Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

  Broussard forced his eyes from the painting and began to saunter down the gallery, feigning interest in other items. Halfway down was a seven-foot Renaissance-style bronze candelabrum. Broussard figured that the price of the painting would drop 20 percent by the time he reached it.

  At the Louis XVI tulipwood parquetry commode just before the candelabrum, Epstein said, “Of course, I can do better on the price. Say we discount it… twenty percent?”

  Broussard nodded vaguely and kept moving, down that side of the gallery, across the back, and up the other side, being sure to run his fingers appreciatively over a bit of turquoise inlay, a stretch of well-wrought carving, knowing that Epstein would soon sweeten the deal.

  A few feet farther on, in front of a Regency-style mahogany bookcase, Epstein said, “If you were to take it today, I might be able to discount it by thirty percent.”

  Broussard looked at Epstein with raised eyebrows and a slight nod, then resumed the ritual. At the front of the rear gallery, Broussard unhooked the braided rope and worked his way toward the door. When he was perilously close to it, Epstein said, “For you, because you’re such a good customer… forty percent.”

  “Done,” Broussard replied, and walked out the door, leaving Epstein to take care of billing and delivery.

  Outside, instead of turning toward Canal, Broussard went left, the direction that would take him to the area where the three murders had occurred. Around him, the sidewalks were full of people. Apparently no one was afraid of the Quarter during the day. As he walked, he scanned the buildings along the street, imagining himself in need of a place to hide, somewhere you could secrete yourself with no one noticing that you had come in the night before with blood on your clothes.

  Having never looked at the Quarter in just this way, he was surprised to see that the structures lining the street presented an unbroken skin that any would-be intruder would find difficult to breach. The buildings all had strong outside doors, many of which were covered at night by metal security doors. The high walls around the courtyards between buildings were topped by sharp spikes, or in some cases, broken bottles set into cement. Courtyard doors were heavy and tall, with concertina wire or other protective devices deployed above them. And even if someone were able to get through these barriers, they’d be seen during the day.

  A few blocks farther on, he came to the spot where the body of the third victim had been found. Though the blood had been washed away a week ago, he could still see a faint discoloration where it had been. It was like this for him in hundreds of locations. Where others saw nothing, he saw ancient blood stains, old bullet tracks, invisible skid marks, because as much as he would have liked to forget a case when it was finished, he remembered them all, and it was by these signposts that he knew the city.

  He thought about the other bodies, one, a block ahead and half a block down on St. Ann; the other, two blocks straight ahead. As he stood there deep in thought, his hand strayed to his nose and began to stroke the bristly hairs on the end of it. The killings, all clustered so close to each other… that had to mean their man was holed up somewhere nearby.

  A smartly dressed woman in heels brushed by him and walked across the dim stains that had started him on this train of thought. Ready now to move on himself, he chose a stain-free course next to the porcelain shop facing the sidewalk, fortifying himself as he went with a lemon ball from the linty cache in his pocket.

  A little beyond St. Anthony’s Square, his attention was drawn down Père Antoine Alley—the passageway between St. Louis Cathedral and the Presbytere—by the sound of an electric drill. At the far end of the alley, on an extensive set of scaffolding erected all across the side of the Presbytere, he saw two men affixing new copper drainpipes to the building. For want of something better to look at, he headed toward them.

  Skirting the scaffolding, he went out onto the broad flagstone pedestrian mall that ran along Jackson Square to see what exactly was being done to the old building. From the white dust over the granite block covering its lower half and the small Carborundum wheels that he had seen littering the flagstones under the scaffolding, he concluded that they were repointing the block as well as replacing the guttering.

  Shading his eyes, he looked more closely and saw raw wood showing through the trim around the Palladian windows. Apparently, she was getting a fresh paint job, as well. It made him feel good to know the city was keeping the old girl in such good shape.

  Good shape.

  The thought made him step back and look to his left, at the Cabildo, the building on the other side of the cathedral, where Napoleon signed away the rights to Louisiana. Once identical to the Presbytere, its mansard roof had burned off a few years earlier and had yet to be replaced. The symmetry of the two buildings, with the cathedral between, had always appealed to Broussard’s sense of order, but the gimpy appearance of the Cabildo without its roof was like a death certificate attributing death to unknown causes, a wholly unacceptable state of affairs.

  His gaze drifted back to the slate roof on the Presbytere and the four dormers that faced the cathedral. Apparently, the painters hadn’t yet reached the dormers or else… Was that… He moved to his left so he could get a better angle on the closest dormer. Yes… it was. One of the small panes on the dormer’s casement windows was broken.

  He walked quickly toward the open iron gates that kept people out of the Presbytere’s portico when the building was closed. As often as he had admired it from the outside, this was the first time he had been inside. Used now as a historical museum, the front doors opened into a cavernous room with a curved wooden counter just inside where a clerk collected an admission fee. Wishing to satisfy his curiosity on an unofficial level, he paid the fee and headed directly for the wide stairs he saw in the rear, off to the left of a large glass case containing a model of a three-masted sailing ship.

