“You be careful, too. That’s a long way to fall.”
“Ah can’t fall. Grandma O won’t allow it.”
Kit waved and went to her table, where Grandma O took her order before disappearing into the kitchen.
The restaurant was as empty as Kit had ever seen it. At a table in the center of the room was a prosperous-looking older couple—the man wearing a canvas hat bristling with travel pins; she in a sweatshirt advertising the Cunard cruise line.
Used to be you had to pay people to wear commercials, Kit mused. Now the wearer pays.
Her thoughts went back to the meeting in Broussard’s office. A hair from a corpse—that was bizarre. But then the whole case was bizarre. Her gaze drifted to the right and for the first time she focused on the three people sitting near the wall—a man in his thirties and two gray-haired women. Not a particularly unusual combination, except that half the man’s face was covered with a port-wine stain and the two women were identical twins both dressed in red-and-white polka-dot blouses and red slacks. Seeing this strange trio gave Kit the peculiar sensation that perhaps the two murders had not really happened at all, that she was actually asleep and the last few days had merely been a lifelike dream. Either that or there was a door open somewhere letting in the unusual.
From this unproductive little detour, she went back to thinking about Scrabble letters, numbers, and newspaper pages. She pulled a napkin from the dispenser on the table and got a pen from her purse.
KOJE 6181
For a few seconds, she stared at what she’d written. Then, elbow on the table, fist propped against her cheek, she began to doodle, first drawing a box around the cluster of letters and numbers, then making the inside corners into little triangles. She attached curly pigtails to each corner and began connecting the horizontal sides of her box with vertical lines.
“Never saw you do dat before,” Grandma O said, interrupting with Kit’s food. “You mus’ have somethin’ both-erin’ you.”
Grandma O moved around and looked at Kit’s scribbling right side up. Her face fell and her Grandma O demeanor wilted, an amazing conversion for a woman who could bend tenpenny nails with her fingers and eject abusive patrons by force.
“What’s wrong?” Kit asked.
“Nineteen eighty-one . . . dat’s when my Albert passed.”
Looking at her scrawls on the napkin, Kit saw that her doodling had divided the 6181 into 6/1/81, June first, 1981. “I’m sorry I reminded you of something so sad,” she said.
“Albert was a good man an’ Ah know he went to a good place,” Grandma O said bravely. “Person can’t go back to what was. We gotta jus’ move on. You have somethin’ to eat an’ you’ll see your way through dat problem.”
She put Kit’s food down and headed for a sailor at the bar, who was fondling the pelican.
Kit went to work on her sandwich, her eyes returning to the napkin while she chewed.
6/1/81
She felt the stirring of an idea. Farfetched? Perhaps. Perhaps not. She certainly had nothing to lose in checking it out. And it could be done on the way back to the office.
She chewed faster now, wanting to be done with lunch and on her way. Had she been in any other restaurant, she wouldn’t have bothered finishing her poor boy, which suddenly seemed enormous. But she was as intimidated by Grandma O as any of her other regulars were, so she stayed, chewed faster, and got it all down.
She was a block from the restaurant before she realized she’d left her rain hat behind. This caused her to pick up the pace.
The library was on Tulane Avenue, a few blocks from the hospital. She went directly to the Louisiana Room on the third floor, where the librarian directed her to some gray cabinets in the back, past the microfilm readers. In those cabinets were rows of small cardboard boxes containing microfilms of old copies of the Times-Picayune. She found the box containing the issue printed on 6/1/81 and took it to the readers.
She checked the instructions on the reader and threaded the film according to the diagram. Black pages flew by as she turned the crank. Finally, she got to the front page. As she scanned it intently, a small voice said, “Dear, can you read this?”
It was a birdlike old lady at the next machine. Kit leaned over and saw on the reader something that looked like the guest register for a hotel. She bent closer to the entry above the old lady’s veined finger and squinted at the faded signature. “It looks like . . . Vorheis.”
