New Orleans Requiem

by D. J. Donaldson

  The letters were held together by a strip of tape on the front and one on the back. The hair was caught in the front strip angling across all four letters. Using a blunt pair of forceps to keep the letters from moving, he picked at the right edge of the tape with his best pair of watchmaker’s forceps until he could get a decent grip. Carefully, he peeled the tape back. When the hair was fully exposed, he plucked it from the tape and put it in the drop of Protex. Since the tape was now almost free of the letters, he removed it completely and tacked it lightly onto the bottom of the dish. After marking the dish so the lab could tell what the tape’s orientation had been in relation to the letters, he put a coverslip on the slide bearing the hair and put the slide on the stage of his compound microscope.

  With the prize safely ready for study, he paused, relishing once again the way he’d found it right under Gatlin’s nose. The only thing that kept this from being an entirely satisfactory moment was the fact it came with a body, now cooling in the morgue frig. From the body, Broussard had learned much about the killer and hopefully he would soon know more.

  He centered the hair in the light path of the scope and looked through the eyepieces. The first feature he saw was the pear-shaped root indicating this was not a forcibly extracted hair but a shed one, as it should have been had it fallen onto the tape from the killer’s head as he lined up the letters before taping them together. Then . . . Oh, yes, this was definitely going to hurt him.

  WHEN HE WOULD LEAVE to go home early Monday morning, Teddy would depart without breakfast, planning to stop at a café he liked an hour out of New Orleans. Coming in, he always waited so he and Kit could have breakfast together, usually at a little place on St. Charles that made omelets lighter than seemed possible. After leaving the vet, they went to the restaurant as usual, but neither had much of an appetite. They then returned to Kit’s home and tried to figure out which of the neighbors might have poisoned Lucky.

  Based on proximity, the three most likely choices seemed to be the neighbors on each side or the one directly in back. Any of them would have found it an easy matter to lob a piece of doctored meat over the fence. Of the three, Kit suspected old Mrs. Bergeron, the tight-lipped widow on her left, who, according to the man across the street, once kept a football a local kid had kicked into her yard, later giving it to her grandson for his birthday. Bergeron, of course, said she knew nothing about the poisoning. Kit found her expression of sympathy forced and unconvincing.

  They then tried to clean the footstool Lucky had soiled, deciding after many attempts that it would have to be recovered. This led to a search for fabric and delivery of the stool to the upholsterer. But it was a traffic-halting fender bender between a new Mercedes and an ancient truck full of galvanized fencing at the Tulane-Loyola intersection that made Kit late to her meeting. When she arrived, she found Broussard behind his desk and Gatlin pacing the floor.

  She muttered an apology and quickly sat on Broussard’s green vinyl sofa next to a pile of medical journals that threatened to topple onto her.

  Gatlin jerked his chin at Broussard. “You first.”

  Broussard leaned back in his chair and folded his small hands over his belly. “We’re dealin’ with a pro. The victim had a minor bruise on the back of his head that was inflicted very near the time of death. But he was killed by a solitary knife thrust that went under the sternum, through the diaphragm, and amputated the tip of the right ventricle. This is not an easy maneuver. Done correctly, there’s very little external bleedin’. It mostly ends up in the pericardium—the sac around the heart.”

  “How long for someone to die with a wound like that?” Gatlin asked.

  “Couple of seconds for blood pressure to drop to zero, another seven for him to gray out and go down.”

  “Long enough to yell,” Gatlin said. “Or grab at the killer.”

  “If he realized what was happenin’. Most likely, he didn’t— ’specially if he never saw the knife, which could have been hidden under a newspaper or a map.”

  “So he just stood there?”

  Broussard nodded.

  “How’s this for a scenario?” Gatlin said, beginning to pace again. “Somebody makes off with the contents of the locker and leaves the lid open; victim comes by, sees the open lid, and goes over for a look; killer approaches, says something to make the victim face him; the knife goes in, killer steps back, and the victim begins to sag; killer pushes him backward and he falls into the locker, making that bruise you found on his head; killer adjusts the body so all of it fits in the locker, performs his little eyelid operation, then puts the newspaper and letters on the victim’s chest.”

