Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  “Is it really all that important to know exactly when he died?”

  “In a murder, always. In a suicide, about one in fifty. But you never know which one until it’s too late. Say we let this one slip by without gettin’ too particular. A month from now, there’ll be some snotty-nosed kid lawyer handin’ me a summons in which a relative of our victim died the same day and left him a trunkful of money… providin’, of course, he’s still alive. If not, it goes to somebody else. Now, who gets the money? Our suicide’s beneficiaries or the somebody else? Time of death of that schoolteacher then becomes real important. And I don’t like bein’ on a witness stand with lawyers pokin’ holes in my work.”

  “Who was that with the tape measure?”

  He probed his shirt pocket and slipped a lemon drop into his mouth. “Phillip Gatlin. He and the photographer are part of our VC squad.”

  “VC?”

  “Violent Crimes. Phillip’s one crackerjack of a detective… least he used to be.”

  “What happened?”

  “A few months ago, his daughter disappeared. A lot of her clothes were missin’ too, so it wasn’t a kidnappin’. She’ll show up in a few weeks tired and happy to be back. But it’s killin’ Phillip. I guess you noticed how he was dressed. He never used to look like that, but he’s just been goin’ through the motions ever since she left. Used to be, he had the highest solve rate in the department. Word is, it’s now dead last. Our next case is in here.”

  He turned the car into a subdivision of neat middle-class homes and drove the winding streets until he came to a house with a fire truck and a chief’s car out in front. Across the street, a flock of talked-out neighbors watched the firemen roll up their hoses. The door to the two-story house was standing open, and the siding around the windows was black with soot.

  “Nuts,” Broussard said, staring at the gutted house. “Tryin’ to do my job after these folks have mucked around is like tryin’ to put together a jigsaw puzzle after somebody’s whittled on the pieces with a pocketknife.”

  They were met by a man in a tan canvas parka trimmed in fluorescent yellow stripes. In the fading light, Kit could see pain in his eyes and the word chief, on his helmet.

  “This is a bad one, Andy,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you what we found.”

  Broussard had a sour look on his face as he followed the man inside. Kit could see that, once again, there would be no introductions or invitations to tag along, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t blame Broussard for forgetting her. Inside, the house smelled like a chicken that had been cooked without getting all the feathers off. She followed the chief to a room that showed considerably more damage than the small foyer through which they had come.

  “It started here,” the chief said. He pointed to the burned skeleton of a chair liberally covered in foam. “Poor devil was nothing but charcoal when we arrived.”

  Kit thought it was odd that he would call the chair a “poor devil,” but then she saw the charred shoes protruding from the foam and realized there was a corpse attached to them. The foam danced with collapsing bubbles and the grinning remains of a face emerged. She shuddered and looked away.

  “Found this next to the chair,” the chief said. He turned and picked up a blackened can with flecks of red paint and the letters G SINE showing through a sooty haze. “I’m sure we’ll find traces of gasoline in the hot spots. Now back here…”

  He led the way into the kitchen where the wainscoting and the floor cabinets were blistered and black. Untouched by the flames, the drenched wallpaper above the chair rail had come loose at the ceiling and hung in flaps that were slowly creeping toward the floor. The linoleum was barely visible through a film of grimy sludge crisscrossed with bootprints.

  “This door was locked. And we found these two inside. The woman was holding the little girl in her arms. They had to be separated to get oxygen to them, but as you can see…”

  Broussard squeezed through the narrow pantry door and knelt to examine the two bodies. “Corneas are clear,” he said. He stood up and put his penlight back in his shirt pocket. “Been dead less than two hours.” He went back into the kitchen, pulled on the pantry door, and looked at the lock on the outside. “You said this door was locked. How’d your men get it open without the key?”

  “Isn’t it there?”

  “Afraid not.” Broussard and Kit exchanged glances.

  The chief shook his head and shrugged. “Why would you put a lock on a pantry?”