  On the way, he passed a wizened old security guard, who, from the way he was rocking back and forth on his heels with his eyes closed, was mentally home on his porch, which was good, because Broussard was not planning to stay in the public area.

  At the top of the stairs was a long hall lined by paintings and marble busts on pedestals. He walked down the hall until on his left, he came to a heavy red drape, running from floor to ceiling. Slipping behind the drape, he found himself in the support area. To his right were the rest rooms. Straight ahead was a room in which he could see kitchen cabinets and a counter. The continuation of the stairs was on his left.

  The stairs were his primary objective, but before going to them, he walked over to the room that looked like a kitchen and flicked on the light. An employee lunchroom—sink, Formica-covered table, microwave, electric can opener, coffee maker, and a sign taped to the cabinets over the sink. If you couldn’t see the anger in the slashing strokes with which it had been written, it was clear from the message: CONTENTS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY D. HOWELL. FOR HER USE ONLY!!!

  Broussard crossed the room and opened the cabinet. Inside was an assortment of canned soups and other items suitable for a quick lunch. On the way, he examined the door and found that it had no lock.

  Then to the stairs, enough of them to make his pulse quicken—or was it his growing suspicions that were affecting his heart? At the top of the stairs, there was a large landing and a single door. Even from where he stood, Broussard could see the splintered wood below the doorknob, as though the throw on the lock had been rammed through the trim by a force applied from the inside. He crossed the small space, paused a moment to catch his breath, and opened the door.

  CHAPTER 12

  The door led to the Presbytere’s attic, a huge dark space illuminated only by dust-laden shafts of light from the nine dormer windows on the front and four on each side of the building.

  Broussard stepped inside and groped around for the lights. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw a bank of switches a little farther over from where he expected to find them, which, as it turned out, didn’t make any difference
, because none of them worked.

  The air was musty but temperate. Apparently, even this remote area of the building was air-conditioned. As his eyes became more accustomed to the dim light, he saw why. Piled in typical attic disarray were stored displays: wooden cases with glass fronts containing old photographs whose subjects he couldn’t make out, bits of architectural ornamentation, cards with minerals glued to them.

  At the far end of the attic, he could hear the muffled sound of a drill from the men on the scaffolding, followed by the faint ring of a hammer against metal. Then there was another sound, delicate and repetitive, like a fine gold chain dangling against a hard surface—the kind of sound a crucifix might make if its owner was on his hands and knees crawling along the floor.

  Broussard looked around for a weapon. Over by the nearest dormer was a two-seater bicycle with no front wheel… fat lot of good that’ll do. Against the wall near where he had come in were two Corinthian columns, way too big to be useful. Blast. You’d think in all this junk, there’d be something.

  On the floor a few feet away was a motor of some kind resting on two pieces of two-by-four. The motor was not as heavy as it looked and he was able to slip one of the supports out from under it. Clutching the lumber in both hands down low where he could get the most leverage in his swing, he crept toward the sound, which was coming from the end of the attic with the broken window.

  The display cases were nearly eight feet tall, and as he moved, he could see only small areas of the attic at a time from between them. After covering a significant distance, he paused at a case containing a stuffed fox holding a pheasant in its mouth, and stole a look at what lay ahead. He quickly pulled his head back. The light from one of the dormers was casting a long shadow on the back wall: the distinct image of someone hiding behind a display case ten feet away. And he was holding a club.

  Broussard turned and crept to the other end of the case with the fox. Holding his breath so as not to give his position away, he moved quickly across the space that separated him from whoever was waiting. Despite his size, Broussard was light on his feet and he managed to cover the distance without kicking anything or making a floorboard creak. This was going to have to be quick and good.

  Even as he rounded the corner of the case hiding his adversary, he began his swing, a powerful roundhouse that sent the two-by-four in a curving arc of which even the Babe would have been proud. In the instant before contact, something erupted into his face with the sound of a sheet whipping in the wind, blinding him. But he had caught a glimpse of the one he was after—well-built, shirtless, and facing away from him, as he’d hoped.

  When the two-by-four struck home, Broussard knew that something was definitely wrong. Instead of the sound and feel of flesh, whatever he’d hit cracked and crumpled. The thing that had blinded him was out of his face now and he could see again. Everything up to the waist of his adversary was still standing, but his upper half lay on the floor.

  A fiberglass Indian with a hoe over his shoulder. He had just matched wits with a blasted statue. And, considering the results, had lost big.

  Above him, he heard the sound that had started all this: a pigeon, its claws clacking against the top of another display case as it strutted nervously back and forth. So that’s what had hit him in the face.

  An image flashed into his head: his fireplace, with the upper half of the Indian mounted on a plaque so that it projected horizontally into the room like a moose head. Yeah, I got him with a yellow pine two-by-four with chamfered edges. I always use pine if I can get it. Fir’s too splintery and cedar’ll break on you.

  He began to chuckle, a deep resonating sound that caused the pigeon to turn his head and inspect him with one red eye.

  For the first time, he noticed that several of the cases ahead had been pulled together to form a wall that blocked his view of the dormer with the broken window. Keeping the two-by-four with him, he circled the grouped cases and looked on the other side, into a small room enclosed by more display cases.