  “Sounds all right,” Broussard said.

  “But it’d be dark in the locker and he’d need light to cut. Think he had help?”

  Broussard shook his head. “There are ways one man could do that and illuminate his field at the same time.”

  Kit wanted Gatlin to ask Broussard for an example, but instead, he said, “You learn anything from that hair?”

  “A little. It came from a straight-haired Caucasian who’s either prematurely gray or over forty. He uses a black dye to hide the gray and had a razor cut between one and two weeks ago.”

  “You get his phone number?”

  “Only the first three digits.”

  “You said, ‘he.’ That come from the hair or we still guessing about that?”

  Kit bristled at the word guess. It wasn’t a guess. It was practically a certainty.

  “Still guessin’,” Broussard said.

  “Can’t we do better?”

  “Cells associated with the hair are too dried out to look for Barr bodies.”

  “DNA profiling?”

  “Sex probes for such a small amount of material are just bein’ developed, and those labs don’t do criminal cases yet.”

  “Jesus, you aren’t much help.”

  Gatlin made some notes in his little black book, then returned it to the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “You run the scene details through the FBI Violent Criminal Apprehension Program?” Broussard asked.

  “Yeah. Got zilch . . . no match nowhere. He’s new and fresh and totally our problem. Let’s talk about those letters.” He went to the small blackboard next to the door and wrote KOJE on it with red chalk. “Anybody got any ideas?”

  He looked at Kit, who had not given the letters a moment’s thought since she’d arrived home. Thankfully, Gatlin’s eyes left her and moved to Broussard. “Andy . . .”

  “If you rearrange ’em, they spell joke.”

  Gatlin looked at the letters to see if he was right. “You saying they don’t mean anything? It’s a hoax?”

  Broussard shrugged. “Too soon to tell.”

  Gatlin proceeded to list the four letters in all possible combinations.

  OKJEKOJEJOKEEOKJ

  OKEJKOEJJOEKEOJK

  OJKEKJOEJKOEEKOJ

  OJEKKJEOJKEOEKJO

  OEKJKEOJJEOKEJOK

  OEJKKEJOJEKOEJKO

  He stepped back and surveyed what he’d done. “Well, joke is the only word I recognize. Maybe you’re right and this is a waste of time.”

  While Gatlin had been writing, Broussard had unlaced his fingers and folded his arms over his chest, the index finger of his left hand stroking the bristly hairs on the end of his nose, a posture that usually preceded a perceptive comment. “I don’t think he wants the letters rearranged,” he said abruptly. “That’s why they were taped together and not given to us loose.”

  This was such an obviously correct analysis that Kit was upset at herself for missing it. But, of course, she had Lucky on her mind.

  “Maybe he taped them together just to make sure we found all of them,” Gatlin suggested.

  Broussard shook his head.

  “Okay,” Gatlin said. “Then what do they mean?”

  “There’s only so much a man can do without breakfast.”

  “Well, if you get any bright ideas after you’ve eaten, be sur
e and call me. Can I have the letters for the lab?”

  Broussard handed two small plastic bags across the desk, one containing the letters, the other, the dish with the tape he’d removed and a note explaining what he’d done.

  “And his clothes?”

  “Over there.” Broussard gestured to a large brown paper bag on some file cabinets.

  While Gatlin signed a chain-of-evidence form, Broussard said, “You’re not gonna leave without tellin’ us more about what you been doin’, are you?”

  “The usual,” Gatlin replied. “Talking to the deaf, the dumb, and the blind. Can you believe that with all those apartments facing the square not one person saw or heard anything?”

  “It was probably pretty early in the mornin’ when it happened,” Broussard said.

  “Which reminds me, we got a reasonably good fix on the time of death. It was sometime after one A.M.”

  “How’d you come up with that?”

  “We caught the guy who stole the stuff from the locker. Walked right into a pawnshop and tried to sell it in front of two uniforms who’d just asked the owner to get the name of anybody trying to unload art stuff.”

