Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

  “You okay, Doc?”

  Kit brushed herself off, plumped her hair, and carefully touched her tender lip. “I’m a little wet and dirty, but that’s about all.”

  “So Ah guess Ah should shoot him,” Bubba said, leaning into the doorway.

  The bum threw his hands in front of his face and sucked in a breath, the rushing air rattling wetly in his nose.

  “I’d be satisfied just to see him running as quickly as he could that way,” Kit said, pointing away from the French Market. Ordinarily, she might have had Bubba hold him until he could be turned over to the police, but she still didn’t want it known that she had come down here.

  “You hear da lady?” Bubba asked.

  “Yes, sir, I heard her.”

  “Den why you still here?”

  The bum got to his feet, oozed out of the doorway, and slid along the wall, Bubba’s pistol touching his nose. Then he ducked under the gun and began to run, stumbling for a few steps over his own feet.

  Bubba put the gun back in his pocket and got Kit’s umbrella from the gutter. Kit remembered the man she’d been following. By now, he could be anywhere.

  “Thanks, Bubba. That’s one I owe you.”

  “Maybe we oughtta go home now.”

  “Not yet. There’s something I still need to do. You follow from behind, like before.”

  Kit hurried to the gate where the man she was following had disappeared. She looked up and down the long parking lot that separated the wall from the riverfront levee. Far to the right, she saw a figure on the raised sidewalk leading to the river.

  Crossing the parking lot and the riverfront trolley tracks, she scaled the wet grass of the levee and worked her way toward the man, using the trees on the crest of the levee for cover. From behind one of those trees, she saw the man play his flashlight along the edge of the timbered steps that led down the other side of the levee into the Mississippi, as though he was trying to see under them. Then he moved to the other side of the steps and did the same thing.

  From there, he retraced his path and went up to the moon walk overlooking Jackson Square, using his flashlight to examine the beds of foliage flanking the stairs.

  By the time Kit had gone up those same steps, he was already down the other side and halfway across the square. Hurrying after him, Kit used the statue of Andrew Jackson and his horse to shield herself from view, getting closer to him than she’d ever been. From behind a crepe myrtle in full flower, she saw him pause at the scaffolding that had been erected in the passageway between St. Louis Cathedral and the Presbytere, the building that once served as home to the cathedral priests. He sent the beam from his flashlight up the scaffolding and stepped back so he could pick out the dormers that projected from the slate on the Presbytere’s mansard roof. Then he entered the passageway and checked each of the cathedral’s empty planterlike recesses, his face pressed against its wrought-iron fence.

  Deciding that she must see this man’s face, Kit gambled that he would turn left when he came out onto Royal Street. She rushed past the cathedral and hesitated at Pirate’s Alley, another passageway that led to Royal. If she went down Pirate’s Alley and missed, she’d still be behind him. Better to go on to St. Peter and cut over. He must have quickened his pace, though, after Kit had lost sight of him, because they collided at the corner of Royal and St. Peter.

  “Sorry,” she said, getting a good look at him. He had a long face with a prominent oval chin. His deep-set eyes were surmounted by sharply arched hoary eyebrows. Below, they sat on puffy pouches of skin that would have made a plastic surgeon cluck with disapproval. At each corner of his mouth, there were small fleshy bulges below his lower lip, suggesting that his glum expression had nothing to do with what had just happened but was something he carried around all the time.

  Without looking at her, he mumbled a reply that included the word clumsy and continued on. When he was a block away, Kit set out after him. A few minutes later, she saw him ring the bell at Maison Toulouse—one of the Quarter’s most exclusive small hotels—and go inside when the concierge answered.

  Most curious, she thought as she looked behind her for Bubba. Spotting the tip of an umbrella sticking out from the edge of the building at the corner, she motioned with one finger and Bubba stepped into view. She could hear the legs of his coveralls rubbing together as he came briskly toward her.

  “Doc, you sure cover a lotta ground when you take a walk. Ain’t you gettin’ jus’ a little bit tired?”