  On the floor, some wrinkled fabric had been thrown over a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes to make a bed. Glass from one of the cases making up the room’s left wall littered the floor between the wall and the bed. The display inside the damaged case had once suffered water damage and the title was no longer legible. The display consisted of a variety of metal objects strapped to white Foamcore: a set of iceman’s tongs, a gargoyle door knocker, a half dozen square nails, a gear wheel. The presence of a hole in the Foamcore along with the location of the hole suggested that once there had been another object in the display, an object that had been ripped loose with such force the strapping had been pulled through the board.

  Broussard suddenly caught an odor, sickly sweet, an old friend: decaying flesh. In the back right corner of the room stood a pyramid of empty cans, probably from the lunchroom downstairs. Beside the cans was a feathery mound. He went to the mound and turned it with his foot. Hordes of maggots boiled out of the carcass in protest. He knelt to look closer. It was a pigeon with its wings pulled off. He looked around the room and saw what appeared to be a pair of wings in the opposite back corner.. Despite the maggots in the carcass, it looked relatively complete, indicating that the bird hadn’t been killed for food.

  He discarded his two-by-four and tore two pieces of cardboard from the bed, using them to scoop up the pigeon. Taking the carcass out of the room and over to a dormer window, he examined the maggots with the tiny hand lens on his key ring. Hard to tell what species they were. Had he been back in his office, he would have let a few harden in alcohol and then examined the structure of the breathing pores in a section taken from the tail. Field guess? Since houseflies prefer manure to animal carcasses, it was probably a bluebottle.

  As if irritated that he had disturbed its children, a fat bluebottle soared out of the gloom and began to buzz around his head. A swat of his hand sent it fleeing out the broken window.

  The window.

  He put the carcass on the floor where he wouldn’t be likely to step on it and examined the latch on the window with the broken pane. It was unlocked. The live pigeon had probably not come in through the small broken pane but, rather, had slipped in when whoever had been living here had left the window open. But was it their man or just a harmless transient? The pigeon carcass suggested the former. Still, it could have been…

  His eyes focused on the stone sill of the dormer window and he knew in that instant he wasn’t dealing with an ordinary transient. There were scratches worn into the sill, sets of four long gouges in which the two members on the right were closer together than the others.

  *

  Broussard called Phil Gatlin from the pastry shop in the lower Pontalba building catercorner from the Presbytere, and had a Napoleon and coffee while he waited for him to show. Gatlin had the good sense to arrive on foot and alone.

  “You’re certain about this?” he said.

  “Judge for yourself,” Broussard replied, taking no offense at Phillip’s skepticism. Phillip was a good detective, probably the best in the department, and he wouldn’t let himself off lightly for failing to find what Broussard had discovered.

  “Let’s play this low-key and quiet for now,” Phillip cautioned as they crossed the street. “We don’t want to spook anybody.”

  To the clerk at the desk, Broussard was simply a tourist who had enjoyed the museum so much he had returned with a friend. The security guard didn’t even see them, his attention being taken by two little potential museum wreckers in tan baseball caps and polo shirts.

  Broussard led the way to the red drape on the second floor and pointed out the sights behind it. “Toilets there, and over there, a lunchroom where he was able to steal food at night.” At the top of the last flight of stairs, he said, “Lock broken out from the inside.”

  “He used the scaffolding on the side to get in?”

  “Broke out a pane of glass so he could unlock the window. Come on.”

  When they passed the shatt
ered Indian, Gatlin tapped Broussard on the back. “He do that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ll explain it to you later.”

  “Before or after you send the place a check for the damages? Was he a tough customer? I hear Indians are hell in hand-to-hand combat. But this one probably had lousy reflexes. What’d he… jump you from behind?”

  “You here on business or pleasure?”

  “Little of both, as it turns out.”

  “He made himself a bed over here.” Gatlin followed Broussard to the open end of the arranged display cases. “Bed, empty cans from the lunchroom downstairs—”

  “And fingerprints up the wazoo, I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah, and some of ’em might even be his.”

  “I’d rather have lots of prints than none. What’s that smell?”

  Broussard pointed to the pigeon carcass. “Somethin’ he did while he was warmin’ up. But here’s the clincher.” He led Gatlin to the window and pointed at the marks on the sill.

  Gatlin bent down and studied them for a few seconds. “… like he stood here sharpening it while he watched foot traffic through the window.” He stood up and looked back at the improvised hideaway. “You figure he got it from that broken display case in there?”

  “I’d put money on it.”

  “So where is he?”

  Broussard waved his arm toward the square below. “Out there somewhere.”

  “Wonder when he was last here?”

  “I can tell you approximately when he did the pigeon. It’s full of third-instar maggots, which if they’re from the bluebottle as I suspect, he was here a week ago.”

  “Around the time of the last murder.”

  “That’s the way I figure it.”

  Gatlin took a penlight out of his pocket and went to the stack of cans in the corner. He knelt to examine the contents. “Everything’s pretty dried up in here.”

  He got to his feet and poked at his shirt where it had come out of his pants.