balustrade on the roof. She crossed to the front door and put her key in the lock, kicking off a sensor that turned on all the lights inside. She hadn’t lived there nearly long enough to be immune to the dazzling interior. Stretching before her were two huge high-ceilinged rooms joined by a columned portal that framed against the far wall an English painted leather screen behind a gilded nineteenth-century Russian settee upholstered in black leather. Leading the eye to this focal point were splashes of color and surprising blends of Chippendale and Georgian— gleaming woods and bright fabrics, accents that drew the eye—an orange pillow with zebra striping, African masks of hammered copper, glided mirrors and sconces, flashes of glistening oak floor between Chinese and Indian carpets, every piece, every pillow, every chair in just the right place, facing exactly the correct direction—leather and gold, velvet and chintz.

  When her three years were up, it was going to be very difficult to leave. She thought briefly of her own few furnishings safely stored in the attic, then crossed to the phone and called her parents in Speculator for the third time that day, having tried the first two times from the office.

  Still no answer.

  She hung up and went to the kitchen, where the gleaming black counters and white cabinets once again almost made her feel like learning how to cook.

  What made this whole arrangement even more astonishing was the willingness of the owner to accept her dog, Lucky, in the deal. True, he’d had to audition for the owner’s lawyer and she’d had to agree that he’d never be left alone in the house, and then it was hers—for three years, anyway.

  She opened the door to the small courtyard in the rear and saw Lucky lying on his belly, watching a black butterfly slowly flexing its wings.

  “Lucky . . . Here, boy.”

  The little dog’s head jerked her way and there was a brief moment of hesitation while his brain seemed to be checking out alternate responses. But then he gave the one she’d never tired of seeing. He jumped up, threw his head back in sheer joy, and came running.

  “What a good boy.” She knelt and gave him a brisk rubdown, then lifted him onto his hind legs and scratched his chin as his big brown eyes rolled upward in ecstasy.

  They went inside and she gave Lucky his dinner before putting a Lean Cuisine in the microwave for herself.

  Lucky finished his meal in about the time it took hers to heat and he began pushing his bowl across the floor.

  “Grape?”

  Lucky’s ears went up and he stared at her, poised for action.

  She got three grapes from the fridge and held one up for Lucky to see. Then she rolled the grape across the floor, sending Lucky scrambling after it. When he caught it, he threw it up in the air and went after it again.

  He tossed it a few more times, then took it to the carpet by the sink and ate it. He was only a three-grape dog, so that he chased the second one as fast as the first but tossed it only once before carrying it to the carpet. He went after the third with much less enthusiasm and ate it on the spot.

  With the grape game over, Kit took her dinner and a glass of wine to her favorite room in the house, a small octagonal conservatory bay with five tall windows through which she could look out onto the front courtyard. There, she pulled a fan-back wicker chair over to the carved black lacquer table in the center of the room and had her dinner, Lucky lying at her feet.

  As she ate, her mind drifted back to the conversation she’d had with Broussard about Jack Doe, particularly about him having a bad heart. It felt so strange. She’d spoken to the man around one o’clock. By three, his heart was in Broussard’s hands.

  Suddenly, the sliced beef on her plate seemed too . . . organic to be edible. She pushed it away and returned to the telephone.

  This time, it was answered.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Me who?” her father said, never tiring of this little game.

  “Where’ve you been? I called earlier, and you were out.”

  “VFW hall. Tonight is steak night. Should have stayed home, though. Meat was so tough, I could have made shoes with it.”

  “Is Mom there?”

  “Yes, dear,” her mother said. “And you shouldn’t believe a word your father says. He ate all of his and some of mine.”

  “Say, something peculiar happened to me today. . . .”

  “You’re not hurt?” her father said.

  “No, I’m fine. I met a man in a restaurant today who seemed to know me, but I didn’t know him. Barely after we began talking, he collapsed and died . . . of a heart attack. He was taken to the morgue. . . .”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” her mother said.

  “What should I call it? Never mind. We were looking through his belongings, trying to learn who he was, but he had no identification. In his wallet, there was a picture of you two and me in my junior varsity cheerleading outfit. We were coming out of our old house on Claybrook.”

  “How odd,” her mother said.

  “He stood around six feet tall, was probably sixty years old, and had deep-set eyes, a straight Roman nose, and a little cleft in the center of his chin. There was a crude tattoo on his right wrist that said ‘Think Free,’ and we believe his first name was Jack. Does that sound like anyone you know?”

  “Nobody I know,” her father said.

  “No . . . not at all,” her mother added. “I wonder where he got that picture? How very strange.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I’d hoped you could tell me who he is. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “I’m not surprised,” her mother said.

  “There’s a chance we’ll find out his identity tomorrow,” Kit said. On the other end of the line, she heard the phone bump something.

  “Mother . . . Daddy . . . Are you there?”

  There was a pause and her father said, “Yes, Kitten, we’re here. Go on, you were saying . . .”

  “They’ve sent his prints to every identification network there is. If he was ever printed for the service or was ever in jail—and we think that tattoo suggests he was—we should find him.”