  “I guess he didn’t use black hair dye,” Broussard said.

  “It was Danny Delgado. You can tell it’s spring or close to it when Danny hits town. He’s sorta like a human version of the Capistrano swallows . . . with a bad liver. And as for hair, I don’t think he even has eyebrows. He said he took the stuff around one-fifteen and there was no body in there then.”

  “Did the victim have a family?” Kit asked.

  Gatlin sparked to her question with unusual interest. “No kids, no wife, but he did have a male roomie, if you know what I mean. They had a little shop in the Jax building where they sold jewelry made of polished stones and fossils. Last night, they had an argument about some guy the victim was getting too chummy with and the victim took a walk. That suggest anything to you?”

  “You don’t think the roomie did it?”

  “No defensive wounds . . . could have been someone he knew.”

  “What about the letters?”

  “Who knows? Something that has significance only to the victim and his lover. They don’t spell anything except joke and Andy doesn’t think we should rearrange them to spell that. And the guy has no alibi.”

  “Homosexual jealousy murders usually involve overkill,” Kit said. “This was done dispassionately.”

  “You said, ‘usually’ . . . that leaves me some room, Doc. And if you want to talk probability, how about the fact that two-thirds of all homicides are committed by acquaintances of the victim. Husband’s murdered, look at the wife; wife’s killed, check out hubby; boyfriend, girlfriend, gay lover, that’s fertile ground, Doc.”

  “What color’s his roommate’s hair?” Kit asked.

  Gatlin tilted his head and looked down his nose at her. “Black.”

  “Coincidence,” Kit said. “Get some samples. I’ll bet they don’t match.”

  Kit left the meeting shaking her head. Gatlin’s idea that it was the victim’s lover was so wrong. Why couldn’t he see it? Well, he’d see it soon enough, for there were going to be more . . . unless they could figure out what those letters meant.

  On the way home, she stopped at Gambini’s deli and had Mr. Gambini make up two box lunches of fried chicken. After checking with the vet at the animal hospital and learning that Lucky was doing fine, she and Teddy took their lunches to the park across from Tulane and Loyola and spread a blanket on the ground near the mansions that lined the sidewalk connecting St. Charles and Magazine. Apart from the Frisbees that students occasionally flicked their way and a dog that tried to snatch a drumstick out of Teddy’s hand, lunch was uneventful. It was also short on conversation, Kit’s mind being heavily occupied with thoughts of Lucky and the murder that morning. Knowing nothing of the murder, Teddy assumed the silence was all because of Lucky.

  After lunch, while they were on their way to Old River Road for a drive, Kit suddenly pointed at the entrance to a small shopping center. “I want to go in there.”

  Accustomed to moving quickly to avoid being snagged by one of his alligators, Teddy yanked the steering wheel to the right, barely missing a gray BMW leaving the parking lot.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked.

  “Over there.” Kit pointed to some shops on the right and Teddy cruised that way.

  “Park beside that van.”

  Knowing that she’d tell him what was up only when she was ready, Teddy followed instructions.

  “Be right back.”

  She slipped from the truck and Teddy watched her cross the asphalt, enjoying the way she moved, appreciating the fact she could have any man she wanted. He had been waiting all week to see those liquid brown eyes and he wished now that he could think of a way to ease the worry in them. He longed to see the skin crinkle across the light spray of freckles on the bridge of her nose when she smiled. Puzzled, he saw her go into a toy store. She reappeared a few minutes later with a package under her arm.

  Unable to wait any longer for an explanation, he said, “What’s that?” as she got in.

  “The key to a murder that took place early this morning in the Quarter.”

  Teddy gave her a lingering look of surprise.

  “Just before you arrived this morning, I got back from a murder scene. The police found a body in an artist’s locker on Jackson Square. The corpse had four Scrabble letters on its chest, KOJE, held together with transparent tape. We think it’s some kind of message, but we don’t know what. I thought if we played the game, it might help me figure it out? Do you mind?”

