by DJ Donaldson
“Dueling Banjos”—with a guitar and a harmonica. The old man was always comin’ up with weird shit like that, Deke thought.
“C’mon son, you’re missin’ your cue,” the old man said.
Deke took his fingers off the strings. “Who the hell we doin’ this for?” He gestured to the nearly empty street. “Ain’t hardly nobody out. And with this drizzle, ain’t gonna be, neither.” He picked up the old man’s greasy hat and looked inside. “Whoa, can you stand the prosperity. There’s all a two dollars and thirty cents in here.”
“Once you start a piece son, you gotta finish it,” the old man said. “It don’t matter if anybody’s around or not. You gotta finish it.” He moved around in front of Deke and took him by the arm. “You finish it because you started it. When music is all you got, you gotta respect it. A man that don’t respect his work is a bum.” He looked up and swept his harmonica through the air. “And an unfinished piece of music hangs in the air forever like a lost soul that can’t find rest.” He looked back at Deke, his eyes pleading. “Do you see what I mean, son? Do you?”
When the old man started in on this kind of shit, he could go on for hours, and you only had two choices: give in or walk away. If you walked, he’d make you beg before he’d perform with you again, and it was nice havin’ someone to work with. Pay me now or pay me later, Deke thought. He decided to pay now and get it over with. “Okay, old man, let’s finish it.”
Deke raised his guitar and gave the best show he could considering his heart wasn’t in it. But the old man had just said finish it; he didn’t say it had to be good. As the drizzle sucked away the last chords, Deke reached again for the hat and took his half of the take. “Now, old man, I’m gone.”
While the old man fished the remaining coins from the hat, Deke slipped his guitar into a plastic bag he’d found in the trash from the cleaners on St. Peter Street. He tore a hole in the bag and pulled the strap out so he could still wear the guitar around his neck. Slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder, he stepped into a light rain.
A dollar and fifteen cents—either a flop or somethin’ to eat. It was late and the trash had already been picked up at McDonald’s, so there’d be no pickin’s there. It seemed like it had been rainin’ forever and he wanted a dry bed, even though he might have to share it with a few bugs. What the hell, they couldn’t get to you much if you kept your clothes on, and who in their right mind would take ’em off… might be the last time you saw ’em.
What he disliked most about wet weather was the way it made his guitar sound all mushy. He began to think about what the old man had said about respecting the music and Deke saw what he’d been getting at. The music was what set them apart from the ones who didn’t have it. He was glad the old man had made him finish the song.
He’d about decided on a bed instead of food when he saw a Lucky Dog wagon being pushed back to the warehouse on Gravier by a fat vendor in a red and white striped shirt.
“Hey man,” Deke said. “How about a dog and half a Coke.”
“I’m closed,” the vendor said. “And the dogs are probably cold, anyway.”
“Hot as it is, they ain’t likely to be all that cold,” Deke said. “C’mon, whadda you say, gimme a break. I ain’t had anything to eat all day and where’m I gonna find anyplace open this late?”
Reluctantly, the vendor lifted the cover on his wagon and put a dog on a bun, using his fingers instead of metal tongs.
“Whadda you want on it?”
“Everything you got, only don’t put it on with your fingers. And half a Coke.”
“What are you big spender, food critic for the Times?”
Deke wolfed down the dog on the spot, stretching his half a Coke so that he had one swallow left to wash down the last bite. No longer hungry, he wished he’d chosen a bed instead. It didn’t really matter though; he’d slept on the street before and could again.
With his duffel bag over his shoulder and his plastic-bagged guitar hanging in front of him, he walked a few blocks farther and turned left on St. Ann, heading for a nice deep doorway he knew. If you were in a deep doorway, there was less chance of some dog peein’ on you while you slept.
A few minutes later, a drunk who had beaten Deke to the prize doorway was aroused from beery slumber by the sound of mindless strumming and splintering wood as pieces of guitar and shreds of plastic were driven into Deke’s chest.