  When she was following the strange man, she’d been too preoccupied to notice anything else. Now that he was off the street, she realized she was not only tired but her knee hurt. And her lip felt like a basketball. “Well, if you’re ready to call it a night, I guess I am, too.”

  Before allowing Bubba to go home, Kit gave him some tea and a small plate of butter cookies, which he avidly consumed. As they said good night, she took off his cap and gave him a sisterly kiss on the forehead. Bubba responded by turning the color of a boiled crawfish.

  Despite all that had happened, Kit fell asleep almost immediately after she got into bed. In the morning, while showering, she found a yellow bruise on her arm where the bum had grabbed her and one on the knee that had absorbed most of her fall. Her lip, though, felt almost normal.

  Later, as she poised over Lucky’s bowl with a Gainesburger, she asked his opinion of what she’d seen. “He’s out looking at the murder scene, walks all over the area where the murders occurred, looking in corners, looking in the shrubbery. And what about that collapsed building? I’m sure he was saying the same word over and over. What was that all about?”

  While she questioned him, Lucky sat on his hind legs, his head cocked to one side, his big brown eyes giving the impression he understood everything she said. Kit put the burger in his bowl, and while he ate, she scratched his neck and gave the problem a little more thought herself. Maybe she was making too much out of what she’d seen. The guy could have been an undercover cop. But would a cop be staying at a hotel in the Quarter? Not likely… unless, of course, he was a really good undercover cop.

  The morning was clear and bright, the kind of day where nothing unpleasant could possibly take place and where problems could be solved. But as Kit pulled onto South Claiborne, the sun disappeared behind a cloud bank that plunged the city into a gloom that robbed Kit of her optimism. A few minutes later, the sun reappeared. Having already been fooled once, Kit lapsed into a neutral attitude.

  Upon reaching her office, she called Phil Gatlin and asked whether there was an undercover officer with a long face and heavy, arching eyebrows working the Quarter late at night. Assured that there was not, she parried his curiosity as to why she thought there might be, and hung up.

  She spent the next hour proofing and polishing a description of her activities for the last six months to be included in Broussard’s semiannual report to the Orleans Parish hierarchy. Finally finishing the blasted thing, she wanted to personally place it in Broussard’s hands. To do that, she went down the hall and knocked on his door, trying hard to tune out the old air-handling unit overhead that lately had begun to clank and clatter as if it was about to fly apart. Thinking she heard a faint “Come in,” she pushed the door open and saw Broussard behind his desk, one hand digging in his bowl of lemon balls.

  “Hello, Kit.” He motioned her inside with the hand that wasn’t in the bowl. “There’s someone here I want you to meet.”

  One of the two wooden chairs in front of Broussard’s littered desk was occupied. As the man in it turned toward her, she felt her jaw drop.

  “Henry, this is Kit Franklyn, the psychology arm of our operation. Kit, meet Henry Guidry, an old friend from Bayou Coteau.”

  “My pleasure,” Kit said, shaking hands with the man she had followed the previous night. From his expression, it was obvious he didn’t recognize her.

  “Kit just got back from visiting Claude and Olivia,” Broussard said.

  “How do you know them?” Guidry asked.


  “I don’t really. I dropped off an anniversary gift from Dr. Broussard on my way back from Shreveport and they allowed me to stay the night. How long have you been in town?”

  “About an hour. Came to see if I could pick up a good bull at the Laplace livestock auction later this afternoon.”

  “Henry’s a vet turned cattle rancher,” Broussard said. “What do you run Henry, about a thousand head?”

  “More or less.”

  “Kit, Henry and I are gettin’ together tonight for dinner. Why don’t you come, too?”

  Kit didn’t have to think at all about her answer. There was absolutely no doubt this was the man she had followed. By itself, his behavior the previous night was merely peculiar. But add to that the lie about just arriving in town… How could she pass up an opportunity to learn more? “I’d love to join you.”

  “You mind meetin’ us at Grandma O’s? Three just won’t fit in a Bird.”

  “When?”

  Broussard looked at Guidry. “Say… seven?”

  Guidry nodded.

