Kit reflected once again on how fortunate she’d been to find an affordable house within walking distance of the untouchably valuable real estate along this street. For the next ten minutes, she concentrated on the scenery, forgetting for a while the thoughts that had been tumbling in her head since a talented married woman with kids had dug a murdered girl from her future rose garden.
Dinwiddie and the other towering gray stone buildings at the Audubon Park end of the campus was where Tulane first began. “This,” a visitor approaching from St. Charles would say, “is what a university should look like.” But it was a case of architectural bait and switch. Behind this auspicious start, succeeding architects had done pretty much what they pleased. The result was, to Kit’s mind, an eclecticism that marred an otherwise-fine institution. Though if anyone else had made this observation, she would not have let it go unchallenged. After all, this was her doctoral alma mater.
Dinwiddie was cool and slightly musty and the slightest sound echoed through its empty halls. Momentarily puzzled at the lack of students, Kit remembered that it was summer. High on the wall to the left, the fossilized remains of a long-tailed creature embedded in rock too uniform to be real hung in a dark oak frame. Straight ahead was the darkened door to the physical geology lab; beside it, a glass case containing a rock display to whet the budding geologist’s appetite. A young female voice coming from the floor above spilled down the stairs to Kit’s right. “Did you hear what happened to the Cro-Magnon that had unprotected sex?”
“No, what?” another female asked.
“He got plesiosaurs.”
One of the women screamed, then both laughed hysterically. A door slammed and they were heard no more.
The first thing Kit saw when she opened French’s door was a glass case on the far wall containing a very stocky-looking skeleton, which, except for a peculiar outward flaring of the back part of the jaw, looked human. But what did she know about it? Probably, it was either some other primate or an archaeological specimen. Next to the glass case was a long table with a computer and printer on it. Beside the computer keyboard was a skull, perhaps the one from her yard.
“Over here,” a voice said from behind the bookcases on the near wall that blocked her view to the right.
She stepped into the room and saw Victoria French at her desk. Her hair was freshly done and she was wearing a tan safari outfit with lots of buttons and buckles. Searching for a word to describe her, Kit decided on tawny… like a plains lioness. On the wall behind French’s desk was a framed piece of shale with several glistening black trilobites embedded in it. Kit didn’t know much about paleontology but she knew a trilobite when she saw one, because when she was a kid, her father would always take her with him on those Saturdays when he got a haircut. The barber’s hobby had been trilobites and he had had a big case of them for kids like her to look at.
On each side of the shale was a picture of an archaeological dig in progress, everyone in the pictures looking sunburned and wind-tousled. Under the shale, stuck to the wall with tape, was a piece of construction paper with a crude crayon sketch of a house with smoke coming out of the chimney, trees that looked like green cotton balls on sticks, and a flat father and mother with hair that resembled the foliage on the trees.
“Did you have to walk far?” French asked.
“I got lucky and found a parking place right out front.” Kit pointed at the skeleton. “Is that human?”
“Yes. I inherited it from my predecessor. It was found bricked up in an old house that burned in the French Quarter.”
“Murdered?”
“Quite likely. Have a seat. Just push those boxes out of your way.”
French was referring to a short stack of long cardboard boxes on each side of the wooden chair in front of her desk. “Are there bones in them?” Kit asked.
“If you see a cardboard box anywhere around me, it’ll probably have bones in it. Just move them aside.”
Kit cleared a path to the chair and sat down.
“Sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk Saturday,” French said, “but a forensic dig is always pretty intensive.”
“Why is your office here rather than in the anthro department?”
“They’re short of space over there and since I have a secondary appointment in geology, everybody involved thought it was a good idea. I earn my keep over here by helping out in the basic geology course.”
On French’s desk was a small sculpture of a tree with a distinctly nonhuman primate clinging to the top like a Christmas angel. Increasingly human-looking figures were arranged in descending order on the side branches. A man in a derby hat and smoking a cigar stood at the base, with his fingers proudly in his suspenders.
“That’s cute,” Kit said, pointing to the sculpture. “Does it come with a woman at the bottom?”
“Oh, there aren’t any more,” French said. “I only made one. It’s not a man. It’s man in the generic sense.”
“You made it? I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. It took forever and I probably started over fifty times before I got it right.”
Anthropologist, geologist, sculptor, wife, mother—was there anything this woman couldn’t do? If you had asked, Kit would have said that her only reason for coming here was to see the facial reconstruction French had been working on. But there was another reason, one that lay just at the interface of the conscious and the subconscious. She had dimly hoped to find that French wasn’t all that good an anthropologist. It was, of course, a hope born dead, because Kit had already seen her in action. The confusion that had spawned this illogical hope now made Kit say, “How do you do it?”
“Do what?” French said kindly.
“Take care of a family and still have a professional life?”
French considered the question. She smiled more to herself than at Kit and, for a moment, reminded Kit of Broussard and how he would sometimes mentally leave a room when he had thinking to do.
Something clicked in French’s eyes and she said, “Do you know the name, Ales Hrdlicka?”