  “And you say you’ll hear tomorrow about that?” her mother said.

  “Probably late afternoon.”

  “Call us and tell us the results, will you?” she asked.

  “Of course. Well, you’ve heard my news. How are you two?”

  “We’re both fine,” her mother said. “Aren’t we, Howard?”

  “Oh yes. Couldn’t be better. Had a light sprinkling of snow this morning. Didn’t last, though, and didn’t stick. Probably be seeing some signs of spring here in a few weeks. Yes . . . both fine.”

  “Good to hear your voices, even if you couldn’t help me.”

  “You, too,” her father said.

  “Be sure and call us tomorrow,” her mother said.

  “I will. Talk to you then.”

  Kit hung up and sat staring at the phone. She couldn’t remember the last time a question about her parents’ health had not brought forth a detailed account of her father’s troubles with his blood pressure or her mother’s latest migraine. And there had been something in her mother’s voice. . . . If they weren’t her parents, she’d almost think they’d lied to her.

  KIT SPENT MOST OF the next day investigating the death of a punter for the Saints, who’d been found with toxic levels of cocaine in his blood. After talking with his friends and family, she concluded that, like the gunshot death, this one, too, was an accident. All through the day, below the surface, her mind picked at her meeting with Jack Doe, his death, and the odd feeling she’d had when talking to her parents about it.

  A little after three o’clock, Broussard called with the news that none of the computers they’d fed Jack Doe’s prints to had found a match. As promised, Kit passed this information along to her parents, who were home this time on her first try.

  At
4:15, as the last page of her report on the cocaine case hummed from her laser printer, she realized she’d made a decision. Tucking her report into a clean file folder, she headed down the hall to Broussard’s office, where, for a moment, the absence of light behind the frosted glass panel in his door made her think he was out. But then the room grew brighter.

  She knocked and stuck her head inside, to see Charlie Franks, the deputy medical examiner, standing by a slide projector. On the wall across the room was an image that at first she couldn’t decipher. Then she realized it was the right shoulder of a corpse—and not a very fresh one. Broussard was rocked back in his chair, which was turned to the image, his fingers laced over his belly. The two men looked her way.

  “I can see you’re busy. I’ll come back later.”

  As she withdrew, Broussard said, “C’mon in. Charlie’s just showin’ me a couple of slides he’s thinkin’ of usin’ in his talk on body identification at the University of Florida next week. You might find the information interestin’ considerin’ our conversation yesterday.”

  “Hi, Kit. By all means, join us,” Franks said.

  “Orient her,” Broussard added.

  “This is a photograph of the right shoulder of a body found three weeks after death,” Franks said. “We knew who lived in the house, but the face was so bloated, it was unrecognizable. Fingerprints were also useless, and there were no dental records available. A relative said the occupant of the house had a tattoo of an American flag on his right shoulder, but, as you can see, the decomposition pigments produced by the reaction of bacterial hydrogen sulfide with erythrocyte hemoglobin have produced such discoloration, it’s impossible to tell if he even has a tattoo. But look what application of a gauze pad containing three percent hydrogen peroxide for ten minutes does.”

  He pressed the advance button on the projector and another image appeared on the wall. In this one, a flag tattoo was clearly visible.

  This was a downside of working for Broussard—never knowing what grisly thing he’d want to show you. She was much better now at handling it than when she first came, but it was definitely not a perk of the position.

  Both men were looking at her, beaming with pride, waiting for her reaction.

  “Amazing,” she said. Then, fearing a one-word response might seem unappreciative, she added, “And so easy.”

  Broussard smiled happily.

  Franks chuckled. “That’s the beauty of it. Simple and effective.”

  Franks showed a couple more examples and Broussard suggested he eliminate the final one, which wasn’t quite as impressive as the others. Franks then unplugged the projector and excused himself, flicking on the lights as he left.

  “Now,” Broussard said, rocking forward in his chair. “What can I do for you?”

  She put her report on his desk. “The punter . . . an accidental overdose in my opinion.”

  “Then it’ll be my opinion, too.” He looked at her for a moment, then said, “I don’t believe I ever told you this, but . . .”

  At last, Kit thought. He was going to say it. . . . She was doing a good job. There was no doubt in her mind he’d always believed that, but, damn it, he wouldn’t say it. The closest he’d ever come was when he began buying wrapped lemon balls just for her when he saw she was reluctant to take the naked ones he carried for himself. This need she had for his approval was something she tried to fight, but it was always there. . . . Why? She had no idea.

  She was competent and she knew it. That should be enough. But it wasn’t. So she felt her pulse quicken as she waited for him to finish his thought.

  He hesitated, teetering on the edge.

  She leaned forward in anticipation.

  Then, above his short beard, his face flushed and she saw retreat in his eyes.

  “I . . . think it’s time we get your office repainted.”

  “That’d be nice,” she said, making sure her disappointment stayed hidden. “Speaking of our conversation yesterday, I’ve decided to try my hand at figuring out who that man is—or was—on my own time, of course. . . .”

