New Orleans Requiem

by D. J. Donaldson

  “Now, what can I do for you?” he said. “We’ve got a special on cordon bleu finches this week, or I could make you a good deal on one of those oscars.” He gestured to a tank containing large flat fish with an orange circle on the tail. “No. You look like a dog person. I got a little malamute you’re gonna love.”

  “I’m not a customer,” Kit said, obviously disappointing him. She gave him her card and got the band’s picture from her bag while he read it. “I want to talk to you about this. . . .” She handed him the picture and his expression brightened.

  “Son of a gun,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “A friend at the Times.”

  “From that old article they did on the Heartbeats, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Son of a gun.” Without taking his eyes from the picture, he said, “The year I was with the Heartbeats was the best time of my life.” He looked up, his eyes watery. “When you’re on a bandstand, it’s like . . . you’re somebody. Instead of bein’ an anonymous schmuck, you’re special. . . . People look at you and it really registers. They don’t look through you. Gene, Kyle, Phyllis . . . it was magic. Back then, the amps were covered in a fabric called Tolex. After they’d been on a while, they gave off a sweet sweaty smell like girls who’d just come from a gym class. I really miss that.”

  He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and Kit imagined him peeking through a hole drilled into the girl’s locker room.

  “Kyle Ricks said Ochs had a divisive influence on the group and that Ochs was romantically interested in Phyllis,” she said.

  “We were all in love with Phyllis. Who wouldn’t be? But I don’t remember any problem with Gene. Like I said, it was magic. If I could, I’d turn the clock back to then and stay there forever. Why are you interested in the band?”

  “There’s been a series of murders in the city and the killer has left certain clues that have led us to that old article on the band in the Times. I was hoping you might be able to tell us why.”

  “Led you to us? The Heartbeats?” He wiped his brow. “That’s freaky. Who was killed?”

  “The owner of a small jewelry shop, a clerk at the Chartres House hotel, and a waterfront security guard. I’m surprised you haven’t read about it in the paper or seen stories on the news.”

  “You work a place like this by yourself, cook your own meals, and try to keep from livin’ like a pig, it doesn’t leave time for readin’ the paper or watchin’ TV. The Heartbeats? The killer led you to the Heartbeats?”

  “Does the name Nick Lawson mean anything to you?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “Not necessarily.” She described Lawson, but Pope still didn’t know him. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but where were you this morning between two and three?”

  “Asleep, where else?”

  “Alone?”

  He turned his hands inward and gestured to himself. “You have to ask?”

  “Would you know where I can find Phyllis?”

  His faced reddened. “Not really.”

  He was lying. “I think you do. And I should remind you that there are legal penalties for obstructing a police investigation.”

  He considered this and wiped his forehead, which by now would have been better served by a sponge. “Okay, I do know where to find her. Two weeks ago, I didn’t have any idea, but then I happened to be in Shirley’s Place on Bourbon Street.” His face grew redder still. “And she came onstage. . . .”

  “As a singer?”

  He shook his head. “A dancer. And she was really good, certainly the class of that field.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  His eyes went to the front of the store as though a customer had come in. “No. In fact, I . . . I left before she was finished.”

  “Why?”

  “She has this thing she does . . . right down where the guys sit at the table that rings the stage. I didn’t like seein’ her all spread out and I didn’t want her seein’ me . . . to know I went to places like that. So I took off.”

  SINCE THERE WASN’T TIME to go to Grandma O’s for lunch and still make her one-thirty meeting with Gatlin and Broussard, Kit went into a Chinese restaurant a few doors from the pet store. The place didn’t have much decor—a few paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, a couple of pearl-inlaid panels on the wall. But there were a lot of Asians eating there, a barometer usually as reliable as truckers at an expressway café.

  She was shown to a booth by a tiny doll in red and gold. Another, even prettier, took her order, bowing timidly before withdrawing.

  What to make of the Heartbeats? Pope was a maladjusted, unhappy man to be sure and there seemed to be a dark undercurrent to the relationships among the band members, juicy stuff—if it had been a band member who had been killed.

  Her waitress returned bearing a white teapot decorated with a green dragon, from which she filled Kit’s cup with deliciously fragrant jasmine tea. Kit thanked her by tapping twice on the table with two fingers, an act of respect she’d learned from Betty Woo, a friend in graduate school. In response to this simple act, the waitress smiled for the first time and bowed more deeply than before, leaving her then to enjoy her tea.

  So far there wasn’t a shred of a relationship between the Heartbeats and the murders. The problem lay mostly with the victims—particularly number two. He was only twenty. In 1981, he would have been just a kid. What could a kid do to cause his murder so many years later? Nor was there any connection with the band and Nick Lawson.

  The waitress returned with a huge bowl of Hong Kong soup and one of those flat Chinese spoons that seems more like a table decoration than an eating utensil. After placing the soup in front of her, the girl put a small plate beside it.

  “Something—how you say . . . on house,” the girl said, gesturing to the plate. “Very good for taste. Try now.”