What French had said didn’t sound like a name at all but just a bunch of random syllables.
“No, of course you don’t,” French said, answering her own question. “Ales Hrdlicka is the father of physical anthropology. The entire discipline goes back to the work of this one man… and you’ve never heard of him.”
“I’m sorry…. I…”
“Don’t be,” French said. “I wasn’t implying that you should have heard of him. My point was that even a man that great is known to only a handful of people.”
“So, you’re saying that no matter what you accomplish professionally…”
“In the big picture, it isn’t going to matter much. If Hrdlicka hadn’t come along, it would have been someone else. Don’t misunderstand me—I love what I do and I think I’m respected for my ability. I have a decent list of publications and I do my share of committee work, but I set limits. I don’t let my work consume me. There’s more to life than anthropology.”
Kit took this news hard, because she had come to believe that “you can have it all” articles belonged in supermarket tabloids, right next to the “impregnated by alien” stories. Now, sitting across from her was a clear challenge to that belief.
French was blushing slightly. “It wasn’t my intention to get on a soapbox, especially with thoughts that I wouldn’t want my male colleagues to hear. Anyway, I’m diverting you from the purpose of your visit.”
French got up and came around the desk. “Can’t imagine what’s wrong with my printer,” she said, going to her computer. “But I can still show you the facial reconstruction.”
Kit left her chair and joined French at the computer, where with a single keystroke, French called up the color image of a skull on her monitor. Her fingers clacked over the keyboard and a scan line dropped from the top of the screen and migrated downward, putting hair and flesh on the skull.
I REALLY NEED TO TALK….
/> “You understand,” French said, “that there’s some guesswork involved in all this, in the length of the nose, for instance, the thickness of the lips, and the color and style of the hair. But with this program, we can pick any hairstyle and color we…” Glancing at Kit, French paused in midsentence, because Kit looked quite ill.
French pulled the computer chair over and gently guided Kit into it. “I’ll get you some water,” she said, hastening from the room. But it was not water that Kit wanted. She wanted only to go home.
Without waiting for French to return, Kit made her way back to her car, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the face and voice in her brain.
I REALLY NEED TO TALK….
Guided by instinct, she started the car and got it moving. A few minutes later, she missed her street and had to make a U-turn at the next one, nearly getting clipped by a streetcar whose looming shape and clanging bell went unnoticed.
Lucky met her at the door, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t get his head scratched. With Lucky darting and panting at her feet, Kit went to the bookshelves in her study and took down the Jambalaya that had been issued her second year in graduate school. She thumbed through the pages until she got to the School of Social Work.
I REALLY NEED TO TALK….
Her reddened eyes went to the middle of the right page, to a girl with the high cheekbones of a model but with eyes too widely set and a nose too broad for her to be truly beautiful.
Leslie Music: a happy name for a tormented girl.
It had been nearly five years, but Kit could still remember the phone call word for word.
“Kit, this is Leslie…. Could you… Could you come over for a while? I’m feeling kind of low.”
Why hadn’t she gone? God. She had known how unstable Leslie was. It wasn’t as though it was a stranger calling.
“Gee, Leslie, this is such a bad time. I’ve got a date and he’ll be here any minute.”
“I really need to talk.”
Looking back on it, the desperation in her voice had been so obvious.
“Look, tell you what. I’ll give you a call when I get home and if you still feel like talking, I’ll come over. How’s that?”
“Okay, fine… that’s… fine. Sorry to have bothered you. Have a good time. Bye.”
Sure, she had thought about Leslie a couple of times during her date. Big deal. But she hadn’t done anything. Then much later that night, the phone call to Leslie’s apartment that rang and rang and rang… a life preserver thrown into an empty sea.
She laid the annual aside and got out the manuscript box that held the first seven chapters of her book on suicide. She removed the lid. As yet untitled and barely a quarter finished, it already had a dedication. Oh yes, it had that. In fact, there had been a dedication before there was anything else.
Kit’s finger lightly touched the two words that had marked a beginning she hoped would somehow give meaning to the ending she had been too selfish to prevent.
FOR LESLIE
The face that French had reconstructed was not Leslie, of course, but bore such a resemblance it had brought back the most painful memories in Kit’s life. And suddenly, Kit knew what she must do. It was as if she had been given a way to atone for not having being there when Leslie needed her. Now someone else needed her, and this time she would not turn her back. If Gatlin wouldn’t look for the killer of the girl whose bones they’d found, she would do it herself… for the victim and for Leslie.
5
The next morning, Broussard said that if Gatlin gave her permission to work on the case, it would be all right with him as well. Gatlin put up a short, unspirited defense against the idea, then gave in, warning her that he was to be kept apprised of any significant developments.
Since she was already in the building and had seen French’s facial reconstruction, Gatlin suggested that Kit look over the old unsolved missing persons files. She agreed and spent an hour going through a two-foot stack of manila folders in a sparsely furnished, windowless room that smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
Nearly all the files contained photographs of the missing individual and those that didn’t had vivid verbal descriptions of the subject. The net result of this activity was nothing more than a slightly stiff neck and a sore rear end from the hard chair she’d been given.