“Yes,” the old lady said. “I see that now. Thank you so much.”
Kit went back to her own search but, unlike the old lady, had no idea what she was looking for. Over the next few minutes, she encountered nothing but page after page of uninteresting old news and old ads, so that when the front page for June second rolled into view, she reversed direction, rewound the film, and put the spool back in its box. Her failure to solve the Scrabble riddle was not to be the only negative associated with her visit to the library, for when she reached down to get her purse, it was gone.
Heart thumping, she looked on the other side of the chair. Her purse was not there, either. With an inventory of her credit cards mentally rolling by like frames on the microfilm reader, she shoved her chair back and hurried to the gray cabinets, thinking she might have left it there when she was searching the drawers for the right box.
Nothing.
Concentrate. . . . When did she have it last? She’d definitely had it at Grandma O’s, because she’d taken the pen out of it to write on the napkin . . . and she had it at the cabinets, because she remembered setting it right here . . . and she also had it at the microfilm reader, because she distinctly recalled putting it on the floor next to . . . the old lady.
She rushed to the elevators. Having been so intent on reviewing the film, she had no recollection of when the old lady had left. She could be blocks away by now.
The elevator took forever to get to the ground floor and when it finally did, she ran through the lobby to the exits, one of which opened toward city hall and the other toward the Tulane-Loyola intersection.
She dashed to the Tulane-Loyola exit and went out onto the steps. No sign of her. She continued onto the sidewalk and looked to her right, down Loyola. There she was, about forty yards away, carrying a shopping bag and walking fast.
Kit started after her in a dead run, giving out an ill-advised shout. “You with the shopping bag. Stop.”
The old lady looked back and then began to run like a whippet, her long dress flipping around her thin legs as she flew over the pavement. She was fast, but Kit was faster, and the distance between them steadily closed.
The old lady ran to an occupied car waiting at the curb and began clawing at the door handle. She got it open just as Kit reached her. As the old lady dived inside, Kit grabbed at the grocery bag, which ripped in half as the car sped away, the door on the passenger side still partially open.
There was dried mud on the license plate, so there was no chance to get the number. But Kit did retrieve her purse, for it had fallen out of the bag and onto the street.
A quick survey of the contents showed that everything was there. Heart still thumping, she slipped the bag onto her shoulder and headed back toward Tulane Avenue as a misty rain began to fall.
7
Killer Claims Second Victim
Yesterday, police found the night clerk at the Chartres House hotel murdered in the hotel parking lot on Madison, where, based on the estimated time of death, he had gone around 2:00 A.M. Monday morning to move a guest’s car. The victim, Danny Racine, 20, was killed by a single knife wound in the heart, exactly as another New Orleans man was killed early Saturday morning near Jackson Square. The presence of Scrabble letters on the bodies of both men have caused authorities to label the perpetrator the Scrabble Letter Killer. There were four letters on the first victim and three on the second, leading to speculation there will be another two victims. Visitors and residents of the French Quarter are therefore urged to travel in groups or remain indoors after midni
ght. Though there are presently no firm leads to the killer’s identity, useful information has been obtained from hairs left at both murder scenes. Dr. Leo Fleming, head of the human identification laboratory in Raleigh, NC, here for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting, has been called in as a consultant. Authorities have not disclosed what they hope to learn from Dr. Fleming.
KIT THREW THE PAPER down in disgust. The Scrabble Letter Killer . . . She hadn’t heard anyone call him that. Nick Lawson was really playing this for all it was worth. At least he didn’t know what Fleming had found—not yet, anyway. But by tomorrow, who knows?
She rinsed her coffee cup in the sink and put the Pop-Tarts back in the cupboard. She wiped the kitchen table and went to the pantry for Lucky’s leash.
Ah Lucky . . . He wasn’t there. He was still at the vet’s. Surely he was well enough to come home today.
She went to the phone and called the animal hospital.