*
Kit arrived in New Orleans the next morning a little after ten. from the way her dog, Lucky, acted when she picked him up at the vet where he’d been boarded, you would have thought she’d been gone a month instead of just three days. It was such a short time that she hadn’t bothered to cancel the newspapers, and they lay scattered over the lawn, still dry in their plastic sleeves even though it had rained every day according to her car radio.
As she passed the FOR SALE sign stuck in the lawn, she considered once again buying the place herself, but not at the price David was asking. She knew he was getting anxious, what with two mortgage payments and all. And that was really the problem. How do you sleep with someone and then take advantage of them in a business deal? If he had let her pay rent, then he wouldn’t be so vulnerable to a low offer, which, if she decided to join him in Shreveport, was all irrelevant. “Aggggh.” Kit groaned aloud at the complexity of it all as she unlocked the front door.
She went directly to the bedroom and tossed her suitcase on the bed. Always on the lookout for a way he could get closer to her petting hand, Lucky jumped onto the suitcase and yipped for some affection. She responded by giving him one of his favorite treats; her knuckles rubbed across his skull until the friction almost set his fur on fire.
“Now that’s enough,” she said finally, putting him on the floor.
Eager to see what had been happening in the examiner’s office during her absence, she phoned in to tell Broussard she was back, learning from his secretary that he’d left not ten minutes ago on a call to an address on South Hector, a street only a few minutes away.
Officially, her job as suicide investigator did not require her to accompany the medical examiner when he was called out. It was something Kit herself had begun to do after deciding that her forthcoming book on suicide should include a section on forensic details of the suicide scene. It was a decision that could have required far less of her time if Broussard had been willing to let the cops at the scene give him a preliminary report over the phone as to what had happened. His refusal to allow anyone to interpret a scene for him before he had seen it himself meant that she ended up at a lot of scenes that merely made her ill without contributing anything to her book.
*
Through the wipers and the fine drizzle that speckled the windshield, Kit saw that South Hector was lined with small one-story houses, most of them with full garages instead of the carports you’d expect to see in such modest homes. The Bermuda lawns were all closely cut and edged; a street where the dinner conversation might include speculations on the cause of that brown patch of dead grass in the neighbor’s yard.
Kit didn’t need to check house numbers to locate the scene. The NOPD cruiser, a couple of unmarked civilian cars, and one of Broussard’s ’57 T-Birds stretched in a line along the curb did that for her. On the sidewalk across the street, two women sharing an umbrella watched her drive up.
Both the front door and the garage door on the house were open, as were all the windows. She didn’t recognize the cop posted outside, but he seemed to know her, and her presence wasn’t challenged. Inside the house, camera flashes drew her into the den, where she found Broussard writing in his little black book.
The photography subjects were a man and woman in their late forties sitting side by side on a sofa in front of the TV, their heads touching like young lovers. With their shoeless feet on the coffee table amid some partially filled wineglasses, they looked like a contented couple spending the evening at home. Most of all, they didn’t look dead. In fact, with their rosy complexions, they app
eared healthier than anyone else in the room.
Looking up from his black book, Broussard saw her and raised his bushy eyebrows in greeting. His eyes took on a distant glaze and he stroked the bristly hairs on the tip of his nose in thought. She would have bet everything she owned and all she could borrow that the bulge in his cheek was a lemon ball.
The detective on the case was Woodsy Newsome, a tall, athletic bachelor who spent all of his vacations camping in Michigan. While Broussard and most of Newsome’s colleagues routinely dropped the “ing” ending on words, Newsome never did, sometimes even adding it to words where it didn’t belong, producing creations like chicking and cotting. Newsome was tipping a wallet on top of the TV into a Baggie with the back of his index finger.
Ray Jamison, the photographer, circled by and shared a thought. “Bet they didn’t look that good when they were alive.”