  “No reason to do it off the clock. It’s somethin’ I need to know, too. Better we turn the body over to relatives than to strangers who’ll just want to get him buried as cheaply as possible.”

  “In any event, tomorrow is Saturday and Teddy will be back from his trip. I thought he and I would start on it then. Any ideas where we should begin?” It was a question she would have asked even if her search was to be a purely personal activity. He was simply uncanny when it came to solving puzzles, and it was highly unlikely he hadn’t already set his mind to work on this one.

  In reply, Broussard reached under the table behind him and put the bag containing Jack Doe’s clothing on the desk. From the bag, he withdrew one shoe, turned it sole up, and handed it to her. It was covered with dark stains and there was a kind of sludge in the treads.

  “His shoes are new, but he went somewhere in ’em that got him into some old grease. I found strands of hemp in that grease, along with these. . . .”

  He handed her a photograph. Looking at it, she saw several dozen golden objects against a black background—some shaped like clams, some like flowers, some like figure eights. Others resembled triangles filled with pebbles.

  She looked up, her brow furrowed.

  “Diatoms,” Broussard said happily. “One-celled algae with silica shells. I found ’em in the grease. Every body of water has ’em, and in every location there are distinct types. Most of those are typical of the kind found around Pensacola.”

  “So he’s from there?”

  “I don’t think so. I also found a couple typical of the Caribbean and a few common to the middle of the Atlantic.”

  “I’m lost.”

  “No you’re not. Where in New Orleans might you find hemp and diatoms from several bodies of water?”

  Kit thought a moment. “Hemp . . . isn’t that used to make rope?” Then it hit her. “He was on a ship. . . . The docks . . .”

  “That’s where I’d start.” He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a stack of Polaroid photos, sifted through them, and handed one to her. It was a morgue photo of Jack Doe’s face.

  “Take that along. Maybe it’ll jog someone’s memory.”

  After Kit left, Broussard sat for a moment wondering why he couldn’t just tell her how impressed he was with her and that he didn’t see how he’d functioned all those years before she’d come. It seemed a simple-enough statement. But every time he was about to say it, it came out as something else. Paint her office—where had that come from? Ah well . . .

  He got up, turned on the stereo, and as the room filled with the opening passage of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy,” he went to his microscope, sat down, and removed his glasses, letting them dangle against his shirt from the lanyard at the temples. He selected a slide from the tray to his right and put it on the stage of the microscope. This would be the first look he’d had at the cellular detail of Jack Doe’s organs.

  The slide was of the kidney, a maze of tubules that looked perfectly normal at low power. He moved the slide to the cortex of the organ and switched to a higher power. Immediately, he saw numerous necrotic foci—cells whose nuclei had become shrunken and black and whose cytoplasm was fragmenting.

  He turned to a higher power and saw in many places the extensive capillary network was blocked by small blood clots. He returned that slide to the tray and chose another— this time of the liver. Here, too, many of the smaller vessels were blocked by clots. Slide after slide showed the same thing—the brain, the adrenals, every organ was involved. Had the victim not succumbed to a heart attack, he would soon have died of multiple organ failure or bled to death internally as the tiny clots used up his clotting factors and the tissue served by the blocked vessels died.

  Disseminated intravascular coagulation—DIC. Not an uncommon condition, except when it occurred, it was usually in people with cancer or someone suffering from complication
s of pregnancy, neither of which applied here.

  He sat back, folded his arms, and closed his eyes. Stroking the bristly hairs on the end of his nose, he thought of all the other conditions associated with DIC—burns, transplant rejection, heatstroke, mismatched transfusions—but none of those was appropriate, either. That left—

  His eyes popped open. . . . Some type of infection.

  With alarm, he remembered Natalie cutting herself.

  He put on his glasses, went to the phone, and called Laboratory Medicine, where Jack Doe’s blood and tissue samples were being tested for disease.

  “Hello. . . . This is Dr. Broussard, the medical examiner. I sent a blood sample to you yesterday—John Doe number six. We know anything yet?”

  He was put on hold while the person who answered went to check on things. She came back a minute later with the news that the immunology report was on the way up to his office and that they’d found nothing. Micro and Virology had likewise found nothing, but they needed a few more days for a definitive result.

  Broussard broke the connection with his finger and stood motionless, staring at the phone.

  Kit was wrong in her belief that he loved puzzles. Rather, he hated intellectual disorder. And questions without answers were the most nettlesome example of that. What had caused Jack Doe’s organs to be filled with microscopic blood clots? What, what, what?

  When his mind was unsettled like this, everything felt out of kilter, as if somebody had moved every piece of furniture in his office a few inches from its normal position. Water from the fountain in the hall didn’t taste quite right, the airhandler noise in the hall sounded louder, and his clothes no longer seemed to fit. He ran his finger around the inside of his collar, trying to stretch the fabric. At the same time, he became aware of his belt constricting his belly and his socks squeezing his calves. By God, he needed an answer.

  But first . . .

  He entered the number of the morgue assistants’ ready room and got Guy Minoux.

 

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