  Whatever was on the plate was quite pretty, strips of a material that looked like smoked glass with a lovely white curly strip in the center. She took the chopsticks the girl held out to her and unwrapped them. Expertly, she picked up a piece of the smoked glass and carried it to her lips. The taste was subtle and not readily identifiable with anything she’d previously eaten. Though not terribly impressed, she nodded and said, “Very good. Thank you. What is it?”

  The girl’s English was not up to the question, so Kit pointed with her chopsticks and repeated it. “What is this?”

  Nodding rapidly, the girl replied, “Pig ear . . . very special.”

  STILL THINKING OF PIG ears and how they were not so different from detached eyelids, Kit arrived at Broussard’s office as he was opening the door. With him were Leo Fleming and Crandall Brooks. She exchanged greetings with the visitors, then said to Broussard, “How was court?”

  “Jury seemed attentive. I think I got my points across.”

  They all followed him inside, where he went to his desk and picked up the plastic bag containing the knife left on the third victim. He held it out to Fleming. “Make us love you, Leo.”

  Everyone waited while Fleming examined the knife through the bag. In only a few seconds, he handed it back to Broussard. “Five bucks at any Walmart.”

  “Not what we’d hoped for, Leo,” Broussard said.

  There was a knock at the door and Gatlin came in. He acknowledged Kit and Fleming with a wave of the hand and looked vacantly at Brooks. Broussard introduced them and said, “Brookie’s agreed to sit in and give us his views.”

  Gatlin nodded, then put his hand to his chest and groaned. “Damn those chili dogs.” He turned to Broussard. “Got any Rolaids?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What have we got?”

  “Leo said the knife is nothin’ special. Real common.”

  “So we’re right where we started.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You gotta forgive me this impatient streak, but I’d sure like to know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “At first, I thoug
ht that last hair was from a straight-haired Caucasian,” Broussard said. “But somethin’ didn’t seem quite right. Then when I looked at the scale pattern, I realized it was not a human hair.”

  “Dog . . . cat?” Gatlin asked.

  “Bear.”

  There was a shocked silence in the room.

  “A bear?” Gatlin said finally. “This is getting crazier by the minute.”

  “Not true,” Broussard said. “For the first time, it’s beginnin’ to make sense. Most animal hairs have distinctly more medulla than cortex. In humans, it’s the reverse. That makes it easy to tell animal from human. But bears have human-type medullas. You have to look at the scale patterns to tell they’re animal.”

  “So the killer’s not your average guy,” Brooks said. “He knows hair.”

  “There’s more,” Broussard said, going to a drawer in the microscope table. He withdrew a piece of fabric and showed it to Gatlin. “This was cut from a morgue pad . . . paper on one side, plastic on the other, and in the middle—”

  “Viscose fibers?” Gatlin guessed.

  “Right. For the killer to use this material around his knife hand, he’d have to cut a piece from a bigger pad, which exposes the fiber center. I sent some samples over to the lab and they said the fibers on the first victim could have come from a similar pad.”

  “Am I followin’ this?” Fleming said. “Are you suggestin’ the killer is someone—”

  “In town for the Forensic meetin’,” Broussard said, not wanting Fleming to steal his summation.

  “Hard to believe,” Brooks said.

  “And I’m not suggestin’,” Broussard said. “I’m certain of it. Kit saw it before I did.”

  “When was that?” Kit exclaimed.

  “When we asked your opinion of why the killer left the knife, you pointed out how Leo’s name was in the paper and that it almost seemed as though the killer knew what we expected to learn from him. You also said he gave us the knife to show us it wouldn’t help—and it didn’t, at least not the way we thought it might.”

  Kit was flattered that Broussard had thrown some of the credit her way, but she also believed she didn’t deserve it since she’d been thinking of Nick Lawson when she’d made that observation. Thankfully, she’d never mentioned those suspicions to anybody. If she had, right about now, she’d probably be hearing a Babe Ruth story.

  “How many people at the meeting?” Gatlin asked, already shying from the answer.

  “About eighteen hundred,” Broussard replied.

  Gatlin’s hand went to his chest and he exhaled through ballooned cheeks. “Maybe I’ll die in my sleep tonight and not have to deal with any of it. They all at the Hyatt?”

  “Most, but we got ’em in the Holiday Inn, Le Pavilion, Comfort Inn, and the Clairmont, too,” Broussard said.

  “Eighteen hundred suspects,” Gatlin moaned. “Gotta hand it to you, Andy, when you narrow it down, you really hone in.”

  “It’s not as bad as it seems,” Brooks suggested. “You’re looking for someone familiar with anatomy and the physiology of knife wounds, someone who had access to morgue supplies, a person who knows the microscopic anatomy of hair and knows that Leo’s specialty is tool marks. If it was me, I’d concentrate on just the anthropologists and the pathologists.”

  This was exactly what Broussard was going to suggest, but he was just as happy to have it come from Brooks.

  “How many would that be?” Gatlin asked.

  “Couple hundred,” Brooks said.

  “Still a lot,” Gatlin said. “But at least they’re all in just a few hotels.” He looked at Broussard. “Can you get me the right names and where they’re staying?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’ll you do then?” Kit asked.

