New Orleans Requiem

by D. J. Donaldson

  A quick look sent a chill down his spine. The hairs . . . the knife . . . the fibers in the bloodstains on the first victim’s shirt . . . He knew now where to find the killer.

  11

  Kit woke forty-five minutes later than usual, having no memory of turning off the alarm and going back to sleep. Today, the Forensic meetings would shift into high gear with a three-hour opening session on the Tawana Brawley case. She was particularly interested in the psychiatry portion of the presentation, which promised to provide some insights into the mind of pseudovictims. She would, of course, not be there, having more important things to do. But first, she needed to check on Lucky.

  Her call to the animal hospital brought good news. Lucky could probably come home on Friday. She was so pleased, she gave the vet’s bill barely a thought.

  The clouds of the previous night had moved on without delivering rain. Though bright, the sun was so cool, it almost seemed a different celestial body than the one that would be cracking windshields of closed cars and baking the life out of the city in a few months.

  Upon reaching her office, Kit skimmed the article on the Heartbeats, refreshing her memory about who was who in the picture. The drummer’s name was Gene Ochs. He had dark deep-set eyes and hollow cheeks that made him look every bit like an overworked cardiology resident, which, except for the overworked part, the article said he was. Apparently, the life of a lab tech was easier, for Bill Pope, the guy on guitar, had clearly been expending fewer calories than he’d been taking in. The article identified the keyboardist as Kyle Ricks. Ricks looked older than the others, probably because his hair was gone on top. Like many men with his condition, Ricks wore his hair long on the sides and back, making an unfortunate turn of nature distinctly worse. By day, Phyllis Merry-man, was an EKG technician. By night, she was the singer for the Heartbeats. In both jobs, she was blond and beautiful.

  Where to begin? So much time had passed.

  She took out the phone book and began a search for the four names. This yielded a number for only one of the four, which, if it actually belonged to the correct Kyle Ricks, would be more than she’d expected. She tried the number and got no answer.

  Her obvious next move, a call to the personnel office of the hospital where the Heartbeats all had worked in 1981, produced the news that none of the four were current employees, nor did the hospital have any records of what had become of them. Thinking that former colleagues of the four who were still at the hospital might have information on them, she asked for likely names but was told it would take several days to generate such a list. Personnel suggested they put a note in the hospital newsletter asking anyone with pertinent information to give her a call. This, of course, was worthless given the time constraints the killer had imposed. Nor could she wait for that list of names. A call to the departments where each of the Heartbeats worked turned out to be equally useless, which left her only one other avenue—to call the personnel offices of every general hospital in the city.

  Heating . . . Hobby . . . Horses . . . Hospitals. A look at the list made her groan aloud, for the city had a great many hospitals. Since the only way to get through the list was to start, she punched in the number for Bayou Oaks.

  Thirty-six calls later, her once-slender hopes had become paper-thin. Three dozen calls without results. But with the next call, her luck improved. Kyle Ricks, the keyboard player and the one name she’d found in the phone book, was working as a respiratory therapist at St. Francis. From the shift supervisor of his department, she discovered Ricks was at that moment on the cardiac ICU ward but could be freed to come to the phone if she wished. Since she wanted to gauge Ricks’s facial expressions while they spoke, she declined this offer and arranged instead to interview him in person.

  St. Francis Hospital consisted of a central tower and two large wings of almost equal height. It sat impressively at the rear of a huge lawn that was now a uniform shade of brown but which in summer was surely a perfect carpet of green. As Kit walked past the drive to the emergency room, she heard a noise above and to her right. Looking up, she saw the silhouette of a helicopter. It descended with surprising speed, swung over the lawn, and dropped neatly onto the cement pad twenty yards from the hospital’s main entrance, the wind from its blades blowing bits of dried grass into her face and ravaging her hair.

  Squinting, she moved quickly toward the entrance and went inside, pausing a moment to watch the occupants of the helicopter hand a prone figure to a pair of gurney jockeys that had come from the emergency room. A messed hairdo and something in her eye seemed a fair price for the good the helicopter was doing.