Newsome winked at her and handed the Baggie to a uniformed cop. “Put this in my car, will you?” He put a hand on Broussard’s shoulder. “Andy, me and Ray are going out to the garage.”
“So are we,” Broussard replied, motioning Kit over. “How was your trip.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“Can’t ask for more than that. Seen the papers?”
“Haven’t had a chance.”
“Well, we had some trouble in the Quarter while you were gone. Somethin’ we need to discuss. After we’re through here, we’ll get together with Phillip and talk about it.”
The garage door was open now, but it was obvious from all the soot on it that the car had been running for a long time with the door closed.
“Anybody touch the car?” Broussard asked.
Newsome shook his head. “All the uniforms did was open the garage door to clear out the exhaust fumes. It wasn’t running when they got here, so it’s probably out of gas.”
Broussard looked at Kit. “Cable TV installer found ’em,” he said, shifting the lemon ball in his mouth to the other cheek. “When they didn’t answer the bell, he went around back and saw ’em through the patio doors.”
“No keys in the ignishing,” Newsome called out.
Broussard continued with his story. “Air conditioner had cleared the carbon monoxide out of the house by the time help arrived, but apparently it was still pretty thick in here. Hemoglobin has a choice it’ll take carbon monoxide over oxygen. When it’s saturated with carbon monoxide, it can’t carry anything else.
“Carboxyhemoglobin is what makes ’em look so pink. Now we got to figure out why it happened.”
“What do you make of this?” Newsome said from the front of the car.
Kit followed Broussard to where the detective and the photographer were standing and saw what looked like an electrical plug coming out of the grill.
“I make that to be the last piece of the puzzle,” Broussard said.
Jamison snapped a quick picture and they all followed Broussard back into the den, where he bent over the bodies and slipped his hand into the space where the thighs of the two corpses touched. “Woodsy, gimme a hand here.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Slide her a little to the right.”
“You want the cushing moved, too?”
“No, just her… that’s it.”
Broussard opened his black bag and removed a large pair of chrome surgical scissors that he used to cut open the right pocket of the male corpse’s pants. As he laid the fabric back, Kit saw a thin black object in the pocket.
“Ray, get a shot of this in place, will you?”
Kit averted her eyes from the flash. When she looked back, Broussard was teasing the object into a handkerchief by using a tongue depressor.
“What is it?” Newsome asked.
“Indirectly, the cause of these deaths. When you check it out, I expect you’ll find that this couple and the car recently came here from Alaska, Anchorage most likely.”
“Based on what, that electrical cord on the car?” Newsome said.
“That’s one way they keep the cars from freezin’ up in arctic climates. In the big cities, most parkin’ meters have outlets you can plug into.”
“Why Anchorage?” Newsome asked.
“There was a membership card to the Anchorage Zoo in that wallet on the TV.”
Newsome pointed his finger at Broussard. “Which not only tells us where the car came from but shows that they lived there, too.”
“Excellent point, Woodsy.”
Crafty old devil, Kit thought, catching Broussard at one of his favorite tricks: giving others the credit for something he had figured out. She’d come to know him so well it no longer worked on her.
“This little gizmo”—Broussard held the black object up so they could get a good look at it—“explains why there was no key in the ignition even though the car had been runnin’. Here, I’ll show you.”
They followed him back to the garage, where he made the car’s engine turn over by pressing the button on the object with his tongue depressor.
“Sometimes in the Arctic, you find yourself havin’ to park for several hours in an area where there’s nothin’ to plug into. That’s where a gizmo like this is useful. You can start the car every hour and keep it from freezin’ up without goin’ outside. Question is, was the wine to toast a suicide pact or did the gizmo get set off accidently while they were snugglin’? The absence of a note and the fact that the gizmo was in his pocket and not on the coffee table suggests an accident.” He looked at Kit. “When you work this one up, see if you can find out why he’d been carryin’ this thing around in a climate like ours.”