  “Interview every single one. . . . Find out when they got to town and where they were when each murder occurred.”

  Remembering what Bill Pope had told her, Kit said, “I expect a lot of them will say they were in bed, and if they have single rooms . . .”

  “Thanks for the optimism,” Gatlin said. “But that’s all I can do.”

  “You’re going to take their word for when they arrived in town?” Kit asked.

  “I’ll also check the hotel records.”

  “Suppose they arrived a few days early and registered at a different hotel under an assumed name?”

  “I can’t deal with that.”

  “Sure you can. You could call the home office of every anthropologist and every pathologist here and ask when they left.”

  “Let’s take that a step further,” Gatlin said. “Suppose they didn’t register at all. Suppose they’re in town and have never shown up at the meeting.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “All good detective work is based on the KISS principle— ‘Keep it simple, stupid.’ I don’t mean you, Doc. I mean me . . . us. . . . You let yourself get bogged down in minutiae and the big things’ll get away from you. Andy, you got any ideas on the best way to set up the interviews?”

  “After we get the names, I’d make up a schedule and leave a message for each person at their hotel, givin’ the time and place for the interview and a phone number they could call if they need to change times.”

  Gatlin nodded. “Hope we got some detectives with nothing to do, ’cause I’m gonna need help.”

  “If you want to lighten your load, you could probably eliminate women,” Kit said.

  “I don’t imagine that’ll lighten it much,” Gatlin replied.

  “The interviews are certainly necessary,” Broussard said. “But we’d help ourselves a lot if we could figure out what the Scrabble tiles mean. The hairs meant something, and so do the tiles. There’s no doubt about it. Solve the riddle of the tiles and we’ll find the killer’s identity.”

  Since her meeting with Ricks and Pope had revealed nothing, Kit had considered not mentioning the Heartbeats. But seeing that no one else had any ideas about the riddle, she decided to risk a Babe Ruth anecdote and get the idea on the table.

  “I may have something to contribute on the riddle,” she said, going to the chalkboard. She picked up a stub of chalk and wrote:

  KOJE 5181

  “Scrabble tiles don’t have just letters on them. They also have numbers indicating the point value of the letter. The number five-one-eight-one can be divided into a date, 5-1-81.”

  Sensing this was going to require a little time, the four men had taken up comfortable positions, Gatlin and Broussard with their rumps against the desk, Fleming sitting on the microscope table, Brooks sitting in the microscope chair, which he’d turned backward. She was heartened to see that all of them were listening receptively.

  “It occurred to me there might be a connection between this date and the fact that a different section of last Friday’s paper was left on each body. So I went to the library and looked up the issue of the Times for 5-1-81. I found a picture and a story there about four local hospital workers who in their spare time performed together as a band called the Heartbeats.”

  “And the victims were all killed by injury to the heart,” Brooks said.

  “That’s interesting, but not what attracted me to the article. Someone had circled the picture with a grease pencil on the microfilm. I copied the article and also got some prints of the picture from a friend at the paper.” She went to her bag, which lay on Broussard’s vinyl sofa, took out a copy of the article, and unfolded it. “Should I read it aloud?”

  Gatlin nodded, his lined face expressionless.

  After reading the article, she produced one of the prints and handed it to Gatlin. “I’ve talked to the piano player and the guy on guitar. . . .” To this point, she’d presented her story with an energy suggesting she’d really stumbled onto something. Now having reached the end, she was reminded that her investment in this lead had yet to pay off. “But I didn’t get much. The piano player is still working as a respiratory therapist and he has an excellent alibi for the time of the third murd
er. The guitar player owns a pet shop across the river. He’s got the same alibi most of the anthropologists and pathologists are going to have—he was in bed, alone. So far, that’s it.”

  “What about the other two in the picture?” Broussard said.

  “The drummer moved away years ago. I don’t know where, West Coast maybe. The girl is still in town, but I haven’t talked to her yet.”

  Gatlin shook his head. “Sounds like a wrong turn to me. Andy’s got a convincing story that it’s somebody at the Forensic meeting. What does this band—” he gestured at the picture, which by now had made it to Brooks “—have to do with the meeting?”

  “I don’t know. But, like I said, there are still two members I haven’t spoken to. One I haven’t located, but I know how to find the other. Possibly she’ll tell me something.”

  Gatlin’s heartburn bubbled again. When it subsided, he said, “Doesn’t seem productive to me, but it’s your time.”

  “Sounds like one of our colleagues is takin’ you all on a real sleigh ride,” Fleming said to Broussard.

  “We don’t have snow down here,” Broussard said.

  “From what I’ve heard, I’m not so sure about that,” Fleming replied.

  “Leo, I just thought of somethin’,” Broussard said. “You came in early.”

  “Arrived Saturday, if you’ll remember, after you found the first body. Sorry.”

  “Too bad,” Broussard said, looking disappointed.

  13

  Gatlin had been so negative when Kit had told her story that she didn’t offer him the article or the picture. Broussard had been kinder, or at least it seemed that way. So she left them with him. Returning to her office, she looked up the number of Shirley’s Place. The phone rang a long time before a voice that sounded as though it ran on a battery answered.