  Putting her hair and her watering eye ahead of her need to see Ricks, she passed by the information booth and went down the hall until she found a ladies’ room, where she washed the grit from her cornea with tap water held in her palm. Since she rarely used eye makeup and had no need for foundation, this act did not require any cosmetic repairs. She ran a brush through her hair a few times, reset the combs that kept it from her face, and was then ready to get on with the reason she’d come.

  From the length of time it took the woman at the information island to locate Respiratory Therapy on her map, Kit concluded it was not a popular destination of hospital visitors. The first leg of the trip took her past the gift shop and the coffee shop, the latter smelling strongly of buttered popcorn. Like the main hall that ran through the heart of the hospital, the tributary she was in was lined with green marble. It seemed a cheery place in which to be sick, as long as you had plenty of insurance.

  The elevators at the end of the hall took her to quite a different world, one of freshly remodeled functional simplicity, which probably rarely saw anyone but hospital employees. There was no directory to guide her, so she simply wandered off to her left, looking for help.

  At a door marked MEDIA SERVICES, she found a chubby young man sitting at a desk whose nameplate said he was Sandra Ferguson.

  “Respiratory therapy?”

  “Straight ahead, through the doors at the end of the corridor.”

  This took her deep into the hospital’s netherworld; to ancient terrazzo floors and venerable yellow tiled walls, a place not unlike the floor in Charity Hospital where she and Broussard had their offices.

  The area seemed quite deserted. On her left was a tiny room full of green oxygen bottles, resembling large Vienna sausages, stacked in shopping carts. To her right was a much larger room littered with electronic equipment fitted with ribbed blue hoses—and something with a head of blond hair. . . .

  “That’s Resusci Annie,” a voice said.

  She looked down the hall and saw a woman dressed in white coming toward her. She had a big body but thin little legs that looked like pipe cleaners stuck into her thick-soled shoes.

  “Resusci Annie,” she said again in response to Kit’s puzzled expression. She pointed into the equipment room. “Our clinical simulator.”

  Now Kit saw what she meant. The blond hair was on the head of half a female torso that had a ribbed blue hose coming from its mouth.

  “Better Annie than a real person for some of these green kids they send me,” the woman said. “You ever been intubated?”

  “It’s something I try to avoid,” Kit said.

  The woman smiled. “Good one. I’ll have to remember that . . . ‘something I try to avoid.’ Ha.”

  “I’m Kit Franklyn . . . here to see Kyle Ricks. Was it you I spoke to?”

  “Yes. I’ll get him for you and cover his floor while you talk. You can wait down here. . . .” She led Kit to a bleak room containing an old dinette table, a microwave, a midget frig, and a bank of cubbyholes with lockable wooden doors. Then she was gone.

  Looking for something to occupy her mind while she waited, Kit went over to a sepia-tinted photograph hanging on the wall. It was of a long row of what appeared to be nurses, each standing slightly turned to the side. They were of varying heights, but their skirt hems were all exactly the same distance from the ground, forming a
line so sharp and precise, they looked as though they might suddenly loop their hands behind one another and start doing high kicks.

  From there, she wandered to the grimy window, where through the bars fixed on the outside, she watched two pigeons quarreling on the roof of the adjacent building. When a third pigeon chased the other two away, she moved on, picking up a worn magazine from one of the dinette chairs.

  Red letters beside a downy-cheeked nymphet on the cover asked, “Is It Love? Ten Questions to Help You Know if He’s Mr. Right.” She opened the pages and checked the table of contents for the quiz.

  Teddy did fine on questions one through five, but number six asked, “Does his view regarding the nature of your relationship five years down the road agree with yours?”

  Five years? She hadn’t been able to get Teddy to talk about this at all. She’d tried once and he’d gotten out of bed, thrown on his clothes, and driven back to Bayou Coteau in the middle of the night. Some discussion. She’d let it pass because she wasn’t sure herself what she wanted to be when she grew up—forever single, married, a mother, childless—tough decisions. And she hadn’t been—wasn’t even now—ready to tackle them. But she could feel within her the ponderously slow turning of gears, the stirring of machinery that before too much longer would produce a decision. Soon, Teddy would have to choose. And so would she. Then she would find out what they had. Until then, it remained possible that theirs was what the article called “a relationship of convenience,” in which she was deluding herself regarding her own depth of feeling to validate the fact they were sleeping together.