  “Sounds like we have to play.” He pulled from the lot, made a left turn at the first intersection, and headed for home.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting at Kit’s kitchen table with the Scrabble board open in front of them, KOJE arranged horizontally in the center four squares for inspiration. From across the table, Kit saw Teddy give himself thirty points.

  “What’s that for?”

  “KOJE,” Teddy said. “Fifteen points, plus double for the pink square. It was my idea to put it out there, so I should get the points.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a lot of difference, because this is strip Scrabble.”

  “I never heard of that.”

  “Oh, it’s a Cajun tradition. First game on a new board has to be strip Scrabble.”

  “And just how is this played?”

  “Whenever one player accumulates fifty points, the other one has to take something off.”

  “So that’s why you were so agreeable when I asked you to play.”

  “No,” Teddy said earnestly. “I hate the idea, but what can I do? I’m Cajun and it is a tradition. My relatives ever hear I played straight Scrabble on a new board, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  Not wishing to ruin Teddy’s weekend, Kit tried to ignore her somber mood and play along. “Well . . . since it’s a tradition . . .” She began lining letters up vertically under the J: O-N-Q-U-I-L-S, ending on a red triple-word square. “That’ll be one hundred and twenty-five points and your shirt and pants,” she said brightly.

  “How do you figure that?” Teddy complained. “Twenty-four times three is only seventy-two.”

  “My U is on a double-word square and I get fifty points for using all seven tiles.”

  “You’re supposed to start with my shoes.”

  “I don’t believe in conventional warfare.”

  Teddy’s hands went to the buttons on his shirt. “Franklyn, you’re ruthless.”

  Later, with Teddy spelling words like gator (six points), snap (six points), and flies (eight points), and Kit spelling things like quixotic (double word, fifty-two points and another fifty for using all her tiles again), Teddy was soon sitting there wearing not much more than a little-boy look of expectation. To even things out, Kit began to hold back. The game ended as they knew it would—in Kit’s bed, where d
espite her good intentions, she was not herself.

  Afterward, as she lay contemplating the ceiling, Teddy bunched his pillow under his head and watched her without speaking. Eventually, he said, “If I could, I’d help.”

  She turned toward him and stroked his hair lightly above his ear. “You are helping. It’s just that . . . All the excitement with Lucky . . . and that murder. I feel like I should be doing something to catch the killer.”

  “You may have done more than you think. The Scrabble game we played has reminded you of the fine points. Give it time to settle in. You might be surprised at what pops out when you’re not dwelling on it.”

  “Thanks.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  THAT NIGHT, PLANNING TO stay only in well-lighted areas and let no stranger approach them, Kit and Teddy went to the French Quarter, intending to have dinner at Tortorici’s. But they were both disappointed and surprised—disappointed at finding the restaurant closed for repairs, surprised at someone calling Kit’s name.

  At first, their view was blocked by the milling crowd on Royal. Then the throng parted briefly and they saw Broussard standing on the opposite street corner with another man. The two came toward them.

  “Looks like we all had the same idea,” Broussard said.

  “What’s that?” Kit replied.

  “Italian food. Hello, Teddy. How’re the gators?”

  “Haven’t had one complain in years.”

  Broussard chuckled. “You two, this is Leo Fleming. Leo heads up the human identification laboratory in Raleigh and teaches forensic anthropology at Duke. No relation to Doyle Fleming in the crime lab.”

  Leo Fleming was a big, raw-boned man with a loopy smile and a chapped outdoorsy look about him that made Kit think he’d willingly trade his ill-fitting gray suit for a checkered wool shirt and Lands’ End twills.

  “Leo’s helpin’ with a workshop at the Forensic meetin’ and he came down a little early so we could go over some things on a book chapter we’re doin’ together. He’ll also be givin’ a paper on his specialty later in the week. Leo, Kit Franklyn, my suicide investigator and profiler for the NOPD. This fine fellow with her is Teddy LaBiche. Teddy owns an alligator farm ’bout a hundred miles west of here.”