Next, she made a quick trip out to the Tulane campus, where she apologized to French for leaving so abruptly on her last visit and obtained from French’s repaired printer a hard copy of the facial reconstruction. Though she didn’t know what she was going to do with it, Kit also requested and got the toothpaste tube that had come out of the pit that first day, as well as the artifacts French’s assistant had found when he screened the pedestal the following morning. As collateral, she left her signature on a chain-of-evidence form.
By 10:30, she was back in her office, wondering what to do next. She studied the facial reconstruction for a minute, then opened the Baggie containing the artifacts and spread them out on her desk. There wasn’t much: six opalescent buttons, probably from a blouse, a black button and zipper from a skirt, some chrome hooks and eyes that most likely were part of a bra, and two small pieces of metal she thought were once high-heel tips—ordinary items that had been witness to an extraordinary event. But how to get them to talk? She dumped the toothpaste tube from its Baggie and examined the two remaining letters on it: DA.
Where to begin?
There was a knock at her door and a familiar shadow on the glass. Broussard stuck his head inside.
“So what happened?” he asked, a lemon ball clacking against his teeth. “You on the case?”
“Already at work,” she replied, gesturing to the items in front of her.
He came into the room, took a quick look at the artifacts, then sat in her visitor’s chair and folded his hands over his belly. “What are you gonna do first?”
Before he’d showed up, Kit had been mentally circling the problem. Now, ready or not, she had to make a move, because she didn’t want him to think she was slow-witted.
“Gatlin suggested that I start by checking the old missing persons files, but they were no help.”
“I guess that picture there is French’s reconstruction?”
“Yeah.” She picked up the picture and handed it across the desk, using the few seconds this bought to order her thoughts.
“Pretty girl,” Broussard said, returning the picture. “Why do you figure she wasn’t in the files?”
Kit shrugged. “Maybe she was new in town and didn’t have any friends or relatives here to miss her.” Kit’s eyes rolled to the side. “I wonder…”
“Wonder what?”
“I was thinking she might have been killed in another city and brought here, but that’s pretty unlikely.”
“So, what’s next?”
“I think this can be approached from two different angles.” A part of her was talking and another part was waiting to see what she would say. “One way is to come at it from the direction of the victim… try to identify her.”
Working with Broussard was both a privilege and a giant pain in the backside. What he didn’t know about pathology wasn’t worth knowing and behind those glasses tied to the lanyard around his neck were eyes that missed nothing. At a scene, he was like a large vacuum cleaner sucking up facts and storing them for later. And as far as synthesis, she’d match him against the best detective minds in the country. That was the privilege part. But this… this patient paternalism where he let you talk until you put your foot in it was the pain. Still, she wouldn’t have traded places with anybody.
“I thought I’d call the Picayune,” Kit said, “and see if they’d like to follow up that small article they did Sunday with a bigger one, including this picture, under the heading ’Do You Know This Girl?’ And give my name and phone number as a contact. Maybe somebody will come forward with some information.”
Broussard shifted his lemon ball to the other cheek. “Oh, you’ll get phone calls. M
ight even get a confession or two, if the moon is right.”
“Then this is a bad idea?”
“No, it’s a good one, just be sure and hold back some important detail so you can screen the real from the real strange. You said there were two different angles to approach this. What’s the other one?”
“To find out who was living in my house when it happened.”
“But we don’t know when it happened.”
Kit hesitated, sensing a trap. She mentally checked her facts and found them correct—unless, of course, the old vacuum cleaner had sucked up something he hadn’t yet disgorged.
“That’s right, we don’t,” Kit said. “There’s no way of knowing when that root grew across the pit. So all the root does is establish the minimum amount of time that’s passed. Somehow I’ve got to come up with a more reliable number… maybe from these artifacts.” She picked up the toothpaste tube. “So far, though, no progress.”
Broussard slapped his thighs and stood up. “Sounds like you’ve got it under control. I was on my way downstairs to get a diet soda. Want anything?”
“No thanks.”
“Then I’ll just tend to a number of things I’ve got to do in the morgue before I come back up.”
Broussard left Kit’s office, went to the elevator, and took it to the hospital basement. Before going through the scarred double doors to the morgue complex, he paused in the vending area and looked at the soft-drink machine. Diet soda? Why, he’d never had a diet anything in his life. And soda? A soda had ice cream in it. A number of things to do. He chuckled softly. Maybe she’d get it, maybe she wouldn’t. If not, he’d try again.
Back upstairs, Kit was trying to figure out what the writing had been on the toothpaste tube. DA: Those were clearly the last letters. DA.
She took out a legal pad and began writing down all the words she could think of that ended in DA. It wasn’t as easy as it appeared and for a while she couldn’t think of any.
Freda.
Yeah right, toothpaste Freda.
No Mardi Gras for the Dead Page 4