  “Do we know each other?” a voice said from the doorway.

  Kit looked up and saw a man that did not seem to be the Kyle Ricks in her picture. Irritated at wasting so much time, she put down the magazine and started to apologize for also wasting his, then realized this was the Ricks she wanted— his face fuller and with a complete head of hair. “Mr. Ricks, I’m—”

  “It’s Kyle. Mr. Ricks is my father.”

  “Kyle, I’m Kit Franklyn. I’m investigating a series of murders we’ve had in the city over the last week.”

  Ricks crossed the room and took the card she offered but didn’t look at it.

  “The killer has left certain clues that led us to this . . .” She reached into her bag and produced one of the prints she’d gotten from Terry Yardley. Ricks accepted it with significantly more interest than he had her card.

  “Boy, this brings back memories,” he said. “Most of ’em bad. Gene Ochs, M.D. . . . minor deity. No, that’s wrong. In Ochs’s case, it’s major deity. Doctors are not only a pain in the ass in the hospital but outside it, as well. Nobody ever had a decent idea but Ochs. And did he have the hots for Phyllis. . . .” He held the picture so Kit could see. “That’s Ochs and that’s Phyllis . . . but she wasn’t interested. Made for a lot of tension.” He looked at the picture again and shook his head. “God, I hate this picture of me.”

  Kit marveled at Ricks’s level of self-absorption. She’d told him people were being murdered and he was more interested in his appearance in an old photograph.

  “Twenty-six years old and I look fifty. Don’t know why I put up with it as long as I did. You ever look at old pictures of yourself and wonder what possessed you to buy that dress or those shoes? Of course back then, I don’t think they had the technology they do now.” He lowered the picture and bent his head. “Go ahead . . . feel it. You can’t tell it from the real thing, so help me you can’t. Go on. . . .” Ricks grabbed Kit’s hand and put it in his hair. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  She withdrew her hand, resisting the impulse to wipe it on her slacks. Ricks looked at her with a happy twinkle in his eyes. “Want to know how it’s done?”

  “Mr. Ricks . . . Kyle . . . it’s very becoming, but I’m here to talk about those murders.”

  “Oh right. Sorry, sorry, sorry. What can I do to help?” Finally, her opening statement sank in. “You said some clues the killer left led you to this picture?”

  “And the accompanying article in the paper. Do you have any idea what the connection might be?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Do you know a man named Nick Lawson?”

  Ricks shook his head.

  Thinking he might know Lawson by a different name, she added, “Well-built fellow, tanned, green eyes, blond hair he wears in a ponytail.”

  Ricks continued shaking his head.

  “Would you mind telling me where you were this morning between two and three o’clock?”

  Ricks shrugged. “Here at the hospital, in cardiac ICU, just where I was a few minutes ago.” The implication of her question got through and he drew a sharp breath. “You don’t think I’m . . .”

  “Of course not,” Kit said, “but I had to ask. I’d like to speak to the other people in the picture, but I’m having trouble finding them.”

  “Well, Ochs, thank God, moved away. I think he’s in California, or Washington, or maybe Mount Olympus. Don’t remember where. Phyllis had a drug problem and got sacked from the hospital. I don’t know what happened to her after that. Bill Pope went into a real tailspin when the band broke up. Begged us to stay together . . . cried in front of us . . . funny guy.”

  “He still in town?”

  “He’s got a pet shop across the river in the Three Oaks shopping center. Calls it Paw and Fin.”

  “Kyle . . .” A slim redhead wearing a green dress that reminded Kit of theater curtains stood in the doorway. “Leona called from cardiac ICU. Easton wants a stat IPPB with a half cc of albuterol in two cc of saline for the patient in four-ohtwo. You’re to get blood gases in thirty minutes and call him.”