*
As usual, on the way downtown, Kit was caught by the first traffic light she encountered, while Broussard slipped through. Invariably, if she was following him, the lights would be green for him and red for her, as if they were cooperating with him because he was a native. Consequently, by the time she reached Broussard’s office, he’d been there long enough to be on the phone already.
“How much hair?” he said into the mouthpiece.
While the person on the other end figured out how to answer such a question, Broussard put his hand over the phone and said, “Phillip’s on his way.” Then to the phone: “Think it’s a contact wound?” He picked up a folded newspaper, tossed it to the front of his desk, and jabbed his finger at the headlines: MUTILATION MURDER IN THE FRENCH QUARTER.
“Do you know the kind of ammo? ’Cause federal ammo burns real clean…. Go by your naked eye…. Sections are only supportive….”
While Broussard talked, Kit scanned the article: Young girl… mutilated with a gardening claw… sources close to the investigation said that the victim’s throat had been torn out by human teeth.
Kit looked up at the sound of the door: Phil Gatlin, his wet hair lying on his head like somebody had dumped a plate of black spaghetti on him. “Anybody remember what the sun looks like?” he growled, shucking off his raincoat. He looked over Kit’s shoulder at the newspaper. “‘Sources close to the investigation.’ I’d like to get my hands on those sources.” He went to the coffeepot, poured himself a cup, and then, remembering his manners, offered it to Kit.
Knowing how strong Broussard liked his coffee, Kit shook her head.
“What we need…” Realizing for the first time that Broussard might be finding it difficult to talk with other conversation in the room, Gatlin tapped the paper with a huge finger and whispered, “What we need in this country is to repeal the First Amendment… to where it doesn’t apply to reporters.”
“You found soot?” Broussard said into the phone. “And a flash burn? That’s six inches…. Right. Let me know.”
“How’d the paper find out about the throat wound?” Gatlin asked.
“Leaks,” Broussard said. “Big leaks.”
Gatlin looked at Kit. “We found another victim this morning… street musician. That one’ll be in tonight’s paper.”
“Also with a throat wound?”
“This wound was loca
ted a bit more anterior than the first one but was significantly deeper,” Broussard said. “All the way into the trachea.”
Suddenly, Kit saw why they were relating all this. When she’d told Teddy LaBiche that she occasionally helped develop profiles of murderers for the police, it was all true, except that she hadn’t yet been given an assignment. This case was to be her first.
“The musician, male or female?” she asked.
“Male,” Gatlin replied.
“Any chance it’s a copycat of the first one?”
“None,” Broussard said. “The puncture wounds in the first victim showed a distinct pattern that was also present in the second victim.”
“Robbery?”
“The guy didn’t have anything worth stealing,” Gatlin said. “The girl still had money in her purse.”
“I take it she wasn’t sexually molested?”
Broussard rocked back in his chair, folded his small hands over his belly, and shook his head.
Kit felt the eyes of both men on her. It was like being back in school taking her Ph.D. orals again, only this was worse. If she screwed up here, a murderer might remain free long enough to kill again… and there was Broussard, keeping a scorecard on her. She had never wanted to please anyone as much as she wanted to prove herself to Broussard. “I guess you’ve had time to talk to some of the girl’s friends,” she said to Gatlin.
“All day yesterday. If you had a popularity contest between this girl and Mother Theresa, you’d have to have a runoff.” Gatlin crossed himself to make sure his Mother Theresa remark wouldn’t be used against him in the hereafter.
“One female, one male,” Kit said. “Serial killers usually stick to the same sex. What did the girl do for a living?”
“Exotic dancer,” Gatlin said.
“Any hooking on the side?”
Gatlin shrugged. “Haven’t found anyone so far who’ll say so. What do you think?”
“Neither victim was what you’d call an asset to the community,” Kit observed.
“Depends on your point of view,” Gatlin replied.