  “Maybe to keep the little girl out of the cleaning supplies,” Broussard suggested. “What else you got?”

  “This way.” They went back through the room where the fire started, up a flight of stairs, and down a narrow hall. “That chair was propped against the bathroom door,” the chief said. “And we found this one inside.”

  On the floor, with her back against the wall, was the body of a woman wrapped in a towel. Broussard looked at her eyes, then stepped over her, and pulled the shower curtain back. “No window,” he said as though he knew there wouldn’t be one. “If there’d been a window, she might have escaped. Was this on when you found her?” For the first time, Kit realized the exhaust fan was running.

  “I don’t know,” the chief replied.

  Broussard switched it off and the quiet pall of death settled over the tiny space. “One of those things that seems like a good idea at the time,” he mused. “All it did was draw smoke under the door. I’ve seen enough.”

  Kit and the chief started back down the hall and suddenly they heard the sound of splintering wood behind them. Broussard had put his fist through the hollow bathroom door. “It was hung wrong,” he said quietly. “They’re supposed to open in. Then that chair would have been useless. And there should have been a window,” he added under his breath.

  They all went downstairs, Broussard regretting his unprofessional display of emotion, Kit respecting him for it.

  Outside, the chief looked up and down the street. “Wonder where the VC squad is?” he said.

  “Phillip Gatlin is finishin’ up a case a couple of miles from here,” Broussard replied. “Jamison left even before we did. Shoulda been here by now. Maybe he stopped for a bite to eat.”

  From all she had seen, Kit was filled with disgust, shock, and pity. Hearing that Jamison might have an appetite after seeing the dead schoolteacher surprised her. For a moment, she disliked the photographer for being insensitive, but then she realized that he had responded to his job the only way he could… by adapting. It seemed to be happening to her already. This case, actually worse than the first, didn’t make her feel quite as nauseated. Was it because there was no blood in this one?

  They went back to the car and Broussard confidently retraced their path through the subdivision’s winding streets. At the main drag, he turned toward the river. Though they were now on the opposite side of the Mississippi, they were still only a few miles from the heart of New Orleans. But the fast-food strip on either side of the highway might have led to any city in the country.

  “When we get those folks from the fire downtown, we’ll do a blood study on the child and the women and probably find lethal concentrations of carbon monoxide,” Broussard said. “We’ll do the same on the corpse in the chair and also look for burns in his trachea, providin’ we can find some blood, and if there’s a trachea left. Low monoxide and no tracheal burns would indicate he was dead before the fire started. It’s more likely, though, we’ll find that the fire killed him. Which will suggest a murder-suicide. But there’s no way I can prove that from the autopsy. Phillip is gonna be pretty interested in your report on this one. Once we identify the burned corpse, you should concentrate your efforts there.”

  “I will.” Remembering the featureless face, Kit said, “How do you know the body in the chair was a male?”

  “The shoes.”

  “You’re awfully good at all this.”

  “Been doin’ it a long time, and experience never made anybody worse at anything.
It’s not hard. You just have to pay attention to detail, and most folks don’t.” Squinting at her, he said, “Describe the wallpaper in the kitchen back there.”

  She thought about it and said, “I can’t.”

  “Stripes or flowers?”

  “Stripes.”

  “Wrong. Flowers. Big ones, yellow on blue, with a twelve-inch repeat.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  He waved away the compliment. “I do it now out of habit. Once you learn to pay attention to your surroundin’s, it’s simply a matter of playin’ the odds to find the most likely explanation for what you see.”

  “For example?”

  They were near a crowded shopping center and Broussard turned in and drove slowly past a sidewalk full of shoppers.

  “See those two?” he said, pointing to a pair of overweight women. “Watch ’em till we go on by, but don’t look back.”

  She had only a few seconds before the car was past them.

  “What were they wearin’?”

  “Jogging suits,” she replied triumphantly.