“Good morning, this is Kit Franklyn. You have my dog, Lucky. When can I pick him up?”
Instead of answering, the girl on the line asked her to hold for the vet. Kit’s heart fell and she prepared for the worst. If Lucky had died . . . This was so terrible to consider she pushed the thought from her mind and tried not to let it creep back in.
They kept her waiting a thoughtlessly long time, then she heard the vet’s voice. “Dr. Franklyn, I’m afraid Lucky . . .”
Oh no . . . He did die. Her eyes blurred.
“. . . has had a small relapse. It’s nothing to be concerned about; we just need to keep him a while longer.”
“Of course. I understand,” Kit said, her heart settling. “You’ll call the minute he can come home, won’t you? You have both my numbers?”
The vet turned her over to the girl, who correctly recited both Kit’s home and office phone numbers and also expressed optimism over Lucky’s recovery.
Reluctantly, Kit hung up and sat for a moment, pulling herself together. That little dog had certainly given her some bad moments over the last few days. Her thoughts were interrupted by the doorbell. When she opened the door, she saw a UPS driver heading back to his truck at the curb. On the porch was a package from Happy Pastimes. For a few seconds, she did not understand what this could be. Then she remembered—the Scrabble game she’d had to buy to find out the value of K and J.
Having no use for it now, she took the package inside and put it on the hall table. She looked at herself in the mirror over the table, reset one of the tortoiseshell combs that kept her long hair from her face, and inspected her lip gloss. Satisfied that she was presentable, she got her purse from the bedroom, along with the umbrella she planned to keep in the office, and left the house.
With her key still in the lock, she hesitated, the package inside reminding her that she’d never looked at actual tiles comprising the riddle sequence since Teddy had pointed out they had numbers on them as well as letters. And the riddle had yet to be solved. This caused her to go back inside, where she picked up the package and carried it to the kitchen.
Even as a child, she’d always been neat, so the brown paper around the package went directly into the wastebasket. There was, of course, no plastic wrapper around the box, the clerk having already taken that off at her request.
She removed the lid and lifted out the game board. Under it were four plastic tile holders and a pouch of tiles, whose contents she poured onto the table. Since there were many O’s and E’s, she found these quickly. Because there was only one J and one K, they took longer.
She located the J and lined up what she had so far:
OJE
Just when she was beginning to think the clerk had lost the K, she found it and placed it in sequence.
KOJE
Her eyes widened. The K was worth five points, not six, as the idiot clerk had told her. She remembered now how a customer had been riding him for taking so long on the phone. He had apparently gotten flustered and told her the wrong number.
All the ideas she’d had about the riddle swam before her. With the mix-up in value for the K, none, except for the map of Japan, had been properly checked. License plates . . . airline flights . . . No. She had evolved beyond those theories. The newspapers . . .
May first, 1981. Not June first. She’d looked at the wrong microfilm.
But was it worth going back? She recalled how she’d felt looking at the film—at loose ends, not knowing what to concentrate on. But maybe that was because it was the wrong film. If it had been the right one, the answer might have been obvious. And if it was worth doing once, it was worth doing correctly. She hurried from the kitchen, leaving the Scrabble set littering the table and forgetting her umbrella.
Thirty minutes later, she was at the microfilm reader in the library. She had not seen the old lady this time and had reported her to the library staff so they could be on the lookout, but she still sat with her purse firmly between her feet.
Black pages . . . black pages . . . page one.
The first interesting fact she noticed was that May first, 1981, had been a Friday—just like the paper that had been left with the Scrabble tiles. But back in 1981, the paper was called the Times-Picayune—The States Item.
SOVIETS SCOFF AT U.S. PLEAS ON MIDEAST . . . Well, they won’t be doing that anymore, at least not as Soviets, Kit thought, looking further.
HOUSE BEGINS DEBATE ON BUDGET . . . How unusual.