  *

  Back in her office, Kit lugged out the Yellow Pages and looked up the number of the Laplace livestock auction. They picked up on the third ring.

  “Yeeellllo.”

  “Could you tell me when the next auction will be held?”

  “Not only could but will,” the voice on the other end said. “You want some prime beef on the hoof, you be here nine o’clock sharp week from today and we’ll see you get fixed up proper.”

  Kit thought she could smell cow manure through the phone. “Then there’s no auction today?”

  “Not to my knowin’, and I run ’em.”

  “Thanks.”

  As Kit replaced the receiver, she wondered whether Guidry ever told the truth.

  CHAPTER 7

  Kit spent the afternoon in the LSU medical school library, becoming so engrossed in what she was doing that she had to go directly from the library to meet Broussard.

  Grandma O’s was Broussard’s favorite restaurant. Located near the Quarter but on the opposite side of Canal, it had something French Quarter restaurants didn’t: a parking lot. When Kit pulled into it, she saw Broussard and Guidry getting out of Broussard’s red T-Bird. Despite the misty rain that had begun to fall, neither of them had umbrellas or raincoats. Even so, they waited for her to join them before going inside.

  They were met by Grandma O herself, a large woman whose hips made it look as though she wore an inflated inner tube as an undergarment. While others called her Grandma because she wanted them to, Bubba Oustellette did it because she had borne his father. As usual, she was wearing a black taffeta dress that flared so widely from the hips that she inadvertently rearranged the empty chairs and dusted the customers in the occupied ones as she walked through the narrow spaces between tables.

  “Don’ stand in da doorway,” Grandma O said. “It’ll make folks think de’ll have to wait for a table.” She pinched Broussard’s arm. “City boy, you feel like you losin’ weight. We better get some food into you quick.” Then she let loose with a loud cackle that showed the gold star in her front tooth. “Doc Franklyn, you lookin’ fine, and who is dis handsome fella?”

  Broussard introduced her to Guidry, and she led them past a lot of small round tables with white marble tops to one much larger than the rest.

  “Any man spends as much time in here as city boy does, gets da best Ah got,” she explained to Guidry as she put in front of each of them a menu made up to look like a shack on stilts. “Ah know dat city boy wants a strawberry daiquiri to start,” Grandma O said. “And Doc Franklyn, Ah bet you want a rum and Coke.”

  Kit nodded.

  “A draft… whatever you have,” Guidry said when Grandma O looked his way. She went off to fill their order and Guidry picked up the menu.

  “Red beans and rice is what you want,” Broussard said. “Nobody makes andouille sausage like Grandma O.”

  “Well,” Kit said to Guidry, “Find anything at the auction today?”

  There was a fleeting trapped look in Guidry’s eyes that made it appear as if he was sifting answers.

  “I’m embarrassed to say that I got over there and discovered that the auction wasn’t today; it’s next Tuesday.”

  Kit didn’t know what to make of his answer. Had he somehow detected that she was testing him and had decided he’d better cover himself? Or was this the truth?

  She decided to probe deeper. To make her interest seem innocuous, she directed the next question at Broussard. “How did you and Henry meet?”

  “As I recall, it was when I fell on him.”

  Kit shook her head. “I don’t—”

  “Football… when we were kids,” Broussard explained. “I was on one side and Henry was on the other.”

  “I wondered why no one else was trying to stop him,” Guidry said. “Then when I hit him, I found out. How long was I unconscious?”

  “I don’t think you were ever really out,” Broussard said. “Just a little confused.”

  “Like when I went after you in the first place. After that, I always made sure we were on the same team.”

  Grandma O brought their drinks and took their orders—red beans and rice all around. As she went off to the kitchen, Broussard said, “Henry, Claude, and I were best friends all through high school. Compared to Henry, Claude and I were choirboys. Henry spent more time in detention than anybody else in the history of the school.”

  “That’s probably not far from the truth,” Guidry said. His heavy brows crept together, partially hiding his eyes—a signal to Kit that he was about to change the tone of the conversation. “Andy, I’ve never told you this, but I always admired the way you handled yourself after the accident. Don’t know if I could have done as well.”