  “What color?”

  “Gray and green.”

  “Both of ’em?”

  “Yes.”

  Her smug smile lasted only until he said, “Which one recently felt the touch of a man other than her husband, on her bare skin?”

  “Which one?” she asked, as though he couldn’t possibly produce an acceptable answer.

  “The one on the inside.”

  “Explain.”

  “Guess you didn’t notice that her right shoe had been cut away for the cast on her foot.”

  Kit flushed at having missed something so grossly obvious. “And the man who touched her was…”

  Together, they both said, “Her doctor.”

  “How do you know her doctor wasn’t a woman?”

  “Like I said, play the odds. There’re not nearly as many women in medicine as men.”

  “But you’re not absolutely sure it was a man.”

  “It doesn’t accomplish a thing to withhold judgment just because unlikely explanations exist along with the likely. Unless, of course, you’re a medical examiner lookin’ for a permanent vacation.”

  He pulled back onto the highway.

  “You’ve heard the sayin’, ’Things are not always what they seem’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually they are.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Instead of heading for the heart of the city, Broussard turned onto a side road that quickly left all signs of human habitation behind.

  “Where are we going now?” Kit asked.

  “To pick up somethin’ I should have taken with me when I left for work this mornin’. It won’t take long.”

  On each side of the road, redwing blackbirds perched on nearly every structure that would hold their weight. Occasionally, the car passed a turtle that had gone up to the roadside to attempt a crossing. Once, she saw the snout and glistening eyes of a nutria push through the grass, then disappear back into it.

  The abundant wildlife was one of the things Kit liked best about this part of the country. But she wished it didn’t come with quite so much marshland. Sometimes a rainstorm would hit with drops so big they sounded like baseballs hitting the roof, and geysers of water from the overloaded sewer system would blow the manhole covers off. During those storms, she felt that New Orleans existed only at the pleasure of the natural forces around her, and one day they might just decide to call in the mortgage. Usually after such a storm, a trip across the Pontchartrain Bridge to Covington was in order, where after a few hours on high ground, she would be ready for another few months in the crazy old city where the natives sound like they came from either New York or France, where politicians have nicknames like “Moon,” and the water tastes like gasoline.

  An armadillo blundered out of the grass and waddled across the blacktop a few yards ahead. Broussard jerked the wheel sharply and sent the right tires onto the shoulder. The left ones went over the tip of the armadillo’s tail. Under the floorboard, there was a scraping noise as the car passed over a dead branch. In the mirror, Kit saw the armadillo pause, cock his head slightly, then go snuffling across the road.

  “An armadillo pancake lookin’ for a place to happen,” Broussard said, guiding the car back onto the road.

  Now they seemed to be dragging something. Broussard pulled over and got out.

  “Nothin’ serious,” he reported a few seconds later. “Tail pipe came loose. We can change cars at my place.”

  After another mile or so, the car slowed and pulled off the road onto a drive that ran under a canopy of ghostly old live oaks draped with Spanish moss. It was the kind of drive that should have led to a brooding old mansion. Instead, they came to a stop in front of a sprawling structure so heavily hidden by flowering vines and other vegetation, it was almost invisible. Here and there through the foliage, Kit caught a brief glimpse of mottled white brick and an occasional tall window.

  Leading to the house was a short flight of steps made from thick slabs of black stone. Moss was growing in the joints, and dozens of varieties of flowering plants and nonflowering species lay along and over the steps so naturally the plan could only have been made by someone very talented.

  “This is lovely,” Kit said.

  “Come on in. I’ll find the things I need and we’ll get another car.”

  As they went up the steps, Kit said, “I get the feeling there used to be a different house on this site.”

  Broussard turned to look at her. “There was… an aristocrat of the old South, and I used to live in it.”

  “What happened?”