  Ricks looked at Kit. “Leona’s real good about covering for you long as nobody needs anything. I gotta go. You think of any more questions, call me.”

  The redhead stepped aside to let Ricks pass. “Sorry about the interruption,” she said to Kit.

  Moving closer and lowering her voice so Ricks couldn’t hear, Kit said, “Was Kyle on duty this morning between two and three o’clock?”

  “He was scheduled.”

  “Could anyone have covered for him?”

  “For a few minutes, like Leona’s doing now.”

  “I mean like work part of his shift without telling you.”

  “No. If he got sick or something, the supervisor would cover for him until we could get someone else in. Everybody on each shift has distinct obligations, procedures that have to be performed. And we need to know who did them. We keep close track of our people.”

  THE ELEVATOR HAD BEEN empty coming up. When the door opened to take Kit down, she encountered an old man and woman. He was in coveralls, a denim shirt, and a John Deere cap. She was in a loose flowered dress. They moved to one side to let her on, then the old man leaned out and looked up and down the hall, holding the door open with one weathered hand. Finally, he turned to Kit and said, “This here the floor where they clean out your plumbing?”

  Kit showed the old couple the way to the information island, then went to her car, mulling over her interview with Ricks. The only part of the entire experience that had any relationship to the three murders was Ricks’s pride in his new hair.

  A hair left at each scene . . . Ricks has new hair. It was a weak connection indeed, and since Ricks had a firm alibi for the last murder, surely nothing but a coincidence.

  12

  There were kittens in the window of Paw and Fin, a half dozen romping, fuzzy, lovable little creatures that made Kit forget for a moment she was on the trail of a killer. One, a dusky mite so tiny it would fit in Kit’s hand, came to the window and tried to touch her with its paw. She wondered briefly how Lucky and the kitten would get along, then forced herself to turn away, thinking Ralph Nader or somebody ought to require that kitten displays have warnings on them.

  Inside the shop, it was the puppies that got to her—clear-eyed, intelligent, full of pep, and in such tiny cages. . . . She thought of Lucky and wondered if the vet
was keeping him like that. She should have asked to see him even though he couldn’t come home.

  Thankfully, the birds were not as persuasive as the kittens and the puppies, except maybe for the peach-faced love-birds, which sat wing-to-wing and took turns nibbling one another’s necks. The dimly lighted back room of the shop was walled with fish tanks. Seeing no evidence of a clerk or a storeroom where one might be hiding, she walked toward the fish.

  There she found a large back bent over a long glass tank with no water in it. “Hi, I’m looking for Bill Pope.”

  The fellow turned and looked over his shoulder. “Be with you in a minute. He’s about to take it.”

  A brief glance was enough for Kit to see that she’d found her man. Curious as to what he was doing, she moved to the end of the tank and looked inside, where a large black snake watched a ball of raw hamburger bounce past its nose. The hamburger was being played like a puppet, a thin thread running from Pope’s hand to a loop tied around the meat.

  “The secret is to make it look like it’s alive,” Pope said, hopping the meat past the snake’s nose, “and to make sure it’s heated to mammalian body temperature.”

  Suddenly, the snake’s head darted forward and it seized the meat in its mouth, its body looping forward in an attempt to throw coils around the catch. Pope reached toward the snake’s mouth with a pair of scissors and snipped the thread. “He’ll digest the thread along with the meat,” he said, putting a wire top on the tank. “Won’t hurt him.”

  Pope’s forehead was sweating profusely and there were wet rings under his arms. “Used to feed them mice, but I never liked that, too cruel. Then I got this hamburger idea.”

  He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and returned the cloth to his back pocket. He was no more overweight than Broussard, but Kit felt he was much bigger, possibly because she no longer saw a fat man when she looked at Broussard, but saw only a good friend. Not knowing Pope at all, his weight could not be overlooked. Then, too, Broussard’s shirts fit and Pope’s were too small, the fabric around each button stretched so tightly, he looked segmented, like an insect.