  “The accident?” Kit said.

  “Truckload of cypress logs on their way to the mill,” Broussard said, stirring his daiquiri with his straw. “Chain came loose just as my parents were passin’.”

  “And they were…”

  He nodded.

  “How awful.”

  “I remember when the call came,” Guidry said. “Andy, Claude, and I were helping Claude do some bodywork on the car his father had given him. I can see that moment in my mind as clearly as if it happened an hour ago.”

  “So can I,” Broussard said. “It wasn’t an easy time for a sixteen-year-old, that’s for sure. Would’ve been worse, though, if I hadn’t had a grandmother to look after me. Course it meant I had to leave my friends and move over here, which, as it turned out, wasn’t such a bad thing. It’s criminal, though, how rarely I get back. In the last ten years, I’ll bet I haven’t been in Bayou Coteau more than…” He thought it over and came up with “… twice. Only twice.”

  Further reminiscences were put on hold by the arrival of the food. Before she left them to enjoy it, Grandma O looked sharply at Guidry. “Ah don’ know if city boy tol’ you da rules, but you gotta eat everything on your plate or explain to me why you didn’. An Ah ain’t likely to believe you if you say you jus’ weren’ hungry.”

  “That’s why she’s Grandma O,” Broussard said as she swished back to the kitchen.

  “Looks good,” Guidry said. He cut himself a slice of the plump sausage that lay across his generous portion of Grandma O’s renowned red beans and rice, skewered it with his fork, and carried it to his mouth. His eyes closed in reverence. “I don’t think I’m going to have to explain anything,” he said.

  They ate in silence for a minute or two, then Guidry said, “I see from the papers that you’ve had a couple of unusual murders in the Quarter. Making any progress on solving them?”

  The conversation about their days as kids had lulled Kit into complacency. Guidry’s question stripped that away.

  “If we knew ten times as much about them as we know now, we’d still be pretty much in the dark,” Broussard said.

  “What kind of person is able to commit murder?” Guidry asked Kit.

  �
��Practically anyone,” Kit answered. “Given the right circumstances… maybe even you.” She was disappointed that Guidry took no notice of her attempt at a personal jab.

  “The right conditions… like anger or jealousy?”

  “Those are some of the more common ones. But there’s also evidence to indicate that normal people can kill in a cold, dispassionate way.”

  “What sort of evidence?”

  “You thinkin’ of the Milgrim experiments?” Broussard said.

  “Yes,” Kit replied, once again surprised at the old pathologist’s breadth of knowledge. She turned to Guidry. “A large number of volunteers agreed to participate in what they thought was a motivational learning study to determine the effects of punishment on learning. Each volunteer was given the designation teacher. The role of the teacher was to deliver an electric shock for every mistake to a learner who was required to learn a list of word pairs. With each mistake, the teacher was asked to increase the severity of the shock. In truth, the learner was actually an actor hired by the experimenter, and there was no electric shock at all. But the actor made it appear as if there was, faking mild discomfort at supposedly low voltages, obvious distress at high ones, and even screaming and pleading at the highest voltages to be released from the straps that held him to his chair. To the experimenter’s astonishment, over ninety percent of the teachers were willing to inflict pain on the learner if the experimenter agreed to take the responsibility. Many of them were even willing to force the learner’s hand onto a metal plate to give him the shock.”

  From behind Kit came the voice of Grandma O. “Doc Franklyn, Ah notice you don’ seem to be eatin’ much. You know what dat means. Can Ah get anybody anything?”

  They all shook their heads and Grandma O moved off to warn other customers who were dawdling over their food.

  “But would these same people have been willing to kill the learner?” Guidry asked.

  “We have to assume they would. After all, a severe shock could cause a heart attack. It was at least theoretically possible that they already had engaged in homicidal behavior. Apparently when atrocities are part of a large program in which an individual plays a subordinate role, however proximate to the actual infliction of the atrocity, he’s able to dissociate his moral sense from the act. That’s one explanation for the willingness of so many Germans to participate in the operation of Nazi death camps.”