  He squeezed his lips together and wiped the back of his neck. “Been almost seven years now and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I had inherited the place from my grandmother.” He closed his eyes and lifted his face to a memory. “Columns so big two men couldn’t reach around ’em, and a spiral staircase that rose through the house like a hawk ridin’ a hot wind.” His small eyes popped open. “Then one mornin’ just after dawn, one of the upstairs ceilin’s fell in. I ran into the room where the noise came from, and there they were, all wiggly and white on the fallen joists like maggots in a festerin’ wound.”

  “What were they?”

  “Termites!” He spit the word out like a bad taste. “I still see ’em about once a month in my dreams. The entire house was full of ’em, and the damage was so extensive, there was no way to save it. Even found ’em in the stairway. So I had the old house torn down and this one put up. It was too expensive to reproduce the old place, and since I don’t like any other style of architecture, I decided to just have no style at all and make the exterior look like part of the landscape. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

  At the top of the stairs, they passed through a cleft in the foliage and entered a recess lined by the same brick she had seen earlier. Using the light that filtered into the chamber through a skylight in the high ceiling, Broussard found the lock with his key, and they entered through tall French doors intricately inset with beveled and frosted glass. He thumbed a light switch and a great chandelier heavy with crystal garlands lit up a huge room with polished wide-planked floors that gleamed between the soft colors of Oriental rugs. Somehow, the ponderous bulbous-legged refectory table, the upholstered French chairs, the delicate tables, and the two overstuffed sofas all worked. It was a room fully capable of holding the grand piano to the right of the entrance without appearing crowded. Throughout, bouquets of real flowers or excellent fakes picked up the reds from the carpets and sofas.

  “There’ll be no termites in this house,” Broussard pronounced. “There’s not a piece of wood in any structural element. The walls are Sheetrock glued onto reinforced cement block. The ceilin’s are screwed to structural steel beams, and to keep the little beggars out of the floorin’, the house was built on two eighteen-inch concrete slabs with a copper plate between ’em. Come on, my study is back here. I’ll get my things and we’ll go o
ut through the garage.”

  Kit followed him into a wide hallway and watched him disappear through a door on the right. He was out quickly with a fat yellow file folder, and she got only a brief glimpse of his desk—huge and dark with the heads of mustachioed men as drawer pulls. She also had the impression that the room’s freestanding bookcases with glass doors bore heavy carving that matched the desk. They passed the dining room so rapidly that only the gilded dining room chairs, whose armrests ended in small rams’ heads, registered. Despite a loathing for all activities related to food preparation, she found the broad expanses of bronze granite and the spotless copper utensils hanging from the kitchen ceiling inviting.

  “You pick our transportation,” Broussard said, holding the kitchen door for her.

  The garage was as big as a gymnasium, and it had to be. Parked in a row, all looking as though they had just come off the assembly line, were five additional ’57 T-Birds.

  “You need one more,” Kit said. “Then the entire week would be taken care of.”

  Broussard shook his head. “Six is abundance. Seven would be eccentricity. Which shall we take?”

  “How about the yellow one?”

  “Always been my favorite.”

  Kit felt something heavy and soft against her ankles. She looked down and saw two big green eyes looking back at her.

  “That’s Chuck,” Broussard said.

  Chuck was a fat black tomcat with pink lips and a white bib. The upper half of one ear hung in a rakish droop. The other had a notch in it. When Kit bent to pet him, he began to honk like a goose, and she pulled her hand back in alarm.

  “Worst cat I ever saw for hairballs,” Broussard said, reaching for a bag of Cat Chow beside the door. “Been nearly twelve years since I found him half-dead on my front porch with an arrow in him. Guess he was shot by some kids, or a grown-up with a mean streak. Even now, you can’t get near him if you’re carryin’ anything long and sharp.” He filled a green plastic bowl with food and looked around the garage. “Princess should be around here somewhere. Guess she’s afraid of you.” Chuck, now recovered from his hairball, fell to his meal, keeping one eye on the stranger with the funny smell.