Schwegman’s had sirloin for $1.85 a pound; an irate citizen had written the editor complaining about the litter at city hall; new asphalt walks were going to keep this year’s jazz fest attendees dry; Winn Dixie was opening a new store in Algiers. DEAD JUDGE LAUDED FOR SERVICE . . . Real sensitive phrasing there.
She leaned back and gave her eyes a rest. This issue of the paper was as useless and dull as the other one she’d checked. It was tough going, but there couldn’t be too many more pages. She pushed on.
The next page was the Vivant section, which was largely devoted to coverage of a lot of kids celebrating their sixteenth birthday. Whoopee.
She cranked along to the Lifestyle section and suddenly grew much more interested. A picture at the top of the page had a hand-drawn circle around it. Drawn on the original newspaper or on the film? To find out, she lowered the film gate and slid the film out of the reader. By tilting it and holding it up to the overhead lights, she saw that the circle was drawn on the shiny side of the film.
She reloaded the film and studied the picture, which was of a small dance band consisting of three men and a woman. One man was posed with a guitar, another with his hands on the keyboard of one of those abbreviated pianos, and the third was at a set of drums. The girl, a pretty blonde, also with a guitar, was standing in front singing into a microphone.
According to the accompanying article, they were a group called the Heartbeats. All four worked at the same hospital; the drummer as a cardiology resident, the piano player as a respiratory therapist, the male guitarist as a lab tech, and the girl as an EKG tech. The article went on to describe how they’d met and how they managed their double lives.
Was this what she was meant to find? Was one of the Heartbeats the killer? Then she saw the connection . . . hearts again.
This had to be it. The killer was one of the members of this band. Probably not the girl; most likely, one of the other three.
Shouldering her bag, she went to the copy machine and made three copies of the picture and the article, then returned the film to the cabinet where she’d found it.
The copies of the newspaper photograph were not very good. Therefore, when she reached the office, she pulled out the phone book and looked up the Times-Picayune.
There were many numbers listed but none for the paper’s library, where Terry Yardley had been transferred a few months earlier from the news photo desk, so she dialed Terry’s old number and got them to transfer the call.
“Terry, this is Kit Franklyn.”
“Why, honey, I thought you married that alligator farmer and mo
ved away, it’s been so long since I’ve heard from you.”
“I know. It’s terrible how friends can live so close and still lose touch. Have I forfeited any chance of a favor?”
“You want me to take that man off your hands?”
“Actually, I was hoping you might be able to get me some prints of a photograph that appeared in an old issue of the paper.”
“Pooh. I’d rather have the man, but I’ll see what I can do about the other. What issue we talking about?”
“May first, 1981. It was a photograph of a small dance band that appeared in the Lifestyle section.”
“It’ll take a few minutes for me to see if we have the negative. Give me your number and I’ll call you right back.”
While waiting for Terry’s call, Kit reread the article accompanying the picture, her finger twirling a lock of her hair. When the call came, she snatched up the receiver.
“I’ve got the negative,” Terry said. “And Photography says they can have some prints by three o’clock.”
“Terry, you’re terrific.”
“How many prints and what size?”
“Three, and—how big can I get them and still have everything be sharp and clear?”
“I don’t think I’d go eight-by-ten. They might be a little grainy. Let’s say five-by-seven. What’s up?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“Oh good. Is there sex in it?”
“Not that I see at the moment.”
“Gossip?”
“Not really.”
“Gee, Kit, you used to be more fun. When you get here, come up to the newsroom on the third floor. I’m way in back.”
Kit had barely hung up when the phone rang again. It was Edna Gervais, at the Forensic meeting, telling her that someone had misplaced the restaurant guides and the ones on hand were going fast. Therefore, she put all other plans on hold and left for the tourist commission to get more.
BROUSSARD CLICKED THE PROJECTOR control and a slide appeared, showing him in shorts, at the top of a ladder, getting a kitten out of an oak tree in his yard. A ripple of laughter spread through the audience.
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